Which, Mara knew, wasn’t the same thing as their not having it.
It wasn’t just paranoia she was feeling. She was angry, mad at the agency, furious with Langley and the idiots there who ran things. She wasn’t even too happy with Peter Lucas. She needed to talk to him, but despite trying, she couldn’t get through. She’d been with the Company long enough to guess the reason: Lucas, temporarily heading the agency’s Southeast Asia operation, had been called back to the States to give a command performance for the White House.
Idiots.
And then there was the problem of the ten thousand dollars missing from the drop. Which, at best, indicated that the station was employing thieves.
“So do I get to check your clothes now?” Zeus asked.
“Very funny,” said Mara, handing him back the shirt. “Did the Vietnamese give you anything?”
“Indigestion.”
“In case you haven’t guessed, I’m not in a very good mood, Major.”
“Really? You were just about bowling me over with your jokes.”
“Walk,” she said, starting again.
“So your plans were changed,” said Zeus, falling into stride. “Which is what has you in such a good mood.”
“The airport was closed. As if nobody could fucking foresee that.”
“Go out by ship.”
“Apparently the Chinese have set up a blockade and we’re not going near enough to the coast to test it,” said Mara.
The SEALs had come from a submarine farther offshore, which had rendezvoused with a helicopter. The submarine had gone northward near the Chinese coast immediately after the SEALs left and was not available to even try for a pickup.
“You sound a little bitter,” said Zeus.
“I am.”
Mara realized she was almost running. She slowed her pace, trying to calm herself. There was no sense being angry; plans changed all the time.
“Too much coffee,” she told Zeus.
“Didn’t get much sleep, huh?”
A jet rocketed overhead. Zeus stopped and spun in the direction of the sound, braced for a bomb. Mara felt comforted somehow, his tension proof that her jangling nerves were normal, were deserved.
“Probably a reconnaissance flight,” said Zeus.
“In any event, the upshot is, I need to get south,” said Mara.
“I can talk to General Trung,” said Zeus. “I’m sure we can get an escort.”
“I don’t want an escort. I don’t want anything that will draw attention to us. More than the obvious,” said Mara. As foreigners, they would stand out no matter what.
“You don’t trust the Vietnamese?”
“No,” said Mara.
“Not even Trung?”
Mara had been told by Langley to treat the Vietnamese army as if the general staff had been penetrated by the Chinese — which to Mara meant that it had been. She wasn’t supposed to tell Zeus that, since it could possibly jeopardize whatever means the agency was using to gather its own intelligence from the Chinese. But she wanted him to put two and two together, for his own safety.
“I wouldn’t trust anyone,” said Mara. “The Chinese have a huge spy network here. A very efficient one.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, I’m supposed to get south quietly,” added Mara. “The Vietnamese don’t know about Josh. They know very little about the UN mission that he was on.”
A mission that had been penetrated by the CIA, a fact that also had to stay secret, though it did not involve Josh. The spy had been killed in the Chinese massacre.
“I need to know what roads south are open,” said Mara. “That’s number one.”
“They’re all open,” said Zeus. “South of the reservoir.”
“Will they be open twelve hours from now?”
“Hard to say. It depends on what the Chinese do next. If I were them, I would be swinging eastward to hit Hanoi,” said Zeus. “And I’d be coming in from the sea. But if I were them, I would have had a different strategy to begin with.”
“I may need to find out what’s going on,” said Mara. “I need to be able to talk to you.”
“Call me.”
“Good idea.”
“You’re being sarcastic?”
Mara turned at the corner and picked up her pace again, walking to a building in the middle of the block whose door was painted bright green. She stopped, looked around, then walked to a set of steps leading downward just beyond the main door. Zeus followed.
She knocked. The door was opened by a short, gray-haired Vietnamese woman, who looked at her expectantly.
“Four,” said Mara in Vietnamese.
The woman told her that the price was one hundred dollars apiece.
“One million dong for all,” said Mara.
“Dollars.”
“I’ve always paid in dong.”
Mara had never bought a phone here, or anywhere else in Vietnam for that matter. But it was a plausible lie. Mara knew she wasn’t going to pay in dong, but she had to try and get the price down as far as possible to preserve her small supply of American money.
“Phone always in dollar,” said the woman, switching to English.
“You won’t be able to change them,” said Mara, sticking to Vietnamese.
“Changing them is my problem,” said the woman, back in Vietnamese. She offered Mara ninety a phone. Mara told her that was unacceptable, waited for a moment, then turned to go.
“I know that trick,” said the woman.
Mara ignored her. She had reached the sidewalk when the woman offered the phones for fifty apiece.
“Too much,” said Mara.
“Mister, buy for your wife,” said the woman, appealing to Zeus in English.
“She’s not my wife,” said Zeus.
The words confused the woman.
“One hundred for all the phones,” said Mara in Vietnamese.
The woman made a face. “Your Vietnamese is very good,” she told Mara. “So you must know how poor our country is.”
What Mara knew was that the phones had surely been stolen. Pointing that out would not be helpful at this stage in the negotiations, however.
“One hundred for all of the phones,” Mara repeated.
The woman closed her eyes.
“I will give you three phones for that,” she said finally.
Mara took the deal.
The phones had numbers taped to the back. But those weren’t the numbers they were going to use. Two blocks away, Mara found a wooden crate to sit on. She carefully opened the phones and inserted new SIM cards, in effect changing the brains of the phones. She gave Zeus one and kept the other two.
“I should only have to call you once,” said Mara. “But don’t get rid of the phone until I call and tell you to do so. You realize the Vietnamese listen to all cell phone conversations, right?”
“Uh — ”
“So we have to assume that they’re going to be listening in. Maybe even the Chinese will by then. I’ll give
