Conspiracy

56

The tracking bug Karr had placed on Thao Duong ran out of juice a little past six, while Thao Duong was on his way back to his apartment. Dean and Karr decided there was no use planting another; Thao Duong was likely to get changed when he got home anyway. They trailed him to his house and waited outside until half past eight. The Art Room reported that he was watching television; Dean and Karr decided to knock off for dinner before checking out Saigon Rouge. They stopped in a noodle place; pots of boiling water and noodles were brought to the table, along with an assortment of vegetables and meat that they were supposed to toss in the water to cook.

“Do-it-yourself soup,” said Karr, enthusiastically tossing in everything from his side dish. “I’ll take anything you don’t want.”

Dean found himself brooding while he waited for the noodles to cool. He missed Lia. It had nothing to do with the mission; he just wanted to talk to her, to feel her bumping up against him.

“You hit the red-light district when you were in the war, Charlie?” asked Karr.

“I was only in Saigon once, for a really short time.”

“Not just this red-light district,” said Karr, spooning up some broth to taste. “Any red-light district.” Dean knew what he meant, but instead of answering, he stared at Karr.

“Good stuff,” said Karr.

“Isn’t it hot?”

“Steaming.”

“I did go to a cat house once,” said Dean.

“Cat house?”

“That’s what we called them,” explained Dean apologetically. “It was my eighteenth birthday — my real eighteenth birthday. Some of the guys arranged it for me.”

“Pop your cherry, huh? Great present.”

“They thought so.”

Dean hadn’t been a virgin; the other men made that assumption because he didn’t have a girlfriend back home, never talked about getting laid, and was consistently shy around women, a trait that afflicted him to this day.

Between his shyness and the girl’s limited English, the encounter had been awkward. The only part that he remembered now came after it was over — he was shy, but not that shy — she’d given him a soft kiss and then left the bamboo-and-rice-paper-sided room.

“You ever been to a prostitute, Tommy?” he asked Karr.

“Nope.”

Karr looked up from his soup. Then his face slowly turned red. “Is that part of the plan?” unlike the “clubs” that catered to tourists in Saigon’s business and trendy downtown areas, Saigon Rouge catered to Vietnamese. It was located on the edge of District 4, a tightly packed shantytown slum.

Even the most committed party member would lose his illusions about communism and workers’ paradises here.

Knots of old people dressed in rags congregated in front of tumble-down tin-faced huts, soaking up what little breeze the night air provided. The area was one of the poorest places in Asia, and, by extension, the world.

But on the street where Saigon Rouge stood, a half-dozen Mercedeses idled in the night, their drivers watching the sidewalks warily from air-conditioned cabins. Most of the drivers were armed with the latest submachine guns or automatic rifles, though the majority of District 4’s denizens knew better than to attack or harass the men who owned the cars. Justice in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam could be quite severe, especially here.

A kind of demilitarized zone had grown up around Saigon Rouge, making possible a thriving black market. The block was a thriving locus for drug smugglers, who found it con ve nient to locate near a ready pool of cheap labor. It was also the headquarters for several other illegitimate and semi-illegitimate businesses, for whom operating beyond the eye of local authorities had certain advantages.

There was, for example, a man who traded in tiger parts, shipping them surreptitiously to various Asian and, on occasion, Western countries. He owned a narrow two-story building directly across from Saigon Rouge. The bottom floor of his building was stacked with an assortment of antique junk.

The top floor was completely vacant, which made it a convenient vantage point for observing the brothel.

“You have guards on both ends of the hallway on the third floor,” said Rockman, who’d taken over as their runner in the Art Room. A Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle — a ro-bot aircraft carry ing ground-penetrating radar that had been “tuned” to look inside the building — was orbiting overhead, supplying real-time intelligence on the building and surrounding area. The aircraft’s gear was sensitive enough to discern human beings as they moved in the hallway.

“The hall is z-shaped,” added Rockman. “The guards can’t see each other, or the room itself.”

“Does that door on the top connect to the back stairwell?” asked Karr.

“Yes,” said Rockman. “Looks like the guard sits in front of the door. Has a chair there and everything. Once you get the video bugs in the lobby, we’ll be able to ID the subject when he comes in. Then we’ll follow him up to the second or third floor, wherever he goes.”

Karr turned to Dean. “Ready?”

Dean nodded.

“Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” Karr said, preparing to give his body to science.

* * *

Dean kept his finger against the rifle’s laser button as he watched from the window, ready to flip it on. His glasses would show him precisely where the A2’s bullets would hit if he fired. But that wouldn’t necessarily save Tommy Karr if things went bad.

“He’s coming around the side of the building right now,” said Rockman from the Art Room.

Besides the Global Hawk’s images, low-light video was being provided by a small unmanned aircraft nicknamed the Crow; Dean and Karr had launched it from the roof of the building when they’d arrived. The Crow’s image was being displayed on the screen of Karr’s PDA, which he’d left on the floor near the window for Dean, but Dean found the image distracting, and it was much easier to rely on Rockman as his long-range eyes and ears.

Karr sauntered into view, a big blond American walking like he owned the world. Dean tensed as a black sedan pulled onto the block; he raised the boxy assault gun, ready to fire. The rear door of the car opened. A single, diminutive figure got out. It was a middle-aged woman, who crossed the street in front of Karr and went into the building. Karr let her get ahead of him and paused for a moment to look around, as if worried that someone might see him. Then he spun toward the entrance.

“Here goes nothin’,” said Karr cheerfully, ducking inside.

* * *

The woman who sat on the couch that dominated the entry hall at Saigon Rouge didn’t know what to make of the tall blond American who crowded her doorway. She did, however, know what to do with the two hundred-dollar bills he took from his pocket.

“You are American?” said in English.

“Norwegian,” Karr replied. And then, in halting and poorly accented Vietnamese, he told her that he had heard from certain friends that Saigon Rouge was the only place to visit when in town.

“You speak Vietnamese?” she answered.

“Just a little,” he told her. “Mom taught me.”

“Your mother, Joe?”

“She came from Lam Dong Province.”

This baffled the woman even more; Karr had zero Vietnam ese features, and Lam Dong was not known for producing giants. But she had seen many strange things in her years as a madam, and questionable parentage was hardly unusual, let alone relevant in the face of a fee several times over the normal charge.

“No guns inside,” she told him, holding out her hand.