“Now how do you know I have a gun?”
“Everyone have gun. We search.”
A squat bodyguard dressed in a brown Vietnamese suit came out from the other side of the flowered screen opposite the couch. Karr took his Beretta from his belt and handed it over, then dropped to his knee and took the small Walther from its holster above his right ankle.
“I get it back, right?” he said, handing the gun to the madam.
“You get back, yes. Search him, please.” The man found Karr’s Walther TPH pocket pistol on his left ankle. The bodyguard smiled triumphantly and rose — missing the other Walther on Karr’s right ankle. Barely five inches long by three inches high, the tiny gun fired .22-caliber bullets, but it was better than nothing.
“Must’ve forgotten about that one,” said Karr as the madam took the weapon.
“No joke, honey,” said the madam. She hesitated, then waved her bodyguard back to his hiding spot. “You follow me, and no tricks.”
“You’re the one with the tricks.”
“Very funny, Joe. Norwegian has a good sense of humor.” She led Karr through a beaded doorway to what in a normal house might be a parlor, though here it would have been more accurately called a bullpen. The woman who had preceded Karr into the building was just leaving with a much taller red-headed girl wearing a silk kimono that reached to the top of her thong strap. Four other girls lounged on the couches, wearing Western-style lingerie. It was just going on eleven; business wouldn’t pick up for another hour or so, which was when Cam Tre Luc was expected.
“Who?” said the woman, gesturing. “You make a pick.”
“So hard to decide,” said Karr, glancing around.
“You want Miss Madonna,” Rockman reminded him.
Karr knew who he wanted, but he didn’t want to make it too obvious. He also wanted to give himself time to plant a video bug here. He’d slapped one apiece on the frames to the doors as he’d come through but thought he needed at least two in this room to cover it adequately.
Two women got up from the couch and walked over toward him in a languid, dreamy dance, hoping to help him make up his mind.
“Cute,” purred one of the girls. The other began blowing in his ear.
“Decisions, decisions,” said Karr.
There was a small bust of Ho Chi Minh in the corner. The vantage was perfect, but there was no place to put the bug where it wouldn’t be obvious. Karr decided he would have to settle for the underside of the table.
“Come with me, Joe,” said one of the prostitutes, running her hand down his side. She wore an oversized yellow camisole that fell just far enough below her waist to make it clear that was all she had on.
“Whoooph,” said Karr. “Getting hot in here. Say — can I have a drink?”
“Tommy, don’t drink anything,” hissed Rockman. “It may be doped.”
The second girl, who wore a long strapless gown, began rubbing Karr’s other side. He slid between them, angling for the couch near the table where he wanted to plant the bug.
This was an invitation for the other girls to join in. They
The madam went to a secretary-style desk at the side of the room and revealed a small bar. Karr snaked his hand around the girl with the strapless gown and slid the bug under the end table. She naturally interpreted this to mean that he was interested in her, and ran her hand up and down his thigh.
“What you drink, Joe?” asked the girl in the camisole, pouting because she seemed to be losing out.
“Water,” said Karr.
“Water?” asked the madam. “You need vodka. It will make you loose. You are too tight now. High- strung.”
“Oh, is that what you call it?”
The girls giggled. The one in a see-through pink chemise got up and began doing a dance in front of him, wiggling her breasts.
“I was told there was a girl named Miss Madonna,” said Karr. “Is she here?”
“Miss Madonna?” The madam made a face as if she did not know who he was talking about, then shook her head.
“She was the best, I heard,” said Karr. “I came all the way to Saigon to see her.”
The girls began rubbing him frantically, hoping to get him to change his mind. Karr kept his gaze on the madam.
“Very expensive,” she told him.
“Two hundred not enough?” asked Karr, reaching back into his pocket for the bills.
“Five hundred.”
“I think two is more than enough.”
“Three-fifty.”
“I have three.” Karr removed the bills from his pocket.
“All I have.”
Another frown. “Fifteen minute,” said the woman.
“Thirty.”
“Twenty.”
“Deal.” Karr pushed himself up from the couch — which wasn’t easy. “Sorry, ladies. Another time, I’m sure.”
“Karr’s on his way up,” Rockman told Dean. “They’re taking him to see Madonna. All right, he’s in — the room, I mean.”
“I figured that out,” said Dean.
“Miss Madonna has the suite at the back of the third floor. There’s a window on the alley. No fire escape.” Somehow, Dean didn’t think the code enforcement people would care. He turned his attention back to the street, watching as a light-colored Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up near the whore house. Two men dressed in black jumped out from the back, scanned the street, then tapped on the truck’s roof.
“Hey, Rockman, what kind of vehicle does Cam Tre Luc have?”
“Yeah, we see that, too,” said Rockman. He cursed — it looked like their subject was more than an hour early. “We’ll check the image when he comes into the hallway to be definite, but that looks like him.”
57
The Vietnam national phone company had an admirable security system designed to prevent computer break-ins. It was so admirable, in fact, that Gallo had studied the system it was modeled on as a sophomore in college.
If he recalled correctly, the class mid-term required students to demonstrate all six ways of breaking into the system without being detected.
Gallo had shown there were actually eight.
After he broke into the system, Gallo obtained a list of every phone call Thao Duong had made in the past two years. Gallo then obtained lists of everyone those people had called — and everyone whom they had called. He then took the American numbers — Canadian, Mexican, and Ca rib be an as well as U.S. — and requested call lists on them. Ironically, though these requests were filled voluntarily by the phone companies, they took the longest — several hours rather than the ten or fifteen minutes it would have taken Gallo to get them by breaking in.
Bureaucracy.
Gallo shared the information with the other analysts, who used it in a number of ways. One created a chart showing Thao Duong’s “friend network”—acquaintances whom he regularly spoke to — and looked for interesting individuals.
Another focused on finding banks and financial institutions active in the list, and began tracing transactions
