Conspiracy

minutes later, the dogs’ barks sounded even farther away, though Sleeth claimed they were closer.

“Snow up here just last week,” said the guide as he and Dean edged downward. “Now it’s all gone or we’d have an easier time.”

“Yeah.”

“Warm today.”

“You figure forty degrees is warm?”

“Depends on your point of reference.”

“True enough.”

“Stop. Listen.” Sleeth held up his hand, pointing to the sky. “The dogs.”

The dogs were barking, loudly, in short, quick yaps.

“They’ve treed him,” explained Sleeth. “Come on!” Dean followed the guide down into a thin copse of trees.

The dogs’ excited barks bounced off the two sharp horizon-tal walls that bookended the canyon about a quarter mile away.

Dean started to think about the shot. A treed lion was not particularly difficult to hit, and Dean began to feel a little guilty, as if the dogs and the guide had given him an unfair advantage. Like any hunt, the tracking and chase were the critical elements; the finish was just the finish — necessary for success, yet vaguely unsatisfying, especially for someone like Dean, who had hunted humans before turning to animals.

Sleeth stopped suddenly. “Something’s wrong,” he told Dean, and in the next moment he started to bring his gun up.

By then Dean had already spun to his right and dropped to his knee. Ten yards away, the brush parted, revealing the face and teeth of an angry lion. The big cat pressed its weight onto its front paws and sprang forward, teeth bared.

Dean fired toward the lion’s head.

And missed.

He threw himself left as the animal lunged, its paw claw-ing his leg. Rolling on the ground, Dean bashed the butt of the rifle into the animal’s side. The mountain lion’s snarl filled his ears as he tried to scramble away. He felt as if he were underground, swimming in a pit of sand.

The cat rolled off to the side and Dean pushed himself to his feet. He had a round chambered. The gun was up, aimed.

He fired, point-blank, this time taking the cat through the head.

A dank musk surged around him as if it were air rushing into a vacuum chamber: death’s scent.

The animal shook violently, its feet vibrating.

Sleeth ran over, 357 drawn. He administered the coup de grace to the lion, then looked over at Dean.

“You OK?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Dean.

Everything had happened so fast, he couldn’t decipher it.

Had he shot once or twice?

Twice — he’d missed the first time.

How, from that range?

It didn’t make sense, but he had missed.

The dogs were howling. Dean looked toward the sound.

“The other lion is out of the tree,” said Sleeth, his voice a monotone. “One of the dogs is hurt.” Dean started in that direction.

“Wait,” said Sleeth, catching up. “We can’t shoot the

other lion. Your license only allows one kill.”

“OK,” said Dean, lowering his gun.

13

“Old warriors. Ancient grudges,” declared Simon Dauber solemnly, summarizing the brief in the CIA secure conference room. Though most of his experience was in China, Dauber had been on the Southeast Asia desk long enough for Rubens to know and respect him. Those two things did not usually go hand in hand where the CIA was concerned.

“Old warriors can be quite potent,” remarked Hernes Jackson. “They shouldn’t be discounted.” Rubens had taken Jackson and Gallo along for the briefing. Unleashing Johnny Bib on the CIA would have been considered cruel and unusual punishment.

While Jackson’s point was valid, there was a lot to back up Dauber’s assessment of Infinite Burn. The CIA had developed information about the assassination plot from an agent code-named Red Diamond three years before. Diamond was a smuggler with ties to the government, a border-line undesirable whose status, naturally, made him a very interesting “catch.” He had given the CIA a number of tidbits over the two years that he had been on the payroll.

Most of the information had to do with drugs that were being transported, probably by rivals, in and out of Thailand and Cambodia as well as Vietnam. That information had been extremely reliable. He’d also given up details about different military matters. In those cases, his track record wasn’t quite so impeccable. He had a tendency to exaggerate, even when reporting on things like purchases of spare parts for aircraft.

Nor did the information about Infinite Burn fit in with what might be termed his usual reporting patterns. Even the CIA officer who had been running Red Diamond at the time felt it came out of left field. The officer had tried to sniff around among other sources, without finding anything.

Yet here they were, three years later, with an assassination attempt on a prominent U.S. senator — exactly as Red Diamond had predicted.

“So let’s say they have all these guys go deep undercover into America, right?” said Robert Gallo, repeating one of Dauber’s hypotheses. “How do they communicate with them?”

Dauber shook his head. “Don’t know.”

“How do they pick targets?”

“You have to remember, we didn’t find much evidence beyond Red Diamond’s original information. And he died a short time later. Or disappeared.”

Red Diamond had fallen from a boat in Saigon Harbor and was never heard from again. The case officer believed Red Diamond had probably been shot before falling, but that was not part of the police report.

“Your source implicated Thieu Gao,” said Jackson. “He’s now their ambassador to the U.S.”

“It’s important to note that we didn’t develop anything more tangible at the time than rumors,” interrupted Debra Collins, who had said very little during the entire session.

“We developed no other information from the government.

And a program like this — one would assume it had to have approval at the very highest levels to proceed.”

“Not necessarily,” said Jackson. “It could be simply, as Mr. Dauber said, old soldiers working together on their own.”

“That would not be the Vietnamese way,” said Jack Li, another Vietnam/Asian expert.

“But it is possible.”

“Whatever the assessment at the time,” said Rubens, “clearly this needs to be pursued.”

“I agree,” said Collins.

* * *

A half hour later, Rubens and Collins sat across from each other in her office, waiting for a call back from the President’s National Security Advisor, Donna Bing. Rubens didn’t particularly relish talking to Bing and he sensed that Collins didn’t, either.

Ironically, Bing’s appointment had drawn Collins and Rubens closer together, encouraged to ally in the face of a common enemy. Briefly lovers, they had become rivals after the creation of the NSA’s Desk Three — also known