Heat Lightning

“What about these assholes? What about Mai, or whatever her name is?”
    “Hey—let me tell it. So I told the Agency what I was thinking. You know, that I was tired and, worse than that, a liberal. And they just let it go . . . quite a few liberals in the Agency, actually. I retired. I was doing pretty well as a teacher and a writer, I still had contacts in Vietnam—I’d married my Vietnamese woman, though I met her here, in the States—and I started doing some work on trade deals and so on. I’d still get a call from the CIA guys every once in a while, and I was happy enough to talk to them. Then Chester Utecht got drunk and told everybody in sight about stealing bulldozers in Vietnam.”
    Vietnamese intelligence picked it up. In the way of the world, the father of the woman raped and murdered that day in Da Nang was now an eighty-five-year-old first-tier government official in the misty realm where intelligence and the military overlapped. He heard the story.
    He could have his revenge, his peers agreed, as long as it didn’t upset the trade apple cart.
    As it happened, Vietnamese intelligence had also picked up a line on an al-Qaeda plot that came out of Indonesia. Whether it was real or not, they got in touch with somebody at Homeland Security and suggested that the information was available. In return, they wanted the relevant layers of U.S. intelligence agencies to look in the other direction during a short, violent operation in Minnesota.
    The people who would die were all known killers and rapists. The people who would die on the West Coast—and there would be many more of them, if al-Qaeda had its way—were innocents.
    A deal was cut—and a deniable contact was needed between Washington and Hanoi.
    “You,” Virgil said. They were on Cretin Avenue, headed north toward the golf course, just a few blocks away now.
    “Me. I speak Vietnamese, have contacts in both places—though the Viets were a trifled surprised about the CIA,” Sinclair said with a grin. “I talked to an old friend over there who thought it was hilarious—turns out he was a member of their intelligence service, and he’d been playing me. One thing about the Vietnamese—they got a pretty goddamn good sense of humor.”
    What wasn’t so funny, he said, was what happened when he tried to turn them down. The people from Homeland Security pressed on him the urgency of the case, and said something to the effect that the Vietnamese had already researched him . . . and knew where his daughter was.
    “It was a threat,” Sinclair said. “I didn’t really believe they’d do anything to her—family is pretty important in Vietnam. But I wasn’t sure. So here I am.”
    “You set me up to see Tai and Phem,” Virgil said.
    “Of course; and they were seriously pissed. I’ll tell you what—the real Tai and Phem would be astonished to hear about it. They’re in town all the time, you know. Don’t stay at the Hilton. But if you’d called somebody at Larson to check their bona fides, they would have told you that Tai and Phem were outstanding citizens and enthusiastic followers of the capitalist road.”
     
 
JENKINS TURNED the corner on Marshall, headed down the hill toward the clubhouse at the Town and Country Club. The place was lit like a Christmas tree, people all over the entry and parking lot.
    “Do you have any idea of exactly what Hoa’s doing?” Virgil asked.
    “No. But I believe it’s a gun, I believe it’s Warren. All I get is what seeps through from phone calls that Hoa makes. I’ve also got the feeling that they may have a line on the last man. One thing I didn’t tell you—they’ve got a direct connect, I think, with somebody in Washington. I don’t know where. Homeland Security, probably. They have access to every record you can think of. I got Hoa’s laptop password, not without a lot of trouble, I can tell you, and signed on when she was gone with you. If you get your hands on it, you’ll find documents that you won’t believe. The U.S. government vectored them right in on Utecht and Sanderson.”
    “So why tell me now?”
    “Because we’re at the end of this,” Sinclair said. “My daughter will be okay—the Viets will have what they want, so they’ll be done with us. I just might be able to fuck with the people who did this to me, the guys over here. Depending on what you want to do.”
    A guy in a black tuxedo, accessorized with a Beretta 93R with the twenty-round mag, was flagging them