Heat Lightning

country punk.”
    Virgil said, “Thank you.”
    “But you went and broke down the program, and shot a bunch of people up, and here you are, looking me in the face and telling me that I might be going to prison.”
    Virgil stood up. “I gotta go. I wanted to tell you about Mai.”
    Sinclair said, “Wait a minute. Sit down for two more minutes. Let me tell you what I know about this whole thing. Maybe we can work something out. . . . You owe me, after I gave you Phem and Tai.”
    “You knew you were giving them to me?”
    “You knew the Virgil quote—I thought there was a good chance that you’d be smart enough to pick up on me.”
    “Weird way to do it.”
    “I needed something absolutely deniable.” Sinclair grinned at him. “You got the information, I got the deniability. Deniability is the Red Queen of American intelligence.”
     
 
VIRGIL PLAYED THE TAPE for Rose Marie Roux, for Davenport, and for Neil Mitford, the governor’s aide. Roux, who’d been a cop and later a prosecutor before she went into politics, said, “He’s willing to testify that Homeland Security—some officials at Homeland Security—cut this deal knowing that a bunch of people would be murdered.”
    Virgil nodded.
    Rose Marie tapped a yellow number two on her desktop, then looked at Mitford and asked, “The governor’s on the way?”
    “He should be in the building if traffic isn’t too bad.” Mitford was another lawyer.
    “Get down there and brief him. We’ve got to go.” Two Homeland Security people were in the conference room, waiting.
     
 
THE HOMELAND SECURITY guys looked like the security people that Warren had been bringing in, but with thinner necks. They were sleek, tanned, confident, smiling, gelled, and their neckties coordinated with both their suits and their eye color; one of them checked out Virgil’s cowboy boots and backpack when he came in and frowned, as if he suspected that he might not be talking to the BCA’s upper crust.
    Rose Marie sat everybody down and introduced the two, James K. Cartwright and Morris Arenson, to the BCA agents. She said, “Virgil has just come back from a firefight up north. Three of the Vietnamese were killed, and two escaped into Canada. We are asking for Canadian assistance in tracking them down.”
    Arenson threw back his head and said, “Ah, damnit.”
    “I thought that would be good news,” Rose Marie said.
    “Anytime things go international, they become harder to control,” Cartwright said. “Was one of the dead Viets a young woman?”
    “No, that was Mai,” Virgil said. “Or Hoa. She and another guy got away.”
    Cartwright looked around the table and said, “Thank God for small favors. Her family is right at the top of the totem pole in Hanoi.”
    Davenport asked, “Whose side are you guys on, anyway? We’ve been—”
    Before he could finish, the governor pushed through the door, smiling, trailed by Mitford. The governor said, “Glad I could make it. Glad I could make it.”
    When they were introduced, Arenson looked at his colleague and then at Rose Marie and the governor and said, “I’d thought that we were keeping this on an Agency level.”
    The governor said, “I like to keep up.”
     
 
THE TWO Washington men, Mitford, the governor, and Rose Marie then went through a couple minutes of name-dropping and bureaucratic hand-wringing, and the governor finally said, “Look, I came all the way down the hill to hear this. I have other things to do, so let’s cut the horse hockey and get down to it.” He turned to Virgil: “Virgil, tell me what you know about all this.”
    Virgil said, “Well, from what I’m able to tell, six Minnesotans went to Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon and stole a bunch of Caterpillar tractors and other equipment that was being abandoned by the military. While they were there, one of them, Ralph Warren, killed a number of people, including a couple of toddlers, and raped a woman who was, at the time, either dying or dead.”
    “Disgusting,” the governor said.
    Virgil continued: “A year or so ago, the Vietnamese found out who’d done it—found a couple of names, anyway. The murdered people had family who are now high in the Vietnamese government. The family decided to get revenge.
    “To do that, they contacted an American intelligence agency and offered a trade: they had information about an alleged al-Qaeda plot coming out of Indonesia. They would turn over the information to Homeland Security, if