Heat Lightning

ghost.”
     
 
THEY SAT IN silence as more people gathered, men in black and white, women in every color in the universe, laughing among themselves, kissing, hugging. Mai was amazed at her sex, sometimes, because of the female ability to enjoy power, status, position. Not the ingrown satisfaction shown by males, but an overt celebration, a genuine happiness.
    “Do you expect to see Virgil?” Phem asked.
    “I’m done with Virgil,” she said. She smiled at him in the dark and let her smile seep into her voice. “What are you asking, you old gossip?”
    “Nothing whatever; we all know that the mission comes first,” Phem said.
    “Ah, the mission. Well, I can tell you, Virgil got about as much of this mission as he could possibly tolerate,” she said.
    Phem giggled. “I think he gave as good as he got. You seemed . . . your aura was very smooth when you returned.”
    “You are worse than your mother,” Mai said.
    “My mother . . .” Phem said, and his voice trailed away. Then: “When they find the electronics on the truck, they will be . . . amazed.”
    “Who knows, maybe they’ll never find it,” Mai said.
    “Oh, I think they will. If Sinclair is correct, Virgil is a smart man,” Phem said. “When you vanish, when the investigation is curtailed, he’ll begin to think. He’ll find it eventually.”
    “He is smart, but not that smart, I think,” Mai said.
    MAI LAY BACK in the truck and thought about the mission so far. If they had been sent simply to remove the men, there would have been no problem; but that’s not the way the mission had been briefed. Simple death would not have brought the necessary satisfaction.
    Not to Grandfather, anyway.
    The mission had begun to evolve after Chester Utecht had gotten drunk with several old friends, including one who’d long been paid by the Vietnamese government to keep an ear on the Chinese in Hong Kong. The informant—not a spy, but simply a man who listened, and who occasionally found an envelope with three or four thousand yuan under his door—had told a strange tale of a man who’d stolen a ship full of bulldozers at the end of the war, just before the final victory.
    And with the theft, there’d been murder. The story came out of a drunken fog, and back in Hanoi had rung no bells at first. Instead, the story of the bulldozers and the murder circulated simply as a tale . . . and then an old man, high in the government, heard it. Heard it almost as a joke. Within a day, he’d followed the story back to its source and had identified Utecht.
    The Vietnamese had no desire to disturb the sleep of the Chinese, and so they moved carefully, lifted Utecht, and visited him with a moderate amount of pain before the old man told the story again. But he had only two names other than his own; and one of those names was his son, a name he gave up in croaking horror and despair.
    He’d been left in an alley, dead, and full of alcohol. There’d been no stir at all, no ruffle in the leaves of the Chinese peace.
    The ear had gone to his funeral, with twenty thousand crisp new yuan in his pocket; had seen the younger Utecht, had chatted with him and taken down the details, and sent them along.
    Another twenty thousand, in gratitude, and the investigation moved on. Details were difficult to develop. Then, fortuitously and fortunately, an agent in Indonesia, on an entirely different mission, had found indications of an al-Qaeda effort in San Francisco, with (perhaps) critical munitions shipped from Jakarta through the Golden Gate.
    It was all very foggy, but the Americans’ Homeland Security was needy, in a time of declining budgets and controversial war. An exchange had been made, a liaison forged, one that would be both reliable and deniable. He was a well-known former radical activist with ties to the Vietnamese government, but who’d actually been an active CIA agent from the beginning—a man who could see his comfortable end-life ruined by disclosures from either the American government or the Vietnamese. Further, a man with a daughter, now working in Europe, who could be held over his head, an implicit, unspoken threat . . .
    A man who could be grasped and twisted into the necessary shape for the job.
     
 
A CAR WENT BY at high speed, followed by another car, down the hill, cutting in toward the country club; gathering Republicans turning to stare. Mai watched through the glasses, then lifted a walkie-talkie—an ordinary plastic walkie-talkie that