Rainfall

personal problem with him. I wonder how many subsequent S&D operations were based on intelligence from his so-called fucking source.”

    I took a swallow of coffee. “He caused a lot of problems for me after that. He’s the kind of guy who knows just which ears to whisper in, and I’ve never been good at that game. When I got back from the war I had some kind of black cloud over me, and I always knew he was the one behind it, even if I couldn’t catch him pulling the strings.”

    “You never told me about what happened in the States after the war,” Harry said after a moment. “Is that why you left?”

    “Part of it.” The terseness of my reply was meant to indicate that I didn’t want to go there, and Harry understood.

    “What about Benny?” he asked.

    “All I know about him is that he was connected to the LDP — an errand boy, but trusted with some important errands. And that apparently he was also a mole for the CIA.”

    The word
mole
felt unpleasant in my mouth. It is still one of the foulest epithets I know.

    For six years, SOG’s operations in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam were compromised by a mole. Time and again, a team would be inserted successfully, only to be picked up within minutes by North Vietnamese patrols. Some of these missions had been death traps, with entire SOG platoons wiped out. But others were successful, which meant that the mole had limited access. If an investigator could have compared dates and access, we could have quickly narrowed down the list of suspects.

    But MACV — the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — refused to investigate due to sensitivities about “counterpart relationships” — that is, they were afraid of insulting the South Vietnamese government by suggesting that a South Vietnamese national attached to MACV might have been less than reliable. Worse, SOG was ordered to continue to share its data with the ARVN. We tried to get around the command by issuing false insert coordinates to our Vietnamese counterparts, but MACV found out and there was hell to pay.

    In 1972, a traitorous ARVN corporal was uncovered, but this single, low-level agent couldn’t possibly have been the only source of damage for all those years. The real mole was never discovered.

    I took Benny’s and the
kendoka’s
cell phones from my jacket pocket and handed them to Harry. “I need two things from you. Check out the numbers that have been called. They should be stored in the phones.” I showed him which unit had belonged to the
kendoka
, and which to Benny. “See if there are any numbers speed-dial programmed, too, and try chasing them all down with a reverse directory. I want to know who these guys were talking to, how they were connected to each other and to the Agency.”

    “No problem,” he said. “I’ll get you something by the end of the day.”

    “Good. Now the second thing.” I took out the disk and put it on the table. “What everybody is after is on this disk. Bulfinch says it’s an exposé on corruption in the LDP and the Construction Ministry that could bring down the government.”

    He picked it up and held it up to the light.

    “Why a disk?” he said.

    “I was going to ask you the same question.”

    “Don’t know. It would have been easier to move whatever’s on here over the Net. Maybe a copy management program prevented that. I’ll check it out.” He slipped it inside his jacket.

    “Could that be how they knew we were on to Kawamura?” I asked.

    “What do you mean?”

    “How they found out that he’d made the disk.”

    “Could be. There are copy management programs that will tell you if a copy has been made.”

    “It’s encrypted, too. I tried to run it but couldn’t. Why would Kawamura have encrypted it?”

    “I doubt that he did. He probably wasn’t supposed to have access. Someone else would have encrypted it, whoever he took it from.”

    That made sense. I still didn’t understand why Benny had put me on Kawamura weeks earlier, though. They must have had some other way of knowing that he had been talking to Bulfinch. Maybe telephone taps, something like that.

    “Okay,” I said. “Page me when you’re done. We’ll meet back here — just input a time that’s good for you. Use the usual code.”

    He nodded and got up to leave. “Harry,” I said. “Don’t be cocky now. There are people who, if they knew you had that disk, would kill you to get it back.”

    He nodded. “I’ll be