Jake Fonko M.I.A. (24 page)

“No way,” Sonarr snorted indignantly. “Impossible. Our field people don’t operate like that.” The rest of the discussion didn’t take long—a repeat of his job offer, with harder sell behind it. Hashing out details for the next couple days. Etc. Kevin drove the lot of us back into town, and Sonarr deposited Soh Soon and me at the Oriental Hotel.

I’d heard it was one of the great hotels of the world, and what I could see of it gave me no reason to doubt it. Soh Soon was enraptured. After all those years crashing around in the Cambodian jungle, the Oriental must have seemed like her wildest fantasies come true. Shoot, 
I
 was impressed, and I’d grown up on the rich side of L.A. By now it was late afternoon, the end of a long, hot day. “How about if we hit the swimming pool,” I suggested to Soh Soon. “Then we’ll have dinner and take in the sights.”

“No have pretty bathing suit like other ladies,” she pouted.

Come to think of it, neither did I. Open tab, Sonarr said. “No problem,” I told her. “Let’s run down to the shops in the lobby and get some.”

We crawled back to our rooms around eleven. The stress and hardship of the last few days had overcome us, bone-weariness scaling our extravagant plans for painting the town down to dinner, a stroll and a couple drinks. We’d have a few more days, so decided to leave some town to paint later. Soh Soon wanted to go straight to bed—hers—and I didn’t have the energy to persuade her otherwise. Time enough for that, too. The light on my room phone blinked in the dark. I had a message, the operator told me. A man named Mr. “Sarge” had left his number and wanted me to call someone named “Asap”—A.S.A.P., I finally figured out. I dialed him up.

“Jake, great to hear your voice! Man, you had me worried for a little while, when I heard about them Khmer Rougers rollin’ into that Phnom Penh, and nary a word from you.”

How did 
he
 know I was in Phnom Penh? “Everything’s A-OK now, Sarge,” I told him. “Couldn’t have done it without you.”

“You mean, all that junk and stuff I got rid of was useful to you? Glad to hear it did a little good. Listen, I’m stationed here in Thailand now. Had some friends keepin’ an eye out for you, told me you blowed into town yesterday, so I helicoptered in to Bangkok. Man, we gots to get together. Lot of things to talk about.”

“The last few days have worn me pretty well down,” I said. “I’d be better company after a good night’s sleep. You free to come by here for breakfast first thing tomorrow morning?”

He joined us next morning in the coffee shop at the Oriental. After breakfast, I told Soh Soon to go off and enjoy herself for a while. It being her first time in a city since she was ten, I was sure she’d find plenty to catch her fancy. And God help the fool who tried to molest her. Sarge and I walked out along the river. We found a place to sit where we couldn’t be bugged, short of having one planted in my clothes (and I’d checked for that before leaving my room, just in case). I had some security problems on my mind—not national, but my own personal. Top Secret or not, I needed some advice from Sarge. I told him the whole story and asked him what he thought.

“What it sounds like to me,” he said, “is a cover-up. This whole Driffter business smells worse’n a skunk’s outhouse. What I heard about that guy, he’s the baddest news in town. Why would the CIA even want him back? You say Sonarr said you was supposed to ‘service that asset’? That could be CIA code-talk for ‘take him out,’ you know.”

“He didn’t say 
I
 should do that, and if I had, we’d still be stuck up in the hills.”

“I ain’t sayin’ you should have, Jake. But look what happened. Driffter blows into Bangkok with that wild-ass story of his, after being missing for eighteen months, and now he’s no place to be found. You come in a few days later. Sonarr 
tells you Driffter’s story
 and asks you to verify it. You’re intelligence-trained. If you got two people, and you want to get to the bottom of something, do you do it that way, or do you ask them separately each to tell their own versions?”

“So Sonarr wants to bury the whole thing deep and out of sight?”

“Sure. If they went and sweated the truth out of Driffter, how many people are gonna come out lookin’ bad? Hell, our side wasn’t supposed to be muckin’ around down in that Cambodia in the first place—it was a neutral country, never no business of ours, according to the law. So if what ‘d been goin’ on came to light, they might have to do something about it, roll a head or two, maybe Sonarr’s. Same with you. Spy comes in from the cold, and the debriefing’s over by lunchtime? Come on! If they was serious about it, they’d be grillin’ you like a chicken-fried steak and feedin’ you sodium pentothal by the glassful. They got to have an idea of the real story by now—Sonarr spent an hour talking to your ladyfriend, you told me. That whole Driffter business could be mighty embarrassin’ for some high up people. Better to just send him off someplace far away, and good riddance. Though he’d best be watching his backtrail from here on out.”

“You think that’s why they wiped the last five years off my life, this cover up?”

“You know, they didn’t have to do it that way. Could have a couple reasons. One, they might want to destroy your credibility—make you sound like a raving maniac. Should you ever try to tell on them, it’d be your crazy tale against the official record, so who’d believe 
you
? Or maybe they’re trying to paint a picture for the KGB, keep ‘em confused, make ‘em think you’re still under cover. A third possibility is, maybe that mole-hunt business didn’t work out so good as they thought, and they want to bury it deep, get that whole play-act of Sonarr’s erased with no trace. Always remember this, folks crows about their successes and hides their mistakes. You never see no lottery losers bragging, only them winners. But there’s another idea I have—I think Sonarr wants you in the CIA real bad, so he’s usin’ the old carrot and the stick. That big salary, this hotel, all this VIP treatment, that’s the carrot—what you stand to get. Breakin’ you down to sergeant and RIF’ing you out, that’s the stick—where you’re left if you don’t join up.”

“So, you think that whole mission was a failure?”

“Mebbe the CIA sees it that way. But don’t 
you
 be talking failure, Jake. Damn, if you didn’t put on one maestro performance out there. Look at what happened. That CIA set you up like a decoy duck—down there so far from home, with no backup, or support, or help, keepin’ you in the dark all the while, why, that KGB clown could have killed you, who’d have stopped him? They already had you down on the books as MIA—who’d have ever known? And that phony-ass mission impossible to find Driffter they put you on?

“Now, look at what you accomplished. You beat them Khmer Rougers, then you took on two of the most dangerous men in the business all by your lonesome, and you beat 
them
. And then you got yourself out of that mess, and you brought that lovely young lady out with you. The CIA might have screwed up, but you sure didn’t. From what I hear, that story Driffter told is already leaking around, unofficial of course. It may not be what actually happened, but it ain’t that far off the gist of it. Ain’t nobody ever going to say so in public, but I understand some folks in the CIA regards you as a real-life legend already.”

Sarge and I talked about this and that, then he had to go attend to some business. It later turned out he’d been right about the CIA mole hunt—it hadn’t worked, and they wanted to seal it away out of sight. The man they’d thought they’d nailed through my charade didn’t pan out. In fact, Angleton’s whole mole hunt was a monumental disaster for the CIA: twenty years of frenzied searching, not to mention wasted resources and not a few ruined careers, failed to uncover a single mole. As far as I could tell, Colby’d done the right thing. How’d the KGB get my résumé, if there was no CIA mole? That’s a whole other story involving the Walker family naval spy ring that was exposed in May of 1985. My go-around with Grotesqcu was the first incident to alert the government to their activities, so maybe my little adventure had some value at that. And it wasn’t the last time I got mixed up with the Walkers, either.

When I got back to my room the message light on my phone was blinking again. Todd Sonarr had called, telling me he’d be coming by to see me at two that afternoon. Soh Soon and I had adjoining rooms. I knocked on her door and got no answer—no sign of her downstairs either. I diddled away the rest of the morning, swam a few laps, worked on my tan, had lunch by the pool and loafed around. At two on the dot, Sonarr was at my door, all pressed and polished. He sat down at the desk in the room and opened his buttery leather briefcase.

“Everything’s all squared away,” he announced with understated triumph. “Soh Soon’s paperwork is all taken care of. She’ll go in on a student visa—you told me she wanted to go to college. She didn’t have a passport, so we worked that out. She has family and friends in Los Angeles, and she said she was anxious to get going, so we’ve got her on a flight out of here at 2215 tonight. We’ll send somebody by to pick her up at 1930 hours, just have her down in the lobby.”

“Shipping her out so fast?” I said. “I thought she’d be staying in Bangkok for a few days, at least.”

“Maybe some other time, Jake. She’s involved in a sensitive situation, don’t forget. It’s best for everybody, including her, to move her out this region quickly. This way she’ll have time to get settled before school starts. Oh yeah, I pulled strings and enrolled her as a freshman at UCLA, your old alma mater—forgot to mention that. You’ll be going back in a week or so, yourself. You two can get together then. Say, what do you think of CIA efficiency?”

“Impressive,” I admitted, but thwarted lustful designs damped my enthusiasm. I’d been looking forward to getting to know her a little better—not much time for that now. “How on earth did you get a photo for the passport? She wasn’t out of my sight for a minute after you talked to her yesterday.”

“You’d be surprised at all the places we have our little cameras. Microphones too. You have a good talk with Sarge this morning? Hell of a man, ain’t he? He’s one guy you can always count on to do the right thing.”

“You had us bugged?!”

“Now, I didn’t say 
that
, Jake. But we knew the two of you got together. We always cover our assets. So, you sleep well last night? Come to any conclusions about that offer I made you? They have an old saying, you know. Once in the Company, always in the Company.”

“Whose saying is that? Which ‘they’ do you mean?”

“Why, Them, the They that’s behind everything, of course. ‘What are They up to’, and all that.” He was chuckling. He thought he’d made a joke. “Almost forgot! Here’s something for you—I pushed it through channels, no sense keeping you waiting. It’s that mustering-out check I told you about. Going through proper channels, it’d be months before it hit your mailbox. Probably best if you hold it and don’t cash it until you get back to the States. Here,” he said as he passed me another envelope from the briefcase, “this is some cash, should do you for a few days. Okay, that’s all for now. I’ve got to run along. Think about that offer. I’ll be in touch.”

Things were happening too fast again. Soh Soon was leaving in a few hours. Sonarr was pushing me for a decision. I opened the envelope with my backpay check in it. Sonarr had been right about that typographical error. It amounted to nothing. That is, somebody slipped an extra zero just to the left of the decimal point. I supposed Evanston, my lawyer step-father, dealt with money in such amounts, but I’d never held that much in my hand before. I looked in the other envelope Sonarr gave me. Yep, $5000 would do me for a couple days.

I went out on my balcony and gazed down on the traffic bustling back and forth on the lazy, brown Chao Phrya River, thirteen stories below—the howling longtail boats, the spic and span tourist ferries and the rice barges lined up like rail cars. Small peddler’s boats plied the canals that mazed through the opposite bank. In the distance upriver I could make out the thrusting spires of Wat Arun, the Temple of the Dawn. Sonarr was making quite a presentation for me. All that money. The way the CIA could get things done. The miracle technologies I’d be working with. How could you resist the temptation?

I heard a tap-tap at my door. It was Soh Soon, laden with bags and bundles. “Jake, I go shopping,” she said breathlessly. “See what I get!” She came in, dumped everything on my bed and hauled out dresses, blouses, shoes, jewelry and all the rest.

“Looks like a busy day,” I remarked. “You must have spent a fortune.”

“That Major Smith tell me okay,” she said. “He give me little plastic card, say it same as money! Sure was, you bet! Just one minute, I model for you!” She grabbed a dress and pranced into the bathroom with it. She came out a minute later in a figure-hugging, shimmering silk sheath. “What you think, Jake? Sure beat black pajamas, okay?” She looked undeniably stunning, though the dress deserved only part of the credit for that. She whirled around a couple of times, catwalk style, then pulled me down onto the bed and sat next to me, her arms around me.

I returned her hug and we flopped back on the smooth comforter. “It’s funny how everything worked out,” I mused. “Your father’s face reading was pretty accurate, at that.”

“Face reading? Accurate how?”

“That night before we left. He analyzed my face and my birthdate and predicted there was no way our escape to Thailand could fail.”

She looked at me, kissed me on the cheek and broke into giggles. “Jake, you got lovely face, but father’s face readings biggest joke in Hong Kong. One time hire accountant—face say ‘honest and reliable’. Two months later embezzle two million dollars. Another time hire solicitor—face say ‘trustworthy’. Then find out he spy for other trading company, passing inside information. What father think about you not come from face reading. I tell him about your LURPs and how you rescue me. He says: ‘U.S. Army officer, and U.S. Army gone since 1973. Clever man, expert jungle fighter. Come alone from Saigon to Phnom Penh on mission. Maybe some kind of top CIA covert ops guy?’ So he radio friend in Saigon, they find out, say you at Embassy, so must be CIA. Father figure, with CIA behind you, our chances pretty good. Give you those diamonds, figure, good investment for business to have CIA top covert ops guy for friend.”