Lethal Redemption (2 page)

He knew it was going to be tough to leave a place he’d known more than any other. He’d come back after college, after a failed marriage, and after various global sojourns. Always back here to work with his father and his father’s expatriate associates, men forever exiled by a disastrous war they couldn’t leave behind. Men who’d gone home or to Thailand, only to come back after Pol Pot’s terror ended. They did the searches for missing planes, missing soldiers that the government had never acknowledged. They were the final Bone Hunters.

But it wasn’t Porter’s war and he wanted no more to do with it. He was on a new mission, a new journey. Phnom Penh was just another room in a world of many rooms.

The sons, as his Buddhist friend would put it, always carry the burdens of the fathers, but must, at some point, become free of those burdens if they are to become true to themselves.

“Time to move on,” Porter said as he waved to the undercover plainclothes cops in the Jetta. They didn’t wave back. He slid behind the wheel, Knolls beside him in the passenger seat. He turned the key and headed down the street and didn’t look back.

“You worry us a bit,” Knolls said.

“How’s that?”

“We all agree you’re getting too serious in your middle age.”

Porter Vale nodded. “Got to grow up sometime.”

“That’s where you and I differ, mate.”

Porter smiled. In truth he had become very serious in the past year or so and knew that would continue. For most of his life he’d taken things as they came. Accepted what was, not what should be.

But lately he wasn’t so accepting. As one of his Buddhist friends put it, which man really dies, the one who stands back and watches the tank go by, or the man who risks standing in front of the tank?

3

Kiera spotted a blue Vespa snaking through traffic. Feeling vulnerable, her instinctive reaction was defensive.

The driver, wearing a red slicker and a beatific smile, pulled up alongside her. She looked for a weapon or any sign of aggression.

The Vespa driver, a slight Khmer, assaulted her with this big ear-to-ear smile. “Me Miloon. Take cheap.”

He looked about as innocent as one could look. But then so had the tuk-tuk driver. “You’re not a taxi,” she said. “I need a taxi.”

“You go hotel?” Smiley said. “Miloon fast, cheap. Better than taxi. Rain go.”

“Did you see the accident? Two men who took my suitcase?”

Miloon shook his head vigorously, then said, “You wait police. They do nothing. No good. Miloon many friends. Find suitcase. You no money, okay. You pay later.”

She studied him for a moment, her peripheral vision on constant patrol behind the smallish Khmer. Was this part of the operation to get the backpack in the event the others failed? Or just a nice Cambodian man looking to make a few dollars?

“Police cost beaucoup,” Miloon said. “No help.”

In her wet clothes with the heat growing even more oppressive, traffic, like a debris-filled river relentlessly flowing on by, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She said, “You saw what happened to my driver?”

He shook his head. “No see.”

Kiera detected no obvious sign of bad intent and she did want to get out of there so she decided to take the man up on his offer. “Okay, you take me to town. I want to go to Vale Expeditions. Do you know them?”

“No Vale Expeditions,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “I take you very good guide. Miloon know everyone. You like American, okay. English, okay. German, okay.”

Jet-lagged, having had no decent sleep in days, living on a few hours she’d managed during her stopover in Tokyo, Kiera was in no mood to be argued with by a scooter driver. “No. Just take me to—” she showed him the GPS location on her phone. “One block off the Sisowath Quay. You know?”

He nodded. “Yes. No good.”

“I’ll pay twice the usual fare to
no good
. But if you’re a bad man, part of some gang, I’m going to have to kill you. Okay?” She smiled.

He smiled back. “Okay. Very good. No bad man. No kill.”

She liked his easy demeanor. Maybe all Khmer men weren’t thieves. I’m getting very cynical as I approach thirty, Kiera thought. Too many bad places. Why do I keep doing it? I should settle down, have babies, and experience the joys of a boring, regular, routine-filled normal life.

Kiera climbed on the back of smiley Miloon’s Vespa, wondering how much worse this day could get. Only an hour or so ago she’d been nearly turned away from Bangkok’s newer Suvarnabhumi International Airport because of unrest and rioting in Bangkok airport. It now looked like being turned away would have worked out much better.

Miloon gunned off, quickly displaying his skills by slaloming through slow traffic like he was playing a pinball or video game, avoiding water buffalo, motorbikes and swarms of bicycles with great agility as he maneuvered into town.

Some of the girls on motorcycles flying past had long, split dresses with pantaloons beneath, the flaps of the dresses billowing as they sped about like a flutter of beautiful butterflies. Kiera thought they might be Vietnamese.

Every time the traffic slowed she was besieged by minnow swarms of begging children with outstretched hands calling out
njam njam.
At an intersection a traffic cop, wearing a white medical-type face mask, stood statue-like on his platform, ignoring the chaos and was ignored in return. A false little god with no disciples.

In this city of wide, tree-lined boulevards and faded French colonial buildings she saw no working traffic lights. Once known as the Pearl of Asia, it was a worn jewel now, though Wikipedia lauded the new hotels, restaurants, and double-digit growth.

“Here,” Miloon said, pointing with one hand, steering toward the curb with the other. They were a few blocks from the river on a street lined with office buildings and homes.

When he stopped, Kiera climbed off the scooter and followed him as he walked up to the wrought iron gate, opened it and went up to the door of the address of Vale Expeditions.

There were no business signs of any kind. She peered in through a side window into a room that was empty, save for a giant spider busy building a web on the inside corner of the window and a picture frame hanging on the far wall.

She stood perplexed, stranded in limbo. Perfect, she thought. Now what?

In the worst of places, whether war zones or trekking through wildernesses and climbing mountains, she had always had a team behind her. Guides, cameramen, fellow reporters, security guys, and in war zones her home office. She’d taken them for granted. Right now she felt alone, isolated. She couldn’t call on any of her normal resources.

Maybe Vale Expeditions just moved and had a new number as well. She returned to the scooter with her smiley-faced escort.

“No good. Fini,” Miloon said.

“Yes, you were right, my friend. Fini. Let’s go to the American embassy.” Kiera mounted the scooter. “Maybe they know where Vale is.”

“Father gone. He have son still here. Porter Vale.”

“At this point I’ll take any Vale I can find.” She was on a mission that she felt was compromised and that made it all the more important she find her guide and find him soon.

Her grandfather, as he lay dying—his body wasted, his gnarled hands thin and veined as they gripped hers—her grandfather had insisted that she could trust no one but Michael Vale. This once strong, powerful man, this former soldier who had raised her after her parents had been killed in a boating accident when she was eight years old, now reduced to a frail skeleton of his former self. She’d seen many shocking and violently disturbing things over the past years, but in some ways seeing this man ravaged and in constant pain was the worst.

He’d been her rock, her teacher and mentor. He’d taken on the task of turning a scared, confused little girl into the opposite. He taught her how to be strong, to compete, and think about the world and deal with life. And now she intended to honor the only thing he had ever asked of her.

Born almost a decade after his war ended, Kiera knew little about her grandfather’s role and he’d never talked about the war until he knew he was going to die.

She’d flown back from the Middle East and took a leave of absence to care for him, and that first day of her arrival at his home in Chicago he had something he wanted her to do. He’d already signed everything over to her and wanted her to clean out his bank box. That’s when she first saw the journals, the pictures, the diary and the maps of the location of the plane, that last CIA flight out of Saigon. All his life he’d denied he remembered anything of the crash or the plane’s location. And it was all a lie.

That’s when, through his eyes, through his journals, she was finally introduced to his war and to the plane crash that ended with his miraculous escape from Laos into Thailand with the help of fleeing Hmong. But what he didn’t tell her was exactly why he’d kept it a secret for so long. He said she’d understand when she found the plane and its contents.

Kiera had been steeped in the dark dramas of so many current wars, so many of her own nightmares from Homs to Kabul, that going back into his history and into that war felt a little like time travel from one terrible place to another. Yet, on some level, this was what her grandfather had trained her for.

Growing up, everything had always been about her. Now it was about him and what he’d left behind. His big secret and the origin of his dark, paranoid world that he’d finally asked her to enter.

At her grandfather’s Arlington funeral three weeks ago, some men she’d never seen before showed up at the solemn burial. A couple of them identified themselves as Neil Hunter’s old war colleagues, Army Intel officers or CIA types. They were dutifully apologetic, knew who she was, and seemed very friendly. But they came at her with questions, with interest about if her grandfather had written his memoirs, or if he’d regained some of the memories of the plane crash. She gave them nothing. Or so she thought, up to the break-in of her condo.

She was now convinced her Google searches and phone conversations were big mistakes. She hadn’t taken the warnings, the seeming paranoia of her grandfather, seriously enough and she was paying the price. She wasn’t the only one looking for that long lost plane.

4

The black Mercedes raced along the swollen Tonle Sap River at high speed, harassing anyone in its way with blaring horns and flashing headlights, as it shot toward the largest estate west of the city.

The driver turned off the main road and slowed at the entrance gate that led into a vast estate. He was waved on by two AK-47 toting security guards. In the passenger seat a former colonel in the Cambodian military and now a head of security for Besson Enterprises, nodded to the armed guards, both once in his army unit.

The colonel turned to the backseat, glancing at the wet, muddy suitcase between the two thieves. That they’d failed to get the woman’s other bag might seal their fate and maybe his. He gave each of them a hard look. He’d sent them on a simple errand and they’d come back with half the package. Not acceptable.

The Mercedes raced up the palm tree-lined ribbon of road that led to the massive French colonial building on the banks of the swollen river. The estate belonged to Luc Besson, a former French intelligence officer and one of the wealthiest men in Indochina.

The driver swung in by the side of the house and parked between a vintage gray Citroen and a green Land Rover.

The colonel got out, opened the back door and took the Samsonite suitcase. He walked around the side of the main house past a fish pond to the expansive veranda that overlooked the gardens, the chopper pad and the river. As he approached he heard the familiar sharp crack of a heavy caliber rifle.

When the colonel mounted the steps, Luc Besson, a tall, thin, grey-haired Frenchman, aimed at something out in the gardens until his houseman said something. He lowered the rifle and turned, seeing the colonel, and more importantly, the suitcase. He emitted a little yelp of delight, and then surrendered his rifle to one of his housemen.

“
Vous l’avez
. Excellent.” That was followed by a frown. “There were two bags?”

“The men said the woman was big and strong and fought like a tiger. They were able to get only one before a big crowd gathered and they were forced to run away.”

Besson didn’t take that news well, as the colonel knew he wouldn’t. But it was his American business associate, Arnold Cole, who had ordered the theft and he was the one to worry about. Cole would be arriving from Angkor Wat and he had a vicious temper and many powerful friends all over Southeast Asia. He was nobody to anger.

“Open it,” Besson thundered. He then yelled to his houseman to bring a tool box.

From the tool box the colonel selected a hammer and chisel. He cut the locks with a couple well placed blows.

Besson dumped everything out onto a table. He picked up a plastic bag and removed a manila envelope and took out some photos. He then removed a well-worn, leather bound book of some kind that he leafed through fast. Then, apparently disappointed, went through it much slower the second time. Finally he dropped it with disgust on the table.

Besson then went through the woman’s clothes and toiletries, throwing things that the houseman picked up. Whatever he was after wasn’t there and the colonel wasn’t happy about that at all.

The Frenchman then ripped out the lining of the suitcase, before setting it aside. For a moment he stood and stared at the pile. That’s when his phone buzzed.

Besson pulled the phone from his shirt pocket, looked at the caller ID. He answered, walked away and had a brief conversation.

When he hung up and walked back he said, “Cole is coming in from Angkor Wat. You’d best find Kiera Hunter. Do nothing to her. Just locate her and have your men watch her every move until we’re ready. And those idiots you hired that got their asses handed to them by a damn girl, get rid of them.”

The colonel left Besson and returned to the car. He was in a very sour mood for what those idiots had done by letting a woman beat them, because it would come back on him.