“With me underneath him.”
Elson shakes his head. “Who knew you’d be there? I mean, who could have known?”
“But you knew, after it happened, that they’d go nuts if they found out the name of the person who called the station and asked for the crew and it turned out to be my father. Makes it a little harder for Shen to believe I was there by accident.”
“I don’t think they did,” Elson says. “It never got back to me, and it would have. Murphy wanted everything about you, but the relationship between you and your father is down a few levels. He wouldn’t have turned it up unless he already knew what he was looking for.”
It’s begun to rain again, and the two of them are getting wet, since Elson is using the umbrellas as a wall to hide behind. “Why is it down a few levels?”
“He’s living right there in Virginia,” Elson says, “in a nice, expensive house, on Uncle Sam’s tab. And he was a high-ranking criminal in a Chinese triad. We’re not going to put him on a billboard.”
“Plausible deniability.”
Elson shrugs. “If you like.”
“I don’t like anything. There’s a coffee place right down here. Got a second floor, where no one on the sidewalk will be able to see us. Come on.”
“I have to get back.”
“Dick. If I do what I’m about to do without telling you about it, without giving you a chance to get in position, you’ll regret it for the rest of your career.”
“I’d love a cup of coffee,” Elson says.
“THE VIETNAMESE? THE newspapers?” Elson has his forehead in his right hand.
“The Phoenix Program returns to Southeast Asia. And the explosion down south, don’t forget the explosion. That’ll look good to the New York Times.”
“We don’t know anything about the murder in the States. We don’t know anything about an explosion.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Good point. I’m not in the chain of command. He just wanted me at your … um, interview so I could tell him if you were lying.”
“Who is in the chain of command?”
“That’s the question. The ambassador, undoubtedly. They’re not going to run anything in the country without him knowing about it. The CIA guys at the embassy. But it might not be the ones you’d expect. They keep all this kind of nebulous.”
“Sure. This is shit nobody wants on his shoes.”
“It’s a different world, Poke.”
“And we helped to make it that way.”
Ming Li comes up the stairs with a cup in her hand and sits down at a table behind Elson. She doesn’t glance at them.
Pulling at his sodden suit coat, Elson says, “Jesus, I’m sick of being wet.”
“Yeah?” Rafferty says. “How’s your rice crop doing? Your house been swept away yet?”
“Fine, fine.” Elson lifts his hands, showing Rafferty his palms. “Guilty of thinking of myself.”
“That’s sort of what we do,” Rafferty says. “We Americans. A tsunami hits Japan and we start worrying about radioactive flounder off Santa Monica.”
“What do you want me to do? Agitate for a change in global policy?”
“Let’s start with this,” Rafferty says. He puts on the table the second copy of what he wrote in Coffee World. “Read it. And while you’re reading, tell me why you guys never put up a decent picture of me.”
The look he gives Rafferty is almost guilty. “We didn’t request one,” he says. “I didn’t pass the request along, and Murphy probably didn’t want to do it himself, didn’t want the embassy to realize that it was he, not Shen, who was looking for an American. And there are virtually no good pictures of you on the Internet. Just your author picture, over and over.”
“So I have you to thank. Well, what you’re about to read isn’t going to seem very grateful.”
Elson squeezes his eyes closed and rubs at the bridge of his nose. Then he lets out a deep, melancholy breath and pulls the page to him. Rafferty drinks his coffee, and his eyes briefly meet Ming Li’s. It’s comforting, he decides, to have her there.
Shaking his head in disbelief, Elson runs the tip of his index finger down the edge of the page. Halfway down, he says, “Beat her to death?” but it’s not a real question, just another way of exhaling. When he’s finished, he folds the paper with great precision and stares at it.
“All true?” he finally says.
“To the best of my knowledge.” Poke thinks for a second. “Yeah. All true.”
“And you’ve given this-”
“To the Viets and a newspaper here in Bangkok.”
Elson says, “I don’t know what I can do with any of this. If I go to anybody who is in the chain of command, the first question is going to be, who gave me the intel? And then they’re going to want to nail you to the floor until they’ve verified everything, which could take months, and they might even give Murphy a crack at you to see who comes out on top.”
“Here’s what I want: I want you to say you received this anonymously today.” He puts two fingers into the bottom of his T-shirt and uses them to pull the napkin-wrapped envelope from his jacket pocket. “It’s the same thing you just read, everything from the Vietnam massacre to the murder in Wyoming and Murphy’s role here, including the names of Shen and Sellers.” He tugs the napkin, and the envelope falls to the table. Elson pushes his chair back as though he’s afraid his DNA might jump from him to it. “You’re going to have to handle it, Dick. You can’t give it to them without touching it.”
“How did I get it?”
“Did you hang up your raincoat in the restaurant?”
“Sure. It was dripping.”
“Well, somebody put it in your pocket while you were eating. You found it when you got back to the office, and you knew they’d want to evaluate it.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“So figure out something better.”
Elson shakes his head. “But … I mean, what’s your objective? Do you actually care whether we-they, whoever they are-are embarrassed, or whatever, by being linked with him?”
“If you really want to know, I don’t give a shit. If people do business with rats, they should expect to get the plague. On the other hand, if something should happen to Murphy, I just think this is information that you-or they, whoever they are-should have, before they make a big stink about it and call attention to the connection, to the fact that this guy was essentially their boy, on their payroll, doing their bidding. Before people figure out how dirty the bidding was.”
Elson starts to pick up the envelope and then pulls his hand back. “There’s no telling how they’ll react if something happens to him.”
“I understand that. But it seems to me, as a good citizen, that they should know about the massacre in Vietnam and the murder in Cheyenne and the murder here in Bangkok and the possibility of a major newspaper story and the interest of the Vietnamese before they go out and do something that will have the whole world looking at them.”
Elson picks up the envelope. “I’ll think about it. But Jesus, Poke. You’re supposed to be a travel writer, as far as I know. How does someone like you get this devious?”
“I’m just writing,” Poke says. “I got stuck in somebody else’s story. All I’m trying to do is write my way out.”
27
He jerks awake as the car begins to move, ripped from a dream in which Miaow was back on the sidewalk, her clothes and face filthy. She was running from someone, a shadowy shape looming behind her. His mouth tastes foul, and his heart is hammering, pumping pure panic through his veins.
“What?” he says. A rattle of rain hits the windshield.
“We going,” Vladimir says, turning on the wipers.
“Who? Oh, you mean-”
“Lady. Janos just give me one ring. Means she going.”
“Time is it?”
“You have watch.”
“Right, right. Ahh, twenty to six.” Through the windows the city is gliding into the terminal stages of dusk, hurried by the heavy cloud cover.