Don Winslow - Satori

Raynal was a fat man with dark, heavy rings under his eyes. De Lhandes thought that both conditions came from his spending countless hours behind his desk, smoking cigarettes and eating bad food as he went over the stacks of reports that came through every day. If you were charged with keeping up with all the espionage in Saigon, you were charged with a lot.

“There’s a new player in town,” De Lhandes said. The Corsicans had asked him to find out what he could about this Guibert, and De Lhandes was in the business of buying and selling information. If he could do both at the same time, all the better.

Raynal sighed. There were already too many old players in town, a new one was the last thing he needed. “And who would that be?”

“Something called a ‘Michel Guibert,’ “De Lhandes said. “He turned up at the Continental.”

Raynal resisted the bait. “Probably just some businessman.”

“Probably,” De Lhandes agreed as he helped himself to another drink and one of Raynal’s cigarettes. “But he joined the Corsicans for their afternoon pastis.”

Raynal sighed again. A true Parisian, he despised Corsicans as a matter of social duty, and resented that his job forced him to at least tolerate, if not actively cooperate with, them here in Saigon. “What do they want with this… Guibert, was it?”

“It was,” De Lhandes said. “And who knows?”

Who does know, De Lhandes pondered, what L’Union Corse is ever up to? It has its greasy fingers into every pie. He slumped a little more into the chair and contemplated the slow circulation of the ceiling fan.

Raynal had a fondness for the Belgian dwarf, and he was useful. A few piastres here and there, a few chips at the casinos, a girl tossed in occasionally, it was little enough. And Raynal needed assets just now, especially the sort that warned him of newcomers.

“Operation X” – could we have come up with a less creative name? – was running smoothly and nothing must be allowed to interfere with that, he thought. If “X” failed, we could very well lose the war, with it Indochina, and with that any vestiges of a French Empire.

Personally he didn’t give a damn -he would much rather be drinking at a civilized boîte in Montparnasse, but professionally it mattered to him a great deal. His job was to defeat the Viet Minh insurgency in the south, and if that meant distasteful operations like the certainly distasteful “X,” then c’est la guerre.

And De Lhandes brought old news. Signavi had already called to report that this Guibert had apparently sold weapons to Bay Vien and had witnessed X’s operation in Laos. Raynal had questioned Signavi’s judgment in allowing Guibert to actually fly in with the opium shipment, but Signavi answered that Bay Vien had given him little choice.

“De Lhandes?”

“Yes?”

“Would you mind going around and having a drink or something with this Guibert?” Raynal asked. “Sound him out?”

“If you’d like, Patrice.”

“Please.”

“Of course.”

Raynal opened a desk drawer, pulled out a used envelope, and slid it across the desk. “For your expenses.”

De Lhandes took the money.

XUE XIN CLIPPED a vine away from the stone and looked up to see a novice monk approaching.

“What is it?” he asked, unhappy to be interrupted.

“I have a message for you.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I am instructed to tell you,” the boy said, looking puzzled, “that ‘the Go stones are pearls.’ ”

“Thank you.”

The boy stood there.

“You may go,” Xue Xin said.

He returned to his work and smiled.

Nicholai Hel was in Saigon.

DIAMOND RECEIVED THE CABLE and went straight to Singleton’s office. He cooled his heels in the waiting room for a good forty minutes until the receptionist told him he could go in.

The old man didn’t look up from the briefing book that he was reading. “Yes?”

“Hel is in Saigon.”

Now Singleton looked up. “Really?”

The boss was in one of his moods, in which every response came in the form of a single-word interrogative. Diamond continued, “Sir, he seems to have arrived on a French military flight with a shipment of weapons, rumored to be rocket launchers.”

That information made Singleton somewhat more expansive. “Where did the flight originate?”

“X.K.”

“Would that be an initialization of ‘Xieng Khouang’?”

“Yes, sir.”

Singleton thought for a moment. “Well, that’s not good.”

“No, it isn’t.”

It was especially not good, Diamond thought, as he hadn’t received this information from Haverford but from Signavi, who had phoned him shortly after Hel left Cap St.-Jacques. The Frenchman had asked him to find out everything he could about this Michel Guibert. Signavi was worried about Guibert’s alleged prior relationship with the Viet Minh, especially with the agent Ai Quoc. Signavi’s Vietnamese special forces troops had been hunting Ai Quoc for months, to no avail.

“Who is in possession of the weapons now?” Singleton asked.

“The BX,” Diamond answered. Seeing Singleton’s annoyed look he added, “The Binh Xuyen.”

“Hel is creative.”

“That’s one word for it.”

“Do you have a better word in mind?”

“No, sir.”

Singleton sat back and thought. This Hel person is really quite remarkable, he decided.

Remarkable, unpredictable, and dangerous.

“Take care of it,” Singleton said.

“What should I tell Haverford?”

Singleton pondered Hel’s remarkable escape from Beijing. “Why tell him anything?”

He went back to reading the briefing book.

Diamond stood there for a couple of seconds before figuring out that he’d been dismissed. Feeling the receptionist’s contemptuous look on his back, he hurried out of the office and into the elevator, discovered that he was in a sweat, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

Then he realized that it was all working out. Hel would finally be terminated and…

But what if Hel talked to Haverford about what he had seen in Laos.

And what if Singleton ever found out that…

He left the office and booked himself on a military flight to Saigon.

The supposedly brilliant Hel had walked right into his trap.

CITIES, NICHOLAI PONDERED as he walked along Boulevard Bonard, are like women of a certain age.

The evening masks the signs of aging, smoothes over lines, shades decay, replicates the golden glow of young years. So it was in Saigon, which at night became a lady in a basic black dress, with diamonds around her neck.

Haverford was doubtless a fine intelligence agent, but he made a damn poor street operative, and his clumsy efforts to follow Nicholai were almost comical. Nicholai quickly grew bored of the game, however, and literally turned on him near the clock tower outside the central marketplace.

He looked to be alone, but Nicholai scanned the crowd for signs of other agents. It would be almost impossible to tell, he had to admit. They could be mixed among any of the shoppers or merchants in the busy pavilion. But he looked for the overly watchful, the purposefully disinterested, or anyone who made even glancing eye contact with Haverford.

Nicholai eased into the crowd, circled, and came up behind him.

“Don’t turn around,” Nicholai said. “And walk.”

“Easy,” Haverford said. But he kept walking. Nevertheless, he took the offensive. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried about you.”

“After setting me up to be killed? I’m touched.”

“I don’t know what happened in Beijing,” Haverford said. “We had an extraction team in place and then you just went off the radar.”