Don Winslow - Satori

Now there was only one thing left to do.

Get Solange to safety.

DE LHANDES WADDLED down the aisle of the cinema.

Michel had said that Solange loved the films. The screen was dim, some film noir, he thought, of the type that he couldn’t bear. De Lhandes preferred comedies or period pieces, with low bodices and heaving bosoms.

Then a daylight scene brightened the screen and he saw her in the third row. He slipped into a seat behind her. She was staring up at the screen and weeping as she dabbed a tissue to her eyes.

“Mademoiselle,” De Lhandes whispered. “Michel is waiting for you. Go out the back. There are men to take you to him.”

He saw her neck stiffen with doubt.

“You have no reason to trust me,” he said. “Only that I am an admirer of beauty and, like all cynics, a disappointed romantic. And I am his friend. Go now, Mademoiselle Solange, before it is too late.”

He waited as she decided what to do.

Then she got up, slid down the aisle, and walked out the back door of the theater.

GUIBERT WASN’T at the House of Mirrors.

Nor at Le Parc, nor the Continental, nor Le Grand Monde. He wasn’t on Rue Catinat, the Central Market.

He was gone.

Diamond cruised the streets. If he couldn’t find Hel, he’d find someone who would tell him where he could.

HAVER FORD WALKED the narrow alleys of Cholon.

If the Corsicans had sent another killer, it meant that Nicholai was still alive, and he figured that Hel would most likely run to a neighborhood where he spoke the language and knew the customs.

But no one had seen a tall kweilo who fit Hel’s description, or at least no one was talking.

BERNARD DE LHANDES was looking for a decent meal, reading the sidewalk boards that listed the evening’s fixed-price menus when the men jumped out of the car, grabbed him, and shoved him onto the floor of the backseat.

“Where is your friend?” Diamond asked.

“I-I-I don’t know.”

“Tell me before I hurt you very badly.”

But De Lhandes did make them hurt him very badly. He made them bruise organs and break bones but, in the end, he couldn’t stand the pain.

“Forgive me, Michel,” he wept. “By the sacred blood of Saint Joan, forgive me.”

He told them what they wanted to know.

“THE RUNG SAT?” Signavi questioned.

“That’s what the little bastard said,” Diamond answered. “Believe me, he was telling the truth.”

The French paratrooper found the information troubling. “The Rung Sat is Binh Xuyen country.”

Diamond didn’t want to hear it. He’d already gotten the word that La Corse had botched the hit on Haverford, and that the smart-mouthed son of a bitch now knew about his connection to Operation X and the heroin trade. And now Hel had made it out of Saigon, into the so-called Swamp of the Assassins, which could only mean that he was under the protection of Bay Vien.

“I don’t care if he’s in the pope’s living room!” Diamond yelled. “You have troops, send them!”

Signavi shook his head. Americans were so clumsy – they would always use an axe when a stiletto would do. “The Cobra will track him down. We don’t want to get in the way.”

“Yeah? Is the Cobra as good as the guys you sent to kill Haverford?” Diamond asked. “Listen to me – if ‘Guibert’ gets away he takes Operation X with him. It’s over! We’re finished! You think Bao Dai is going to sit around and watch all his money go down the chute?”

He could see Signavi wavering and pressed, “We know that the woman is on her way to Guibert. Send a team, get it done.”

Signavi nodded.

JOHN SINGLETON SAT and contemplated the Go board.

He had acquired an appreciation for the game during his days in China, but could find no one in Washington who could give him a decent match, so he preferred to be alone and play both sides.

It was a good mental exercise, disciplining him to see a situation from all perspectives.

Now he looked at the go-kang and pondered the whole Nicholai Hel scenario. He reviewed it from all angles, considering Hel’s origins, his killing of Kang Sheng as well as Voroshenin, the arms connection to Liu, Haverford’s Beijing network of spies, Hel’s escape from China into Laos, his liaison with the Binh Xuyen.

He changed his perspective to consider the situation in Vietnam – the intense Viet Minh activity in the north, the relative quiescence in the south since the last failed Communist offensive, the fact that the very dangerous Ai Quoc had been in hiding, that Hel had delivered the weapons to Bay Vien instead of to Ai Quoc, the fact that Haverford had served in Vietnam during the war…

Then there was Diamond, the allegedly secret Operation X, his connection to the Corsican heroin trade, and his visceral hatred for, and fear of, Nicholai Hel…

Now both his agents were on the ground in Saigon, and it would be fascinating to see which of them emerged victorious. He found it amusing that each stone on the go-kang thought that it determined its own moves and never saw the hand that moved them toward their fates.

This Hel, on the other hand…

He did seem to move himself.

NICHOLAI HEARD her footsteps on the hatchway steps.

“Solange?”

“Nicholai.”

Her perfume was intoxicating.

Nicholai rolled out of the bed and came to her.

“Thank God,” she said. “I was so afraid…”

Solange pressed herself tight against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her, trapped the knife against her back, and whispered, “Per tu amicu.”

She stiffened, ever so slightly, and he knew.

And felt his heart break.

“It’s you,” he whispered into her hair. “You’re the Cobra.”

Then he let her go and took a step back. The light in the cabin was dim, but he could see in her eyes that it was true. Lying in the bed, waiting for her, he had seen it, and realized that he should have known sooner.

The Cobra is deadly with a blade.

La Corse had recruited her all the way back in Montpellier to kill the German colonel. They had taught her to use a knife and she slashed his throat. They took her to their base in Marseille and used her for other missions.

She kept her association with La Corse, but started to freelance, both her sexuality and her other skills. That night in Tokyo, after the attack in the garden, she came in with a knife in her hand and murder in her eyes.

Were you going to use that?

If I had to.

And you knew how, didn’t you, he thought.

She might have killed him during their romantic rendezvous at the hotel, but she knew that she was under observation and would be a suspect. But, the next day, De Lhandes had told her about the House of Mirrors and she had come, as the Cobra, to kill him. His proximity sense had told him it was someone he had encountered before, but now he truly realized it.

Life as it really is.

Satori.

“Is it Picard,” he asked, “or Picardi?”

“Picardi,” she said.

The Corsicans are the best assassins.

“The story you told me,” Nicholai asked, “how much of it was true?”

“Most of it,” she replied. “The hurtful parts, if it’s any consolation.”

It wasn’t.

“How many men have you killed?” Nicholai asked.

“More than you, perhaps,” she said. The knife slid out from behind her back. She held it low at her waist, slightly back, out of his reach. “I make money as I can – as a courtesan, as a killer. Tell me the difference.”