Tess Gerritsen - Never say die

At last, at a faded green building, they stopped. Guy squinted at the number over the doorway and nodded. "This is it." He knocked.

The door opened. A single eye, iris so black, the pupil was invisible, peered at them through the crack. That was all they saw, that one glimpse of a woman's face, but it was enough to tell them she was afraid. Guy spoke to her in Vietnamese. The woman shook her head and tried to close the door. He put his hand out to stop it and spoke again, this time saying the man's name, "Sam Lassiter."

Panicking, the woman turned and screamed something in Vietnamese.

Somewhere in the house, footsteps thudded away, followed by the shattering of glass.

"Lassiter!" Guy yelled. Shoving past the woman, he raced through the apartment, Willy at his heels. In a back room, they found a broken window. Outside in the alley, a man was sprinting away. Guy scrambled out, dropped down among the glass shards and took off after the fugitive.

Willy was about to follow him out the window when the Vietnamese woman, frantic, grasped her arm.

"Please! No hurt him!" she cried. "Please!"

Willy, trying to pull free, found her fingers linked for an instant with the other woman's. Their eyes met. "We won't hurt him," Willy said, gently disengaging her arm.

Then she pulled herself up onto the windowsill and dropped into the alley.

Guy was pulling closer. He could see his quarry loping toward the marketplace. It had to be Lassiter. Though his hair was a lank, dirty brown, there was no disguising his height; he towered above the crowd. He ducked beneath the marketplace canopy and vanished into shadow.

Damn, thought Guy, struggling to move through the crowd. I'm going to lose him..

He shoved into the central market tent. The sun's glare abruptly gave way to a close, hot gloom. He stumbled blindly, his eyes adjusting slowly to the change in light. He made out the cramped aisles, the counters overflowing with fruit and vegetables, the gay sparkle of pinwheels spinning on a toy vendor's cart. A tall silhouette suddenly bobbed off to the side. Guy spun around and saw Lassiter duck behind a gleaming stack of cookware.

Guy scrambled after him. The man leapt up and sprinted away. Pots and pans went flying, a dozen cymbals crashing together.

Guy's quarry darted into the produce section. Guy made a sharp left, leapt over a crate of mangoes and dashed up a parallel aisle. "Lassiter!" he yelled. "I want to talk! That's all, just talk!"

The man spun right, shoved over a fruit stand and stumbled away. Watermelons slammed to the ground, exploding in a brilliant rain of flesh. Guy almost slipped in the muck. "Lassiter!" he shouted.

They headed into the meat section. Lassiter, desperate, shoved a crate of ducks into Guy's path, sending up a cloud of feathers as the birds, freed from their prison, flapped loose. Guy dodged the crate, leapt over a fugitive duck and kept running. Ahead lay the butcher counters, stacked high with slabs of meat. A vendor was hosing down the concrete floor, sending a stream of bloody water into the gutter. Lassiter, moving full tilt, suddenly slid and fell to his knees in the offal. At once he tried to scramble back to his feet, but by then Guy had snagged his shirt collar.

"Just-just talk," Guy managed to gasp between breaths. "That's all-talk-"

Lassiter thrashed, struggling to pull free.

"Gimme a chance!" Guy yelled, dragging him back down.

Lassiter rammed his shoulders at Guy's knees, sending Guy sprawling. In an instant, Lassiter had leapt to his feet. But as he turned to flee, Guy grabbed his ankle, and Lassiter toppled forward and splashed, headfirst, into a vat of squirming eels.

The water seemed to boil with slippery bodies, writhing in panic. Guy dragged the man's head out of the vat. They both collapsed, gasping on the slick concrete.

"Don't!" Lassiter sobbed. "Please…"

"I told you, I just-just want to talk-"

"I won't say anything! I swear it. You tell 'em that for me. Tell 'em I forgot everything-"

"Who?" Guy took the other man by the shoulders. "Who are they? Who are you afraid of?"

Lassiter took a shaky breath and looked at him, seemed to make a decision. "The Company."

"Why does the CIA want you dead?" Willy asked.

They were sitting at a wooden table on the deck of an old river barge. Neutral territory, Lassiter had said of this floating cafe. During the war, by some unspoken agreement, V.C. and South Vietnamese soldiers would sit together on this very deck, enjoying a small patch of peace. A few hundred yards away, the war might rage on, but here no guns were drawn, no bullets fired.

Lassiter, gaunt and nervous, took a deep swallow of beer. Behind him, beyond the railing, flowed the Mekong, alive with the sounds of river men, the putter of boats. In the last light of sunset, the water rippled with gold. Lassiter said, "They want me out of the way for the same reason they wanted Luis Valdez out of the way. I know too much."

"About what?"

"Laos. The bombings, the gun drops. The war your average soldier didn't know about." He looked at Guy. "Did you?"

Guy shook his head. "We were so busy staying alive, we didn't care what was going on across the border."

"Valdez knew. Anyone who went down in Laos was in for an education. If they survived. And that was a big if. Say you did manage to eject. Say you lived through the G force of shooting out of your cockpit. If the enemy didn't find you, the animals would." He stared down at his beer. "Valdez was lucky to be alive."

"You met him at Tuyen Quan?" asked Guy.

"Yeah. Summer camp." He laughed. "For three years we were stuck in the same cell.'' His gaze turned to the river. "I was with the 101st when I was captured. Got separated during a firefight. You know how it is in those valleys, the jungle's so thick you can't be sure which way's up. I was going in circles, and all the time I could hear those damn Hueys flying overhead, right overhead, picking guys up.

Everyone but me. I figured I'd been left to die. Or maybe I was already dead, just some corpse walking around in the trees… " He swallowed; the hand clutching the beer bottle was unsteady. "When they finally boxed me in, I just threw my rifle down and put up my hands. I got force marched north, into NVA territory. That's how I ended up at Tuyen Quan."

"Where you met Valdez," said Willy.

"He was brought in a year later, transferred in from some camp in Laos. By then I was an old-timer. Knew the ropes, worked my own vegetable patch. I was hanging in okay. Valdez, though, was holding on by the skin of his teeth. Yellow from hepatitis, a broken arm that wouldn't heal right. It took him months to get strong enough even to work in the garden. Yeah, it was just him and me in that cell. Three years. We did a lot of talking. I heard all his stories. He said a lot of things I didn't want to believe, things about Laos, about what we were doing there… "

Willy leaned forward and asked softly, "Did he ever talk about my father?"

Lassiter turned to her, his eyes dark against the glow of sunset. "When Valdez last saw him, your father was still alive. Trying to fly the plane."

"And then what happened?''

"Luis bailed out right after she blew up. So he couldn't be sure-"

"Wait," cut in Guy. "What do you mean, 'blew up'?"

"That's what he said. Something went off in the hold."

"But the plane was shot down.''

"It wasn't enemy fire that brought her down. Valdez was positive about that. They might have been going through flak at the time, but this was something else, something that blew the fuselage door clean off. He kept going over and over what they had in the cargo, but all he remembered listed on the manifest were aircraft parts."

"And a passenger," said Willy.