The Kaisho (32 page)

A slow smile spread over Leonforte’s face. “You know, Do Duc, I believe I made the right choice not blowing your brains out.” He got up, brushed kernels of rice off his fatigues. The Gwai followed suit.

Do Duc, rising with them, was more acutely aware than ever of being under Leonforte’s control.

“Let’s get going,” Leonforte said. “There’s something back at base I want you to see.”

They arrived just before sunset. Color was lavishly splashed across the cloud-swollen sky, and the treetops appeared to be swords of stained glass. Birds flitted nervously among the branches, and some distance away, Do Duc could hear the low warning growl of a large predator, a tiger, perhaps.

Leonforte’s camp was both more and less than he had imagined. While it was composed of houses rather than pitched tents, these hooches were ramshackle and mean in a way that spoke of poverty and suffering plainly beyond Western understanding. The stench of refuse and offal was so strong it soon became an acrid taste in the back of their mouths.

Almost immediately, and without a sign from Leonforte that Do Duc could see, the Gwai broke up. Only one stayed with them as Leonforte led them toward one hooch that seemed more substantial than the others. Do Duc assumed this was Leonforte’s own place, but he was wrong, and it was the last time he allowed preconceived notions to cloud his assessment of the man.

The hooch, was, in fact, a jail. It was occupied by one man: a Caucasian in black VC pajamas. Though he was obviously without the insignia of rank, it was most obvious by his posture and mien that he was a military man.

“This the spook?” Rock asked.

Leonforte nodded. “The Mad Hatter.”

The man stared at them mutely, defiantly. He was very tan and fit. Tall and thin, he seemed a bit put out by the low ceiling of his jail, but that was all. His piercing blue eyes studied them seemingly without prejudice, but Do Duc did not mistake this mask for indifference.

“He led the first party to come looking for me.”

Do Duc was going to ask what had happened to the rest until he realized this man was the answer. He was the only one in Leonforte’s jail; the others had never been heard from again. They were dead.

Do Duc understood then the mortal line that Michael Leonforte had crossed, and the enormity of the step he and Rock would be taking should they decide to link up with this man. No wonder he thought of himself as a god; he had transgressed the law of man with a vengeance. To do that it was imperative he know he was beyond the law.

“What are you going to do with him?” Rock asked in that almost gentle tone that Do Duc had come to identify as his killing voice.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

Rock took a step toward the cage within which the Mad Hatter was imprisoned. Looking him hard in the eye, he said, “I have an idea.”

Do Duc did not object to what Rock had in mind because it would cement their relationship with Mick Leonforte. Leonforte himself was impressed with the plan because it at once increased the power of his spell over the Gwai and therefore the pipeline, while it bound these two to him in a manner that was as close to irrevocable as the human condition could get. It also appealed to him for the kind of message it would send back to the Jabberwocky.

“When they get a load of this,” Rock had said, “they’ll think twice about sending anyone else after us.”

He instructed the Gwai to tie the Mad Hatter to a rectangle of bamboo. Then, squatting over him, he had begun asking him questions. This was something of a ruse. Rock suggested that they make the Mad Hatter believe that they wanted access to the spook secrets filed in his brain. The fact was they wanted simply to make an example of him, to alter him significantly enough so that when he was dumped onto Pentagon East’s doorstep, the Red Queen would take immediate notice.

“We could kill him,” Rock had told him, “but that’s so final—and the message could be misconstrued. Who’s to say that Charlie didn’t do this to him? No, we need to send a stronger message, pack him up like a party favor and deliver him from evil so that he’s got a story to tell the Red Queen, so he can mislead them about what we’re up to—he’ll be able to do it far more convincingly than we ever could.”

Do Duc was impressed with Rock’s thinking. It would drive the spooks crazy to think they were out in the boonies setting up their own business in heisted military secrets. Commerce was the one thing spooks understood better than anyone else. It didn’t matter if you were a capitalist or a Marxist, a fascist or an anarchist. It was the prime directive of spookdom: commerce transcends ideology.

So he and Michael Leonforte watched in fascination as Rock went to work on the Mad Hatter, interrogating him for hours on end, using light and sound in concert, in between bouts of intense pain persuasion. Absorbing the process, which Rock conducted as if it were a medical protocol, Do Duc felt an odd sensation stirring the short hairs at the back of his neck.

No way had Rock learned this discipline in the Big Dead One, his former infantry outfit. He felt as if a supposedly well-trained pit bull had suddenly slipped its leash and was now gnashing its teeth in the nearby underbrush.

Apparently, Leonforte had the same thought because on one of their breaks from their newest spectator sport, he said to Do Duc, “He learn this shit in the Werewolves?”

“
I
never learned it in the Werewolves,” Do Duc replied.

They were at the latrine, urinating into the damp morass below them.

“I bet your CO knows how to slip between the slats of consciousness like this.”

“Bowel? I don’t see that. Why would he have a small Science Fiction outfit and not be with the other honchos at Pentagon East?”

“Spook think,” Leonforte said, buttoning his fly. “He’d be nearer the action, able to move on any mission he needed to without questions being asked. Also, no one would suspect who he really was.”

“Maybe,” Do Duc said adjusting his trousers. “And maybe you’re seeing spooks hanging like bananas in the trees.”

“Let me tell you something,” Leonforte said as they turned back to the hooch where Rock was tirelessly trying to slip between the slats of the Mad Hatter’s consciousness. “In the business you and your pal just bought into, you’d better be looking for spooks in the trees. Otherwise, you’re liable to be court-martialed and executed before you can invent a defense.”

They returned to the hooch. The stench of fear, sweat, and feces hung in the air like a spider’s web. They could see Rock’s back. He had taken off his blouse and his heavy muscles were oiled with sweat, bunched as he performed his work.

Do Duc could see that he had a small blade in his right hand and, with a surgeon’s precision, was making incisions in the Mad Hatter’s face.

Hearing them enter, Rock said, “I want to make sure he never forgets what we wanted from him.”

There was a peculiar sound, a kind of spine-chilling susurrus that resolved itself into a soft sobbing interspersed with an animal’s panting. As he moved closer, Do Duc got a full view of what Rock was doing. The Mad Hatter’s teeth were clenched, and as Rock worked on him, they ground together as puffs of agonized sound distended his cheeks.

That was as much as Do Duc cared to see. He nodded to Leonforte, and together, they moved out of the miasma into the sticky late-afternoon light.

“Let’s make arrangements with the Gwai to get him back to Pentagon East,” Do Duc said.

“Your friend Rock’s certainly a workaholic.”

“You don’t know the half of it. But it seems all of us here like this work more than your average Joe.”

Leonforte laughed. “It’s like my father says: nothing beats the capitalist spirit.”

“For Rock, I think this enterprise transcends money or power. It’s somehow spiritual, like the Holy Grail.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Leonforte said, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “I get the impression he could work on the Mad Hatter another couple of days.”

“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea. What would be left?’

“To tell you the truth, I don’t want to find out.”

Do Duc watched Leonforte as he spoke to the Gwai; it was decided they’d take the Mad Hatter back in-country at first light tomorrow.

“Now let’s get down to business, partner,” he said when Leonforte had dismissed the Gwai. “I want to know exactly how you cut Charlie out of his own drug pipeline.”

Leonforte threw his head back and laughed long and hard. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

“What the fuck d’you mean?” Do Duc was already a little pissed off being made the butt of a joke he didn’t get.

“You
stepped into it big time, Do Duc. This pipeline from the Shan States is the mother lode. It isn’t Charlie’s, never was. It’s being run by Uncle fucking Sam. The whole stinking war’s being funded through this mother.”

“You mean the United States government owns and operates an opium pipeline? You must be out of your mind.”

“If by the government you mean Congress or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, no. That
would
be an insane notion. No, I mean a clique of high-level officials from all branches of government—the military, judiciary, legislative, executive—a sub-rosa organization at work for their own purposes.”

“Which is?”

“Power. That’s all any of them care about: possessing the power to manipulate events, people, governments, economies. Power and the circumvention of the law. The group’s even got a name. It calls itself Looking-Glass.”

“How d’you know all this?”

“I was sent out here to monitor this mother lode for Looking-Glass, but I got one look at it and decided this was the opportunity of a lifetime, so I liberated it. I don’t think Looking-Glass should have all the goodies for itself.” Leonforte laughed again. “Why d’you think the Jabber-wocky’s so damned anxious to bring me back?”

“This is all bullshit. You with your record would be about the last person Veil—or anyone else, for that matter—would trust with monitoring the biggest drug pipeline in Asia.”

Leonforte’s eyes sparked as he laughed. “I’ve got friends in high places. Or, at least I did. And I’ve got a brother who watches over me like a guardian angel.”

Do Duc stood very still, the sweat running down him in rivulets. For a long moment, his mind was paralyzed. He felt numb with the implications. He noted with interest that Leonforte had said “brother,” not “father.” What of the famous “hot-shit” Mafia boss, as Bowel had referred to him, Frank Leonforte?

“And now you’ve fucked these guys in a major way. Why?”

Leonforte shrugged. “This jungle does something to you. As a Vietnamese, you should understand because you’ve been close to it all your life. There’s
power
in these mountains. It infects the blood like the bite of a vampire. And I thought, ‘Why should I be an errand boy for Looking-Glass when I can be monarch of this realm.’” He laughed again. “Besides, Do Duc, it’s a rush to fuck with people’s heads when you know there’s nothing they can do about it.”

“If what you’re telling me is the truth, Looking-Glass won’t let you get away with it. They’ll bring in an entire division to weed you out.”

Leonforte smirked. “Really? Tell me, how many regular Army units would have to be rerouted? How many officers would get wind of a mass movement like that? And in a priority-one out-country hot zone like Laos? No way.” He was smiling now. “Besides, I got a deal going with my brother. It’s no sweat.”

Do Duc was thinking this through. He thought of how batshit Pentagon East had gone at Leonforte’s MIA sheet, how they had brought out pattern-activity surveillance on a massive scale to get a line on this one man. And how they had chosen Bowel’s elite Werewolves to go in and bring him home. And then he thought of Bowel’s directive to extract Leonforte by any means possible, and he knew something had gone wrong.

He took a breath, said, “I want you to know something. My orders were to bring you back, one way or another.”

“Looking-Glass,” Leonforte said, nodding. “They sent this other bastard after me, too. So what?”

“I don’t think it
was
Looking-Glass. See, my CO was very specific. He told me I had to deliver you to
him,
not to the people at Pentagon East. I thought it odd at the—”

Leonforte stared at him for a moment. He blinked as if he could not believe his ears. At last, he said softly, “Who gave you those orders?”

“My CO, Bud Powell.”

“My brother,” Leonforte said, as if invoking one of the ten thousand names of God. “Powell works for my brother inside Looking-Glass. My fucking brother has turned against me.”

He turned away for a moment, his shoulders hunched as if against a chill wind only he could feel. When he turned around again, he seemed in some subtle way changed. His eyes glittered and burned as if reflecting firelight, and seeing this, Do Duc listened with all his attention when Leonforte said to him, “This changes everything, including your role in this deepening shadow play.”

The truth about a man
lies first and foremost
in what he hides.

—André Malraux

When Celeste awoke, the demon and the Kanfa bridge had vanished. She took a deep, shuddering breath and blinked like someone awakening from a nightmare. She found herself sprawled on the cool stone floor of a vast windowless room that seemed to have been hewn out of the heart of the palazzo. There was no furniture in this space, but seven enormous brass candelabra ringed them, the ash of hemp or, perhaps, the mushroom of which Nicholas had spoken mingling with the muddy residue of yellowish tallow.

She saw Nicholas, his back to her, crouched and silent in the center of the room where the apex of the horrid bridge had been. He was naked to the waist, as if his battle had stripped him of his shirt and jacket. She could see the bunched muscles of his shoulders and upper back, the faint expansion and contraction of his ribs.

“Nicholas?”

He did not answer her.

Slowly, her breathing returned to normal. She became aware that the walls were hung with ancient Flemish tapestries, depicting hunting scenes. In one, the prey was a delicate, silvery unicorn; in another, it was a horned dragon, spitting bright, acidic flame.