Lethal Redemption Read online

  And she thought about the robbery and the Mercedes. That might have been a random crime but it didn’t feel like it to her. Everything about her arrival in Cambodia had her unnerved.

  She began to wonder if she’d see Miloon again. And if not, what to do next. There were plenty of westerners walking around. She considered talking to some of them, but changed her mind. Porter Vale was somewhere in town and she was going to make a final pitch and he was going to listen.

  Again she laughed to herself at what she was willing to do at this point to get the bastard to listen. Again she chastised herself for being all bent out of shape. She’d been in a lot worse places by far. Seen horrible things done to innocent people and some not so innocent. But always somebody had her back.

  There it was. All her life with her grandfather, then after, with the organizations she worked for, somebody had her back. Now she was in a world with no one helping her. I can’t do this without help, she thought. And that was the simple truth of the matter.

  When her clothes were returned cleaned and pressed she was amazed they’d done it so fast. She tried to give the woman some money but she refused to take it.

  “Thank you so much, you’ve been too kind,” Kiera said.

  They bowed back and forth, then the woman left.

  8

  The chopper carrying Arnold Cole from Angkor Wat to Phnom Penh bumped through wind gusts along the Tonle Sap River before settling uneasily down on the helo-pad of Luc Besson’s massive riverside estate.

  Cole hit the ground and ducked under the swirling blades, moving like a man feeling much younger that his seventy-two years.

  He strode up the gravel path between massive gardens toward the estate’s veranda and saw Besson rushing down to meet him. “I couldn’t get here earlier,” Cole said. “Had to deal with a problem. You found her?”

  “We know she’s in town somewhere. She tried to hook up with Porter Vale, but from what my men have found out, he flatly turned her down. He’s leaving in the morning and wanted nothing to do with her.”

  “Good. Show me what you have.”

  Cole couldn’t resist a little rush at the idea that he’d been right for decades about Neil Hunter. And he alone. Every other agent or operative from that time believed the bastard. Cole knew better. He knew Neil Hunter and there was no better deceiver than that guy. They’d tried to wean him away from the military into the agency, but he’d refused. He worked with them, but he had this situation, almost a free hand, at running the supplies to the mountains and he liked it.

  Something had happened to the man after the crash. He became a recluse. Hid away from the world and never came back. Cole had always kept some eyes on him. Anytime he left the country and got anywhere near Southeast Asia, Cole wanted to be the first to know.

  “Very interesting, Arnold, very interesting. You have been right all along. Let’s have a drink of my new wine and I’ll show you a journal and some pictures.”

  As they approached the veranda a slender, young woman in a paneled white dress crossed the lawns with two children and disappeared in the gardens. “Your wife gets more beautiful every time I see her,” Cole said.

  “Young women keep us young until they tire of us, then they kill us off for the inheritance,” Besson said.

  Cole follow Besson around the fish pond, past the stables and up onto the long veranda of the massive estate house where a white-clad houseman waited to serve them from the bar.

  Besson had to show him his new hunting rifle, a .458 Winchester magnum with scope that he’d won in a poker game.

  Besson was, among other things, a major collector of artifacts and antiquities. They were partners on gambling halls and hotels across Southeast Asia. Both had military intelligence backgrounds from which they were long retired. Luc Besson’s family had, during the colonial period, controlled more plantation land in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than all but three other major French families of that period.

  Besson’s obsequious houseman poured a new favorite wine, one from the family vineyards in Southern France. They got comfortable on the veranda with its great view of the retreating flow of the Tonle Sap River, the only major body of water to reverse flow every year when the mighty Mekong swelled.

  Twirling the wine around in the glass before taking another sip, Besson put his glass down on the coffee table, then pulled open a drawer from which he took a journal.

  “Something to bring life back to old bones, my friend. One of the local thieves who occasionally does some errands for me and brings me interesting pieces, has this time brought me something very intriguing. And for that he is well paid. And you were absolutely right this time.”

  He handed a journal to Cole, explaining the means of obtaining it. Inside the journal were two fading pictures. “Don’t react until you’ve read a few entries. Look hard at the pictures. Try not to have a seizure.”

  Cole studied the pictures and the journal and was pleasantly shocked.

  “How did you know his granddaughter would do this? Come here?” Besson asked.

  “She’s a war correspondent and when she came back to take care of Neil, she started doing all kinds of searches on the internet. Talking to people on the phone. I had my people all over her.”

  Cole knew plenty about Neil Hunter’s granddaughter. She owned a sporting equipment company for women athletes, designed military protective gear for women, then became a correspondent for a local Chicago outlet and worked her way up and was on the verge of becoming big time with offers from CNN and others. He’d seen the company site which had pictures of the woman climbing a mountain, kayaking down white water, in a jungle—all displaying her specialized gear. She was a big, well-built girl and good looking.

  He went back to the journal and read entries written almost forty years ago. He leafed through to the last entries written in 1974. They depicted the last CIA flight out of Saigon and the approaching NVA led by sapper squads already within half a mile of the airfield. The utter chaos. How they almost didn’t make it up over the Catholic steeple beyond the runway.

  And then later entries about wanting to go back to the plane and bring Bobby home and return the statue to the Buddhists. He looked up at Besson. “But there is nothing here about the exact location. The other bag. The one she fought for…”

  “Has to be something. Or, maybe she committed the coordinates to memory.”

  “The woman’s damn near six feet tall. Can’t be hard to find. I want to talk to her tonight. Now.”

  “I have men all over the city looking for her. We’ll have her tonight. In the meantime, my chef is preparing your favorite dinner.”

  9

  Miloon came into the small patio with a beaming smile. This guy was relentless with the upbeat personality. And she knew he had good news. “You found him?”

  “I find. He go Chenla Theater.” He looked around like he was expecting somebody. “You go?”

  “Yes. What’s there? A movie?”

  “No. Rock opera. Where Elephants Weep. Hurry.”

  “A rock opera? What kind of rock opera?”

  “Yes. Very important. Please. Get on, we go fast. Western rock, Cambodian music. A love story in the bad time. Where Elephants Weep.”

  Beneath the smile he seemed more nervous than he had been. She got on the Vespa and he took some dark backstreets, avoiding traffic and at times using narrow back alleys.

  A rock opera? This is what Porter Vale wants to see on his last night in Phnom Penh, music in the Killing Fields?

  “Can I get a ticket?”

  Miloon gunned out into traffic. “In Phnom Penh, you pay, you have. Everything for sale. I get you inside.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes. Boy. Girl. Kidney, five hundred. You commit murder, you pay one thousand, maybe two. You buy land, water, building, police chief. Everything in Cambodia for sale.”

  “Porter Vale for sale?”

  Finally a frown when he looked at her over his shoulder. “He not Cam
bodian. Many enemies. Very difficult man.”

  “He is that. But I’m a difficult woman.”

  Miloon nodded in agreement.

  She couldn’t help thinking that she and Porter Vale would indeed make a formidable team.

  Ten minutes later they pulled into the nearly full parking area of the Chenla Theater in the Cultural Center on Boulevard Mao Tse Toung. The complex had two large buildings, one dome-topped, the other sporting a modernistic bent slab roof that turned out to be the crowded Chenla Theater.

  Miloon drove around to a side entrance and parked between a truck and what looked like the Land Rover she’d seen Porter driving.

  “How much do you need?” she asked.

  He shook his head. She gave him four ten dollar bills anyway.

  He looked at them and handed one back. “Cambodian no like if has tear.” He showed where the bill was slightly torn. “Bad luck.”

  She gave him another one that wasn’t torn.

  He looked around again, as if expecting somebody. He left her in the dark and hustled to the theater entrance.

  Miloon returned a few minutes after his negotiations and announced proudly, “I know manager. You will be special guest. I get you very good seat. Very close to Porter Vale.”

  He gave her a ten back. She refused the money.

  “Tip?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “A tip.”

  A man met them at the door and took her back to the auditorium. There were a fair number of Westerners in the audience and at first Porter Vale didn’t notice her entrance. He was busy talking to a couple of Buddhist monks in saffron robes.

  When they left he turned and saw her and wasn’t happy to see her or to see she had a seat almost directly behind him. “Are you stalking me?”

  “Yes. I need you to look at something and then I’ll stop.”

  “Not here and not now,” he said.

  She nodded. “After the play.”

  He shook his head and turned away, his jaw clenched.

  He pretty much hates me, she thought.

  A young boy came by and handed her a playbill. She read a synopsis of the performance. The show was a traditional Khmer love story fused with modern rock, about a successful New York record producer who returns to Cambodia, his native home, and falls in love with a Khmer pop star. And underneath it all—the misery of the wars and Pol Pot’s destruction of the country.

  Sounds like a night of fun, she thought drolly.

  The opera got underway. The first song, “Where Your Country Is,” set the tone of a lost soul, a Cambodian in New York. The meaning came across even if the story wasn’t familiar. She listened to the chant of a “Noble Path” and the man’s captivation by the beautiful Cambodian singer, Bopha.

  The song “What’s Another Wrong?” had a fantastic, tragic power. Song after song coupled with drama and passion, led to the final, “That We Might Leave a Trace.”

  In her raw, sleep-deprived condition, the storyline began to get to her. What these people had gone through was simply unimaginable. One of humanity’s worst hours. And what made it all the more stunning was the age of the people in the audience.

  The mass murder of intellectuals, musicians, actors, dancers, teachers, the emptying of cities, mass starvation, the killing fields…and she was sitting with people, many of whom had gone through it. That seemed incredible to her.

  This happened in their lifetime. In my lifetime!

  And her grandfather had played a part in the events that swallowed this country and its people.

  When the production was maybe half over, a man who looked highly disturbed, made his way over to Porter and as he talked he glanced repeatedly at Kiera.

  The man left and Porter motioned to Kiera. “Follow me.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “You, sweetheart, are apparently what’s wrong.”

  10

  Porter guided Kiera around the stage through the same door where she’d come in. He looked not only irritated but a little bit nervous as well.

  He paused at the door and spoke with a Cambodian man, and then he led her to a rear door. Miloon was gone.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Let’s get out of here first.”

  She followed him out through the back and into the dark of the parking lot behind the theater.

  They went to his beat-up Land Rover. He clicked the door locks and she slid into the passenger seat and he got behind the wheel and got going. His being nervous was making her really nervous.

  “There are a couple guys asking about you and they aren’t the kind you would invite to dinner. How many people have you talked to about why you’re here in Phnom Penh?”

  “Nobody. I mean, I have a partner in my business and she knows why I’ll be gone. But she’s not—” That sounded lame even to her, so she shifted gears. Time for more facts. If he was going to help her, he deserved to know them. “I was involved in an accident on the way in from the airport.” She told him about the suitcase and what was in it. Then she backtracked to her condo break-in, then back to the funeral and the inquisitive men who showed up. She sounded too stupid just hearing herself, but once she started, she knew she had to tell it all.

  He didn’t react one way or another. He probably expected her to be a novice. He tracked everything around them, eyes in the mirrors, on the side streets. He pulled to a stop in a recess between buildings and parked.

  Then he said, “Alright, let’s see these pictures and the diary.”

  She opened her backpack and pulled out the diary from a plastic bag and then pulled out the pictures.

  As he turned on the interior light, Kiera watched his face as he glanced through them.

  She said, “The coordinates to the crash site and grave are in there.”

  She took a breath, then told him everything she knew about the flight, the contents, and the aftermath. “The journals are very specific but they were in my suitcase.”

  “The directions to the crash site?”

  “No.”

  He studied the page with the coordinates and physical markings.

  “Like I said before, my grandfather said it’s so remote there’s a very good chance the grave and the plane have been undisturbed.”

  He scrutinized the photo of her grandfather with the statue of the girl on the elephant, then got out and made a call on his cell as he paced around. He hung up and made a second call, then, after a brief conversation, closed the phone and slipped it in his pocket and returned, handing the photo back to her.

  “Get out. Come with me.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “The Phsar Thom Thmei market a couple blocks from here. There’s a woman there I want to show that picture to. The chances of it being real are about one in a million. I want her take on it. She’s an expert.”

  “If this is the five-hundred-year-old original of Trung Trac, that will change your mind?” She felt the glimmer of hope glow brighter.

  “We’ll see.”

  That would seal the deal, Kiera thought. The woman on that elephant, Trung Trac, was the greatest female warrior in Southeast Asian history. A kind of Joan of Arc of Vietnam. She and her sister had led a revolt against the dominating Chinese in 40 B.C. They came from a military family and there was speculation that Vietnam might have been a matriarchy in those days. The ladies raised an army of eighty thousand soldiers to take on the ruling Chinese. All the detachments were captained by female commanders.

  They waged a war for a couple of years and succeeded in kicking the Chinese out of village after village. Ultimately they were defeated, but not before changing the consciousness of Vietnam forever. Vietnam had schools, roads and holidays named after her. Those female-led forces were so fierce, legend had it, that one of their captains was supposed to have given birth on the battlefield and, with a newborn in one hand, a sword in the other, kept right on fighting.

  “My grandfather said that the statue was hidden a
t Nui Ba Den, the mountains of the Black Virgin, a holy place for Viet Buddhists,” she said as they crossed the street. “It was thought that it had been found and taken by the French when they conquered Indochina, but that turned out not to be the case. A fake was taken by the French. The real thing remained in hiding until the communists threatened to take over the country. He was bringing it out for the Buddhists.”

  “We’ll see,” is all he would say, effectively shutting her up.

  He hates me, she thought for the second time. Unfortunately, she was really starting to like this guy. He definitely had something about him. The way others respected him, the hard, cool demeanor, the connection to some Buddhist underground, his history with his father as bone hunters. He had a lot going for him. The bottom line, though, was that he was perfect for what she needed. Other than she was apparently ruining his life.

  A block away the market lay under a huge dome. As they got closer she would see the place had an old, art deco style that she’d always liked.

  He led her through the back door of shops, down a labyrinth of aisles jammed with colorful vendor stalls—selling everything from fine silks to gold and silver jewelry and antique coins to endangered animals—women squatting around their charcoal burners cooking soups, past restaurant alcoves busy feeding the hungry patrons, and finally to a row of shops separate from the main mall, the air wafting with spices and fish smells.

  They entered a narrow shop and a bell tinkled. The walls were lined with glass cases of jewelry and artifacts, and recesses filled with statues and vases and paintings.

  The bell alerted a woman who now came through the burgundy curtain hanging at the rear of the store. She was probably in her fifties, but it was obvious she took great care of herself, and as she drew closer Kiera marveled at her flawless skin and her shiny black hair which she had pulled back in a loose bun. She wore a black and gold silk ao dai, a traditional Vietnamese dress with a mandarin collar, and gold pantaloons. An elaborate floral design swept up from the bottom of the gown to the bodice. She seemed to glide into the room like an exotic bird.