Page 161 of Cry Havoc

The CIA safe house was not far away. They had carried Ella to the end of the alley and thrown her into a small, dilapidated red, white, and yellow Coca-Cola delivery van that reminded Tom of a clown car. Tom slid the door closed and the vehicle pulled into traffic, blending into the chaos of Saigon’s streets.

The van was driven by one of Serrano’s assets whom Tom had met days earlier. Though Trân Van Chuan was no longer a local, he fit in as though he was. In his mid-twenties, Trân was familiar with Saigon, having spent much of his early life there. His father was a government liaison fromthe Ministry of Education to the private schools that had survived the French exodus. Because of his father’s position, Trân was one of the few Vietnamese enrolled in a school founded by Christian missionaries. His high school years were interrupted by the school’s move from Vietnam to Thailand in the early 1960s after the influx of U.S. troops. His class finished off the school year at the American Club in Bangkok before permanently moving to Malaysia. When Trân left high school with a commanding grasp of Vietnamese, Thai, Malay, English, and French to attend Orange Coast College in Orange County, California, on a scholarship, he came to the attention of the CIA. The intelligence services kept close tabs on international students as they were primed for recruitment, which is how he came to be behind the wheel of the Coca-Cola delivery truck in Saigon with a drugged kidnapped woman in the back cargo space.

Tom stayed with Ella while Serrano rode in the passenger seat, providing another set of eyes for Trân, who concentrated on avoiding the bicyclists, three-wheeled Lambro passenger vans, scooters, and pedestrians clogging the streets.

The safe house had a back entrance with a narrow garage. When they pulled to a stop, Serrano slid from the passenger seat, spun the combination on the garage lock, and threw open the tilt-up door, closing it behind them as Trân parked inside. Serrano helped Tom carry Ella up to the second floor of the three-story building and laid her on the couch while Trân went to the window to observe the streets below.

“How long will she be out?” Tom asked.

“Another twenty minutes,” Serrano replied.

“And when she wakes up?”

“When she wakes up, we make her an offer she can’t refuse.”

CHAPTER 57

THE TWO MEN CAMEinto focus as Ella opened her eyes. Slowly, she pushed herself to a sitting position and brought her hands to her temples, a dry mouth and pounding headache threatening to overwhelm her.

Her handbag was gone, but the paperback copy ofLe Fuethat she had removed from the dead drop was on a rectangular French coffee table of stained rosewood next to a glass of water.

Tom was dressed much as she remembered him, in jeans and an untucked safari-style dark green shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Serrano was in tan slacks and a light blue button-up short-sleeve top. They were seated across the table from her. A smaller Vietnamese man she did not recognize was sitting across the room in a chair positioned so that he had a view of the street below. A round wooden end table that looked like it came from another room was to his left. On it was a black pistol with a long silencer.

“Is he supposed to intimidate me?” she asked, reaching for the water.

She brought it to her lips, the cool liquid soothing both her parched mouth and frayed nerves.

“I see you have yet to put the bracelet on that watch,” she said, glancing down at Tom’s Submariner.

Tom remained silent as she pulled herself together.

“Well, now what?” she asked.

Serrano leaned forward and set a photograph on the table. It had been taken in Bangkok from what was obviously some distance away. Ella was clearly laughing with the man across from her at a restaurant, a bottle of chilled 1968 Phu Yuck champagne next to them in an ice bucket.

“What do you expect of me?” she asked.

“Only the truth,” Serrano said.

“The truth. And what of it? Why should I talk with you if you just intend to kill me?” she said, indicating the Vietnamese man with the pistol.

“You are alive and well, Mademoiselle DuBois. Whether you stay that way is up to you. There is no reason you cannot go back to running your business when this is over.”

“When what is over?”

“Who is the man in the photograph?” Serrano asked.

“That is a man I met in Paris. A friend. A lover,” she said, looking directly at Tom.

“And his name?” Serrano pressed.

“Gabriel de Machaut.”

Serrano pulled out another file and made a show of reading it over before turning it around and setting it in front of Ella. It was an official photograph of the same man in a Soviet military uniform.

“Are you sure you don’t know him as Major Kirill Dvornikov?”

She pushed the file back a few inches toward Serrano and shook her head.