Page 79 of Cry Havoc (Tom Reece #1)

Saigon, Vietnam

ELLA DUBOIS HAD BEEN trained well.

She had the taxi drop her a few blocks from her destination in the Cholon district. The walk would be just shy of ten minutes and would give her time to spot a tail.

She concentrated on not looking over her shoulder.

Instead, she focused on using the reflections in storefront windows to observe those behind her.

She entered and exited shops, and crossed busy streets only to double back, scanning for surveillance.

She was looking for vehicles and people appearing more than once, the way the man she knew as Gabriel de Machaut had taught her in Paris.

The Russian GRU spy had once told her what he professed to be his true first name.

She knew he had done it to establish trust, to bring her closer.

It happened when she was younger, as they lay intertwined, naked on the bed of his Paris apartment.

“Kirill, dear one. My name is Kirill.” She had never once called him by that name.

She passed a narrow alley on the opposite side of the street and then crossed and doubled back.

Why was she thinking of Tom Reece? Gabriel had asked about him when they had met up in Bangkok after the death of her father.

He had surprised her by already being in her room at The Oriental hotel when she arrived.

“I’ve missed you, dear one,” he had said, lowering his head to hers.

He had broken from the passionate kiss and brushed the hair from her face.

“Did the GRU kill my father?”

“Why ever would we do that?”

“He was being recruited by the CIA.”

“The very agency that killed him. This is a nasty business.”

“Why would they kill him?”

“Because they knew they could not turn him and that he was playing them. You need to watch yourself. Give them no indication that you are connected to us. Trust me, dear one, we will avenge your father. The Americans will leave Vietnam in defeat.”

She had studied him for a moment. The same light blue eyes that had seduced her as a student in Paris bore into her yet again.

“Do you have the package?” he had asked.

“The book is in my purse.”

“Good. And the American?”

“What American?”

“The one you are sleeping with.”

“I’m not sleeping with him anymore. I broke it off.”

“You didn’t fall for him, did you?”

“Of course not.”

That had been February. They had been meeting in Thailand twice a month ever since.

Being a Friday, she would stay in Saigon overnight and take the first flight out to Bangkok in the morning.

There, she would spend Saturday through Tuesday and return to Vietnam early Wednesday morning.

She had meetings scheduled with her Thailand executive team and with the Thai Minister of Commerce who was also a member of the Royal Thai Government Cabinet.

He was a slimy little man who was always making inappropriate comments in the hopes she would take the bait.

She made sure to never be alone with him.

She would meet Gabriel at their favorite hotel and pass him the paperback that was resting in the dead drop location.

She never read what was inside. If he ever asked, she did not want to lie.

He would know. Gabriel de Machaut was not a man one crossed.

Even if his love for her was genuine, she was still a part of the great game.

She also knew that this was but an assignment for him.

Southeast Asia was her home. It was not his. He was only a guest.

On her last trip to Bangkok, something was different.

Gabriel was not alone. He was protected by a man with blond hair and dead eyes.

Ella was no fool. She knew that he was Spetsnaz.

Though he did his best to blend in, she had picked him out immediately.

She asked Gabriel about it. He was impressed that she had noticed, though she thought he was more impressed with himself for having trained her to notice—of course he took the credit even if he didn’t explicitly say so.

He waved it off with a joke. “I must be important,” he had said.

Satisfied she was not being followed, she turned down a narrow alley, one that always made her feel claustrophobic.

The proximity of the buildings made the passageway dark, so she took off her sunglasses and placed them in her purse.

She glanced behind her as she slowed her pace closing in on the dead drop.

Still clear.

Her eyes found the brick with the red mark in the lower right corner signifying that the drop was loaded.

She looked up and down the alley again before dropping to a knee and removing the brick.

She reached inside and pulled out a tattered paperback copy of Le Fue by Henri Barbusse.

She flipped the brick so that the red mark was now in the upper left corner.

She then stood and placed the book in her handbag.

The process had only taken a few seconds.

She straightened her outfit and began walking toward the other end of the alley. She was getting hungry. Maybe she would stop in a café instead of waiting until she was back in Lam Son Square.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a figure who entered the passage in front of her.

She stopped abruptly and turned back the way she had come.

She could hear the footfalls of the man behind her echo off the walls.

She quickened her pace. His steps accelerated.

She twisted her head to look behind her in alarm.

He appeared too thick to be Vietnamese, but it was hard to tell in the shadows.

When she turned back, another man had entered the alley.

She was trapped. This new man was tall, and there was something familiar about the way he walked.

Maybe it was a coincidence. She decided to lower her head and keep going.

If she could just brush past him and get to the end of the alley, she would be okay.

She could disappear on the streets of Saigon. As she got closer, she raised her eyes.

“Hello, Ella.”

Her shock of coming face to face with Tom Reece quickly turned to horror as she felt a needle plunge into the side of her neck from behind, injecting a quick-acting drug that immediately incapacitated any ability she had to scream or escape.

Her last memory was of Tom’s ice-blue eyes as she collapsed at his feet.

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 Tran Van Chuan was no longer a local, he fit in as though he was.

In his mid-twenties, Tran was familiar with Saigon, having spent much of his early life there.

His father was a government liaison from the Ministry of Education to the private schools that had survived the French exodus.

Because of his father’s position, Tran 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 Tran 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 Tran, 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 Tran parked inside.

Serrano helped Tom carry Ella up to the second floor of the three-story building and laid her on the couch while Tran 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.”