Julia Rendel asks Maier to investigate the 25-year-old murder of her father, an East German cultural attaché who was killed near a fabled CIA airbase in central Laos in 1976. But before the detective can set off, his client is kidnapped right out of his arms. Read the latest adventures of Tom Vater’s Detective Maier, from The Man With The Golden Mind, only in The Advisor.
The two men crossed the river road as the sun set on the other side of the Mekong, over Thailand. Hammers and sickles set against blood-red backgrounds fluttered from a row of sorry-looking poles by the water. This was the Laotian way to remind the Thais who’d won the war.
It was early November. The rains had stopped, but the river remained swollen and muddy. The revolution, a long time in coming, had come. And gone. Vientiane looked less like a national capital than a run-down suburb of Dresden with better weather. The sun, a misty, dull red fireball, sunk into the turgid current in slow motion.
Once the American infrastructure – a few office blocks and residential areas, the CIA compound at Kilometer 14, a handful of churches, bars, brothels, clinics and aid agencies – had been removed, closed down or reassigned, there was nothing left to do but to enjoy socialism. More than fifteen years of intense US involvement, political and military, overt and covert, ambitious and disastrous, had left few traces in the city. The locals lingered in hammocks or went about their business in culturally prescribed lethargy as they’d done for centuries.
Once it got dark, Laotians disenchanted with the revolution would take to modest paddle boats to flee across the water to the free world. The authorities, glad to be rid of these vaguely troublesome citizens, turned a blind eye or two. Laos was that kind of place. Not even the politburo took anything too serious. And if it did, no one ever heard about it. No one worried about the consequences of this or that so long as it didn’t make any waves in the here and now. Some workers’ utopia.
The two men walked at a healthy but innocuous pace. The German Democratic Republic’s newly appointed cultural attaché to Laos, Manfred Rendel, strode purposefully ahead, a harried expression on his face. He was the younger though hardly the fitter of the two, and sweated profusely in his polyester suit. No one would have called him handsome, not even from across the river and the free world. Rendel needed to lose weight both in body and mind. For now, it was the mind that was in the process of unburdening itself.
“I tell you, it’s serious. Thought it better we meet in the street than in my office, where half the world is likely to listen in. Especially our friends, the Viets.”
The second man, broad-shouldered and in his early fifties, his blond hair cropped short, cautiously brought up the rear. He had just arrived in town and wore an innocuous short-sleeved white shirt and grey slacks, black shoes, no tie. He kept his eyes locked to the ground and took care not to look directly at passers-by. He walked the way a predator might move through dense jungle, purposefully, quietly and acutely aware of every movement. Elegant in a way it was hard to put a finger on. A casual onlooker might have assumed him to be a rather superfluous character, a slightly ruffled subordinate of the more dynamic man up front. A very careful observer would have noted that this man achieved near invisibility without a great deal of effort.
“She asked for me, specifically?”
Rendel nodded. “Asked for your codename. Loud and clear. Was a bit of a shock. I mean, no one knows that name. Mentioned Long Cheng as well. And gold. American gold. Lots of American gold.”
Rendel’s eyes flashed greedily.
The man codenamed Weltmeister ignored the attaché’s predilection for vice and profiteering and carefully scanned both sides of the potholed river road ahead of them. Everything looked as it always did. The courtyard of the Lane Xang, the riverside’s best hotel, lay deserted but for the usual half dozen party limos that parked there for the weekend, their drivers lounging under a rickety wooden stand to the left of the building, plucking hair from their chins with steel tweezers, and playing cards.
It was Saturday evening and the country’s decision makers were most likely lying half dead in their suites, nursing their foreign liqueur hangovers, fawned over by taxi girls, exhausted from celebrating the revolution the night before or getting ready to do it all over again. Unlimited supplies of Russian vodka, local sex slaves and an entrenched feudal mindset that was immune to both the benefits and strictures of communism could do terrible things to a government, even one that had partaken in beating the world’s mightiest superpower.
For the have-nots, it was business as usual. Prior to the revolution, the same drivers had sat in the same spot, waiting for their American employers to emerge from the same kind of weekend carnage.
The traffic was light. A group of female students, dressed in white blouses and dark sarongs, cycled past and threatened to distract the attaché from the clandestine nature of his walk. But the passing girls didn’t manage to stop Manfred Rendel grinning with all the severity of a man who’d spent his entire life steadfastly refusing to develop a sense of humor, “Must have practiced pronouncing it. It rolled right off her tongue. Wouldn’t tell me anything else. Good-looking little number, too. Pale skin, Chinese features. Nice tits. Bad teeth. Savage basically. She calls herself Mona. And she said the magic word. Weltmeister.”
The older man shook his head and hung back, as if trying to distance himself from his old friend who reveled in the loss of his moral compass. But it was just a reaction on his side to hearing his code name spoken by someone else. Weltmeister didn’t suffer common afflictions such as moral dilemmas or sentimentality. He was free. Long-term unaccountability in a high-risk profession could do that to a man. He couldn’t care less what the attaché was up to so long as it didn’t interfere with his program.
“A Hmong girl perhaps. But hardly anyone knows my codename. A few Viets, maybe. And they’d never blab. Even at our embassy here, no one knows.”
His cover had been blown. Someone was on to him. Somebody knew he’d been to Long Cheng. Someone was on to the fact that he had been to the secret American base not just as a Vietnamese agent, but that he’d lived and worked there for the CIA. And whoever had made him, they were organized and they were close. But it never occurred to Weltmeister to tell his old friend the truth. The truth hadn’t propelled him to the top of his profession.
Right now, he needed more information. If the cat was out of the spook sack, he was finished. As were all those others, who had sponged off his genius years ago. If the U48 surfaced, people would be soiling their government-issue suits from Washington to Moscow, from Hanoi to Bangkok. Retirees across several continents would scramble to hide ill-gotten gains and fear for the retraction of past honors, or worse. No one would be happy. Heads would roll in the White House and the Kremlin. A small but vital aspect of twentieth-century history would have to be rewritten. The man codenamed Weltmeister shrugged. Who cared about Realpolitik? His life was on the line. The trenches he’d dug, the palisades he had carefully erected around himself were about to be overrun. He would have to check out of the program, batten down the hatches, close the loopholes and sink into the dust of history, never to reemerge. His war was coming to an end. And he would have fun ending it on his terms. “No one knows except you, Manfred.”
Rendel stopped in his tracks on the crumbling pavement and turned back to his friend, his face flushed with anger and, deeper down, beneath the layers of fat, slothdom and greed, a little fear.
“Well, I didn’t shop you. And I resent that remark. How long have we known each other? Didn’t I help you get laid at college in Leipzig all those years ago? When you acted like an introvert spy who’d come in from the cold? Semester after semester, I talked you up with the girls without ever hinting at what a truly twisted individual you really were. Didn’t I help facilitate your current position? You have changed sides more often than the oldest whore in Vientiane, and the first thing I do when your name comes up is call you. Isn’t that what trust is made of?”
The older man smiled sardonically, “You know how it is in our line of work. Take no prisoners.” But Weltmeister chuckled disarmingly, and Rendel let the threat pass. The cultural attaché was a sentimental man.
As daylight faded, the Mekong receded into the almost-silent tropical night, filled only with mosquitoes and military patrols who would have the streets cleared in a couple of hours. Only the cicadas would be singing in Vientiane tonight. Across the river in Si Chiang Mai, the nearest town on the far shore, primitive rock music throbbed from unseen speakers. This was the Thai way to remind the Laotians that the forces of evil had been beaten but not vanquished, and that the river served as one of the most important Cold War fault lines in the world.
The clandestine meeting was coming to an end. “I mean it, Manfred. Let’s play the old game. A little subterfuge. You meet her. Tell her you are Weltmeister. See what she has got for us.” It was the younger man’s turn to laugh. “First, I’ll see what she’s got for me. This girl is a honey trap if ever I’ve seen one. I might as well taste the honey before I pry the trap open.”
Weltmeister shrugged. “Just get the intel. Find out what she wants. But don’t scare her with your cock. Just be me. And if she’s Hmong, remind her that the war is over and that the good guys won. The Americans won’t be back for some time.”
The Most Secret Place on Earth
Two nights and a day later, Rendel and Maier hid Mona under a tarpaulin in the back of the attaché’s jeep and left town. The Hmong girl was desperate to get into the mountains and reunite with her brother, the man who knew where the gold was stashed. The man who’d given his sister one of the most secret codes of the American war in Asia. The man who’d sent her to the city. She’d spent the night with Rendel, only to intone the same mantra over and over again. “We meet brother Léon. Léon meets Weltmeister. Very good.” And that was all he could lure out of her.
Outside the capital, the roads turned into muddy tracks lined with impenetrable walls of bamboo forest interspersed with tiny settlements and their adjacent fields. Children dressed in rags waved at them from the roadside. Neither man waved back.
The Laotian military stopped them at several roadblocks: Rendel’s embassy credentials and a few cartons of American cigarettes provided smooth transitions. They spent the first night in a paddy field hut just north of Ban Houay Pamon. Rendel kept pestering the girl about the gold she’d shown him in Vientiane. “Are you sure there is more of this gold up there?” “You see, I tell the truth. Long Cheng, big American airport, many boxes gold. My brother, Léon, he show you. We meet in Long Cheng. You help me and Léon go America. We all rich. I help you.”
Weltmeister didn’t have any interest in gold, nor did he care about the escape plans of a few CIA-trained Hmong rebels. Thousands of these hill tribe people had been caught up in the almost twenty-year-long war. Some had fled to refugee camps in Thailand, from where they had moved on to France and the US, while others lingered in the Laotian jungles, their futures blighted by their erstwhile alliance with the Americans.
Mona was probably leading them into a trap. But he felt reasonably safe as long as Rendel kept up the charade of pretending to be his alter ego, the elusive superspy. The three travelers all had their private agendas. Loyalty, greed and the need for anonymity would be battling it out soon enough. Weltmeister relished the fact. He didn’t like loose ends.
They entered Xaisomboun District. Beyond the small town of the same name, a trader’s outpost mired in mud and the deprived locals’ long faces, traffic petered out. Wild animals so little known they’d never been on television occasionally ran, scuttled, slithered or jumped across the road in front of the vehicle. The district, until recently the heart of the US Secret War in Laos, was off limits to everyone except Laotian military and local farmers. Even comrades, be they Soviet or German, weren’t welcome. It was probably a different story for the Vietnamese. They went everywhere and de facto ruled parts of the country. Victor’s justice.
The road snaked deeper into the hills, wearing down the jeep’s suspension and the travelers’ patience with every pond-sized hole in their path. Halfway through the second day of automotive torture, Mona told them to stop. “Many army post before we reach Long Cheng. We walk from here.”
They pushed the jeep into thick brush. As Rendel pulled the key from the ignition, only the faint tick of the hot engine was audible.Weltmeister inhaled the forest. He loved silence. Silence, he’d long decided, was his hobby. Rendel unloaded several backpacks and a couple of shovels and pulled a gun from under the passenger seat. “Manfred, how much gear did you bring? Are you planning to tunnel through to Vietnam?”
The attaché grinned. “Need something to carry at least some of that gold away with us. Once we figure the situation down there, we take what we can and try and work out a way to come back with a larger vehicle. Was thinking of burying some of it.”
Weltmeister held out his hand. “Give me the gun then. I’m a better shot than you.”
“In your dreams. This is my Dienstpistole from back home, the gun I was issued at the Ministry of State Security, on my very first day at work.”
Weltmeister stood waiting, his hand out, an easy smile on his face, waiting for his friend to hand-over his duty pistol. Rendel snorted and laughed. The older man didn’t move. Rendel stood in doubt for a long moment, then his sentimental side got the better of him.“Well, you are my old friend. Look after it.” He handed the Makarov and two boxes of cartridges to his partner.
They dropped away from the track into the jungle. Mona walked ahead, barefoot, resolute and sensuous. If she was concerned about the gun, she didn’t show it. “Stay on the path. Maybe land mine around.”
Rendel was right behind her, hypnotized by the swing of her narrow hips while Weltmeister cautiously followed. The narrow trail led upwards. The tree cover started to thin. Two hours later, they reached Skyline Ridge, the Americans’ last defense. The view was breathtaking.
The gigantic former US air base of Long Cheng, codename Lima Site 20A, lay in a wide, verdant valley beneath them. A couple of years earlier, this unlikely location had been the world’s busiest airport. And no one had ever heard of it.
Weltmeister pulled a pair of binoculars out of his pack. The runway, long enough to take large transport planes, was intact and stretched towards high karst stone formations. The American field agents who had lived here for almost two decades had likened them to a pair of pointed breasts. Dense jungle punctuated by bomb craters spread across the hills beyond the valley.
Everything looked familiar to him. He knew this valley as intimately as any place on earth. A ramshackle collection of wooden shacks spread on both sides of the runway, augmented here and there by small clusters of more ambitious concrete structures, the former CIA offices. Long Cheng had been the nerve center of the agency’s clandestine war in Laos, a covert slice of a larger conflict fought to contain communism in Indochina. A conflict that had cost more than four million lives and had taken some twenty years to grind itself and the region into dust.
A US-financed secret army, a mercenary force of hill tribe soldiers and their families, some 50,000 people, had lived in Long Cheng for more than a decade. Most of the fighters had died. Even their children, sent into battle by the CIA, had been lost to the final years of the war.
Weltmeister could see a couple of Laotian patrols on the cracked tarmac. A cow, a long rope dragging behind the animal, meandered towards the mountains, following a faded white line. There were no other signs of life. The communists had overrun the base a year or so earlier, and since then the secret city, the second largest in the country, had simply died. Weltmeister, in the service of the Vietnamese at the time, had helped oversee the end of the airfield.
Now the jungle, spurred on by the recent rains and the almost complete absence of human activity, was on the move, determined to wrestle Long Cheng back under its control.
Weltmeister laughed inwardly at the sacrosanct absurdities his various paymasters engaged in and the lengths they were prepared to go to, to see their demented visions through. Only the jungle really knew what it was doing.
The thrill of having returned to the scene of his crimes was weighed down by bitterness and misgivings. The devil always ruled both sides.
But Weltmeister wasn’t a religious man. And he wasn’t driven by ideology either. Rather, he was motivated by a lifelong desire for anonymity. His existence as a nobody kept him focused and interested. He had felt no need for family or friends. For security reasons, he had almost completely denied himself the affections of others and avoided confessions. Almost.
His lack of preference for a particular life had made him an excellent spy in Nazi Germany, and after the war, in East Germany, in the US and finally in Southeast Asia. And now, despite being the best in the business, one of his former selves had been found out. The great cloak-and-dagger game, which until a year or so ago he had thought to be the true love of his life, hung in the balance.
It was time for a purge.
The Man With The Golden Mind, by Tom Vater, is available from robottradingcompany.com in ebook format for $9.23.