The Man With The Golden Mind E-Book

Tom Vater

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Detective Maier has a new case. This time it is a cold case: investigating the death of Julia Rendel's father, an East German culture 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. Maier follows Julia's trail to the Laotian capital Vientiane, where he learns different parties, including his missing client, are searching for a legendary CIA file crammed with Cold War secrets.

The real prize, however, is the file's author: someone codenamed Weltmeister, a former US and Vietnamese spy and assassin no one has seen for a quarter century. Racing against time, Maier needs to dig deep into the past - including his own - in order to make sense of the present.

The second book in Tom Vater's Detective Maier Mysteries series, The Man With The Golden Mind is an action-packed thriller with plenty of sex, drugs, assassinations and double-crosses.

This book contains graphic sex and violence, and is not suitable for readers under the age of 18.

Leseprobe

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN MIND

DETECTIVE MAIER MYSTERIES BOOK 2

TOM VATER

CONTENTS

Other books by Tom Vater

1. The Honey Trap

2. The Most Secret Place on Earth

3. Fingerprint File

4. The End

I. Maier

1. A Hell of a Client

2. I’ll Be Your Sister

3. Enter the Dragon

4. The Insomniacs Club

5. The Island of Lost Deals

6. Bad Elements

7. Never Get off the Boat

8. The Good Americans

9. One Velvet Morning

10. The Free State of Mind

11. The Teacher of Averages

12. The Jungle Visa

13. Nine Pillars

14. Walk That Walk

15. Death Comes in Surprises

16. Reunion Hall

17. Sticky Fingers

18. Play Me a Song of Death

19. A Bullet for Weltmeister

20. The Comedown

21. Friendship

II. Weltmeister

22. The White House

23. Paradise

24. Father

25. Peace in the Valley

26. Front Page News

27. Julia

28. Flame War

29. The Big Man

30. Enlightenment

31. Family Affair

32. Farmer’s Lament

33. Undertow

34. Absolute Power

35. The Beginning

36. Flying Without a License

37. Silence is my Hobby

38. Operation Menu

Next in the Series

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2021 Tom Vater

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2021 by Next Chapter

Published 2021 by Next Chapter

Edited by Emlyn Rees

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

PRAISE FOR TOM VATER

“There’s a tremendous – and tremendously fresh – energy to Tom Vater’s writing.”

ED PETERS, THE SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST

“The narrative is fast-paced and the frequent action scenes are convincingly written. The smells and sounds of Cambodia are vividly brought to life. Maier is a bold and brave hero.”

CRIME FICTION LOVER

“This is noir at its grittiest, most graphic best. There is a lush complexity in the narrative that Mr. Vater has brought us readers. To say this was a historically laden story is to sell it short. We are transported into the world of Cambodia, and quite possibly one that most of us will never see in real life. The magic, the awe, the mystique and mystery all accompany the depth of characterization.”

FRESH FICTION

“The Cambodian Book of the Dead is an enigmatic, unsettling thriller that never lets you get your balance.”

CHEFFOJEFFO

“Exuberant writing.”

ANDREW MARSHALL, TIME MAGAZINE

OTHER BOOKS BY TOM VATER

The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu

The Cambodian Book of the Dead (Detective Maier Mystery, Book 1)

The Monsoon Ghost Image (Detective Maier Mystery, Book 3)

Kolkata Noir

Sacred Skin – Thailand’s Spirit Tattoos (with Aroon Thaewchatturat)

Burmese Light (with Hans Kemp)

Cambodia: Journey through the Land of the Khmer (with Kraig Lieb)

1

THE HONEY TRAP

LAO PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC, OCTOBER 1976

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. 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 on the street than in my office, where half the world’s 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 with gray 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 everything around him. 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. She said Weltmeister. 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 older man 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.

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. For the first time in decades.

“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. The past is the past.”

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’d 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. He’d 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 as he spoke, 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 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’re Weltmeister. See what she’s 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. 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.”

2

THE MOST SECRET PLACE ON EARTH

Two nights and a day later, Rendel and Weltmeister 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 were muddy tracks lined by 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.”

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. Weltmeister didn’t have any interest in gold, nor did he care about the escape plans of a few CIA-trained Hmong rebels.

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 a different story for the Vietnamese. They went everywhere and de facto ruled parts of the country. Victors’ 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 the 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’re 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 made up the rear. The narrow trail led upwards. The tree cover started to thin. An hour 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’d 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 fifty thousand 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 ‘d never felt a 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.

3

FINGERPRINT FILE

“So, the gold is down there, near the runway?”

Mona nodded distractedly and pulled a small mirror from her shirt.

“What time now?” she asked, her voice a monotone of defiance.

“Three o’clock.”

“We wait one hour. Before sun goes down, I send signal, my brother. Then we go meet.”

Rendel grinned at her, watching a thin rivulet of sweat run from her neck into her cheap polyester shirt.

“No,” she said, a flash of anger in her eyes that Weltmeister hadn’t seen before.

He liked her righteous indignation. After all, she’d slept with creepy Rendel to get them here. Now that they were here, there was no more need for pretense. The honey trap had withdrawn its sticky content. They were close. The trap was about to snap shut.

They descended towards the base just before sunset. Mona, dead sure her brother had seen her signal, walked with a renewed spring in her step. They quickly dropped down from their vantage point, carefully keeping low brush between themselves and the lazily patrolling troops on the runway. Fifteen minutes later, they’d reached the first shacks. Whatever trap had been set; they were about to walk right into it.

The formerly bustling city was in a state of rapid decline. The roads and trails between the shacks were rutted. The detritus of war lay scattered everywhere – sheet metal, rusting tins of American foodstuff, shreds of clothing, torn and frayed Stars and Stripes, shell casings of every imaginable caliber. The girl led the two men into the heart of the decaying jumble of buildings, towards the concrete structures they’d seen from the ridge.

Weltmeister remembered the way perfectly well. He’d walked along the narrow alleys hundreds of times. But there was no need to let his companions know how deep his connection with Long Cheng was.

The girl stopped in her tracks quite suddenly and tried to orient herself.

“Guten Abend.”

They stood surrounded by armed men. The Hmong militia fighters, some of them teenagers, dressed in rags and carrying heavy weapons, had popped up like ghosts. The youngest couldn’t be more than twelve years old. Mona fell into the arms of a handsome boy and whispered rapidly. No one else spoke. Everyone stared at the white men.

As the girl recounted their journey in her own language, the boy, no more than sixteen, watched the two Germans like a hawk. He was tall and pale, with thick black hair and a wispy goatee, and, to Weltmeister, very familiar. Léon Sangster had grown from child to man in three short years. The war had sped things up. His bloodshot eyes burned like black pools of burning coal and he smelt of lao khao, the local rice wine. Growing up as an American in this wilderness had freed the young man from some of the constraints of one culture and trapped him within those of another.

Weltmeister had recognized him immediately. There’d always been something feral about Léon. And, he noticed, the girl had it as well. But unlike her half-caste brother, Mona was all Asian.

The other men looked battle-scarred and resigned to the routine boredom and brutality of war. Weltmeister would have to play this very carefully. Whatever she was telling her brother, who’d failed to recognize him so far, didn’t enamor them to the young man. Léon was more Sturm und Drang than Weltmeister liked. A sensitive boy, driven by righteous and rightful anger.

Léon looked at him more closely then. “You look familiar. I’ve seen you somewhere before,” he spat in fluent American English.

Weltmeister smiled affably and shook his head in mock confusion.

“That seems unlikely, young man.”

The young Hmong waved the thought away, led them to a two-story house and entered. His fighters spread around the building and melted away into the shadows to keep an eye out for passing Laotian patrols. The siblings sat down on wooden bed frames without mattresses, the only pieces of furniture in the dilapidated room, facing their visitors. Shovels and sledgehammers leant in an untidy row in the far corner. Otherwise, the room was empty.

Weltmeister noticed that they sat on the old frames in deliberate poses, stiff and tense. One of Léon’s soldiers stayed in the room, casually leaning against the back wall, a Kalashnikov strapped across his shoulder. The gold had to be close.

The two Germans remained standing.

“You speak my language?” Rendel barked across the room.

The boy shook his head, and got straight down to business, “You’ll help us move the gold. We give you twenty percent when we reach Vientiane. Then you help us cross the Mekong into Thailand.”

Rendel nodded, keeping up with the English, wearing his best expression of integrity.

“You are Weltmeister?”

“Yes,” Rendel lied.

The boy smiled for the first time. It wasn’t a friendly smile. There was too much doubt in it.

“I was here when Long Cheng fell last year. My father was one of the last remaining CIA case officers, Jimmy Sangster. My mother was a Hmong princess. Mona is my half-sister. This isn’t about politics. It’s about us. We want out.”

Léon fell silent. Outside, darkness came quickly, the subtropical night descending on the spy city, which was without electricity. Mona stared at her brother in the fading half light, her eyes full of admiration.

Weltmeister felt a little sick. This was war, or its immediate aftermath, he told himself. Things were messy. He’d seen all this before. Humanity. Hope. Suffering. Disappointment. And this time, Long Cheng wasn’t safe. The beautiful teenage girl, the daughter of legendary CIA case officer Jimmy Sangster who’d given his life for the country, had led them into a heart of darkness he felt no desire to linger in. Familiar and highly dangerous. He was taking a huge risk. To find out what this boy knew about him. What he remembered.

“The Americans left thousands of us on the runway. Women and children. Old people. We didn’t know anything about when the last plane flew out. Our leader, General Vang Pao, escaped in a CIA helicopter and went to America. When the communists closed in on the runway, we fled into the jungle. We thought the Americans would come back to save us. We’d given them everything.”

Léon looked emotional, the desperate last days of the American war at the forefront of his mind.

“Surely you could have been on a plane? You had great connections,” Rendel wondered with his usual lack of tact.

“Our parents loved both their children and their countries.”, Léon continued slowly, his voice filled with resentment, “Mona is all I have in this world. And now she has brought me Weltmeister.”

“Why me? How do you know this name?”

“The file, it’s in the file.”

“What file?” Rendel demanded.

“The file my father was responsible for. The file you put together for the Vietnamese. The U48. The file that killed my father. The file you came looking for.”

Rendel stared at the young man with his best neutral expression.

The man with the codename Weltmeister knew he was coming to the end of his journey and silently got ready to enter the next phase of his life. He discreetly clicked the safety off his friend’s gun.

4

THE END

“The U48?” Rendel asked.

“Come on, Weltmeister. The secret Vietnamese file? All the names of all the double agents the Viet Cong ran in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand? Even yours. Weltmeister? Can you imagine what we will get if we sell you to the Americans? Or the Vietnamese?”

“Have you read the file?” the real Weltmeister asked, careful to weigh his question with as little urgency as possible.

Léon shook his head, but kept his eyes on Rendel. “No, only glanced at it, at some names, at your name, but we knew you would come back to Laos for it.”

“Where is the file?” Rendel kept pushing.

The boy broke into his troubling smile again.

“With my father and my mother.”

“You said they were killed?” the attaché, exasperated by the young man’s monosyllabic answers, asked.

“I buried them. You see, they never planned to escape without the file and my mother refused to leave her family. The agency left us stranded. Perhaps they’d planned to sacrifice us.”

Weltmeister got up, walked to the only window in the room and stared out into the night.

Rendel did his best to sound unconvinced, “If the file is still here, the Vietnamese will also be looking for it.”

The boy answered, “The Vietnamese dogs shot my mother and father. I buried them with the gold, our last batch of heroin, and the file. My father couldn’t leave. He was too attached to this place, this situation. When the Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao attacked, I ran away. I thought the war would continue. That we’d get our revenge. Our justice. But our fight is finished. We’re finished. Now I’m back to take the file and some of the gold with me to a new life in the West. With Mona.”

The attaché did his best not to look out of his depth. “So how did you guess I was Weltmeister and why did you send your sister?”

“My father told me there was a superspy on the list, a German who worked for the US. A lone wolf and a double agent. The man who betrayed Long Cheng. He told me that this man would come because the cover for his identity depended on getting the list. Some of our supporters in Vientiane have been watching the German embassy. And then you arrived and took up your post. I knew it was my only shot to find closure. And to get the gold out.”

“Where is the file?” Weltmeister repeated with more urgency.

The young Hmong looked at him with renewed interest. Weltmeister looked away, nothing more than a casual move of the head. For a split second, a thought seemed to pass through Léon’s mind, then it was gone.

Mona got up and pushed the bed frames aside as her brother handed the two men a shovel and a hammer.

“Right here,” he said, pointing at the floor, “Start digging.”

“Scheisse,” Rendel screamed and fell through the floor as it collapsed around him. Their breakthrough shattered the near silence of their work. They’d found their treasure. The trap had opened and closed.

Dust swirled around the room and Weltmeister edged his way to the door. He could hear feet rushing around the building. Probably Léon’s men. He carefully opened the door and slipped outside. Far off, from somewhere on the runway, he could hear shouting. The Laotian military was up and running. Time was up. They’d been made. He slunk back inside and shone his torch into the hole in the center of the room.

Rendel was making a lot of noise.

“Get me out of here. I’ve broken my bloody leg.”

Weltmeister shivered uncomfortably. He hadn’t felt this nervous since escaping the Gestapo in Berlin more than thirty years earlier. Timing was everything now.

Léon suddenly loomed in front of him, “Now I know you. I saw you in Long Cheng. A long time ago, when I was a kid. Now I remember your eyes.”

The Hmong sucked in his breath as more unpleasant realizations appeared to flood his mind. He shook his head in disbelief.

“You’re the devil who…”

The man codenamed Weltmeister shot the boy. Léon fell beside Rendel into his parents’ grave. His next shot killed the Hmong soldier before he had time to move his weapon. Mona screamed and made for her brother, but the third bullet caught her in the neck. Weltmeister stood still, listening into the night. None of the other Hmong rebels around the building seemed to have heard the shots. Rendel’s Dienstpistole, with a silencer, was a reliable tool.

“I’ll get you out, Manfred; don’t worry.”

He climbed down into the chamber below the building’s floor. His torch flicked across Rendel who had suffered an open break in his left leg and looked like he was about to pass out. This place wasn’t made for cultural attachés with shattered femurs.

To his right, the low-ceilinged chamber was filled with boxes and metal ammunition cases, rusty but intact. The first one he pried open contained gold bars. The second one was packed with sealed bags of Double Uoglobe heroin. He took one of each and stashed them in his pack. But the file was nowhere to be seen.

Léon was still alive.

“Where is my sister?”

“She went outside to get help,” Weltmeister answered in a kind tone.

“You save my sister; I tell you about the file. Promise?”

He made eye contact with the young man and nodded solemnly. Léon hadn’t seen his sister die.

The Hmong pointed to the far side of the chamber.

“In the bag under my father’s head. Promise.”

The young man passed out, a pool of blood spreading under his prone figure. He’d be dead soon enough.

The remains of Léon’s parents lay in a crumpled embrace in the far corner of the chamber. Weltmeister assumed that Léon had dragged them there after they’d been killed. He found the bag and pried it from under the decomposed head of Jimmy Sangster, his former colleague.

Inside he found his grail.

The man who’d sat at tables with beggars and kings, who’d deceived the Gestapo, the CIA, the TC2 and the Stasi, allowed himself a vague smile as he peeled a bundle of papers from an oilcloth bag. His handwriting was still legible. A neat list of names, codenames, ages, birthplaces, and photographs, including, most importantly, his own, covered page after page. Memos and reports followed.

The U48. The file that had eluded him the last time he’d been in Long Cheng.

The trail to Weltmeister ended here. For a second, he contemplated burning the document. This was the only copy, the only clear evidence of who he was. Of what he’d done. But he knew he wouldn’t do it. The U48 was too valuable. And he knew he was too vain. He’d created this file as much as he had created his persona. The file, he knew, was one of the great masterpieces of the western world. You could hold it up to a Picasso or a Gauguin. It had to live on in some shape or form. Who’d be mad enough to burn the Mona Lisa, even if she were to harbor uncomfortable truths?

Rendel regained consciousness and moaned, “We must leave. The Laotians will be here any minute. I can walk if you hold me. Don’t leave an old friend behind.”

“Sorry, Manfred, you know how it is in our line of work. Take no prisoners. Silence is everything.”

Weltmeister turned to his old friend, raised the other man’s Dienstpistole and pulled the trigger.

Without losing another second, he wiped the Makarov clean and pressed it into Rendel’s limp right hand, climbed out of the chamber and pushed Mona down into what was becoming a mass grave. Then he moved the bed frames over the hole. Pushed together they covered the collapsed floor. There was nothing to be done about the terrible stink that would soon lead anyone within a mile to the gold and heroin. Outside, gunshots began to sound across the valley. The Laotians had noticed the activity and were on their feet. It was time to leave the most secret place on Earth. His eyes drifted across the room one last time. All this money. All this bad karma. He sighed. The list was all that mattered.

A few minutes later, he’d cleared the huts and was climbing out of the valley. The Laotian troops guarding the airstrip would finish off the rest of the Hmong.

PARTI

MAIER

1

A HELL OF A CLIENT

HAMBURG, GERMANY, NOVEMBER 2001

“In 1976, for a few short months, my father was the German Democratic Republic’s cultural attaché in Laos. He was an old Asia hand. He knew the region. But he was killed shortly after he arrived and his body was never repatriated. In fact, we know almost nothing about his death. I want you to find out why and how it happened. Who killed him? And I’d like you to find him, if possible. Retrieve his body, in fact.”

Julia Rendel didn’t waste time. The assignment was on the table before she’d given herself a chance to sip her coffee – black, very strong, no sugar. Nor did Maier’s elegant client appear to be perturbed by the fact that half the customers and all the staff in the rather bourgeois but frighteningly trendy Herr Max were twisting their heads to get a better look at her. The detective guessed her to be in her mid-thirties. She had the gift and the money.

Her dark hair was piled high in an unruly and, at least to Maier, pleasing creation. Unruly hair didn’t come cheap in Germany. Her chunky jade earrings, probably from Burma, accentuated her long, pale neck. Her face was narrow, with high cheekbones and full lips. The stuff of movies and broken hearts. Her eyes shone with this knowledge like black stars. Her pale skin and slim nose somehow accentuated the fact that she was half-Asian. Her wardrobe said dressed-to-kill detectives in the most subtle way. Julia Rendel’s silk blouse was low-key but made no attempt to close over her alluring cleavage. The jeans she wore looked like they’d been molded around her.

Maier could see why Ms. Rendel might have sought his services. She spoke German with a slight Saxony accent and, like himself, had probably grown up in the East. Her father must have been one of the top dogs at what Maier assumed had been a reasonably important embassy in Vientiane. Following the defeat of US forces across Southeast Asia in the mid-Seventies, the GDR, along with other Soviet-aligned countries, had quickly built up a strong presence in Laos.

“I know this is an unusual case, Maier. My father was killed a long time ago in what was then still a war zone. In fact, I made my peace with his murder when I was a teenager. I was ten when he died and I barely remember him. My mother is half-Cambodian, half-French. My parents met in Phnom Penh in the early Sixties, but my father never married her. He left her and took me to Laos. After he was killed, the GDR authorities told me next to nothing, took me back to Germany and placed me in a foster home.”