Return to Tomorrow (2 page)

“W
HAT MADE YOU WANT TO
return to Southeast Asia, Mrs. Phillips?”

That was a very good question. Rachel McKendrick Phillips lifted her eyes from her soup and studied the face of the man across the table. Was there something more to this young State Department official than her first impression had led her to believe? Or was he merely curious about her past, as so many others were, and had chosen this particular way of opening up the subject?

“I've come to Thailand,” she said with just a hint of the smile that more than one reporter had described as elusive and hauntingly sad, “as a favor to an old, dear friend.”

“Ah, yes, that would be the Dutch priest, Father Pieter Hauer, I believe his name was, who was with you in that hill village in Laos.”

Rachel stiffened, betraying her surprise at the extent of his knowledge. A small, stinging dart of anger pricked her. The slight annoyance she'd felt all morning at being in Harrison Bartley's company escalated.

“Yes.” She hoped her curt answer would stop his flow of questions.

“The old man is dead now, isn't he?” The junior-grade diplomat was nothing if not tenacious.

Rachel stared at his round, unformed face for a long
moment before answering. “Yes, he's dead. He's been dead for seven years.”

“But there's a nephew, isn't there, also a priest?” He paused, his fork suspended over a bite of his duck salad. “Working with hill tribe refugees somewhere up in the Golden Triangle, isn't he?”

“North of Chiang Rai.” Rachel returned her attention to her meal.

“Downright primitive up that way.” Harrison Bartley shook his head as if in sympathy.

Not a hair shifted out of place.
It wouldn't dare,
Rachel decided, looking up once more from her excellent soup, flavored with an herb known as lemongrass, for which the restaurant was named, and fiery with tiny red and green chilies.

“I think I can adjust,” she said quietly.

Harrison Bartley had the grace to look sheepish. “Yes, Mrs. Phillips, I expect you can.”

“Look, you might as well call me Rachel. We're going to be spending a lot of time together over the next few days.” Taking advantage of the fifteen years' difference in their ages to impose her will, Rachel changed the subject.

“Thank you, Rachel.” He smiled and Rachel revised her estimate of his charm upward slightly. He did have a very nice smile. His teeth were white against his skin. His hair was a dark mahogany brown, fashionably cut and styled. His white linen suit had certainly been made to order, probably in Hong Kong. He would be a valuable addition to any hostess's insurance list of single men available to fill a vacant seat at a dinner party on very short notice.

Rachel realized as she watched Bartley toy with his food that he wasn't ready to drop the subject of her past. She waited. How would he phrase it? The question he was dying to ask?
What was it like, Rachel, being a prisoner of the Vietnamese all those years?
Or would he be more subtle, in keeping with his chosen calling?
It must be difficult, Rachel, returning to a part of the world where you've known such hardship and…degradation….

“It must be diff—”

Rachel cut him short. “I spent five years in a Vietnamese work camp somewhere in Laos after the fall of Saigon,” she said, her voice even and emotionless. It was still the only way she could get the words past the automatic tightening in her throat, the familiar clutch of fear that squeezed her heart and made it hard to breathe. “Father Pieter and I escaped and made our way through the mountains until we were found and taken in by the Hlông. It was almost ten years later that my brothers learned I was alive and came to Laos to find me. Surely all that must be in my official records, Mr. Bartley.”

“Yes, it is. Sorry for the third degree. Part of my job is asking questions, you know. Look, why don't you call me Bart? I feel uncomfortable calling you Rachel and you're still addressing me as Mr. Bartley.”

“All right,” she agreed reluctantly.

“When Alf Singleton, my boss, was called back to Washington to brief the President on Khen Sa, he asked me to look after you.” The charming smile was in place again. “He said that you were a very special lady and to get you to Chiang Rai safely or my…butt…would be in a sling. Alf's got a very colorful way of expressing
himself but he meant what he said. I made it a point to learn what I could.”

“I do appreciate your help.” Rachel relaxed a little. Her brother, Simon, couldn't have known that his trusted friend, Assistant Ambassador Alfred Singleton, would be unable to escort her north. She'd have to make do with D. Harrison Bartley as a guide.

Bart leaned toward her. “And I promise, no more questions.”

“Mai pen rai,”
Rachel said, and picked up her glass of bottled water, giving a small salute.

“Never mind,” Bart translated loosely from the Thai. “I should have known you'd throw their favorite saying at me sooner or later this afternoon.” He picked up his own glass. “Cheers.”

 

B
ILLY
T
ODD PUSHED ASIDE
the curtain of wooden beads that covered the archway leading into the bar of the Lemongrass with an impatient gesture. The damn things were a real nuisance, but the tourists expected them and so there they hung. The room itself was dark and cool and nearly empty, but beyond the screened windows the terrace tables were filled with the late lunch crowd, mostly Japanese, some Americans with a few Australian sailors and retired British schoolteachers thrown in. A waiter entered the service door from the terrace and Billy beckoned him over. They carried on a low conversation in Thai for a few minutes. Then Billy made his way to the private area at the back of the restaurant.

“What are you doing back here so soon?” The speaker, a tall man, outlined by the bright January sunlight shining through the arched window, didn't bother to turn
around at Billy's approach. He continued to stare out at the thatch-roofed dining area with its view of high rises and gilded temple roofs beyond the low, flower-bordered wall. Billy walked up beside him and observed his friend from behind the tinted lenses of his sunglasses. They were both tall men, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, in their early-to mid-forties. Americans. One white, one black, so in tune with each other's thoughts and habits that their speech sometimes resembled a kind of verbal shorthand.

“Take it easy, Tiger. I've got everything under control.” A former combat infantryman, Billy Todd had spent his last tour of duty with a secret search-and-destroy team in Laos. Tiger Jackson had been his commanding officer, only a captain then, but tough and disciplined, an ex-air force Raven who had logged too many hours in the air war. Billy pushed his hands into the back pockets of his worn and faded jeans and rocked back on the heels of his crocodile-skin cowboy boots.

“Who's watching the hotel?” Brett “Tiger” Jackson turned his head to meet his oldest friend and business partner's gaze.

“Lonnie's there.”

“Lonnie? He's so strung out he can't even watch over himself.” Thick, blond eyebrows met in a frown above eyes the same dark blue as a midnight sky.

Billy shook his head but his expression was grave. “He's tight. Someone scored for him last night. He'll be okay until tomorrow.”

“Dammit, Billy, I thought you were going to keep your eye on him. I don't want him buying hits off the street. The stuff out there these days is too unstable.
There're too many amateurs and get-rich-quick thugs getting into the game. You swore you could keep him in line until I could arrange another buy.”

“I did my best, man. He's a big boy now.”

“Yeah.” Brett's tone was ironic. “He's a big boy, all right.” He patted the pocket of his shirt, looking for the cigarettes he'd given up two years ago. Lonnie Smalley had been his company corpsman his last tour in Nam. A fresh-faced Ohio farm boy, with a smile a mile wide and everything in the world to go home for. Only he never had gone home. He'd become a casualty of war, as much as the young boys he'd tried to save and couldn't. The burden of that failure had driven him to try to forget in the euphoria of first morphine, then heroin. He'd cut himself off from family and friends, never leaving Southeast Asia, living on the fringes, on the shady side of the law to support his habit. One day, a few years after the war ended, he'd appeared on Brett's doorstep, a burned-out shell of a man, and he'd found a home. What had happened to Lonnie in Vietnam may not have been ex-lieutenant colonel Brett Jackson's fault, but from that day on Brett considered his former corpsman his personal responsibility.

“I tried. Sorry it happened, Tiger.”

“It wasn't your fault, man. He's been slipping away from us more and more often lately. He's just too damn good at disappearing these days.”

The two men stood in silence for a long moment, each lost in his own thoughts. The war was long ago, if not so far away, but some days it seemed much closer than others.

“I found out when the lady's leaving for Father
Dolph's camp,” Billy said quietly, the soft drawl of his native Georgia still evident in his voice, even though he hadn't set foot in the States in more years than he cared to remember.

“When?” Brett's voice was clipped. They spoke in English but in an undertone. Even here in the Lemongrass it wasn't safe to assume the walls didn't have ears. Caution was second nature to them now. Caution learned in the jungles of Laos and Vietnam in their youths and honed to a sixth sense by the life they'd led for nearly twenty years.

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Be ready.”

“I always am, Colonel.” Billy gave his friend a side-long glance. Brett paid no attention to the use of his old military title.

“Who is this woman I'm keepin' track of, anyway?” Billy asked.

Brett grinned and relaxed a little. “She's Micah McKendrick's sister, the one we should have helped get back to the States two years ago. I don't want anything to go wrong this time.”

“It won't.” Billy chuckled. “Everything's going great.”

Brett wasn't so sure of that. The last thing he needed in his life now was another complication, another responsibility. Sometimes he just wanted to dump it all, turn his back and head for the beach. He was forty-four years old. He deserved a little peace and quiet. This deal was definitely beginning to get to him.

Until an hour ago he'd have said nothing or no one could have diverted him from the business at hand. Now
he wasn't so certain. That was before the woman at table sixteen had shown up at the Lemongrass.

Sad, beautiful, no longer young, her face held all the character of her years, and something more. Something that reached out to him at a level below conscious thought, a part of him that was primitive and male, the hunter, the provider. Bangkok was a city of beautiful and desirable women. Brett Jackson had known many of them, he'd even loved one or two, but few of them had intrigued him so from the moment of first encounter. It wasn't the way he operated; spontaneity was grounds for early and permanent retirement in his line of work. One-night stands were damned near as dangerous. Anyway, this lady had class. He'd bet a bundle one-night stands weren't her style, any more than they were his.

“Did you get a good look at her?” Brett asked, his own dark blue gaze still fixed on the woman at table sixteen. He was talking about Rachel Phillips but his attention was focused on the flesh and blood woman before him. Definitely not just another bored socialite on the make. Her clothes were too ordinary, although the red silk blouse and white full skirt fit her slender frame admirably. Her silver-threaded black hair was styled too simply and her makeup—she wasn't wearing any—was a dead giveaway in his book.

“I got a real good look at Mrs. Phillips.” Just a hint of wry amusement in Billy's tone alerted Brett that something was up. He turned to face his old comrade-at-arms.

“What's up, man? You're too damn laid-back about this whole business.” It wasn't like Billy to have gone off and left Lonnie alone to watch for Rachel
Phillips—especially someplace as busy as the Royal Orchid Sheraton, where it would be very easy, indeed, for a lone woman to slip past him.

“I already sent Ponchoo back to pick up Lonnie,” Billy said, reading his mind. “We'll have him tucked away in his own hooch by two.”

“And what about Mrs. Phillips?” Brett didn't try to soften the low growl of impatience in his words.

“She's right where I can keep an eye on her.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Billy nodded toward the terrace. “That's her. The black-haired woman in the red blouse. That's Rachel Phillips. She's a damn fine-lookin' white woman.”

“Damn fine.” Brett gave a snort of mirthless laughter as he shoved his hand through his thick blond hair, amused that his quarry had found her own way into his lair. “Who's the gigolo she's with?”

“Some turkey from the U.S. embassy. One D. Harrison Bartley, by name. One of Alf Singleton's flunkies. He's harmless.”

“That's her escort? He's going to be responsible for her safety up in the hills?” It also explained why she'd turned up at the restaurant. It was a favorite of the embassy crowd.

“That's the drill.” Billy looked a little uncertain, himself, as he sized up Harrison Bartley with shrewd brown eyes and found him wanting. “There shouldn't be any problems. The border's quiet, no shelling for over a week, and they won't get that far north, anyway. Khen Sa's been stayin' close to home. Her Thai's pretty good, by the way, at least according to what Buon just told me.
She shouldn't have too much trouble with the up-country dialect.”

Brett cut short his recitation. “I don't care how you do it,” he said gruffly. “Just make sure you don't let her out of your sight.” He'd given Micah McKendrick his word that he'd see his sister arrived at her destination safely and was handed over to Father Dolph without any untoward incident. It was the least he could do for his old friend. Especially since he hadn't been able to help him two years before. He didn't intend for anything to go wrong this time around.