Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller (12 page)

Both men dwelled in their own thoughts until the driver once again dropped them around the back of Club Avatar. Like every other building in Rangoon, in daylight, the house was tired. The blackout curtains downstairs and shuttered windows upstairs gave the place an abandoned look—at least until one spotted the bevy of SUVs parked behind, big lumps under PVC drop cloths. However, few pedestrians would ever see more than the second story, dull red clay roof tiles and a handful of bushy antennae, given that the premises were shielded by a nine-foot-high brick wall topped with broken glass and a garnish of razor wire.

Nolan’s hunger now exceeded his tiredness. Even so, his aches and pains took pride of place. Without jolts of adrenaline every hour or so, he was drained. He trudged up the stairs to the conference room.

CHAPTER TEN

TOAD HALL

SUNDAY, MARCH 9, RANGOON

Nolan swung open a shutter to let natural light into the room. Looking out the window, he mused how Rangoon was a still life of Southeast Asia thirty years ago. Sleepy, sweltering, bustling and bursting with opportunities. In contrast to Singapore, which enforced property rights and featured clean courts, 2014 Burma was a military dictatorship of the worst kind. Law and order was rented by the day, allowing Teller and his ilk to operate openly. Small wonder that North Korea was the junta’s best buddy. They were Asia’s two failed states.

Hecker’s secretary, Chit, showed up, and he gave her the photocopy of his US passport photo page he had in the bottom of his duffel bag, as well as a Canada passport identifying him as Derrick Larson. Chit made a booking for Robert Nolan for that evening’s Tiger Airways flight to Singapore at 7 p.m. That was a smokescreen. There was also a Myanmar Airways flight at 6:10 p.m., which she booked for Mr. Larson. Nolan would have opted to take the earlier Thai flight to Bangkok and connect from there, but a breathless phone call from Millie had nudged him the other way: Lloyd Matthews had given her two weeks on the MH370 task force, and she’d already booked on Myanmar Airways.

Hecker reassured Nolan that he shouldn’t have any problem getting past passport control with his photocopy passport page in lieu of the original. There had been so many passports stolen from Western backpackers that the officials were used to the twenty-somethings begging their way out of the country, their dreams on hold of hitchhiking across Asia for world peace on Dad’s platinum card.

Derrick Larson was another challenge; this gentleman had to get back into Singapore without ever having left the country, or entered Burma. Chit conquered the first hurdle—persuading Myanmar Airways to accept the reservation—by supplying a valid credit card number on the website’s booking page. So much for post-9/11 international upgrades in traveler screening and security measures.

Nolan confirmed with Chit that, just like the CIA, the DEA also had a working relationship with the Singapore authorities. She keyed in Larson’s vital signs, encrypted the email as per the bilateral protocols and sent it to Singapore Immigration (copying the Internal Security Department), requesting preapproval for tourist entry for a Mr. Derrick Larson who was working undercover for the DEA. Despite it being a Sunday, the Singaporeans turned around the request in twenty minutes.

Hecker explained that the samples would go in the diplomatic bag and remain in DEA custody. The bag’s contents would be divided in two, with DEA Singapore locking half in their evidence safe and sending the other half to testing labs.

He told Nolan, “Depending on what you want us to add to the standard checklist—a long list of drugs, chemicals and explosives—we should get the results in one or two days, certainly by midweek.”

“Run screens for weapons of mass destruction: bio-agents, nerve gas, precursor chemicals and nuclear materials. Oh, and look for human DNA.” Hecker scribbled it down, shaking his head.

Nolan was anxious to get moving, not knowing how long it would take to reach the airport, particularly since they were swinging by Millie’s apartment first. While the driver helped Zeya wrestle two gargantuan suitcases on board, an excited Millie bounded into the back seat, scooting to the middle to avoid the worst of the soiled upholstery.

Shoulder-to-shoulder with her, he asked, “How did you persuade Matthews to let you go?”

Millie leaned hard against him and said, “He asked me to the prom. I said I’d think about it.”

Nolan was suddenly seventeen again, his brain awash in an intoxicating hormone cocktail.

Before he could shift the conversation to safer ground, Millie waved a thick manila envelope. “I have the passenger and cargo manifests!” she crowed.

Nolan slid out the contents and did a quick flip. “Any ideas in-house?” he asked, skimming the passenger list.

“We’re running the names through every computer in the free world. So far, the only thing that’s jumped out is that there were seventeen employees from a semiconductor design firm called Eagle Claw. It’s Idaho-based and is putting up a plant in Malaysia. The execs were on their way to China for a company off-site.”

“What kinds of chips does Eagle Claw design?”

“We’re not certain. The website describes high-end video chipsets aimed at gamers, but until DOD comes back, we won’t know if they have defense contracts, too.”

He finished a second run-through of the seven pages. “I don’t recognize a single name, not that that means anything. What would justify the slaughter of two hundred twenty-seven passengers and twelve crew?”

“Bob! Stop talking like that. We don’t know that these people are dead. If you’re right, they all landed safely here in Burma. That’s a lot better than crashing into the ocean off Vietnam.”

“Maybe,” was his doubtful reply. He kept thumbing. “Ah, look at the cargo printouts. Lithium batteries, over two hundred twenty kilograms worth, almost five hundred pounds
.
What were they doing on board? These are known fire starters. Recall the Florida jet that crashed about twenty years ago? Lithium batteries in the cargo hold caught fire and killed everyone. ValuJet, I think it was.”

“No, I
don’t
remember. I was only six years old at the time, old man.”

Nolan was as excited as a lottery player who’d matched six numbers. “There are 2,236 kilos—about 5,000 pounds—of ‘radio accessories and chargers.’ I’ll wager my last nickel that this wasn’t a RadioShack order being shipped from Malaysia to China.”

“Those caught everyone’s eye, too. That’s where the investigation’s concentrated.”

“Maybe they’re missing the most important clue,” Nolan said.

“What’s that?”

“Mangosteens
.
The plane had 5,500 pounds of mangosteens in four crates.”

“So?”

“Because Travis said the contents of one of the burned crates in the shed smelled of bananas, which are similar to mangosteens in smell and taste. And one of the two gunmen at the guardhouse yesterday was eating a fruit when Kyaw and I pulled up. My wife buys mangosteens at the wet market. They’re dark purple, almost black. I don’t care for them, but the Chinese love ’em, which explains why they were on a flight from Malaysia to Beijing. Can you call someone and check whether mangosteens grow locally?”

“My cover job is trade and economics, so I can tell you that Burma’s only two agricultural exports are dried vegetables and rice. We mostly ship garments, timber and seafood. Not fruits. Maybe that guard has a mangosteen tree in his backyard.”

“He doesn’t,” Nolan said. “He pulled that mangosteen out of a crate sitting on the ground at the airstrip. Teller was after something in the hold. The mangosteens must have been in front of it. They off-loaded what they wanted, stuffed it into the K-Line containers and didn’t bother reloading whatever they didn’t need. Instead, Teller burned the mangosteens along with whatever else was left behind.

“I’m guessing the guard put that fruit in his pocket. He must not have liked it very much: he took a bite and spat it out before he pointed an M-4 at me.”

“I’ll call the office and let them know,” Millie said.

“Please don’t. Hecker beat it into my head how farfetched the Burma hijack theory sounds. Let’s not go crying that the sky is falling because there were tons of mangosteens on MH370. Start by checking out whether and where mangosteens grow here, and then we can decide where to take it. Even so, there's one other thing we can do right now. Zeya?”

Zeya had been scanning the streets front, back and sideways like a spectator at a 360-degree tennis match. He turned around, fixing Nolan with mirrored eyes. “Yes?”

“Can you dial Ryder and hand me the phone?”

“Here.”

Nolan waited for Rangoon’s overloaded cellular network to connect the call. “Travis? It’s Bob. I’ll make it short. I think we’re more likely looking for cargo than people. It could be electrical or electronic items based on the shipping manifests, or even computer chips given all those semiconductor employees on board. I’m almost positive it’s not just a person, or else Teller wouldn’t have bothered opening the cargo hold. Please factor that into your search priorities. I haven’t had a chance to tell Hecker yet, either. I’ll type all this up when I get to Singapore. Bye.”

To Millie he said, “He’s with their Rangoon police buds. They’re going to hit Teller’s home and office in less than an hour. Until now, he hasn’t come up with anything. Maybe we can get Teller on the run so at least he doesn’t have time to look for us.”

Rather than talk about himself—which was either boring or classified—Nolan jumped into the unofficial Khun Sa history lesson given Millie’s earlier embassy soliloquy. Nolan showed off, but with an ulterior motive. “Khun Sa was a pseudonym in the Shan language meaning ‘Prince Prosperous.’ He was an illiterate orphan, half Shan, half Chinese, which made him suspect in Shan eyes. Ethnic purity aside, this fellow had huge balls and even bigger connections. In the late 1970s, the FBI named him the most-wanted man in the world and put a two-million-dollar bounty on him. Little matter. He lived in his own town in Burma across the river from Mae Hong San, the major contraband entry point into Thailand. There he had the only house with .50-caliber anti-aircraft batteries and a private fifteen-thousand-man army protecting him while he lowered his golf handicap. You probably knew all this already,” Nolan concluded.

“Well, some of it.”

“Here’s where it gets more interesting. Our man was also the largest client of Double Llama Trading. As a side project, while the CIA was covering up Daniel Kranz’s murder and erasing the names of prominent customers, my colleagues were keen to make certain the prince recouped the money spent on prepaid weapons that were now too hot to smuggle into Shan State. I don’t know the exact figure, but the Chiang Mai warehouse alone held six million dollars in heavy arms and ammo. I assumed it was mostly his. Khun Sa was not a fellow you short-changed if you wanted to live.

“I was a junior cipher clerk in the Bangkok embassy working in counterintelligence, mostly targeting Vietnam, the Soviets and Warsaw Pact countries. It was so long ago, China wasn’t yet the top priority. The cloak-and-dagger routine to stem the tide of global communism ended when Kranz was throttled for reasons and persons unknown. About the only employee who wasn’t a suspect was Teller, who had been in Singapore. Rob hustled back to Bangkok along with a handful of Agency old-timers. Together they stonewalled the Thais while the secretaries and I shredded evidence.

“Among the thousands of pages were bills of lading for shipments to Chiang Mai–based front companies, some of them running into the millions of dollars’ worth of weapons. DLT had current and foreign CIA seniors running up to northern Thailand every month for client handling, deposit taking, packing and shipping. The CIA had turned a blind eye to the opium sales, which were funding the majority of the arms purchases, because most DLT profits funded Agency clandestine shipments across Asia and Africa. Ex-Agency people—some DLT-affiliated and some not—continued to cache arms and money in Thailand, so it was confusing sometimes whether DLT employees were official CIA, or just old boys and known to Teller. The US was in the post-Watergate/Carter pacifist era; no one in DC favored military activity, so gifting arms and covert training were about as far as the Agency could push the proxy war angle. Recall, too, that Saigon fell in 1975, Vietnam had conquered Cambodia in 1979 and the dominos were pointing toward Thailand. There were plenty of covert staff who supported Teller and his cronies, even if the DLT principals were making millions for themselves.

“So now it was February 1985 in Bangkok. I was nearly four years out of Carnegie Mellon and a little more than six months out of my first post-training probationary assignment. I requisitioned one of the three Agency IBM PCs and taught myself Lotus 123 to run compound interest calculations for the DLT customer refunds. I heard whispers later that a CIA senior had personally delivered over six million in cash to Khun Sa’s local rep in Chiang Mai, along with the details for a much larger sum—maybe fifteen million—spread in fresh deposits across a handful of other CIA-friendly offshore banks. So even though DLT went bust with over forty-five million in customer funds missing, I don’t think public enemy number one lost a dollar.”

“So Teller knew Khun Sa from back in the day?”

“Based on where he’s working, I’d say so.”

“And if the patriarch vouched for him, Teller would have had a lot of leeway even with the old man no longer on the scene.”

“Yep.” Nolan exhaled. “Enough Khun Sa for now. Tell me a little about yourself. What did you do before Rangoon?”

Millie didn’t mind being the center of attention. She’d grown up in Cupertino, California the daughter of Indian immigrants with a father an alumnus of Hewlett-Packard. She’d majored in Hindi and Linguistics at UC San Diego, where she picked up Burmese on a self-study basis. While she was at college, her parents split, and it seemed her father had disappeared back to India under a cloud. After graduation she worked two years for Strategic Policy Advisory, a DC consulting and lobbying boutique. SPA encouraged her to earn a master’s degree and rejoin afterward. At the University of London’s School of African and Oriental Studies, she focused on Burmese, while adding a little Shan and Thai. Rather than return to SPA, she’d joined the CIA eighteen months ago. Rangoon was her initial posting after completing training at the end of November.