The Deceivers (37 page)

When the sports car's front tires hit the object lying across the road, an explosion erupted, lifting the car from the road. The SUV reversed and shot backward as a second explosion erupted when flames hit the sports car's gas tank.

The SUV pulled up beside me and I could see the faded lettering of a United Nations emblem on the side of the door.

44

“Plan to stay at the Hanoi Hilton?” Kirk asked.

We were at the airport in Siem Reap waiting to board a plane for Ho Chi Minh City. Taksin and I got tickets for the first plane out. Just as I had at the Phnom Penh whorehouse, I kept looking down the corridor expecting police officers to come charging for me in any moment.

Kirk was amazingly calm. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. What would it take to make a guy who defuses land mines and bombs nervous?

“Is it a good hotel?” I asked.

Both Kirk and Taksin cracked up. An American businessman who overheard the question and answer walked away, shaking his head. Okay, the joke was on me, but at the moment I was more worried about being arrested than some stupid witticism.

“Very funny.” I didn't want to appear not to get the joke. Maybe it had something to do with Paris Hilton.

“You keep looking down the corridor as if you expect to see the police at any moment. Stop worrying.”

I sighed. “Stop worrying” had been Kirk's mantra ever since we got into his SUV after he blew up the sports car. Ranar had been the one behind the driver's wheel.

Two human beings had died and I was cold inside about their passing. I wasn't glad they were dead. I was just happy I wasn't.

Kirk had not caused a “diversion” at General Chep's camp. He had set off the explosions, but they had been made with Ranar and Chep's cooperation. The explosions had been a ploy to back up Chantrea's story that she was rescuing us.

The “rescue” had been set up so Taksin and I would be killed when we ran over a strip land mine that Kirk had laid across the road at Ranar's request. Ranar thought Kirk would kill me to protect himself. He was wrong. Kirk killed Ranar and protected both of us.

Killing two foreigners would cause infinitely more political and investigative heat than the death of Rim Nol. For Taksin and I to join the thousands of victims of land mines was pure genius. Getting lost on a back road and hitting a land mine while driving toward Angkor would be an easy sell to foreign embassies, especially with an inference that Taksin and I would have been looting artifacts, considering our reputations.

Rim Nol was also part of the scenario.

Kirk told me his body had been put in the trunk of the car that Taksin and I were in. He never mentioned Bullock's name. I didn't bring him up, either. He promised to give Nol a proper burial. I asked him to scatter Nol's ashes on the Killing Fields so he could be with his family.

Kirk had been battered and bruised and got some facial cuts after he rammed the sports car with his SUV so their tires tripped the land mine. The facial injuries only added to his sexy masculine appeal.

We survived because Kirk was simply an old-fashioned soldier of fortune. He didn't want to be king like Ranar, wasn't a fanatic like Chantrea, wasn't impossibly greedy and perverted like Bullock, wasn't a murderer. He was also much too independent to take orders from Ranar that went against his grain.

I was eternally grateful to Kirk. Someday I would repay him, but right now I just wanted to get out of this damn country before I was stuck here for the rest of my life—literally.

During the drive to the airport Kirk had told me not to worry. “Ranar has fallen. It's a small country, news spreads fast. Right now anyone who had anything to do with Ranar is taking cover. General Chep is on the phone making deals and distributing some of his ill-gotten gains to politicians to make sure he doesn't have repercussions from the fallout.

“Tomorrow it will be the talk of the capital. Rumor and innuendo will rage, conspiracies hinted at. In a week it won't even be coffee break talk. Ranar and his plot will fade away because the next political plot will take its place.”

I glanced down the corridor again. No SWAT team was storming toward me in battle gear. Yet.

An announcement came across the PA system that it was time for boarding. I hugged Kirk and kissed him good-bye.

“What are you going to do?” I asked. “You'll be in danger.”

He grinned and shook his head. “Not really. Land mine hunters are hard to come by. It's not a real popular job. Or one with a future and a pension check. Besides, I'm a foreigner. No one will care about me. I'll spread a little money around and just keep doing what I do.”

What he did included smuggling antiquities, but it wasn't the right time to give him a lecture.

“I'll never forget what you did for me and Taksin,” I said.

His grin widened. “Yes, you will. Everything will be back to normal when you get back to New York and—”

“No, you're wrong. You don't understand. It's not just Cambodia and Bangkok. It all goes back to New York.” I grimaced. “It's not over, Kirk. There's a big score to settle back home.”

V
IETNAM

45

Ho Chi Minh City

I checked into the Caravelle Hotel in the Vietnamese capital. No flights were available for several hours for a connection to New York for me or to Bangkok for Taksin, which actually worked to our advantage because we both needed to clean up and rest.

The tickets and hotel rooms came in just under the limit on my charge card, so I would arrive home broke with no priceless treasures or even a finder's fee. It would be a cold day in hell before I got compensated for anything I'd done for Cambodia. I would be lucky if they didn't try to extradite me for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Both of us were exhausted. A few hours of rest at a hotel would be reviving. Taksin grinned and told me he could find a place where he could treat me to a cobra cocktail but I turned down the offer. I couldn't even imagine what snake blood tasted like. Or why someone would drink it. Or, as he inferred rather graphically, why it would be an aphrodisiac.

I ordered separate rooms.

Out of curiosity, I asked at the front desk about the Hanoi Hilton and just got a blank stare. I'd have to check out the joke after I got home. I was still sure it must have something to do with Paris Hilton.

It's not over until it's over
, ran through my head as I lay on the bed. It had started in New York and it had to end there. Not just because it was home but to finish what had begun there with a knock on my door from Sammy, the delivery guy.

A piece to the puzzle was still missing and it wasn't in Southeast Asia.

Chantrea had been on my mind since I crossed the border. I felt sorry for her. I don't think she really ever had a chance. Things were just too messed up during her lifetime in Cambodia for her to think straight. I believed that she really was trying to help her people. Even when she tried to kill me.

Ranar could rot in hell as far as I was concerned for what he did to me, to Chantrea, and to the deserving people of his country.

Rim Nol was different. I would light a candle for him when I got home. The Cambodians were great human beings because only people with incredible courage and resolve could have survived all the horrors and deprivations that they had to endure. Nol was of that caliber. A light went out in the world when he died.

Leaving Kirk at the Siem Reap airport had been emotional for me. We had been lovers, if only for a short time. He had saved my life. But, of course, he was still a bastard. I was certain he didn't come with us because he had some nefarious dealings to conclude and/or get his loot out. We would not ride off into the sunset together—he was still a smuggler, drawn to the dark side of the art world. Maybe he saved me because he simply drew the line at murdering people he liked.

I had to wonder about my luck with men. Did I automatically gravitate to nice bastards … or was the supply of available men in the world for my age so low that I had to scrape bottom? I wanted to think of it as just bad luck rather than a genetic defect or poor karma on my part.

I had hopes of getting an outstanding fake on credit from Taksin that I could sell to a rich buyer who didn't mind buying a fake, but he was all smiles and evasive commitments when I asked. I guess nearly getting murdered together was not enough for Taksin to trust my credit. I wished I had grabbed that museum piece on the table in the cell I shared with Taksin. Hopefully it would make its way back to the museum, but I seriously doubted it.

During the flight, Taksin had taken out a packet of pictures and showed me his reproductions like a proud father showing off his children. I recognized a piece I'd seen in New York and it stunned me.

Taksin had just given me the final piece to the puzzle. It was to end in New York, as I thought. And that weighed heavily on my mind and nerves as I waited for my flight because I had to wonder whether I would get home just to end up as a statistic as my body washed up on the shore of the East River.

Kirk wasn't the the blond foreigner who kidnapped Taksin and killed his friend. After we crossed the border, Taksin gave me an emphatic no—in Thai and shake of his head—when I asked if Kirk was the bad guy who kidnapped him and killed his friend.

That left a few million other blond foreigners as potential candidates but I had one particularly in mind. When we reached the hotel in Saigon—aka Ho Chi Minh City—I sat down with the hotel concierge and had her guide me through an Internet search that brought up a picture of my prime suspect.

I didn't need an interpreter to translate what Taksin was saying when the picture popped up of the blond-haired man who had had him kidnapped in Bangkok and had his friend killed.

Before we parted I had asked Kirk about the New York connection but he either knew nothing or refused to share the information with me. I wasn't sure he was even involved in the museum scheme, anyway. He only fessed up to looting antiquity sites, or more accurately buying stolen pieces and smuggling them out of the country.

I should have realized that a New York connection had been necessary for the sale of the Siva.

That person wasn't just part of a plot to sell the Siva in New York that Ranar had taken from the museum and replaced with Taksin's fake. He was also a coconspirator for looting, forgery, theft, and murder in Thailand and Cambodia.

Boarding my plane for Newark with a changeover in Tokyo, I hoped I was right about a lot of things.

N
EW
Y
ORK

46

Being back in a city of skyscrapers, cold rain, and organized chaos, I rather missed the warm tropical atmosphere, warm smiling people, and quaint disorder in Phnom Penh. I didn't miss being on the hit list of the Cambodian mafia, but I had to admit that the country had an exotic charm that the steel and concrete jungles of New York lacked.

I felt like I had been gone an eon rather than just days. Nothing had really changed. Except I had become harder. I always considered myself strong enough to compete with other women and men in a tough business, but I drew the line at being so ruthless that winning was everything. It was okay in this world for a man to be a bastard—it fit male biology, contact sports, machismo—but women were nurturers biologically and hardness wasn't nurturing.

Right now though I felt angry and betrayed.

I was not a believer in redemption, rehabilitation, or even a little mercy toward violent offenders. My mentality ran more toward an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. I wouldn't condone cutting off a thief's hand, but whacking a rapist's dick was all right with me. And it was time for someone to pay.

Time also for what the French called the denouement. Or as we would call it, the denouncement. The victims deserved closure even if I had to be their stand-in.

That was why I had come back to Chelsea. In a way, it had started here. For certain, it had to end here.

I stopped by the small sign that simply said “Bolger's” and looked down to his basement apartment. I felt my courage melting, my resolve getting mushy. It was easier to think brave thoughts than act them out.

The blinds were drawn for the two wrought-iron barred windows and only a hint of light showed on the blinds. His lights were off in the living room, which meant he was probably in his kitchen.

I went down the steps slowly, feeling a little cold and numb in my stomach. A line from the lyrics of a sixties folk song played in my head:
Where have all the flowers gone …
I couldn't remember the next line.
Gone to graveyards everyone
?

I rang his doorbell and waited. Then rang it again. The light never went on in the living room-bookstore, but I saw a window blind move. There was enough light from the streetlights for him to see it was me.

He opened the door. “Maddy. I couldn't believe my eyes. Where did you come from?”

“A cold day in hell.”

I entered and deliberately hit the light switch next to the door.

“I've been worried about you. You should have given me a call and told me you were back.”

I picked up the linga, the phallic fertility piece from his shelf, and turned around to face him.

“This is an interesting piece of art. You indicated it was Hindu, but this one was produced as a Khmer piece.”

He shrugged. “Not really. It's a fake.”

“What's interesting about it is that I've seen it before.”

“Running around the antique stores in Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Phnom Penh, I'm sure you've seen many fakes.”

“True, but this is a very unique fake. Taksin made it. I'm sure if I examined it with a magnifying glass, I'd find his trademark. I should have recognized the sandstone in the first place. It's Angkor stuff.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What are saying? All those pieces on that wall are fakes. I couldn't afford to own a museum-quality piece.”