Stephen Coonts’ Deep Black: Conspiracy by Stephen Coonts & Jim DeFelice

Author:Stephen Coonts & Jim DeFelice
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312937003
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

68

THAO DUONG WENT home after eating. Karr followed, keeping his distance as the Art Room had directed earlier. Shortly after he sat down at the café a block away, Marie Telach came on the line with new instructions.

“Tommy, we want to be in a position to pick up Thao Duong if necessary. You’re going to have to find a way to get a tracking bug on him.”

“Aw, man.”

“I don’t think it will be impossible. I was thinking you could plant one of the horseshoe bugs in his shoe. We’ve done that in heels before. We saw on one of the surveillance shots that he wears thick Western-style dress shoes.”

“Nah, that’s not what I was complaining about. It’ll be easy. But I was just about to order some food,” Karr said, getting up. “Now I have to get back to work.”

“Didn’t you just eat?”

“Snacks from street vendors don’t count,” said Karr.

He found a shoe repairman whose shop was still open a few blocks away. Considering the language barrier—even with the translator talking in Karr’s ear, he struggled to get the tones right—he thought he did fairly well to buy an entire shoe repair set for fifty bucks. The cobbler even had his apprentice shine Karr’s shoes as part of the deal.

He was wearing sneakers, so it wasn’t much of a shine. Still, the thought was there.

Karr hoped that Thao Duong would veg out in front of the television and call it an early night; he’d break into the apartment and doctor the Vietnamese bureaucrat’s shoes once he was sleeping. But around eight o’clock, Thao Duong put on his things and went downstairs to his own motorbike.

Karr had already bugged the bike, so he let Thao Duong stay about two blocks ahead. It wasn’t long before Karr realized where they were going—the same red-light district that Cam Tre Luc had visited the night before.

“Ten bucks he’s headed to Saigon Rouge,” said Rockman. “I had a hunch these guys were connected.”

“Where’s my ten bucks?” said Karr as Thao Duong passed by the street where Saigon Rouge was.

“He’ll come back,” said Rockman. “Don’t get too close.” Karr turned to parallel Thao Duong as he drove deeper in District 4. Finally Rockman reported that Thao Duong had stopped a few blocks away.

The buildings in the area Karr drove through were mostly one-story shacks, a patchwork of mismatched metal and discarded wood. Men clustered in the shade of the streetlights, eying the large motorcycle driver suspiciously.

Thao Duong had stopped on a block with large buildings, five- and six-story warehouses made of crumbling cement. Karr spotted the bike in front of a narrow five-story building whose bottom-floor windows were covered with pieces of cardboard boxes and whose upper windows were empty. He circled the block. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire set off a tiny junkyard immediately behind the building. As soon as Karr stopped, a trio of large dogs ran at him, smashing into the fence as they yapped.

“Guess I’ll wait somewhere else,” he told the dogs, revving the bike and driving away.

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