“Talk to my accountant,” laughed the rotund scientist. He grew serious as they neared the Rex Hotel. “May I ask you a question? I admit to being somewhat confused, Brandon. Clearly, you hate what happened to Dzung, and yet you have no problem with Colonel Pham, who as we know is out there playing golf while these people suffer. Or—shall I be blunt? Possibly making love to his daughter?”

Condley thought for a moment, his mind buried in the past that had caught him up all those years ago and forever changed him. Then he shrugged casually. “I believe in God. Does that surprise you? And so I ask myself, why did He take me on this journey? Why did I wander through Asia for all those years, never fitting back in with my own people, never at ease with them anymore, in those false little kingdoms where they spend their days clutching their fragile idols of money and false power? And why was I led back here—simply to be swallowed up in bitterness, or to again become obsessed with death? I don’t think so. Maybe something good was supposed to come out of it. Something new. A birth? Maybe a birth that looks like a death. The death of the old, and the birth of the new. I have a certain power, Professor. Let’s call it the power of the uninvolved. I can talk to both sides, and both sides can talk to me.”

“It seems to me you’re very involved.”

“Not when it comes to payback. If you’re not Vietnamese they don’t really keep you on their score sheet.”

They had reached the hotel. Professor Muir watched Condley with a stunned respect as he climbed down from the cyclo. “I’ve never heard you speak so profoundly, Brandon. It’s almost scary to know you’ve been hiding that kind of intelligence from me for so long.”

Condley waved good-bye to Dzung as they crossed the street and walked toward the hotel’s entrance, then he turned to Muir. “People talk a lot more freely in front of you when they think you’re dumb.”

“What about Salt and Pepper?”

Condley now laughed coldly, his skylike eyes growing molten once again. “That’s different, Professor. They killed Marines. That’s the American score sheet. And it’s all about payback.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN