“All right,” he said. “You see, I was quite a well-known anti-war activist in the States. I’d written a book and other stuff. I was invited to run for Congress on a peace ticket, but we had a plan. I was already a decorated pilot.”

“You were a pilot? Wow!”

She squeezed his arm. He flexed his muscle.

“I enlisted so I could operate from inside the insidious war machine,” he said.

“From minute five to minute eight you’ll notice there was a lot of bull dung getting tossed around,” said Siri. “It’s not easy to separate the fact from the fiction. We only edited out his trips to the bathroom and our girl changing the cartridges. The rest is verbatim. But just bear with it. We make our appearances toward the end.”

Dom was stooped over the screen, the gun limp at his side. He didn’t react to Siri’s comment.

“To cut a long story short, I stole an airplane,” said the man. “An F-100. I flew it away from the war zone and landed it in a Communist controlled area. Of course, I disabled it so the enemy wouldn’t use it against my brothers. I hiked a week to the border. I’d broken a leg landing it, but I had jungle training. I knew how to lash it and tolerate the pain.”

“So where were you for those six years if you weren’t in a POW camp?”

“Here,” he said. “I shacked up with a Thai whore and her mental son—as a front, mind you. And I continued to fight for our pacifist cause incognito from a village in Ubon. I had to come in to the bars and spend time here, earning the trust of servicemen and journalists and learning their confidential information. I’d pass on this intelligence to the anti-war movement in the States. I knew them all. Jane Fonda was a close friend. She came to visit me here several times. We had a sort of . . . fling. She was serious but I didn’t need all that baggage.”

“I’m jealous,” said the blonde.

“No need, Honey. I’ve got plenty of loving to share.”

“So you were like a real spy,” said the girl.

“I was a master of disguise,” he said. “I could change identities overnight. I have a knack for convincing people I’m somebody else.”

“Give me an example,” she said.

“Well, languages and accents. I can do accents. Australian’s one of my best. I remember I took the whore’s son to Bangkok and got him on a scholarship to Australia by convincing the embassy he was the top student in my school in Ubon. I didn’t have a school but I had all the fake paperwork to say I did. And I had an Australian passport I’d stolen from some drunk here. Even the Aussies thought I was one of them.”