“What about Mai?”

“Hoa-she’s the coordinator. She’s the one who can pass as American. Got all the right American accents. You oughta hear her Valley Girl.”

VIRGIL WAS on the phone, and Davenport answered: “What’d you get?”

“There are three Vietnamese, two men and a woman, and they’re planning to kill Warren. I’m told that nothing would make them happier than killing him at your party. To do it in public. They got a shooter with them. I don’t think it’s a suicide run.”

“It won’t be-no suicide,” Sinclair interjected.

“I’m told it’s not a suicide, so they’ve got to get in close or do him with a rifle,” Virgil said. “You better tell his security to get tight.”

“I’m on it and Warren ’s here,” Davenport said. “This place is crawling with security-I’ll light them up. Can I tell Warren?”

“Yeah, yeah, he has nothing to do with the lemon killings,” Virgil said. “It’s a Vietnamese hit squad, going back to the war days. That whole murder thing.”

“Where are you?” Davenport asked.

“At Sinclair’s. He’s telling us a story. It’s complicated, man.”

“You better get over here. I’ll get St. Paul SWAT, but that’s gonna take a while. They’re probably up on the golf course looking down at us… If we can get SWAT around the edges of the course, we might chase them out.”

“What about Sinclair?” Virgil asked.

“Whatever you think-I’ll get with Warren, call me when you’re close.”

VIRGIL RANG OFF and said to Del and Jenkins, “We’re going. My truck is bugged, Sinclair and I will ride with Jenkins. We’re gonna bring in SWAT and see if we can corner them on the golf course.”

“They’ve got night-vision gear.” Sinclair said. “They’ll see you coming.”

“Ah, shit.” Virgil got Davenport back on the line.

“What?”

“Sinclair said they’ve got night-vision gear…”

“And a starlight scope,” Sinclair added.

“And a starlight scope,” Virgil said. “Maybe it’s better to put the guys out on the perimeter of the golf course, keep bringing people in until it’s completely blocked, and wait for daylight.”

“Let me think about it,” Davenport said. “Get down here.”

“We’re coming.”

IN THE CAR, Virgil took out his cuffs and cuffed Sinclair’s hand to a loop of the safety belt in the backseat. They were five minutes from the golf course, running without lights.

“Tell me,” he said to Sinclair, and Jenkins’s eyes flicked up in the rear-view mirror. Storytelling time.

A LONG TIME AGO, Sinclair said, when college kids thought they were the spearhead of a revolution, when fifty-five thousand Americans were dying in Vietnam, when ghettos were burning in most of the major American cities, when women started burning their bras and hippies were dropping out and turning on, he’d been a student in American studies at the University of Michigan.

“I loved this country. My grandparents were immigrants, my father and all my uncles fought in the Second World War, and I wanted to do something for the country,” Sinclair said. “My history prof knew that, the jolly old elf that he was, and knew just what to do: he put me in touch with the CIA. He said there was no point in going to Vietnam and dying as a second lieutenant. Anyone could do that.”

So Sinclair took some tests, went to Langley, was trained, and then dropped right back into his most natural environment: the University of Michigan.

“I was there when the Students for a Democratic Society got going, I knew all of the early Weathermen… You know about the town house explosion in Manhattan? No? Never mind. Anyway, I started going to Vietnam,” he said. “I dodged the draft with the help of the Agency, made a lot of contacts with Vietnamese who were moving up in the government over there.”

By the time the war ended, he said, he had radical contacts everywhere in Asia and Europe. He did the last interview with Ulrike Meinhof in April 1976, a few weeks before Meinhof either hanged herself or was murdered in her German jail cell.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Virgil said.

“I suppose not. You’d have been a baby at the time… Ulrike was the coleader of the Baader-Meinhof Group, one of the so-called Red Army groups, the Rote Armee Fraktion,” Sinclair said, sputtering through the German with an academic’s enthusiasm. “Big radical deal at one time.”

“So you were hot.”

“Yup. But like all good things, the nonsense stopped, and there I was. I’d gotten my PhD, and to tell you the truth, I’d been in academia for so long that I had pretty much adopted the points of view of a lot of people I’d opposed at the start. That the Vietnam War was a waste of time and blood, a tragedy-”

“Yeah, yeah, so much for old home week,” Virgil said. “What about these assholes? What about Mai, or whatever her name is?”

“Hey-let me tell it. So I told the Agency what I was thinking. You know, that I was tired and, worse than that, a liberal. And they just let it go… quite a few liberals in the Agency, actually. I retired. I was doing pretty well as a teacher and a writer, I still had contacts in Vietnam-I’d married my Vietnamese woman, though I met her here, in the States-and I started doing some work on trade deals and so on. I’d still get a call from the CIA guys every once in a while, and I was happy enough to talk to them. Then Chester Utecht got drunk and told everybody in sight about stealing bulldozers in Vietnam.”

Vietnamese intelligence picked it up. In the way of the world, the father of the woman raped and murdered that day in Da Nang was now an eighty-five-year-old first-tier government official in the misty realm where intelligence and the military overlapped. He heard the story.

He could have his revenge, his peers agreed, as long as it didn’t upset the trade apple cart.

As it happened, Vietnamese intelligence had also picked up a line on an al-Qaeda plot that came out of Indonesia. Whether it was real or not, they got in touch with somebody at Homeland Security and suggested that the information was available. In return, they wanted the relevant layers of U.S. intelligence agencies to look in the other direction during a short, violent operation in Minnesota.

The people who would die were all known killers and rapists. The people who would die on the West Coast-and there would be many more of them, if al-Qaeda had its way-were innocents.

A deal was cut-and a deniable contact was needed between Washington and Hanoi.

“You,” Virgil said. They were on Cretin Avenue, headed north toward the golf course, just a few blocks away now.

“Me. I speak Vietnamese, have contacts in both places-though the Viets were a trifled surprised about the CIA,” Sinclair said with a grin. “I talked to an old friend over there who thought it was hilarious-turns out he was a member of their intelligence service, and he’d been playing me. One thing about the Vietnamese-they got a pretty goddamn good sense of humor.”

What wasn’t so funny, he said, was what happened when he tried to turn them down. The people from Homeland Security pressed on him the urgency of the case, and said something to the effect that the Vietnamese had already researched him… and knew where his daughter was.

“It was a threat,” Sinclair said. “I didn’t really believe they’d do anything to her-family is pretty important in Vietnam. But I wasn’t sure. So here I am.”

“You set me up to see Tai and Phem,” Virgil said.

“Of course; and they were seriously pissed. I’ll tell you what-the real Tai and Phem would be astonished to hear about it. They’re in town all the time, you know. Don’t stay at the Hilton. But if you’d called somebody at Larson to check their bona fides, they would have told you that Tai and Phem were outstanding citizens and enthusiastic followers of the capitalist road.”