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at the idea that he’d been right for decades about Neil Hunter. And he alone. Every other agent or operative from that time believed the bastard. Cole knew better. He knew Neil Hunter and there was no better deceiver than that guy. They’d tried to wean him away from the military into the agency, but he’d refused. He worked with them, but he had this situation, almost a free hand, at running the supplies to the mountains and he liked it.
    Something had happened to the man after the crash. He became a recluse. Hid away from the world and never came back. Cole had always kept some eyes on him. Anytime he left the country and got anywhere near Southeast Asia, Cole wanted to be the first to know.
    “Very interesting, Arnold, very interesting. You have been right all along. Let’s have a drink of my new wine and I’ll show you a journal and some pictures.”
    As they approached the veranda a slender, young woman in a paneled white dress crossed the lawns with two children and disappeared in the gardens. “Your wife gets more beautiful every time I see her,” Cole said.
    “Young women keep us young until they tire of us, then they kill us off for the inheritance,” Besson said.
    Cole follow Besson around the fish pond, past the stables and up onto the long veranda of the massive estate house where a white-clad houseman waited to serve them from the bar.
    Besson had to show him his new hunting rifle, a .458 Winchester magnum with scope that he’d won in a poker game.
    Besson was, among other things, a major collector of artifacts and antiquities. They were partners on gambling halls and hotels across Southeast Asia. Both had military intelligence backgrounds from which they were long retired. Luc Besson’s family had, during the colonial period, controlled more plantation land in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than all but three other major French families of that period.
    Besson’s obsequious houseman poured a new favorite wine, one from the family vineyards in Southern France. They got comfortable on the veranda with its great view of the retreating flow of the Tonle Sap River, the only major body of water to reverse flow every year when the mighty Mekong swelled.
    Twirling the wine around in the glass before taking another sip, Besson put his glass down on the coffee table, then pulled open a drawer from which he took a journal.
    “Something to bring life back to old bones, my friend. One of the local thieves who occasionally does some errands for me and brings me interesting pieces, has this time brought me something very intriguing. And for that he is well paid. And you were absolutely right this time.”
    He handed a journal to Cole, explaining the means of obtaining it. Inside the journal were two fading pictures. “Don’t react until you’ve read a few entries. Look hard at the pictures. Try not to have a seizure.”
    Cole studied the pictures and the journal and was pleasantly shocked.
    “How did you know his granddaughter would do this? Come here?” Besson asked.
    “She’s a war correspondent and when she came back to take care of Neil, she started doing all kinds of searches on the internet. Talking to people on the phone. I had my people all over her.”
    Cole knew plenty about Neil Hunter’s granddaughter. She owned a sporting equipment company for women athletes, designed military protective gear for women, then became a correspondent for a local Chicago outlet and worked her way up and was on the verge of becoming big time with offers from CNN and others. He’d seen the company site which had pictures of the woman climbing a mountain, kayaking down white water, in a jungle—all displaying her specialized gear. She was a big, well-built girl and good looking.
    He went back to the journal and read entries written almost forty years ago. He leafed through to the last entries written in 1974. They depicted the last CIA flight out of Saigon and the approaching NVA led by sapper squads already within