Two nights and a day later, Rendel and Weltmeister hid Mona under a tarpaulin in the back of the attaché’s jeep and left town. The Hmong girl was desperate to get into the mountains and reunite with her brother, the man who knew where the gold was stashed. The man who’d given his sister one of the most secret codes of the American war in Asia. The man who’d sent her to the city. She’d spent the night with Rendel, only to intone the same mantra over and over again.
“We meet brother Léon. Léon meets Weltmeister. Very good.”
And that was all he could lure out of her.
Outside the capital, the roads were muddy tracks lined by impenetrable walls of bamboo forest interspersed with tiny settlements and their adjacent fields. Children dressed in rags waved at them from the roadside. Neither man
