Sunshine poured like melted butter across oak floors; ice melting from the roof produced rhythmic and musical pings! on the terrace outside. It was January, and Mrs. Pollifax, list in hand, looked doubtfully at the pair of suitcases standing by the front door and said, "Are you quite sure we've not forgotten something?"
Cyrus Reed said dryly, "Emily, you've gone over that list four times this morning. Between my legal mind and your imaginative one, how could anything have been overlooked?"
"It's the imaginative half that worries me," she told him frankly. "I know I packed your precious survival food— those six tins of sardines—but now I'm wondering if I packed my malaria tablets, and if so, where?"
Cyrus replied by grasping her by the shoulders and steering her into the kitchen. "Breakfast, Emily," he said firmly. "Scrambled eggs are waiting. My God, Emily, after all the traveling you've done—"
She smiled up at him sunnily, an act that required a major tilt of the head because Cyrus was well over six feet tall. "Traveling, yes," she reminded him, "but you know I've never been a real tourist before. Only a pretend one for Carstairs and the Department."
"Yes, I know," he said, amused. "Getting bashed over the head by an assassin in Zambia—"
"Well, I'd never have met you if—"
"—not to mention sniffing out the KGB in China."
She noticed that very wisely he was not including her last adventure, when the odds had caught up with her and she had endured the nearly worst that could happen. "Well, it does seem strange," she mused, taking her place at the table. "A real holiday, not a care in the world . . . Delicious eggs," she told him, fork in hand. "What did you put in them this morning?"
"Garlic, parsley and a pinch of salt," he said, pouring coffee.
"I'll try to remember that when it's my turn. Do you suppose I tucked the malaria tablets in with the vitamins, Cyrus? We leave in four hours," she reminded him.
He smiled and lifted his glass of orange juice. "To Thailand, m'dear—and to malaria tablets definitely packed with your vitamins."
"Good," she said, and nodded happily, still very aware that she'd nearly lost all this, as well as her life, in Hong Kong a few months ago, and grateful that she could still look at Cyrus across the breakfast table each morning, at his thatch of white hair, the broad shoulders, his sleepy smile and the eyes set so oddly in his face that he resembled a Chinese mandarin. "To temple bells and dancing girls and elephants," she said, touching her glass to his, and then as the doorbell stridently rang she put down her glass and sighed. "Now who on earth can that be at ten o'clock on a Sunday morning!"
"Only one way to find out," Cyrus told her.
"I'll go—you made breakfast," she said, and pushed back her chair and hurried into the living room, annoyed that whoever was ringing their doorbell seemed determined to continue until acknowledged. Circumnavigating the suitcases, she opened the door and drew in her breath sharply: an attractive sandy-haired man in a sheepskin jacket stood beaming at her, attache case in hand.
"Thank God you're still here," he said, and removed his finger from the doorbell.
"Bishop?" she faltered. "Bishop?"
Cyrus, following her to the door, said doubtfully, "Bishop? Met you last June, didn't I? Bishop, isn't it?"
"I seem to have trouble establishing my identity this morning," said Bishop cheerfully. "You're making me feel like an apparition from the spirit world but I'm quite alive, thank you, although in danger of freezing to death standing here. May I come in?"
"Coffee," said Mrs. Pollifax, nodding. "Come in at once, Bishop, although you must admit—" Abandoning her sentence, she led him into the living room and divested him of his coat, her mind already racing with thoughts of what his appearance meant, because Bishop was assistant to Carstairs of the CIA, and although she and Bishop were excellent friends they never met face to face without its signaling a new adventure.
Except what an inopportune moment, she thought, when they were leaving in less than four hours for the airport and their flight to Bangkok; they would have to refuse him, of course, any change being absolutely impossible when she and Cyrus had spent so many weeks planning this holiday.
"No eggs left," Cyrus told him. "Settle for half a Danish and coffee?"
"The gods are smiling," said Bishop, following him into the kitchen and rubbing his hands together. "Oh—handsome," he said, glancing around appreciatively. "Lots of sunshine."
"Sit and revive," Mrs. Pollifax told him, coffeepot in hand.
Cyrus presented him with what remained of a large Danish pastry and sat down facing him. He said bluntly, "Should tell you we're leaving on holiday in four hours."
Bishop, crumbs dropping all around him, smiled and nodded his head. "So Emily says," he said, his mouth full. Swallowing, he took a sip of coffee and leaned back in his chair. "Nothing like a transfusion of coffee, is there? I'm really getting too old for this sort of rushing around but I've caught you in time, thank Heaven, which I must say is satisfying. I had to move so fast there wasn't time to phone."
"Hard to believe," said Cyrus, looking amused.
"On the contrary I left Virginia at 3 A.M.—that's three o'clock in the morning" he emphasized. "Enough to infect anyone with martyrdom."
He didn't look martyred, thought Mrs. Pollifax, nor did he look at all old from rushing about; he was wearing a shirt open at the neck and a soft blue sweater over it, and he looked astonishingly boyish in spite of the frenetic life he lived as Carstairs's aide and the years that she'd known him. "What," she asked, "has produced this wild urge to have coffee with us?"
"Thailand," he said.
Mrs. Pollifax stared at him blankly. "Did I mention it to you?"
"Of course—in your Christmas note. 'PS.,' you wrote, 'Cyrus and I are off to Thailand January 12th, and for nothing but a holiday, isn't that amazing?'"
Cyrus said dryly, "I take it no longer?" Despite his cryptic manner of talking and his sleepy eyes the air of laziness that he exuded was totally deceptive; Mrs. Pollifax knew that he was already probing Bishop's psyche adroitly and shrewdly.
Bishop smiled disarmingly. "Well—here you are, all packed and ready to go, which is too splendid a coincidence to be overlooked when we need a pair of Innocent Tourists for Thailand in a hurry—in fact, needed them practically yesterday. Damn providential, actually." He added politely, "Just where do you plan to go first?"
"We intend to browse," Mrs. Pollifax told him. "A few days in Bangkok and then we'll fly to Sukotai—the old kingdom, you know—and inspect all the temples, and then go on to Chiang Mai . . . I understand that venturing farther north isn't safe yet for tourists."
Bishop put down his cup of coffee and shook his head. "Now there you're wrong, you must have an out-of-date guidebook. It's perfectly safe now in the north so long as you don't wander off the beaten paths. The area's been opened up in the past few years, thanks to a road built clear up to the Laotian and Burmese borders. It's no longer isolated: schools are being built, the border patrol's active . . . All beside the point, however, because all we'd ask, if you could slightly rearrange—"
"Still opium?" interrupted Cyrus.
"Opium?" Bishop said blankly. "Oh, the Golden Triangle, and all that. Well, of course opium's not easily eradicated when the hill tribes in the north have grown it for generations but things are changing, yoαknow. The King's been active in that, researching and promoting substitute crops—coffee, tobacco, that sort of thing—and there's a limit now on how many acres of poppies the hill tribes can plant for their own use. And then of course—as you've probably read—the United States subsidizes raids on the poppy fields when any of them get out of hand." He shrugged. "Of course a lot of the stuff still comes into the country from Burma so no one can say there's not still a problem but that needn't concern you. If you could rearrange your—"
Mrs. Pollifax, having done her homework, nodded wisely. "The Shans."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The Shans in Burma, just over the mountains, the ones still rebelling against joining the union of Burma."
"You do seem informed," he said appreciatively. "Yes, they're pretty much the culprits where drug smuggling's concerned—still wanting an autonomous state and to be independent of Burma, and of course the only way they can buy weapons to fight their war is to sell their opium for guns."
"In Thailand," contributed Cyrus.
"Yes, but this has nothing to do with—look, it's Chiang Mai we hope you can get to as quickly as possible," he explained, "and Chiang Mai, I can assure you, is nearly a hundred miles from the Golden Triangle. Could you— would you—consider rearranging your itinerary by going to Chiang Mai first? On a very small errand," he added.
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