The Secret Agent by Francine Mathews Page A

of his Decree of Divorce—no matter how long ago they had occurred. “Our Jack was something of a Brahmin. A trust-fund boy. Spent the Great Depression squiring socialites around the New York party circuit, then dove into the war and the OSS. Given the funds he started out with and his success in Bangkok, there should have been a tidy little sum awaiting his heirs. But at his death, there was exactly three hundred and twenty-seven dollars in his bank account, plus or minus a few cents. Odd, what?”
    “Think he had an account offshore?”
    “He left no instructions to that effect.”
    “Maybe they were lost, too.” Frowning, she flipped to the will’s final page, where the signatures stood out in bold black ink. Jack Roderick had got his witnesses, at least. In that respect the will looked valid. “Who are these people? George and Richard Spencer?”
    “Pair of Englishmen. Father and son. Roderick hired George in the early fifties to man the Bangkok store, and the Spencers gradually acquired twenty percent of the shares.”
    “Who owns the rest?” Shares—the trading power of percentages—was something she understood.
    “The weavers,” Oliver told her.
    “The Weavers?” she repeated blankly.
    “Silk weavers. Entire families, usually, who producedthe hand-loomed goods. Jack Roderick Silk is a cottage industry, you know—or was. That was Roderick’s brainstorm: place the power of production into the hands of the artisans. Pay them for whatever they produced. Offer them shares in the total profits. Give them incentive to control their own industry. They called him the Silk King in Bangkok but he’s a Bloody Pinko Communist to you, and don’t you forget it.”
    “How is the stock presently disposed?”
    “Most of the original weavers made fortunes, sold their shares and set up in direct competition with Jack Roderick Silk; the cottage system is defunct; the company is centrally organized. George Spencer is dead; son Dickie is President and Chairman of the Board of Directors and holds fifty-one percent of stock. Spencer
is
Jack Roderick Silk.”
    “Never gone public?”
    “Too small-time.”
    She waved the papers in her hand. “So how much is this legacy worth to Max?”
    “Zero,” Oliver answered cheerfully. “The three-hundred-odd dollars is long gone. When the Thai government declared Jack Roderick dead in 1974, his silk shares reverted to the company. Old Man Spencer snapped them up. To tell you the truth—with the house and the art collection in the hands of the Thais, and the silk company in Spencer’s control—I’m not sure what Max is fighting for.”
    “And yet—you describe him as a man in the grip of an obsession. What does he really want? His grandfather’s house? Or the truth of what happened to Jack Roderick? And why are you so uncertain whether Max is capable of murder?”
    “Call it respect for what is brutal in the blood,” Oliver returned. “Jack Roderick—however charming, howeverpatrician—lived and died by his wits. His son was beheaded at the hands of his enemies. Max is heir to both men.”
    Stefani thrust herself restlessly out of her chair and stood near the fire, her expression hidden by the fall of dark hair. “There’s nothing in that will to cause murder. No reason to strangle a prostitute in a hotel bedroom. No reason to send your friend Harry to Kowloon and run him over with a taxi.”
    “Then perhaps those deaths have nothing to do with Max’s Thai business,” Oliver suggested. “But his sudden appearance in Bangkok a year ago, armed with his grandfather’s last will and testament, coincided with a good deal of bloodshed.”
    She glanced at him swiftly. “You think someone wants Jack Roderick to stay dead?”
    “Why else have him disappear?”
    “That presumes the disappearance was deliberate, and not of his choosing,” she countered. “The man walks down a driveway in ’67. He might have got lost in the Malaysian jungle. He might have met a