PROLOGUE

Life is strange. One minute you’re sitting there, sipping your tea, reading the newspaper, and suddenly a thought occurs to you… “I wonder what soandso’s up to these days…?” Then your mobile rings and it’s soandso on the other end wondering what you’ve been up to.

Coincidence, happenstance, fate, serendipity. Synchronicity, if Jung’s your cuppa tea. It happens all the time. But sometimes there’s a subject, an incident, a story that has nothing to do with you that keeps resurfacing, over and over, throughout your life; an event that holds no more significance for you than a pocket full of change. Except that over time, as it resurfaces from different sources, in different forms, you start looking for connections, seeking the links. And wondering… what the fuck…?!

This is one of those.

This story covers a twenty-two year period. It begins outside a truckstop in Northern Ontario in the middle of the night, and ends at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. more than two decades later. And yet for me it really all takes place during the course of a couple of very entertaining evenings in Bangkok. Before I was done I would come face to face with automatic weapons, mercenaries, spies, secrets, a redhead and a handful of the most colourful characters I’ve ever met.

But let’s start where all good stories begin – at the beginning.