Death in the Kingdom (19 page)

‘Imagination,' I chided myself. I was in danger of acting like a big kid on this one. Whatever had escaped from the box had been washed away by the tide. Whatever was still in it was sealed up tight. I had just sliced open my thumb and maybe picked up a slight infection. Face it, the
Odorama
was about as hygienic as a sewer.

I had the coach driver drop me a hundred yards short of the approach to the expressway leading to the Rama IV bridge. I cut down a couple of side alleys and fell back out of instinct, just to reassure myself that I wasn't being followed. I wasn't. I changed direction and flagged down an orange jacket. I had the motorcycle taxi take me down river a mile or two. I was going to get into the city through the back door.

I had figured that the CIA's ground troops would be watching the train and bus stations, the approaches to the British Embassy and, just maybe, they would have the sky train stations closest to the embassy covered as well. I wasn't heading for the embassy. Not yet! I had something else to put in place first. After I had paid off my orange jacket, I grabbed a long-tail river taxi and haggled my fare to Banglamphu. The big six-cylinder car engine in the stern of the boat bellowed as we flew up river. It was always a unique experience screaming up the Chao Phraya River with a cowboy driver wielding a flailing naked propeller. Failing light or not, we hurtled along at a rate of knots. The reflected light from the great hotels that lined the shore turned the river to molten metal, and rafts of water hyacinth riding the current dotted our path. We raced past the Grand Palace and went under the Phra Pin Klao Bridge. Here I gave my man specific directions.

I switched my mobile on and tried Sami again. This time he answered in person. I had to shout over the sound of the boat's roaring engine. ‘I'm coming in the back way. Five minutes!'

‘Okay,' came the reply. The phone vibrated as I finished the call to Sami. It had to be Bernard. I flicked the thing off. I had the fucking box but there were things to do and speaking to that old queen wasn't one of them at that particular moment in time. I'd never known him to be so damned twitchy or demanding. Where I was going, the forces of evil couldn't reach me. I would be safe at Sami's.

The last time I'd been up that way was when Arune had grabbed me as I came over the border from Laos. My boatman found the canal I was looking for and turned off the main river, heading back into the old city. He produced a big torch and began shining it on the water and buildings that crowded in on us. There were few boats on the narrow, ancient waterway. The buildings—old warehouses and sweatshops—crowded in on us. This canal redefined pollution. The stench was something else. It was one spot that definitely wasn't on the tourist agenda. But I was no tourist.

It took five minutes and a bit of backtracking before we found what I'd been looking for. There were no signs and no street numbers as such. I was relying on a daylight memory from years before, translating it into black, white and shades of night. I generously paid the boatman and took my life in my hands, climbing a slimy wooden ladder up onto a high landing. This was the rear entrance to Sami's place.

The metal door was ancient. It didn't look as if it had been opened in half a century. I knew better. I pulled off my cap with its fringe of fake hair and ponytail and thumped on the steel sheath. I didn't want to be mistaken for someone else when it opened. Five seconds after my knuckles beat out their paradiddle, the door opened noiselessly on oiled hinges. The man who met me was carrying an Uzi. The muzzle of the sub-machine-gun was pointing loosely in my direction. The face above the gun, however, was split into a wide grin. ‘Daniel, welcome back. Come in.'

‘Greetings, Sami,' I replied, stepping past the man who had been one of my most trusted companions back in the days when I did things in the bush and over the borders. Sami Somsak still did those things, but these days he was an industry in himself. Sami locked the door with a mechanism that pushed six huge bolts into the metal recesses positioned around the heavy metal doorframe. Basically it was the sort of door that you'd expect to find in a bank vault. When he was done, we embraced. We both had our genuine smiley faces on.

It had been a year and a half since Sami Somsak had been to the UK and we'd caught up. Anyone looking at my friend would see a slight, good-looking Thai male of about thirty, a man who always had a smile on his face. In actual fact Sami was almost sixty. He feigned bad English when it suited him to acknowledge anything other than Thai. In reality, his English was perfect and virtually accentless. He also spoke at least half a dozen other languages.

Sami Somsak was a paradox, just like the country that had raised him. There was some Chinese in his racial mix, amongst other things. Once, over a whisky session with me doing all the drinking, I had coined the term The Onion Man for him. Far from being offended, he had just smiled back at me over his mineral water. Sami was made up of layers, each one more complex than the next. I'd maybe penetrated two or three layers in the years I'd known him. However I had always sensed that there were many more hidden beneath those I thought I knew about.

‘Come, old friend,' Sami said. ‘I still keep a bottle of vintage Jack Daniels just for you.' I fell in step and let him lead me through a labyrinth of corridors off which dozens of doorways opened. Some doors were ajar. In the rooms beyond I could see vats, burners and people wearing chemical masks. ‘Business is good?' I asked.

‘Yes, Daniel, business is good. And you?'

‘I'm busy, but the business is not of my making.'

‘You still working for those arseholes?'

‘The same, Sami. The very same.'

‘That is a pity, Daniel. Join me and let me make you rich. I'd hoped that was why you'd come. It's time you did, and as the Yanks say, “get a life, boy”.' Sami's southern drawl sounded genuine. I had to chuckle. We climbed several short flights of stairs and emerged onto a wide mezzanine that looked like the lounge bar of a luxury hotel. The only thing that jibed with that impression was a bank of television monitors showing street and canal scenes. There were conventional video cameras at work as well as infrared scanners. Very sophisticated! A young and very attractive Thai woman sat at a control panel watching the monitors. One of Sami's unspoken edicts was that all the women he chose to surround himself with, be it at work or for pleasure, had to be attractive, if not stunningly beautiful. I admired that in a man.

‘We saw you coming. Or at least we saw the boat. Only those who know us come that way,' Sami said, nodding at the bank of monitors as he pulled his communications earpiece out of his left ear and dropped it into his shirt pocket. He put the Uzi on a side table and moved to the elaborate bar. ‘Ice?'

‘Please,' I responded, lowering my holdall and camera case to the polished wooden floor. Sami had a thing for wood. He loved it, not in a tree-hugger way. He liked it cut, polished, waxed and pampered. While not a Buddhist in any pure sense of the word, he had always espoused the living qualities of wood.

‘It lives on after it is cut,' he'd explained to me one night as we'd huddled beneath our ponchos somewhere over the Burmese border, waiting for a meet with some revolutionary faction or other. ‘Wood never dies, not even when you burn it. You burn it and you just release its energy and soul to the sky. And then it returns to the earth and grows again.'

At the time, the theory had seemed intriguing, and it had kept my mind off the fucking miserable night we were spending, at least for a second or two. But I'd never forgotten it. Deep thinker was our Sami. I finished admiring the woodwork as he drifted back with the drinks. ‘How is Tuk Tuk?'

‘Dying,' I replied.

‘And Choy?'

‘Dead!'

‘You?'

‘Yes. It was one or the other and I preferred it wasn't me.' I gave Sami a hard grin as I accepted the cut-glass tumbler of amber liquid he handed me. For himself he had chosen mineral water with ice. It was his usual tipple. My friend Sami was not a drinker.

‘Sit and tell me about it,' he said, indicating a nest of thick leather couches.

We sat and I told him everything because if there was one person in that land or any other that I could trust with my life it was Sami Somsak. I had saved his life half a dozen times in the past and he mine an equal number of times. Ours was a brotherhood based on genuine trust. A trust that was uncontaminated by politics, money, lust, envy or anything else. It just was.

It was midnight when we called the party quits. Thanks to Sami's input I had a plan for the next stage of ‘operation black box'. Sami had his operator patch me through to Don Don at his embassy apartment. After apologising to him for the lateness of the hour, I asked him to do something for me. He didn't question it. I gave him the number Sami had written down for me and hung up. I then debated whether or not to call Bernard but rejected the notion almost as soon as it arrived. As I'd decided earlier in the day, ‘tomorrow is time enough'. Above the mezzanine were the living quarters, or should I say the luxury apartments that Sami called home—one of his many homes at least.

When I was ensconced in a suite that would have done justice to any of the great Bangkok hotels, my host asked me if I wanted company. I refused the offer. I had a feeling that that night I would be dreaming of an angel's kiss.

19

The next morning as I lay in my wide, soft bed, I called Bernard. He was not amused, as always, and as before I cut him off at the pass and went on the attack. It was the best defence. I told him about the CIA team hunting for me down south.

‘So how did they know about the submarine and the fucking black box? How did they track me, Bernard?' I wanted to know.

‘I don't know, Daniel. We don't have a leak this end, I promise you that,' he was saying in his most reassuring tone. ‘We have kept it close, very close.'

‘Whitehall is like a damned sieve when it comes to security, Bernard. You know that. Someone, somewhere tipped the bloody Yanks off and now I'm playing fox to a bunch of trigger-happy hounds. What is in the fucking box?'

‘I can't tell you that because I don't know,' he replied primly.

‘I'm tempted to open it, Bernard,' I responded, playing devil's advocate just for the hell of it. The reaction I got caused me to pull the mobile phone away from my ear.

‘Don't, Daniel! For God's sake, don't open it. If you do you're signing your own death warrant. Believe me on this. Please believe me.' Bernard's words tumbled over themselves.

‘I'm joking,' I yelled into the phone. ‘Just winding you up.'

Bernard went quiet for what seemed like an eternity. When he started talking again his voice was as cold as I'd ever heard it. ‘Don't fool around. This is too damned big. Stay where you are until nightfall, then make your way to the embassy.'

‘Why wait?' I replied. ‘I've got a plan.'

‘For God's sake, you're obviously in a safe house. Stay there until dark. We can arrange a pick-up and escort.' He sounded close to panic. I paused a moment. I didn't want the old sod to blow a fuse.

‘Okay, Bernard,' I said in what I figured was a voice of resignation. ‘I'll stay here until nightfall but then I'll get to the embassy my way. No escorts.'

‘Thank you, Daniel,' came the reply. The sheer relief in his voice was obvious. ‘Just stay there until dark and then do it your way,' he said. I smiled. Frank Sinatra Swann at Her Majesty's service.

‘I'll call you from the embassy,' I said and closed the mobile. I had no intention of waiting for nightfall. I was getting to the embassy that morning but no way was I going to tell Bernard. The old prick was going through menopause or something. Stop! Go! Go! Stop! Did he want the fucking box safe in the embassy or not? I went into the luxurious bathroom to shower. My thumb was throbbing again. The cut was inflamed and red but there was no pus and the bleeding had long stopped. I anointed the gash with bug killer and stuck a fresh plaster on. If it didn't let up I'd get a shot of antibiotics when I hit the embassy.

Back in the bedroom I dressed. So why wasn't I going to wait until dark? Why didn't I organise an escort of military types from Don Don? Of course, they couldn't carry loaded weapons outside the embassy grounds. Why didn't we hire an armoured car to deliver me to the damned embassy? Simple reason was that calling the embassy and arranging for an escort just wasn't the safest way of doing things. In fact, it was probably the most unsafe because it came with a whole bunch of problems. The circus would get too big, too confusing and too prone to detection and failure, simply because it would attract too much of the wrong attention. If the professionals were watching the embassy and waiting for me to turn up, they would read what was going down and act accordingly. Therefore I had to do the unexpected, and sometimes doing the obvious was the most unexpected thing of all. So we were going to do it just the way Sami and I had planned.

Sami and I met on the mezzanine for a breakfast of coffee and croissants. Stage one of our plan was locked in place and it was dead simple, as all good plans should be. I was going to ride into the embassy on a motorbike. Of course, I wasn't going to necessarily look like me.

We had just finished our meal when a pair of young women appeared on the stairs below us, responding to a signal I hadn't picked up on. One of them carried a metal make-up case, the other a small suitcase. It was time to transform the Swann into an ugly duckling or similar. Mr Black Ponytail wasn't coming back this trip. I knew that Thailand abounded with motorcycle taxis, both licensed and unlicensed, so it seemed like the best idea. Orange-vested official taxi riders did big business with mainly Thai clients, and with traffic snarls around Bangkok a fact of life, bikes were a great way to get around.