Death in the Kingdom (30 page)

Halfway along the corridor was a set of carpeted stairs set in a recess in the wall. Sami nodded to Nuampara. The man looked vaguely disappointed, but he carried on along the corridor as Sami and I climbed the stairs. There was a landing that cut back, and then we were in a second corridor. Again, Sami chose a door and led me inside. The room we entered was a huge lounge. The wall opposite to where we had entered was mostly glass. I was aware of a couple of people at the far end. I ignored them and followed my host to the window. We stood and looked down into one of the biggest laboratories I had ever seen. Huge vats and pipes filled the complex. Small figures in familiar white overalls were dotted around the vast room.

‘Oh shit,' I muttered.

‘Plenty of shit, Daniel. Pure shit,' he repeated. ‘We can process virtually all the opium we can get.'

‘You own it?' I asked, shaking my head in something like dumb disbelief. ‘It's yours?' Sami smiled, but it was a smile that contained something else. ‘Not quite all mine. I have a partner.'

‘May I ask who?' I said, feeling my heart flip. I had a feeling I knew who Sami had in tow.

‘Yes, Daniel, Tuk Tuk,' Sami said simply. ‘When he goes I am prepared to take you on as my partner.' My breathing and heart stopped for a second. I replayed the words once, then twice before I could manage to get my tongue to work.

‘But what can I contribute?' I asked. ‘Christ, Sami, this damned barge alone must be worth millions. I'd be lucky if I could pay for the fucking toilet paper for the bogs for a week.'

‘You'd contribute friendship and trust, Daniel, and your rare skills in several other areas,' he replied. ‘We all need people at our side we can trust. I trust you implicitly. Otherwise, do you think for a minute I would be showing you this?' He chuckled. ‘This is The Onion Man's biggest secret, Daniel.'

He was right, of course. Trust was that rarest commodity, a word that was carelessly bandied about. Unfortunately so few people knew the true meaning of the word, and of those who did, most didn't honour it or the concept it represented. Five letters, big word. ‘I trust you with my life, Sami. I have done many times,' I replied, ‘and you likewise. Let's just get fucking Chekhov and Sir Bernard Turncoat and then we'll talk. Okay?'

‘Okay,' came the reply. Sami smiled. He knew he almost had me. ‘Lunch, I believe, is being served,' he added with a sweep of his arm. At the far end of the lounge two figures were standing beside the table they had been laying. One was a man in a chef's uniform. The other was a woman, dressed in a conservative European-style top and skirt. She advanced to meet us, smiled and took Sami's hand as she kissed him on the cheek.

‘Hello, big brother,' she said in English. ‘You are looking well.'

‘And you, Anita,' replied Sami formally before his face broke into a broad grin and he embraced his sister.

I'd met Anita Somsak once years before when she had been in her late teens. She had been quietly beautiful then. Now she was an elegant and definitely very striking woman in her early thirties. There was no wedding band on her finger.

‘I remember you well, Daniel,' Anita said as Sami and she broke their embrace. She proffered her hand and I took it. It was cool and strong. Her lips were soft on my cheek.

‘And I you, Anita,' I replied. ‘You are also involved in the family business?'

‘Of course,' she smiled and drew me towards a chair. ‘It is a thriving industry and Sami needs help. I manage this facility.'

‘Uh-huh,' I said, catching Sami's eye. He shrugged. ‘He's been talking to you has he?' I queried. Anita smiled disarmingly back at me.

‘Just a little. You really should consider it.' She smoothly changed the subject with a wave of her hand as she indicated the food displayed on the table. It was a superb spread. ‘In honour of our guest and old friend,' she added.

‘I'm flattered,' I replied. I nodded to the chef who was standing nervously by the door that obviously led into his kitchen. ‘A wonderful banquet, ‘I said in Thai. ‘Fit for a king.'

The man's face split into a huge smile. He thanked me profusely and took that as his cue to vanish back into his lair. Anita took her seat between Sami and I, and played mother. She and I split a bottle of excellent New Zealand Chardonnay, while Sami drank Evian. The conversation was light and touched on everything and nothing. No mention was made of Chekhov or the deaths in the family. As Sami had already made plain, the grieving would follow.

We sat and enjoyed a magnificent lunch in that luxurious apartment in a huge floating shed in the middle of the Gulf of Thailand. It was surreal in anyone's language. From the outside, the roaring mammoth was devouring the ocean floor, supposedly sucking riches from the mud and sand. In reality there we were, dining in elegant silence in another world. What genius to see the potential and set up a drug-processing factory out in the Gulf. Thing was, it really was genius and so simple to operate. No one bothered coming near these rigs. They were there, so huge and ponderous, but no one noticed them. They were like mountains—they just were.

The way it all worked was simplicity itself, as Sami explained. Raw materials would arrive by fishing boats, re-supply vessels, ore boats and speedboats. The finished product left the same way, much of it going directly to passing vessels that had already been cleared for departure by customs at the port of Bangkok. Simple and so very effective. It was pure damned genius and it had all been Sami's idea, as he grudgingly revealed during our meal. Tuk Tuk had recognised it for what it was when Sami put his proposition to his uncle. The pair had split the cost of setting up the operation.

It was mid-afternoon when Sami and I made our departure. I left, having made a promise to call Anita when Sami and I had finished our business. I could see something at work in Sami's eyes when she set that up. There was no doubt a man could do a hell of a lot worse than to have Anita Somsak on his arm. Sami's little smile confirmed that. It was one thing to have a friend as a partner. It was even better to have a friend as a partner and brother-in-law. Problem was, Sami knew my past and present with regards to women. Maybe I was mistaking that look and, in actuality, he was warning me off.

‘Anita was married for two years. He was an arsehole. She tossed him out,' Sami yelled at me as we peeled away from the dock and waved farewell to Anita and Mr Nuampara who had come to the dock to see us off.

‘No kids?'

‘No. He couldn't fire a live one. She needs a man and a swag of babies,' Sami said. ‘Interested?' he added with a laugh.

‘Sami. I'm not the marrying kind anymore. I wouldn't be good for her.'

‘I'm not so sure,' he replied. ‘After Chekhov we'll have a lot to talk about, my friend.'

‘Yeah,' I said, suddenly feeling apprehensive about my future beyond a soon-to-be-dead Russian mafioso. And what about Tuk Tuk? Would the old devil keep his side of the bargain? At the end of the day I'd saved his life, but for what?

30

Bangkok, 19 July 1996

Your round,' Casey said, pushing his empty glass across the bar with his right hand, while his left slid up the oiled thigh of the girl in the G-string who was swinging her lithe body around the chrome pole that extended from bar to ceiling.

I hated the fucking bars in Patpong. They were for tourists and tourists only. There were other places I would rather have been, but Casey had this thing about dance bars and he and I were partners, sort of anyway. I finished my JD and nudged my glass to sit it next to his.

We were in an upstairs annex bar where there was a little more action than you found in most street-level ones. Up another level and it got wilder still. These were the private bars where money and familiarity gave entry. Casey was a familiar in every single one of them.

The bartender looked thirteen, which meant she was probably ten or thirty. She was topless, her pert little titties crowned with jutting rosy nipples that perfectly matched the colour of her lipstick. She smiled and began fixing re-fills.

I pushed over a handful of hundred-baht notes and retrieved the drinks. Casey's hand had gravitated to his girl's groin. He was doing the boy–girl check. Number Fourteen squatted at the base of the pole, smiling until Casey was done. He nodded and her much practised smile broadened. When the dance ended, she would be joining us. Casey fished out his wad of notes, peeled off 500 baht for the bar, folded it and slipped it down the front of his new girlfriend's G-string.

‘Oh shit,' I thought to myself. The mad Yank was planning a night of debauchery, or at least rampant sex, which meant I wouldn't see him until well after noon the next day. Problem was there were things we needed to do and places we needed to be. We had arrived back from Chiang Mai after doing a little business over in what was still Burma in those days. That evening we had been in the Pussy Bar for three hours, having arrived there straight after dropping our kit at our apartment on Yen Akat Road. The apartments were adjacent units in a block of twelve—a hop, skip and proverbial jump from half the embassies in the city as well as a short
tuk tuk
ride from Patpong, or Phat Phong to be annoyingly correct.

The apartment was a halfway house for guys like Casey and me. It was an anonymous plain-white building hidden behind a high wall. With heavy but discreet security, Lot Thirty-Four was an ideal R&R environment for Black Ops operatives in all but one aspect. Casey couldn't take his girl of the night back to his apartment. That was just about the only no-no and it was strictly enforced. Allowing a clever little Asian assassin into the nest of half the undercover operatives in the region was not a good idea. Casey would have to take Number Fourteen to a hotel, which meant he wouldn't be around when I left for a very important meeting down at Thonburi. I could and would remind him of that before we parted, but I knew from almost eighteen months' experience with the horny Texan just what the result would be. When he came out of the bush he was like a tomcat on heat.

As for me, well, I was heading for a little apartment over in Khlong Toey where a friend was waiting. Mai was an eye doctor at the hospital at Phra Khanong down by the university. We had met six months before when I had arrived back with an eye infection from an excursion into Laos. We'd sort of kept semi-regular company ever since. She would take care of my itch and, I hoped, I hers.

Out in Patpong the night stalls were up in both of the short streets that made up Patpong 1 and 2. Casey had his new friend, now clad in skin-tight jeans and a plunge-neck top, hanging off his arm. He was grinning in anticipation of the delights to come. AIDs wasn't as rampant back then, but I couldn't help thinking he'd better have a rubber or two in his pocket. He wouldn't, I knew that as well. It was bareback or nothing for Casey, the boy from Houston out of Langley. Fucking Texans pissed me off. In their world nothing could go wrong until it did. Then everyone else was to blame. Casey had once shaken both of the Bush presidents by the hand, something he was prone to telling the world when he'd had a drink too many. Hell, I'd shaken hands with royalty and I had never told a soul.

Anyway, we stepped out past the show touts in Patpong 2 who were promising sixty-baht beers and free sex shows. Like hell! We gave the stallholders the brush in their own language and made it out to the crowded footpath on Silom Road, looking to flag down some transport.

The first we knew that the shit was about to hit the fan was when we heard an almighty shriek of rubber on the road, coupled with the howl of big engines and the distinctive staccatoed overlapping boom–whack sound of at least three semi-automatic weapons.

The entire throng of humanity that crowded the footpath and the entrance to Patpong 2 froze, eyes locked on the big black Mercedes that was hurtling down Silom towards us, sending traffic spewing in all directions. Behind the Merc was a silver American tank with a sunlit roof. The roof was open and a guy with an AK47 was standing firing at the Merc, along with another guy who was hanging out the front passenger-side window. The second gunman had an M16. These guys were playing for keeps.

‘Fuck,' was all Casey could say as he headed for the pavement, dragging his date down with him. I squatted on my heels and made myself small, praying that the whole circus would scream on by. It didn't. The Mercedes was fifty feet away when it lurched and headed for the footpath, taking out a pipe-railing fence as if it was made of pasta. The car slammed into the throng of huddled, screaming pedestrians and started taking them out along with the flimsy street stalls as it careened towards us. A pipe railing which was hanging off one side of the car acted like a scythe, sending broken people spinning in all directions.

At six foot two and fourteen stone I wasn't a small guy, but I became a giant in about a millisecond as I came to my feet and threw myself backwards. I took out a couple of people on the way and landed flat on my back on a stall full of watches and knick-knacks at about the same time the Mercedes arrived where I had been. The canvas awning of the stall collapsed over me and the whole damned thing I was lying on was shunted further back into the broad alley that was Patpong 2. I scrambled to get free of the tangle of clothing, canvas and bodies I was now engulfed in.

The screaming was all around as I kicked myself out of the mess not a moment too soon. There was a roar of horsepower and more screaming. As I made it up the curb to the pavement outside a bar, the fucking Mercedes was under way again. The driver had his foot down hard on the pedal and to hell with whomever and whatever was in front of him. There was a girl sprawled on her back across the bonnet—a street girl, tiny, half-naked and definitely broken.

The Mercedes shunted its way another ten yards past me before the sheer weight of bodies and debris from the crushed and smashed stalls bogged it down. People were running and crawling in all directions. I vaulted several crouching bodies and rolled into the first doorway I could find. I knew what was going to go down next and it wasn't good. I was in a bar and the fucking jukebox thumped on despite the chaos outside. Madonna, it seemed, was still a virgin. Yeah, right!