December 26th, 2004. Phuket
Jack woke up at two a.m. He’d had a horrific nightmare. Although in life he was constantly in control, dreams were beyond any man’s rule and they often revealed his innermost fears. The last image branded in Jack’s mind was that of Wheatley, laughing madly from the edge of a crater, Mina in chains, looking on helplessly as Jack fell backwards into the volcano’s roaring magma. He sat up, sweating heavily and trembling at the idea of losing Mina. He stroked her long, dark hair delicately. He got out of bed, turned on his laptop and started the scrambling software. He then turned on his mobile phone, but there were no new messages from Wheatley. He needed a drink. He puts some clothes on and sat down on the edge of the bed to tie his shoelaces. Mina stirred in her sleep.
‘Jack?’ Mina asked, ‘what time is it?’
‘Two a.m.,’ he answered and kissed her softly, ‘I’m just going out for a drink to wind down. I need to clear my head. I’ll be back before you know it.’
‘Any news?’ she asked.
‘No, not yet. I think Wheatley’s going to wait until the last minute to let me know the meeting place.’
‘That can only mean the meeting will be in Patong. We’d never have time to get anywhere else on the island,’ she said.
‘Yeah. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be here somewhere. But it doesn’t change a damn thing. After all I can’t scout the whole town, hoping to find my mother and Jen.’
‘Hmm,’ she muttered.
‘OK,’ he said as he took the small rucksack containing the laptop with him, ‘I’m off. Don’t open the door to anyone. You know the drill.’
‘Night Jack,’ Mina said, before falling back sleep.
Jack left the bungalow quietly. His mind raging with thoughts, he walked slowly, twisting left and right through narrow alleyways. The only noises in the night were the muffled beat of dance music, the dying laughter of drinking parties and his rucksack brushing past coconut trees. He chose a bar in a slight recess, off the main street. It was less flashy than other places, but wasn’t seedy. He was no moralist, but he couldn’t stand the way prostitution was flaunted in tourists’ faces as if it were something Thai people were supremely proud of, ‘check out our temples, our great culture and our ping-pong banana shows!’ He sat down at the bar, and ordered a drink. ‘Poor mum and Jen,’ Jack thought to himself ‘their first trip outside the US and I’ve got them into this dangerous mess’. If only he could get his hands around Wheatley’s neck, he’d crush his windpipe and every bone in his body. He asked the barman to hit him again with another shot of Jack Daniels. ‘I’m feeling worse than before,’ he thought to himself. Now he was assailed by even darker thoughts, morbid images of Wheatley’s twisted face, covered in his own blood and guts. He opened his rucksack and pulled out the laptop. He looked at the JPEG file Mina had produced. She was quite the artist, Jack whistled in admiration. He’d never have thought it was a fake photograph. It looked like the tablet he’d seen himself. He copied the JPEG file onto a small digital USB storage key and called the barman.
‘Are you the owner?’ he asked him.
‘No, but I can get her,’ the barman answered.
‘Maybe you can help me, I need to print a good quality photograph right now.’
The barman looked at him thinking Jack was a lunatic.
‘At this time? All closed Mister!’
‘I’ll pay good money,’ said Jack.
‘OK. OK. I call my friend and take care of everything.’
‘Thanks, here’s the key. There’s only one document on there, it’s the image I need to print in high resolution,’ said Jack, handing him the USB stick.
The barman asked a girl working there to take care of the bar, and he left. Jack wondered if he really was going to call a friend or just go home and print it out on glossy paper on his own printer. In the end, he didn’t care one way or the other. He’d have the photograph in hand before the morning. He suddenly remembered his conversation with Mina half an hour ago. He’d said he wasn’t going to scout the whole island to find his mother and sister. Maybe he’d been wrong?
He switched on the WIFI connection on his laptop and picked a few signals from various modems in the neighbourhood. One of them was not password protected, so he connected his laptop to it. He clicked on the same special website he’d used the other day to track Wheatley’s whereabouts but typed a different character combination. This website was a backdoor into an hour-by-hour satellite photographic coverage of various regions of the world. He typed in the longitude and latitude coordinates of Patong Beach, 7° 53? 24? N, 98° 17? 24? E, and was almost immediately offered a choice of fifty high resolution satellite photographs from the past five hours. As soon as he glanced at the first two, he knew his hunch was the right one. There was only one yacht of the kind Wheatley could be interested in and the detail of the photographs was such that he was able to identify men guarding the yacht, carrying submachine guns. He checked the last position of the yacht and it hadn’t moved from its location in the past four hours. He had to go and check. Maybe that’s where they were being held. He noticed the barman had returned but hadn’t wanted to bother Jack while he worked. He gestured for the man to approach. He handed Jack the printed photograph and asked an exorbitant amount for it, which Jack paid without a murmur. The barman returned to his customers, a happy man. Jack called him again.
‘Yes Sir?’ asked the barman.
‘I need a small boat, a rowing boat. Any ideas? I need to rent it for a few hours,’ Jack said.
‘With motor?’
‘Yeah. Why not,’ Jack replied.
‘OK. No problem. You come with me and I show you,’ said the barman.
Jack packed the laptop and the photograph into his rucksack and followed the barman, who was busy making a phone call. He hesitated about returning to the bungalow, to wake up Mina and let her know where he was going. But he guessed he would be back before morning, so there really was no point scaring her unnecessarily. The barman was waiting outside on his moped. Jack climbed on the back and off they went. He’d tried to find out how much this rental would cost him, but the barman had conveniently gone deaf. After a ten-minute ride, they drove down a path that lead back to the sea front. Jack could see a small boat, moored to a pier, made of a few odd planks of wood thrown together. They got off the moped. The barman walked over to the boat, followed closely by Jack. ‘Here is boat,’ said the man.
‘But where’s the motor?’ asked Jack.
As he said these words he heard the approaching sound of another moped.
‘My friend brings it now.’
Jack waited for the other man to fit the motor, start it and show him how it worked before paying his favourite barman. The price was as before, overwhelming, and Jack thought of the multiple ways he could knock out both men and disappear with the boat, but in the end he shoved a hand in his pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled dollars.
Once both men had left, he stepped onto the boat and turned on his laptop. He needed to take another look at the satellite photographs he’d saved, comparing them to a coastal map he’d downloaded. He could roughly estimate how far he had to go to find the yacht. Hopefully it was Wheatley’s. He couldn’t bear the idea of navigating in the dark for an hour or more, covertly boarding the yacht to find a group of drunken Japanese businessmen playing cards. But did he have a choice? He started the motor and slipped away into the night. It was a good thing there was a relatively powerful torch at the front of the boat, but as he got closer to the yacht he would have to be discrete, which meant turning off the torch and also the motor.
Within an hour he found the yacht, roughly where he’d guessed it would be. He spent twenty minutes or so observing the comings and goings but there seemed to be very few people on board. One guard stood on the main deck, another below and he also caught a glimpse of Natasha, Wheatley’s head of security. Now came the difficult part. He needed to tie his boat to the yacht and get on board unobserved. After ten minutes spent approaching the
