shook.
“Good luck,
“Thanks, Tom. Don’t forget to get me a run down on the company that owns that house.”
Captain Tom snapped me a little salute and strolled away in the direction of an open-air beer bar at the edge of the beach.
On my own now, I slid into the driver’s seat and started the jeep. By the time I had reached the top of the driveway, parked in the lot, and walked into the lobby of the Phuket Yacht Club, I was already in trouble. I had forgotten who I was supposed to be.
Fortunately it came back to me. I walked over the desk and gave a smiling girl in a yellow silk sarong the name Benny Glup, stumbling over it a little when I did. She seemed very young to me, but then most Thai women seemed very young to me. Either they really were, or I wasn’t, and I didn’t like to dwell too much on which explanation was the more accurate.
The girl’s smile briefly changed to puzzlement, as I suppose any sensible person’s would when confronted by a man stumbling over his own name. She tapped a few keys on her computer terminal, puckered her lips into a little frown, tapped again, and then her smile quickly returned.
“Oh, Mr.
“Yes, indeed I am.”
I made the claim decisively and noted with some satisfaction how convincing I sounded. Maybe I was getting the hang of this stuff.
“You already registered in room 324, Mr. Glup. It very nice suite. Very good ocean view.”
The girl tapped a few more keys. There was a gentle whirring sound and a card key popped out of a flat box next to the computer. She passed it over with another bright smile.
In spite of what Tom had told me, I held out Benny Glup’s gold American Express card. The girl shook her head.
“Your suite complimentary, Mr. Glup. Like always. Welcome back to the Phuket Yacht Club.”
“I call boy for luggage?”
I held up my duffle bag and shook my head.
The young girl gave me another dazzling smile. “Have nice day, Mr. Glup.”
The suite was lovely, of course, decorated in muted colors with irritatingly perfect taste. This was a five-star resort after all, and I wondered what it cost people who paid actual money to stay here. I kicked off my shoes and lay back across the king-sized bed. Now that I apparently knew where Barry Gale was, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t all that sure what to do next. Did I just go over there and demand to know what the hell he had gotten me into, or was there a better strategy?
I had been assuming I would have plenty of time to decide about that while I was searching for Barry, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Manny’s people seemed to have fingered him without breaking a sweat, although it looked like Barry had hung out enough signs to get himself found by Helen Keller.
Did that mean Barry wanted to be found, or had he just gotten careless? Either way, I supposed, the problem for me was essentially still the same.
I stood up, lifted the duffle bag, and dropped it on the bed. Unzipping it, I dumped everything out. There wasn’t much. If I was going to hang around Phuket very long, I was going to have to do some shopping. Maybe Benny Glup’s American Express card would come in handy after all.
My dirty jogging clothes went into a drawer, my running shoes into the closet. I turned on my cell phone in case Tom called and it and the field glasses went back in the bag along with the map of Phuket, the driver’s license and the Amex card. The.45 I held in one hand for a moment, bouncing the extra clips around in the other hand. Finally I shoved them into the duffle, too, rolled up the blue FBI windbreaker, pushed it in on top, and zipped the bag.
A slight rumbling in my stomach reminded me that I’d had nothing to eat all day so I slipped back into the Topsiders, slung the bag over my shoulder, and went downstairs, wandering around the hotel until I found a round pavilion open to the ocean that I took to be a cafe. Since it was the middle of the afternoon the place was empty, which was just fine with me. I took a table near the rail where there was a spectacular view of the beach, ordered a club sandwich and iced tea from a smiling teenaged boy in a starched white jacket, then pulled out of my bag the map Tom had left me.
The red line somebody had drawn on it appeared to leave the paved roadway less than half a mile inland from Nai Harn Beach. Then it snaked back and forth across what looked like mostly open country and headed generally westward until it ended at a point near the sea, marked with a circle.
I contemplated the route while I ate my sandwich. There weren’t very many landmarks and it occurred to me that some basic reconnaissance might help me to make up my mind exactly what to do. If I drove the route that Tom had marked and took a closer look at the house, maybe something brilliant would occur to me. Bolting the last crusts of my sandwich, I signed the bill-ripping off Benny Glup’s signature with a flourish-refolded the map, and walked out to the jeep.
I found the place where the red line on Tom’s map began without a great deal of trouble. It was little more than a bumpy track that intersected the asphalt from the left and disappeared inland between two dilapidated wooden buildings, but I turned into it without hesitation. I drove for a long while through pineapple fields while the terrain rose steadily toward some rugged-looking hills to the west. When Captain Tom had stopped the jeep and pointed out the compound where Barry was supposed to be holed up, it seemed to me that we were on the ocean side of those hills, the opposite side to the one I was now approaching.
Beyond the pineapple field was a dense forest of rubber trees, all of them apparently planted about the same time, and the utter uniformity of their size and the geometrical perfection of the long rows gave the entire grove the unreal feeling of a cartoon. The track entered the rubber forest slipping between parallel ranks of spindly, white- streaked trees set barely ten feet apart and the afternoon light slowly went gray and spongy. Then abruptly I was out of the grove again and climbing once more in the harsh glare of the afternoon sun.
About ten minutes later I came upon a ramshackle one-story wooden building with the roof caved in and I wondered if it was the abandoned tin mine Tom had mentioned. I saw no other obvious evidence of a mine, but then again I really had no idea at all what a tin mine might look like, abandoned or otherwise, so I couldn’t be sure. Just beyond the mine, if that’s what it was, the road twisted sharply and I saw how far I had climbed.
Out along the horizon was the Andaman Sea. It was slate gray now rather than blue, and it looked to be turning rough in a rising wind. From somewhere, perhaps one of the craggy, shrub-clad islands just offshore where I had heard sea gypsies still lived, the steady breeze carried the pungent smell of salted fish drying in the open air. Up here the rain forest was thick and luxuriant. Fed relentlessly by the southwestern monsoons, groves of frangipani trees with their cloying fragrance were intermingled with deep stands of coconut palms, figs, and mangos. The jungle was damp and lush. You could hear the solitude.
The jeep pitched and bounced over the ground as the track became steeper. When I topped a little ridgeline, the ruts swung sharply right and paralleled it for a short run before cutting left again then surging over the top. On the opposite side of the ridge, the deep lushness of the rain-forest vanished, metamorphosing abruptly into a vast and ominous pan of bare limestone interrupted only intermittently by lonely clumps of scrubby trees bent and twisted into angry shapes by the winds that swirled up from the Andaman. The twin ruts became an almost invisible track over the rock and the jeep struggled for traction. About a half-mile further on, the track swung around a sharp outcropping of limestone and I saw just below me the compound that Captain Tom had called Berghof.
The track gradually descended for another four or five hundred yards on the other side of the outcropping until it dead ended at the compound. An asphalt highway emerged from behind a rise to the right and led directly to the main gates. I gathered that was what Tom had described as the main road.
I stopped and backed up until the jeep was out of sight down behind the ridge, then I got the binoculars out of the duffle and walked up the road again. When I found a place where I wouldn’t be too conspicuous, I settled
