Laundry Man

When I had set out to storm the Black Prince’s castle I figured I was right on the verge of getting everything under control. Of course, I always figured I was right on the verge of getting everything under control, but this time it wasn’t quite working out that way.

Maybe Barry was right. Maybe either the Agency really was responsible for killing Howard and Dollar, either because they were trying to get the Chinese slush fund back or because they were trying to cover up the embarrassing fact that it had existed in the first place. But why did that necessarily make me the next guy on their list? Even if I could bring myself to believe that agents of the United States government really went around murdering other Americans to keep them quiet, what in God’s name would these guys accomplish by killing me?

I didn’t know shit about whatever they were up to. That was precisely my problem.

I sat there for a while on the sofa with my hands laced behind my head trying to decide what I ought to do now. Surely after Barry came back I could finesse my way past him somehow and work something out. After all, finesse was my best punch, wasn’t it? A sharply focused argument here, a glib phrase there, baffle them with bullshit then run for the door. It had always worked before. Why not now?

Eventually I got bored with thinking about my predicament and started examining my surroundings. Although right at that moment it wasn’t the decor that had my attention, it was more a question of where the exits were.

I could see two sets of double doors at the opposite end of the room and of course I knew the gallery behind me that led to the front door. Then along the right-hand wall flanking the fireplace there were a half-dozen windows covered with shades of red-and-green tartan fabric.

I walked over and pulled one of the window shades aside. Outside I could see only a small section of the compound, but it looked like I was somewhere at the back. The area was deserted and the moon was just strong enough to illuminate everything with a soft, sourceless glow that under different circumstances might have been romantic. Floodlights, maybe even a pack of snarling German Shepherds, would have seemed more fitting to me, but I didn’t see any sign of either.

I walked to the end of the room and tried the left hand pair of double doors. Locked. Then I went to the right hand pair, placed my palm against the upper panel of one of the doors, and pressed gently. It swung open without a sound and I stepped through half expecting to trip some kind of alarm. But nothing happened.

In front of me was a windowless corridor that ran straight for about twenty feet and then ended at an ordinary single door that was standing half open. From just beyond it, I could hear the crackle of a radio. I walked quickly down the corridor and through the door. There was no one in the room.

My eyes swept over the small space. On the left-hand wall there was a rack with a dozen or more guns I had no trouble recognizing. They were AK-47s with folding stocks, nasty-looking pieces of hardware that provided serious firepower. I had played tennis with a couple of SWAT guys back in Washington and one day they had taken me out to their training range and let me mess around with some stuff they had taken off a street gang which included a Chinese-made version of the AK. Barry must have been scared shitless if he had stockpiled heavy-duty weapons like that.

In front of me there was a sagging leather couch and on the opposite side of the room there was a desk pushed up against the wall with a line of five television monitors mounted above it. The first, second, and third monitors showed gray-toned pictures that were apparently coming from various parts of the compound. The fourth monitor showed the area just inside the main gates. The gates stood open a few feet and I could see several of the guards hovering together in a little knot and watching something outside. Oddly, none of the guards seemed to be carrying weapons now.

But it was the fifth monitor that drew my full attention.

That one was displaying what had to be the picture from the camera I had spotted above the gate. In the glare of the lights shining down from the top of the wall, I could see two white Toyotas and a jeep right outside the gate and a group of men who had apparently just arrived in them. There were seven or eight in all, each wearing the chocolate-brown uniform of a Thai policeman. All but one were also wearing dark green combat helmets with red stripes running around them. The only man without a helmet appeared to be the officer in charge. The left side of his chest was emblazoned with a clipboard-sized pad of ribbons and he stood apart and just in front of the others.

I slid into the black swivel chair in front of the desk and leaned toward the monitor, studying it carefully.

Barry Gale had gone outside to meet the police and the scene on the monitor looked like a tableau that had been arranged around him. Beth was standing to his left, and to his right one of the guards appeared to be talking to the senior police officer and translating for Barry. The half-dozen or more uniforms behind the officer looked ready to move into action at a moment’s notice. In the foreground I saw three of Barry’s guards backing him up, but like the guards still inside they appeared to have discarded their weapons. Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it? It would have hardly been smart to carry AK-47s out to meet the cops.

On the monitor I could see Barry shaking his head. His body language made him appear more exasperated than concerned, but I still wondered what was going on. There was something about the whole scene that didn’t look quite right to me, although I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.

As I watched, Beth turned her head away from the conversation and lifted a handheld radio to her lips. When she spoke I could hear her voice coming through a loudspeaker that was mounted above the monitor rack.

“Activity in any other sector?” she asked.

“Negative,” a male voice with a Thai accent replied immediately. I gathered it was a guard posted somewhere else around the compound.

“Negative.”

“No.”

Two more voices. Okay, so there were a lot of guards around the compound.

What was it about the scene on the security monitor that looked so strange to me? Something was wrong, but whatever it was dangled just out of reach.

The senior police officer was talking to the translator again and pointing his finger at Barry. After whatever he had said was repeated in English, I saw Beth step forward and hold up both her hands, palms out, shaking her head vigorously. The man immediately raised a radio of his own, turned and spoke a few quick words into it.

As soon as he did, Barry turned around and started toward the gates, but several of the cops drew handguns and moved quickly to outflank him, and he stopped. I was still trying to work out what that was all about when two of the other uniforms produced folding submachine guns from somewhere and spread out expertly, covering Beth and her people through widely separated angles of fire.

Now I saw exactly what was wrong with the whole picture.

Thai street cops didn’t move like combat soldiers. Thai police generally moved more like the last customers in a pub emptying out at closing time. Regardless of their uniforms, these guys obviously weren’t police. They were military.

And they were there for Barry. I had no doubt about it.

Barry had stockpiled all this firepower and secured himself behind these walls. Then some guys showed up and he told his the guards to open the gates and put away their AKs and just because the men were wearing police uniforms the guards did it.

In Thailand, the army did all the really high-class hits. Cops were a lot cheaper to rent, of course, but they were not nearly as reliable.

What a schmuck Barry is, I thought. Stupid to the end.

FORTY EIGHT

“Wait a minute.”

It was one of the guard’s voices coming through the speaker.

I watched on the monitor as Beth raised her radio again. “What have you got?” she asked.