Little Girl Gone

They passed dozens of people on the way up, an equal mix of tourists and Thais. At the top was a building with a wide passageway that ran underneath it into an open-air courtyard.

“Is this it?” Logan asked, once they were in the courtyard. If it was, he was underwhelmed.

“No. Over there.”

Daeng pointed at another, considerably shorter, set of stairs, this one only about twenty steps. There were dozens of pairs of shoes sitting on and below it.

“You need a ticket first, though,” he said.

 “You don’t need one?” Logan asked.

Daeng shook his head. “Only farang.”

Once Logan had his ticket, they left their shoes at the bottom of the staircase and proceeded up to the main part of the temple.

This was more like what he expected. It, too, was basically a courtyard, but there the similarities ended.

Everything here seemed to be covered in gold. There must have been a hundred Buddha statues in different sizes, standing and sitting and lying down. In addition, there were bells and elephants and latticework on the building, all of it in gold.

And then there was the stupa, or as Daeng called it, the chedi. This was the bell shaped tower that rose into the sky in the middle of the temple. Logan had seen them in the other temples they’d passed. While this one wasn’t the largest, it was definitely the most golden.

Daeng took him quickly around the grounds. It was basically a square. The stupa was in the middle, and had a narrow area directly surrounding it for devotees to circumnavigate in prayer. A few people were doing so, their hands clasped together in front of them and holding several sticks of burning incense. Outside this was a larger area that also went around the stupa. That’s where the majority of the people were, the tourists in the crowd snapping pictures of almost everything in sight. Between this pathway and the walls containing the grounds were several enclosed areas. Some were small shrines, while others housed larger displays of Buddhas. As they walked around, Logan noted several doors that appeared to lead out from the temple, but all of them seemed to be closed to tourists.

The problem was he had no idea what mattered here, and what didn’t.

For all he knew, Bell wasn’t planning on coming all the way up to the actual temple. Maybe the switch was going to happen in the area where Logan had bought his ticket. Or maybe down below before the steps, where the vendors were.

“We’re going to need help,” he told Daeng. “There’re just too many places to watch on our own. Do you think your friends from earlier can give us a hand again, and be our eyes.”

“I have a better idea, but I need to check first,” Daeng said. “Can you give me thirty minutes?”

“Help?”

“I hope so.”

“Sure. Do it.”

“I’ll meet you at the bottom of the steps when I’m done. Near the food vendor selling the fried rice cakes.”

With that Daeng was gone.

Logan spent fifteen more minutes familiarizing himself with the layout, and fixing the locations of every potential exit in his mind. As he walked back down the long stairway, he couldn’t help but think that this was an odd place for a foreigner to choose. If he were Bell, he would have wanted a quiet place on some empty side street to exchange daughter for mother, not a crowded temple at the top of a mountain. Though there were several Western tourists around, if something happened, Bell and his men would stand out.

Unless…

…unless Bell wasn’t the one who picked the location.

Logan stopped halfway down, his hand resting on the dragon’s back.

What if this wasn’t just where Bell was going to exchange Elyse for Sein? What if this was also the place he was suppose to deliver Sein to the ultimate interested party—which, Logan was confident, had to be a representative of the Myanmar generals?

It was brilliant. This way Bell not only avoided detaining a known public figure in Sein, he also bypassed the even trickier proposition of having to transport her internationally. Instead, he had made her come to Chiang Mai on her own. All he had to do was grab her considerably lower-profile daughter. It was much easier to make sure Elyse’s disappearance wouldn’t be noticed for days. If Logan hadn’t walked into the back of the Coffee Time when he had, that’s exactly what would have happened. Tooney would have been dead, and no one would have known a thing. Still, as Sein had pointed out, even with that foul up, Bell had managed to get both of the Myat women to Chiang Mai.

And as far as choosing the temple?

Chiang Mai was only a fifty mile helicopter flight from the Burmese border. And the temple itself would provide the cover of camouflage and confusion. If trouble occurred, the Myanmar contingent could easily blend in with the crowd, and disappear with their prize, not caring at all what happened to their Western counterparts.

There was no way to know for sure if Logan was right, but he felt like he was. And it certainly fit with everything else he now knew.

He finished the steps, then found a spot near the rice cake vendor to wait.

When Daeng showed up, the first thing Logan did was tell him his theory. Daeng was nodding by the time he was done.