watch.
He felt a little obvious standing outside the door, so he wandered down the hall toward the restrooms forty feet away. Just as he got there Harry heard footsteps coming down the stairs behind him. They were coming fast. There was no time to go back and tap on the glass. Besides, whoever it was was moving so fast they were probably on their way to the ground floor and out of the building, unless it was a call of nature.
Harry figured he could hide in one of the stalls. He opened the door to the men’s room and stepped inside only to discover that the room was a single-holer, one commode. Good news was, there was a latch on the door.
He waited to lock it to see if whoever it was would go on down the stairs. They didn’t. The footfalls suddenly stopped. Harry eased the door open just a crack. There was a guy, six feet tall, Caucasian, in slacks and a polo shirt standing just outside the stairwell. He was looking at the door to room 208 as if he was in a trance.
The thought suddenly hit Harry that perhaps there was a motion sensor inside the room. If so, the janitor who fixed the lights might have reset it when he locked up, in which case it may have triggered a silent alarm. They needed to get the hell out of here.
The guy in the polo shirt walked away, down the hall in the other direction. Just as Harry started to take a deep breath, the man came walking back, headed straight for the bathroom. Harry closed the crack and locked the door. Six seconds later he heard the door handle jiggle, and somebody pulled on it.
If Harry had known the Thai word for busy, he would have used it. But he didn’t. So he just held his breath and hoped the guy would go away. A few seconds later, he heard footsteps going the other way, and then elephant feet on the stairs again, all the way down to the ground floor.
Harry waited a couple of seconds, lifted the latch on the door, and peeked out. The coast was clear. He walked quickly down the hall toward the dark office. It was time to leave. Just as he got there, elephant foot was back. Coming up the stairs two at a time. Harry knew he was screwed. He stood there frozen, waiting for his fate. The guy was close enough that Harry could hear him breathing. Any second the man would step out of the stairwell and into the hall and Harry would be standing there in front of the dark door. That is, until he realized that the sound of the thudding footfalls was now coming from overhead. The guy had gone on up to the next floor.
Harry let out a deep sigh. He was standing there catching his breath when he heard them. Much slower and lighter this time, a tapping patter on the concrete steps. High heels. The place was getting busier than Union Station. Harry turned around and rapped on the glass. “Come on!”
The patter of the footsteps was getting closer. They seemed to be slowing as they approached the second floor. Harry skated on the balls of his feet down the hall as fast as he could. He grabbed the door and slid into the men’s room. He held the door open and caught his breath as he peered through the crack.
The woman entered the hall from the stairwell. She didn’t even slow down. Instead she walked right up to the dark glass in the door and slipped a key into the lock.
Chapter Twenty
Traffic was thick as cement. It was approaching the peak of rush hour. Cars and tall tourist buses were parked in the lanes on Second Road. The little blue baht buses, light pickup trucks with stainless steel tops and benches in the back for passengers, were stacked up all over the shoulder of the road picking up and dropping off fares.
Liquida watched the gal in the flowered dress as she threaded her way through the stalled traffic, checking between lanes so that she didn’t get creamed by a motorbike riding the lines.
As soon as she disappeared, Liquida went back toward the table in the beer bar. He snapped his fingers, and the taxi bike kid got up from the table. He left his beer, and together the two of them headed back to the taxi stand where the bikes were parked. Liquida gave the kid a five-hundred-baht banknote. “You know what you’re supposed to do?”
The kid nodded.
“Sabai, comprende?” said Liquida. “You understand?”
“Yeah, yeah. Soi 2.”
With that Liquida turned and headed quickly back toward Second Road. When he got there, he turned right. But he didn’t go into his hotel. Instead he walked past it and kept going south along the sidewalk. He looked across the street to see if there was any sign of the girl. He didn’t see her. By now Liquida figured she must be inside the building.
He picked up his pace and kept walking. He glanced over as he passed the green door on the other side of the street. He walked another fifty yards and stopped near the curb. Liquida took one last look around and then stepped off the sidewalk. He used a key from his pocket to pop the seat on one of the motorbikes parked at the sidewalk. He grabbed the helmet from under the seat and put it on. Then he fastened the strap under his chin and closed and latched the seat.
Liquida took a deep breath, put the key in the ignition, threw his leg over the bike, straddled it, and began to roll it backward out onto the shoulder of the road. He turned the handlebars to the left and worked the bike back and forth a little with his feet until it was parallel to the stalled traffic and just a few feet off the road.
Cars and buses were creeping forward, inches at a time. Liquida turned the key and pushed the starter button on the bike. The little Suzuki Hayate started up instantly, its engine purring almost silently as it idled.
Liquida had rented the motorbike the day before. He used it the previous night to scout out the area behind the office building looking for signs of surveillance. He didn’t see anything, but he still wasn’t convinced. It was the reason he had lived this long.
Joselyn and I take turns working high and low, using the small flashlight to quickly scan the labels on the filing cabinets and hoping the single battery in the Maglite lasts.
We get to the bottom drawer at the end of the last aisle. Joselyn looks up at me. “That’s not it. So either there’s nothing here, in which case we’ve wasted a lot of time and a good deal of money,… or else it’s the one we saw back over there.”
None of the labels on any of the cabinets bear the words Waters of Death.
“That would explain why the fellow who leases the office-I assume he owns TSCC limited, whatever that is- why he told Thorpe’s people that he never heard of anything called Waters of Death,” says Joselyn.
“Do you remember where it was?” I ask.
She gets to her feet and starts walking along the back wall past the end of each aisle until she comes to the second row of cabinets. Using the Maglite, she flashes it up and down the face of each cabinet. “It was around here somewhere.”
“As I recall it was up high, first or second drawer,” I tell her.
She moves forward a few more cabinets. “Here it is.” She holds the light on the label. In the center of the two-by-three-inch label is the word WOD in large block letters, all capped. It is printed on the same form as every other label, with the three large black letters just under the smaller green print showing “TSCC Ltd.” and telephone numbers.
Joselyn reaches up and grabs the handle on the drawer and pulls, but it is locked. You can see the small brass cylinder lock jiggle in its setting just a speck each time she jerks on the handle. “Any ideas?”
“No. Last time I saw one of these locked up like that, it was in our office. Somebody lost the key. We had to call in a locksmith. It would take a crowbar to pry it open, and then we’d probably make enough noise to bring the whole place down on us.”
Something catches my eye on the top right corner of the cabinet. “Here, let me see that.” I take the flashlight from Joselyn and look more closely.
It’s an old decal about an inch long, pasted to the corner of the steel frame right at the top. It’s old and worn, very nearly scraped off the metal, but I can make out enough of the letters to piece it together.
“What I said about prying it open with a crowbar…”
“Yes?”
“Forget it. It’s military surplus stuff. See that?” I touch the old decal. “It says ‘U.S. Army Signal Corp.’ It’s
