The fourth watcher

of here.” His lips have vanished completely, baring the thumb sucker’s dent in his front teeth.

Rafferty comes farther into the room, pushing into the man’s space and shifting to his right, toward the dresser. “Don’t like it much, do you? I didn’t either. There’s a difference, though. You came to cause me trouble. I came to save your ass.”

Elson seems to realize how he looks and gives the shirt of his pajamas a downward tug, straightening it as though that could turn it into something else. “I’m not going to engage in a dialogue with you, Rafferty. I came in the discharge of my lawful duty.”

“And you wrong-footed it, didn’t you? Chasing a couple of women who haven’t got fifty thousand baht in the bank. Grabbing the wrong teller out of the bank. Letting Petchara lead you around like a pony in a ring. Petchara’s crooked. I own inanimate objects that could have seen that. My fucking toaster could have seen it.”

“I’m calling security,” Elson says, taking a step toward the phone on the table between the beds.

“Wrong,” Rafferty says, and Elson glances back and stops, off balance, in midstride at the sight of the gun Rafferty has pulled from the tote bag hanging from his shoulder. It takes a quick little shuffle for Elson to remain upright, and he looks furious that it was necessary. “Here’s what you’re doing,” Rafferty says. “You’re sitting on the end of that bed. I’m sitting on this one. We’re going to talk, just a couple of Americans in a confusing foreign country. And I’m going to be generous, by way of an apology for what a jerk I’ve been. I’m going to show you mine first, and then you can decide whether you want to continue the conversation.”

Elson sits slowly, as though he thinks the bed might be wet. The bed is low and his legs are long, forcing his knees to fold in acute, storklike angles. He shifts his legs to the left for balance and starts to lean right, toward the table, then stops. He says, “I need my glasses.”

“Get them. Just leave the phone alone.”

“I heard you.” Once the glasses are in place, Elson sits a little straighter. He puts his hands on his knees, fingers spread. He has a pianist’s hands.

Rafferty sits and puts the gun down beside him on the bed, lifting his own hands to show that they’re empty. Elson doesn’t even register it, just watches and waits. “First,” Rafferty says, “I’m sorry. I’m not consumed with guilt, it’s not keeping me up nights, but I’m sorry for the way I treated you. You came on wrong, and you threatened someone I love, but I shouldn’t have been such a smart-ass. You can accept the apology or see it as weakness or do whatever you want, but I’m making it anyway.”

Elson offers a stiff-necked nod, more a punctuation mark than anything else. His left hand fingers one of the little clocks on his pajamas as though he’s curious about the time printed there.

“Second. Here’s a present. Late last night the government you work for lost an asset here, or at least a former asset-God knows which. Have you heard about this?”

Elson tilts his head an inch to the right. “Prettyman. The CIA guy.” He shrugs. “I know about it, but so what? Not my business.”

“It’s your business if you clear it up.”

For a moment Elson’s eyes lose focus and slide down to Rafferty’s chest, and then they come most of the way back, with quite a lot going on behind them. “Marginally, I suppose.” He is talking to Rafferty’s neck.

“If you’re going to lie, at least choose a lie I might believe. A former CIA guy gets killed in Bangkok, the American government loses face, and in Asia that’s important. Even this administration is smart enough to know that. The man who comes up with the killers is going to get a little gold happy face on his lapel.”

“Maybe.” Elson shifts his weight uncomfortably. His eyes are making tiny motions, as though he is counting gnats. “You’re saying you know who did it.”

“I know exactly who did it, and I can give him to you.”

He puts a hand on the bed behind him, leans back slightly, and eases one foot forward with a small grimace of relief. “How?”

“I’ll tell you, if this chat gets that far. But I can promise you he’s somebody you want anyway. Somebody who is your business.”

Elson straightens his glasses, which already look like they were positioned by someone using a carpenter’s level. “I need to know who it is and why he’s my business.”

“A thousand baht is worth a million words,” Rafferty says. “Catch.” He dips into the canvas tote. Elson brings his hands up far too slowly, and the six-inch brick of money hits him in the middle of the clocks on his pajama top and bounces to the floor. He stares down at it, his mouth open.

“Take a look,” Rafferty says. “That’s your second present.”

Elson bends forward and comes up with the packet of thousand-baht notes. His eyes flick up to Rafferty, and then he flips through the stack, pulls a few out from the middle, and looks at them closely. He blinks twice, heavily enough to make Rafferty wonder if it’s a tic. “I need to get up,” he says.

“It’s your room.”

Tucking the brick of money beneath his left arm and clutching the loose bills in his right hand like a little bouquet, Elson goes to the desk near the window and snaps on the lamp. He holds the bills in the pool of light one at a time, inspects them front and back, and then he removes the shade from the lamp. He chooses a bill at random and positions it in front of the naked bulb, as though trying to see the bulb through it. Dropping it onto the desk, he picks up another and then another, examining each of them for several seconds. He runs a thumbnail over the front of two bills, feeling for texture. Then he shapes the loose bills into a stack and yanks a few more from the brick, repeating the routine with each of them.

“There are some American hundreds at the bottom,” Rafferty says.

Elson gives him a sharp glance and then finds the bills and gives them a moment of scrutiny. When he has finished, he turns to Rafferty and says, “You have my attention.”

“Good. There’s another sixty million baht where that came from.”

“Sixty?”

“Give or take. That’s about a million seven in U.S. All brand new and uncirculated. And two hundred thousand in American hundreds, fresh as milk. The North Korean who was passing them out is getting stitched up right now, but he’ll be good enough to travel.”

Elson squints as he replays the end of the sentence. “Getting stitched up?”

“He got shot.”

“Did you shoot him?”

“He was shot by a schoolgirl. Listen, none of this matters. What matters is that you can have him.”

“I can’t have him if I don’t know where he is.”

“You’ll know in a few hours. By then it’ll all be available: the money, the North Korean who’s been passing it, and the guy who murdered Prettyman.” He studies Elson’s face. “He’s in the same business as the North Korean, but on a much bigger scale.”

Elson’s eyes drop to the spill of money on the surface of the desk. He stands there, studying it, and then he picks up the bundle and riffles through it, making a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled. Without turning to Rafferty, he says, “I’m pretty much by the book. I don’t go outside the lines much.”

“I guess it’ll depend on how badly you want what’s on the other side.”

“I want it. I’m just telling you, my comfort level is low when it comes to playing cowboy. And I don’t like surprises.”

“Then you’re in the wrong city.”

Elson slaps the money against his thigh, then brings it up and looks at Rafferty over it. “How far outside the lines am I going to have to go?”

“Some unpleasant things may happen, but I don’t think you’ll have to do any of them. You won’t even be on the scene when they go down, if they do. You’ll have-what’s the phrase? — plausible deniability. Your end should be pretty much inside the lines.”

Elson nods. He has the distracted expression of a man evaluating a position on a chessboard: if this, then what? Finally he says, “Even assuming this is something I can do, I need a cop. I can’t do anything here without a Thai cop. That’s a rule I can’t screw with.”

“I can get you a cop.”