The fourth watcher

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” With a quick movement, he folds the money in half, one-handed, and his thumb pages idly through it. Elson has obviously counted a lot of money in his time. He lifts the bundle and fans it expertly, as though preparing for a card trick. “Should be a cop who’s been assigned to me.”

“It won’t be.”

Another nod, confirmation rather than agreement. “If this is big enough, I can probably get the Thais to say they assigned me whoever it is. Especially if we can prove that Petchara is dirty. They’ll be embarrassed about that.”

“Petchara put the bag in Peachy’s desk. You saw his reaction when you pulled out the old money.”

A gust of wind makes the window shiver, but Elson doesn’t seem to hear it. When he speaks, his voice has been hammered flat. “The bag. You mean the paper bag. The bag you didn’t know anything about.”

“It was originally full of counterfeit, thirty-two thousand worth. Peachy found it on Saturday, and I changed it for the real stuff.”

“She found it on Saturday?”

“She goes into the office a lot.”

He shakes his head. “But then. . why bother to exchange it? Why not just move it? Put it someplace we wouldn’t find it?”

“I needed reactions. I needed to know who was setting us up.”

Surprise widens Elson’s eyes. “You thought it was me?”

Rafferty passes a hand over his hair, and a chilly rivulet of rainwater runs down the center of his back. “Could have been anybody.”

“I’m an agent of the federal government.” He sounds like his feelings are hurt.

“Look at it, would you? You practically kick my door in, you make slurs about my fiancee, you embargo my passport, and then all this junk money shows up, just materializes in a desk drawer. And I’m supposed to think, Oh, no, not him, because you’ve got that thing in your wallet.”

Elson fills his cheeks with air and blows it out. “Okay,” he says. He glances at the storm’s special effects through the window and shakes his head in disapproval. Finally he says, “Now I’ll show you mine. We’re under a lot of pressure. The Service, I mean. Personally, I think the administration is overreacting, but I’m not paid to have personal opinions. Look at it mathematically, though, and the level of concern is way over the top. There’s about seven hundred and fifty billion bucks in our currency-I mean cash, actual paper-circulating at any given moment, around sixty percent of it outside the country. These jokers are turning out somewhere between seventy-five million to five hundred million a year. Sounds like a lot of money, but put it all together and it wouldn’t make a dimple in this year’s deficit.”

“Somewhere between seventy-five million and five hundred million?

Is that supposed to be some sort of scientific estimate, or did somebody draw a number out of a hat?”

“It’s a punch line,” Elson says. “The work is too fucking good. We have no idea how much of this stuff is actually out there. And we’re being boneheads about getting banks to work with us.” He holds up the loose bills. “Say you run a Thai bank, okay? Or a Singaporean bank, or one in Macau, where these guys are really active. And one day you get nine or ten of these things across the counter.” He passes the bills from one hand to another, giving them to himself. “So you’re holding junk. You’ve essentially got two choices. You can call us up, wait around until we can be bothered to clear a space on our desk calendar, and we take the bills and maybe say thanks, but we don’t give you a penny. Or you can skip the call and just hand them to the next customer who wants hundreds.”

“That’s a tough one,” Rafferty says.

“I’m sure they agonize over it. So they don’t cooperate. And multiply it: These guys, the North Koreans, are operating in something like a hundred and thirty countries. They’re the first government to counterfeit another country’s currency since the Nazis, and they seem to be able to drop it practically anywhere, while we sit around looking like the only reason our thumbs evolved was so we could stick them up our butts. We’re a relatively small outfit, you know? And we’re, like, sitting at the president’s feet, and the president has a huge hard-on for Kim Jong Il, so we get a lot of heat.” He waves a hand in front of his face once, as though to clear away smoke. “And there’s the other piece, the really big piece. We want the North Koreans at the negotiating table. We’re not thrilled about their nuclear program. The idea is, if we can put a big enough crimp into their counterfeiting income, they’ll pull up a chair and listen to how much money they could make by not screwing around with plutonium. Whether they’d really sit down or not-and they might not, because these guys are certifiably nuts-there’s a lot of motivation to give it a try, so the president can declare a foreign-policy triumph and say, ‘America is safer today.’ He likes to say that.” His eyes when they come back to Rafferty’s have a kind of appeal in them. “So what I’m saying is, yeah, sometimes we act like assholes.”

“Some people probably respond to it better than I do.”

Elson says, “Pretty much everybody responds to it better than you do.” He drops the money on the desk. “In that office, when I said I’d

told you to shut up and you said you forgot, I damn near laughed.”

“Shame you didn’t. Things might have gone a little better.”

“We’re where we are,” Elson says. He comes back to the bed and sits, facing Rafferty. “I’ve got a million questions,” he says. “This all seems very sweet, but not if my ass is going to be hanging out there, getting rained on.”

On cue, a gust of wind slams against the window, rain hitting the glass like bullets. Elson bares his teeth at it and says, “How can you live here?”

“I like it.”

“This is my first monsoon,” he says. “One is enough.” Behind him, through the window, the wind is lashing palm trees around as though they were peacock feathers. “Such a great word, ‘monsoon.’ I expected something-oh, I don’t know-something more romantic. Girls in sarongs hanging on to palm trees or something.”

“You’re in Bangkok. You want girls in sarongs hanging on to palm trees, I can probably give you a phone number.”

Elson actually grins. “Bullshit.”

“Monsoons grow on you. And this one’s going to be a dilly.”

Elson regards the storm with a little more interest. A huge palm frond whips past the window, and he turns back to Rafferty. “So. I get the money, the North Korean and his connections-”

“You’ll have to get those out of him yourself.”

“Fine. And the big guy who’s also in the game and who torched the CIA man.”

“Prettyman,” Rafferty says, surprised at his own vehemence. “Arnold Prettyman. He wasn’t much, but he had a name.”

Elson lifts a palm, fingers pointing up, and wipes it back and forth, erasing the words. “Okay, okay, he had a name. I’m going to tell you something else I shouldn’t. There’s a folder in that desk over there. You’re in it. You’re not the cleanest guy in the world, but you’re not the dirtiest either. Some people say nice things about you. I should have read it before I busted in on you.”

“You’ve read it now,” Rafferty says.

“Yeah, and it’s enough to make me wonder what you’re getting out of this.”

“Something that was taken from me.”

Elson lowers his head and regards Rafferty over the top of his glasses. “Yours legally?”

“To the extent that anybody belongs legally to anybody else.”

The agent’s lips purse as though he is going to whistle. “People?”

Rafferty nods.

“People you care about.”

“Are you married?”

Elson hesitates and then says, “Yes.”

“Got kids?”

“Two.”

“What would you do to get them back if someone took them?”

Elson’s face empties while he thinks about it. “Anything.”