“What kind of police?”
“Like undercover types. Nasty undercover types! The type of policemen that would stick a knife in your back, then arrest you for carrying a concealed weapon. I’ve got a picture of them on my phone, I’ll send it to you.” He sounded concerned and that bothered Carl.
“Okay I will see if I can lose them.” Carl hung up.
At the early part of the twenty-first century, anonymous plainclothes police units had been executing suspected drug dealers as government policy. Police spokesmen admitted the body count to have been in the thousands. The executions had stopped after a shocked world had reacted loudly. There was no doubt that some of the executioners had killed people for their own profit or advancement in the criminal underworld. Many of the executed had not died well as the hit squads had tortured them for information and access to their money prior to dispatching them. The killings had stopped, or at least there was no overt government assassination policy anymore, but Carl knew the execution squads must still have been there, keeping a low profile somewhere in the police force. Carl hoped that the group following him was not from that background.
The phone buzzed and vibrated telling Carl that a message was coming in. He opened the attachment and looked at the picture of two men standing behind him as he queued at the airport desk to book the limo. They both wore safari suits, the Asian thug’s uniform. He didn’t know them and one look told him that he didn’t like them. Carl put the phone in his pocket and told the limousine driver that there was a change of plan and to take him to the Hyatt hotel instead of his home address. Carl promised the driver a nice tip for the extra distance.
The next half hour had Carl feeling stressed. The mind did strange things when fear was thrown into the equation. He wasn’t scared of death as much as the majority of people in the world. His life experiences had provided a certain level of immunity. The problem was being stuck in the car. The adrenalin wouldn’t kick in until he was on the move. Then Carl knew he would stop feeling like throwing up and do what was required. It wasn’t like this was going to be his first dance.
Carl asked the limousine to stop about fifty yards short of the hotel. He tipped the driver, as promised, and got out of the car. Carl walked casually into the lane that led to the car park and entered by the side door of the hotel. Just inside the door he loitered at the dry cleaning counter as if he was there to do his laundry.
Carl observed the car arriving with the two men inside. They would have been harder to lose if they had been on a motorcycle but the car was their only option for an airport job because bikes cannot enter the elevated expressway from the airport to the city. An airport job requires a car. Carl watched one of them jump out of the car and walk towards him while the car drove off to enter the underground car park.
Carl walked past the hotel’s trendy noodle restaurant, turned left and sat at one of the small tables outside the bakery nearest to the front of the hotel. A few minutes later both men walked into the bakery area and took up positions at the furthest table from where Carl was sitting. It was time to go as Carl had achieved what he was hoping for and got them both away from their car. Carl walked fast, almost running, to the street level front entrance. Past security, out the front doors and then a few yards dash into the street. There was a metal barrier the length of the hotel between the pavement and the road. Carl jumped over it and ran out into the road looking for a taxi with its sign lit up. He spotted one, stopped it in the middle of the road, jumped in and told the driver to take him to Patpong. Then he was moving away from the hotel. Carl saw through the back window of the taxi that his pursuers were still standing on the pavement outside the hotel. They were too surprised to have followed him over the barrier. Maybe they had been slow coming out of the hotel and didn’t see him. It didn’t matter. Carl was gone. Now he would get time to think.
On arrival at Patpong Road Carl went straight to the Madrid bar. It was a small bar in a single shop house with a heavy wooden door. The theme was built around oil paintings of Spanish bullfights and dark mysterious nudes. The Madrid was the only bar he knew that hadn’t changed since the 1970s and it was a quiet place to have a drink in the afternoon. He badly needed a drink. Carl had to go through the usual pleasantries with the staff, as he was well known there. After his drink arrived the staff left him alone. They knew the rules. If he had wanted to talk he would have sat at the bar. As usual Carl was sitting in a booth.
As soon as he had started on his drink George walked in and sat opposite him in the horseshoe booth.
“How the hell didn’t I lose you?” Carl asked.
“You did. Nice move, I saw it but was in the wrong place to follow you,” George told him. “I just figured that you would probably come here.”
“Thank God you’re on my side,” Carl said seriously.
“Yup.” He replied laughing and then Carl started to laugh too.
George ordered an orange juice and waited for the waitress to leave before he spoke again.
“Might be a good idea if you told me what’s going on,” he said.
Carl brought him up to date. George’s eyebrows went up when Carl told him about the demise of Victor Boyle and what happened in Macau.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said after a moment’s silence.
“I have to nail the bastard!”
“What about right now? It would appear that you are homeless.”
Carl thought for a minute and replied. “I will get a new SIM card for the phone. They can tell where my phone is by triangulating the towers it uses whenever it is switched on. I will call you on this phone later and give you a number, deduct 500 from the number I give you and that will be my new phone number. Actually, it is better for me to get a new phone; otherwise they can track down the new number from the IMI code on the old phone. Then I will check into a short-time hotel, one of the older ones with the curtains that pull over the parking spaces in front of the rooms. Not that I’ll be using a car but these places don’t require the usual registration process so I won’t have to show ID. Those two things first, I need time to think.”
“Do you have your iPod?”
“Yes, why would you ask?”
“Because you think better when you listen to opera and you are going to have to be brilliant. I am hoping for your best plan ever.”
“I need you to do something for me.”
“Sure,” he said as Carl had expected him to.
“I need you to handle the old man and his son. They are tailing the target and it would be better if I went on silent running for a few days. I will call him now and tell him to report to you. If that’s okay?”He nodded. Carl continued.“Use your old phone to communicate with him but get a new phone and only use the new phone to communicate with my new number.”
“Done. You know what Confucius said?”
“What was that?” Carl asked him.
George wrinkled his face and squinted his eyes, “Confucius he say; private detective without client is like prostitute in room without a customer — probably only there to make self-entertainment.”
“Point taken. Do you need some money?”
“No, that’s not a problem. You can settle up with me later.”
“If there is a later.”
George ignored Carl’s last statement and got up and left the bar. Carl called the old man and told him he was going out of town again so George would handle things. Carl also told him to be extra careful, as the target knew he was being investigated. Then Carl paid his bill and left the bar to look for a mobile phone outlet on Silom Road.
An hour later he called George and gave him his new number, having first added five hundred. As soon as he finished the call he switched off his Blackberry. Knowing nobody could call him gave Carl a peaceful feeling. It was like going back in time to when nobody ever knew where anybody was.
He spent the next hour walking around in circles and performing tricks to see if anybody was following him. Having convinced himself that there was nobody there Carl went looking for a taxi.
In such a situation he would never take one of the taxis that worked the area and was parked waiting for a fare. Carl had found too many people by showing taxi drivers a photograph with a promise of money if they had ever taken the person in the picture anywhere and could remember where it had been. Sometimes it would take Carl all day to find the right taxi but he usually found them in the end. So Carl walked to the traffic lights at the junction of Silom Road and Rama IV Road and jumped in the back of an empty taxi that was waiting for the lights to turn green.
Carl arrived at one of Bangkok’s seediest short-time hotels in the late afternoon. The one-storey hotel was
