Carl needed to use his Blackberry with his original phone number and list of contacts. It felt like paranoia as he took a taxi to the Thonburi side of the river. Carl knew his enemies were no phantoms and their brief was to put a bullet in his head, so wasting several hours being elaborately careful didn’t feel like a total waste of time.
The other side of the river is different to the Bangkok side. It is like a foreign country and they do things differently there. Carl had asked the taxi driver, much to his amusement, to drive around Thonburi for ten minutes and then take him back over the bridge.
He switched on his Blackberry and it started coughing out beeps as it downloaded messages. There were several e-mails that were not of interest, as he was not taking on any new cases. There were the usual messages from friends asking where he was and did he want to meet up for a beer. There was a message from Duke’s saying people had been in there asking about him. If they were concerned enough to let him know by SMS then they hadn’t liked the look of the people who were doing the asking. There was also a message from Jack, the head of security at the Sukhumvit Grande. He was in a funk because one of his guests had been murdered. Fear took its grip and made Carl feel physically unwell and uncoordinated.
It was logical to assume that Carl was being treated as a missing persons investigation and would be searched for by the standard methods. The trouble was he didn’t think that they were planning to serve papers on him, arrest him, or tap him on the shoulder and tell him he needed to call home. The people doing the hunting were, he assumed, the same people who had gunned down Victor Boyle. Their brief would be the same, get rid of Carl before he talked to too many people. Inman wanted the toothpaste put back in the tube and didn’t care how messy it got.
Carl needed a cigarette. He asked the taxi to pull over and park by the side of the road for a while. Carl stood on the pavement smoking. A foolish habit but compared to how he lived the rest of his life it seemed sane enough. He called the colonel from the pavement.
“Where have you been?” The colonel sounded annoyed. “I can’t reach you on your phone.”
“The fat man outside the Sheraton was my client and now the same people are looking for me.”
“Okay. What do you need?”
“I need a meeting. Somewhere safe. How about that place we met the informant during the Nigerian case a few years ago?”
“What time?”
“Three o’clock. Don’t think I’m being paranoid but make sure you are not followed.”
“I won’t be,” he told Carl. “I had a strange phone call this morning from a policeman that I don’t know. He said they needed you to do some translation work for them and could I put them in touch. I told them you owed me money and if they found you to let me know.”
“I’ll tell you what is going on at three,” Carl said and disconnected.
After attaching the picture of the men standing behind him at the airport that he had received from George, and messaging it to the colonel, he switched off his Blackberry and got back in the taxi. Carl instructed the driver to take him back to the Bangkok side of the river and deliver him to Sukhumvit Soi 5. The meeting place he had chosen was a large sports pub and restaurant with food, drinks, pool tables, and big-screen televisions so it would be busy enough to feel anonymous in.
Carl got out of the taxi at the top of the street. Soi 5 was a narrow one-way street that became a horseshoe with Soi 7 going one way in the other direction and letting the cars get back to Sukhumvit Road. It had a supermarket, small hotels, and lots of bars. The top end of the street was a hangout for African pimps and drug dealers. Shopping at the supermarket was an unusual experience as you were likely to be whispered to by big African men with offers of ecstasy, cocaine, speed or if that was not your bag they would offer to get you a big African prostitute from around the corner. It was known in Bangkok as little Africa and the police looked the other way.
Carl walked along the street and ignored the yells of, “Hey man,” from the groups of African males outside Foodland supermarket. Carl wasn’t buying. He walked on a little way to the bar opposite the pub he was going to meet the colonel at and found a discreet corner where he could observe the comings and goings across the street. Carl trusted the colonel but did not know how good his pursuers were. He wasn’t going in there until he knew the colonel hadn’t been followed.
The colonel arrived promptly at three and he was on foot. He was obviously taking the situation very seriously. Not only had Carl never seen him arrive anywhere on time before but, more importantly, he had never seen him arrive anywhere without his Mercedes. He went into the pub, looked around, and when he couldn’t find Carl he picked a discreet table in the corner and waited. He was in civilian clothes but still had his shiny police boots on. The boots were always the first thing people noticed. Everywhere he went they knew he was a policeman. Maybe that was the point.
Carl watched for the next ten minutes until he was sure the colonel hadn’t been followed. If he had, Carl was confident that he would have seen them. In such a small street there were a limited number of positions they could have used to watch what was happening in the pub, and from where Carl was he could see all of them. Feeling reassured he crossed the street, went inside and sat down at the table.
“So tell me what this is about,” the colonel said almost in a whisper.
Carl told him everything, the whole story. The only part that brought a smile to the colonel’s face was how Carl had gone through old direct mailing lists to confirm Inman’s presence in Thailand under the then known alias. Apart from that his face remained deadly serious throughout.
“You are in trouble this time,” he told Carl. “You no longer have a client and anything you do will be seen as a direct attack by this man and his associates. You will not be a service provider, you will be the enemy.”
“Quite.”
“I did a check on his mobile phone. He has some powerful friends in the police and the army. He makes a lot of calls to General Amnuay.”
General Amnuay was the army’s equivalent of a Godfather. He had a reputation of being involved in most of the profitable rackets. As far as Carl knew, he didn’t have a lot of enemies, not live ones anyway. The situation was getting worse on a daily basis.
“Did you get the picture I sent you? They are the ones that followed me from the airport.”
“They are soldiers. I mean they were soldiers. They are well known to the police by their nicknames Cat and Rat. They are from a group of rogue Special Forces. They are mafia for hire to politicians and big shots. They had promising military careers until they got exposed in an FBI case involving Americans smuggling guns to the Yakusa in Japan. They were the suppliers. The guns were being stolen from upcountry Army bases. They were never prosecuted but were kicked out of the Army instead. Now they make their living as muscle for hire.”
“Did they ever get the boss? The one that would have fronted the money and had the overseas
