Plausible Denial (31 page)

Paiboon
stood in the middle of the road, speechless, and watched the white Land Cruiser
disappear from sight.

Chapter Ninety-Nine

S
ophon
pulled out onto the highway with his eyes fixed on the rear view mirror. He was
relieved not to see anyone following him. He was still shaken by the crazy man
who ran at him at the airport exit. “
Phom sia jai, khrap
. I am sorry. I
almost run over that guy.”

Culler
and Mac straightened up from their cramped positions on the floor and sat up in
the back seat. “You did great,” said Mac. “Now continue heading into Chiang Mai
until you spot a taxi stand and we’ll drop you off.”

Sophon
wanted nothing more than to end this odyssey, collect his money and get as far
away from those crazy
farangs
as he could. “Amarin Hotel is up on left.
I could get taxi there. Is that okay?”

Mac
said, “That would be perfect, Sophon. Pull in and we’ll drop you off at the
entrance. Maybe you could grab a nice, leisurely lunch inside the hotel before
heading back for your car as well. That would put even more distance between
us.” Mac pulled the remaining three one hundred dollar bills out of his pocket
and passed them up to Sophon. “Take this for your extra time and trouble – and
please don’t say a word about this to anyone.”

Sophon
stuffed the bills into his shirt pocket. “Please do not worry about me. I go
back and collect my car and be on my way. I will not say nothing. You very
generous and I thank Buddha you are safe.”

They
pulled into the drive leading to the hotel and Santos said, “Don’t go all the
way to the entrance. Pull over here where we can turn around and avoid the
congestion at the front door.”

Sophon
did as he was told and jumped down out of the vehicle, leaving the keys in the
ignition and the motor running. He exchanged a deep, respectful
wei
with
Mac as they exchanged places and Mac climbed behind the wheel.

“
Khawp
khoon ma khrap
,” he said, “I wish you both good luck and good fortune. May
Buddha smile on you.” And then he was gone, hurrying toward the front entrance
of the hotel, glad to be out of there.

“Do
you think he’ll really keep quiet about this?” asked Culler, heaving himself
into the front passenger seat.

Mac
pulled the Land Cruiser around and headed back onto the highway toward the
center of Chiang Mai. “I think so, for awhile anyway. By the time he has to
explain where he got all of his newfound wealth and figures out who we are
we’ll be long gone.”

Culler
pushed back in his seat and took a deep, cleansing breath. “Okay, we made it
safely this far, but before we can declare mission accomplished we going to
have to get out of this God forsaken country. How are we going to do that with
every cop in Thailand on our trail?”

“I’ve
been giving it a lot of thought. I think we should first go back to the
safehouse to get cleaned up and rest a bit and get rid of all these alias docs,
guns and military crap we’ve been lugging around. We can leave the excess gear
behind and Charly can get the stuff out of the safehouse after we’re gone.
Then, with our civilian gear and true-name passports, we’ll drive across the
country to Nong Khai like a couple of tourists. Nong Khai is on the border with
Laos. There’s a new bridge there, the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge. We can cross
the Mekong over to Vientiane, and fly back home without having to go through
Thai customs.”

Culler
frowned skeptically. “Won’t we have to go through Thai customs in Nong Khai?
It’s a border crossing point, right? Same as an airport?”

“Same,
but not same-same, as the bar girls often say. They certainly do chop people in
and out, but it’s a border town and not as sophisticated as say, Bangkok or
Chiang Mai. They don’t have the on-line computer hook-ups like those major
cities. And then…well, I have some good contacts there. They will be able to
help us get across the river safely. Once we’re in Laos we’ll be home free.”

A
police car sped toward them with lights flashing and siren wailing, causing
them to stiffen, but it passed and disappeared in their rear view mirror, and
they relaxed once again.

“Is
that where you were posted way back when? Nong Khai?”

“No,
but close. I was in Udorn, about fifty kilometers south of there. That was back
in the late nineties. The base is in Udorn.”

Mac
slowed the Land Cruiser and turned onto the tree lined street leading to the
safehouse apartment.

Chapter One Hundred

W
orking
silently, they unloaded the Land Cruiser in the garage and carried the duffel
bags up to the apartment. There they sorted out their gear, showered, cleaned
out the refrigerator of all of the leftovers, and took a long nap.

Mac
made two brief calls on his throwaway cell phone. The first was to Charly
Blackburn to tell her of their plan to leave the country via Nong Khai and to
alert her that their gear and alias documents would be left behind in the
safehouse; the second was to Maggie in Fort Lauderdale to tell her they had
accomplished their mission and were on their way back home.

Maggie
in turn informed Edwin Rothmann of their plans and mission success.

They
waited until dark before leaving the apartment. They were refreshed, rested,
cleaned up and well fed. They dressed casually in jeans and light, short
sleeved shirts. They carried their true name passports and wallets and several
hundred dollars in cash. The rest of the remaining cash, approximately twenty
thousand dollars, was concealed in the lining of MacMurphy’s travel bag.

They
discussed leaving their side-arms behind as well, but agreed that they would be
better off with them during their approximate ten hour drive across the mostly
deserted Thai countryside to Nong Khai.

MacMurphy
suggested they could give the H&K pistols to his police contact in Nong
Khai as a gift for helping them across the border. The police contact could
also make secure arrangements for the return of the Land Cruiser.

Everything
would be neatly wrapped up and all traces of Bob Humphrey and Ralph Callaway
would be gone.

Santos
climbed behind the wheel of the Land Cruiser and MacMurphy climbed in beside
him with his GPS and a Thai roadmap spread out on his lap. “Let’s roll,” said
Mac.

They
reached Nong Khai early the following morning. After a huge breakfast at one of
Mac’s favorite floating restaurants on the bank of the Mekong River, they drove
to the home of Police Colonel Chatchai Sunthonwet to make arrangements to cross
the border into Laos.

The
Colonel was already at work when they arrived, but his wife remembered
MacMurphy fondly and invited them in for tea while she called her husband.

After
a brief meeting where Mac and the Colonel became reacquainted, Colonel
Sunthonwet personally escorted Culler and Mac to the border, supervised their
passage through Thai customs, and drove them in the Land Cruiser across the
Friendship Bridge into Laos. He dropped them off at the beautiful French
colonial Settha Palace Hotel in the center of Vientiane, and returned to
Thailand in the Land Cruiser with two .45 caliber H&K pistols, suppressors
and holsters, and $1000 in US currency in his pocket.

Chapter One Hundred-One

Ft. Lauderdale

M
aggie
met them at the airport in Ft. Lauderdale and drove them back to the offices of
Global Strategic Reporting on Las Olas Boulevard. They briefed Maggie on what happened
in Thailand – for security reasons, the rest of the GSR staff was kept entirely
out of the loop. The briefing was complete with screw-ups, anecdotes, warts and
accomplishments, but without, of course, any mention of Mac’s trysts with
Charly Blackburn.

Maggie
in turn briefed them on her conversations with Edwin Rothmann. The DDO was
effusive in his praise for what they accomplished, but fearful of reprisals by
Khun Ut, particularly regarding Charly Blackburn, who was laying low on his
orders.

She
informed them the front company was beginning to pay for itself and
subscriptions to GSR’s “CounterThreat” publication were continuing to rise.

B
ack in Northern Thailand, Vanquish and the
kid delivered the tainted shipment of heroin bricks to the warehouse in Mae
Chan along with the body of bandana guy tied across the back of one of the
donkeys.

Vanquish’s
explanation of the cause of death was accepted by a simple shake of the head
and a tongue clucking “tut-tut” by Ung Chea.

A
few days later the three hundred and twenty kilogram shipment of tainted heroin
was included in a five hundred kilogram shipment that moved by truck, secreted
in the midst of a load of bagged charcoal, from the warehouse in Mae Chan to
Samut Sakon, a small fishing port in the Gulf of Thailand, south of Bangkok.
From there the heroin bricks were loaded onto a small coastal freighter where
it made its way to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

In
Ho Chi Minh City the shipment was secreted in a concealed compartment in the
bilge of a Hong Kong registered nineteen hundred ton bulk grain carrier named
the Ruaha. The ship was pumped full to the gunnels with rice from the Mekong
Delta and sent on a three day voyage to the port of Hong Kong.

In
Hong Kong the heroin bricks were transferred in a mini-bus to a state of the
art refinery located in the basement of an old colonial mansion in the hills
overlooking Tsim Sha Tsui and Hong Kong harbor.

There
the ricin laced heroin bricks went through the most delicate forth and final
refining process, turning the heroin base into heroin hydrochloride, a fine
white powder, ready for packing and shipping to distributers in cities around
the world. The process also had the affect of spreading the deadly ricin
equally throughout the five hundred kilogram batch.

The
bags of white powder were then secreted in a container load of rough cut teak
lumber destined for The Decorator’s Furniture Warehouse in North Carolina.
Several of the four inch by six inch solid teak planks had been carefully
split, hollowed out and glued back together with the bags of pure heroin
filling the void inside. The concealment was unnoticeable to all but the most
trained eye.

A
huge Mersk Line container ship carried the teak lumber to the Port of Miami,
arriving on the third of September. From there the lumber container was shipped
by rail to Fayetteville, North Carolina and unloaded at The Decorator’s
Furniture Warehouse three weeks later. By that time the pure white heroin had a
street value of $175 per gram.

The
ricin laced heroin was cut further and repackaged at the furniture factory. It
began hitting the streets in cities along the entire southeast coast of the
United States by mid-October.

Chapter One Hundred-Two

S
antos
and MacMurphy slipped back into the routine of life in sunny Ft. Lauderdale.

They
worked out in the mornings, Santos mostly in the weight room and MacMurphy with
long runs along the Intracoastal and ocean. The rest of their days were spent
in the GSR offices, working to turn the company into a profitable business to
enhance its cover.

Mac,
Culler and Maggie continued to debate the ethics of the operation in the Golden
Triangle, but they tried not to let the disagreement affect their business
relationship. As weeks turned to months, Khun Ut and Ung Chea and Charly
Blackburn and Northern Thailand seemed very far away.

As
part of their daily work, under the cover of doing research on the effects of
drug overdose on heroin users for a large government “think-tank” customer,
Maggie had put the whole GSR research team to work digging up statistics on the
subject of heroin overdose.

They
found that across the country drug overdoses killed about thirty-five thousand
people a year, making it the second leading cause of accidental death, right
behind motor vehicle accidents and ahead of deaths caused by firearms.

But
some of the information they uncovered through confidential interviews with
coroners gave them pause. It indicated deaths caused by poisoning might be
masked, and falsely attributed to simple heroin overdose. Whenever a coroner’s
autopsy detected any kind of illegal drugs in the body of a corpse, the autopsy
was usually stopped right there, and the death was declared to be caused by an
accidental overdose.

So
their concern was, if people started dying from the ricin laced heroin, and
their deaths were attributed to simple drug overdose, the results of their
operation could be in jeopardy. If no one found out that the heroin was
poisoned, then there would be no blow-back on Khun Ut and the trail of
suppliers between him and the local street pushers.

They
worried about this, and reported their fears back to Rothmann, who did not
appear to be overly concerned. He just told them to wait and keep researching –
something would happen.

But
nothing did.

By
early November their research began to show a definite rise in heroin related
deaths in the southeastern United States, but no one outside of GSR seemed to
notice, and not a word was written about ricin or any other related reason for
the deaths.

All
of the deaths appeared to be individual overdoses. Some were caused by
inhalation (snorting), others by injection. And all of them were of known
heroin addicts.

And
then, finally, it happened.

On
Thanksgiving Day, the Palm Beach Post ran a headline story about eight members
of the violent Palm Beach County Haitian gang,
Top 6,
dying from an
apparent heroin overdose in a run down smack-house on Sappodilla Avenue in West
Palm Beach.