Trader of Secrets: A Paul Madriani Novel (16 page)

Harry figured he could hide in one of the stalls. He opened the door to the men’s room and stepped inside only to discover that the room was a single-holer, one commode. Good news was, there was a latch on the door.

He waited to lock it to see if whoever it was would go on down the stairs. They didn’t. The footfalls suddenly stopped. Harry eased the door open just a crack. There was a guy, six feet tall, Caucasian, in slacks and a polo shirt standing just outside the stairwell. He was looking at the door to room 208 as if he was in a trance.

The thought suddenly hit Harry that perhaps there was a motion sensor inside the room. If so, the janitor who fixed the lights might have reset it when he locked up, in which case it may have triggered a silent alarm. They needed to get the hell out of here.

The guy in the polo shirt walked away, down the hall in the other direction. Just as Harry started to take a deep breath, the man came walking back, headed straight for the bathroom. Harry closed the crack and locked the door. Six seconds later he heard the door handle jiggle, and somebody pulled on it.

If Harry had known the Thai word for
busy,
he would have used it. But he didn’t. So he just held his breath and hoped the guy would go away. A few seconds later, he heard footsteps going the other way, and then elephant feet on the stairs again, all the way down to the ground floor.

Harry waited a couple of seconds, lifted the latch on the door, and peeked out. The coast was clear. He walked quickly down the hall toward the dark office. It was time to leave. Just as he got there, elephant foot was back. Coming up the stairs two at a time. Harry knew he was screwed. He stood there frozen, waiting for his fate. The guy was close enough that Harry could hear him breathing. Any second the man would step out of the stairwell and into the hall and Harry would be standing there in front of the dark door. That is, until he realized that the sound of the thudding footfalls was now coming from overhead. The guy had gone on up to the next floor.

Harry let out a deep sigh. He was standing there catching his breath when he heard them. Much slower and lighter this time, a tapping patter on the concrete steps. High heels. The place was getting busier than Union Station. Harry turned around and rapped on the glass. “Come on!”

The patter of the footsteps was getting closer. They seemed to be slowing as they approached the second floor. Harry skated on the balls of his feet down the hall as fast as he could. He grabbed the door and slid into the men’s room. He held the door open and caught his breath as he peered through the crack.

The woman entered the hall from the stairwell. She didn’t even slow down. Instead she walked right up to the dark glass in the door and slipped a key into the lock.

Chapter
Twenty

T
raffic was thick as cement. It was approaching the peak of rush hour. Cars and tall tourist buses were parked in the lanes on Second Road. The little blue baht buses, light pickup trucks with stainless steel tops and benches in the back for passengers, were stacked up all over the shoulder of the road picking up and dropping off fares.

Liquida watched the gal in the flowered dress as she threaded her way through the stalled traffic, checking between lanes so that she didn’t get creamed by a motorbike riding the lines.

As soon as she disappeared, Liquida went back toward the table in the beer bar. He snapped his fingers, and the taxi bike kid got up from the table. He left his beer, and together the two of them headed back to the taxi stand where the bikes were parked. Liquida gave the kid a five-hundred-baht banknote. “You know what you’re supposed to do?”

The kid nodded.

“Sabai, comprende?” said Liquida. “You understand?”

“Yeah, yeah. Soi 2.”

With that Liquida turned and headed quickly back toward Second Road. When he got there, he turned right. But he didn’t go into his hotel. Instead he walked past it and kept going south along the sidewalk. He looked across the street to see if there was any sign of the girl. He didn’t see her. By now Liquida figured she must be inside the building.

He picked up his pace and kept walking. He glanced over as he passed the green door on the other side of the street. He walked another fifty yards and stopped near the curb. Liquida took one last look around and then stepped off the sidewalk. He used a key from his pocket to pop the seat on one of the motorbikes parked at the sidewalk. He grabbed the helmet from under the seat and put it on. Then he fastened the strap under his chin and closed and latched the seat.

Liquida took a deep breath, put the key in the ignition, threw his leg over the bike, straddled it, and began to roll it backward out onto the shoulder of the road. He turned the handlebars to the left and worked the bike back and forth a little with his feet until it was parallel to the stalled traffic and just a few feet off the road.

Cars and buses were creeping forward, inches at a time. Liquida turned the key and pushed the starter button on the bike. The little Suzuki Hayate started up instantly, its engine purring almost silently as it idled.

Liquida had rented the motorbike the day before. He used it the previous night to scout out the area behind the office building looking for signs of surveillance. He didn’t see anything, but he still wasn’t convinced. It was the reason he had lived this long.

*  *  *

Joselyn and I take turns working high and low, using the small flashlight to quickly scan the labels on the filing cabinets and hoping the single battery in the Maglite lasts.

We get to the bottom drawer at the end of the last aisle. Joselyn looks up at me. “That’s not it. So either there’s nothing here, in which case we’ve wasted a lot of time and a good deal of money, . . . or else it’s the one we saw back over there.”

None of the labels on any of the cabinets bear the words
Waters of Death.

“That would explain why the fellow who leases the office—I assume he owns TSCC limited, whatever that is—why he told Thorpe’s people that he never heard of anything called Waters of Death,” says Joselyn.

“Do you remember where it was?” I ask.

She gets to her feet and starts walking along the back wall past the end of each aisle until she comes to the second row of cabinets. Using the Maglite, she flashes it up and down the face of each cabinet. “It was around here somewhere.”

“As I recall it was up high, first or second drawer,” I tell her.

She moves forward a few more cabinets. “Here it is.” She holds the light on the label. In the center of the two-by-three-inch label is the word
WOD
in large block letters, all capped. It is printed on the same form as every other label, with the three large black letters just under the smaller green print showing “TSCC Ltd.” and telephone numbers.

Joselyn reaches up and grabs the handle on the drawer and pulls, but it is locked. You can see the small brass cylinder lock jiggle in its setting just a speck each time she jerks on the handle. “Any ideas?”

“No. Last time I saw one of these locked up like that, it was in our office. Somebody lost the key. We had to call in a locksmith. It would take a crowbar to pry it open, and then we’d probably make enough noise to bring the whole place down on us.”

Something catches my eye on the top right corner of the cabinet. “Here, let me see that.” I take the flashlight from Joselyn and look more closely.

It’s an old decal about an inch long, pasted to the corner of the steel frame right at the top. It’s old and worn, very nearly scraped off the metal, but I can make out enough of the letters to piece it together.

“What I said about prying it open with a crowbar . . .”

“Yes?”

“Forget it. It’s military surplus stuff. See that?” I touch the old decal. “It says ‘U.S. Army Signal Corp.’ It’s probably left over from the Vietnam War. Thailand was a big R & R center, rest and recuperation for the troops. If I remember right, they had a big air base around here somewhere. That’s probably where it came from.”

“So?”

“So the U.S. government doesn’t buy cheap stuff. You’re probably looking at a twenty-thousand-dollar filing cabinet—to go along with their forty-thousand-dollar toilet seats and their fifteen-thousand-dollar hammers. And even if they overpaid, that’s heavy-gauge steel. You won’t find that in Office Depot.”

“So where’s the nearest locksmith?”

Just as she says it, there’s a tap on the glass at the door. I turn and look over the top of the cabinets. I see Harry’s silhouette backlit against the lights out in the hall. “Come on, we better go.”

“What’s the matter, getting nervous?” says Joselyn. “You don’t like the idea of doing time in a Thailand jail?”

“We can try and figure out something tomorrow,” I tell her.

Joselyn and I start to move toward the door when I look up and see Harry’s shadow receding like a sprinter away from the glass. “Hold on a second!”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

As we are standing there, another shadow approaches the door. This one is much smaller than Harry, with a feminine form.

I twist off the Maglite. Joselyn and I retreat back down the aisle as fast as we can. We reach the end of the row just as we hear the key in the lock at the door.

It opens as we slink around the corner behind the end cabinet. I am down on one knee with Joselyn behind me. She has a hand on my shoulder, breathing in my ear as the lights in the room suddenly flash on.

The unexpected brilliance blinds me. I hear the door close and then the click of high heels as they cross the linoleum floor and head down the aisle directly toward us.

I push back against Joselyn, trying to retreat. Just as I do, the woman slows down. She takes a few tentative steps and then stops. For a few seconds I hear nothing, then the jiggle of keys. It’s followed by a slight metallic
click
, and an instant later a drawer slides open.

I can’t resist. I ease my head toward the corner of the cabinet until my left eye just clears the edge.

The woman is standing in the aisle maybe ten feet away with her back to me. She is leaning over an open drawer removing papers and a few envelopes, putting them in a bag.

Joselyn taps me on the back. She wants to know what’s happening.

I shake my head, wave her off.

A second later the woman closes the drawer. She pushes the lock back in, turns the key, and removes it. She straps the bag over her shoulder and heads for the door.

I slowly settle back against Joselyn.

The door opens, the lights go out, and then the door closes behind the woman.

Joselyn lets out a long deep sigh. “That was close. Now it’s time to get out of here,” she says.

“No! You stay here in case we need to get back in.” I twist on the flashlight and hand it to her as I get to my feet and head down the aisle.

“Where are you going?”

“She just cleaned out the drawer,” I tell her.

“You mean WOD?”

“Yes.”

Chapter
Twenty-One

L
iquida saw the girl coming out of the building as he sat on the bike with the engine purring. She had the white canvas bag, carrying it with the straps over her shoulder. He could tell there was something in it from the way it drooped.

She walked a short distance up the sidewalk on the other side and then slowly began to cross over. Liquida watched her as she carefully threaded her way through traffic.

He looked to see if anyone was following her. It was possible they could be watching her from a distance. If they were, all hell was going to break loose in about twenty seconds.

She reached his side of the street and headed down the sidewalk in front of Liquida’s hotel. Just as she stepped off the curb across from the beer bar, the kid on the taxi bike pulled out of the side street directly in front of her.

They talked for a second as Liquida watched. Then the kid handed her the five-hundred-baht note. She took it, and a second later handed the bag to the boy on the bike.

The kid took off like a shot, turned north onto Second, and screamed along the shoulder of the road, streaking past the stalled traffic like lightning.

It happened so quickly that Liquida barely had time to react. He slapped the face mask down on his helmet, twisted the throttle, and took off after him. He tried to gun it and glanced down at his speedometer just as the flailing form darted out from in front of the stopped bus. He jerked the bike to the left. The guy did a toreador move to the right, hips and ass in reverse. Liquida screeched by him, shaving the front of the guy with the right side of the bike and the hot muffler.

He didn’t bother to look back. Instead, Liquida twisted the throttle all the way over. The bike shrieked along the side of the road, leaving all of the commotion behind. Liquida raced along, trying to catch a glimpse of the kid, but the taxi bike was gone.

*  *  *

By the time Harry sees me coming out of the office door, the woman with the bag is halfway down the stairs.