World of Trouble (9786167611136) (48 page)

I turned the alternatives over in my mind
while I walked, but there was really no reason to do that. I
already knew exactly who I needed to see.

When I got back to the building where my
office was, I went straight down to the garage and got into my
Volvo. A few minutes later I was headed north on Phayathai
Road.

DARCY RICE LIVED
in
one of Bangkok’s older neighborhoods that was out near Chitralada
Palace where the king maintained his official residence. It was a
part of town where you seldom saw foreigners, and that suited Darcy
just fine.

Her house was at the end of a tiny soi that
branched off Wisut Kasat Road at an Esso station. If you didn’t
know exactly where you were going, it didn’t look like a street at
all, but just part of the station’s driveway. Behind the Esso
station the soi made a sharp bend to the right and ran along a row
of nondescript shop-houses for about a hundred yards until it
dead-ended at a green metal gate set into a high ginger-colored
wall. Thick stands of rangy bamboo tumbled over the wall from
inside and gave the whole area a slightly overgrown appearance, but
the bamboo had a very specific purpose. Concealed within it was a
sophisticated security system that encircled the entire property.
It was an exceptionally thorough piece of technology and it
effectively ensured the total privacy of the occupants.

After Darcy retired from more than thirty
years of working for the US government, some of it in Washington
and the rest in various postings around Asia, she took her whole
pension in a cash settlement and headed straight for Bangkok. I met
Darcy shortly after she set up shop here. She had made it her
business to look me up and introduce herself. At first I wondered
why, but after I got to know Darcy better I understood perfectly
well.

Darcy was in the business of collecting
information and so she also collected people who had information.
For a few months I heard from Darcy only occasionally, mostly when
she needed me to explain some arcane twist of international
finance, but gradually the calls and our visits increased in
frequency and a friendship developed. Darcy had never spoken to me
about her background except in general terms; however, I had no
difficulty reading between the lines. CIA would have been an
obvious guess, but I doubted it. My own theory was that Darcy had
been with the NSA, the National Security Agency.

NSA was so secretive that it made the CIA
look like the
New York Times.
What’s more, they did the
stuff that few people even knew was going on—the computer
break-ins, the telephone and email intercepts, the satellite
surveillance, and the other black arts wizardry almost anybody out
of the know would have been inclined to dismiss as paranoid fiction
rather than real life. That was exactly the kind of stuff Darcy
seemed to know all about.

Her computers occupied all of a two-story
cottage across a swimming pool from the main house, and they were
fat with data. There was little Darcy could not get access to. She
could nail down details about intelligence networks and the
activities of individual agents that conventional corporate
investigative agencies had never heard of. The end of the Cold War
had scattered a welter of unemployed, freebooting intelligence
operators across the globe. A lot of them had tried to do the same
thing Darcy had, but there were few others who could claim the
sophistication of the operation she had created in Bangkok. It was
nothing less than a private intelligence agency, one with
capabilities equal to any competitor and to not a few
governments.

At the end of the soi I stopped in front of
Darcy’s gate and lowered the driver’s window. Before I could push
the button on the intercom box, the gate split into two panels and
began to swing inward. I gave a little wave in the direction where
I knew the security camera was and the intercom speaker
click-clacked in acknowledgment.

Parking on the gravel of the circular
driveway, I got out and made my way up the short brick walk between
rows of tropical plants so carefully tended and perfectly formed
that they might have been shot out of plastic injection molds.
Darcy opened the door and stepped onto the house’s wide front
porch. She was a smallish woman, a few years past sixty, trim with
a pleasant but forgettable face, and she wore her silver hair in a
tightly fitted, masculine crop. As always when she was at home, she
was dressed in a white silk blouse and an ankle-length sarong,
today’s selection being in the brightest shade of saffron I had
ever seen.

“It’s been a long time, doll.” She pecked me
on the cheek and held my arm in a kind of embrace as we entered the
living room of the house. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Out chasing women. What else is there to do
in Bangkok?”

Darcy laughed and gestured me toward a couch
in the elegantly proportioned living area. She sat on the one
opposite and folded a leg up under her. A maid appeared almost
immediately and placed sweating glasses of cold water in front of
each of us, positioning them carefully on tiny squares of coarse,
white cotton.

Darcy smiled at me and waited until the maid
had glided silently out of the room before she said anything
else.

“Nata is out in the cottage running some
stuff. She ought to be in any minute.”

Nata had been Darcy’s companion for almost
fifteen years and, not surprisingly, she was one of the primary
reasons why Darcy had chosen Bangkok for her retirement. The
daughter of a Thai general who had ended up on the wrong side of
some long-forgotten military coup, Nata was a stunningly beautiful
woman who must have been in her late forties. She was very slight
with wispy, wide-set eyes, and she seldom wore make-up. Her skin
was smooth and milky-looking, so white that you could go snow-blind
just looking at it.

I was the pretty much the only foreigner I
knew who hadn’t ended up in Thailand because of the women.

“So tell me, doll, what’s on your mind? I get
the feeling you didn’t come all the way out here looking for a free
lunch.”

“I guess I did in a manner of speaking. I
need something.”

“Don’t we all?”

“I’ve got to meet somebody tonight, and I
don’t want to sound completely stupid when I do.”

“Uh-huh.” Darcy’s face was professionally
empty, waiting.

“I just need a little background. Nothing
heavy duty.”

“Tell me the story. Let me decide that.”

I told Darcy about the telephone call and
about my summons to Foodland that night. I also told her what I
remembered about Barry Gale’s so-called suicide and the stories
linking the Texas State Bank with money laundering by Russian
mobsters. But I didn’t know much so that didn’t take very long.

“What I need is a digest of the press
coverage around the time Barry Gale is supposed to have died,” I
finished. “Can you manage that?”

“Exactly what are you looking for?”

“To be honest, I’m not sure. Anything that
would prepare me for however this conversation tonight ends up
going, I guess. Whatever that means.”

“I don’t see how any of the public stuff is
going to help you figure out whether this really
is
your
guy, if that’s what you’re trying to do.”

“Well…”

“Yeah, I know,” Darcy laughed. “You’d also
like to see if I could come up with anything that might not have
made the papers.”

“Something like that.”

“For you, Jack, anything.”

Darcy stood up and held out her hand.

“Let’s take a walk out to the cottage,
doll.”

LAUNDRY MAN

THE BUILDING THAT
Darcy called a cottage was actually the size of a whole house even
if it didn’t look much like one. Had it not been for a door on the
first level and two small windows on the second, it would have
resembled a solid cube of stucco.

The first floor was a single brightly lit
room with at least a dozen computer workstations positioned around
its walls. Three matronly-looking Thai women, all apparently well
into their sixties if not older, moved silently from station to
station checking the screens and occasionally tapping a few
characters on one of the keyboards. In the center of the room, on a
low platform, there was a far more elaborate workstation equipped
with four huge thin-panel displays supported by sleek, black
pedestals.

Nata perched at the center of the platform in
an orthopedic chair and rested her folded forearms on the table in
front of a keyboard. She was looking from one display to the other,
twisting her brows in concentration. A thin microphone on a chrome
boom curved in front of her mouth and I had the impression she had
been murmuring into it when we came in, but when she saw us she
pushed herself back from the table and flicked the boom up over her
head like a surfer chick flipping up sunglasses.

“Hey, Jack boy! Long time.”

“I was in the neighborhood, so—”

“Yeah, yeah. What is it this time? You never
come to see me except when you want something.”

“That’s not entirely true,” I said, but it
pretty much was.

Darcy stepped in and in a few clipped phrases
related to Nata the high points of the story I had just told her
about my call from the man claiming to be Barry Gale.

“This guy wants to meet you
where
?”

Nata’s question was addressed to me, but she
was looking at Darcy when she asked it.

“Took Lae Dee.” I said. “It’s in
Foodland.”

“The one on Sukhumvit Road? Down by the
Ambassador Hotel?”

I nodded. I didn’t much blame Nata for
wondering about that part of my story. I was wondering a little
about it, too.

During daylight hours Sukhumvit Road was one
of Bangkok’s principal arteries, four lanes jammed with vehicles
and the Sky Train running on massive concrete pillars down its
center. It slashed like a fault line across the part of the city
where almost every foreigner in town lived. For miles it was lined
with luxurious shopping malls, expensive restaurants, and
many-starred hotels. It was generally thronged with people:
well-heeled tourists, foreign residents, and those adventurous
Thais who didn’t mind so much mixing with either.

In the hours after dark, however, a different
breed took over Sukhumvit Road. Even at its most benign, Bangkok
was part Miami and part Beirut, and there was nothing benign about
midnight on the fault line. In the late, late hours, Sukhumvit Road
became Blade Runner country.

I had always thought there had to be some
kind of international network devoted to coaxing social rejects and
dropout cases worldwide into coming to Bangkok, because come they
did by the thousands. They walked away from third-shift jobs in
places like Los Angeles, London, Sydney, Berlin, and Toronto,
packed what they had, bought a cheap airline ticket, and made their
way to the Land of Smiles. Some were looking for a cheap tropical
paradise; others thought they’d found Sodom and Gomorrah; but
almost every one of them was hoping in some way to make a fresh
start on a life that up until then probably had little to recommend
it. Many of these refugees from reality probably couldn’t have
located the city on a map before they decided it was the place for
them, maybe they still couldn’t, but now Bangkok had become their
last, maybe their only hope.

In the empty hours it was this army of the
dispossessed that took control of Sukhumvit Road.
Tuk-tuks
, little three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, flew up
and down the street most of the night ferrying carousers between
the two clumps of go-go bars that anchored the neighborhood: Nana
Plaza on the west and Soi Cowboy about a mile to the east. They
were all there: the lonely, the frightened, the guilty, the
depressed, and the psychotic. Soaked with sweat, they rushed back
and forth from one bar to another, reeking of that peculiarly sour,
metallic odor habitually given off by the emotionally overmatched
and underachieving. It was this floodtide of the lost and abandoned
that owned Sukhumvit Road after midnight.

“So what do you want from me, Big Jack?” Nata
asked.

“Whatever you can find out for me about Barry
Gale. If I’m going into Indian country tonight, I want to go
well-armed.”

Nata raised an eyebrow at me.

“Metaphorically speaking,” I added
quickly.

Nata thought about that for a moment, her
face a blank, then turned back to her keyboard and pushed a few
keys. Boxes began appearing on one of the big screens in front of
her. I watched her type Texas State Bank into a space in one of
them and after ten or fifteen seconds a list rolled up on the other
screen. She typed Barry Gale into another box and waited until a
second list replaced the first. Then she typed something that
appeared on the screen as nothing but a row of asterisks, hit the
Enter key twice, and waited.

After a few seconds an index of news stories
appeared back on the first screen, each entry providing a headline,
a newspaper’s name, a date, and the first few sentences from the
story. Nata started working her way methodically through every
item, calling up the full text of some of the accounts. By the time
she had been at it for ten or fifteen minutes, we knew pretty much
everything the press had reported about the death of Barry
Gale.

Barry had been at the bank’s North Dallas
guesthouse for several weeks while preparing the Texas State
directors for their formal meetings with the federal banking
examiners. The examiners were awfully curious as to exactly how
millions of dollars of the bank’s deposits managed to wander away
without anyone noticing, and they were ready to ask the directors a
lot of tough questions.

It was a Thursday afternoon when Barry told
everyone he was exhausted and was going to knock off and go to
Acapulco for a few days, so no one really wondered very much why
they hadn’t heard from him until he failed to turn up for a
conference with some Treasury Department people the following
Wednesday. Then on Thursday, exactly a week after Barry had last
been seen, a maintenance man found the body in a lap pool behind
the guesthouse off Preston Road.