Pattaya 24/7

by Christopher G. Moore

  “Ask him if he knows who was on duty the first of January,” said Calvino.

  “He wants to know what day of the week that was.”

  “Wednesday,” said Colonel Pratt. “New Year’s fell on Wednesday.”

  “How did you know that?” asked Calvino.

  “This year is a Wednesday child. I am a Wednesday child.”

  “I never knew that.”

  Colonel Pratt looked over at his friend.

  “There are many things you don’t know.”

  The security guard didn’t know who had been on duty; but he wrote down the name and phone number of his supervisor. He never asked why a couple of investors would want that information. They walked into the first floor area, stepping over pieces of rebar, scattered rusty nails and weathered pieces of scrap wood. Anything of value was long gone. Nui squatted down on the floor and spread out the blueprints.

  “We are here,” she said, pointing at the blueprint.

  “If we go through that area, on the other side is the elevator shaft.”

  A small voice in the back of Colonel Pratt’s head told him that he should stop and return for backup. Another voice said there wasn’t enough time. It could be a wild goose chase, but he had no choice but to follow up the lead. The information was dated; if it led anywhere, it would be a miracle. He decided it would be enough to check out the elevator shaft and drive back to the hotel before others started asking why he’d been away so long. The clock was ticking and the special Cobra Gold opening ceremony was twenty-four hours away. The Ambassador would be coming from a reception in U-Tapao. The US navy had maintained a presence at U-Tapao since the Vietnam war. No one would admit to active operations. Or to interrogation centers. Presence was the new codeword. It was like dark energy, which was everywhere in the universe.

  In the center of the lobby was the elevator shaft. Nui knocked away a thin wall of cobwebs, walked inside the shaft and looked up at the sky eighteen stories overhead. She reappeared a moment later.

  “If you wanted to do some serious damage, that’s where you’d hide a bomb,” she said, picking the cobwebs off her fingers.

  “It would be like shooting debris out of an eighteen-story gun barrel,” said Calvino.

  “I never thought of it that way. It would make quite a bang,” said Nui.

  “We can take the stairs to the top.”

  Calvino looked at the first step and thought, Eighteen floors of concrete stairs. That was just what the doctor had ordered. On the twelfth floor, they stopped to rest on a landing. Calvino was out of breath, doubled over, arms resting on his legs, taking deep breaths. Twelve floors taken fast gave an indication of what kind of shape a man was in. He was in lousy shape. They looked out on the soi below and beyond to the sea obscured by a light rain.

  “What if he’s up there?” asked Nui.

  “That’s why you are stopping here,” said Colonel Pratt. “Because I am a woman?”

  “Because you’re a civilian.”

  “Your ‘secretary’ doesn’t look like a Thai cop.”

  Calvino was trying to catch his breath, wishing his face didn’t look so busted up. He had caught her staring at the stitch line over his ear. “I am not his secretary. I am a private investigator. And the colonel is right. There’s nothing more you can do.”

  He breathed in slowly, letting the air out.

  “Did you have an operation or something?” she asked.

  “I had a new ear sewn on. I change every couple of years. It improves my hearing.”

  She turned back to Colonel Pratt.

  “I won’t get in the way. Besides, I can show you the emer- gency access door. Or secret trap door, if you like Nancy Drew mysteries. This door, you’d never find it in a million years.”

  “Go on,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “The emergency access door is on the blueprint. It leads to a small room overlooking the elevator shaft.”

  Having caught his breath, on the floor Calvino saw a piece of paper with foreign writing. He picked it up, looked at it, and sighed. The printed letters on the paper were in Arabic. He showed it to Colonel Pratt. Nui looked at the paper, too. Neither of them could read the writing. It might have been a page from a book of poems, or scriptures, or a prayer bulletin or an operational manual. In other words, it might have been anything.

  “There’s a good chance our man was here,” said Calvino.

  “He might have found the access door,” Colonel Pratt said to Nui.

  Nothing was ever that easy. Jardine had said that Hasam was a fundamentalist who had been waiting for months, if not his entire life, for a special day. Curled up in the heart of a barbarous, poisonous city, waiting for his order, waiting to purify the impure. And tomorrow was the day he’d been waiting for. Jahiliyya was the word for this state of barbarism. True believers spent their entire lives waiting for tomorrow and that day never came. In Hasam’s case, it was coming. It was less than twenty-four hours away. A Thai police colonel, a farang in a sports coat, and a slim, beautiful Thai woman wearing a hardhat and jeans stood between him and his virgins. The moment he saw them he would realize that his world was coming to an end. He would only need his thumb to press a button to set off the bomb. Better blow it up a day early than never have the chance at all. He would still die a martyr. He would cleanse the world.

  “He occupies the high ground,” said Colonel Pratt. He stood in front of the open elevator shaft on the twelfth floor.

  “That gives him the advantage.”

  He looked at the paper with the Arabic writing on it. They had gone as far as they could go.

  “Khun Nui, it’s time to turn around and go back to the car.”

  “I know and, ‘Thank you for your help. And it would be better if you didn’t say anything.’ That’s what you were going to say, right?”

  “What I was going to say is that, given these circumstances, you had better stay with us. We can’t risk anything at this point.”

  She smirked.

  “Meaning, I might be helping the man you’re looking for.”

  Colonel Pratt folded the paper, slipped it into his pocket. His cellphone rang.

  “Jardine, we might need some advice. Do you read Arabic?”

  Colonel Pratt nodded.

  “I’ll meet you in ten minutes in the parking lot of Big C.”

  As the colonel spoke, Calvino leaned against the edge of the elevator shaft, arms folded. But he felt on edge. He had no idea what was at the upper end of that shaft. It was like waiting for a taxi in the old days when muggers lurked in the shadows with cheap handguns on the lower East Side of Manhattan. It was ever so easy to get killed and ever so easy to make the mistake that you weren’t being clocked.

  After the call ended, Colonel Pratt nodded to Calvino, “Time to go.” He turned and started down the concrete staircase. Nui, agitated and disturbed, had turned a ghostly pale color. She was holding back the stress but it was written in white all over her body. She wrung her hands. Calvino remained the target of her anger.

  “Am I under arrest?” she asked Colonel Pratt.

  Calvino put a finger to his lips.

  “Please whisper. Your voice will carry.”

  She walked to the top step and waited for him to respond. He said nothing.

  “Not arrest. Protective custody,” whispered Calvino. He stood beside her and then started down the stairs after Colonel Pratt.

  “You have lived in Asia too long.”

  Her voice quavered as if she’d lost the ability to keep the frequency steady.

  “Do you know the Chinese word for confusion? You put together the symbol for woman and the symbol for dealing with a Harvard engineer who can read blueprints.”

  She had been one step behind him; she pulled ahead, blocking the staircase.

  “The translation is corruption,” she whispered. Her tone lingered over the word “corruption” as if some distasteful thing had to be identified before being spit out.

  Calvino shoul
d have figured her mother was Chinese.

  “Just testing.”

  “How do I know either of you are telling me the truth?”

  “You don’t,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “Have some faith, Vanessa May,” said Calvino.

  “This is not happening,” she said.

  “For everyone’s sake, let’s hope that it doesn’t happen,” said Calvino.

  FORTY-TWO

  JARDINE HAD ALREADY arrived and stood, arms folded, leaning against his car. He had shed his jacket and tie. He held an umbrella in his right hand against the light drizzle. His white shirt looked slept in and his dark trouser cuffs were damp from the rain. He was impossible to miss. Calvino pulled in the parking space beside Jardine’s Volvo. He opened the door and Colonel Pratt stepped out under the umbrella. Jardine looked in the back and saw the engineer.

  “You two stay put,” he said, looking at Nui and Calvino. He returned to his Volvo with heavily tinted windows.

  Colonel Pratt got in on the passenger side.

  “What’s going on here, Colonel?”

  “We have a possible location for Hasam.”

  “Who is the ‘we’?”

  Colonel Pratt said nothing.

  “This is a highly sensitive operation, Colonel Pratt. We can’t afford having civilians fucking it up. If Hasam gets away. . .”

  “You’ll have my balls,” said Colonel Pratt. “One thing, Jardine. Don’t threaten me in my own country. Or I’ll have your balls.”

  Jardine leaned against the steering wheel, both hands palm down on the rim.

  “Okay, let’s start over. What have you got?”

  Colonel Pratt handed him the paper that Calvino had found in the condo. Jardine read it a couple of times.

  “Can you take me where you found this?” asked Jardine. Without a word, Colonel Pratt opened the Volvo door, climbed out and walked back to Calvino’s car. A moment later, Jardine slammed his car door shut and slid into the back seat next to Nui. She slid close to the opposite door, wondering why this tall, rangy farang had suddenly joined them.

  “What’s the paper say, Jardine?” asked Calvino.

  Jardine looked at the woman in the back seat and at Calvino and shook his head. He hated operations with civilians. They asked too many questions and got in the way.

  “Vincent found it,” said Colonel Pratt.

  “Nui’s the one who found it,” said Calvino.

  She nodded at Jardine. “Hi, I am Nui.”

  “Who is she?” he asked the colonel.

  “A Harvard-educated civil engineer,” said Colonel Pratt. There was a slight hint of pride in his voice. She was after all Thai, and pride was to be taken in any Thai who had shone on the international stage.

  Jardine raised an eyebrow.

  “And I presume there is a reason you are here.”

  “I wouldn’t presume anything if I were you. I thought they were Hong Kong investors. Then it turns out they’re not from Hong Kong. I should ask where you’re from. Assuming I can get a straight answer out of you,” said Nui.

  Jardine had a snapshot and in the frame of that shot was a Thai police colonel and an American national private eye on a back channel operation likely in way over their heads.

  “Hong Kong investors. What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “It worked,” said Calvino. “We got into the building.”

  “For the record, I never bought their story about being investors from Hong Kong,” she said, looking at Colonel Pratt and catching Calvino’s eye as he watched her in his rearview mirror.

  “For the record, I didn’t think you were a secretary,” said Calvino.

  “What was written on the paper?” Colonel Pratt asked. Jardine closed his eyes and slowly shook his head.

  “The paper is a message. It is from the Koran and in the middle of the passage is a date and time.”

  He glanced at his watch.

  “We have about an hour and a half to find him.”

  “We’ll drive you to the probable location,” said Colonel Pratt. “But we still don’t have a positive confirmation that Hasam’s inside. The only evidence is the paper we found.”

  “Nui was the engineer on the building site,” said Calvino.

  She explained the history of the building to Jardine, stopping to answer his questions. “From the room, he can see anyone approaching the building,” she said.

  “We studied the blueprints,” said Colonel Pratt. “If he’s inside, Nui was able to pinpoint his probable location.”

  It fit a pattern that Jardine knew from Bosnia to Somalia. The chances were that Hasam was holed up in the elevator tower. Jardine knew their training. Hasam would be heavily armed. He would be prepared. Men like him were pretty much meat-and-potatoes or rice-and-fish-sauce. No-frill killing machines. He also immediately understood Nui; she was one of those bicultural marvels who fell between two worlds. It was okay and not okay at the same time. The colonel would have understood the two spheres operating in tandem.

  Jardine went back to his Volvo and opened the trunk removing a long leather case. Calvino popped the lid of his trunk and Jardine loaded his weapon, then closed the lid. He looked at his watch. He wiped away the beads of rain and sweat mixed together on his upper lip. With Jardine in the back seat, Calvino drove back to the condo site. The same security guard came out under an umbrella and looked inside. Seeing Calvino on the driver’s side, he motioned for him to roll down the window. When he did, Colonel Pratt leaned over and showed his police ID.

  “Please go back to the guard house and stay there until I tell you to leave. That is an order,” said Colonel Pratt.

  The security guard swallowed hard, snapped off a smart salute and retreated to the guardhouse, shutting the door behind.

  From the car, Jardine thought that Hasam had chosen a good operational location. It was the place he would have chosen himself. At the top, he would have an unobstructed view of the road. The colonel had been right. Putting a team of sharpshooters in place wouldn’t work. Cars, helicopters and armored vehicles would tell Hasam to move up his appointment with paradise. Once that happened, he would trigger the device, and the dust from a dirty bomb would blast radiation a kilometer out in every direction. The wind would carry it for hundreds of miles, and once afloat, catching the right winds, the cloud of radioactive material would rain down over Pattaya and carry on into Cambodia and Vietnam before breaking up over the coast of China. Hasam knew precisely what he was doing choosing that spot and no doubt the site had been picked because of this advantage and location.

  Calvino drove his Honda through the entrance of the building site. When they got out of the car, it would have been impossible to see how many people were in the car, or that Jardine had unpacked his sniper’s rifle and mounted a night vision scope for use inside the elevator shaft. Then he removed an Uzi, slapped in a clip and handed it to the colonel. Next from the case Jardine removed a twelve-gauge sawed-off shotgun, felt inside the case for a box of shells and loaded the magazine. He leaned the shotgun against the side of the car. The last weapon was a Glock. He checked the clip; it was loaded and a round was in the chamber.

  “Finished unpacking your home arsenal?” asked Calvino. “I never leave home without it. Otherwise I might not be going back.”

  Nui felt cold; a shiver bolted up her spine. She looked smaller, more vulnerable and much younger standing in the open as Jardine checked all of the guns.

  “You have the blueprints?” asked Jardine. “Let’s have a look.”

  Nui fumbled with the blueprints on the concrete floor inside the parking area. Jardine could read blueprints. He didn’t need an explanation of what he was looking at. It turned out Jardine had trained as a civil engineer at the Ohio State. He had been unable to get into Harvard. Nui gathered up the blueprints and they walked from the parking area into the main lobby.

  Calvino checked his .38 caliber police special. Jardine watched him, leaned down, picked up the shotgun and held it ou
t to Calvino.

  “Your .38 isn’t going to be of much use.”

  Jardine immediately walked to within inches of the large empty voids that were to be used as the elevator shaft. He put a finger to his lips.

  He mouthed the words, “Move back to the parking area.”

  Once they were outside in the parking lot, Jardine said, “I have two objectives. Kill Hasam before he detonates the bomb. And then I have,” he looked at his watch, “about thirty-eight minutes to defuse the bomb.”

  “Looks like you found the right place for a clean shot,” said Calvino.

  No one needed to tell Jardine that he had only one shot. Nui told Jardine about the emergency access door.

  “It could be booby trapped,” said Jardine. “I have to take him from the elevator shaft.”

  She shrugged off his instant dismissal of the secret door. Maybe he was right, the man inside the room—if there was a man after all—might have found the door. She let it go. Her entire career had been one long head-butt against male ego. Let it go, she told herself.

  “The shaft was designed for three side-by-side elevators,” said Nui.”

  “What about the interior shaft walls on each floor? There should be a short ridge around the perimeter. A place where a maintenance man can crawl around and check the cables.”

  She nodded.

  “They should be there.”

  “I’ll crawl inside the shaft on the sixteenth floor and balance against the ridge. I’ll need someone to go on the roof and caused a diversion. If it works, we can get whoever is left inside to go to the window and look down the shaft.” He didn’t need to explain what would happen next.

  “In New York I grew up on rooftops. I’ll get his attention,” said Calvino. He slung the barrel of the sawed-off shotgun over his shoulder. It smelled freshly oiled. Remington was the make of an excellent shotgun and also of an excellent typewriter. In the scheme of weapons and word-processing, both had seen better days, but for the right moment the shotgun was indispensable. No one was saying anything about the five million dollar reward; but it was working somewhere in the back of their minds.