Tranquility Denied

by A. C. Frieden

  Aspen explained the subject who had disappeared, Dr. Tim Snow, was a colleague. They both worked for the CDC out of Atlanta. The missing man had finished some official business in Hong Kong and had scheduled some personal time to tour Thailand before returning to the U.S. That was the last anyone in official channels had heard from him. The sensitive issue was that Dr. Snow had the highest security clearance in the communicable disease area especially as it applied to foreign origin viruses.

  “Okay,” Matt said, “but what do you want from me? I’m not a detective.”

  “But you do know your way around Thailand and specifically the jungle. We understand you are periodically traveling into and spending time in forest and jungle areas throughout the country. It wouldn’t seem unusual for you to be banging through the woods in the area north of Chiang Rai where this man disappeared. Certainly if you are on the scene, it would be normal to ask questions about what happened to the foreigner.”

  “What if I come up with nothing?”

  “Then we have nothing. But it’s nothing that has been checked out. We can’t close the file until we know for sure what has happened but it would be an important step in that direction.”

  “Let me think on it. How do I get in touch with you?”

  Aspen handed Matt a mobile phone. “It’s better, unless absolutely required, if we don’t meet again to keep from calling attention to what you are doing. This is an unregistered phone. Just call or send me a text if things get complicated. We can go day by day. When we finish I will send you an email address to which you can send a report. You text me an account number and a bank, any country, and we’ll pay your expenses and fees, government rate I’m afraid, into that account.”

  Matt stood up, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was falling into a trap of some sort but he couldn’t see it yet. “Okay, let me sleep on it and I’ll answer you tomorrow. If I go, I’ll leave after I wrap up some things here in the morning. I’ll possibly go up tomorrow afternoon”.

  “Thanks. This is important. We really appreciate it.”

  They shook hands and Jim left, heading up the lower lobby stairs to the main lobby. Matt sat back down to take a second to organize his thoughts. He felt a bit queasy about all of this. The pieces he had been given didn’t quite add up. It wasn’t what he was told. As always it was what he wasn’t told. If the missing guy was really that important why wasn’t the embassy in on this? Why weren’t the Thai government security people involved? He trusted Carl with his life, had done so many times, but this was not as straight forward as the government man was trying to make it seem.

  As he was thinking these things over, four women came walking down the stairs going in the direction of the nightclub. One stopped and looked over at Matt. Then she called to him, “Hey, you.”

  Matt looked, saw who it was, smiled and responded, “Hey, you, back.” It was Noi his only girl. They had been circling each other for over six months, both interested and yet both wary of getting too close. After making several dating mistakes on his return to Thailand with what he termed Bangkok beauty queens in their mid-twenties, Matt had met Noi while rock climbing in the Krabi area of Southern Thailand. She was thirtyish, very attractive but definitely not a beauty queen in that she didn’t seem to mind being exposed to the sun or salt water and could handle climbing and laying ropes on the rock face as well as many men. His constant travel to forest areas kept them apart but she had no problem with it, only telling him to call when he could.

  Noi separated from her girlfriends, waving them on into the nightclub. She didn’t look outdoorsy tonight. She wore a simple black cocktail dress cut above the knees with a snug V bodice showing a moderate amount of breast. Walking over to Matt, she said, “It’s good to see you. Are you busy?”

  “No, I was just bringing an overseas visitor back to the hotel. How about you?”

  “The girls wanted to make a last stop for the night. I’m just tagging along. Got a better idea?” She knew Matt had no interest in stepping inside the nightclub. It just wasn’t his scene.

  “Well, I’m a bit hungry. Want to go see if we can find a bowl of noodles in the neighborhood?” One of the things Matt liked about Noi was that she wouldn’t stand on ceremony as far as dress was concerned. Many women wearing a cocktail dress would protest that they were overdressed to sit at a street side table eating noodles. Not Noi.

  In reply, Noi turned and waved at her girlfriends who were watching through the windows from inside the nightclub. She gave them a thumbs up letting them know she was going with Matt. They all laughed and waved back. One gave them the peace sign.

  Chapter 2

  Yoshi Moriumi was hot and tired and wished he was back in Osaka with the string of bar girls and nightclubs he managed for the big boss. Thailand, with its rampant sex industry, enormous drug industry and corruption throughout, had attracted the yakuza since the 1950s. Illicit activities tied to organized crime accounted for up to twenty percent of Thai GDP by some accounts. This was a wonderland for the yakuza. Every major syndicate in Japan was present here as was every major crime. This was the perfect setting for the special project he had been sent to check on. He had been in at the beginning of the project and the bosses felt he was the best one to oversee any problems that came up.

  Normally a trip to Thailand would have made him the envy of his brothers in the Osaka gang, but not this one. There was to be no pleasant stop to visit the gang club in Thaniya Plaza in Bangkok or time to catch a day or two on the golf course. He had been given three hours’ notice to catch the plane in Osaka then had to rush straight through the Bangkok airport and catch a connection to Chiang Rai. Now, he was to meet with the gang’s local rep who would brief him before making a trip to the work complex in the jungle.

  This man—a fellow yakuza Yoshi knew from Osaka—and two younger members of the local organization met him at the airport and took him to the hotel. They had booked him into a luxury hotel, the Dusit Island Resort. He appreciated that even though he would spend little time there. The local man had already checked into the room for him as well. As he followed the bellboy up to the suite, he thought at least this was going well. He was being shown a bit of the respect he deserved. After all, his family had over a seventy year history in the organization. His grandfather had been an associate, however minor, of Toyama Mitsuru, the legendary founder of the Black Dragon Society—the first and foremost of the ultra-right wing patriotic societies formed before the Russo Japanese war in 1905. The yakuza—self-styled latter day samurai in their various gangs—had been the strong arm of these societies from the very beginning. Yoshi’s family had been involved from the very beginning to the present day. He thought of himself as part of a warrior aristocracy and in the world of the Japanese gangster, he was.

  After thirty minutes to clean up and unpack, he went down to the front of the hotel. There was a car waiting to take him to meet again with the local rep, Kenji, an Osaka gang member serving out several years in exile after killing an uncooperative politician in Southern Japan. This had made him too hot for the local scene and forced the gang to take him out of Japan until official memories faded.

  The ride to a villa on the outskirts of town took twenty minutes. Kenji was waiting for him on the front porch which was shielded with mosquito screens and filled with green plants. Most of the plants were hanging orchids that Yoshi appreciated. His host waiting outside for him was another sign of respect. Kenji, though younger, was close to his age and apart from the fact that Yoshi was visiting from the head office, had no obligation to defer to him. Yoshi thought possibly it was an eagerness on Kenji’s part to have his exile end as soon as possible that brought on this good behavior. In any case, he noted it.

  Kenji took him to a side room with a small table fitted in a sunken floor—much as a private room in a Japanese restaurant—allowing them to sit on cushions on the floor with their feet under the table. The room was somewhat Spartan in its lack of furnishings. The surfaces of the walls we
re decorated with bamboo and hangings of Japanese nature prints. A small water fountain gurgled softly in the corner. It seemed Kenji, longing for home, was trying to construct a bit of Japan in this remote corner of Thailand.

  After sitting and receiving the obligatory cup of tea, Yoshi decided to move quickly to the subject. “What went wrong? Why was this foreigner killed?” he asked.

  Kenji paused, looking down for a moment and then said, “Our Thai friends are responsible for what went wrong. The men who did this were our contractor’s men handling the drugs. Not our men. The foreigner was walking along the back road through the forest and stumbled across the contractor’s group loading a drug shipment onto a pickup truck. The fools convinced themselves they were going to be exposed by a U.S. drug agent and the only option was to silence him. He wasn’t shot; rather they beat him to death when he tried to run away while they were questioning him about his presence. The man never got near to the camp.”

  “Well, what is the truth? Was this man an American drug agent?”

  “It’s not clear. He maintained he was not. He was supposedly in Thailand as a tourist after a work visit in Hong Kong. He was carrying an official passport but had no identification linking him with any drug or security agencies.”

  “This is regrettable. What did they do with the body?”

  “We had a lucky break. There is a forest clearing some distance away where the park rangers had recently built some small cabins in which they could spend nights while patrolling for poachers. Somehow this enraged the local elephant herd and they came through and broke up most of the huts. Our local crew left the body there making it look as if the tourist had stumbled upon the elephant herd and the elephants had attacked him. The contractor’s crew phoned in an anonymous tip to the rangers about seeing a farang, a foreigner, walking in the forest nearby. Rangers looking for the tourist soon discovered the body. We have been told they are taking the approach that the elephant herd was responsible in the report they are making now.”

  Yoshi just grunted, not willing to signify that what had been done was either good or bad. Time would tell. “What about the shipments? Did they both go off in their respective directions?”

  “One did. The load of shabu was taken down to the river and south by boat and then overland to the port at Laem Chabang. That shipment went off immediately. That’s what was being loaded when the foreigner stumbled upon them. The shipment of special materials up river to China is being delayed until we make sure of who and what the foreigner was. I have cleared the scientists working on the shipment off the site. Once they return it will take a week to ten days processing the materials to have the shipment ready to go. These are very dangerous substances.”

  “How about the contractor’s men responsible for this mess? Has any action been taken with them?”

  “Not yet. I thought it best to keep them off guard and quiet for now. We can punish them later.”

  Yoshi sat back and thought, deliberately taking time to let Kenji squirm a bit, impressing on him through this process who was the boss. Finally, Yoshi heaved a sigh. “This incident is regrettable. Our security must be tighter, but the witness has been eliminated and one shipment is gone. Let’s stand down activity on this site for a while, get the contractor’s men out of here and have our security men just keep an eye on things and await developments. Make sure our friends with the forest rangers get the word to post the area as closed. No one enters, Thai or foreign. Tell them to use the danger from the elephants as an excuse if anyone protests.”

  Kenji nodded in acceptance.

  Yoshi again took time before speaking further and then said, “If there are no further intrusions, we will make payment and send off the second shipment when we are sure of things. This is a critical phase of the program. It cannot be allowed to go wrong.”

  For the first time during the discussion, Kenji showed a faint smile. “I gave the orders for the site to be vacated already. Currently all the staff are standing down awaiting our word to start up again except for some of our men watching the site area to keep it secure and two men in contact with the park rangers to monitor their activities. Perhaps tomorrow you will have time for some golf while we wait for developments?”

  Yoshi allowed himself a laugh. “That’s the only good thing I have heard today. Let’s plan on it. And let’s keep a close eye on the site, the forest department rangers and any other foreigners who may be looking around. Maybe this is a coincidence and maybe…” He let the sentence trail off not wanting to speak the unspeakable. Things had gone so smoothly with the special operation so far. This operation was very important to his superiors in the gang and their right wing political connections. He would not want to be the one whose name was associated with its discovery or disruption.

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