She came in to the dock a little too hot and threw it into reverse. Fortunately, the big diesel slowed her down and the boat nudged up against the black tires that lined the dock. Cole jumped ashore and tied off the lines while Riley helped the paramedics aboard with their gurney. These guys were good. It was only a matter of seconds before they had him on the board, breathing bag on his mouth and one attendant continuing the heart pumps as they carried him toward the ambulance. One of the guys spoke excellent English, and Cole followed them to the ambulance, telling them what little he knew about the fellow’s identity.
“I hope he makes it,” Peewee said.
She turned to face him. “You’ve got some explaining to do, too,” she said.
“First I want my hat back.”
Riley rolled her eyes. When she went to grab her backpack off the engine compartment, she saw the other poisonous dart stuck into the wood.
She tossed the backpack to Peewee and said, “Front zipper pocket.” Then she grabbed an oily rag and pulled the dart out of the wood. “I’ll be right back.” She ran out to the ambulance and gave the dart to the attendant who was closing up the back door.
“This has got some of the poison on it,” she said.
The man nodded, then stepped around to the front and climbed in. Then with a belch of exhaust and a screeching siren, they were gone.
She turned back and walked through the passage along the side of the bridge that led back out to the river. Cole was leaning against one of the supports that held the roof up. She paused for a minute to just look at him. There was nothing more she could do for that boat driver. Perhaps she could allow herself to let her guard down, to allow herself to feel.
He looked so different with the beard—and the last four years showed on his face. He had aged. He was still fit, though. If anything, he probably weighed less than he had back in the Caribbean. He was almost too thin.
She thought about the times she had imagined their first meeting. Not one of those scenarios included the stink of a Bangkok canal, the sound of horns honking and sirens, and a guy dying from being hit with a dart from a blowpipe.
But now, there he stood. She opened her mouth, wanting to say something to him, but no words came to her. She had trusted him so completely once, but so much had changed since then. How could he have lied to her for four years?
That was when she noticed who was missing.
“Irv’s gone,” she said.
Cole turned around and a small smile lifted one corner of his mouth. In spite of her worries, her body reacted as though he had touched her.
“Good riddance,” he said. “I don’t trust that guy.”
“Oh, no.” Riley ran over and jumped aboard the boat, but her backpack was right there on top of the engine box. The front pocket hung open and Irv’s hat was gone. She felt a flush of panic as she reached into the other pocket and rummaged around. There. The Tibetan prayer gau was still there.
It wouldn’t have been a crime if he had taken it. It was his, after all. She wasn’t at all sure she believed the story about her grandfather wanting his son to have it. But she wanted it to be true.
So why hadn’t he taken it? And why had he really given it to her in the first place?
Riley stepped off the boat and approached Cole. She should show him the trinket, as Irv had called it, and see what he thought about it. His head swung from right to left. He was watching the traffic passing on the bridge above them.
“There’s something I want to show you,” she said.
“Okay, but I feel like a sitting duck here.”
She followed his eyes and saw all the pedestrians flowing across the bridge. “You’re right. Irv said this Benny has an uncanny ability to track people. If Irv took off, we’d better get out of here, too.”
“Then let’s go.” The engine was still running on the canal boat, and when Cole stepped aboard, she expected him to shut it down. Instead he turned and looked at her expectantly.
“You coming?”
“That’s not our boat.”
“The hell it isn’t. I paid the man to charter his boat for twenty-four hours. It’s my boat until, oh, about four o’clock tomorrow. Let’s get the hell out of here. Throw off those lines.”
Riley shrugged. She couldn’t argue with that logic.
Saphan Taksin SkyTrain Station
Bangkok, Thailand
November 17, 2012
Elijah arrived at the SkyTrain station early and staked out his corner of the structure far from the turnstiles, where a few straggling passengers passed in and out of the arrivals and departure area. It was too late for the working people, and perhaps too early for the denizens of the night. He leaned on the concrete barrier and looked down on the pedestrians walking beneath the elevated platform. Assorted carts selling everything from barbecued skewers of meat and cold drinks to jewelry and T-shirts lined the sidewalk beneath him. The people hurried past, ignoring the bored-looking vendors, most of whom sat on upended plastic buckets and avoided making eye contact with their prospects.
After an exquisite meal at the Oriental, along with several whiskies, he felt sleepy and irked at getting called out for a meeting at this hour. Benny had better have good news for him.
“Mr. Hawkes?”
Elijah turned around and the moment he saw the hesitance in the man’s manner, he knew it had all gone to shit.
“So you lost them again?”
“Yes, sir.”
Elijah swung around and slammed the palm of his hand on the top of the concrete wall. “Fuck!” He dropped his head back as though he were staring at the roof over them, but in fact, what he was seeing was his longed-for interlude with a lovely little Thai girl slipping out of his grasp.
And he had so been looking forward to the next meeting in San Francisco, where he would announce his success with his methods for defeating gold fingerprinting. It would all be for naught if there wasn’t any gold.
He turned and leveled his eyes on Benny. “How difficult could it be to find a ninety-three-year-old man and a woman?”
Benny said nothing.
“I should know better than to rely on some little Malay faggot with his fucking blowpipe.”
Benny still didn’t say a word. He stared back at Elijah.
So he was going for the inscrutable Oriental thing, was he? Elijah considered pulling out his boot knife to see if that would make the gook widen his eyes a little.
Elijah stepped in closer, then leaned in until their eyes were six inches apart. His voice was soft but tight. “The old man outrun you? The girl outsmart you?” He shoved Benny back against the railing and shouted, “Say something for yourself! What the fuck happened, asshole?”
“They had help.”
“You’re sure this time?”
Benny nodded.
Elijah stepped back. “What happened?”
“When I went into the hotel restaurant, they had already gone out the back door. Both of them. The old man and the girl. I followed them to the docks but before I could get to them, someone offered them a ride on a canal boat. They disappeared down the river.”
“Did you shoot?”
He nodded. “I hit the driver.”
“Any idea who this is who’s helping them?”
Benny shook his head. “There were two of them on the boat. The driver and another man. The other one is the one who is helping. He’s Caucasian.”
“Does the old man know him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where do you think they’ll head?”
“That’s why I asked to speak to you. It was no use following anymore. She is a sailor and she will want to return to her boat. It’s down in Phuket. The old man, I don’t know. I believe he will stay with her. I still don’t know what he stole or what skin he’s got in this game. It makes more sense for me to go to Phuket and intercept the girl there. Assuming she still has what you want.”
Elijah looked out over the rooftops of the city at the c
razy web of tangled electric and telephone lines. The man was right. There were dozens of ways they could travel to Phuket. Better to jump to the other end and not try to follow their trail. He nodded. “Okay.”
“Mr. Hawkes, I could do a better job if I knew exactly what I was looking for.”
Elijah sighed. Benny was getting out of line. He didn’t know his place anymore. His part in this operation was strictly on a need-to-know basis. On the other hand, he didn’t want Benny bringing back the wrong goods. And a tattooed heathen was expendable. In fact, that would give Elijah something to look forward to.
“The old man was working on certain documents. As usual, old stuff from the Second World War. They were found at a historical site in the Philippines. The first one was a typed letter written in Japanese. The second was a hand-drawn document with some pictograms. Both of these were wrapped in a piece of silk. The old man stole the lot, and now we’re going to get them back.”
“Yes, Mr. Hawkes.”
“Good. Go down there and get our property back. These are old and fragile artifacts. Don’t let them get damaged. The girl, you can get rid of, but bring the old man to me. We need him alive. Unfortunately, he’s the only one who can figure out these damn Japanese codes.”
The Chao Phraya River
Bangkok, Thailand
November 17, 2012
After Riley pushed the bow of the boat off the dock, Cole let the current do the rest to turn the boat around. He shoved up the throttle and headed back down to the river. There was plenty of traffic on the canal, even past nine. If anything, it seemed like the city was just coming to life.
She was right that it wouldn’t take too much guessing for that guy to figure out where they’d headed—that they would try to get their man to a hospital. If Riley had figured out this was the closest hospital, someone else could do the same math. The only thing they had in their favor was that traffic on the streets of Bangkok was in a constant state of gridlock. Even if the guy took one of the motorbike taxis, he’d still be working his way across town.
When they started down the canal, Riley stayed at the back of the boat, looking at something in a piece of cloth. The damn canal boat had no autopilot so he couldn’t leave the helm to go talk to her.
“What’s that you’re looking at?” he shouted over the noise of the engine.
She walked up to the bow and held out a small, tubelike container made of lacy gold filigree.
“That’s beautiful. Where’d you get it?”
She didn’t say anything right away. He waited.
When she did speak, it was to answer his question with one of her own. “How’d you know where to find me?”
Keeping his eyes on the narrow canal ahead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a cheap disposable phone. “Theo called me. He’s got an alert set so he knows every time you post something online. He told me you were going to a hotel called the Napa House down by the river. I decided to charter a boat in case I needed to make a fast getaway. I sure didn’t expect to see you come running down the dock an hour later.”
“How is Theo?”
Cole stared at the dark water of the canal ahead. Now wasn’t the time. “He’s fine.”
“Where is he?”
“On the boat. In Subic Bay. That’s in the Philippines.”
“I used all my State Department connections to search for your boat. How’d you make her disappear?”
“Well, you wouldn’t recognize her today. We made some big changes in Guatemala a few years ago.”
“A new name, I guess.”
He nodded. “We all got new names. And we fly under the Cayman Islands flag now.”
“When I couldn’t find either one of you, I really worried about Theo. I’m glad to hear you say he’s okay.”
He looked away from their course and stole a quick glance at her face. He’d heard something in her voice, and for a minute he thought maybe she knew somehow. But that was impossible.
“Theo’s doing fine.” He couldn’t tell her the rest now. She’d see for herself—soon, he hoped, assuming he could talk her into going back to the Philippines with him. That he had to do. It was the only way to keep her safe now.
She walked to the side of the boat and looked up at the sky. She was still clutching that gold thing in her fist, but she hadn’t offered to tell him about it. He felt as though she were slipping away from him.
When he’d first spoken to her, she’d been surprised, but still glad to see him. The longer this craziness went on, though, the longer she had to think about the last four years. He didn’t blame her. He thought about how much he would have suffered if she’d made him believe she was dead. But he’d had to do it. He had to protect her. When he’d seen what they’d done to Theo, he knew it was no longer possible to contact her. And yet somehow, as stubbornly independent as she was, he had a feeling she wasn’t going to buy that. Well, buy it or not, it was the truth.
And now it appeared as though what he had feared all along had happened. They had used her to find him.
When the canal ended at the Chao Phraya River, he turned right toward the sea. He had no charts, and while he knew it was quite a distance, he figured it was time they developed a plan. She’d had a navigation program on that little phone of hers with charts.
He looked over his shoulder. She was still standing with her back turned to him on the port side, bent forward at the waist, her forearms resting on the thick wood rail. The wind was blowing the hair back from her face. Even in the dim glow cast from the city lights she was a glass of ice water to a man dying of thirst. He wanted to stand there all night drinking in every detail of her.
But if these guys, both Peewee and Benny, worked for the men he thought they did—then he’d better stop mooning over the girl and come up with a plan.
“Riley, have you got charts and GPS on that phone of yours?”
She turned to look at him and smiled, and he almost forgot his name, much less a plan. She straightened up and strolled across the deck. She picked up her backpack, reached into a zippered pocket, and pulled out her phone.
“Where do you want to go?” she said.
“I want you to come back to the Philippines with me.”
She smiled again. “Not in this boat. It’s probably eighteen hundred miles down around Singapore and across the South China Sea.”
“I like it when you smile.”
“I assumed you were joking.”
“I’m serious. Theo and I, we’re on to something really big. This is bigger than those Skull and Bones Patriarchs, bigger than Surcouf. These guys have been behind false-flag attacks, buying elections, assassinations, Iran–Contra. You name some kind of black-ops deal in the last fifty years, and these guys were the ones.”
She sighed. “Oh, Cole. You might look a bit different, but you haven’t changed that much.”
“Come back with me. There’s no other way I can protect you now.”
“Protect me?” She laughed. “Really?”
“You don’t know what they’re capable of.”
“Cole, where the hell have you been for the last four years? I’ve done a pretty damn fine job of taking care of myself, thank you. I sailed my boat single-handed halfway around the world chasing after dead-end clues you left me, and suddenly you think I need you to protect me? Besides, I can’t go to the Philippines. My boat’s down in Phuket.”
“Then let’s go get it.”
She stood with her arms crossed and didn’t answer him.
He tried again. “We could sail it to Subic Bay together. It would take us what, a couple of weeks?”
“Yeah. But right now we’re a long way from Phuket. What are we going to do with this boat?”
“At first I thought we’d just leave it at one of the ferry docks on the outskirts of Bangkok, but then I thought it through a little more.”
“Yeah?”
“If we fly or take a train, you are going to have to show your passport.”
; “Right, but this is Thailand. It’s not like they have supercomputers in their transportation industry here.”
“Don’t underestimate these guys, Riley.”
“What guys? Cole, I’ve been standing over there at the rail trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Do you know who’s behind this Benny guy? Because I sure don’t. The last thirty-six hours or so have been . . . interesting, shall we say? A grandfather who was supposed to have gone missing in World War II supposedly showed up in the Philippines, a dead boyfriend turns up alive, and somebody is shooting poison darts at us with a blowpipe. And mixed up in the middle of it all is this ninety-three-year-old elf with loose dentures and an apparently endless supply of fortune-cookie wisdom. And now you’re going to try to link what happened today to your crazy conspiracy theories. It’s a lot to take in.”
He nudged the helm a little to port to miss a tug with a long string of barges, then stroked the whiskers on his neck. “I know. And I know I have a lot of explaining to do.”
She shot him a look that felt like she had laser vision. The kind of lasers they use to do surgery.
“But Riley, first, we’d better figure out where the hell we’re going now. I say we take the river all the way to the Gulf of Thailand.”
“What about that poor guy back in the hospital? I have to believe he’ll live. How will he find his boat?”
“I’ve got his name. We’ll call the hospital and leave a message explaining where his boat is. Let’s pick a small place just south of the river mouth. Can you show me how to use that nav program?”
She sighed and pulled her lips in over her teeth. Then she rubbed the phone on her pants leg to polish the screen. She lifted it into his field of vision so he could watch the screen and the river at the same time.
“This app is called iNavX. I bought charts for all of Thailand. See that little blue boat on the screen? That’s us. The GPS is amazingly accurate.” She swiped her fingers across the screen. “See. This is how you zoom in and out. And at the top of the screen here, it shows that our speed over ground right now is 9.6 knots.”
Dragon's Triangle (The Shipwreck Adventures Book 2) Page 12
