“Have the guests signed a lease or is it just a month to month arrangement?” Cathy asked.
“One year. He’s Algerian. She’s from Mumbai, I think. Been together for almost two years. Here, they’ve only been staying for three months and she’s already called in a broken lamp shade, a cracked plasma screen, Housekeeping has had to clean up a blood stain on the carpet and Engineering has had to pick up their dead cat from a twelfth floor apartment balcony. Trust me, that’s only some of it. If I gave you a list, you’d be thinking of ways to throw him out too.”
“Wow.”
“You telling me. You know how it is, I can’t come right out and tell her to leave him. They are both guests and he could turn around with a long list of complaints. I’m finding it so hard. How do you just stand and watch without putting a stop to it?
“Ray, you can’t. You know that. She needs to put a stop to it herself. She needs to say “no”. But in her position, I’m sure she feels as if nothing good can come from her. He must be filling her head with all kinds of nonsense about how stupid she is. It’s not as easy as it looks,” Cathy said gently.
“Are you speaking from personal experience?” Ray asked, looking around as the associates on duty attended to other guests.
“No, just watching from the outside through the years.”
“She calls me directly, it was the least I could do, Cathy. I gave her my mobile number and told her to use it for emergencies. He’s extremely possessive as well, you know. This one time she had gone for a walk on the beach and I was off duty, enjoying my daily jog. We had stopped for a chat and he saw us from the apartment balcony and was livid. Within the hour, he had wanted to see me in the lobby and had accused me of flirting with guests and had made an official complaint that I wasn’t doing my job.”
Cathy watched his expression, knowing there was more to the story than what Ray told her, but decided not to push the matter, for now. He sighed.
“I just don’t want the next call to be about something I can’t fix and the thing is, she’s not stupid, Cathy. The other day, we had a server issue which affected all the computers in reception. IT cracked their heads for more than half a day. She volunteered and it took her less than twenty minutes to figure it out before we were up and running. She makes it seem so easy.”
“What does he do? As in for work?” Cathy asked.
“He runs a bar downtown, it’s about ten minutes away. She used to help out as a cashier or something and then he told me that it was awkward to have her around because he couldn’t see his other women.”
“His other women?!”
“Oh yeah. He’s a proper Casanova. Thinks he’s a Brad Pitt look-alike, always chasing our girls at reception. This one time, I saw him in a guest room, on the other side. He was with another cafe owner, well the owner’s wife. He felt he needed to explain and told me she needed money to save her business. He was going to give it to her but at a price of course. He said that’s all women were good for, their holes.”
“I think he got left behind a couple of decades,” Cathy grimaced.
“Looks like it, doesn’t it? One of his staff has already lodged a police complaint against him. He called me one night, asked me to help out with the local police. Of course, he insisted that he was innocent and she was a local slut trying to make a quick buck but her story seemed pretty air tight. Apparently, he wanted to pay her $3000 for a week of sex.”
“Stop it! The more I know about him, the more I have the urge to spit on him when I meet him and I’m pretty sure I will,” Cathy said, feeling disgusted that anyone would tolerate such behaviour.
“I’ve never told anyone how much I know but please tell me what to do, from a female perspective?”
“She’s holding on because she seems to think that this is the best she can do and it’ll be hard to convince her otherwise. But Ray, as Resident Manager you can’t get involved. You know that. I can try talking to her ... to offer her a way out but she’s old enough to make her own choices and if we push this in the wrong direction it’s bound to blow up in our faces.”
“I know. Well, let me go see what he’s paying to be fixed this time,” said Ray as he stood up, already dreading the moment he would see more bruises on Linda, again.
“Sure, I’ll be at the office going through some press releases that need to be sent.”
An hour passed before Raymond walked into the office and sat down opposite Cathy. He seemed far more relaxed than earlier.
“It was the bathroom door. She said it had jammed and she couldn’t get out, so he broke it down. Can you believe it?”
“You really care about her don’t you? As in more than a guest?” Cathy asked softly as the pieces fell into place.
“Is it that obvious?” he smiled.
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“She has this smile. It starts from her eyes and then her whole face lights up. I’ve just never met anyone like her,” Raymond said with a faraway look in his eyes.
“And you’re planning to do something for her?”
“Yes. Well I know she might not feel the same about me but I need to know I tried and I was wondering if you could help?”
“Me? How can I fix this?"
"Well, apparently the only reason she’s putting up with him is because she doesn’t have a job. Even when she worked for him, he didn’t pay her and she’s stuck. Is there anything you can offer her? Even at entry level, a Public Relations Assistant or something, anything would be fine. I can work on the other details.”
“Sure, I could do that,” Cathy smiled. “But it’ll have to be somewhere away from this property, of course. Ask her to send me her CV and it’s done. When can I meet her?”
“Meet her? Ah see, that’s the strangest thing. I got this call about a broken bathroom door, I went to check and she was already gone. I don’t have a clue where she is, well, at least that’s the story bloody Larry will be getting. Wonder how long it’ll take before he gets some other girl to move in with him?”
CHIANG MAI, THAILAND
September 2010
On the one end, this city boasts a bustling nightlife, lined with conventional restaurants selling fancy dinners and fine wines. On the other, Chiang Mai’s street corners are coursed with local joints, satisfying sexual fetishes you have never heard of. A city that is known to offer Asia on a platter, Chiang Mai is also known to struggle with ensuring all its communities stay above the poverty mark. There are many different sides to Chiang Mai, but none allows you to leave without taking a small piece of it with you.
In the literal sense, Chiang Mai means “New City” and it is one of Thailand’s largest cities, receiving at least three million foreign tourists every year. Thriving on tourism, it remains a major exporter for handcrafted items such as wood carvings, handbags and silver ornaments. Like any other Thai state, Chiang Mai is also a well-known hub for a variety of spas, including the latest trend of fish spas and centres that offer courses for those wanting a career as a masseuse. At night, the streets come alive with night markets, selling anything and everything from food to stolen goods.
The city also plays host to numerous local festivals which attract many tourists. One of the more prominent festivals is the Full Moon Festival known as Loi Kratong and is celebrated in November. Tens of thousands of people gather to offer their “kratong” or floating banana leaf containers, decorated with flowers and candles to the Goddess of Water. A prayer is offered to her in the hopes of steering away misfortune from local families and to ensure the city’s prosperity.
In recent years, this peaceful festival has been marred by stampedes on overcrowded piers, but it continues to be a yearly attraction among locals and foreign tourists. Songkran, the traditional Thai New Year is celebrated in April and attracts large crowds to the citywide Water Festival and beauty pageants.
Local festivities aside, Chiang Mai is also in the running to host the World Expo 2020 and is already deemed "the preferred event location" for a
series of conferences and business conventions.
It was during one of these conventions that MoonStar Chiang Mai was in a state of utter flurry. In one of their rooms, tension brewed as raised voices were heard arguing.
“You fool! What the bloody hell did you think we were training you for, to be the next Travel Channel hostess?” the older man stood in the middle room and barked as his face flashed with fury.
Cathy sat on the bed, her eyes were closed and her body trembled. She bit her lower lip doing her best not to answer him. At this very moment, she would give anything to be dealing with a hotel issue than what she was facing now. She had received her CI-7 mission earlier that day and had only just been told that it involved putting a bullet through a man’s head. The man screaming at her was Jeremy, her handler for the past two years.
It was standard protocol that all missions were supported by two other agents, although Cathy suspected there were numerous other agents unknown to her, lurking in the shadows, just in case a mission failed. She had always felt too much was at stake for a mission to fail and on most missions when she tried to cope with the uncertainty that surrounded her, her handler always seemed collected enough to walk her through a successful mission. Except this one time.
“We have invested time, money and a lot of effort with you. You will do as you're told,” he said, stressing each word, making sure she understood the gravity of the situation.
“But you are asking me to kill a man, it’s a horrible thing to do ...,” Cathy’s voice trailed off.
“It’s nothing you haven’t done before. Stop being a whiny schoolgirl and just bloody get to it. If you didn’t want this life, you shouldn’t have killed your father. It’s that fucking simple.”
A long pause followed as Cathy glared at him, knowing there was little she could say or do to change his mind.
“I ... I just ...”
“What?! What are you going to tell me that I haven’t heard before? You didn’t know you had it in you? You were not sure about what you were doing? Bollocks! We all have it in us and not all of us act on it. You did. You will pull the trigger or you go back to the cell where you came from. Make up your mind, fast!”
Cathy glanced at her hands. A tear trickled down as the memories came flooding back. 'A way out,' she thought, but none came to her and none that she would willingly carry out.
“I’ll do it,” she said softly.
“I thought as much. As I said before, the VIN number is scratched off and the weapon is virtually untraceable. IF anything does come up, it’ll come back to us. You will have dinner with the target at The Empress. Wear the black wig that’s in the bag. After dinner, invite him for a walk by the pier. The second you have a chance, pull the trigger and wipe the weapon clean. It's a suppressed 9mm. No one will hear anything and he won’t see it coming.”
He watched Cathy with her head buried in her hands as she listened. The long red hair, the beautiful face that masked so many secrets, the unmistakable impression she had made, the first day she had walked into the CI-7 mission room. If only she had come clean all those years ago, she would not be in this position now. But what had to be done, had to be done. She had made her choice and the best he could do was guide her.
Jeremy’s voice softened a little.
“Meet me in the black van by the side of the road. We’ll have a change of clothes and bring you back here. We’ll take care of the weapon. If anybody asks, you were outside the property having coffee with an ‘old friend’ Mark who will be waiting in the van for you. People will see the two of you coming back to MoonStar together. Understood?”
“Yes, but why does he have to be killed? The others ... when I’ve done it before, they’ve been taken in for questioning or arrested ... what did he do?”
“What did your father do to deserve a knife in his chest? You said he raped you. Nobody found anything. Maybe you came on to him and he refused you,” Jeremy glared at Cathy.
“Stop it!” Cathy screamed, holding her hands to her face.
“He has gone beyond selling info ... graduated into biological weapons. We have tried for two years to stop him with every legal way possible but he’s covered his tracks well. Next week, at the Creative Global Meet, we have confirmed reports that he plans to release some new virus into the air vents. He needs to be eliminated and that’s your job. Everything else, you leave to us. We have been doing this even before you were born. We know what to do.”
Cathy nodded, her stomach already in a huge knot. She stood up and walked towards the window.
“You seem especially angry that I brought up your father’s death. Is there anything you want to tell me? I always knew there was someone else in the room with you. The fools that the local police were they didn’t have a clue but the way the body had been dragged towards the door ... was there someone else in the room with you? Is that what this is all about?”
“No, I killed my father. As I’ve always said, he had been forcing himself on me for years and that night I snapped,” Cathy said in a hurry as she turned to face him.
“If you say so. This is yours,” said Jeremy, pointing to the gun that he placed on the bed.
“We are always watching, Cathy. Remember that. Always.”
Cathy heard a loud 'click' as Jeremy left the room and closed the door behind him. For all the years they had trained her, she had never expected to pull the trigger. How was it possible that she would soon be responsible for the end of someone else’s life? But if she did not do this, then more people would be killed. Could she really pull it off? She took a deep breath and started to get ready.
William looked at the woman walking next to him at the pier. These days, few women looked this. Classy, elegant and simply beautiful. Any man would walk through fire just to spend an evening with her and here he was, with her on his arm. She had been eating dinner alone at the hotel in which he was staying, The Empress. She had approached him and asked if they could share a table. She told him she had just been dumped by her boyfriend and could use a little company. One look and he knew he could spend all night with her if she wanted. As they walked across the deserted pier, Cathy looked around one final time before she reached for the weapon in her bag.
Her fingers traced the steel, as she hesitated a little, then took it out and pointed it at him. His face crumpled with fear.
“What the fuck are you doing? Do you want money? Here, this is a Rolex,” he said grabbing at his watch, the panic in his voice apparent.
Cathy took a deep breath.
His body slumped towards her. Cathy stepped away, stunned. She looked at the weapon in her hand. Almost instantly, she had a whiff of rotten apples and turned around as a figure stepped out from the shadows.
“Reggie, is that you?” she croaked hoarsely as the shock wore off.
“How did you know?”
“That smell ... It was the same chewing gum that you were chewing the night you visited me in prison.”
Reggie towered over her, his smile still as crooked as it had been all those years ago.
“Not bad Catherine, you remember."
"Of course I do. Wait. Reggie, what do I tell Jeremy and the rest? This was supposed to be my mission.”
“And it was. I’m not here. We’re not talking and that’s how it will stay,” he said.
Reggie took the weapon from Cathy, fired a shot into the water, wiped it clean and dropped it into her bag.
“Besides, you really don’t have it in you. I’ve done this at least a hundred times. You haven’t done it even once. Let’s not start.”
Cathy looked at him, not sure if she understood what he was saying. He slowly took her arm and led her away from the pier.
“You knew?”
“Of course I’ve known. We’ve all known but we could never prove it and you didn’t make it easy. A lot of things didn’t make sense. Thomas was the only person who knew that the window was locked from the outside. I remember his exact words, ‘Cathy couldn’t run from
her father because the window was locked from the outside that evening’. Nobody asked, nobody wanted to know but he did and it always bothered me.”
“If you knew all along, why didn’t you say something? And now ... wh-what happens to us?”
Cathy felt a lump in her throat. The one secret she had guarded with her life was spilling over and she couldn’t stop it from happening.
“Nothing. I’m retired, remember? No more missions, no more rescuing troubled teenagers from prison cells.” He laughed loudly hoping to ease the tension. “Catherine, give an old man some peace of mind. Tell me what really happened that night. Just so I know. It stays between us, I promise.”
They had walked away from the pier by now, she stopped to look around and took a long, deep breath.
Frequent Traveller (Cathy Dixon #1) Page 18
