Plausible Deniability: The explosive Lex Harper novella

by Stephen Leather

  Plausible Deniability

  Stephen Leather

  Copyright © Stephen Leather 2019

  The right of Stephen Leather to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE RUNNER

  CHAPTER 1

  Dawn was still streaking the eastern sky when a figure emerged from one of the apartment buildings fronting Pattaya Beach. Lex Harper crossed the road to the walkway along the edge of the beach, took a few deep breaths and then began to run. He settled at once into a steady pace, his long stride eating up the metres. The air was as close to cool as it ever was in Pattaya and this early in the morning, the walkway was still virtually deserted. A few drunken tourists were sleeping it off under the palm trees, some of whom would wake to find that their wallets had been stolen by the thieves and pickpockets that prowled the beaches during the night looking for victims. However, most of the tourists were still in bed and the stall-holders, street vendors, prostitutes, lady-boys and the rest of the multitude of traders and petty criminals who operated on the strip, pandering to the tourists or preying on them, had yet to begin business for the day.

  As usual, Harper ran the three miles to the city’s main entertainment area, Walking Street, where among the town’s raunchier go-go bars almost any sexual taste and preference could be catered for - at a price. At night it was a neon-lit maelstrom of sex tourists, tour groups, hookers, lady-boys and loud-mouthed touts shouting the delights of bars, sex shows and clip joints. Daylight revealed it as a shabby ghost town, with potholed roads and pavements, fly-blown shopfronts with peeling paint, and neon signs connected to electrical wiring that would have been banned as unsafe in any country in the First World.

  He drank a bottle of water and then ran back along the beach, sprinting the last mile flat out. He showered and dressed, then took a cup of coffee out onto the wraparound balcony of his three-bed penthouse apartment, with spectacular views out over the bay. He was just finishing the last mouthful of coffee when he felt a vibration from the denim hip pack around his waist. He always had the hip pack on him, no matter what the time of day. It contained one of his many phones, an Irish passport in a false name, two credit cards under the same name and fifty-thousand baht - just over £1,100 - in cash. The pack and the heavy gold neck chain he always wore, meant that he could always leave the country at a moment’s notice, either through the airport or overland to Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia or even Myanmar and live a below-the-radar existence for as long as was necessary to avoid or eliminate the threat to him. He had a larger bug-out bag under the emperor-size bed in his apartment and another in a specially constructed compartment under the floor of his SUV, but the essentials were in the hip pack. He loved Thailand, the Land Of Smiles, but if necessary, his unbreakable, life-preserving rule was always to be ready to leave any place, at a moment’s notice, without ever looking back.

  The text message was from a number he didn’t recognise and said only ‘YOU HAVE MAIL’, but Harper smiled, finished his coffee and then headed back into the streets to a combination internet café and beauty parlour a little way along the beach road. There were only three other customers, a middle-aged European man hunched over one of the terminals, planning his day’s itinerary or watching a little breakfast porn, and a couple of bar-girls, one having her nails done and the other browsing the internet before starting her shift. The owner of the shop, Khun Bee, was in her late fifties with greying hair and deep lines on her face, but she still had the body of a much younger woman, in tribute to the years she had spent earning her living pole-dancing at a bar a few metres further up the street. She greeted Harper with a smile, took the money he gave her for half an hour’s internet use and waved a hand in the direction of the terminals. ‘Any you like, Lek.’ Most Thais had a problem pronouncing Lex and Lek was a common nickname in Thailand. It meant small, and Harper had long ago accepted it as his Thai name.

  He took the terminal furthest away from the counter, tilted the screen to hide it from the other customers and logged on. He knew the email address and password as well as he knew his own name, even though the account had never been used to send a single email. Its only purpose was to allow for secure communications between him and his handler, Charlotte Button, formerly of MI5 but now controlling a shadowy, strictly deniable organisation that handled jobs that were too risky, too politically sensitive or too illegal for government spooks to touch. It was known to those who worked for it as The Pool, partly because of the fluid nature of the group but also because a substantial number of its members, like Harper, came from Liverpool.

  The Pool was a commercial organisation, largely funded by the UK government but run at arm’s length from it. Most of the company’s business was legitimate: bodyguarding, training the security personnel of Western allies and client states, supervising the security of buildings, plants and installations in sensitive areas. They even had a maritime division combating piracy around the Gulf and the Horn of Africa. All these activities and other, even more clandestine ones, would once have been carried out by British troops, British spooks or British government agencies, but in common with the US, in a policy described as “Secure Outsourcing”, more and more secret operations were now kept off the books and contracted out to private companies.

  The source of much of the company’s very substantial budget was still primarily Her Majesty’s Government, but the money was paid through offshore accounts several times removed from the true source allowing the government and its agencies to deny all knowledge of it and responsibility for it. If anything ever went wrong, it was the company, not the UK government that had to take the flak.

  Button and Harper were the only people who could access the email account and they used the Draft folder to send messages to each other, a technique borrowed from al-Qaeda terrorists who had developed it to communicate without being detected by even the most high-tech surveillance systems. If an email had ever actually been sent, it could have been intercepted and read by operatives at the National Security Agency in the US and GCHQ in the UK, who had the capacity to eavesdrop on any phone call and intercept any email anywhere in the world. However, since no emails were ever transmitted from the account, its existence and its content remained unknown to all but the two people who used it. Only if a spook had discovered its existence and hacked into it, would messages in the Drafts folder be compromised, but even then, it would have to have been monitored constantly, since their SOP was to delete every message as soon as it had been read.

  Harper found a message summoning him to a meeting with Button in Bangkok later that afternoon, which surprised him because so far as he was aware, Button rarely left the UK.

  He jogg
ed back to his apartment, showered and changed into a polo shirt and jeans, then headed down to a British restaurant where he had a full English – eggs, bacon, sausage, black pudding, baked beans, mushrooms and fried bread and two more cups of coffee.

  He drove the 150 kilometres to Bangkok in just over two hours. Button was staying at the JW Marriott in Sukhumvit Road, one of the city’s best hotels. It was a short walk from the Nana Plaza red light area, but Harper was sure that Button wouldn’t be dropping by. He parked in the hotel’s car park. Button had given him the room number and the name she was staying under, so he bypassed reception and went straight up.

  He knocked on the door and she made him wait almost a minute before opening it, which he assumed was her way of asserting dominance. But when the door finally opened she was holding her mobile and she flashed him an apologetic smile and waved him in.

  She was in a suite and from the look of it she had only just arrived. Her Louis Vuitton suitcase was on a stand by the door, unopened and the bed hadn’t been disturbed. She was wearing one of her signature Chanel suits and her chestnut hair was shorter than last time he’d seen her. She smiled again and pointed at the minibar and Harper helped himself to a water while she finished her call.

  ‘Sorry about that, Lex,’ she said. ‘It’s a flying visit so I’ve a lot to pack in.’

  ‘I’m just pleased that the mountain has come to Mohammed for once,’ he said, sitting down on the bed. ‘Usually I have to fly half way across the world for a meeting.’

  ‘We’re about to do some work for the Thai Government and there are some i’s to be dotted and t’s to be crossed.’

  ‘Getting into bed with a military dictatorship is never a good idea,’ said Harper. He took a sip of water.

  ‘The Thais are having trouble with Muslim militants in the South and have requested our expertise,’ she said. ‘I haven’t mentioned it to you because it’s never a good idea to shit on your own doorstep.’

  He raised his water bottle in salute. ‘Much appreciated,’ he said.

  ‘Anyway, enough chit chat,’ she said. Sitting down at a teak desk and demurely crossing her legs. There was a slim leather briefcase on the desk and she snapped open the locks and pulled out a file. ‘A decision has now been taken at the very highest level to change the focus on the war on drugs. The US President has got tired of waiting for results he can crow about from Central America, so he has taken the unilateral decision to switch the attack to the heroin fields in the Myanmar part of the Golden Triangle.’

  Harper gave a sour smile. ‘Nothing beats the quick fix for a politician, does it? Especially in an election year. And presumably our own PM has fallen into line as usual.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And equally, the President will not be wanting to risk any US personnel on the mission, in case it all goes to ratshit.’

  ‘As you say. So the mission is to eliminate the whole of this year’s heroin crop before it can be processed and transported to the US, either by destroying it or by cutting a deal to buy it. I can give you carte blanche on methods and tactics, but as ever, and even more so in this case, it is a completely deniable mission. Once you’re out there, you’re on your own. If you’re compromised, the UK and US governments and agencies will never even have heard of you.’ She paused. ‘However, the cousins are happy to throw money at this to get a result and that being so, the tidiest way to achieve the aim would probably just be to buy the whole crop and then, once we’ve secured it, the cousins can arrange its destruction at their leisure.’

  ‘The Yanks are going to buy the crop? The whole crop?’

  ‘That’s the plan, yes.’

  ‘How exactly? Paypal? Or one of those super big cheques you see on TV?’

  ‘I’ll come on to the specifics,’ she said. ‘The plan is for you to go in with a support team who will be supplied covertly by the authorities here: six ex-Thai special forces soldiers who have all been operating illicitly in the target area of southern Myanmar. The Thai special forces speak the local languages and have already had dealings with the drug lords. They’ll give you back up and protection, and lead you to the RV, deep inside Myanmar.’

  ‘The Thai special forces are all trained by the Americans,’ Harper said, ‘so they won’t be that special, will they?’

  Button pursed her lips. ‘Be that as it may, they speak the language, know the terrain and can get you face to face with the warlords who control heroin production there, so they should earn their keep.’

  Harper included his head. ‘Fair enough. And what will I be taking to these warlords?’

  ‘Well, the days of making pay-offs in gold have long gone and in any case, it would take a truck to carry the amount of gold bullion we’re talking about, so the idea is to make a payment of ten million dollars in bearer bonds.’

  ‘Bearer bonds?’ Harper said, ‘are they even a thing anymore? I thought the Yanks had banned them a few years ago.’

  ‘They did, because they were so widely used by money launderers, drug lords and tax evaders, but other countries still issue and cash them.’

  Harper smiled. ‘So the country that banned them is now making use of someone else’s? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Americans have no sense of irony. Anyway, irrespective of how the cash is going to be paid, you won’t buy the heroin crop for $10 million, it’s got to be worth at least 100 times that amount.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Button said, sounding like a primary school teacher waiting for a rather slow-witted pupil to catch up. ‘The $10 million is just a down payment to show good faith and get the attention of the warlords. A much larger sum will be paid to complete the deal.’

  ‘The cousins better have deep pockets then,’ Harper said, ‘because I can’t see the warlords listening to offers much below $1 billion.’

  ‘Maybe so, but when you consider that the US Congress put the cost of US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan at $2.5 trillion, a billion to shut down a substantial part of the world’s heroin trade might seem like a bit of a bargain.’ She paused. ‘Anyway, that will only be payable on receipt of the crop, and by then your involvement should be over. If all has gone to plan, the cousins will be willing to put their own heads above the parapet.’

  ‘Just in time for the photo-ops for US domestic consumption,’ Harper said. ‘I can see the headlines now. “POTUS’s decisive action deals fatal blow to heroin trade.” And there’ll be a tiny bit of reflected glory for our own PM too - just a little, not too much.’

  ‘Such cynicism, Lex,’ Button said with mock severity.

  ‘Anyway, it sounds like the deal’s already been done,’ Harper said. ‘So why do you need me to be a very expensive delivery boy?’

  ‘Because you’re entering one of the most unpredictable and lawless areas on the planet and as I’m sure you know, bearer bonds are quite literally as good as gold. No proof of ownership is necessary or possible because possession of bearer bonds is not just nine points of the law; it’s all ten. If you have them in your possession, you are the rightful owner, QED. So you’re there to use any means necessary to keep those bonds out of unfriendly hands and deliver them safely to the drug lords, but only once you’ve satisfied yourself that they’ll keep their end of the deal.’

  ‘And if anything does go wrong, the Yanks don’t want an American involved?’

  ‘It gives the Americans plausible deniability, yes.’

  ‘And you’re trusting me not to just trouser the bonds myself and do a runner?’

  She gave a smile in which her eyes played no part. ‘You could do that, of course, but you would then spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder and I can promise you that the duration of that life would be very short. You’re not the only hired killer on my books, Lex.’

  ‘I’m sure I’m not, Charlie, but I am the best. Anyway, don’t get your expensive silk underwear in a twist, I’m not about to do a runner, I enjoy our relationship too much.’ He grinned. ‘And who knows, one day, it mig
ht be more than strictly business …’

  Button rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not always sure exactly what my type is, Lex, but one thing I am sure of, whatever it is, you’re not it.’

  He burst out laughing and took another sip of water. They spent another hour discussing the finer details of the plan and studying the mapping and satellite imagery of the target area that Button had brought with her. ‘That’s what’s driving the policy, isn’t it?’ Harper said. ‘Suddenly everyone’s an expert. The guys behind their desks at GCHQ and Northwood, and at the NSA, the DEA and the Pentagon in Washington, can call up an image from anywhere on the planet, and if they can see it, they think it must be easy to go in and solve the problem. But seeing it from a satellite and actually getting to it are two very different things.’

  ‘Which is why we use people with skill-sets like yours.’ She flashed him a tight smile.

  ‘So what are you going to be doing while I’m risking life and limb, Charlie? Glyndebourne? Royal Ascot? Cowdray Park for the polo?’

  ‘Believe it or not, Lex, I’m going to take a little holiday in Phuket.’

  ‘A holiday? You? I didn’t think you did things like that, least of all in a place like Phuket. Are you sure you’re not just doing it to keep within range of me and those bearer bonds?’

  She gave an enigmatic smile. ‘Heavens no, Lex, you know I’d trust you with my life.’

  ‘And the money?’

  Her smile widened. ‘Not so much.’

  ‘And where are they, these bonds?’

  Button stood up and walked over to the suitcase. She opened it and lifted the lid. Inside the case was a grey aluminium tube. She took it out and gave it to him. It weighed less than a kilo and he grinned at her. ‘You’d have thought ten million dollars would be heavier,’ he said.

  CHAPTER 2

  Harper booked himself into a hotel much less salubrious than the JW Marriott, then made some purchases from a warehouse in Bangkok that sold high end security and surveillance equipment. He bought an untraceable weapon and ammunition from a contact whose day job as a Thai army quartermaster gave him access to US-supplied weaponry, some of which he then sold on the black market. He left the bonds and the purchases in his SUV, then made his way downtown to Khlong Toei, the worst of the worst areas of the city, where he linked up with the ex-Thai special forces who were to be his escort in and out of Myanmar. There was a sergeant, Narong, a corporal, Decha, and four other soldiers. As Narong introduced the rest of his men, Harper said ‘You speak very good English.’