by Brad Taylor
My stroke of genius was to use this routine and convince them that Knuckles was being transferred to Bangkok, the theory being that Chiang Mai would forget him once he was out the doors, and Bangkok wouldn’t check on him until prodded by the State Department—which would never happen. With the bureaucratic chaos that was Thailand, he wouldn’t be missed for weeks—if not years.
Unfortunately, because of Knuckles’s little fight, Piggy had moved him into the newest section under his personal command. This made his transfer no longer routine, as Piggy himself had to approve the release, and we’d never pull off this charade against anyone with a reason to stop it. A single phone call would be the domino that fell flat.
I had to get Piggy out of the prison, and I was using Jennifer to do so. Remembering his comment on our first visit, I knew he’d run at the chance to hop in the sack with her. All she had to do was pretend like she was reluctantly doing it for a quid pro quo for Knuckles. The naïve American about to learn a hard lesson in life.
When I’d given her the mission she’d balked, saying, “Why do I always have to play some sort of floozy? Surely there’s something else I can do to get him out.”
I’d said, “Jennifer, we need him out of the prison for an hour. A coffee break won’t cut it. Given the drive time to his house and back, that means only thirty minutes of stalling. Thirty minutes and you can flee the house like you misunderstood.”
“Come on. Did you see that guy? You’re putting me in a house by myself with someone who wants to attack me.”
Like an ass, Decoy had blurted, “Yeah, but you’re good at that shit. I remember what you looked like in Prague dressed like a hooker.”
I saw her eyes water, and she left the room. Too late, I realized she was reliving the attack on her just months ago, and now, callously, I was throwing her directly into what she feared the most.
Decoy said, “What did I do? What was that about?”
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
Besides Jennifer, there were just two people on earth who knew what had happened to her: me and the guy who’d done it. Since I’d slaughtered him with my bare hands, that left only me, and Jennifer wanted to keep it that way. Nobody else on the team had a clue, and now they were potentially about to misjudge Jennifer’s reaction as her not being able to handle the stress of mission profiles because I’d been blind to her specific fear. I couldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t have them questioning her capabilities for the wrong reasons, because it might prove catastrophic under fire.
I stood and said, “Wait here a second.”
Before I could leave, Jennifer reentered, eyes clear and voice firm.
“Okay. I’ll do it. Who’s my backup?”
Decoy, looking a little ashamed, said, “I’m your backup. I got your back.”
He always pretended to be a chauvinistic man-whore, hooking up with anyone willing in any town he entered, but in Prague I’d seen what he was really like underneath the bravado. No way was Jennifer going to be in any danger with him on the prowl.
Now, watching her drive away with that sadistic pig, I hoped she didn’t lose it on her own. Hoped she could keep it together long enough to play the part.
14
Jennifer, her purse clutched tightly in her lap, said, “You said maybe we could come to an accommodation about my employee. Maybe we could get some coffee, discuss how exactly I can help you.”
Continuing north on Highway 107, Piggy put his hand on her thigh. “Yes, that’s just what I want to do. But why pay for coffee? I have free coffee, tea, beer, whatever you want at my house. It’s only a short drive.”
She brushed his hand away, saying nervously, “Where is your house? Where are we going?”
She ignored his answer, because she knew the entire route already. Instead, she focused on the Symbol handheld computer he’d thrown into the backseat. One more string in the domino chain, as Pike had told her.
Originally, her mission had simply been to keep him occupied, but after the team’s repeated attempts at cracking the Wi-Fi network in the prison, they’d given her another mission.
The hackers had failed, which meant they needed to access Piggy’s actual PDA. The encryption in the prison was simply too strong, even with the fifty-pound tech help from Taskforce geeks in DC, leaving them unable to open Knuckles’s special cell door. They’d decided on a shortcut, which had been thrown into her rucksack to carry after she’d agreed to become the diversion.
Piggy placed his hand on her thigh again and said, “You can help your friend out very much. Food, medicine, maybe even release. It depends on how much you care for him. How long are you planning on staying in Chiang Mai?”
She gave a tepid smile and left the hand on her thigh, feeling sick to her stomach, knowing what he was asking. Knowing he was intimating that there’d be more than one “meeting.” She gave him the truth.
“Hopefully, I’m flying back to Bangkok today.”
This brought a scowl, making him look like a petulant child. “Then we should make the most of this, shouldn’t we?”
She didn’t answer, seeing the intersection for the road leading to the Mae Ping River a hundred meters ahead. And the pickup truck idling next to it. She felt time begin to slow.
Piggy said something else, turning the wheel and exiting the highway. Looking out the window, Jennifer saw Brett sitting impassively in the cab of a beat-up Nissan truck, the front end aimed toward them. Waiting.
Just as her door passed, she saw the pickup jump, and she braced for impact, shouting for effect. The vehicle hit them solidly in the right rear quarter panel, causing Piggy’s car to skip lightly. The impact was hard, but not as bad as she expected. They came to a stop after a few feet, the Toyota skewed sideways, with Piggy yelling in Thai.
He cursed and shut off the car. As soon as he exited, she grabbed the Symbol PDA and ripped a clone device out of her purse. Nothing more than a thumb drive with a cable attached, it had the necessary software to duplicate his PDA in a couple of minutes. She plugged it into the mini-USB port and watched the Symbol screen go blank. Now all she could do was wait until it came back on. Supposedly in two minutes.
She glanced to the rear and saw Brett waving his hands in the air, with Piggy pointing a finger in his face. She went back to the PDA and did a double take, returning to the window. Sitting on the dingy outside patio of a homemade roadside café was Decoy, a small grin on his face, his eyes hidden by sunglasses, watching her work.
A minute and forty seconds gone, and the PDA was still blank. Two minutes, and she began to sweat, looking to the rear again. Brett was holding his hands out, still talking. Piggy had calmed down.
Running out of time.
Three minutes. Blank screen. She saw Brett putting his wallet back in his pocket and knew only seconds remained.
She stared at the screen, willing something to appear. Come on. Come on!
To her surprise, it flickered, then scrolled Thai letters.
Yes.
She ripped out the clone device, tossed the PDA into the back, and threw the thumb drive out the passenger window, then whirled around when she heard the driver’s-side door open, praying Piggy hadn’t seen.
He sat down, saying, “All you Americans think you can buy your way out of anything.” Smirking, he placed his hand on her knee again. “Luckily for both of you that’s true in my case.”
Relief flooded through her, the hand a small price to pay for success. She gazed out the window as they pulled away, seeing Decoy mount a beat-up Honda motorcycle.
* * *
I couldn’t help but smile when the call came in, both because it meant phase one had succeeded and because I knew it irked Brett.
“Pike, this is Blood. Inbound with clone.”
Brett was new on the team, having been there barely a year. He’d come over from the Special Activities Division at the CIA and, as such, didn’t come with a call sign attached. On our last mission—his first with me—he’d made an
absolutely asinine comment about the old mother’s remedy Mercurochrome, calling it Monkey’s Blood. I had anointed him with the call sign Blood at the start of this mission.
Being an African-American, he’d immediately bitched, saying there was no way he was going with that call sign, moaning about stereotypes, Crips and Bloods, gang members and everything else. Unfortunately for him, you don’t get to pick your call sign. If you did, every commando in the Taskforce would be called Thundercock. The call sign picks you, like it had here.
In the end, he’d gone with it. After all, the only ones who would hear it would be the team. He knew we were color-blind and that we understood where it had come from. Even still, like Jennifer with her call sign of Koko, it irked him. And made the rest of the team laugh.
I alerted Retro, who was waiting in the prison transfer van, bringing him forward. Before it arrived, Blood pulled up in his mangled Nissan.
“Any issues?”
He handed me the thumb drive. “Not getting that, but Piggy’s an asshole.”
“Let’s hope this clone worked, or we’re dead in the water. Clock’s ticking now.”
All I was asking from Jennifer was thirty minutes. She’d be out whether we were done or not.
He said, “Free to go?”
“Yeah. Give me a shout when you link up with Buckshot. I’d like the warm fuzzy that we have an exfil vehicle in case we’re coming out hot.”
A van with no windows in the back pulled up, official Thai emblems on the side. In the driver’s seat was a Thai man in a police uniform. Izzy’s guy, and the one who’d be going in with me. He was the same one who’d shown me into Izzy’s bar, standing behind me while we talked. He was called Nung, “number one” in Thai, because he didn’t want to give out his real name.
I went to the rear of the van and opened it, seeing another Thai man in uniform in the back, called, imaginatively enough, Song—or “number two.” Sitting across from him was Retro, now dressed in prison garb and “shackled” to the floor.
I passed Retro the thumb drive and he immediately began working our own PDA. It wasn’t a Motorola Symbol, but Retro was convinced it would suffice. He’d said all he needed was a processor, Wi-Fi, and VOIP capability, and that the specific model didn’t matter. He was a little bit of a computer geek, so if he said it would work, I went with it. After all, I didn’t have a whole lot of choices.
While he finished the download, I gave final instructions. “Okay, Nung, you’re leading the way. Remember we have three posts to get through. You handle the Thai, only turning to me if we get any push-back. I’ll play the State Department mean guy. You got the cell phone jammer?”
Nung, looking completely calm, simply nodded his head, making me wonder what the hell he’d done in the past.
How can you not be nervous with this weak-ass plan?
The tactical side of the house was a microcosm of the operational plan—namely that we were going to convince one post in the prison that the other one had said it was okay to proceed, hoping that neither found out.
“Song, you have any questions about your script?”
He shook his head no.
“Remember, you’re the critical piece. They must think you’re Piggy.”
He said, “No problem, no problem,” in that singsong Thai way.
I said, “How we looking, Retro?”
He punched a couple of buttons, read off something on the screen, then grinned.
“We’re golden. Knuckles’s cell door is no object.”
15
Jennifer fought to control her emotions. No sooner had the adrenaline subsided from the clone mission than she felt it begin to build back up as they drew closer and closer to Piggy’s house, each passing mile reverberating in her like the clank of a roller coaster heading inexorably to the top of the hill.
Driving down a tidy lane with space for only one vehicle, she counted the houses, knowing his was the tenth one from the intersection. Too soon, it was upon them. When Piggy turned off the car, she clicked the timing feature of her watch, seeing it begin to count down from thirty minutes, each second seemingly longer than the last.
Piggy gave his lizardlike smile and said, “Shall we?”
She simply nodded and opened her door.
Inside, the house was surprisingly clean, with teak furniture and a large flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, a faint fragrance of citrus in the air. Piggy went into the kitchen, bringing back two bottles of Singha beer.
Jennifer waved him off, saying, “Really, I just want to discuss how I can help my friend. Can we do that?”
Going to the couch in front of the television, he said, “Certainly.”
She sat on a teak chair across from him, dropping her purse next to it. He said, “No, no. Sit here. Next to me.”
She felt clammy. Nauseous. She didn’t think she had the strength to do this. She focused on Knuckles, remembering why she was here. Remembering Decoy outside, just a press of the button on her phone from breaking down the door. And hesitantly moved to the couch.
As soon as she sat down, he scooted next to her and began rubbing her thigh, causing every muscle in her body to become rigid.
She said, “Stop it. You said we’d talk first.”
He leaned over her, and she could smell the spice on his breath. “Talk later. Payment up front.”
Enough.
She pushed him away and jumped to her feet, glancing at her watch. With dismay, she saw only ten minutes had elapsed. She began to tremble.
Piggy stood up, now clearly angry. “Don’t pretend you have no idea why you’re here. Pay up or instead of helping your friend, I’ll have him hurt.”
She saw her purse across the room. She needed to stall. To get to it. How? What will he believe? She sagged her shoulders and said, “Okay, okay, but let me get something out of my purse. A condom.”
She moved to it, hearing, “No condom. I’m not sick.”
She picked it up and reached inside, feeling the heft of the Mark III. She said, “Yes. You must wear a condom. I’ve heard of all the diseases here.”
She turned around to find him right on top of her, grabbing for her purse and shouting, “No condom!”
She jerked the purse out of his hands, and he swung a wild right cross at her head.
* * *
Marching up to the entry control point in what I hoped was a prissy, State Department way, I presented my black passport and said, “I’m here to witness the transfer of American prisoner alpha twelve twenty-eight.”
The guard said something in Thai too fast for me to catch, and I turned to Nung, letting him take over. They bantered for a little bit, most of which I missed, but it was something about an odd time of day, or not the usual time, or some other bullshit.
Eventually, Nung got him to at least check his computer, and I felt the pucker factor get very, very tight. If the Taskforce failed on this one, I was headed out the door and flying straight home to punch some hacker in the mouth.
After I had finished up my meeting with Izzy, I’d figured I had about an 80 percent solution, so I’d called Kurt, laying it all out. He was on his way to an Oversight Council meeting, which were never good, and had very little time to talk. He’d given me permission to coordinate with the hacking cell and “explore options,” but he’d told me in no uncertain terms that all I was to do was develop the situation. No execution. Which is why I’d ignored the last two blocked calls that had come in. I didn’t want to hear about some Oversight Council hand-wringing. If Kurt could have seen how Knuckles was deteriorating, he’d have executed the mission himself.
Using the cyber-penetration of the police bureau from the Ministry of Education—the very reason Knuckles was in prison to begin with—the hacking cell had been able to duplicate a prison release form and inject it into the official system. Well, at least that’s what they’d said. Now I would find out if it was true.
The man hunted for a bit, then turned back around, shaking his head. This time I
caught every word. “No such request in the system.”
Damn it. Useless fifty-pound heads.
I said, “Check again please. Maybe it went into the wrong inbox.”
“There is no inbox. It’s a special system.”
I raised my voice. “Check it again. Now. I’m not leaving without him.”
Inside, I was getting ready to do just that.
He banged on the keys a few more times, searching various pages, then paused. He leaned into the screen, and I began to have hope.
He turned around, his face suspicious. “I’ve found it, but it’s on an outdated form. It went straight to the archives as something old. Why isn’t it on the correct form?”
* * *
Jennifer had no conscious thought, her body moving instantly, like a cat dodging the lumbering strike of a Saint Bernard. Holding the purse, she collapsed her right arm against her head and blocked Piggy’s wild punch with her left, ducking under the arm and getting behind him. She snaked a hand back inside the bag and closed it on the butt of the pistol, seeing Piggy whirl around, his face contorted in rage, his fists balled at his sides, embarrassed that he hadn’t landed the swing. Not realizing that it wasn’t blind luck.
“I say no condom, I mean no condom!”
Her mind flashed to Lucas Kane. She felt his attack against her, the cord cutting into her wrists as she fought to escape. The stench of his body.
Standing just outside of her reach was another man with the same predilections. Wanting the same thing from her. Willing to take it by force. The thought struck a primeval fear, the terror as strong as a person trapped in a room on fire. She began to pant, the panic rising. Get out. Get out now. Before he gets his hands on you . . .
And then she felt the rage.
Piggy shouted something unintelligible in Thai.
She said nothing, letting the blackness grow.
Piggy switched to English. “Drop the purse!”
She let go of the pistol and did as he asked.
Piggy smirked. “Yes, that’s right. If you want the help, you have to pay for it. This doesn’t have to be hard.”
