Bangkok Burn - A Thriller

by Simon Royle

  Natasha from Odessa

  14 May 2010 Phuket 7:15 am

  Skype. The first word in my mind when I woke up. The Lisp had said don't bother trying to trace him because he was using Skype. Was that how they found Uncle Mike? Did Uncle Mike use Skype? I jumped out of bed, excited, heading for the living room. This was what had been nagging at me. A sharp pain in my arm, I turned. The IV drip machine hit me in the face, I'd forgotten to disconnect. I sat back down on the bed and got the plug out of the needle. I taped the needle back up. Not the best start to a day. It was 7:15 am. I was late getting up. I usually get up at 5, gives me more day.

  Chai was in the open kitchen of the living room making coffee. It smelled good. The TV was on with the volume muted, Government Spokesman Colonel Sanserm all dimples. Sitting down on sofa, I grabbed the remote and turned the volume up while I booted up my notebook. I hoped that during the night a solution had been found to the political mess we were in. My hope was short-lived as Colonel Sanserm laid out the terms by which protestors had to leave the Ratchprasong rally site or face forceful eviction. To give you Farang a better idea of what was happening here in the Land of Smiles; imagine if a group of armed civilians took over Times Square and then fortified the area they had with a 12 feet high wall of sharpened bamboo stakes and rubber tires. And every now and then someone fired an M-79 grenade launcher at groups of people protesting against those behind the bamboo stakes.

  The notebook was up and I switched to Uncle Mike's back up drive. Yes. Skype was there. I disconnected from wireless before I started the app; didn't want anyone knowing that I was in Uncle Mike's Skype. I turned his status to invisible and went straight to the conversations tab. I was working on a single piece of logic. Whoever kidnapped Uncle Mike must have been known to him. His house was hard to approach unnoticed; even the roof had sound sensors on it. Free-spirited he may be, but he wasn't blind to the idea that houses get robbed, especially Farang houses. So his security system was tight and he had a panic room. But nothing was damaged at the house which meant he had let them in or at least one of them. That meant he knew them.

  All the conversations between happy_hippy45, and the people he was having them with made sense. Except one. Natasha. Natasha's profile gave me little to go on: female, user_name Natasha_Odessa, Country Russia. But there was a photo. Of a very beautiful woman. Whether it was a real photo, who knew? I went to the hard drive and searched for strings containing Natasha. Three files came up, with an extension I didn't recognize,.sgf. I left Skype on and then Googled “file extension .sgf”. At the top of the list, screen grabber file, a proprietary format of the Screen Grabber application used to capture video from Skype or MSN. I hit the url and landed on their site. A free download, valid for a 30 day trial. Two minutes later it was installed in my hard drive. I clicked on natasha_1st.sgf.

  She was real. She was beautiful. And the only thing she was wearing was the microphone she was using to talk to Uncle Mike. She looked like she was in her late twenties maybe early thirties, everything firm and perky. Now call me cynical but True Love is not the first thing that springs to mind when I see a twenty-something hanging off the arm of a sixty-something.

  To her credit though she was giving one heck of a performance. It was hard not to get a hard on. I mean it didn't look like she was acting, and us boys are always fascinated with the idea of a woman who loves sex. I focused on the room she was in, but it didn't give anything away. She was sitting in a straight-backed wicker bottomed chair, the walls of the room white. A single painting, I guessed a print of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, hung on the wall behind her above the wooden headrest of a single bed.

  So, maybe, Lisp wasn't Scandinavian. Maybe he was Russian. I'm thinking this has “Honey-pot” written all over it. The other two files were more of the same except in the last she was dressed at first and then disrobed. I couldn't hear what she was saying. Apparently Screen Grabber only grabbed video, no sound. That was okay. I had a photo, a direction, and an erection.

  I closed the notebook and walked out to the pool. Easing my butt over the edge I slipped in, the water deliciously cool. Conscious of the need to keep the dressing on my eye dry, I floated on my back feeling calmer. So here's what happened: Natasha is searching for a mark. She finds one, Uncle Mike. She eases in. No video at first, just a sexy Russian voice. She didn't dive straight into amateur porn, she waited till the fourth chat. Good on-line girls don't do porn on the first date. She probably hit him with the, “Honey, good news. Guess what? I’m coming to Thailand,” line right after show #4 where she showed him she could be a “good-girl” all dressed up - expensive executive chic.

  Could Uncle Mike fall for that? Sure, why not? With her body and looks, any guy with a pulse could.

  There was only one problem with the scenario above, and that was how did they get to know about me and the family? Rolled in with that, while I could see Uncle Mike falling for some cute Russian pussy and inviting her for a holiday, I couldn't see him telling her his net worth. Just not his style. I mean some guys like to talk about how much money they've got. Uncle Mike is, sort of, gleefully ashamed of his wealth.

  I climbed out of the pool and went in for a shower. Washed the chlorine off. Got dressed. Down to my last t-shirt. I'm thinking to head back to Bangkok. Not likely to find out anything new here. They wouldn't stick around once they'd got their man.

  I called out to the living room.

  “Chai.”

  “Yes”

  “We’re heading back to Bangkok. Can you give me a hand with this eye-dressing? We should change it?”

  “Yes”

  A lot of people think that Chai can't speak English. His language skills are superb. He just doesn't like talking. He likes listening, especially to monks. Donates a fair part of what he earns to restoring temples. Maybe it's insurance.

  Chai peeled the eye-dressing away. I was watching his face for any change of expression. Impassive, the dressing off, I waved Chai to one side so I could get a look at the damage. It wasn't pretty. I had a backward L shaped set of stitches running from my forehead near the bridge of my nose, right across my eyelid, just under the eyebrow and finishing at my temple. But it didn't look too puffy and pink, so not infected, just fucking ugly.

  A trip to Korea, I thought, and segued into the staring dead eyes of Por's girlfriend.

  Chai finished with the dressing.

  “Settle up with the front desk.”

  He nodded.

  While Chai was checking us out of the hotel, I sent a screen capture of Natasha to Mother. She'd get it run through the Immigration Police database. Everyone coming in or out gets their photo snapped. If she was here, then she was there.

  I scanned the online versions of The Nation, Bangkok Post, and the Thai dailies. Everyone's prognosis was the same. Bangkok was headed for a showdown. The big question on everybody's minds was whether the whole country would follow. Already, a train full of troops, allegedly headed for the three southern provinces where we have our own little jihad problem, had been stopped and held hostage. Only when the mayor of the town, and the army general in command of the train, guaranteed that the troops were really headed for the south, was the train allowed to continue. There's a fine line between protest and insurrection. It looked to me as if some of the reds had crossed it already. But again nothing is simple in this land. On a simplistic CNN level it was reds versus military. The reality is far more complex: The military may wear green on the outside, but this is Thailand so what they wear is their business, until the time comes when you have to take a side. Talk of watermelons, green outside red inside, and pineapples, green outside yellow inside, abounded on twitter.

  The problem with trying to figure out what is happening in Thailand politically is that you have to understand that Thais are masters of deception. The “third hand” or “invisible hand” is there all the time. Oftentimes, more than one, and what looks like an open and shut case is actually a black box packed full of twists and turns, bubbling
away in an atmosphere of rumor and vapor. CNN had the colors down to poor underdog red, versus rich elite yellow. Not getting that there are more colors here than a Dulux paint catalog, with a flip-side of shades of gray.

  I checked my twitter stream, email, and sms. Nothing from Cheep or Dr. Tom. Chai came back. Stood in the doorway and nodded at me. I held up two fingers, starting to pack up the stuff. He walked over to the sofa I was on and sat down in the easy chair opposite me - the short-barreled Uzi across his knees, the muzzle pointed at the door.

  “Chance.”

  I stopped packing and looked him straight in the eye. It's an occasion when Chai talks.

  “Yes.”

  “We're going to kill them, right?”

  I thought of Natasha. Heels of her feet on the edge of the straight-backed wooden chair with the wicker bottom, head thrown back, neck long and taut, quivering. I imagined Chai behind her slicing through the white skin with his carbon black K-Bar knife. It wasn't a pretty image.

  “Yes Chai, we're going to kill them all.” He had a hint of smile on his lips. Aunt Nings’ Doberman had a look like that. Before it was fed.

  Mustang Sally

  14 May 2010 Bangkok 5 pm

  Uncle Mike had a saying. “Behind every pair of eyes, there's a life lived.” I was looking at Natasha's. It was research. The notebook on my lap. The red cell phone on the seat beside me rang. A last look; what's your story, Natasha? I closed the notebook. It was five in the evening. We were heading past Pinklao into Bangkok. Traffic was light going into the City, and heavy coming out. Rumors of an imminent military crackdown on the red shirts were all over the net. I answered the phone.

  “Chance?”

  “Yes, Cheep.”

  “People saw a black van yesterday and a white van the day before. The doctor said Lilly died sometime in the morning the day before yesterday.”

  “Anyone get a number on the van.”

  “On the black van, yes. On the white no.”

  “The black van was us. Anything else?”

  “That's what I figured. No, nothing else.”

  “Check around. See if anyone has heard anything about a Scandinavian or Russian gang doing kidnappings or extortion. I'll send a photo in a minute, but keep it low profile, okay.”

  “Sure”.

  I hung up. So the morning of the day that I was blown up, Uncle Mike was kidnapped. That was a big coincidence.

  The army driver was snoring in the front seat while Chai drove trying to set a new land speed record between Phuket and Bangkok. I ran algorithms on the base stations numbers, listening to the Rolling Stones.

  I had already singled out the data for the morning of the eleventh. Calls in and calls out. For Patong area base stations, this is a lot of data. An sql query sorted out those numbers that had made calls from that area in the week before. I focused on those that only made calls on that day. People passing through. For those calls I took them down to the Picocell level. A picocell (pico) is base station repeater within say carparks or a mall. A microcell would cover an area of a few malls, and of course, macrocells are the base station receivers and transceivers which can cover an area of up to, in the case of GSM, 40 Km. Patong area has ten main base stations. Each base station has a collection of microcells and picocells within it. This is a lot of phone calls, however a cell phone is simply a two-way radio. Triangulation is built into the network. All the data is there for analysis, it just takes a bit of luck and a lot of time. Normally I'd farm this out. But I didn't know who or where all of our enemies were.

  I eliminated any numbers that were present at tourist spot picos. Kidnappers usually hang out in bars, restaurants, hotels and motels. I overlaid the numbers left on a satellite map of Phuket. Color-coded lines show the movement of numbers flowing from pico to pico. I color coded these according to average time spent at a picocell. If the average time spent in a picocell range is low, and consistent, then they're moving. If erratic then they're stopping places. I adjusted the algorithm to split a color for those which had a 10-20 minute stop at the microcell repeater for Uncle Mike's hill property area.

  A thin neon-pink line emerged. It came in from the mainland, ran to the airport, and stopped there for 15 minutes. It then changed to 4 pink lines, went straight to the microcell area and then all 4 pink lines went to a microcell east of the bridge. The four lines tracked south-east until they disappeared out of the data range. I needed more data. I picked up the green phone. Hit 1 on the speed dial. It didn't even complete the first ring before she answered.

  “Hello, Mother. How's my funeral going?” I could hear the live pipes and cymbals in the background.

  “Wait a second ... there that's better. I can hear you now. The funeral is going good but four streets got hit for protection money last night: four different groups. No one we can recognize. The heads of the five districts are meeting tonight. It was Big Tiger's idea.”

  “Okay, maybe he's making his move. What do you think? Are you going to go?”

  “No. I want to see what happens. We'll know more without showing our hand.”

  “Yes, you're right...”

  “Of course I am.”

  I smiled. “Mother, I need some more data. Four numbers. I've sent you the numbers.”

  “All right. It'll take time. The staff at the telcos are pretty busy tracking numbers right now.”

  “Yes, of course. How's it going with the money?”

  “It's going. Just like the trace data, it'll take time, another couple of days at least. You'll have to go to Singapore though. We can't move it here. Too much is happening right now. The military is trying to shut down red shirt financing. All transactions in and out are being very heavily monitored. This whole mess, I just can't believe it. Did you hear the BMA plan to shut down the electricity in the red shirt camp? That's no good. The red shirts have generators. Anyway, is there anything else? I've got to get back to your funeral.”

  “Yes, couple of things. Can you ask Aunt Ning to visit her Mor Doo, this evening after the monks leave, and to ask him for an update on how I'm doing in the hereafter. She should describe in detail how she saw me dead in the hospital and Khun Por too.”

  “Hmm, yes. Are you trying to spread a rumor?”

  “Yes. A couple of them. Is Sally there?”

  “Yes, she's playing Hi-Lo outside in the Sala.”

  “Can you tell her to meet me at her salon at about five?”

  “Yes. I see your game. That's good. Maybe draw someone out?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “How is your eye?”

  “It's okay. Throbs a bit when I think too much, which means its throbbing all the time. But it seems to be healing all right.”

  “Remember what I told you. All of them.”

  “Yes, Mother. I remember. I have to go now. Bye, Mother.”

  “Take care of yourself.” Her voice nearly cracked. I hung up to save us both the embarrassment.

  “Chai, Bangkok Noi.” He nodded.

  I called Cheep again.

  “Cheep, have your guys ask around yacht haven up north. See if any of the boat boys know anything about a boat leaving day before yesterday. Should have been 4 or 5 people on the boat. Show the photo of the woman if you need to.”

  “Okay. I'll send some guys up there now.”

  ***

  Chai stopped outside Mustang Sally's Salon & Spa, blocking the view from the houses opposite. I took the blue and yellow phones, a few bundles of cash, and left everything else in the van. Chai went into the salon before me to check the place out, rolling his eyes at me as he came back, closely followed by a six foot tall, beautiful woman. I climbed out slowly, aching everywhere.

  “Oh my God, look at you! I'm so sorry about Por. He was such a darling. Come in. Come in.” At one time, Sally was Bangkok's highest paid call “girl”, a katoey, specializing in femdom. Her reputation for blow jobs was legendary. Able to suck a golf ball through a straw, the most common metaphor. Still dressed in black, she
offered me a hollowed, powdered cheek. I gave her a quick peck on the cheek and followed her inside the salon. Hooker to salon is a standard career path, but Sally's success was anything but standard. Known by the nickname, “Dara CNN”, celebrity gossip is Sally's way of keeping the salon full. Sally also does make-up. It allows her to get up close and whisper the latest hot secret in your ear. Sally locked the doors behind us. I needed a disguise and a rumor spread.

  “Have you got a weapon. A gun or...” I put some urgency in my voice.

  “Yes.” She had a frown on her face.

  “Can you go get it? Now.” Her eyes went wider.

  “Sure. Yes.” She started to go back up the stairs off to our right, but turned, her foot on the first step and looked back at me.

  “Are we in any danger?” She had a sort semi-accusing look on her face, as if to say thanks for dropping this shit on my doorstep. I figured the more she felt that way the faster the news would go out.