by Jake Needham
Kate nodded and laid the phone on top of her clothes right next to the Canadian passport.
“We’re going to Canada?” she asked.
“Probably not, but you need a passport to go anywhere.”
“Where did you get it?”
“That was Jello’s doing. The bike and the helmets, too. Alisa only delivered them.”
“Does that explain where the gun came from?”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.
“Was the gun your idea or Jello’s?”
“It was mine.”
Kate seemed a bit surprised at that, but she just nodded.
“Please tell me you didn’t shoot General Prasert,” she said.
“No, I didn’t shoot him, and I didn’t shoot anybody else.”
“But you hit him.”
“I did.”
“With the gun.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you hurt him badly?”
“Why all this concern for Prasert? You do understand he was going to have you killed, don’t you?”
Kate said nothing, but her eyes drifted away from mine.
“You still don’t believe me, do you?” I said.
No reply.
“You should believe me, Kate. I got it from Jello and Jello knows these things. If he says Prasert was going to have you killed in prison, you can take that to the bank.”
“I really do want to know if you hurt General Prasert badly,” she said.
“I don’t know, and I’m not sure I care.”
Kate just looked at me.
I reached under my shirt, pulled the holster with the Sig in it off my belt, and put the whole rig down on the table next to my helmet.
“He appeared to me to be unconscious,” I finally said, “but I didn’t stop to examine him. As you may recall, I was a little busy at the time.”
Kate nodded slightly, and she didn’t say anything else.
She walked over to her purse and opened it, and I watched as she felt around inside and took out a red and gold box of Dunhill filters and a gold lighter. She carried the cigarettes and the lighter back over to the leather couch and sat down. Shaking out a cigarette, she lit it and exhaled quite slowly. Then she put the Dunhill box and the lighter down on the coffee table and leaned back and crossed her legs.
The Canadian passport caught her eye again and she picked it up and flicked through it while she smoked quietly. She said nothing else about it, just closed it after a minute or two and put it back on top of the clothes where she had found it.
“Sit down, Jack,” she said pointing to the couch opposite her. “You’re making me nervous standing over there.”
I sat down facing Kate on the other couch, right next to where I had stacked my own clothes.
“Why don’t you tell me what the rest of the plan is?” she asked.
So I did.
FORTY-FIVE
I FINISHED EXPLAINING my plan to get her out of the country at the same time Kate finished her cigarette. She appeared to be thinking over what I told her and very deliberately stubbed out her cigarette in a shallow blue and grey bowl that was on the coffee table between us. The bowl looked a bit like an ashtray, but knowing Laura my guess was it was probably a piece of fourteenth-century Khmer pottery or something like that.
“I stocked up on food,” I said when I got tired of waiting for Kate to offer any comment on my escape plan. “Enough to keep us for a few days at least. Hungry?”
“You cook?”
“A little. Now and then.”
“You carry a gun, you drive a motorcycle, and you cook? Goodness, Jack, you’re going to make somebody a fine wife one of these days.”
“I think so, too,” I said and got to my feet. “Now, lunch?”
“Let’s start with coffee and see how it goes.”
I shook my head and went into the kitchen.
When I came back out with two mugs of coffee, I found Kate sitting exactly where I had left her. She had lit another cigarette while I was gone but, if she hadn’t, I would have been willing to swear she hadn’t moved at all. I put one of the mugs down on the table in front of her.
“You drink it black, don’t you?”
“That’s nice,” Kate smiled. “You remembered.”
“Not really,” I shrugged. “I forgot to buy milk.”
Kate laughed, and I felt the unreasoning pride every man feels when he is able to raise laughter in a beautiful woman.
We drank our coffee and talked about this and that. Kate and I chatted inconsequentially like the old friends we were and caught up on each other’s lives. For a while at least, we put aside the fact we were also two old friends hiding out from more or less the entire Thai army.
Our intermission from reality didn’t last very long.
“I think we should keep an eye on the news, Jack. I’d like to know what the government is telling people right now.”
“I doubt they’re telling people anything right now. If you were General Prasert, would you be in any hurry to admit that somebody grabbed the former PM right out from under your nose and now you have no idea where she is?”
“A lot of people heard those explosions and the gunshots. They can’t cover that up.”
“Maybe not, but they’ll spin it until everyone is dizzy.”
“You mean try to claim it was only a robbery or something like that and had nothing to do with me?”
“It was a robbery.”
“What are you talking about, Jack?”
“One of the jewelry stores up by the main entrance was robbed. The explosions weren’t bombs. They were flashbang and smoke grenades.”
Kate looked at me with a quizzical expression, as well she might have.
“It wasn’t a real robbery, of course. It was only a diversion. The idea was to distract your military guards while we took off through the supermarket. That part worked exactly like it was supposed to work, but I hadn’t counted on General Prasert and his bodyguards being there as well.”
“Who were the robbers?”
I hesitated.
“It might be better if I don’t tell you,” I said after a moment.
“But you arranged it?”
I nodded.
“You know criminals who have a supply of hand grenades and are willing to stage a robbery at the most high-profile shopping mall in Thailand to help me escape from the army?”
“Sure,” I said. “Doesn’t everybody?”
Kate just shook her head.
WE WENT INTO the kitchen and I found a remote control and turned on the small flat-screened TV on the counter.
I flipped through the Thai television channels, but there was nothing on other than the standard combination of game shows and soap operas that pass for entertainment on daytime television nearly everywhere in the world. That hardly surprised me. Television news wasn’t much of a thing in Thailand. In the early evening, each of the major channels had something on that passed as a local news broadcast, but it was mostly a dull recitation of government press releases and other approved stories read to the camera by talking heads. The really juicy stuff, crimes and fires and explosions, was left to the newspapers. During the day, none of the local stations even pretended to provide any news coverage.
The cable television companies in Thailand mostly carried BBC and CNN, although a few carried Fox and Sky News, too, and some included a smattering of French, German, Russian, and Arabic language news broadcasts in their channel lineups. At times of crisis it was to one of these foreign news broadcasters that anyone in Thailand turned to follow developments in real time. Otherwise, you waited until the next day and read about it in the newspapers.
I flipped over to BBC and sure enough their local correspondent was talking about explosions at a Bangkok shopping mall. He had very little hard information, but naturally that didn’t stop him from repeating what he did have over and over. After the third cycle of nothing but the same inform
ation, I tried CNN, but they had nothing at all. For good measure, I flipped through the other news programming that Laura’s cable service offered and found nothing on any of them either. So I went back to BBC and turned down the sound.
“It looks like the government is saying nothing.”
Kate nodded, her eyes still on BBC.
“The army isn’t about to admit they’ve misplaced you,” I continued. “I can’t imagine a worse loss of face for them. They’re going to try like hell to get you back before anyone notices you’re gone.”
“I don’t know how they can do that. There must have been three or four hundred people there, and people talk.”
“But none of those people know you’ve disappeared. There were explosions and gunshots and everybody took off. I’m sure they all think you were spirited away to safety. You were, of course, just not quite in the way they think.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Look, I don’t know about you, Kate, but I’m starved.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, damn it, seriously. After a morning of rescuing damsels in distress, a man needs to eat. How about scrambled eggs on toast with a side of bacon?”
“Count me in,” Kate smiled. “But are you sure you really know how to—”
I raised my hands, palms outward.
“Don’t say it. Don’t even think of saying it or you’re getting oatmeal instead.”
“I don’t like oatmeal.”
“Nobody does.”
LUNCH WAS PRETTY good, but Kate’s praise of my talents as a cook was remarkably restrained. Perhaps she was rethinking the you’d-make-a-good-wife thing. Perhaps she just didn’t much care for scrambled eggs on toast.
We washed the dishes and sat in the kitchen for a while flipping through the news channels, but nobody seemed to have anything they hadn’t had before. The story had finally appeared on CNN accompanied by the predictable speculation from a variety of no-name talking heads that it might have been a terrorist attack, but the Thai government was still saying nothing at all. Very few news organizations had people in Bangkok any longer since it wasn’t exactly a hot spot for international news. That left the networks with nothing to report except what they were being told by the government. And that was almost nothing at all.
We made a fresh pot of coffee and went back out to the living room, and I got the laptop out of my duffel bag. I logged on to Laura’s wi-fi network and I was soon surfing the international news sites from Fox to Al Jazeera to Deutsche Welt, but there was nothing new there either. Then I hit the Bangkok Post’s website and struck pay dirt.
A Post staff reporter and a photographer had been at EmQuartier for the Brainwake opening, probably because of Kate. She had made few public appearances since the military coup removed her from office, even fewer since her arrest and release on bail, but she had a great many friends and supporters so a public appearance by her was news.
“The Post has something,” I said.
Kate got up from the other couch and sat next to me and I turned the screen of my laptop so she could see it, too. We both read through the Post’s piece while I scrolled the screen.
The story said Kate’s appearance had been interrupted by a robbery at a jewelry store in EmQuartier. The robbery involved at least three explosions as well as a number of gunshots, the story went on, but no one was injured and the robbers all escaped. The part that got my attention was the claim that a foreign security man had escorted Kate away and out of danger.
The story included only a passing mention of General Prasert’s presence at the café opening, which seemed to me to speak volumes, and no suggestion at all that he had pursued us or that I had beaten him to the floor in the storeroom with the butt of my Sig. It would be a cold day in hell before a Thai newspaper would risk reporting that a foreigner had gotten the better of Thailand’s military dictator and beaten him up, even if they knew about it, which I was pretty certain the Post didn’t.
“My foreign security man, huh?” Kate chuckled.
I was far less amused than Kate seemed to be, and I wasn’t at all amused when I looked closely at the photograph the Post had run with the story. It must have been taken immediately after the explosions. In the foreground, people were beginning to panic and, in the background, through the crowd, you could clearly see the stage. General Prasert was invisible behind his screen of bodyguards, but Kate was easy enough to pick out at the far right end. And I was directly in front of her, reaching for her arm to help her step down.
“Crap,” I murmured.
Kate looked closer. “I don’t think anyone would know who you are from that photo, Jack.”
“When it gets out that you’ve slipped your military guards and disappeared, every photo taken today by anyone is going to be examined and re-examined for clues as to what happened and who helped you. They’ll figure it out pretty damned quick.”
“I don’t know. It’s not very clear. Your face isn’t even visible.”
“Look, Kate, you don’t seem to understand that this is going to be big news all over the world. You’ll be the biggest female fighter for democracy since Aung San Suu Kyi, the last woman in the neighborhood who gave the finger to the big bad generals. A lot of people are going to wonder how it happened, and there’s going to be all kinds of wild speculation. Was it a CIA operation? Was MI6 involved? The international news media is going to dig through everything they can find to try to figure that out, and a story and a photo in the Bangkok Post is going to be an obvious catch.”
“I still don’t think—”
“A foreign security man? Really? Everybody knows you don’t have any foreign security men. The army would never allow it. So who is this white guy helping you off the stage?”
“You mean they might think it’s the CIA?”
“I wish. Too many people are going to guess it’s me because they know about my relationship with you.”
Kate paused and seemed to consider what I had just said, but she did it in such a theatrical way, turning her head and widening her eyes, that I should have sensed what was coming.
“Our relationship, Jack? Exactly what would you say our relationship is?”
And just like that I was in trouble.
FORTY-SIX
THE REST OF the day passed quickly. We talked about all sorts of things, and I managed to avoid using the word relationship again. We did not talk about Thailand’s future, assuming it had one, or about Kate’s role in it, assuming she had one.
We kept checking the international news channels on television and poking around on the internet to see if anything about Kate going missing had surfaced. It hadn’t. The military was keeping a lid on the story.
Evening came almost before I knew it and Kate announced it was her turn to cook. I didn’t argue the point.
I made drinks for us while Kate rooted around in the kitchen to see what she had to work with and eventually came up with the ingredients for linguine bolognese. Rats. That was what I had planned to cook tomorrow. Other than scrambled eggs and bacon, it was the only other dish I knew how to make. When it was my turn to cook again now I was pretty well screwed. Maybe I could call out for a pizza.
After dinner we made a pot of coffee and took it upstairs to the roof deck. I had a couple of Montecristos left so I dug one out of the duffel bag and took it and my cutter upstairs with me. Kate brought her Dunhills and her lighter.
The roof deck was furnished with three rattan couches, their thick cushions and plump pillows covered in bright yellow sailcloth. The couches were arranged in a U-shape around a low wooden table with a view straight out to the east over the green lawns of the American ambassador’s residence. On the other side of it, across Witthayu Road, the mirrored towers of All Seasons Place sparkled with reflected light from the city.
“I think we should keep it dark up here,” I said. “I don’t want us to be conspicuous if anyone looks this way.”
“And here I thought you were being romanti
c, Jack.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.
We sat at right angles to each other on two of the couches. There was a big blue and white ceramic dish in the middle of the table and I reached over and pulled it toward us. Maybe it was another national art treasure, but it looked like an ashtray to me so that was what it was going to be tonight. Kate poured coffee for us while I cut my Montecristo.
Kate handed me her lighter and after I puffed my cigar to life I bent across and lit her cigarette, then I put the lighter on the table on top of her Dunhill box.
“I’m going to have to ration these,” she said after she took her first puff, “or I’m going to run out before Tuesday.”
“How’s your disposition when you run out of cigarettes?”
“Not good these days. Not good at all.”
“Maybe you should give them to me and I’ll dole them out.”
“Not a chance, pal.”
I always thought the nights in Bangkok should be declared a national treasure. Daylight was harsh, the sun relentless and the heat brutal, but the nights were something else again. There is a silky softness to a tropical night. There is nothing more romantic, nothing more sentimental. The heat bleeds from the air and the mugginess gives up its grip, and there is an intimacy to the night’s embrace. The world feels rife with possibilities and promise.
I sensed Kate felt the same way so we didn’t talk very much. Mostly we sat and drank coffee and smoked, and we basked in the quiet and the kindness of the night.
After Kate finished her cigarette, she stubbed it out in the big ceramic dish, then she sat quietly for a while sipping her coffee, occasionally casting sidelong glances at me. I knew something was coming, but I had no idea what.
When Kate eventually spoke, it was in a voice so low that I had to strain to hear her.
“I thought you were never coming back to Thailand, Jack.”
“I wasn’t.”
“But you did.”
