“No hard feelings. What you got in there, anyway? Twenty of them? Fifty?” Pu asked.
“None of your business.”
“Oh, I think so, my friend. Very much so. You answer now.”
A blinding flash of lightning seared across the sky, and the trees shivered from the boom of thunder. Pu flinched involuntarily, and for a brief second, took his eyes off Jet.
That was all she needed.
The throwing knife flew at him in a blur, stabbing through his esophagus with a wet thwack. His pupils dilated as he gasped a protest, groped for the knife handle, and pulled it free. Blood spurted from the gash as he dropped the gun. Jet leveled a roundhouse kick and knocked him to the ground, his palsied fingers still clutching the knife, staring at it in fascinated awe, holding his free hand to his neck in an effort to stop the life from streaming out of him.
“That’s for all the children you’ve ruined,” she hissed, then kicked him in the groin. “And that’s for me, you piece of shit.”
He rolled into a fetal position and convulsed, once, twice, and then shuddered and lay still.
She leaned over, picked up her Beretta, and trained it on Matt again.
“I’m going to ask one more time, nicely, and then I’ll start shooting pieces off you. Where are the diamonds?”
He hesitated. “I have some in the bag around my neck. Five million worth. The rest are in a safe place.”
“Not good enough. Where are they?”
“In a bank vault in Bangkok.”
She nodded. “Then it sounds like we’re going to Bangkok. Walking, for the most part. Hope you’re in better shape than you look.”
Jet stepped closer to him and pulled the leather thong from around his neck, weighing the heft of the diamonds in the pouch before sliding it over her own head. Matt watched her with a stony countenance, his five-day growth of beard dripping beads of water.
“Then it’s really just you? Nobody else?”
“I’d say that was enough, wouldn’t you?” She picked up the night vision goggles and put them on again, then walked over to the P90 and retrieved it, pausing briefly before also grabbing the bow and arrows. She slid them over her shoulders and adjusted her backpack and then turned to face him.
“Come on. Let’s get going.”
“You realize that trying to walk out of here in the dead of night in a rainstorm is going to be pretty close to impossible, right? These hills are teeming with drug smugglers who would kill you just as soon as look at you. I didn’t have all this protection for no reason.”
“Did you a lot of good, didn’t it? Come on. Move it.”
He sighed. “You want me in front or in back? I can’t see anything, so it might be better if I followed you.”
“That works for me. But a word of advice. I just killed twenty of your men and didn’t break a sweat. If you try anything, and I do mean anything, I’ll cut your ears off and then work my way south. Nothing that will kill you or keep you from walking, but you’ll wish you were dead. Is that clear?”
“I understand. I try anything, you filet me.”
“Good. I’d say there’s the basis of a relationship here.”
Without another word, she set off into the jungle, Matt trailing her by three yards.
As they moved up the mountain trail, the rain slowed to a drizzle and then eventually stopped altogether. Soon they hit a rhythm, his boots trudging behind her, occasionally stumbling over a root or a rock. She figured that they could make it twelve to fifteen miles by dawn if they kept up a decent pace, although parts of the terrain would slow them, and they needed to be on guard for unfriendlies sharing the jungle paths.
Matt tried engaging her several times, but she shushed him, preferring to keep her ears tuned for threats rather than idle banter. She hadn’t captured him because she wanted a new friend. He was a dead man, and as soon as she had all the diamonds, she’d formalize it with a bullet.
When the first light peeped through the tree tops, they stopped to rest near a creek. She performed a brief reconnaissance of the surrounding area to ensure they were alone, then sat down cross-legged by the water and pulled two breakfast bars from her backpack.
“You hungry?” she asked, after wolfing hers down.
“And thirsty. I could use some water.”
“Is the water in the stream safe to drink?”
“Depends on how brave you’re feeling. I boil it. Lot of parasites around here. I don’t fancy having my organs burrowed through or used as a nest…”
She rooted around in her pack and retrieved two empty liter water bottles, then dropped a tablet in each before filling them from the stream. It took a few minutes for the pills to dissolve, and when she shook the bottles, the water looked milky. She took a sniff and chugged hers before moving to where Matt was leaning against a tree trunk.
“Which do you want first? The bar or the water?” she asked.
“Bar.”
She unwrapped it and held it up, fixing him with a cautious glare. “You try to bite me, I’ll rupture one of your eardrums just for fun, and you’ll spend the next week in constant pain.”
“I wasn’t going to bite you. Unless you wanted me to.” He tried a smile. She noted that he had a certain craggy charm and wasn’t a bad-looking man, overall, with his lean frame and chiseled features. Pity she’d be executing him soon to get her daughter back.
“I’m glad to see you’re keeping your spirits up,” she said and stuffed the first third of the bar into his mouth. He took a bite and chewed it methodically, eyes never leaving her face.
“You’re not agency, are you?” he asked between mouthfuls.
“Doesn’t matter, does it?”
“How did they rope you into this? What did they tell you?”
“Shut up and eat.”
He finished the bar and then nodded towards the water. “How was it?”
“Like cat piss. In a good way.”
“Can’t say as I’ve ever had the pleasure.”
“Then you’re in for a treat.”
She held the bottle to his mouth, and he drank greedily from it, finishing it within thirty seconds.
“Boy, you weren’t kidding.”
“I don’t kid.”
“How many more tablets do you have? Enough to last us three more days?”
“It won’t take that long to make it back to Thailand.”
“Don’t bet on it. The stretch from here to the border is rough going if you don’t have a horse. I’ve done it enough times to know. Even in the best of circumstances, it sucks. And with the rains, it’s not close to being good.”
“I have enough.”
He grunted. “And what about when I have to use the bathroom?”
“I guess I’ll get a show.”
“Did my ex put you up to this?”
She said nothing.
“Seriously. How do I attend to my, erm, necessities, with my hands shackled behind my back?”
“Very carefully.”
“The reason I ask is because it’s going to be that time soon.”
She sighed, annoyed, and then stood as she felt around in her pocket for a key.
“I’ll lock your hands in front of you for now. But again, one wrong move…”
“And you’ll skin me like an eel. I got it.”
She helped him to his feet and unlocked one wrist, then stepped back, her pistol leveled at his head.
“Stay facing the tree. Move your hands to your front, slowly, and lock the cuff.”
She could see him tense, almost imperceptibly, and she prepared for an assault, chambering a round in the Beretta with a percussive snick. His shoulders relaxed when he registered the distinctive sound, and he obligingly moved his hands in front of him and cuffed himself.
“Very good. Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” she asked.
“I can’t believe you didn’t have one in the chamber.”
“That was for your benefit.” She glanced down to where a shiny 9
mm bullet lay on the matted grass.
“I kind of figured.”
“I’m going to toss you some nylon cord. I want you to wrap it around each ankle, twice, and secure it so you have enough room to shuffle, but not enough to get into trouble.” She reached into her backpack with her free hand and pulled out a fifty-foot length of line and tossed the bundle to him, then watched as he did as she’d instructed. Once he was finished, she nodded.
“Try to avoid hitting the rope when you go.”
“I see you’ve done this before.”
“Don’t move more than twenty feet away. Knock yourself out. Then come back, and we’ll reverse the whole process.”
He grinned. “Bit cumbersome, isn’t it?”
“Life is filled with challenges. Maybe I’ll make you dance for me next.”
He lumbered over to a patch of plants and busied himself with his business as she picked up the bullet and replaced it in the Beretta’s clip. When he returned, she cuffed his hands behind him again, then sat down by the stream.
“We’ll rest for a little while, and then start in again. I’d advise you to get some shut-eye if you can. We won’t be stopping again until nightfall.”
“We won’t be able to keep that pace up. I’m just warning you.”
“Thanks for the well-intentioned advice.”
They drowsed in the heat, and then after an hour, Jet popped up, appearing as refreshed as if she’d enjoyed a full night’s rest. She nudged Matt awake with her boot.
“Let’s get moving. You take the lead now that it’s daylight.”
She powered on her GPS and got a bearing, then put it back into her backpack, along with the two water bottles she’d refilled.
As much as she hated to admit it, Matt was probably right about their progress.
It would be almost impossible to keep up a decent pace all day.
But they had to try.
As he shuffled down the trail, Jet shifted the P90 into fire-ready position and followed him, letting him get five yards ahead so he couldn’t easily try anything now that he could see. She wondered what would cause a man who seemed relatively decent to choose a life with sex slavers and heroin dealers, and then banished the thought. It wasn’t her problem. And his whole demeanor could be an act. She’d seen firsthand what Pu’s world was like, and any friend of his was unworthy of her sympathy. Not that she had any.
As to his stealing the diamonds, she had no opinion on that. It was between him and the CIA. Although a part of her bore him resentment — if he hadn’t stolen them, she wouldn’t have had her daughter kidnapped and be trudging through this miserable backwater.
He stumbled and almost face-planted into the trail, but caught himself at the last moment and continued forward.
The hard part of the mission was done. She had him. Now all she needed to do was get him to the bank so they could get the diamonds, and she was home free.
Although a niggling part of her didn’t believe for a second it would be that simple.
Nothing ever was.
Chapter 25
They stopped at five o’clock, this time at the banks of a larger stream, swollen to almost river-size by the rain, which had started again a few hours earlier. They were both soaked completely through, but at least it was warm — the temperature felt like a steady ninety degrees throughout the day, with all the attendant mugginess high humidity brought.
The mosquitoes swarmed as the evening wore on, and they paused to spray themselves again before continuing their forced march. She’d never seen anything like the bugs, not even in Belize — known as the mosquito coast for good reason. But compared to Myanmar, Belize was Toronto; the jungle around them was literally swarming with every variety of bloodsucking parasite known to man, as Matt had been quick to point out during one of their hushed discussions.
They hadn’t come across another living soul all day, but Matt seemed preoccupied with listening for others in the jungle, giving her the distinct feeling that he hadn’t been joking about the drug syndicates and human traffickers being their biggest obstacle to making it out alive.
She repeated the ritual with the breakfast bars and the water, then they sat in the shadow of a rock overhang, which provided slim shelter from the downpour, but more than the trees did. They listened together to the steady drumming of rain on the leaves, a hail of precipitation that seemed to be never-ending.
“You never told me where they got you from,” he began, eyeing her as she chugged more water.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You’re not CIA, I know that. What are you then? Freelance?”
“In a manner of speaking,” she answered, uninterested in pursuing it.
“What did they offer you to do this?”
“None of your business.”
“Whatever it is, I can double it.”
She ignored him, preferring to strip her Beretta and clean it during their break.
“You know about the diamonds. What did they tell you?”
“Guess.”
“Ha. Let’s see. If I was them, I’d tell a story about how I’m the bad guy, and they’re out to set an example. Am I close?”
“You tell me.”
“Who recruited you?”
“Again, none of your business. I don’t want to discuss it.”
“Was it Scarface, the great man himself? Or did he use an intermediary? He’s a coward at heart, so I’ll bet he used a cutout. Unless he’s desperate by now. If so, you met him. Creepy bastard, isn’t he?”
She stared at him with dead eyes.
“So what was the story? How did he explain away two hundred million in diamonds being handled by the CIA in Thailand? That must have been quite a yarn.”
He smiled at her, and she noticed that his eye color shifted from brown to green in the light. Little flecks of gold in the irises created the illusion of them glinting, sparkling.
She relented. “Two hundred? They told me fifty. You stole the diamonds from the CIA, which was supporting insurgency in Myanmar. A formerly trustworthy career officer gone rogue out of greed. Sad story.”
“Not bad. Of course, nothing near the truth, but hey, why let that stop anyone? Why tell you anything even resembling it? Fifty, two hundred, whatever. The only problem being that it isn’t true.”
“Sure it isn’t.”
“You actually believe that tripe? Then I’ve got a bridge to sell you. How about this — tell me which sounds more realistic. That the CIA was funding Myanmar insurgents with diamonds, for unknown reasons. Or that a faction of entrepreneurial CIA scumbags decided to get into the drug business over forty years ago, and the diamonds were just another payment to heroin traffickers in the Golden Triangle.”
She didn’t show any emotion, but she didn’t like what she was hearing.
“During the Vietnam war, some of the power players in the CIA figured out that they had the means and the wherewithal to become the world’s largest drug trafficking entity. Back then, drugs in the United States were illegal, but not a huge problem. Because there wasn’t any consistent supply. These guys decided to solve that problem by opening up a shipping operation from Vietnam — heroin from the Triangle, in return for guns and cash. The traffickers in the Triangle could sell the guns to the Viet Cong, so it was a great scheme. Of course, the only ethical hiccup was that American soldiers were being killed with weapons the CIA was supplying, but hey, can’t have everything. That’s why the heroin supply in the United States boomed once Vietnam was under way. And they didn’t stop at getting an entire generation of hippies addicted. They also made sure that it was the drug of choice for many of the GIs who were fighting in a conflict they wouldn’t ever be allowed to win. It was perfect, and this little club in the CIA made a fortune.
“The pipeline was a simple one. Cash and weapons on army transport planes to Southeast Asia, then heroin on the return journey, concealed in the coffins of dead GIs. The CIA hooked up with the Italian mob for distribution in the States,
and the rest is history. There were a few competitors that got involved as it went along — ex-GIs who knew what was going on because they’d been in on it while stationed in Vietnam, and who decided to set up their own railroads using the same technique, but the CIA squashed those once they got large enough to make headlines. It was all good business — they had other bad guys to point fingers at, and meanwhile the top echelon was getting rich.
“Occasionally a shipment would get intercepted as the traffic grew, but they could always blame it on one of these fall guys or claim it was an off-the-books op or a sting. They also got involved in the traffic to Europe — their problem was that once they were taking literally a hundred percent of the Triangle’s production, they needed addicts to sop up the supply. A classic supply/demand issue.”
“Are you trying to tell me that some faction of the CIA has been running heroin for forty years? Please. Try something more believable,” she sneered.
“More than forty, and not just heroin. Of course, as time marched on, the old hands retired or died, and then new blood took over. We are talking about billions of dollars per year, here. You could work for the CIA, and if you were part of the clique, retire a multi-millionaire, easily, all tax free. It was quite a racket.”
“And where do you come in?”
“I found out about it. I wasn’t one of the in-crowd. They kept everything very hush-hush, all need-to-know, but I figured it out when I was making regular runs into Myanmar and Laos with bags of diamonds and handing them to obvious drug lords. They fed me the same insurgents bullshit, but I soon discovered that there was no insurgency of any meaningful kind in Myanmar. Not over half a billion a year’s worth, anyway. And the CIA screwed up — I became trusted by the drug lords over time, and they began to rely on me to create a market for the diamonds — to create liquidity for them in Thailand. Of course, many of the diamonds made it to Europe for conversion, but a fair number stayed in the Far East.”
“I thought this was all recent.”
“Another lie. It’s been going on for decades.”
“So you were bringing them the diamonds. A courier.”
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