by Barry Eisler
I paused. I wasn’t sure if the display was to warn me off, or if he intended to close. Maybe killing me was the backup plan if snatching me didn’t work out. No way to know. Regardless, I didn’t want to fight him. I just wanted to get away. I would have been happy to kill him to make that happen, but obviously if he was armed, killing him might no longer be the easiest means of exit here.
He started circling, moving closer. His footwork was smooth and balanced. He was just inside the distance that I would have judged safe for turning and running. I moved with him, conscious of my flanks in case the two who had run off reconsidered. I held my knife in my right hand with a saber grip, close to my waist, with my left hand open and partially extended to block and trap if we closed. If we did, I didn’t know if I would make it. What I did know is that he surely would not.
I heard a voice booming from behind me. “Partner, get down!”
It was Dox. I dropped into a squat, keeping the knife close to my body, and glanced over to see the giant sniper moving in with a wooden chair raised over his head. I ducked down lower. He lunged forward and let the chair go like it was an F-14 being catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier.
When a man of Dox’s size and strength throws a chair, there are many places you might want to be. In front of the chair is not one of them. In this sense, Perry Mason was unlucky. The chair caught him full in the chest and blasted him to the ground.
Dox and I were on him in an instant. Dox grabbed his knife and something else, whatever it was that I thought I had seen in his left hand, both of which had clattered onto the sidewalk next to him. I knelt across his chest and almost cut his throat to finish him, but then I saw that he was already helpless. He was grunting and starting to cough blood.
I did another perimeter check. Still okay. Returning my eyes to Perry Mason, I said to Dox, “Quick, give me a hand.”
Dox knelt next to me. I saw that he was scanning the street and sidewalk, and I was gratified to know that, this time, the behavior had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with survival.
“What do you want to do with him?” he asked.
I inclined my head in the direction of the alley, about twenty feet away. “Pull him over there. The dark.”
We grabbed him under the arms and hauled him up and over. He tried to resist, but the chair had broken him up inside and he didn’t have much fight in him.
There were no streetlights over this stretch of sidewalk, as is the case throughout most of Bangkok’s lesser thoroughfares, and once we had moved off to the side of Brown Sugar we were enveloped by darkness. In the alley, just in from the sidewalk, someone had parked a white Toyota van. The sliding door on the van’s passenger side was open, facing the clubs to the left. I saw this and instantly understood that their plan had been to drag me into the vehicle, then drive away and interrogate me at their leisure.
We shoved Perry Mason up against the front passenger-side door and patted him down. He had a Fred Perrin La Griffe with a two-inch spear point blade hanging from a neck sheath—obviously backup for the folder. I cut the neck cord and Dox pocketed the knife and rig. In his front pants pocket, we found a Toyota car key and a magnetic key card for the Holiday Inn Silom Bangkok. I pressed the “open” button on the car key and the van chirped in response. Yeah, the vehicle was definitely his. Beyond all this, and a Casio G-Shock wristwatch, he was traveling sterile.
I pocketed the keys and looked in his eyes. Blood was flowing steadily from the sides of his mouth. He was still conscious, though, still with us. Good.
“How did you find us?” I asked.
He shook his head and looked away.
Dox grabbed his face and forced him to look at me. “How did you find us?” I said again.
He gritted his teeth and remained silent.
I reached down and started probing his abdomen. He winced when I got to his ribs. Either they were broken, or there was some damage underneath, or both. I pressed hard and he grunted.
“We can do this easy or we can do it hard,” I said. “Answer a few questions and we’ll be gone. That’s all there is to it.”
He looked away again. He was trying to focus on something else, to let his imagination carry him away from here.
I knew the technique. There are ways of resisting interrogation. I’ve been schooled in them, and so, I had a feeling, had this guy. What they teach you is that you have to accept that you are in a position you can’t survive. Your life is over. There will be some hours of pain first, yes. Your body is going to be broken and ruined. But then death will deliver you. Concentrate on that coming deliverance, let your imagination go forth to meet it, and use the anticipation of that impending rendezvous to hold out for as long as you can. If you can do this, you can detach yourself from what’s happening to your body and make your mind much harder to reach.
I had to interrupt his reverie. Shake his confidence that his acceptance of death had put him in paradoxical control of the situation. Shock him out of his assumption that we were playing a binary game of live or die, life or death, with no other possibilities in between.
I pulled out my folder with my right hand and flipped it open. I grabbed his face with my left and forced him to look at me.
“No matter what happens here,” I said to him, “you are not going to die. We’re not going to kill you. You are going to live.”
I pressed the knife against his cheek, so that the point was resting just below the bottom edge of his left eye. “But if you don’t answer my questions,” I said, “I’m going to blind you. One eye, then the other. Now. How did you find us?”
The guy didn’t answer, but I could tell from his increased respiration that I had his attention, that I had hauled him back some distance from the relatively safe place to which he had tried to flee.
“Your choice,” I said, and started slowly driving the knife upward.
He squeezed his eyes tightly shut and tried to jerk away. Dox shoved his head against the side of the van and I kept the knife slowly going north.
The guy’s breathing worsened, approaching the cadences of panic. His eyeball was moving upward ahead of the knife. Another millimeter and it would reach the limits of its give and be skewered.
“Cell phone,” he said suddenly, panting. “We tracked a cell phone.”
I paused the knife but didn’t lower it. “Whose cell phone?”
“His. Dox’s.”
Goddamnit, I thought, I told him to keep that fucking thing off. Then: Not now. Deal with that later.
Dox said, “Hey, asshole, how do you know my name?”
I shot him a murderous shut the fuck up this is my show glance, then looked back at Perry Mason. “How did you get the number?”
“I don’t know. It was just given to me.”
Bullshit it was just given to you. “If I have to ask you again, you lose this eye.”
There was a pause, then he said, “I don’t know for sure. I was told it came from some Russian outfit.”
I knew Dox had done some work with the Russians not so long ago. I glanced at him, my eyebrows raised. He gave me a yeah, I guess that’s possible shrug in return.
All right. I had deliberately started with a question about tools and tactics, something this guy could give up without feeling he was compromising his integrity. This would warm him up, help him rationalize his responses to the tougher inquiries that would follow. We’d started with how, and that had gone well. What I really wanted to talk about was who. But I sensed he still wasn’t ready for that, not even at the cost of his eyes. As a bridge between what we had accomplished and what still remained to be done, I decided to use why.
“Why are you coming after us?” I asked.
He paused, then said, “You tried to take out an asset in Manila.”
“What asset?” His neck was stretched taut with his efforts to stay ahead of the pressure of the knife. “Lavi,” he said. “Manheim Lavi.”
“Why? Retaliation?”
I
already knew the answer to that one: information, not retaliation. If it had been simple retaliation they were after, they would have just tried to kill Dox and me. They wouldn’t have bothered hiring a bunch of locals to grab us and stuff us into the back of a van. But I wanted to keep him talking just a little more before we got down to brass tacks.
“Information,” he said. “We needed to know who was behind the hit so we could straighten things out.”
“What do you mean, ‘straighten things out’?”
“We have to protect our people. If there’s a threat, we deal with the threat.”
We were running out of time. The patrons in front of the club might discover some misplaced courage and decide to interfere. And certainly the police would be here soon.
Okay, here we go. “Who is ‘we’?” I asked.
He shook his head. I pushed the knife up a fraction and he cried out.
“Last time, and then you lose this eye. Who is we?”
He started to hyperventilate. He’d been standing on the very tips of his toes and his legs were trembling. But he wasn’t answering my question.
I didn’t want to do it—not out of any misplaced squeamishness, but because once you start hurting the subject, you start to lose your leverage. Fear is the ultimate motivator, but what you’re afraid of is by definition the thing that hasn’t happened yet. Once the thing has happened, you’re not afraid of it anymore. Once I’d taken out an eye, the loss of that eye would no longer be a threat. It would be one less thing the fear of which would motivate him.
But if you threaten and then fail to act, your subsequent threats lack credibility. It’s not pretty, but that’s the way a high-pressure interrogation works.
It occurred to me that there was one more problem. Whoever was behind this guy, if he were found sans an eye or two, they would know he had died after being interrogated. They could then be expected to change their plans, their security, to protect whatever their man might have compromised under duress. And, although in fact he had compromised very little, we had his hotel room key now. That presented some interesting possibilities I would have preferred not to foreclose.
Damn, it was a dilemma. But before I had a chance to resolve it, Perry Mason started to scream. Not so much in pain, or even to call for aid, but in outrage and desperation.
Dox slammed his hand over the man’s mouth, but the screaming decided it for me. We were exposed here, and too much time had gone by since the start of the incident. It was past time for us to bug out.
I looked at Dox. He nodded and I thought he understood. I took a half step back and kneed the guy in the groin. The screaming was displaced by a grunt and his body tried to double forward, but Dox was holding him too tightly. I changed my grip on the knife so that I was holding it ice pick style, blade in, and plunged it into his upper left pectoral, just below the clavicle. I ripped down and across, lacerating the subclavian artery.
I pulled Dox aside. The man spilled to his knees. He let out a long, agonized groan and pitched forward, but managed to get his arms out and caught himself before his head hit the pavement. There wasn’t much blood—the artery was transected, and the bleeding would be mostly into his chest and lungs—but there was no question that he would be unconscious in seconds, and dead shortly after that. I stepped in and slashed him twice across the forearms and he collapsed onto his face. He lay there, moaning and writhing.
I saw that I’d gotten blood on my hands—from his mouth or his chest, I didn’t know. I pulled a handkerchief from my back pocket and cleaned up the best I could. I handed the handkerchief to Dox and gestured for him to do the same. His eyes were wide and he seemed a little stunned, but he used the handkerchief. We’d be more thorough later.
One more thing. I glanced inside the open sliding door and saw what I was looking for: cell phone tracking equipment, strapped with duct tape to one of the back seats. Other than the equipment, the interior was clean. I used the handkerchief to open the van’s passenger door, then to pop the glove compartment, hoping to find registration or some other clue to Perry Mason’s identity. There was a first aid kit inside. I opened it, and saw vials of atropine and naloxone, and syringes. Interesting. But no registration, nothing to identify the people who had rented the van.
“Come on,” I said to Dox, who had been uncharacteristically quiet for the last minute or so. “We need to get out of here.”
We walked briskly across the street to the Lumpini Park side, where it was comfortingly dark. I glanced back at the sidewalk in front of the bars as we moved. The patrons had all gone inside. The two men on the sidewalk weren’t moving. We cut over to a sub-soi paralleling Ratchadamri, then started walking south and looking for a cab. Under the reflected glow of a collapsing storefront sign, I paused and looked at Dox, who still hadn’t said a word in a record-breakingly long time. “Hey,” I said quietly. “Look at me. Am I okay? Do I have any blood on me? Anything?”
He looked me up and down, then shook his head. “No. You’re okay.”
I gave him a once-over, as well, and nodded. “You are, too.”
He didn’t say anything in response. I never thought I’d be concerned that Dox was being too quiet, but it wasn’t like him.
“You all right?” I asked.
He closed his eyes, took two deep breaths, leaned forward, and vomited.
I looked around us. There weren’t any pedestrians on this section of road. Even if there had been a few, I doubted they’d be overly interested. It wouldn’t be the first time anyone had seen a farang who’d had a bit too much to drink.
When he was done, he wiped his mouth and straightened. “Damn, that’s embarrassing,” he said.
We started moving again. “Don’t worry about it,” I told him.
“That’s never happened to me, man, never.”
“It can happen to anyone.”
“Did it ever happen to you?”
I paused, then admitted, “No. But I don’t know that’s something to be proud of.”
“I just didn’t know you were going to do that, stab him like that. If I’d known, I could have gotten ready.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t warn you without warning him.”
“Why’d you slash his arms, man? I saw where you cut him, he was already dead for sure.”
“I wanted it to look like he went down fighting, not being interrogated. If his people think he was interrogated, they’ll assume he gave up information. I want to keep them in the dark.”
“So if he was fighting . . .”
“Then he would have defensive wounds on his forearms.”
“Oh. All right. Glad you weren’t just being sadistic. Is that why you didn’t take out his eye?”
“That’s why.”
“Would you have?”
I paused, then said, “Yeah.”
“Damn. I was afraid you were going to.”
I could tell Dox didn’t have much experience with hostile interrogations. I thought he ought to count himself lucky for that.
A cab came by and we flagged it down. I told the driver to take us to Chong Nonsi sky train station.
As we drove away and it began to seem as though we’d made it, the enormity of what had just happened started to settle in. Yeah, Dox had helped me out, but his stupidity had caused the problem in the first place. I had told him about the damn phone. Told him specifically. Why couldn’t he listen? What was so hard about turning off a cell phone? I tried not to say anything, thinking it pointless at the moment, but then it started coming out anyway.
“What did I tell you about that fucking phone?” I whispered. “What did I tell you?”
He looked at me, his expression darkening. “Look, man, I am absolutely not in the mood.”
“There’s equipment that can triangulate on a cell phone. They had it in that van. It’s accurate to about twenty-five feet. Tiara, the lady-boy who liked you for yourself? Her job was probably to go to the adjacent bars to help narrow it down.”
“How was
I supposed to know that? You didn’t know either, not until after.”
“Is it on now? Is it still on?”
He blanched and squirmed forward in his seat to reach into his pocket. He pulled out his phone, flipped it open, and pressed a button. It issued its cheery farewell melody and powered off.
“Why?” I asked. “Why would you leave that thing on?”
“Look, man, I’ve got clients, okay? There are people who need to reach me.”
“Not when we’re operational!” I paused, then said, “Clients, my ass. It was a girl, wasn’t it? Or girls.”
His nostrils flared. “What if it was?”
“You just opened a tunnel-sized hole in our security, while we’re operational, when we know we’ve got people looking for us, to get laid!”
“You know, not everyone enjoys your well-developed sense of solitude, partner. I like a little companionship from time to time, yeah.”
“They can use voice mail!”
“All right, I get the point! I made a mistake, I admit it, okay? What more do you want from me?”
I started to say something, then got a grip on myself. He was right, there was no point in playing I-told-you-so. And then I felt bad. He had just saved my ass back there with that chair.
I closed my eyes and exhaled. “I’m sorry. Shit like what just happened makes me cranky, okay? Usually there’s no one around for me to take it out on.”
There was a pause. Then he said, “I’m sorry, too. It was a dumb mistake. You were right.”
“What happened, anyway? Where did you go? I thought something had happened to you.”
He grinned, obviously coming back to himself. “Is that your way of telling me you care? ’Cause it gives me a warm feeling, it really does.”
I looked at him. “I think I liked it better when you were puking.”
He chuckled. “I just walked across the street to Lumpini to take a leak. I heard you shout, but it still took me a minute to cut off the stream and get Nessie put away.”
Before I could think better of it, I asked, “ ‘Nessie’?”
“You know, the Loch Ness Monster. I had a girlfriend once who named my . . .”
