by Jake Needham
I turned the alternatives over in my mind while I walked, but there was really no reason to do that. I already knew exactly who I needed to see.
When I got back to the building where my office was, I went straight down to the garage and got into my Volvo. A few minutes later I was headed north on Phayathai Road.
DARCY RICE LIVED in one of Bangkok’s older neighborhoods that was out near Chitralada Palace where the king maintained his official residence. It was a part of town where you seldom saw foreigners, and that suited Darcy just fine.
Her house was at the end of a tiny soi that branched off Wisut Kasat Road at an Esso station. If you didn’t know exactly where you were going, it didn’t look like a street at all, but just part of the station’s driveway. Behind the Esso station the soi made a sharp bend to the right and ran along a row of nondescript shop-houses for about a hundred yards until it dead-ended at a green metal gate set into a high ginger-colored wall. Thick stands of rangy bamboo tumbled over the wall from inside and gave the whole area a slightly overgrown appearance, but the bamboo had a very specific purpose. Concealed within it was a sophisticated security system that encircled the entire property. It was an exceptionally thorough piece of technology and it effectively ensured the total privacy of the occupants.
After Darcy retired from more than thirty years of working for the US government, some of it in Washington and the rest in various postings around Asia, she took her whole pension in a cash settlement and headed straight for Bangkok. I met Darcy shortly after she set up shop here. She had made it her business to look me up and introduce herself. At first I wondered why, but after I got to know Darcy better I understood perfectly well.
Darcy was in the business of collecting information and so she also collected people who had information. For a few months I heard from Darcy only occasionally, mostly when she needed me to explain some arcane twist of international finance, but gradually the calls and our visits increased in frequency and a friendship developed. Darcy had never spoken to me about her background except in general terms; however, I had no difficulty reading between the lines. CIA would have been an obvious guess, but I doubted it. My own theory was that Darcy had been with the NSA, the National Security Agency.
NSA was so secretive that it made the CIA look like the New York Times. What’s more, they did the stuff that few people even knew was going on—the computer break-ins, the telephone and email intercepts, the satellite surveillance, and the other black arts wizardry almost anybody out of the know would have been inclined to dismiss as paranoid fiction rather than real life. That was exactly the kind of stuff Darcy seemed to know all about.
Her computers occupied all of a two-story cottage across a swimming pool from the main house, and they were fat with data. There was little Darcy could not get access to. She could nail down details about intelligence networks and the activities of individual agents that conventional corporate investigative agencies had never heard of. The end of the Cold War had scattered a welter of unemployed, freebooting intelligence operators across the globe. A lot of them had tried to do the same thing Darcy had, but there were few others who could claim the sophistication of the operation she had created in Bangkok. It was nothing less than a private intelligence agency, one with capabilities equal to any competitor and to not a few governments.
At the end of the soi I stopped in front of Darcy’s gate and lowered the driver’s window. Before I could push the button on the intercom box, the gate split into two panels and began to swing inward. I gave a little wave in the direction where I knew the security camera was and the intercom speaker click-clacked in acknowledgment.
Parking on the gravel of the circular driveway, I got out and made my way up the short brick walk between rows of tropical plants so carefully tended and perfectly formed that they might have been shot out of plastic injection molds. Darcy opened the door and stepped onto the house’s wide front porch. She was a smallish woman, a few years past sixty, trim with a pleasant but forgettable face, and she wore her silver hair in a tightly fitted, masculine crop. As always when she was at home, she was dressed in a white silk blouse and an ankle-length sarong, today’s selection being in the brightest shade of saffron I had ever seen.
“It’s been a long time, doll.” She pecked me on the cheek and held my arm in a kind of embrace as we entered the living room of the house. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Out chasing women. What else is there to do in Bangkok?”
Darcy laughed and gestured me toward a couch in the elegantly proportioned living area. She sat on the one opposite and folded a leg up under her. A maid appeared almost immediately and placed sweating glasses of cold water in front of each of us, positioning them carefully on tiny squares of coarse, white cotton.
Darcy smiled at me and waited until the maid had glided silently out of the room before she said anything else.
“Nata is out in the cottage running some stuff. She ought to be in any minute.”
Nata had been Darcy’s companion for almost fifteen years and, not surprisingly, she was one of the primary reasons why Darcy had chosen Bangkok for her retirement. The daughter of a Thai general who had ended up on the wrong side of some long-forgotten military coup, Nata was a stunningly beautiful woman who must have been in her late forties. She was very slight with wispy, wide-set eyes, and she seldom wore make-up. Her skin was smooth and milky-looking, so white that you could go snow-blind just looking at it.
I was the pretty much the only foreigner I knew who hadn’t ended up in Thailand because of the women.
“So tell me, doll, what’s on your mind? I get the feeling you didn’t come all the way out here looking for a free lunch.”
“I guess I did in a manner of speaking. I need something.”
“Don’t we all?”
“I’ve got to meet somebody tonight, and I don’t want to sound completely stupid when I do.”
“Uh-huh.” Darcy’s face was professionally empty, waiting.
“I just need a little background. Nothing heavy duty.”
“Tell me the story. Let me decide that.”
I told Darcy about the telephone call and about my summons to Foodland that night. I also told her what I remembered about Barry Gale’s so-called suicide and the stories linking the Texas State Bank with money laundering by Russian mobsters. But I didn’t know much so that didn’t take very long.
“What I need is a digest of the press coverage around the time Barry Gale is supposed to have died,” I finished. “Can you manage that?”
“Exactly what are you looking for?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure. Anything that would prepare me for however this conversation tonight ends up going, I guess. Whatever that means.”
“I don’t see how any of the public stuff is going to help you figure out whether this really is your guy, if that’s what you’re trying to do.”
“Well…”
“Yeah, I know,” Darcy laughed. “You’d also like to see if I could come up with anything that might not have made the papers.”
“Something like that.”
“For you, Jack, anything.”
Darcy stood up and held out her hand.
“Let’s take a walk out to the cottage, doll.”
SIX
THE BUILDING THAT Darcy called a cottage was actually the size of a whole house even if it didn’t look much like one. Had it not been for a door on the first level and two small windows on the second, it would have resembled a solid cube of stucco.
The first floor was a single brightly lit room with at least a dozen computer workstations positioned around its walls. Three matronly-looking Thai women, all apparently well into their sixties if not older, moved silently from station to station checking the screens and occasionally tapping a few characters on one of the keyboards. In the center of the room, on a low platform, there was a far more elaborate workstation equipped with four huge thin-panel displays supported by sleek, black pedesta
ls.
Nata perched at the center of the platform in an orthopedic chair and rested her folded forearms on the table in front of a keyboard. She was looking from one display to the other, twisting her brows in concentration. A thin microphone on a chrome boom curved in front of her mouth and I had the impression she had been murmuring into it when we came in, but when she saw us she pushed herself back from the table and flicked the boom up over her head like a surfer chick flipping up sunglasses.
“Hey, Jack boy! Long time.”
“I was in the neighborhood, so—”
“Yeah, yeah. What is it this time? You never come to see me except when you want something.”
“That’s not entirely true,” I said, but it pretty much was.
Darcy stepped in and in a few clipped phrases related to Nata the high points of the story I had just told her about my call from the man claiming to be Barry Gale.
“This guy wants to meet you where?”
Nata’s question was addressed to me, but she was looking at Darcy when she asked it.
“Took Lae Dee.” I said. “It’s in Foodland.”
“The one on Sukhumvit Road? Down by the Ambassador Hotel?”
I nodded. I didn’t much blame Nata for wondering about that part of my story. I was wondering a little about it, too.
During daylight hours Sukhumvit Road was one of Bangkok’s principal arteries, four lanes jammed with vehicles and the Sky Train running on massive concrete pillars down its center. It slashed like a fault line across the part of the city where almost every foreigner in town lived. For miles it was lined with luxurious shopping malls, expensive restaurants, and many-starred hotels. It was generally thronged with people: well-heeled tourists, foreign residents, and those adventurous Thais who didn’t mind so much mixing with either.
In the hours after dark, however, a different breed took over Sukhumvit Road. Even at its most benign, Bangkok was part Miami and part Beirut, and there was nothing benign about midnight on the fault line. In the late, late hours, Sukhumvit Road became Blade Runner country.
I had always thought there had to be some kind of international network devoted to coaxing social rejects and dropout cases worldwide into coming to Bangkok, because come they did by the thousands. They walked away from third-shift jobs in places like Los Angeles, London, Sydney, Berlin, and Toronto, packed what they had, bought a cheap airline ticket, and made their way to the Land of Smiles. Some were looking for a cheap tropical paradise; others thought they’d found Sodom and Gomorrah; but almost every one of them was hoping in some way to make a fresh start on a life that up until then probably had little to recommend it. Many of these refugees from reality probably couldn’t have located the city on a map before they decided it was the place for them, maybe they still couldn’t, but now Bangkok had become their last, maybe their only hope.
In the empty hours it was this army of the dispossessed that took control of Sukhumvit Road. Tuk-tuks, little three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, flew up and down the street most of the night ferrying carousers between the two clumps of go-go bars that anchored the neighborhood: Nana Plaza on the west and Soi Cowboy about a mile to the east. They were all there: the lonely, the frightened, the guilty, the depressed, and the psychotic. Soaked with sweat, they rushed back and forth from one bar to another, reeking of that peculiarly sour, metallic odor habitually given off by the emotionally overmatched and underachieving. It was this floodtide of the lost and abandoned that owned Sukhumvit Road after midnight.
“So what do you want from me, Big Jack?” Nata asked.
“Whatever you can find out for me about Barry Gale. If I’m going into Indian country tonight, I want to go well-armed.”
Nata raised an eyebrow at me.
“Metaphorically speaking,” I added quickly.
Nata thought about that for a moment, her face a blank, then turned back to her keyboard and pushed a few keys. Boxes began appearing on one of the big screens in front of her. I watched her type Texas State Bank into a space in one of them and after ten or fifteen seconds a list rolled up on the other screen. She typed Barry Gale into another box and waited until a second list replaced the first. Then she typed something that appeared on the screen as nothing but a row of asterisks, hit the Enter key twice, and waited.
After a few seconds an index of news stories appeared back on the first screen, each entry providing a headline, a newspaper’s name, a date, and the first few sentences from the story. Nata started working her way methodically through every item, calling up the full text of some of the accounts. By the time she had been at it for ten or fifteen minutes, we knew pretty much everything the press had reported about the death of Barry Gale.
Barry had been at the bank’s North Dallas guesthouse for several weeks while preparing the Texas State directors for their formal meetings with the federal banking examiners. The examiners were awfully curious as to exactly how millions of dollars of the bank’s deposits managed to wander away without anyone noticing, and they were ready to ask the directors a lot of tough questions.
It was a Thursday afternoon when Barry told everyone he was exhausted and was going to knock off and go to Acapulco for a few days, so no one really wondered very much why they hadn’t heard from him until he failed to turn up for a conference with some Treasury Department people the following Wednesday. Then on Thursday, exactly a week after Barry had last been seen, a maintenance man found the body in a lap pool behind the guesthouse off Preston Road.
“Your ghost was right on the money,” Nata pointed out. “No useable fingerprints and the corpse’s face was too badly smashed up to get an ID except with dental records.”
“Was there an autopsy?” Darcy asked Nata. I had apparently been relegated to the roll of a silent observer.
“If there was,” Nata said consulting her screens again. “there’s nothing about it here.”
“That manhole cover looks like a pretty big loose end,” Darcy mused. “What do those suckers weigh? They’d have to go at least seventy-five, maybe a hundred pounds, wouldn’t they?”
Nata nodded absentmindedly, still studying one of the screens.
“Staggering around with a cast-iron manhole cover, using barbed wire to tie it around your neck, and then leaping into a swimming pool sounds looks to me like a pretty hard way to commit suicide,” Darcy said. “At least, it is if you’re doing the committing entirely on your own.”
“It sounds like the Russians,” Nata nodded. “Those guys love stuff like that.”
Darcy bent forward, reading a Dallas Morning News story over Nata’s shoulder. It concerned the unexplained disappearance of another director of the Texas State Bank about the same time Barry took the big swim, a guy named Harold Wilkins. The stories about Wilkins were pretty sketchy since Barry Gale’s drowning was so much sexier, but there was enough to work out the gist of what had happened. Darcy pointed to the monitor.
“Wilkins had been buying currency futures for a year or more before he disappeared. He was running all the positions himself using an account in the name of Westmoreland Oil and Gas, which was apparently a real oil trader in Dallas.”
“How could he do that?” Nata asked. “Wouldn’t somebody have started asking questions?”
“Not necessarily,” I offered.
Darcy and Nata both looked at me as if they had just remembered that I was there.
“If Westmoreland had been reasonably active in the foreign exchange markets hedging their exposure on future deliveries like most oil traders do, it would have looked normal enough. And I’m sure Wilkins would have been smart enough to route all the dummy accounts to himself. If he was, Westmoreland would never have noticed anything and there would have been nobody else to blow the whistle.”
Darcy and Nata took that in, glancing at each other, then all three of us went back to reading silently through the rest of the story. As we read, the rest fell into place. Wilkins had been using accounts he had set up in Westmoreland’s name to conduct his tr
ading operations all right. He was buying and selling futures contracts in a half-dozen different currencies for what on the surface appeared to be routine hedging of exposure on crude oil deliveries that provided for payments in Japanese yen and Singapore dollars. When the market turned on Wilkins, however, his losses quickly began to pyramid.
He kept ahead of them for a while—mostly by running hard, shuffling papers fast, and doubling up his losses—but when the magnitude of the debacle became so large that he couldn’t hide it any longer, the entire mess collapsed in a heap. That was when Wilkins disappeared without a trace. He left his house to drive to the bank one morning and stepped right off into the twilight zone.
Two weeks later, Barry Gale—or someone—was found at the bottom of the swimming pool at the guest house. His suicide was quickly attributed to the working relationship between Gale and Wilkins. There was even some speculation that Barry Gale could have been the real mastermind behind the whole currency futures scam and that he might have been using the less experienced Wilkins as a front man; but with one man dead and the other missing, following up the speculation would have been difficult.
In the end, apparently no one even bothered to try.
SEVEN
WHEN NATA FINISHED reading the story, she looked at Darcy. “Maybe this guy Gale really is still around,” she said.
“Then who was the stiff in the pool?” Darcy asked.
No one said anything since the answer was pretty obvious. If Barry Gale was still alive, Wilkins was the prime candidate for the Esther Williams role. Moreover, that opened the possibility that Barry might have had something to do with arranging the casting.
