THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE (An Inspector Samuel Tay Novel)

by Jake Needham

  He should probably stay well away from American women. That was the real lesson here. Their directness was just too alarming for him. Christ, he needed a Marlboro.

  Fortunately, he had come prepared. He fished in the pocket of his bathing suit for the pack he had brought down from his room and shook out a cigarette. A breeze had come up and it took him three tries to light it, but by cupping the match carefully in his hand he was eventually able to manage the feat. The pool boy appeared at his elbow with an ashtray. Tay took it, dumped the burned-out match, and the boy scampered away. Tay was just congratulating himself on killing nearly a full minute without having to respond to Cally’s observations about him, but then he exhaled and glanced quickly through the smoke at her and saw that he wasn’t going to escape quite that easily. He may have earned himself a reprieve, but it was not going to turn into a full pardon.

  “Do you want to have sex with me, Sam?”

  Tay choked and began to cough uncontrollably.

  “It’s a serious question, Sam. Do you?”

  “No,” he stammered when he was finally able to speak again.

  That isn’t right, he thought to himself, but I can hardly say yes, can I?

  “See what I mean? You’re not giving me an honest answer.”

  “Look, Cally,” Tay cleared his throat and stared at his feet, “I just don’t know what to say to that.”

  “Am I embarrassing you?”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? For God’s sake, what do you expect me to say? Yes, I’d like to have sex with you? I can’t say something like that.”

  Cally nodded slowly, but she remained silent.

  “Besides, right now I’m …” he trailed off.

  It had not entered his mind up until this moment to tell Cally about his mother, but all of a sudden that was exactly what he wanted to do.

  “You’re what?” Cally asked.

  “Tired. Messed up. I don’t know what.” Tay looked at Cally. “My mother died.”

  “Your mother?” Cally sat up and swung her feet to the ground. “When?”

  All at once it occurred to Tay that he wasn’t sure.

  “Yesterday, I think. I’m not even sure. She died in New York. Some lawyer from there called me.”

  “Oh God, Sam.”

  Cally leaned toward Tay and took his left hand in both of hers. Tay could feel the smoothness of them. For a moment, he could think of nothing else.

  “I am so sorry,” she said. “I am so very sorry.”

  Tay didn’t know quite what to say. He hadn’t planned any of this and wasn’t sure where to go with it. Cally apparently mistook his silence for grief because she gripped his hand harder.

  “When is the funeral?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you can get there in time, can’t you?”

  “I suppose.” He hesitated, but the truth had gotten him this far so he decided to stick with it. “It doesn’t really matter. I’m not going.”

  “To your own mother’s funeral? You’re not going?”

  Tay looked away.

  “I wasn’t close to my mother and I don’t like funerals,” he said. “I have something to do here that matters more.”

  Cally nodded at that, but she didn’t say anything.

  “How are you doing?” she asked him instead.

  “I’m good.” Tay scratched his cheek and examined the horizon briefly. “No, I’m not. I’m not good at all. I may not have been close to my mother, but she was the last connection I had to the rest of the world. And now she’s gone.”

  “You’ve never had any children of your own?”

  Tay looked at Cally as if she had suddenly gone mad.

  “So you’re not married?” she plowed on.

  “No.”

  “Divorced?”

  “No.”

  “Never married?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Wow.” Cally thought that over for a moment. “Why not?”

  “I…”

  Tay wondered, not for the first time, how to answer that question and decided to stick with his newfound policy of telling the truth.

  “I just don’t know.” Tay looked at Cally. “And I don’t know where that leaves me now.”

  “I do. With your life in front of you.”

  Tay thought about that while Cally continued stroking his hand.

  “Yes, you’re probably right,” he said after several minutes had passed. “But right now I need to find the man who killed these two women. I need to do that. That’s who I am, not the son of somebody I don’t really know.”

  “Okay,” Cally nodded slowly. “I can help you.”

  “I wish you would.”

  “Do you trust me, Sam?”

  The question stopped Tay. It wasn’t because he didn’t know. He did know. To his astonishment, the answer was yes. He did trust Cally. Still, all at once just saying yes didn’t seem enough somehow. He had to tell her exactly what yes meant. And that was what he didn’t know exactly how to do.

  “Okay,” she said after long moments had gone by without Tay saying anything. “Then let’s take it this way. I am going to trust you and then I am going to ask you to trust me in return. I guess we’ll see if you can do it.”

  Tay was losing control of the conversation, if he ever had any control of the conversation, which he doubted. More and more he felt like he was just along for the ride.

  “You asked me whose apartment Ambassador Rooney’s body was found in. Remember, Sam?”

  Cally’s sudden shifts of direction were giving Tay a serious case of whiplash. First it was the deeper meaning of his life, after that it was having sex, then it was the death of his mother, and now she was on to two murdered and abused women. If he didn’t tell her to cut it out, she was going to drive him crazy. But he didn’t tell her to cut it out.

  “I remember,” was all he said.

  “Well then, here’s my offering of trust, Sam. I know who owns that apartment. And I’m going to tell you.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  CALLY’S eyes slid away from Tay and she sat looking silently out across the pool. Tay wondered if she was going to change her mind.

  “You’re not supposed to know,” she said after a minute or two had passed, “but I’m going to tell you anyway.”

  Tay waited.

  “The apartment is owned in the name of a shell company, but the company is just a nominee for the American embassy. The apartment is one of a number of safe houses owned by the embassy and used by embassy personnel.”

  “Do you know exactly who?” Tay asked.

  “A number of different agencies. Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the military attachés, DEA, FBI…”

  Cally paused.

  “You know,” she finished.

  “The CIA?” Tay asked.

  “Yes,” Cally said, “them, too.”

  Tay sat up on the lounge chair, which caused his hand to pull away from Cally’s. He started to say something, to tell her that he hadn’t really meant to take his hand away, but he didn’t. It would have sounded clumsy, even desperate, and he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  “What do you mean exactly?” he asked Cally instead.

  “That apartment is a place where we meet sources so they don’t have to come in to the embassy.”

  “Sources?” Tay asked.

  “Intelligence sources. Locals who’ve been recruited to pass along various kinds of information.”

  “Mostly, I would guess, because you pay them.”

  “Does it really matter, Sam? Regardless of their motivation, they can hardly stroll into the embassy and have a Coke with us when they have something to report. We meet them in places like that apartment, places where they aren’t likely to stand out or be noticed. There are several other apartments just like it around Bangkok that I know about, and I have no doubt there are others I don’t know about.”

  “Who was using t
his particular apartment around the time Ambassador Rooney was murdered?”

  “There’s no way to know that. It could have been anybody.”

  “No records are kept?”

  Cally sighed in exasperation. “Sam, for God’s sake, these are intelligence operations. What do you think happens? Somebody calls the embassy travel office and asks to book a nice safe house for a couple of days? Maybe one with a sunny outlook and a Jacuzzi?”

  Tay rubbed at his face, but he didn’t say anything. Then he shifted his weight on the lounge chair and rubbed some more.

  “What is it, Sam?”

  “The Singapore Marriott was being used for meetings connected to the embassy there, too. It was certainly being used by the CIA, maybe by others as well.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Tay told Cally about Ramesh Keshar and how the Singapore Marriott’s spare security card had been loaned out to a Mr. Washington at the American embassy whenever he was asked for it.

  “I didn’t understand what that meant until you told me Mr. Washington was a State Department euphemism for the CIA,” Tay finished. “It seems obvious now the Singapore Marriott is used the same way you said the apartment here is used. Do you have any reason to think I’m wrong about that?”

  “No,” Cally said. “I don’t.”

  “Did anyone at the embassy tell you about that after Elizabeth Munson’s body was found at the Marriott?”

  Cally’s eyes flickered for a moment and then met Tay’s.

  “No,” she said, “they didn’t.”

  Abruptly, Cally stood up and walked to the edge of the pool deck. Tay hesitated for a moment, then followed. He leaned next to her, resting his forearms on the low wall, studying the hopeless gridlock in the streets below. Tay wondered if the traffic in Bangkok required motorists to carry around emergency supplies of food and water when they drove. Maybe even a chemical toilet. He waited quietly, knowing Cally was struggling with some kind of decision.

  “There’s something else I didn’t tell you,” she finally said.

  Tay stayed silent.

  Cally twisted around and rested her back against the low wall.

  “Marc Reagan and I met the ambassador at the residence the morning after he came back from Washington.”

  She paused, thinking.

  “He said there were two things we needed to know about his wife’s death. The first was what he told you at your meeting, that he and Mrs. Munson were discussing a divorce. The second was something he didn’t tell you.”

  Cally took a deep breath. She made Tay think of a surgeon who was reluctant to cut. But then she took another breath and just did it.

  “Elizabeth Munson was a CIA intelligence officer. She was working under what is called non-official cover, developing informants in terrorist groups in Southeast Asia. According to the ambassador, he was the only one at the embassy who knew it.”

  Tay was silent for a moment. He didn’t know exactly how far out on a limb Cally had gone by telling him that, but he suspected it was a very long way indeed.

  The day had faded nearly into darkness and the stationary streams of traffic below glowed like strands of pearls stretched between the city’s buildings. The temperature had dropped and the air tasted like a mouthful of coins.

  “Okay,” Cally went on before Tay could decide what to say. “Then let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  She leaned back against the wall and folded her arms, crossing one ankle over the other. “Exactly what did the two murders have in common?” she asked.

  Tay assumed the question was rhetorical so he said nothing.

  Cally held up one finger. “Both women were killed by a single shot into the ear with a .22 caliber handgun and both women were restrained in some way when the shot was fired.”

  She held up a second finger. “The faces of both women were beaten into pulp, both probably postmortem, and both bodies were posed in exactly the same way.”

  A third finger. “Both crime scenes were sanitized after the killings.”

  A fourth finger. “One victim was an American ambassador and the other victim was an American ambassador’s wife who was working under cover for the CIA.”

  Now Cally held up five fingers, spreading her entire right hand, palm outward, like a cop stopping traffic. “And both of the murders occurred in places where American embassy personnel met intelligence sources.” Cally cocked her head at Tay. “That’s it, right? That’s all the two cases have in common?”

  “Not quite,” Tay said.

  Then Tay told Cally about his conversation with Lucinda Lim and repeated her story about Elizabeth Munson having a female lover for whom she was planning on leaving her husband.

  “Come on, Sam, surely you’re not saying that Elizabeth Munson and Ambassador Rooney were—”

  “I guess they could have been,” Tay interrupted. “Although that’s not what I’m telling you.”

  “Then what are you telling me?”

  “It can’t be a coincidence that two women prominent in American diplomatic circles, both of whom had sexual involvements with other women, were both brutally murdered in American embassy safe houses within a few days of each other.”

  Cally shifted her eyes to Tay’s. “You think somebody in one of our embassies is responsible, don’t you?”

  There was a loud sound from somewhere just then, a sound that Tay couldn’t immediately identify. He wondered briefly if it was the sound shit made when it hit the fan.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”

  Cally uncrossed her ankles and crossed them back again in the opposite direction.

  “Goddamn,” she murmured in a low voice. “Goddamn it all to hell.”

  The setting sun was a bright orange ball burning through a thin haze streaked with purple and green.

  “It may not be that easy,” Tay said. “Something about the two crime scenes doesn’t feel right to me.”

  “You mean they aren’t really alike?”

  “No. They are. That’s the problem. They’re too much alike.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Tay paused and organized his thoughts. “Take the gun, for example. How could it be the same gun? The killer couldn’t have flown with it from Singapore to Bangkok. He would have had to bring it by train or car and even that would be risky because he might have been checked by Thai customs. Why take that chance?”

  “It’s probably not the same gun,” Cally said. “Just the same caliber.”

  “Exactly,” Tay nodded. “But then why use exactly the same caliber gun? And why shoot the ambassador exactly the same way Mrs. Munson was shot? It’s as if the killer consciously tried to match up the details of the two scenes to make sure we thought the same person murdered both women. Then, there was that business with the flashlights, too.”

  “What business?”

  “In the case of Elizabeth Munson, the flashlight was already in the hotel room. Using it on her was strictly opportunistic. In the case of Ambassador Rooney, surely it wasn’t just lying around. It’s too much of a coincidence to believe that exactly the same kind of flashlight that was in a room at the Marriott was also in your safe house here in Bangkok. The killer must have brought it with him.”

  “I get it,” Cally nodded. “He was duplicating the first crime scene. So we would know that both women were killed by the same man.”

  “Or woman.”

  It was nearly dark and the damp air had turned far too cool for them to stand around any longer in their bathing suits. At least, Tay thought it was the air that suddenly made him feel cold. Maybe it wasn’t.

  “What does the posing of the bodies mean, Sam? What is the killer telling us?”

  Tay shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  Cally must have felt cool, too, because all at once she pushed herself away from the wall and walked back to where she had left a pool bag on the grass beneath her lounge chair. She pulled out a T-shirt and shorts, slipped them ov
er her bathing suit, and slid her feet into a pair of rubber thongs.

  Tay walked over just as she finished.

  “I hate to go now, Sam,” she said turning around, “but I have to. I promised some friends I’d have dinner with them tonight.”

  Tay hadn’t really thought much about it, but he had just been assuming that he and Cally would spend the evening together. Probably have dinner. Maybe even check out a little of Bangkok’s famous nightlife. Apparently not. Tay hoped the disappointment didn’t show on his face.

  “I’ve got some meetings at the embassy tomorrow morning,” Cally added. “But I can be back by early afternoon. Maybe we can have another swim then and decide where to go from here.”

  “I told my boss I’d be back in Singapore tomorrow. He wasn’t all that happy about me coming to Bangkok in the first place.”

  Cally didn’t say anything.

  “I guess I could always poke around a little on my own while you’re in your meetings,” Tay ventured tentatively.

  “You could.”

  “It might be useful.”

  “Probably would be.”

  “I could give the Chief a call, and tell him—”

  “I think that’s the best thing for you to do.”

  Cally swung her bag over her shoulder.

  “Now you be a good boy tonight, Sam. It’s easy to get into trouble in Bangkok.”

  She gave Tay a little wave and walked away through the dim lights of the pool deck.

  When Cally had gone, Tay pulled his shirt on over his bathing suit and sank down on a lounge chair where he sat for a long time without moving. He thought back through what he had told Cally and what she had told him. He pushed and pulled on everything, turning it first one way and then another. He looked for different ways it could add up, ways that might be less scary.

  He did not find any.

  Tay could feel everything starting to come together now. He did not like how it was coming together and he wasn’t yet certain what it might all mean, but it still gave him a lift to know he was getting close.

  Tay reached for his Marlboros and lit one. He was exhaling his first mouthful of sweet, sharp smoke when he looked off in the distance and saw a crescent moon rising very slowly between two buildings. It was burning like kerosene against the dark sky. As he sat and smoked and watched the moon, he felt an extraordinary silence settle around him and spread even to the city down below. It was a silence deeper and more profound than any other he had ever experienced. It was as if the whole world was holding its breath.