“A good theory, if he was alive when you were hired,” she said.
Actually, I thought it was an excellent theory. I also thought that whatever he suspected was going on had been cleaned up between the time he was killed and I was hired. And I had been retained to present the corporation with a clean bill of health so it could be sold.
Or to be killed. That was the part that didn’t make sense—why send me halfway across the world and feed me to tigers, when tossing me to the sharks would do just as well?
And how had Si gotten involved? I’d called him, not the other way around.
Even if I hadn’t had tiger slobber all over me, I’m not sure I could have sorted it out then. There were too many pieces to the puzzle—I couldn’t even figure out how Trace and Tosho knew where I was.
“Not hard to figure, tiger-breath,” said my Japanese friend. “You left your phone number on Ms. Dahlgren’s voice mail.”
Sensing something was up and worried that she would tip off someone who was with me if she called the sat phone, Trace flew to Japan and met Tosho, who helped her retrace my steps. By the time they got to Bangkok, I’d left my message on Trace’s voice mail; they tracked the number to Si’s Chinatown office. They used that to hunt down Si, first at the airport and then at places where the Bangkok police believed he would be. (For the record, I had never been a “person of interest” in the BetaGo heist; Si had concocted that. The policemen who’d been sent for me turned out not to be policemen at all, but Si’s men dressed up to get me away.)
Trace and Tosho found a young man eager to help—once Trace persuaded him that his life depended on it. The kid was maybe fifteen and did a variety of jobs for Si, who I was discovering was not as much like his father as I had thought.
I recognized the kid in the truck as one of the assholes who’d appeared with an AK-47 before I got clunked on the head. He didn’t speak English and his Thai was unintelligible, but he spoke Chinese well enough for Tosho to say that he was calling on every ancestor in his family to testify that he did not know where Si was.
“He prays that you won’t hit him, and will spare his miserable life as promised,” added Tosho.
“He used the word miserable?”
“My Chinese is rusty, but it was something along those lines.”
“Let me talk to him,” said Trace. “I know his language.”
I held her back. The kid stared at me, his mouth open. He’d tell us anything we wanted to know, as long as he knew it. If we leaned on him, he’d make up whatever he thought we wanted to hear. Gratifying as that might be, it wouldn’t help us much.
“Ask him how he got involved with Si,” I told Tosho, staring at the kid the whole time. “Why is he a terrorist?”
Tosho didn’t know the word for terrorist in Chinese and called him a criminal instead. The kid winced, then began telling his story. He’d been born in Pattani, a province in the south of Thailand about seventy-five percent Muslim; when he was twelve he cut loose from his family and went north to Bangkok to seek his fortune. Things hadn’t worked out all that well. For a short while he worked as a male prostitute catering to foreign tourists, but he was a bit too old to be a favorite, and the act disgusted him. He had been drifting along until he ran into Si.
Si apparently wasn’t interested in using the kid as a prostitute. He found former members of the profession could be pliable soldiers in one of the businesses he ran on the side. Si made a good sum—probably in the tens of thousands of dollars a month, we later learned—selling tiger bones to Chinamen, in China, Malaysia, and Indonesia, as well as throughout Thailand. The kid was one of the runners, charged with delivering carcasses to a shop in Bangkok’s Chinatown, where the items were processed and then shipped out, eventually to be sold as aphrodisiacs and cures for all kinds of diseases.* The kid didn’t know where Si was, but he agreed to show us where the shop was. I figured we could take it from there.
It took us a little more than eight hours to drive back to the city, and by the time we got there it was close to 7 p.m. Tosho went to deposit our informer with some friends for safekeeping. Trace and I did a reconnoiter.
My wardrobe was too cut up to play tourist without a change of clothes. Our shopping trip in Chinatown suggested a better disguise. With the help of a long, tattered cloak, an old, wide-brimmed straw hat, a bit of makeup and some wax applied to my beard and mustache, I became a Chinese ancient, prowling the streets in search of ingredients for my Taoist medicine practices. I don’t look particularly Chinese, but by keeping my head bowed and mouth shut, I figured I could get away with it. At worst, I’d look like a burned-out Western hippie guru looking for my mojo—not an uncommon sight in the Far East.
Whether because of my disguise or the fading light, no one stopped me as I made my way to the shop. It was a small, two-story affair, pretty typical for Bangkok’s Chinatown—the first floor would be used as a shop and the second as living quarters for the family who ran the store.
Our plan had been to do a recon only; we’d come back with Tosho and more weapons than the single Glock pistol he’d lent us. But as I looked over some of the concoctions—and got a feel for the layout of the place—the man who owned the shop gave me a funny look, and I decided that now was as good a time as ever. I put my hands together and bowed my head in the traditional wai greeting, then reached out and gave him a traditional greeting of my own: an ancient Slovak headlock, handed down from generation to generation in the Marcinko clan.
“I’m looking for Si,” I told him, using English and then pidgin Mandarin. He blinked up from the headlock I’d put him into but didn’t answer.
“Dick?” said Trace, running into the shop from the back.
“Go close up the shop,” I told her, taking the Glock from her.
She had to go outside to lash down the bamboo panels at the front of the store. Despite her blond hair, Trace’s Apache heritage can make her look Asian, and it’s possible that with the long blue Thai dress and the straw hat she wore that the passersby thought she was a native. Thais are nonconfrontational by nature anyway, and no one stopped or asked any questions.
The shop owner remained silent, though I’m not sure whether he was trying to be a hero or simply couldn’t understand what I was saying. Large, extended families often crowded into the living quarters of Thai homes, especially in Chinatown; it wouldn’t be all that unusual to find grandparents and cousins and the like. But the room upstairs was empty except for a desk and a small cot in the corner. In the bottom drawer of the desk was a laptop. I booted it, and when the screen came up asking for the password, I put the pistol to the Chinaman’s head and told him it wasn’t a good day to die.
He agreed. But he didn’t know the password.
“Who does?” I asked.
A torrent of Thai-accented Chinese followed. He might have laid out Saladin’s entire network; he might have given me a kickass recipe for fried dumplings. I have no idea.
I took him back downstairs and hunted for the bottles of the powdered tiger bones. Fortunately, you didn’t have to read Chinese characters to find them—they had pictures of the beast on them.
“The man you buy this from,” I told him. “Take me to him.”
More Chinese, this time faster and even less intelligible. I tried to get him to slow down, but my gestures only made him chatter faster.
There was a knock on the front panel.
“Closed,” I said in Chinese. “Come back tomorrow.”
“Dick, you really have to work on your pronunciation,” said Tosho outside. “You’re messing up your pitches something awful. Let me in.”
Tosho’s Chinese is considerably better than mine, but the store owner’s accent made it hard for him to understand as well. Eventually, we pieced together this: It appeared that Si was the actual owner of the building; the man we had captured owned and ran the store itself. The tiger parts were butchered in the downstairs room, then shipped to locations throughout Southeast Asia, the operation coordinat
ed from the room upstairs. The storeowner claimed never to have seen the laptop, much less know what the password was.
I grabbed the old man’s phone and called Shunt to see if he could help figure out a way around the password. After he finished complaining about being woken up in the middle of the night, he told me there were plenty, but none that would guarantee the hard drive wouldn’t erase itself. He suggested I ship it to him overnight.
“We don’t have time. What’s the next best thing?”
Shunt began spewing about getting around the flash memory and ROM and Martians.
Well maybe not Martians. It was hard to tell.
“Do you have a hacker friend in Bangkok you trust with your life?” I asked.
“Yeah, but he’s kind of weird.”
Shunt’s idea of weird turned out to be someone who held a nine-to-five job in a bank and regularly wore shoes to work. His English was impeccable—better than Shunt’s, and without any likes and dudes. He pulled the disk from the laptop and installed it into another machine, where he used an Assembler debugging program to examine the drive before using Windows. (“Overkill,” he said later, but better safe than sorry.)
There were no cannibal programs, and the data on the disk drive wasn’t encrypted. But the drive didn’t have much information on it either—a single spreadsheet of numbers and anonymous email addresses at large email services. Tosho sent a copy of the list to his experts back in Tokyo; I forwarded one to Shunt. Besides comparing it to a list we kept ourselves, he would pass it over to our friends at the DIA, et al., to see if any of the addresses were on any terrorist watch lists. Trace, her Apache blood up, insisted that we send a list to the groups fighting the exploitation of tigers.
“As soon as we’re done, you’re welcome to,” I told her.
The list we were looking at was a tiny window into the complex world of international terrorism and smuggling, hinting at the intricate connections not only between them but legitimate business as well. The network Si used to transport tiger bones and blood could be used to move anything from flowers to missiles; it was just like UPS, except it delivered illegal goods. Did he transport arms or drugs or anything else illegal? Our source only knew about the tigers, but it was a good guess that he did.
What about BetaGo? Was there a connection?
My guess at the moment was yes, though on the ground where I was standing, nothing was particularly clear. If this were a movie, the villains would have been identified within the first five or ten minutes and we’d be off to the car chase scenes and romantic interludes. But life isn’t a movie, and the people who are busting their asses trying to untangle the different networks threatening the modern world aren’t working with a script that tells them what happens next. More intelligence sharing between different agencies such as the CIA, DIA, Customs, Immigration, Drug Enforcement, et al., would definitely be useful and must happen, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves. At the end of the day, the intelligence experts are still going to be looking at a list of email addresses that tell only a tiny bit of the story.
In our case, I thought I could find out a lot more about what was going on by finding Si. But with no fresh leads, I decided to do the next best thing: talk to his father.
Bi Son Phiung lived about fifty miles west of the city, a little beyond Nakhon Pathom. Nakhon Pathom was the center of the Dvaravati kingdom, which dominated central Thailand from the sixth to eleventh century. It’s an important spot for Buddhist pilgrims, who consider the shrine in the Phra Pathom Chedi a sacred place.
An unmarked police car watched the entrance to Bi Son Phiung’s property. I pulled up next to it and Tosho showed the officer his credentials; the man showed no sign that he knew who we were, but made no move to stop us either.
The house was a large, two-story building that dated from the nineteenth century. It had probably been built by a Chinese or European merchant; the roof wasn’t sloped nearly as sharply as the nearby native structures and the balcony and veranda could have come from Italy. A servant met us at the door. He seemed to be expecting us, and led us immediately through the large, high-ceilinged hall to a room at the back of the house. The walls of the hall were covered with large painted panels with Buddhist religious scenes. The smaller rooms were covered with wood veneer. I felt as if I were walking through a museum or even a quiet chapel.
Bi Son sat on an upholstered chair in an otherwise empty room at the back of the house. I had last seen him five years before, in Bangkok; at the time he looked like a slightly older version of the young lieutenant I knew in Vietnam. His face was still smooth, his belly was still tight. Except for the gray at his temples, a casual observer might have thought he was in his thirties, not his early sixties.
The Bi Son who rose slowly from the chair to greet me was an old man. His body was still fit; its athleticism was evident in his graceful bow and the firm handshake as he greeted me. But his face was white and hollow. Deep rows lined his forehead, and the skin around his eyes was black, as if he’d been punched.
In a way he had been, I guess.
“My family owes you everything,” he told me. He stared at the floor as he spoke.
For once in my life, I didn’t know what to say.
“We’re looking for your son, Si,” said Trace.
Bi Son didn’t bother to look at her. As far as he was concerned, he and I were the only people in the room.
“It is a terrible duty to uphold one’s honor,” he said, still staring at the ground. “I seek the solace of the Buddha, but my peace is a barren land. Come.”
He led us to a door at the side of the room. This opened into a small office. On the desk was a ledger book, the sort used to keep accounts back in the days before computer programs. A green ribbon marked a page in the back. There were several pages of addresses and phone numbers in Thai. I glanced through it, then slipped it under my arm.
Trace started to say something but I put up my hand.
“If I can help you in any way, Bi Son, please let me know.”
Bi Son lowered his head but said nothing. We showed ourselves out.
“I don’t get it,” said Trace as we walked to the car. “Aren’t we going to ask where his son is? Is he hiding him?”
“He’s not hiding him,” I told her. “This book has a list of foreign contacts in it. It’ll lay out the network Si was part of. Let’s go to the American embassy. The CIA station chief is about to earn himself a very big commendation.”
“You’re turning that over to the CIA?” said Trace.
“I already know the important thing.”
“Which is what?”
“Si was working with the network that supplied Saladin, if not with Saladin himself. He was tipped off that I was on to him or the operation or both, and was either convinced to kill me or blackmailed to do so. I think he was reluctant—the gunmen who struck the plane were probably supposed to take me out along with the couriers. But they weren’t given enough information, or maybe Si arranged it so I’d be spared. In any event, something happened after that to convince him that I ought to be fed to the tigers after all.”
“I don’t see how Saladin is involved at all,” said Trace.
“He’s been pulling the strings all along. He sent me here,” I told her. “The question is why.”
Time out for half a second. It’s been bruited about lately that I think the Christians In Action, aka the CIA, is rotten to the core. That’s not accurate. Incompetent maybe, but that’s a criticism of the bureaucracy not the people. There are definitely a few scumbags, but on the whole the officers are decent. Bright kids, a lot of them. The one rap on them I have is that many weren’t brought up understanding cultures other than their own. Very few have a listen mode…just broadcast/transmit! But that’s as much the fault of their elders as theirs.
The CIA started to sour when the intel pooh-bahs opted to play with satellites rather than putting eyes and ears on the ground where we could really see what was going on, and feel the
heartbeat of the world. Today, we’re paying the price…no agents with experience.
Now I will say this: There is definitely a “what’s in it for me” mentality inbred in the organization—but you see that in the country as well. JFK said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Today that historical note is considered hysterical. We design corporations and governmental structures so that “responsibility” and “accountability” are spread across a lateral plane so that there is no definitive trail of accountability. It nurtures and stimulates the “book of excuses” and selfish greed.
Here endeth the lecture…. Thanks for your attention.
I was wrong on one count—the head of the Christians In Action, Thailand department, was a woman. Otherwise my guesses had been on the mark. The addresses and phone numbers belonged to smugglers in Malaysia, China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran. Only the ones in Malaysia and Morocco had direct connections to terrorist networks; the others dealt with anyone who was willing to pay a fee.
It took a few weeks for the CIA to line up the contact information with the smugglers, who tend not to buy ads in the Yellow Pages. But I found the connection with Saladin on my own within a few hours of returning to Bangkok, playing a hunch. I called the Singapore detective who’d been investigating the bank robbery where the stolen Minimis were used and offered an exchange of information about the possible source of the weapons. It turned out he already had one of the phone numbers in my book.
Have I lost you somewhere? My head was swimming at the time as I tried to play connect the dots, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I managed to confuse you, too. Here’s what I knew or suspected at the time: BetaGo was a legitimate company used by terrorists to smuggle money or information on the side; someone had discovered what was going on and the terrorists had decided to pull the plug, but not before using the company to get over to Asia for reasons that were still unclear. Si had not been connected directly with BetaGo, but he was familiar enough with the terrorists either to have an interest in killing me or to be persuaded to do so for them. Saladin was somehow directing the terrorist network, and had used it to get money to people in Pakistan and Afghanistan in exchange for actions against my people there. Saladin aimed to take bin Laden’s place, but exactly what sort of power and reach he had was unclear. It was possible he was just a joker with a fax machine and Web access, though I believed he had considerable money and connections across the globe.
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