PR02 - The Fourth Watcher

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Look at it, would you? You practically kick my door in, you make slurs about my fianceé, you embargo my passport, and then all this junk money shows up, just materializes in a desk drawer. And I’m supposed to think, Oh, no, not him, because you’ve got that thing in your wallet.”

  Elson fills his cheeks with air and blows it out. “Okay,” he says. He glances at the storm’s special effects through the window and shakes his head in disapproval. Finally he says, “Now I’ll show you mine. We’re under a lot of pressure. The Service, I mean. Personally, I think the administration is overreacting, but I’m not paid to have personal opinions. Look at it mathematically, though, and the level of concern is way over the top. There’s about seven hundred and fifty billion bucks in our currency—I mean cash, actual paper—circulating at any given moment, around sixty percent of it outside the country. These jokers are turning out somewhere between seventy-five million to five hundred million a year. Sounds like a lot of money, but put it all together and it wouldn’t make a dimple in this year’s deficit.”

  “Somewhere between seventy-five million and five hundred million?

  Is that supposed to be some sort of scientific estimate, or did somebody draw a number out of a hat?”

  “It’s a punch line,” Elson says. “The work is too fucking good. We have no idea how much of this stuff is actually out there. And we’re being boneheads about getting banks to work with us.” He holds up the loose bills. “Say you run a Thai bank, okay? Or a Singaporean bank, or one in Macau, where these guys are really active. And one day you get nine or ten of these things across the counter.” He passes the bills from one hand to another, giving them to himself. “So you’re holding junk. You’ve essentially got two choices. You can call us up, wait around until we can be bothered to clear a space on our desk calendar, and we take the bills and maybe say thanks, but we don’t give you a penny. Or you can skip the call and just hand them to the next customer who wants hundreds.”

  “That’s a tough one,” Rafferty says.

  “I’m sure they agonize over it. So they don’t cooperate. And multiply it: These guys, the North Koreans, are operating in something like a hundred and thirty countries. They’re the first government to counterfeit another country’s currency since the Nazis, and they seem to be able to drop it practically anywhere, while we sit around looking like the only reason our thumbs evolved was so we could stick them up our butts. We’re a relatively small outfit, you know? And we’re, like, sitting at the president’s feet, and the president has a huge hard-on for Kim Jong Il, so we get a lot of heat.” He waves a hand in front of his face once, as though to clear away smoke. “And there’s the other piece, the really big piece. We want the North Koreans at the negotiating table. We’re not thrilled about their nuclear program. The idea is, if we can put a big enough crimp into their counterfeiting income, they’ll pull up a chair and listen to how much money they could make by not screwing around with plutonium. Whether they’d really sit down or not—and they might not, because these guys are certifiably nuts—there’s a lot of motivation to give it a try, so the president can declare a foreign-policy triumph and say, ‘America is safer today.’ He likes to say that.” His eyes when they come back to Rafferty’s have a kind of appeal in them. “So what I’m saying is, yeah, sometimes we act like assholes.”

  “Some people probably respond to it better than I do.”

  Elson says, “Pretty much everybody responds to it better than you do.” He drops the money on the desk. “In that office, when I said I’d

  told you to shut up and you said you forgot, I damn near laughed.”

  “Shame you didn’t. Things might have gone a little better.”

  “We’re where we are,” Elson says. He comes back to the bed and sits, facing Rafferty. “I’ve got a million questions,” he says. “This all seems very sweet, but not if my ass is going to be hanging out there, getting rained on.”

  On cue, a gust of wind slams against the window, rain hitting the glass like bullets. Elson bares his teeth at it and says, “How can you live here?”

  “I like it.”

  “This is my first monsoon,” he says. “One is enough.” Behind him, through the window, the wind is lashing palm trees around as though they were peacock feathers. “Such a great word, ‘monsoon.’ I expected something—oh, I don’t know—something more romantic. Girls in sarongs hanging on to palm trees or something.”

  “You’re in Bangkok. You want girls in sarongs hanging on to palm trees, I can probably give you a phone number.”

  Elson actually grins. “Bullshit.”

  “Monsoons grow on you. And this one’s going to be a dilly.”

  Elson regards the storm with a little more interest. A huge palm frond whips past the window, and he turns back to Rafferty. “So. I get the money, the North Korean and his connections—”

  “You’ll have to get those out of him yourself.”

  “Fine. And the big guy who’s also in the game and who torched the CIA man.”

  “Prettyman,” Rafferty says, surprised at his own vehemence. “Arnold Prettyman. He wasn’t much, but he had a name.”

  Elson lifts a palm, fingers pointing up, and wipes it back and forth, erasing the words. “Okay, okay, he had a name. I’m going to tell you something else I shouldn’t. There’s a folder in that desk over there. You’re in it. You’re not the cleanest guy in the world, but you’re not the dirtiest either. Some people say nice things about you. I should have read it before I busted in on you.”

  “You’ve read it now,” Rafferty says.

  “Yeah, and it’s enough to make me wonder what you’re getting out of this.”

  “Something that was taken from me.”

  Elson lowers his head and regards Rafferty over the top of his glasses. “Yours legally?”

  “To the extent that anybody belongs legally to anybody else.”

  The agent’s lips purse as though he is going to whistle. “People?”

  Rafferty nods.

  “People you care about.”

  “Are you married?”

  Elson hesitates and then says, “Yes.”

  “Got kids?”

  “Two.”

  “What would you do to get them back if someone took them?”

  Elson’s face empties while he thinks about it. “Anything.”

  “What about the lines?”

  “If my family’s involved? Fuck the lines.”

  “Pretty much the way I feel.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. And not to be a prick, but that’s your issue and I’m sure you’re going to take care of it. On my end of things, what do I do?”

  “You wait for me to call you around five this morning and tell you where it’s going down. And I’ll tell you then how it works, and you can pull out if you want to.”

  “Why not now?”

  “I’m waiting to put a few more stepping-stones in place.”

  “Great,” Elson says. “You’re working on the fly.”

  “My turn to ask a question.”

  Elson closes his eyes, drops his head, and puts his fingers wearily to his forehead, where the door hit it. “Why not?”

  “I’ve seen you flash that gun around. Are you any good with it?”

  For a moment Rafferty thinks Elson will smile again. Instead he says, “Better than you can imagine.”

  !40

  I’ll Never Sleep on It Again Anyway

  e’s getting the rubies,” Frank says on Rafferty’s cell phone. “The papers.”

  “He’s not going to settle for the rubies and the papers.” Rafferty is on his way home from Elson’s hotel, in the backseat of a cab. He chose a cab instead of a tuk-tuk in deference to the rain, which has achieved epic scale. In four blocks they have passed half a dozen stalled cars and two accidents. The sidewalk neons are shapeless smears of diluted color, echoed on the wet pavement.

  “What about the money?” Ming Li’s voice comes from the bottom of a cave, and R
afferty has to press the phone harder against his ear to hear her. Frank has his cell phone on speaker.

  “The money’s an extra. He’s not expecting it, so that could help. But let’s face it, what he wants is Frank.”

  Ming Li says, “We’ve talked about this before. The answer is still no.”

  Frank says, “Ming Li. Don’t talk, listen.” Then he says to Rafferty, “Where?”

  “I’ll let you know in an hour or two.”

  “You can’t give him Frank,” Ming Li says.

  “Maybe you can think of something else.” A car speeds by in the opposite direction, throwing up a five-foot wave that shatters against the windows of Rafferty’s cab. His driver says the Thai equivalent of “fuckhead” and hits the horn in retaliation.

  “At the very least, we need to know where it’s going to happen,” Ming Li says.

  “You’re not going to know, until the last minute, and neither will I. I’m letting Chu pick the place.”

  “Are you crazy? If he picks the place, we can’t set anything up.”

  “That’s exactly right. He’s not stupid. One sniff of anything screwy and he’s gone. He’ll kill everyone and disappear. And he’ll still be after you. He’ll be after you until either he or Frank is dead. We have to end it here, and that means he thinks he’s in control and that he’s going to get everything he wants.”

  “Poke’s right,” Frank says. “I know Chu. He’s not going to walk into anything that could be a setup.”

  “So we’re going to let him set us up?” Ming Li says.

  “He won’t get a chance,” Rafferty says. “I’m going to give him fifteen, twenty minutes between the time he sets the place and the time we walk into it. And I’m ninety percent sure I know where it’ll be.”

  “How?” Ming Li asks.

  “I’m going to force it,” Rafferty says. “Send Leung with the box. I’ll talk to you in an hour.”

  He closes the cell phone, looks out the window, and resigns himself to the fact that he’s not going to be able to see where he is until he’s home. He digs a business card out of his shirt pocket and dials the number on it.

  “Kosit,” says the leather-faced cop.

  “This is Rafferty. How’s Arthit?”

  “No word yet. The doctors are still in there.”

  “I need to see you.”

  “Um,” Kosit says, “I’m not sure I should leave here.”

  “This is for Arthit. Believe me, he’d want you to do it.”

  “What do you mean, it’s for Arthit?”

  “It’s between you and me. Are you okay with that?”

  “I might be. What is it?”

  “Fine. You be the judge.” He tells Kosit about Noi, about Rose and Miaow, and about the meeting with Chu.

  “Worse and worse.” Kosit sounds as drained as Rafferty feels. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’ll tell you at my place.”

  Kosit says, “Somebody’s got to be coming out of Arthit’s room soon. Give me half an hour. If we don’t hear anything by then, I’ll leave. And listen, for Arthit I can get you a hundred cops, if you need them.”

  “Thanks,” Rafferty says. “But I think Arthit would say we don’t need them.”

  ONLY ONE JAR of Nescafé this time. The color should vary. Rafferty stirs it in, examines the tint of the water in the washer’s tub, and rummages through the cabinets until he finds a tin of powdered green tea. He can hear the hair dryers whirring in the other room, broken occasionally by the sound of women laughing. Fon comes into the kitchen, lugging two very heavy-looking plastic bags from Foodland, conveniently open twenty-four hours.

  “They’ve only got two left,” she says. “We’ve practically bought them out.” She grunts as she lifts the bags to the counter. “I got your glue, too.”

  Rafferty adds half the green tea to the water and stirs with his hand. “What do you think?”

  “I’m no expert,” Fon says. “When I see money, all I look at is the numbers.”

  “Looks okay to me.” He reaches over and untwists the cap on one of the big jugs of fabric softener from Fon’s shopping bags and empties the entire bottle into the tub. “Let’s just use one this time,” he says. “Last batch got a little mushy.”

  “Fine,” Fon says, looking down at the water. “Maybe there’ll be a bottle I can take home.”

  “I’ll trade it for the basket.”

  “Pretty expensive fabric softener,” she says. She bends down and comes up with a large plastic laundry basket, which she gives to Rafferty. He upends it into the washer. Crisp, flat money flutters down onto the surface of the water, and Rafferty pushes it under and adds more, repeating the process until it’s all in the tub. Fon takes the empty basket.

  “I think we’ll use the delicate cycle,” he says, hearing the absurdity in the words. “It’s faster.” He is up to his elbows in water and money, so he says, “What time is it?”

  “A little after two.”

  “We need more people,” Rafferty says. He pushes “start” on the washing machine, dries his hands, and follows Fon into the living room.

  Lek and three other women, all from Rose and Peachy’s agency, sit on the floor around another laundry tub. The tub is blue plastic with square holes in the sides. Two of the women reach in and toss the money like a salad while the others aim hair dryers through the holes. The floor is a snake farm of extension cords. When Rafferty went into the kitchen to start the new load, the basket looked only half full. Now, with the bills drier and not clinging to each other, they almost reach the top edge. As the dry bills are blown to the top, one of the women gathers them and carries them to the couch, which is covered from one end to the other in loose, dried money, nearly a foot thick. Rafferty goes to it, picks up a double handful, crumples them, then lets them drop.

  They look and feel a lot better. Not ready yet, but better.

  “We’re never going to finish at this rate,” he says. “Who else can we call?”

  As if in answer, someone knocks on the door. Rafferty waves the women into the kitchen, realizes there is nothing he can do about the money everywhere, and pulls the Glock. He opens the door an inch and sees Lieutenant Kosit. “Oh.” He sticks the gun into his pants, behind his back. “It’s you.”

  Kosit’s eyes are red-rimmed, his face tight enough to have been freeze-dried. He peers past Rafferty and pulls his head back a fraction of an inch in surprise. “What are you doing?”

  “Laundering money,” Rafferty says. “To buy Noi back.” He pulls the door open, but Kosit stands rooted where he is, and Rafferty’s heart sinks. “News?”

  “He’s in intensive care,” Kosit says. “The bullet hit the lung, but it also nicked a ventricle. If that tech hadn’t been on top of Arthit’s blood pressure, he would have bled to death internally.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “They don’t know shit. They’re talking about shock, infection, a whole list of stuff that could kill him. But I’ll get a call if anything changes.”

  “Come on in.”

  Across the hallway the elevator doors open, and Mrs. Pongsiri steps off, wearing a short black cocktail dress and carrying the world’s smallest handbag, on the surface of which five or six sequins jostle for space. Her eyes go to Rafferty and then travel to Kosit’s uniform, and she begins to smile. Then she sees the money spread over the couch, and the smile hardens into a mask. She says, “Oh, my.”

  From behind Rafferty someone squeals “Anh!” and he turns to see Fon grinning at Mrs. Pongsiri like a long-lost sister.

  “Fon,” Mrs. Pongsiri says in a voice Rafferty has never heard before: higher, softer, younger, the voice of the bars and clubs. She opens her arms like a soprano reaching for the top note. Fon shoves her way between Rafferty and Kosit, and the two women embrace. Mrs. Pongsiri kisses Fon on the cheek and squeezes her so hard that Fon lets out a little squeak. Holding Fon at arm’s length, Mrs. Pongsiri looks back to the couch full of money and says, “But wha
t in the world—”

  Now the other women reappear. Lek and one other, whose name Rafferty doesn’t know, give Mrs. Pongsiri wide, white smiles as they pick up their hair dryers and get back to work.

  “You’re . . . drying money?” Mrs. Pongsiri asks, the question wrinkling her forehead.

  “We need to make it look old,” Rafferty says. “So we washed it.”

  Mrs. Pongsiri blinks heavily, obviously sorting through, and rejecting, half a dozen questions. Finally she settles on the practical. “Don’t you have a dryer?”

  “Sure,” Rafferty says, “but I think it’ll make them too stiff.”

  Mrs. Pongsiri wearily shakes her head. “Softener sheets,” she says, as though speaking to a disappointing child. “Just throw them in with the money.”

  Kosit and Rafferty look at each other.

  “I bought a box of them today,” Mrs. Pongsiri says. “I’ll be right back.” She gets a new grip on her purse and bustles down the hall. As she unlocks her door, Rafferty hears her say, “Men.”

  KOSIT GIVES A disbelieving glance at the shirt cardboards Rafferty has glued together, looks at the suitcase and the bent coat hangers Rafferty plans to use for support, and says, “Never.”

  Through the open door to the living room, Rafferty hears the women talking. He feels like his battery died and corroded days ago, but the women are fully charged. For most of them, this is the first time they’ve worked their normal hours in months.

  “Why not?” He and Kosit are sitting on the bed.

  Kosit picks up the shirt boards. Rafferty’s newly laundered shirts, stripped from the cardboard, litter the floor. “Too flexible,” Kosit says, bending them. “Even glued together. You need it to be rigid. This stuff is heavy. And the lever won’t work. Not enough pressure.”

  “Start with the boards. What can we do?”

  “Can’t add much weight,” Kosit says, thinking. “What about those books in the living room?”

  “Books are heavy,” Rafferty says.

  “The covers aren’t. Get a bunch of hardbacks and some sort of cutter. Look.” He frames a book cover in his hands and mimes placing them across the platform of shirt boards. “Overlap them,” he says. “Crisscrossed. Glued on both sides, so they don’t bend.”