by Jake Needham
When his order was ready, he took the tray outside and selected a table looking down on the beach. It was a beautiful day with just enough puffy white clouds scattered over the sky to keep the heat under control, and the burger and milkshake were unexpectedly good. Tay even found himself thinking that maybe this was what retirement was actually supposed to be all about. Relaxing in the sunshine at a beach somewhere with a milkshake in his hand. After decades as a cop in the big city, could he really do something like that?
It only took him a few seconds to decide.
No, he couldn’t.
“Khun Tay?”
Lost in his reverie about idle days at some beach, he hadn’t noticed the man approach his table.
He was short, dressed in a black Polo shirt and jeans, and he had a brown canvas messenger bag strapped across his chest. He looked young, but then Thais always looked young to Tay. He was smiling shyly in the self-effacing way that Thais usually did when forced to communicate with foreigners.
“Yes, I’m Tay.”
“I from Khun John.”
Tay gave the young man the envelope and he took it and tucked it into the messenger bag. He waied Tay, bringing his palms together in front of his face in the traditional Thai gesture of courtesy, bobbed his head quickly, and was gone.
And that, Tay devoutly hoped, would be that.
But in his heart he knew it wasn’t going to be nearly that simple.
He finished his milkshake, wiped his hands on a napkin, and went back upstairs to his room.
Tay had been surprised and not particularly happy when he checked into the Hilton to discover that it only offered nonsmoking rooms. The busybodies and nannies were winning everywhere, weren’t they? There was even talk in Singapore now of banning smoking entirely, even in your own home. How did that make any sense?
Not so long ago most people had been reasonably content to live their lives and leave everyone else alone, and we all got along pretty well. These days a great many people insist that others behave exactly as they are told regardless of what they really want to do, and we all hate each other for it. Tay thought the lesson was obvious, but most people appeared to ignore it.
It was far too early to settle in for the evening. He had nothing with him that he particularly wanted to read and watching Thai television was a fate too horrible to contemplate. Maybe a walk along the beach? At least that was a place where he could smoke without anyone bothering him. Tay took his cigarettes and matches, stuffed August’s telephone in his pocket just in case he called, and headed back downstairs.
The sun had already slipped behind a bank of clouds in the west and a gentle twilight had descended on Pattaya. Tay lit a Marlboro, cupping his hand around the match to protect the flame from a warm breeze coming off the Gulf of Thailand, and he drew in the smoke and felt the first welcome tingling of the nicotine hitting his bloodstream. He really was going to have to look into quitting one of these days. He understood that, so maybe he would. Or maybe he wouldn’t.
Tay crossed over Beach Road and turned north on the broad walkway that ran along the ocean. In contrast to what he had seen on his walk to Secrets in the other direction, there were far fewer women working the beach walk this way. Instead of lines of prostitutes being pursued by roving packs of Indians, he found himself sharing the walkway with a remarkably normal looking group of people: tourists out for an early evening stroll, elderly people enjoying their daily constitutional, bicyclists out for a ride, and even a few joggers sweating heavily from their exertion in the heat and humidity. All nationalities, ages, sizes, and shapes were represented. It was a symphony of ordinariness, and the longer Tay spent in it, the better he felt.
He strolled along at a moderate pace while he smoked, and almost before he knew it he had arrived at the end of the beach where the road and the walkway curved away from the ocean toward far less interesting and scenic places. Tay sat for a while on a concrete bench and watched a chubby middle-aged Thai woman fold and stack the brightly colored canvas beach chairs which she had spent her day renting out to tourists. When she finished, she spread a black plastic tarp over the pile and carefully weighted down its edges with large rocks. She looked up, satisfied with her work, and noticed Tay watching her. Flashing a wide smile, she gave him a big thumbs up. Tay smiled back and waved.
It was a small moment of human contact between perfect strangers from different cultures and it meant nothing at all. Or maybe it meant everything. That such small, empathetic encounters still occurred in a world roiled by anger and torn by turmoil made Sam Tay feel better about the planet he inhabited. And that was enough meaning for him.
Tay lit another Marlboro and walked slowly back to the Hilton.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Tay surfaced slowly out of a dream he would never be able to remember. For a moment he wasn’t sure where he was.
He raised his head off the pillow and shifted his eyes around the room. The light seeping between the drapes was pale and watery and rendered his room in a dim palette of grays. He rolled his head toward the source of the cold, dim glow beside his bed and he saw the time displayed in a cloud of green luminescence.
2:57am.
Then he remembered.
He was in Pattaya. In a room at the Hilton. He was waiting for John August to review what he had unearthed about the woman who had set August up to be killed and to tell him he could go back home to Singapore.
But what was it that had waked him from a sound sleep?
Knock, knock, knock.
The rapping on the door was firm, not at all tentative. It was a sound meant to wake him.
Tay gathered there had probably been another knock a few moments before and that was what had tugged him out of his dream. Automatically, he glanced back at the bedside clock again.
Now 2:58am.
Could that be August at the door? Surely not. If August had something to tell Tay, he would have just telephoned, wouldn’t he? There was no reason to drive all the way from wherever he was to Pattaya and pound on Tay’s hotel room door in the middle of the night.
Knock, knock, knock, knock!
The rapping had taken on an aggressive edge. It was clearly a demand that he come to the door, a demand that was not negotiable.
“Just a minute!” Tay shouted.
Tay pushed himself out of bed, hung his foot on the duvet, and stumbled. He caught himself on the side of the bed before he fell and shouted again.
“I’m coming, I’m coming!”
He looked around for the bathrobe he had discarded the night before, found it on a chair, and slipped it on. As he walked toward the door, he tied the belt around his waist.
“Who is it?” he called.
No one replied so he put his eye to the viewer in the door. The lens was smudged and smeared, and it offered such a distorted view that all he could tell for sure was that several human forms lurked in the hallway outside his door. At least he assumed they were human forms. When he combined the crummy image through the viewer with his own state of limited wakefulness, he would not be prepared to take an oath on that.
“You have the wrong room. Go away!”
After a slight pause, a male voice spoke from the other side of the door.
“You are Inspector Tay, yes?”
The voice was strong and assertive, a voice accustomed to being obeyed. The accent was Thai.
Could it be the police? It sounded like the police, but why would the Thai police want to talk to him in the middle of the night?
“Yes, I’m Tay, but it’s three o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake. Come back tomorrow.”
“Open door! Open door now!”
Tay tried the viewer again, but he still couldn’t see shit.
He sighed heavily and opened the door half certain now that it was the cops, but he still had no idea at all what the Thai police could possibly want with him.
It wasn’t the cops.
It was worse than the cops.
Fo
ur armed soldiers stood in the hallway.
Tay knew, of course, that the military had taken over Thailand in a coup d’état a few years back, dismissed the elected government, and cancelled all future elections, and he understood that the military was running the country now. He just wasn’t entirely certain that he knew what that meant in real life, and he had never cared enough to find out. He had heard stories somewhere about students being arrested for criticizing the military on Facebook and political dissidents disappearing into re-education camps, but he had never thought much about that either.
At least he hadn’t until now.
The four men outside his door wore crisp khaki uniforms adorned with enough gold braid to outfit the entire University of Texas marching band. The two at the back sported white combat helmets with wide red stripes circling them, but Tay’s eyes went immediately to the black Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns each of them held at the ready across his chest.
“You are Inspector Tay?”
Tay’s eyes shifted to the man who had spoken. He was one of the two soldiers standing closest to the door. From the uniforms and hats those two wore it was clear enough that they were the officers in charge of this raiding party, or whatever it was. Tay decided the one who had spoken had to be the senior officer. He wore so many medals that he could probably have been defeated by a good-sized magnet.
Unfortunately, Tay didn’t have a magnet, but he did have… his eyes flicked toward the room safe where he had stashed the revolver Max had given him.
But that was crazy. He certainly wasn’t going to grab the gun and start shooting at four armed soldiers, even if that were possible, which it wasn’t.
Then something hugely troubling occurred to him. He might have a problem, a really big problem, if they searched his room and found the gun. At the very least he would have some explaining to do and he knew his Singapore Police warrant card wouldn’t hold up any longer than it took Field Marshall Major Mucky Muck here to make a telephone call, and that was something he would almost certainly do immediately.
Shit.
Tay thought quickly, but nothing even remotely helpful came to him.
So, he cleared his throat and tried to look unconcerned, or at least as unconcerned as anyone could look after being rousted out of his bed in the middle of the night by four heavily armed soldiers.
“Yes, I’m Tay. What can I do for you?”
“You come with us. Now.”
“Come with you where?”
“Now. You come.”
The officer covered in medals stepped back slightly and gestured Tay into the hallway.
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what this is all about.”
The army officer was expressionless.
“You must come! Must come now!”
“I’m wearing a fucking bathrobe, you idiot!” Tay shouted and jerked the lapels toward the man in case he didn’t understand. “You want me to go somewhere in the middle of the night wearing a fucking bathrobe!?”
“Okay, you put on clothes. And you pack, too. Bring everything with you.”
“I’d rather leave my things here until I get back.”
“No,” the army officer shook his head. “You not coming back.”
Uh-oh.
Both officers seemed to have every intention of coming into the room to watch Tay get dressed, but he adamantly refused to let them in and they didn’t insist. They didn’t seem happy about it, but they let Tay close the door without any further protest.
Tay dressed quickly, and it took him only a few minutes to collect his things in the one small bag he had brought with him. He took his passport out of the safe and shoved it in his back pocket, then stood looking at the revolver and ammunition wrapped in the white plastic bags. What the hell was he going to do with them? He could hardly flush them down the toilet, could he?
If he just left them in the room safe a maid would surely discover them when the hotel serviced his room and he would be pretty well screwed. On the other hand, if he took them with him and the army searched his bag for any reason, he would be pretty well screwed that way, too. He remembered those happy-talk policing seminars he had been forced to sit through in Singapore and the way the lecturers preached about creating win-win scenarios. He just didn’t recall anyone ever saying what to do when he found himself in a lose-lose scenario.
Well, shit, Tay sighed. He stopped thinking about it, grabbed the plastic bag out of the room safe, and stuffed it down in the bottom of his case underneath his dirty laundry before he changed his mind. Then he opened the door again.
“Am I under arrest?” Tay asked the officer who appeared to be in charge.
“You come now,” the man said, which Tay couldn’t help but notice wasn’t much of an answer to his question.
The officer pointed to Tay’s bag and one of the submachine-gun-wielding flunkies stepped forward, slung the sling of his rife over his chest, and took the bag out of Tay’s hand. Tay figured that was an encouraging sign. Even in a military dictatorship, he doubted that people placed under arrest were provided luggage service.
When they got downstairs, he found another encouraging sign. Instead of the prison van that had begun to take shape in his imagination, a large black Mercedes with dark windows was waiting for them.
One of the flunkies opened each of the rear passenger doors. The soldier with the largest oversupply of medals pointed Tay toward one door, then got into the car through the other door himself. The two soldiers with the submachine guns took Tay’s bag and got into some kind of a dark SUV parked right behind them. The other officer sat in the front passenger seat of the Mercedes, said something to the driver which of course Tay didn’t understand, and the little caravan moved out onto Beach Road.
“Are you going to tell me now where we’re going?”
Tay put the question to the officer riding in the back seat with him, the one who was clearly in charge, but the man didn’t reply. He didn’t even glance over at Tay. He just stared straight ahead, as did both the soldiers in the front.
What in the world was going on here?
Tay had no idea at all.
Had the Hilton security guy gotten cold feet and blown the whistle on him? That didn’t make any sense. Even if he had represented himself as a Singapore cop in order to check some security cameras at the Hilton, that wouldn’t have turned out a whole squad of armed soldiers. Maybe either Max’s inquiries trying to trace the mystery woman’s movements in Pattaya or his digging through the Hilton’s security tapes hit some kind of hidden trip wire that triggered the army to respond, but what could that have been? What did the Thai army have to do with all this? It wasn’t possible that it was really the Thai army that was behind the attempt to kill August with a bomb in Hong Kong, was it? That made no sense at all.
The Mercedes rolled quickly through the dark early-morning streets of Pattaya. Tay assumed they must be going to Bangkok even if the army officers wouldn’t admit they were. Everything that was important in Thailand happened in Bangkok. And these four very serious guys and this motorcade certainly suggested that whatever this was all about, it was something that was very important to someone.
But they weren’t going to Bangkok. Instead of turning north, the car continued to the south and Tay watched the beach and the dark waters of the Gulf of Thailand off to the right. The light was just beginning to rise, gray and reluctant, when they turned east on a narrow two-lane road.
They passed a Thai temple, its fanciful orange and green peaked-roofs looming out of the dim half-light like a whimsical mirage. Saffron-robed monks carrying their alms bowls were silently filing out of the wat’s front gate in a long line to begin their daily rounds during which good Buddhists sought credit in this life by making offerings of food to the monks. It all seemed so peaceful, so serene, that Tay had to remind himself that he wasn’t having a religious experience. Instead, he was in a speeding Mercedes surrounded by armed Thai soldiers being taken God only knew where.
After another ten or fifteen minutes they came to a bigger highway and turned south again. By now it was full dawn, although the light seemed strained and watery as if it wasn’t sure it should be there at all. Tay knew exactly how it felt.
Abruptly, the car slowed and turned into a wide driveway leading to a big hospital building. Had something happened to August? Was he in the hospital and had somehow gotten the Thai military to bring Tay there to see him? Apparently not, because the car passed right by the hospital’s entrance and drove around the building to the back.
That was when Tay heard a sound that was familiar, but one he couldn’t immediately identify. It was vaguely industrial, like a large piece of machinery running.
Whoomp whoomp.
As the Mercedes rounded the hospital, the sound became louder, and Tay saw its source.
A helicopter.
It had military markings and was sitting on the hospital’s helicopter pad, rotor blades turning slowly.
Whoomp whoomp whoomp.
The Mercedes stopped about fifty feet from the helicopter and almost immediately the pilot began to power up the rotors. As the sound level rose, one of the armed guards from the SUV that had been trailing them opened Tay’s door and pointed toward the helicopter. He held Tay’s bag in his free hand.
Tay got out, but didn’t move fast enough for the soldier’s liking and the man took his elbow and began tugging him toward the helicopter. A hand reached out of the sliding door in the helicopter’s side and helped Tay up while the soldier lifted his bag and pushed it inside. The hand turned out to belong to a soldier who was dressed casually in an open-neck khaki shirt and khaki pants. No medals, no brass, no insignia. He even looked reasonably friendly. He smiled, dipped his head, and gave Tay a respectful wai.
