Paul Patek owed his name to his Indian-born father. His parents had moved to Bangkok when Paul was still a toddler, when his father was named Ambassador to Thailand. When his tour of duty finished, he had left his family in the country he had come to love and only came back a few years later to retire permanently. Paul grew up in elite circles and received the best education money could buy. Smart and studious, he was sent abroad to perfect his English and receive a solid education but, in the end, shunned his father’s interests in academia and public service, envying the seemingly worry-free life of the jet set he had come across on the social circuit, thanks to the avalanche of invitations provided by his classmates. When he was old enough to come to realise that a jet-set lifestyle implied money, and lots of it, he wondered what he could do to obtain it: it was the sort of life he wished for above all else and nothing would stand in his way to the top.
When he set up his first business, importing Indian silver, working long hours and knocking on many doors, he quickly grasped that, at this rate, fame and fortune would always elude him: whilst he had lived a privileged childhood thanks to his father’s glamorous postings, there was no family money to rely on. And Paul was not the type of man with patience typed in his DNA. It was not long before he observed that overnight riches was more often than not tied to illegal activities, and Paul was fast acquiring the contacts to take on the risky but highly lucrative trafficking of heroin. Hiding his less savoury activities behind perfectly legal storefronts, Paul was known to pay well when it came for the police to look the other way and for the authorities to facilitate his import/export businesses, whatever it might be, at least officially.
Well attuned to the party scene, Paul readily understood the potential behind Fentanyl when it first made its appearance in underground clubs in London and LA, where he kept many useful contacts. He quickly purchased a chain of pharmacies across Bangkok so as to access the drug easily and legitimately. The Thai Health Organisation never asked why he would require such high quantities of the highly effective analgesic, with its potency 80 times that of morphine. Neither did its members question the very generous gifts their families received once a year for the New Year. With his profits increasing rapidly. Paul soon invested in a series of top-notched labs to duplicate the drug rather than rely on its importation. In the process, his scientists had finally come up with a formula to produce a new recreational super drug, which he aptly baptised Infinity, to keep the perception that it could be indulged ad infinitum, with little consequences. Even though he had long since abandoned the inescapable violence of heroin trafficking, his previous tentacles into the market still provided him with one of the necessary ingredients to his new product, making it all the easier to manufacture. From the scientists on his generous payroll, Paul had requested the new drug to be jade in colour and bear the uncommon shape of the infinity sign, in order to make cheap imitations easy to spot and the pill easier to split in equal parts.
Paul’s MBA from Harvard had come in very handy when it came time to package, market and distribute the new drug; he understood only too well the mechanism of supply and demand, as well as the effectiveness of cleverly timed advertising. The vibrant green colour made it instantly recognisable. The elliptical shape allowed for easy splitting of the pill at its weakest point. The packaging in foil-covered trays, like mere aspirins, conveyed the appearance of legitimacy, while insuring the product’s freshness. At first, it even eluded cursory police examination. Dealers dealt in boxes of twelve rather than single units, pushing the consumption higher by sheer design. Paul was particularly happy with the relative safety of his product: not without a social conscience, he was proud of the fact that Infinity would never be responsible for another junkie on the streets, haggard and lost, a visible sore on the soul of his favourite city. Indeed with his upper class education, which frowned on any type of addiction that left the sufferer unable to control his own destiny, Infinity allowed Paul to seek both the fortune which gave him the power he sought and maintain high moral ground. With Infinity, he reasoned, he provided quasi-harmless if expensive recreational fun. In his opinion, he could walk around with his head held high: in fact, privately, he referred to himself not as a merchant of death but as a dealer of dreams, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with the latter.
As a completely synthetically manufactured drug, Infinity first made its appearance in the bars and discothèques of Phuket, the well-known Thai beachside peninsula frequented mostly by foreigners. At first, it was offered freely by wholesome, good-looking twenty-somethings of both genders. As such, it made the rounds of both backpackers’ hangouts and 5-star resorts. The unusual colour, same as the most valuable jade, the unusual shape and the pharmaceutical packaging made it instantaneously recognisable by its users. It was easy to describe and thus easy to request. Foreigners took them home as a talisman of some of their most unforgettable nights, undetected by a police force not yet looking for it. When Infinity finally hit the streets of the capitals of Europe, a few months after the first widespread trials in Thailand, where it had been so innocuously tested in the streets of Phuket, one-time users and friends of friends of friends instantly requested the new hot commodity. Its street value hovered between 80 and 100 US dollars a pill, a price rather steep compared to most other drugs, but everyone agreed it was well worth the price. Its unique source, out of Paul Patek’s labs and the tightly controlled supply only heightened its desirability. Its relative safety made it the ‘it’ drug the world over.
In fact, its instant commercial success exceeded even Paul’s wildest dreams. And Paul soon found himself requiring reliable couriers, preferably one-off, to carry the product across borders. As part of his business plan, he had staged breaking through the European continent first, since it was widely accepted that the drug trade was easier to control there than in the US, which would inevitably come on board later. When the demand far surpassed the quantities he was able to move safely without endangering his couriers, he came to a lethal crossroads: he needed to find a way to transport very large quantities and in such a manner as to remain undetected by police. When the drug had not yet made front-page news, it had been relatively easy to find foreign travellers willing to carry small quantities back to their hometowns, in exchange for a few more days in paradise. He had been well aware though that the solution could only be temporary since it did little to solve the problem of increased demand. Paul had been pondering the solution for weeks when he accidentally came across an article detailing the recent coffin scandal, which had erupted in India. Indeed, the US had been caught supplying the Indian government with wooden coffins of inferior quality at inflated prices, with governmental officials pocketing the difference. Paul was elated by the discovery: he had just found the solution which matched his ambitions. Coffins turned out to be exactly what he needed. Indeed, the cavity could easily hold between 70 and 100 kilos of pills with a street value of up to forty million dollars US per box. Provided the coffins travelled empty, of course. The more Paul dwelled on the question, the more benefits he saw to the stratagem. Moreover, provided they travelled with the right documents in accordance with the Geneva Convention, coffins were neither searched nor X-Rayed, neither on departure nor on arrival.
However, how could he ever justify exporting coffins to Europe unless they were meant to go there? He could, of course, introduce bamboo-wood-made coffins and offer them at a cheaper price than anything else on the market made of solid wood, but the marketing of such a novel product overseas would take ages. On the other hand, Bangkok’s naturally high demand for coffins, due to the number of people found dead on the streets every night of the week, could help him maintain a safe and believable front as a manufacturer. In addition, whenever a foreigner died in the Kingdom of Thailand, whether he had come there to live or visit, he rarely followed Buddhist rituals. In most cases, his religion or local customs generally required a funeral and either a ground burial or a cremation afterwards. Thus Paul could not only manuf
acture the coffins, introducing plenty of double walls in which to hide the drugs, but ultimately transport them to various countries when the coffin was repatriated. All he required now to make it work was an endless supply of people dying within the realm.
Paul quickly made a deal with all foreign embassies located in Bangkok to supply them exclusively, at a largely preferential rate, with a range of coffins fitting all tastes and budgets, when and if, there was a need to repatriate any foreign nationals. Substitution of the remains for the drug had been much less challenging than he had first envisaged, since he quickly surmised that it could all be easily accomplished at the airport’s freight hold, where the coffins were sealed, stamped and fumigated prior to their travel abroad. The office of the State Coroner had readily accepted the healthy bribes without asking further questions. The bodies were then unceremoniously dumped in the same common graves as Thai nationals. Since the coffins always arrived sealed at destination and laws required that they never be opened due to the fear of contagious diseases or potential spread of other microbes, the families were none the wiser. At the other end, a deal with the funeral homes who admitted the bodies before releasing them to the families, had not been too difficult to secure either. However, as clever as the scheme was, waiting for foreigners to die from natural causes or from accidents did not make for a regular source of income.
This is where Jade had come in, as other young women had come before her. Jade was hired as both bait and insurance, someone who made sure that the merchandise arrived safely and only transferred hands when the money was safely tucked away in numbered accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman islands. Together Paul and Jade had tested the routes over and over again, careful never to execute more than three to four trips a year to avoid arousing suspicions. Sometimes Jade travelled ahead of time and met the cargo at customs arriving at the same time, albeit through another airline. On the last trip though, they missed narrowly getting caught since flight delays in London almost caused her to miss the arrival of the coffin at Paris CDG airport. Moreover, an administrative error, had automatically routed the coffin to a newly opened funeral home as opposed to the old Pere Lachaise, where Paul had employees on his payroll. It had thus been agreed, that, next time around, Jade would travel with the coffin regardless, a precaution that would automatically expedite and insure its safe arrival.
Paul, of course, had also found a way to replace the traditional heavy timber frame with a bamboo-based composite, which was ten times lighter but just as strong, and maintained exactly the same external aspect as traditional frames. The clever substitution shaved 20 kilos off the weight of the coffin itself, thus adding the same weight back to the shipment or in other words reaping another 5 million dollars in net profits per trip. Indeed, Paul’s entire yearly budget forecast was based on transporting an average body weight of 70 kilos, amounting, after bribes, salaries and travel, to a net profit of nearly 30 million dollars per trip. Three trips a year, on average, made it a highly lucrative business indeed.
Jade had not been particularly hard to rope in. He had met the young woman over three years prior, at the Bangkok Convention Centre. He had never regretted it since. His newest and most successful recruit was about 1,60 in height with straight dark hair, which fell like a veil of black silk over her slim shoulders, all the way down to her small waist. With delicate limbs, large hazel eyes speckled green, firm high breasts, light mocha skin, a straight and narrow nose above a full sensual mouth, she was taller than most of her countrymen, but wore the same engaging smile. Her lean body shape, fine limbs and unusual eye colour though mostly revealed her part European ancestry.
Hers was the old story of a union between a legendarily beautiful Thai mother and a much-too-married Frenchman, who had fallen head over heels in love with her during his first escape to paradise. When, after a few blissful weeks, he had finally returned to his reality back home, he could nonetheless never quite fully forget the woman who had made him feel young again. His values were such, though, that when during one of their weekly phone calls, she announced she was with child, he had immediately promised to take care of her and the child: If they could not live together as husband and wife, the least he could do is step up to the plate.
Raised in relative comfort thanks to bi-yearly checks, Jade had been lucky enough to attend an international school, her mother wanting nothing more than for her to escape the trap of poverty and prostitution so common in her country. The checks had been forthcoming regularly until two years prior, when she had reached her 18th birthday. Then, they had abruptly stopped, with a simple handwritten note wishing her a Happy Birthday and a happy life. Jade had taken it all in stride, knowing how lucky she had been to be given so many opportunities denied to her peers. Thanks to her mother’s benefactor, she had learned not only English but French as well, as a sort of indebtedness to the father she would never meet. Learning foreign languages came quite easily to her and she assiduously studied the white man’s ways for a better understanding of the culture. She understood early on that, her sultry looks always prompted a second interview and quickly acknowledged that at home, her ability to speak foreign languages turned her into a very marketable commodity. However, she had remained wary of any romantic entanglement with the harsh reality of her mother’s life forever imprinted on her brain, she had indeed decided long ago that she would never give her heart away to end up like her, alone, embittered and destitute. The latter, still madly in love with her ‘farang’ after all those years, had never married nor borne any other children either. When the cheques stopped coming, deemed too old to go back and work in the same go-go club where she had first met her protector, she had turned to the slow smoking of opium as her only solace; she dreamt the days away, hoping that one day the lover of her youth would finally come back and take her to live in one of the beautiful foreigners’ house along the city’s river. Jade was left to constantly worry about her mother’s detachment from reality, fearing that one day she would just slip away.
Jade’s trilingual abilities landed her a job with the Thai Tourist Board, where she soon became in charge of handling communication and public relations for large international conventions and tour groups. She was in high demand not only for her skills but also for her beauty, which had sent so many men in a tailspin, especially when they discovered that she could not be bought, regardless of the price. While her salary was enviable by most Thai standards, she knew that any Western woman would earn five times as much as she did for the same work, yet knew she was hardly in a position to argue: she needed the money to keep her mother off the streets and pay the mortgage on the small but safe little cottage in the small town north of Bangkok where she had grown up. Trusting her lucky stars, Jade had nonetheless remained convinced that one day Buddha would answer her prayers, that one day something would break and that she would be presented with the opportunity to escape her current life and provide safely for her mother’s growing opiate addiction.
She was taking down registration at the International Naturopathy Convention, indicating on a large floor map where attendees were supposed to seat, when she felt an old man’s eyes boring into her. Every time she had lifted her head from her paperwork in the last hour, she had seen him watching her. She had smiled at him at first but he had not returned it and thus her unease grew as the minutes ticked by. Swearing to leave her seat as soon as the door closed on the opening statement of the first session for the day, she promised herself she would get past the old man without interacting. She barely had time to grasp her fake Gucci bag, when she saw him, standing right there in front of her, an amused smile playing on his rubicund, crinkled face. After the exchange of the mandatory wei, he introduced himself, addressing her in English and, in return, was impressed by her command of the language. Switching to Thai, he asked her whether she would join him for a tea after work and made it plain that it was not in any way a sexual advance; he may, in fact, have a business proposition for her. She agreed, in spite of herself,
curious about the motif of the conversation and his interest in her.
Later that evening, he came by once again, bowed respectfully as was their respective custom, and led her outside the convention centre to his waiting car with barely more than a word. He gave rapid directions to the chauffeur and they were quickly hauled out in the warm humid evening. To her surprise, they stopped in front of the impressive façade of the Sukhotai hotel, not one of the establishments she could frequent on her salary. Sitting at a small private table near the end of the bar, he ordered a cocktail for her and a neat whiskey for him. He then properly introduced himself and told her what he had observed during the course of the matinee as he was watching her. Then finally, he exposed what he wanted from her. They talked for hours. The sun was already rising in the east when they left the colonnade bar where they had switched to coffee and ordered breakfast just a couple of hours earlier.
On that very same morning, minutes after striking a deal which would change her life, Jade walked into the Tourist Bureau’s office and handed her resignation, immensely relieved at the thought of never again having to deflect either the lecherous leers of convention attendees nor her superiors’ constant sexual advances. After waiting for her final paycheck, she left the city by bus, and headed due north to visit with her mother and explain, as best she could, her sudden change of career. Her mother had listened attentively yet had nodded disapprovingly at Jade’s willingness to let go of steady employment due to a chance encounter which, in her opinion, could offer nothing of substance. The wad of crisp new bills her daughter extracted from her bag though chased away the last of her objections. Nestled amongst the bills, a lacquered vermilion box had also revealed a sticky ball of blackish residue. At the sight, her mother’s eyes had lit up, and she had hugged her, while expertly snatching up the bills, which quickly disappeared in the brassiere behind the fold of her sarong. After that, she was quick to usher her out, so that she could light her dream pipe in peace.
The Samui Conspiracy Page 12