It was a few days still before Cam and Louis were summoned to the lab. There Paul explained that they would go through a dry run, so to speak, at least as far as the airport and that Louis could observe the proceedings all the way along. It was a Friday night when Cam was first injected with a modified liquid version of Infinity, which had been calibrated to slow down his heartbeat and breathing to an inch of his life. The euphoric effects of the drug had been counteracted by heavier dosages of opiates to relax the body to a level close to complete anaesthesia. Following the injection, Cam became very quiet within seconds and when he was asked to count backwards from 10, he never made it past 7. His skin turned very pale and his breathing slowed down as to be imperceptible. The monitor to which he had been hooked up though clearly showed that his vital signs were strong and steady. Once reassured that all was proceeding as planned, Cam was unwired, dressed and laid in the back of the car. In silence, they all drove down the hill, Louis checking constantly on Cam’s state through the passenger’s rear view mirror. When they arrived at precisely the spot where Louis’s car would overturn, they stopped there for ¾ of an hour, Louis, in his nervousness, smoking cigarettes upon cigarettes. When they finally heard the private ambulance Paul had hired coming up the hill, he had breathed a sigh of relief and his friend’s unconscious body was quickly transported to the back. The ambulance truck, expertly driven, went barrelling back down the hill. With sirens screaming all the way to the airport, it only took another 40 minutes to reach it. From the time of injection to the airport, less than ninety minutes had elapsed. The flight to Bangkok alone was less than one hour. It meant that on the day, they would have another four ½ hours to accomplish the rest of the trip; everyone remained confident it could be easily done.
Louis remained close to Cam, his mind reeling with so many conflicting thoughts that he would have been incapable of verbalising a single one. On their return from the airport, the young man’s immobile body was laid to rest in the infirmary of the compound, watched carefully by vigilant nurses. A few minutes before the time was due to expire on the clock, the doctor came back in and gave him another injection to speed up his adrenalin. Six hours later exactly, Cam was back to the land of the living and not the worse for wear. He suffered only from a persistent headache, complained of being somewhat sore from lying immobile for so long, and was otherwise just very thirsty. He was left with no memory of what had happened during the last few hours. Louis was satisfied and Paul elated. Once Cam was given the all clear, both young men went back to Louis’s quarters, drank and smoked and watched movies for the rest of the day. Later that evening, Jade stopped by to listen to the day’s adventures. Had Louis paid closer attention he would have noticed that she did not really seem to care, asking a lot less questions than usual. The drug cocktail had made Cam slightly fragile, and thus they were served a light dinner of salads and fish. Both him and Jade shared Louis’s bed that night, but none were in the mood for anything more than a cuddle.
The first two weeks of July came and went with unfathomable speed. Cam and Louis went windsurfing, kayaking and swimming most afternoons, while Jade seemingly spent her time preparing for Louis’s trip, both for the caper and for his life beyond. She had researched hotels in Sao Paolo and inquired about housing. Every night she gave him informative reports about the country and its history. She even attempted to get him to learn a few sentences of Portuguese, so he could at least get by, but Louis’s heart was mostly with his family, and his time was spent ferociously avoiding the inevitable. Well aware that his new life would not include Jade, he held her and made love to her as often as he could to ward off the loneliness that threatened to submerge him every time he tried to conceive a life without those he loved, including her. Only once did he dare share his misgivings with Paul; the latter had swiftly dismissed his fears, insisting on the fact that money, at his age, would bring many new friends and reveal many unexplored horizons. He had repeatedly pointed out that Louis would never need to work again and could literally spend the rest of his life in hedonistic pursuits. He had claimed he had wished he could do the same. When it came to the subject of his close family and Jade, Paul remained unmoved: no contacts would be allowed lest the deal became null and void. He indicated to Louis in no uncertain terms that he held a sufficiently wide net of contacts to find out if he ever were to re-appear in Paris, Amsterdam or New York and that the consequences would be dire, not just for him, but for the unlucky family member he had decided not to do without. Had Louis been more attuned to the manner than the words, he would have realised that the hollow threats exposed a ruthlessness he had never guessed at before.
A spectacular buffet dinner was set on the night of the 13th in Paul’s private dining room. Jade and Cam were guests, of course, as were most of Louis’s previous playmates. Doctors and nurses had likewise attended and everyone had wished Louis well on his future ventures, as if he were about to take on a new position abroad, instead of being the indispensable pawn in a high stake game of drug trafficking. As the night wore on, lulled by the lies and accolades, Louis became more and more suggestible to the point that he almost came to look forward to his new life. Paul had already warned him that he would not be on the compound premises the following morning, since he needed to supervise things on the Bangkok side. He was due to leave later that night and would take the latest scheduled ferry back to the mainland. The fact that his timely absence would help him construct an iron-clad alibi never crossed anyone’s mind. Around eleven, they said their good byes and Paul, repressing his excitement as best he could, managed to look almost sad to part with the young man, wishing him the best of luck in his new life. Once the party finally over, Cam regretfully returned to his own room to leave Jade and Louis to enjoy their last night alone together. He suspected that there would be more tears than erotic gymnastics. He had loved Louis and he prayed fervently that his next journey would be a safe one. When they embraced, Louis’s eyes were wet with tears and his good bye was barely audible. Out of all his new friends, only Jade and the medical team would be on hand the next morning.
It rained all night and a dense fog danced on the edge of the rainforest. The smells of rich soil and decomposing roots filled the air, still laden with rain. Jade had wakened him at dawn and after making sure that he carried his old passport in his jeans, helped him dress. Louis did not know why he brushed his teeth, nor why he smoothed out his unruly hair, as he realised it would not matter. Without a word nor a look back to his lodging of the past few weeks, he followed Jade to the infirmary, where the doctor and two nurses were already on stand-by. They asked him to hurry to keep to the strict timetable. He asked for two minutes privacy to say his good bye to Jade, but was unable to say a word. He kissed her with a passion he never knew he had and, at that very moment, feeling her heart beating against his chest, he almost backed out of the whole deal. Her firm resoluteness though quickly brought him back to reality, and he nodded apprehensively to the waiting needle. When the doctor depressed the plunger into his arm, he fell rapidly into a dreamless state. Jade’s face above his own was the last face he saw. He struggled to understand why she looked both miserable and relieved, but the drugs acted too fast to give him the answer his mind wonderingly searched for.
Louis’s body was loaded in the front seat of the car and Paul’s chauffeur took the wheel. Ten minutes later, he took Louis’s inert body out of the car and laid him on the damp jungle floor, then reversed the car a couple hundred metres on the steep road, released the break, jumped out and pushed it down the road, the motor still running. On the second turn, the car swerved off the road, hit a large boulder with its front wheel, skidded on the muddy path and flipped, coming to rest against the trunk of a palm tree. Had Paul been able to script the crash, he could not have done it any better. The door had opened on impact and the roof had collapsed when the car had landed just a few feet near Louis’s body. From behind a tree, the chauffeur waited until he heard the small group of hikers coming up the pat
h, listened to their exclamation of horror upon coming across the body and to their frantic call to the police station. When half an hour later, two police four-wheel drive cars stopped at the scene, he went home, his part over. The rest was no longer up to him. Jade, who had followed them down the hill at first, had veered onto another back road leading to the airport where she would wait for the body to arrive.
On the scene of the accident, the Chief of Police had taken Louis’s wrist and had registered no pulse. He motioned to one of his deputies to take a dozen or so photos of the scene and a dozen or so photos of Louis’s body and when they were done, the two of them transported the body to the back of his car. The Chief of Police went through the motions of asking the bewildered tourists what had happened, yet he did not take notes of their answers nor did he record where they were staying. He never asked for any close ups nor did he direct his deputy to look for any recognisable markings such as scars, piercing, tattoos or any other distinguishing signs. The ambulance, which could not drive up the slippery slope, had waited for them on the beachside road leading to the airport. It only took a couple minutes for the body to be lifted to the back of the ambulance. When it pulled up on the runway, Jade was there to ascertain that the charter personnel took care of Louis’s inert body, which they carefully slotted in the helicopter’s rear passenger seat, carrying a gurney for the occasion. As they wasted precious time in obtaining authorisation to land, due to unexpected congestion at the domestic Bangkok airport, she directed the helicopter to fly straight to the main hospital instead, since it was where the final and official forensic examination would be performed.
The hospital roof top helipad allowed helicopters to land and permission was granted immediately. She had already placed the call to the embassy before leaving the island. An unhappy junior staff member had been dispatched to the Coroner’s office while everyone else attended a lavish party, to celebrate Bastille Day, on the garden roof of the Lebua Hotel, a cocktail party hosted by no other than Paul Patek. It was the type of invitation no diplomat in his right mind would miss under any circumstances, as it was a unique chance to rub shoulders with members of the Royal family, property and industrial tycoons and starlets of all kinds. In a country, which remained so close to foreigners, Paul’s parties were known to be fun and lavish, often breaking past the existing social and racial prejudices on both sides. The fact that liquid doses of Infinity often spiked the drinks of guests and were thus responsible for such a convivial atmosphere had never occurred to anyone. The one thing everyone knew for sure was that the invitations were highly coveted, and that a party hosted by Paul would always turn out to be the best party of the year. Paul also knew that it would provide him with an ironclad alibi if he ever came under suspicion.
The gurney was rushed through the hospital corridors and descended to the lower floors which hosted the forensic lab and offices, completely deserted at this time of the morning. Two men in lab coats took the gurney over from the orderlies and after a brief exchange of pleasantries pushed through the double doors of the morgue. The coroner was sitting at his desk, leafing through a holiday brochure. He looked up at the large clock hanging on the drab wall across from him and gestured to the two men to lift the body unto one of the three long stainless steel tables standing in the middle of the room. When the phone rang, they all knew it was crunch time. A late twenty-something man with a dark chestnut mop of hair, dark brown eyes and an open face, wearing a bored expression, yet visibly uncomfortable in these surroundings, introduced himself as Bruno Balfont from the French Embassy, in charge of stamping the exit passport and co-signing the Coroner’s certificate. The inexperienced diplomatic aid took for granted that the people in front of him were exactly who they said they were. He refused to look at the body lying under the thin white sheet and did not question the improbability of the cause of death listed on the death certificate: asphyxiation by poison due to snakebite. Nor did he question the fact that the death certificate in front of him was already typed and stamped, dated and signed whereas the body had presumably just arrived, suggesting an efficiency virtually unheard of. His whole impatient demeanour indicated plainly that he wished to leave as soon as possible, reluctant as he was to miss too much of the party. No one tried to detain him any longer than absolutely necessary. Within minutes he thanked the three men and bowed on his way out. So great was his hurry that he almost ran into an incredibly good looking Eurasian woman standing right outside the doors, whose presence in this place was no less than incongruous. With his naturally curious nature, at any other time, he would have approached her, but not today, not on this day of festivities, where everyone else was gaily celebrating Bastille Day in one of the city’s most prestigious venues.
Once the young man left, Jade entered the room. The two alleged burly orderlies, also on Paul’s payroll, had open the back door through which ambulances usually pulled up and Jade could clearly see the hearse that would take the coffin to the International Airport once they had secured the locks and attached the necessary documents to its lid. She peeled back the sheet, and placed her hand in Louis’s back pocket where she retrieved his passport. The passport needed to accompany the coffin and the death certificate. Gently she kissed him on the lips and passed her fingers through his matted hair. Then she took the new passport, his plane ticket and a wad of fresh notes and slipped it back into his pants. Then she smiled at the coroner and told him that Paul was indeed most grateful for his cooperation and that he could expect to be well looked after. The man smiled back and bade her good bye. Jade slipped through the doors and waited in the car which would take the coffin to the international airport.
The Coroner’s orders had been clear: sign the death certificate, appease the Consular envoy if there were any questions, let the two burly men in through the back door, see the young woman out once she had checked that all documentation was in order and then administer sodium nitrate to the body lying in front of him, a solution that could never appear on any autopsy if one ever needed to be performed anywhere else. The victim would die immediately in his sleep, slipping from his semi-comatose state into death without ever feeling it. He was then in charge of hiding the body amidst the other unidentified corpses until such time as they were collected and burned in the city’s open pit crematoriums. By then the body would be sufficiently decomposed to fail arising suspicions. Dr Kharma Sui had followed Paul’s instructions on a number of occasions and had never looked back since. The handsome rewards had allowed him to send his daughter to a finishing school in Switzerland while his elder son finished his law degree at Harvard. He had never been curious to know why he was asked to dispose of the bodies nor why he had to insure that their death was real. As far as he was concerned he was presented with corpses and did his job. Discarding the victim’s body was, of course, not part of protocol, but it did not really seem to harm anyone and Paul paid well enough to soothe his soul from too much introspection. He never knew what happened to the coffin afterwards and never asked. As soon as Jade had let the pneumatic doors close softly behind her, he approached the gurney and took one of the syringes from the top of a rolling stainless steel cart behind him. For a minute he admired the young man’s beautiful face. As he plunged the needle into his neck, the body shuddered once and Louis’s eyes flicked open, filled with hope and wonder. The ME closed his as the young man slipped to his death without a whimper.
On the way to the International Airport, Jade swallowed her tears. She knew that she could cry freely as it gave her cover an even more realistic tone. Sitting in the back seat of the hearse while Paul’s bodyguards were sitting up front, she reminisced. She realised that in many ways she had loved Louis. His lovemaking had been both poetic and wild, his spirit as free as his soul was pure. More than once she had been surprised by his intelligence, his insights into life and people, yet she never understood why he had chosen in life a path of rebellion and self-indulgence rather than become what his family, friends and education could have led him
to become. For Jade, a woman who placed such stock in the importance of family and ancestors as well as education to think that one would have purposely chosen a path of self-doubt, self-loathing and insecurity had always puzzled her. All her life she had done her best to avoid what she firmly believed were the pitfalls of poverty alone, difficulties she had thought far removed from the lives of the white middle-class people she had come to meet during her numerous travels with Paul. She had always been shocked to see how easy it had been to get strangers to trust both Paul and she, to lead them to indulge in the drugs they liberally offered and to a point of non-return, and to finally consent to a proposition she would have found unacceptable no matter what. No matter how much her mother’s choices weighed on her lithe shoulders, Jade could not imagine ever doing anything in her power other than make her happy and let her save face. She fervently hoped that the dozen young men and women she had so enlisted in their little scheme were now free and happy in the countries they had chosen together. She knew though that she would miss Louis most of all; he alone had reached her heart. She wondered idly if Paul would let her one day go down to South America and look for him. Surely she was not destined to be bait all of her life, was she? Surely there was a point when Paul would want someone younger, smarter and more attractive to attract more potential candidates. She also hoped that, at some point, Paul would fear risking discovery, declaring he had now earned enough money and thus cut her loose: naïve and young on many fronts still, Jade, in truth, never understood why for people like Paul, money seemed to be an end in itself.
The Samui Conspiracy Page 25