With the big decision already made—they would go in lone-wolf style and leave open the possibility of calling in the colonel’s superiors and then the Americans if it looked like this was Hasam’s roosting place—the next set of decisions could only seem easier. The decision to go undercover was beginning to look like the best of the bad alternatives.
“You could pretend to be an immigration officer hunting down illegal migrants.”
“Who are you in this setup?”
An American immigration officer working on technical assistance under one of those government-to-government programs. An anti-foreign sweep wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Anyone on the site would accept the inspection as a necessary precaution. Got to protect all that brass, including politicians and foreign bigwigs, from the foreigners.”
“It won’t work.” Colonel Pratt had taken off his policeman’s shirt and slipped on the white shirt from the back seat.
“Hasam is an illegal. The last thing he wants to attract is the immigration police. That’s how Hambali was arrested.”
“Okay, we’re not immigration police. Hey, that shirt looks good on you. You could be a businessman.”
“Not a bad idea. Not a good one, either.”
“We need a way in that is unofficial. No uniform, no affiliation,” said Calvino.
Only a farang could hold such a radical thought.
“A couple of lost tourists?” asked Colonel Pratt. “No. We’re investors from Hong Kong.”
The colonel warmed to the idea.
“We are looking to buy the building.”
“One more thing,” said Calvino. “I checked around and found out the name of the civil engineer who ran the project. It turns out the engineer is working on a new condo development three sois away.”
“Have you talked with him?”
“It’s her. And I talked to her.”
Colonel Pratt looked surprised. He’d never encountered a woman civil engineer in Thailand.
“And you told her that your partner in the investment also wanted to meet her.”
“You read my mind.”
“Why the part about being immigration officers?”
“I knew you’d hate that. It made being a Hong Kong investor a much better idea.”
“You thought this through, Vincent.”
“I know how your mind works.”
“You think you know.”
He zipped up the black trousers from the back seat. Finally he put on the sports jacket over his .38 snug in its holster.
“You could pass for Chinese,” said Calvino.
“My grandmother on my mother’s side was Chinese.”
“Yeah? You know the Chinese script for housewife?”
The colonel shook his head.
“The symbol for a woman and a broom stick. This is the stuff Ratana’s mother’s been teaching her. What do you get when you combine the symbol for blurry vision with the one for woman? You get the Chinese word marriage.”
Colonel Pratt smiled, having figured out Calvino’s new-found interest in the Chinese language. “Ratana’s mother is Chinese.”
“What are you saying, it dissipates if it’s your grandmother and not your mother?”
“Most things get watered down over time. Blood, money, desire and love.”
“The jacket looks like it was made for you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
The civil engineer sat behind a desk inside her office. She worked on the third floor of a condominium site. The ground floors were full of workers carrying tools, hammering, lifting cement blocks, painting, and sweeping up. She looked up from a set of blueprints as Calvino opened the door.
“Mr. Calvino, back so soon?”
“I want you to meet my partner from Hong Kong, Mr. Jerry Lee Wong,” said Calvino.
“Mr. Wong, you can call me Nui.” She spoke perfect American English.
“You can call him Jerry,” said Calvino.
Colonel Pratt flinched. He hated the name Jerry, which had been the first name of his landlord in New York City many years ago when he was a student. Calvino had threatened to have his uncles and cousins design a new set of legs for Jerry should Jerry ever give the key to Pratt’s apartment to the Chinese gangsters who had been threatening to return.
They sat down and Nui briefed them on the history of the abandoned condo project. Since Calvino’s visit, she had pulled out the old set of blueprints and brochures advertising the development. A hundred and twenty-four people had paid deposits. Later when the project folded, they lost their money. The land titles office showed the developer as a company; the list of shareholders showed a lot of Isan names, people who were likely employed as maids and drivers. Calvino wondered if some of them had been on Veera’s payroll. The developer had gone into bankruptcy in 1997 and all construction had stopped. The site had been abandoned. Pattaya had dozens of half-completed projects. As investors, she would show them other sites with much better prospects.
“We are interested in this one,” said Colonel Pratt.
“For someone from Hong Kong, you speak English with a Thai accent,” she said.
“Everyone says that,” said the Colonel.
“Last life he was Thai,” said Calvino.
“And who were you last life?”
Calvino started to reply but the colonel was one step ahead. “Woody Allen,” said Colonel Pratt.
He’d been talking to Ratana, thought Calvino.
“For my sins, I was reborn to live in Thailand.”
“Woody Allen’s not dead,” she said.
“It’s one of those premature rebirths,” said Calvino. “And I am Vanessa May.”
She is good, thought Calvino. An intelligent and fast-on-the-drawing. Calvino saw her mentally running a victory lap for her Vanessa May line.
Colonel Pratt glanced up at the framed diplomas from Harvard and MIT on the wall. On Khao San Road, anyone could buy a Harvard or MIT degree. The ones in her office looked genuine. She was getting along with Calvino a little too well. It was time to shift the focus, to put her to the test, and to get on with the job.
“What kind of security is there on the building?” asked Colonel Pratt.
“It’s been years. It would likely have been the standard setup. A security guard sleeping in front of the site.”
She turned to her laptop computer on her desk.
“Let me do a search. I probably have some information here. Give me a second to find it.”
Nui wore a denim shirt with the top two buttons undone and tight jeans. A yellow hardhat with a decal reading Safety First sat next to her laptop. She wore an amulet; she didn’t wear a wedding ring. Both were out of fashion with modern, educated Thai women. Calvino remembered Fon’s description of herself as a failure of the system. The system had half succeeded with Nui. She appeared over-educated, slightly superstitious and unmarried. Calvino watched her fingers glide over the keyboard. She’d stop to look at the screen, bite her lower lip, and then type again without looking up. Nui was the kind of woman who’d been loved but not enough to have made a difference. There was nothing about her make-up or clothing other than the tight-fitting jeans and unbuttoned blouse—minor details that could be read as neglect—that suggested she was available. Call it chemistry. She had Calvino bobbing and weaving as she worked at the computer, straining to look over her shoulder. When the chemistry with a woman was right, electricity shot through the air. In the absence of chemistry, sustaining interest was like trying to strike a wet match. You got a wisp of smoke if you were lucky, but no fire. Calvino felt the flames.
Colonel Pratt couldn’t help but notice that Calvino stood more erect, shoulders back, even when he hunched over the screen. He smiled, wondering if her attitude was as hard and concentrated as it appeared. She worked and didn’t seem to notice that she’d attracted more than a little attention from the private eye. If anything, the young civil engineer had gone out of her way to make herself fit into the hardhat crowd of t
he construction site, and the result had only heightened her appeal. Thailand had not quite caught up to the new class of educated Thai women. Especially one working in an almost exclusively male field.
“Found it,” Nui said, turning the screen around for Colonel Pratt to read.
“The security firm’s name, address and phone number.”
Calvino wrote the information down in his notebook. He sat back down.
“Anything else I can help you with?”
Nui had the look of a small, sensitive woman who’d learned to survive in a tough, demanding, dangerous job, neither asking for nor giving any quarter. She looked from Calvino to the colonel waiting for one of the men to respond.
“You wouldn’t happen to have the blueprints of the building?”
“I am afraid the plans are confidential.”
“Meaning?” asked Calvino.
“You would need the permission of the developer to release them.”
She opened another file and scrolled down the page. “It’s in our contract.”
She turned the screen around for them to read.
“We don’t have the time to do that,” said Colonel Pratt.
“That’s not really my problem,” she said.
“In that case, can I let you in on something confidential?” asked Calvino.
Suspicion clouded her face as she looked from Calvino to Colonel Pratt.
Colonel Pratt flashed his police ID. “We have reason to believe that the building is being used for criminal activity. And I would ask that you let us have a look at the blueprints and any other information about the building.”
The disclosure didn’t rattle Nui. She stretched, hunching her shoulders, her small jaw clenched.
“And you’re. . . what?” she asked Calvino.
“His private secretary.”
“That’s why you were taking notes,” she said.
She picked up Colonel Pratt’s police ID and read it carefully before handing it back.
“We are under considerable time pressure,” said Colonel Pratt.
“I am Thai, and that’s the first time I’ve had anyone in uniform ever admit that time mattered.”
“Then you’ll help,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth from the beginning?” Calvino raised his hand like a schoolboy. “I can answer
that. It was my idea.”
“Your idea? I’d say lying is never a very good idea.”
“You’re right. I should have told you straight up front.” Some part of the chemistry was kicking in for her as well.
Only she resisted and threw up a wall of attitude. Just as she was about to close the door, Colonel Pratt cleared his throat.
“We don’t have time. I need this information, Khun Nui. It is important. Very important that you help,” said Colonel Pratt.
It was starting to sink in that there was a police investigation and that she was about to become part of the machinery moving the police investigation forward. Her face flushed and she went back to working on her laptop. She had always played an important part in whatever she had decided to take on. She knew the plans by heart. She had only a couple of moments to decide how far to get involved in the matter. A professional’s last line of defense was to bury the person demanding documents into a sea of technical documents that required an advanced degree to decipher. She began printing out documents and handing them to Calvino. Project reports. Supplier invoices. Material inventories. Cash-flow reports. Balance sheets and drawings, floor plans and model rooms. Subcontractors. The paper piled up in a stack on her desk in front of Calvino.
The construction had slowed down and finally stopped because the developer ran out of money, she explained.
Many projects had crashed around the same time. Some had been revived. Others had stayed a sprawling complex of green-netted concrete.
“What you are looking at is the list of subcontractors. They can provide you with details about the construction crews who worked on the site.”
Nui printed out a blueprint of the building, and put it on the stack.
“Finished,” she said. “Anything else I can help you with?”
She knew from the look on Colonel Pratt and Calvino’s faces that she had won a victory. It would take them weeks if not months to go through all the documentation and check out all the possibilities. Building an eighteen-story project produced a mountain of paper and employed hundreds of companies and workers. At the end, there was to be a con- dominium with three hundred units. It was, upon completion, to be home for three hundred happy middle-class families. The dream hadn’t come true. The question was whether the nightmare vision of Jardine and the Americans was about to be fulfilled.
“I want to be more specific with you,” said Colonel Pratt. “That would be helpful.”
“We have information that a foreigner might have setup a base of operation inside that building.”
“What kind of an operation? Drugs?”
“That doesn’t matter right now,” said Colonel Pratt.
“Think explosive device,” said Calvino.
Colonel Pratt shot Calvino a look. “I’m trying to be truthful,” said Calvino.
“We cannot discuss the details,” said the colonel.
Nui’s mouth formed a perfect “O” and she nodded. That kind of a criminal enterprise was obviously not one that she had thought about.
“This is way outside of my territory.”
“Go over the blueprints with me, if that’s okay?” asked Colonel Pratt.
She spread the printouts over her desk.
“Would any workers be on that site?” asked Calvino.
“No way. The building’s gone nowhere for years.”
“Someone could slip in unnoticed and setup living there,” said Colonel Pratt.
Nui shrugged. “It’s possible. But the security guard would notice if anyone lived there. Their job is to check the floors, and most of the building is exposed. No walls or windows or door. It’s a concrete shell. Even if he were sleeping most of the shift, he’d notice someone coming and going. Someone living in the building would stand out.”
“Okay, it’s open. But if you were going to live on this site, where would you hide?” asked Calvino.
Colonel Pratt liked the way Calvino’s question had made her smile. It was the kind of challenge a woman like Nui enjoyed, a puzzle, a test of her ability to fast-track an answer that only she could come up with.
She flipped through the blueprint printouts, stopping, tapping a pen, before moving onto another page.
“And if you wanted to hide an explosive device where would you hide it?” asked Colonel Pratt. “In the same place or a different place?”
“You are asking a lot of questions,” she said.
“We are asking the right person, aren’t we?” Calvino looked up at the framed diplomas on the wall.
“A Harvard-educated civil engineer would know where the best hiding spot was on any site.”
“It depends on the size of the device.”
“The size of a sailor’s footlocker,” said Calvino.
“Here,” she said, turning the blueprint around so that Colonel Pratt and Calvino could both see it. They weren’t certain what they were looking at; she had to explain they were staring at the central elevator shaft.
“No elevators were installed. They come last because elevators are expensive. You install them after the building has been closed in. You see this space at the top? That is a small room where the relay and switching equipment are housed and spare parts for the elevator stored. It’s enclosed. There are two windows that look over the shaft. You could hide a bomb in a footlocker there and it would be difficult to detect. I doubt the security guards would ever go up to that level. It’s too much trouble.”
Colonel Pratt rose from his chair. “You’ve been very helpful. Please do not mention this conversation to anyone.”
Calvino folded his notebook and asked
for Nui’s name card.
“I could take you to the site, if that would help,” she said. She looked back and forth between Calvino and Colonel Pratt.
“It’s. . .” Calvino started to say.
“Not a good idea,” said Colonel Pratt finishing his thought.
“Looking at the blueprints, I might know a way someone could get in and out of that elevator shaft without anyone knowing.”
Colonel Pratt stared hard at the blueprints. If what she said were true, her presence might make a difference. The downside risk was all his. No one was going to point the finger at Calvino and say, “Why did you allow this to happen on your watch?”
She could get hurt, and her injury would fall on his shoulders; he’d have to take full responsibility. His superiors wouldn’t stand by him. He had already gone outside the chain of command. He was free-floating, entering into that void where his actions could no longer be explained or justified. He told himself this was exactly why men stayed strictly in the chain of command and did things according to the book. He also told himself this was why they hadn’t caught Hasam.
“Okay, you can come along,” said Colonel Pratt. “For now, that is.”
She looked at Calvino.
“If who we think is in that building is inside, he’s very dangerous.”
“Do I look afraid?” asked Nui.
“You should be,” said Colonel Pratt.
FORTY-ONE
ON THE DRIVE to the construction site, Calvino thought how easy it would have been for Hasam to slip into Thailand on New Year’s Day. It would have been easy for his JI contacts to slip cash to the security guard and ask him to leave his post early. It would have been lonely for the security guard seated on a plastic stool in front of a concrete block with piles of dirt and bricks everywhere around him. Since everyone else was on holiday having a good time with family and friends, the temptation would have been great to take the money and go. Five hundred or a thousand baht would have done the trick.
Calvino parked outside the security guardhouse. The guard came outside just as Nui was slipping on her hardhat. He was wide-eyed watching the colonel and Calvino stepping out of the car behind her. She explained that she was taking these two investors for a site tour. She pointed back at Calvino and Colonel Pratt.
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