The Assassin on the Bangkok Express

by Roland Perry

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Six months at least. In that time, the cousins should have acted against Cortez. Remember his kill list is mostly Americans, some of them agency people. He is their most wanted man since Osama Bin Laden. They are finally going after him with force.’

  ‘A Seal op?’

  ‘Could be. The cartel has a considerable armed outfit. Our cousins believe he and it will be most vulnerable while they are in Thailand. The cartel has pulled out of Chiang Mai and moved to Bangkok.’

  Gregory took a package from a briefcase.

  ‘I have a few presents for you,’ he said, handing it to him. ‘I hear your eyesight is failing.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Only kidding. I believe you broke your own range record. Congratulations—20/20 vision at your age is a modern wonder!’

  ‘Thank you, I think. I hate the cliché corollary “for your age”.’

  Gregory handed him a pair of nerdy-looking, square, dark-framed glasses that had sides like small blinkers.

  ‘These will help. Very special ocular enhancements. They can make out more than just shapes from two hundred metres.’

  ‘Infrared?’

  ‘Part of it, yes. CSIRO developed these especially for us. They give you more than just sight in the dark.’ He demonstrated two tiny buttons on the thick frames. ‘There is a special feature I love. Gives you the high-tech equivalent of eyes in the back of your head.’ Cavalier put them on. ‘If you press the left button, and tilt the glasses a fraction, you obtain a clear view of what is happening behind you.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Cavalier said with reserved admiration, ‘interesting. Have to try in the field.’

  ‘It’s called “real-time video”. Tiny cameras and mirrors take a video of what is going on behind you. It is played for your viewing in the glasses with a delay of a fraction of a second.’

  ‘Are our operatives using them now?’

  ‘No, they are prototypes. Operatives will practise with them and report on their effectiveness.’ Gregory handed him a second pair. ‘Here, have these for luck. They have a third function, which allows you to depict colours in the dark.’

  Cavalier tried them.

  ‘These are confusing,’ he said. ‘The colours fuse. I can’t distinguish shapes …’

  ‘They work well in the dark. In any case, you’re a guinea pig. I’d like a full report on them on their respective efficiencies, please.’

  Gregory handed him a third item in a small plastic box. ‘You might as well have these too.’ He lifted the box’s lid to show him what appeared to be normal mobile phone earpieces. ‘These are called extrasensory earpieces—ESEPs.’

  Cavalier put them on and adjusted the volume.

  ‘You’ll hear a mouse fart with those,’ Gregory said. ‘Just plug them into your phone as if you are listening to music. You can pick up a conversation at fifty metres.’ He pulled out two further small items from his satchel. ‘Just a couple of other things that may be of help. Straight from the CSIRO’s special ops department.’

  ‘Didn’t know they had one.’

  ‘They don’t. I call it that because our agency has pinched some of their best scientists.’ He opened a small box. ‘I love this one too. It’s an all-purpose key. Makes the old Allen key look ancient by comparison.’ Gregory removed a small, thin key. ‘This will open anything. It has “thinking” chips that will calculate in milliseconds how to crack a lock. Just flick it against an electronic lock, or shove it into an old-style one. Works every time.’

  Cavalier picked up the key, walked out of the suite and tried it against the electronic lock. It opened it.

  ‘Like it,’ he said, re-entering the room, ‘and thank you. You’ve become Q, as in the Bond movies.’

  ‘Not the latest ones,’ Gregory said with a grin, ‘the new young Q character is way behind the eight ball. The technology for field operatives is becoming better and better.’

  *

  Cavalier did not take long to work out where he should hide out: Chiang Mai. He was familiar with the city and its Northern Thailand surrounds. He had stayed a few days at Centara, a central tourist hotel since renamed Duangtwan, in the previous year when tracking Mendez. Thirty years earlier he had remained in the city with Pin, now his ex-wife, for several months. They had lived in other cities such as Chiang Rai, and over the years he would stay with her when she occasionally did locum work in Chiang Mai, if he were not in Australia or on another assignment.

  Cavalier believed that the last place Cortez and his henchmen would expect him to be would be Chiang Mai. The Mexicans had left their massive bunker outside the city and were going to escape Thailand, or at least that was the most up-to-date intelligence. Nevertheless, he would live a low-key existence for several months.

  Cavalier rented an apartment in the Riverside Condo on the Ping River, with a view from its three fourth-floor balconies that would inspire any painter. Looking left he could see trees and the river just fifty metres away, where it wound its way south-east around a small green island. On the other side of the hundred-metre-wide river there were a few unobtrusive and abandoned houses, half-hidden pagodas, more trees, and the mountains beyond. To the right he could see the white railings of the Meng Rai Bridge where he had witnessed Pin’s motorcycle accident thirty years earlier.

  The place was quiet. Every morning he awoke to the cry of an orange-feathered crow pheasant. He rolled up the blinds to the sight of sun on the still river and peaceful surrounds. In late afternoons and evenings, the sun fell in a splash of red into the mountains.

  The position of the apartment was pertinent. It was just outside the south-east corner of Chiang Mai, and far enough away from the more central location of incidents that nearly cost him his life six months earlier. It was also conveniently located with a Caltex fuel station and an upmarket 7-Eleven store called Tops across from the condominium entrance on the Lamphun Road. The area was mostly inhabited by Thais with few foreigners in sight outside the condo itself and the Holiday Inn next door. His new ‘home’, or ‘writer’s retreat’ as Cavalier liked to call it, was the best in Chiang Mai of twenty he had looked at on the net. The modest rental price was within his means, given that he had received a redundancy package from his newspaper.

  The condo had good security. There was only one way into his place and that was by a solid front door. Leaving the elevator, the apartment was at the end of a fifty-metre-long corridor, which was marked by a permanent smell of marijuana coming from a room halfway along. Cavalier had studied the condo’s exits and entry points from lifts and stairwells and was satisfied that he could come and go without being seen. He judged that in an emergency he could even use a sheet tied to a balcony rail to rappel down a few metres to the abode on the floor below, and so on down to the ground. With that in mind, he had a hardware store three hundred metres from his condo construct a five-metre-long rope ladder.

  He was very well aware that an assassin could strike onto his balconies from across the river, and it would not be a difficult shot of about two hundred metres. Cavalier used his new ESEP glasses to scour the opposite bank and the mainly obscured buildings every morning if he had breakfast on a balcony, and left the lights off if he ate outside at night.

  It was an idyllic setting, into which he could fade with a new identity. He had taken the name Laurent V Blanc, which was an amalgam of two close French friends’ names. Cavalier had two false French passports and two Australian (one false), but had only changed his identity for the purposes of travelling in and out of a country. In a second French document, as Claude Garriaud, he wore his glasses, wig, false moustache and goatee beard. When using the second Australian passport, as Bert Trumper, he would have to present a totally different look: bald and with brown contact lenses. He’d worn a moulded plastic ‘cap’ to look bald in the photo but knew he couldn’t get away with this if interrogated face to face. He would have to shave his entire head of thick salt-and-pepper hair, which he detested
the thought of doing.

  Once through borders he shed his disguises, even dropping his French accent most of the time, only being careful when meeting some Europeans and Australians. He had chosen French because of his fluency in the language, even the nuances of colloquial speech. If he met French speakers, he would be Australian. If he met English speakers, he would be French. His Thai was good, but his height, fair skin, blue eyes, slightly gnarled nose, and square jaw prevented him from trying to pass as a native of his part-adopted country.

  On his first day in the condo he wandered into the local Nong Hoi market, with its enticing smells dominated by chicken, fish, a variety of spices, and strongly scented flowers. He bought two coloured face masks—white and red—which were legitimate in fending off the vehicle pollution, one of the few drawbacks to living in the area. Whenever he walked down the street he wore cap, sunglasses and mask, which allowed him to meld into the local population scarcely identifiable as a farang. He did not himself recognise anyone in the market, which he had frequented in the distant past.

  On one occasion, when he removed his mask and glasses, a middle-aged, corpulent woman named Coo kept her eyes on him as he walked away. He noticed her and did not make eye contact.

  The second time he wandered near Coo’s food stall she called out, ‘Vic? You Vic?’

  Cavalier was shocked that someone had recalled him decades after he had lived in the area, especially as his looks had changed and matured. He pretended not to notice, later buying pork and salad from her.

  While Coo was scooping it into plastic bags, she said in Thai: ‘You look like a handsome Australian farang from a long time ago.’

  Cavalier said in French and with a charming smile: ‘Merci, Madame, my name is Laurent,’ and then shook hands with her.

  She said her name and frowned, still uncertain.

  ‘Not Vic?’ she said.

  ‘Laurent,’ he repeated. The name ‘Coo’ resonated. Despite her face not being familiar, he recalled using the image of a pigeon to remember her name. Cavalier was glad of the face mask just in case others in the four hundred metres of street stalls and cafes had excellent memories.

  His main concern would be coming to the attention of Chiang Mai police or some of the enemies, particularly anyone from the Mendez Mexican drug cartel company—Golden Eagle Constructions—who might be left over in Chiang Mai while the rest of the gang had moved to Bangkok. He had hired a car to drive out to the company bunker, which had an abandoned look. There was security at a boom gate leading down the track to the underground entrance, which seemed to be closed and boarded up. Seeing this eased his fears, but not his alertness. Yet it confirmed that Chiang Mai was the best place for his temporary relocation, at least until he heard that the Americans had moved on the cartel’s people in Thailand.

  Cavalier was sometimes on edge in the street, despite his mask. During the morning he would have coffee on the Lamphun Road, which led south to the quaint city of the same name, at one of three welcoming shops run by three sets of Thai sisters. He would randomly rotate his patronising of these cafes to avoid familiarity with the women, none of whom interfered with his privacy or asked questions beyond the normal niceties about where he was from and what he was doing in Chiang Mai. Cavalier would remove the mask and sit inside to avoid the endless stream of vehicles, which were ten times the number of thirty years earlier, belching out contaminants.

  Occasionally a bike would roar up to the front of the cafe. He would look up at a helmeted rider, unable to know in a split second if it were an assailant or not. Always in his mind was the possibility of an attempt to murder him. An assassin in Thailand could be hired cheaply.

  8

  DISTANT ACQUAINTANCES

  Cavalier was cautious about speaking to anyone. Chiang Mai, similar to any remote outpost in any country, had a small repository of people on the run from something. It might be a mass murderer, or a petty thief; someone deserting a family; another person wanted for tax evasion in his home country; a drug runner owing money to another; and so on.

  Only three people at the cafes and restaurants at different times had attempted to engage him in conversation. One was a strange forty-year-old alcoholic American-Israeli calling himself Guy, who twenty years ago had acted as a military adviser and arms supplier with rebels in Myanmar, formerly Burma. He approached Cavalier in the restaurant at the front of the condo one night and asked too many questions for his liking. Guy claimed to be a protégé of former CIA deputy director Bill Young, who was buried in a nearby cemetery. From then on Cavalier avoided Guy, who was usually too drunk to notice Cavalier stride past.

  Then there was a Frenchman, Albert, who chain-smoked overpowering Gauloises cigarettes and drank black coffee. He too had an unusual past, including a stint with the French Foreign Legion, which he tried to cover up. But the Frenchman underestimated his coffee companion by mentioning the towns and cities in North Africa he had ‘visited’. Cavalier saw a pattern that few would pick up and was certain of his membership of the Legion.

  ‘Did you enjoy the Legion activity?’ Cavalier asked Albert once.

  The Frenchman blanched and went silent. Cavalier had taken a chance in his discussions with him, but Albert was a character almost certain not to report on Cavalier, mainly because he was in a similar position. There was a cautious rapport between them without the exchange of numbers or email addresses. They never planned a meeting. Cavalier called himself just ‘Laurent’ and said he was Australian. He liked the Frenchman’s thinking; he was intelligent, well-travelled and humorous. But soon after Cavalier’s question about his past, he disappeared. One of the Thai women running the cafe told Cavalier that the police had asked questions about him.

  ‘Albert was wanted for something in France,’ she told Cavalier.

  The third person with whom who Cavalier let down his guard was an eighty-year-old American, who had been living in retirement nearly two decades and was contemplating going home to Maryland, probably to die. Ted Baines was tall and lean, with a grey moustache. Cavalier thought he looked and sounded like a long-ago actor and World War II bomber pilot, Jimmy Stewart.

  ‘Not sure I agree with that,’ Ted laughed when told.

  ‘Ok, you have a better jawline and no tremor in your voice.’

  ‘As an actor, he made a good bomber pilot. Ended up a brigadier general.’

  ‘I thought he was a fair actor.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Ted would roll up in his wheelchair, read the Bangkok Post and Nation and chat with Cavalier, who liked and respected him. Ted also lived in the Riverside Condo. He sometimes left his wheelchair, which could collapse to half its normal width, under a canvas sheet among the scores of bikes outside the front of the condo. He would struggle on crutches from the elevator to the wheelchair and battle to open it to its full width. He would be grateful for help in this action, and also in climbing into the chair. On occasions Cavalier would leave the condo heading for the Chang cafe at the same time as Ted. He would assist Ted on the precarious two hundred and fifty-metre roll along the road of broken pavement, with close-running vehicles and bikes.

  Cavalier found the American was sagacious and well read, quoting Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare and Churchill with an easy facility. Ted said he always filled in immigration cards asking if he had anything to declare with ‘nothing but my genius’. He was also well travelled, having been a merchant seaman most of his life. Each day they happened to coincide at Chang, he would tell Cavalier an anecdote about his travels around the globe on all kinds of vessels, from grain transporters for free distribution in India in the 1950s, to destroyer escorts in the 1980s and 1990s. His speciality was as a radio operator and he had moved up to sophisticated listening apparatus by the time of the 1991 Gulf War. He had been brought up on a farm and had graduated from high school in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Ted spoke Thai and was proficient in Mandarin, as was Cavalier, so on occasion they would speak Chinese.

  Cavalier let the friendship grow a
nd often brought him food from the market and did chores for him, such as fixing a broken washing machine and installing Wi-Fi so he could watch American football. Ted was most grateful. It saved him many trips in his wheelchair and gave him some pleasure and security. His third long-term spouse, his Thai wife (his third long-term spouse) of fifteen years, had died a year earlier, and he himself was ailing from unspecified medical conditions. He had nothing to do with his family in the US.

  Cavalier took notes in private, recognising that Ted could be a good character to emulate in a novel. Still, there were gaps in the old man’s narrative. Cavalier’s experience and detail-sensitive training made him mull over the possibility that Ted had a long-held dark secret or two, similar to Cavalier and the French Foreign Legionnaire.

  After several months when a strong, if guarded, friendship had developed, Ted asked Cavalier to renew two passports (which he had to do each year), through two different lawyers in Chiang Mai. The name on one passport was Ted Baines. The other said ‘Edward Blenkiron’.

  ‘You noticed the names on my passports?’ Ted asked Cavalier after he had happily completed the minor task.

  ‘Yes,’ Cavalier replied, but not in a tone that said he expected an explanation.

  ‘Don’t ask about it,’ Ted said with a nervous smile.

  A few mornings later, Ted asked Cavalier over coffee, ‘Have you ever killed a man?’

  It shook Cavalier, but he recovered in a split second by saying with a laugh: ‘Do I look like I might have?’

  ‘Not really. But those wristbands you wear give you a certain understated warrior look. Have you ever been in the military?’

  ‘I was a trainee in the Australian Air Force.’

  ‘You look combat-ready.’

  ‘I keep in condition.’

  ‘I know. I see you coming in from those early-morning runs along the river. How far do you go?’

  ‘Ten K, every second day. I’d do it every day, but for a weak Achilles, which I must manage with massage and manipulation.’