5.0 Where are you?
Chinapat: Cross-check Highway, Chon Buri Province 28480, ALPHA 16 Vector
Where are you?
Seven: Meet you at Login node loading hydrogen atoms to emit microwaves at the frequency “091-centimetre line” sequencing OMEGA 7:33-39 router
5.1
Where are you?
Highway No. 41 between Kms 6 and 7, Muang District
Several hours had passed since the Dolphin Shepherd had docked at the Port of Klong Toey, and Chinapat guided Seven through a scrub of Japanese gangsters in their black suits and ties. The gangsters blocked their path, wielding swords and guns, threatening and shouting, demanding and gesturing. Shockley watched as Chinapat found the keys for the Honda 500 motorcycle. Seven sat on the back and Chinapat slowly found a path through the gangsters. Twenty minutes later, Chinapat pulled behind a gray-bronze van. They were on the way to Chon Buri.
“That’s the van,” said Seven.
Chinapat followed behind at a safe distance and at Kilometer 6 pulled ahead and cut in front of the van. The driver honked angrily and tried to pass him. As Chinapat pulled alongside, Seven had extended her arms, both hands clutched together, pointing a .38 Smith and Wesson at the driver. She waved for him to pull to the curb. The driver said something to the passenger in the seat next to him and, before Kilometer 7 was reached, pulled to a stop on the shoulder of the highway.
Seven kept the gun pointed at the men in the van.
“Get out of the van. Hands up,” said Chinapat.
“Do you know who our patron is?” asked the van driver.
“Shut up and open the back,” said Chinapat.
The driver clutched his fists and stepped forward, arm cocked and ready to swing.
Seven fired a round over his head. “He said open the fucking van.”
When the door opened, inside the modified van were three large dolphins.
Just as Shockley had said, in the back two female Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins and one male lay under a green plastic sheet. Chinapat pulled the sheet away, exposing the pregnant female on a rubber mattress. The dolphins from the cove at Taiji had passed along the kidnapping alert minutes after the gang caught the dolphins in the sea near Trang. The kidnappers were on their way to deliver the dolphins to a powerful person in Chon Buri province.
The police arrived minutes after Seven phoned. They looked at the dolphins as the men in the van watched.
“Do you know who our patron is?” the driver asked one of the cops.
“You’re under arrest,” said the head policeman. He turned to Seven. “You’ve been a great help. We will handle it from here.”
“What will you do?” asked Chinapat.
“Of course, in time, we will return the dolphins to the sea,” the policeman said.
Seven, at last, could understand the dolphins communicating in the van. They were saying that they hadn’t much time remaining, and soon it would be too late.
“There isn’t much time,” Seven said to the cop.
The gangsters, who’d been silent, looked at each other and then at Chinapat and Seven. “You have no choice but to let us go,” said the leader. “You will regret this. Hey, what are you doing?”
Chinapat had climbed into the van and Seven joined him. He rolled down the window. “We will release them.” He didn’t wait for an answer. The police and gangsters stood on the road, watching as Chinapat squealed the tires, kicking up gravel, as he drove the van back onto the highway.
5.2
Where are you?
Beach, Muang District, Chon Buri
Chinapat pushed the accelerator to the floor as the van sped toward the sea. He cut off the highway, and the van bumped along a gravel road. They could both smell the sea. The dolphins, despite their weakened condition, had continued to sing during the entire journey. The rescue revived their spirits. When the van reached the end of a dirt road, Seven got out of the van and guided Chinapat as he backed onto the beach, the surf lapping at the rear wheels.
Seven spotted the Dolphin Shepherd a couple of hundred meters offshore. Shockley and four men worked the oars on the rowboat. Landing the boat, Shockley and his men ran up the beach, and within minutes they had carried the first female out of the van and laid her on the sand. Not long afterward, the other two dolphins were lined up on the beach, too. Shockley’s men removed two cases of iceberg water from the rowboat. Shockley opened several bottles and poured the cool water over the three dolphins. One by one, the dolphins slipped away.
Police sirens wailed in the distance as Shockley and his men climbed back into the rowboat. “That will be the police. You’d better come with us,” he said.
Seven shook her head. She squeezed Chinapat’s hand. “Goodbye, Mr. Shockley.”
He smiled and nodded. “The rescue was worth 10,000 points. You are almost over the finish line. Why stop now?”
Seven knew that was a con. Simulations never had a finish line, only a continuous loop, with points stacking up to reach the moon but never quite reaching the stars.
5.3
Where are you?
Friendship Hotel, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok
Like ice into water and water into steam... Seven continued to fix her gaze at the crate of iceberg water bottles Shockley had left behind. She had never felt more alone and sad. Anger welled up inside as she picked up one of the bottles by the neck and flung it as hard as she could at the sea. It exploded in a star cluster of light, turning the shoreline a silvery glowing white.
As she leaned down for a second bottle of water, she looked to her right. Chinapat was next to her in bed in their Bangkok hotel room. They’d been drinking Mekong whiskey, and the bottles were strewn on the floor. She held an empty bottle in her hand, and as she rolled over she asked Chinapat if he was awake. He’d unhooked a red and blue wire from the insert plates at the base of his skull cables. The first two rows on the consort unit beside the bed flashed a hot white.
“Why does the dolphin simulation always upset you?” he asked. It was like asking an addict why she couldn’t go cold turkey.
He gently removed the cables from Seven and let them drop to the side.
She twisted the wires between her thumb and forefinger, and looked up at Chinapat. He was waiting for her answer.
“We’re out of the router, right?”
He nodded.
“We’re off the grid, right?” she asked.
“Right.” That seemed obvious, and he wondered why she asked.
She shook her head. “It’s not right. I’m logged at 5.2? And where are you, if you’re not at 5.2?”
Chinapat rolled over and grinned into his pillow. She’d confused the “where are you” with the “who are you” matrix.
“Listen,” he said, “and they’ll tell you themselves.”
He cranked up the volume on the black console no bigger than a shoebox. Dolphin voices echoed across the room, liming the ceiling with a blanket of white ice crystals. The hotel window overlooking Sukhumvit Road was caked with a half-inch thick sheet of frost. The rising and falling singsong notes, like musical instruments, formed patterns in the ice.
When Shockley opened the door, it was no longer the hotel. They were aboard ship, in the holding tank. As he stepped inside, Shockley handed her a glass filled to the top with pure iceberg water.
“Take another sip and relax. Another ten thousand years will pass in the blink of an eye.”
Christopher G. Moore
Canadian Christopher G. Moore is the creator of the award-winning Vincent Calvino crime fiction series and the author of the Land of Smiles Trilogy.
In his former life, he studied at Oxford University and taught law at the University of British Columbia. He wrote radio plays for the CBC and NHK before his first novel was published in New York in 1985, when he promptly left his tenured academic job for an uncertain writing career, leaving his colleagues thinking he was not quite right in the head.
His journey from Canada to Th
ailand, his adopted home, included some time in Japan in the early 1980s and four years in New York in the late 1980s. In 1988, he came to Thailand to harvest materials to write a book. The visit was meant to be temporary. Two decades and 22 novels later, he is still in Bangkok and far from having exhausted the rich Southeast Asian literary materials. His novels have so far appeared in a dozen languages.
For more information about the author and his books, visit his website: www.cgmoore.com. He also blogs weekly at International Crime Authors: Reality Check: www.internationalcrimeauthors.com.
The Mistress Wants Her Freedom
Tew Bunnag
Was it destiny? According to Pi Nok there was no doubt about it. His regular fortune teller in Onnut market had told him that very morning that it was going to be a special day, one in which someone from the past might reappear, and that he should be prepared. Admittedly he had already put that piece of cheap, innocuous advice out of his mind by the time he saw Nong Maew later in the Siam Paragon shopping centre for their weekly gossip session. Of course the conversation turned, as always, to her love life, or rather the lack of it.
“It’s so unfair,” she was saying as they peered through the smoky glass display window of a designer store at the ridiculously expensive pair of red suede Italian loafers that they both lusted after.
“He’d buy them for his wife, if she asked him. But I have to wait for him to give me the presents that he chooses.”
Without taking his eyes off the shoes, Pi Nok replied in a sarcastic voice, “You’ve had a sweet Japanese sports car off him, and a sweet luxury apartment and a wardrobe full of clothes and your regular little envelope…”
“All right, he takes good care of me,” said Nong Maew, giggling. “But why do I have to wait around for him all the time? I’m fed up with it. I’m twentythree. I want a life!”
This was a line he had heard a dozen times—the unhappiness of the kept woman—and he never found it convincing. Usually, out of friendship, he commiserated with her, but today her words grated on him. Having lost his own foreign benefactor the previous year and now working in a massage parlour, struggling to keep afloat, he found it hard to sympathize with her poor little mistress number.
“Well, you can always go back to your old life,” he said cattily.
Nong Maew was annoyed at this remark. Even though Pi Nok was her closest friend and confidant, her “gig”, he had no right to be unkind. She did not ever want to be reminded of what she had done or what she had been.Without answering him, and with a petulant swish of her young, lithe body, sheathed in its blue polka dot dress, she turned and headed straight for the escalator.
Pi Nok walked behind her and said, teasingly: “Don’t be so touchy. You know you’re beyond all that now.”
“Oh, you’re such a bitch today. I don’t believe it!” she half-whispered, and they both laughed out loud.
As she looked up towards the floor above, she stopped in her tracks and, to Pi Nok’s surprise, took hold of his hand and squeezed it tightly. Without turning around, she said in panic: “That’s him with his wife. And that must be his grandson. Don’t look, they’re coming down. Oh no! What do I do? Where do I go?”
Without hesitating, Pi Nok pulled her gently onto the escalator. Now he too looked up and saw a man with grey hair carrying a yellow plastic shopping bag. He was in a dark, well-cut suit and looked like a businessman taking time off from the office to do some shopping with the family. Next to him was a stout woman in a Thai silk outfit, wearing thick sunglasses and a complicated, stiff hairdo, and behind them a small boy whose hand was touching the man’s shoulder. As they came closer, to his utter astonishment Pi Nok recognized the man’s face. “It’s destiny,” he thought to himself, suddenly remembering the fortune teller’s prediction. Nong Maew had never divulged her patron’s real name. She always referred to him as Darling, using the English word but stressing the last syllable so that it sounded Thai. It was the way they addressed each other, she had said when she first told Pi Nok about the man who had picked her up in the club two years earlier and who then, one day, out of the blue, proposed that she should be his mistress. She had added that he was good-looking and fit for his sixtyeight years, and that, naturally, he was loaded. This last detail was the most important one. For why else would she be wasting her youth on a married man nearly four times her age who had no intention of committing himself to her in a million years? As the family passed Nong Maew and Pi Nok on their way down to the second floor, the man she referred to as Darling looked over in their direction. The woman was turning the other way while the boy’s attention was drawn to a colourful film poster that was hanging off the balcony. Nong Maew did not return the gaze. Instead she put on a hard, artificial expression of indifference and fixed her attention on the space in front of her. In doing so, she was unaware that it was not at her that Darling was directing his gaze, but at her companion, for as they passed each other with only the two feet between them, he too recognized Pi Nok and in that moment, involuntarily, his whole face lit up with a spontaneous expression that can only be described as remembered pleasure.
They were in a Japanese restaurant on the ground floor. Pi Nok swallowed his mouthful of sushi and said nothing for a while. His fine features registered a moment of choked sadness, enhanced by the pungency of the wasabi dip. He had been explaining to Nong Maew, who sat in attentive silence, how he had met her “Darling” Khun Taworn two years before she did, what had gone on between them and how they had parted company.
“He went to China, on business, and the club was closed down overnight while he was away. That’s why we lost touch, and after that I never saw him again,” he said, continuing his tale and addressing these words to his own reflection in the window as if reminiscing a private and painful episode. If Nong Maew was surprised by what she was hearing, she managed not to show it. She had long suspected Darling of being bi, but she had not expected her intuition to be confirmed by such a personal connection. With her best friend, of all people! And now Pi Nok was trying to paint what must have been a professional encounter into some kind of grand love affair. She kept her composure on the outside, but her mind was swirling, especially when he had the nerve to try convincing her to share Darling with him.
“Come on, he’s got enough for both of us,” he pleaded unashamedly.
Nong Maew, who had hardly touched her food, took this as the cue to comment on what Pi Nok had been saying. She chose her words with care and put on a fine show of well-tempered indignation. In a high-minded tone she told Pi Nok that the supposed romance between him and Khun Taworn had taken place in a gay brothel, albeit a high-class one, but a brothel nevertheless. And how dare he try to muscle in on her good fortune when she had done all the running? But even as she was discouraging him from making a play on her Darling, Nong Maew was well aware that Pi Nok, given his hunger and lascivious nature, was probably already planning his moves. Khun Taworn, one of the wealthiest industrialists in Thailand, was a prime catch for any ambitious hustler. Nong Maew herself could not believe her luck when, true to his word, he installed her in the condo by the river, because she had not made any effort at all to lure him exclusively to herself. He had picked her in the “Twilight”, an exclusive private club where she was one of the part-timers who worked there for extra cash. You had to be both beautiful and discreet because the clientele consisted of the very rich and powerful of the land. Khun Taworn had chosen her out of a roomful of young women who looked like starlets, and in their first sexual encounter in the VIP suite he seemed pleased with her services. After three visits he asked her out to dinner, which was quite normal and encouraged by the management since it reinforced the illusion that the girls were not professionals but companions who were sufficiently attracted to accept the invitation.
That night, in a candlelit French restaurant, Khun Taworn had explained that he was thinking of returning to politics, reminding her that ten years earlier, when she was only a young girl, he had been tipped to w
in the election to be leader of his party. But he had been betrayed, he was quick to add. Now he was ready to return to the fray. Because of this he could no longer risk being seen anywhere that could cause a scandal for him or his family. He had decided not to go to places like the “Twilight” anymore. But he wanted to continue seeing her. And that was when he asked her outright to become his mistress. Without letting her have time to think about his proposition—as though, in the style of men used to having their way, he was sure that she would not resist—he went on to give her the details of the arrangement that he had worked out and which, in fact, were so generous that she would have been foolish to have refused.
Nong Maew had been overwhelmed by his offer. It meant the end of having to make all the effort of going to work and worrying about paying off the debts that she had accumulated and living in shared, cramped accommodation. It would give her time to go back to finish her university degree, if she chose to do so. And if she played her cards well, she could even set up her own business one day. Suddenly the future was wide open. Everything was possible, and all she had to do was to give pleasure to a man whose vanity, with the help of Viagra, was soothed by possessing her firm, trim body. So, without thinking of the consequences, she accepted.
At first she had been drunk with her new life. Moving out of the small rented apartment she shared with two other working girls into a pad in an exclusive condo with its own small swimming pool on the balcony and a view of the city spreading out in all directions was like arriving in the Deva realm of the angels. Khun Taworn visited her three or four times a week, often bringing a bottle of champagne and a little gift. They never went out again after that evening in the French restaurant, but delicious, elaborate meals were ordered in from the best establishments in Bangkok. In those early days, when he had finished talking about himself, he would ask her about how she was spending her spare time and whether she was happy. But as the months rolled slowly by, he became less and less interested in what she did or thought or felt. He would arrive and take his pill and wait for the effect to kick in and then fuck her as though he was offloading some pent-up aggression. Then, afterwards, while she massaged his back, he would ramble on about politics or his family life. Often he would tell her how difficult his relationship with his wife was. It seemed that she hated him. Once Nong Maew made the mistake of giving him her opinion about his dysfunctional marriage, but the way that he cut her short made her realize that he required neither her response nor her sympathy. He merely needed her to be there as a beautiful trinket to bolster his selfesteem and as a receptacle into which he could pour his artificially stimulated desire.
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