Plausible Deniability: The explosive Lex Harper novella

by Stephen Leather

  CHAPTER 3

  Somehow Harper managed to get back across the border after dark that night. He found what appeared to be the only available internet in Mae Sai, in a combination bar, general store and smugglers’ hang-out that had four battered computer terminals set up on a wooden bench against one wall, in full view of everyone in the room. Harper sold half of his remaining heroin to one of the crooks lounging at the bar and used some of the cash to buy some internet time. He hunched over the terminal, blocking the view of the screen while he logged in to the email account he used to communicate with Button. It was painfully slow to load, but eventually he was able to leave a four-word message in the Drafts folder: “Meet Chiang Rai urgentest”. Identifying the place where they would meet in the Drafts folder was a risk, albeit a very slight one, that he would not normally have taken, but this was a desperate situation.

  He bought a bowl of rice and a stew so thin it was more like soup, then set out at once for Chiang Rai. The Thais had taken the Landcruiser from the farm where he had left it, but he walked out to Highway 1 and managed to flag down a truck heading south with a load of teak logs. He used the rest of his baht to bribe the driver to take him to Chiang Rai. By the time the trucker dropped him there, Harper was again in deep withdrawal, his hands trembling and his body pouring with sweat. He shot up with a little more of his dwindling store of heroin, then headed for the hotel where he had stashed his bug-out bag and the remainder of his kit. The key was still behind the ventilation grille and none of the “tells” he had set inside the room had been disturbed.

  He grabbed a thick handful of baht from his bug-out bag and hurried to an internet cafe to check for Button’s response. She was arriving in Chiang Rai that night, flying in on a Nok Air flight from Bangkok. He left directions to an RV, bought some food and then headed out onto the streets of the town to score more heroin. It didn’t prove hard to do for half the population of Chiang Rai appeared to be involved with the heroin trade in one way or another.

  Button arrived that night, driven into town from the airport in a decrepit Mercedes taxi that must have had at least a quarter of a million miles on the clock. While Harper carried out counter-surveillance, she walked the route he had prescribed for her. She was clearly well out of her comfort zone, for he could see that her eyes were darting everywhere and she was jumping at every movement in the darkness around her.

  When he was satisfied that she hadn’t been followed, Harper appeared out of the shadows and took her to his hotel. ‘My God, Lex,’ she said, as he closed the door of his room and turned to face her. ‘Look at the state of you. What the hell happened?’

  ‘It’s a long story, Charlie, but basically we’ve been double-crossed. The Thais were in league with the warlords and neither of them were really interested in doing the deal. They just wanted to take the bonds and then sell the crop anyway. I was lucky to get away. So, we’re going to need to move to Plan B and destroy the crop without the warlords’ cooperation. Air strikes won’t do it without target-marking because the barns and store places are too well concealed. So I need you to get me some kit and then I’ll be heading back in to finish the job. I’ll mark the targets and then call in the air strikes.’

  ‘Is that wise?’

  ‘Possibly not, but I’m going to do it anyway. And it has to be now before the harvest is finished and they begin to move the crop across the border. If that happens, the opportunity to destroy it will be gone.’

  ‘And your opportunity for revenge gone with it, Lex?’

  There was a long silence before he replied. ‘I never like leaving a job half done but in this case, you’re right, it’s also personal - very personal. I need to do this.’ He paused again. ‘There’s one more thing you should know, Charlie.’ He pulled back his sleeves and showed her the track marks on his arms. ‘They gave me something to remember them by. They shot me full of heroin over and over again. So I’m now a full-blown addict.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to get clean, but it’ll take time and there’s a debt I need to repay first.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Lex, forget about that. We’ve got to get you off that stuff before you do anything else. I’ll find some people who can help.’

  ‘That’ll be great when the time’s right, but that isn’t now. Those barns were filling up with the last of the opium crop. Once the harvest’s all in, they’ll be moving it out. There’s no time to waste.’

  ‘But you’re hooked on heroin, Lex.’

  ‘I can control it.’

  ‘Isn’t that what all addicts say?’

  ‘Maybe, but addicts tend to have fucked up lives that give them a reason not to give up smack - I don’t. And addicts don’t have my willpower either. I’ve already thought it through. I’ll use enough heroin to keep me functioning while I do the job and then when it’s over I can go cold turkey and clean up.’

  She gave him a dubious look.

  ‘It’ll work, Charlie. How many rock musicians have been functioning on heroin for years?’

  ‘But they’re only playing gigs and making albums, they’re not trying to cross a hundred miles of hostile territory and then launch a precision attack.’

  ‘It’ll work. You’ll just have to trust me on that. Now even if I wasn’t on smack, I couldn’t carry enough demolition kit to destroy that crop. In fact even a battalion of men couldn’t carry enough kit for that. So I’ll be placing TMTs - Target Marking Transmitters - that you’ll need to get for me. I’ll leave you to make the necessary arrangements with the cousins but, beginning three days from now, I need the Yanks to be standing by at dawn every morning with Cruise missiles, Warthog tank-busters, B-52s or whatever they’re going to use to destroy the crop, waiting for me to call in the air strikes. So from you I need the TMTs, some more cash and some other kit and weapons, including some comms, a rifle and some armour-piercing, tracer rounds, and obviously everything needs to be untraceable.’

  ‘Obviously.’ She folded her arms and clearly wasn’t happy.

  ‘And I need it all here inside 24 hours. Can you do it?’

  ‘I’ll do my best. Give me the list and I’ll have it couriered to you by the time you’re eating your breakfast. Then I’ll be flying back to London.’

  ‘Plausible deniability?’ he said.

  ‘The best kind.’

  He scribbled a list of what he needed and handed it to her. She got ready to leave but then paused in the doorway and gave him a searching look. ‘You’re sure you can do this, Lex?’

  He spread his hands. ‘Have I ever failed you?’

  ‘Not yet, but there’s always a first time, and you’ve never been a smack addict before.’

  She closed the door and a couple of minutes later he heard a taxi pull-up outside. Button was on her way back to the airport for the last flight of the day to Bangkok.

  Harper took some more money from his bug-out bag and in a dive bar in the roughest part of town he scored even more heroin, enough to get him in and out of Myanmar again. He wasn’t hungry but he made himself eat and then lay down to rest, though the junk in his system made it a short and troubled night. Early the next morning he bought another Landcruiser from the same dealer he had used before, who showed no visible surprise or interest at the same customer buying two cars in the space of a fortnight.

  At eleven that morning, a black Range Rover with diplomatic plates pulled up outside the hotel and two burly Caucasians, one of them pulling a wheeled suitcase, walked through the lobby and took the stairs to Harper’s room. They handed him the case and left without exchanging a word.

  When he opened the case, he found that Button had not only come up with the TMTs and some comms equipment, but a couple of vintage and untraceable souvenirs left over from the US involvement in Vietnam: a Browning automatic rifle and a box of ammunition stamped “APTP”: Armour Piercing Tracer Phosphorous. There was also a box of standard rounds. He spent an hour stripping, cleaning and re-assembling the rifle and checkin
g the rest of the equipment. He packed it into a bergen with some rations and the rest of his heroin, then loaded the Landcruiser and drove north.

  He made a clandestine crossing of the border and, using every scrap of field-craft he’d learned in his career, and the landmarks and compass bearings he’d noted on his way into Myanmar with Narong and Decha and their men, managed to follow the same route to the warlords’ base deep in the Burmese jungle. On the ridge overlooking the hut where he’d been held, he made a hide beneath a banana plant, so the leaves would hide him from sight and protect him from the sun, in case he had to be there a long time. Then he shot up with heroin again. He wasn’t happy about using the drug but he knew that now was not the time to be going cold turkey.

  Shortly before last light he prayed to the only god he recognised - the god of vengeance - and then made his way down into the valley. One of the warlord’s men was standing guard on the first of the storage barns, but he was half-asleep and easy to evade as Harper circled around and placed a TMT close to the rear of the barn. It was no bigger than a matchbook and very easy to conceal.

  He placed one at each of the other barns and was just siting the last one when he heard the cry of a baby from the opium pickers’ primitive living quarters under the barn. It was choked off almost at once, as the child found its mother’s breast and began to suckle, but it echoed in his mind all the way back up the side of the valley. He had to harden his heart before he sent a single burst transmission on his radio, then lay down to wait for daybreak.

  He was still wide-awake when dawn came up over the valley; the adrenaline and the heroin in his veins saw to that. One of the warlord’s men came out onto the veranda and stood watching the sunrise. Harper glanced at his watch, then fired one round and the man leapt backwards through the door. Harper smiled to himself. It was exactly what he wanted him to do.

  He put his next shot into the fuel tank at the side of the hut. The burning tracer etched the track of the round across the valley and it went through the quarter-inch mild steel like a welder’s torch, causing fuel to spurt out, but he had fired too low; even a tracer phosphorus round won’t ignite liquid diesel. He put the next shot a little higher, aiming for the fuel-air vapour above the liquid and this time, as the shot hit home, the tank erupted in a ball of flame. It vaporised the hut and the warlords’ men inside it. By now, the shots and the explosion had roused the whole valley. As Harper had hoped, the peasants and their families, including several women with babies in their arms, were now streaming from under the storage barns and running for the safety of the hills, but the warlords’ men remained behind, buzzing around the barns like angry hornets, still uncertain from where the attack had come.

  Two minutes passed. Harper checked his watch again, then turned his back to the valley, put his fingers in his ears and opened his mouth wide to equalise the pressure and protect his ears and lungs from the blast waves that he knew were coming. With his mouth closed, his lungs could rupture from the overpressure and then the sudden drop in pressure following a blast, and without his fingers in his ears, his eardrums might burst.

  There was a few seconds pause and then a Whoosh! of disturbed air and the first barn disintegrated in a massive fireball. The other four followed within a heartbeat as cruise missiles fired from American warships in the Indian Ocean tracked along the transmitter beams from the TMTs Harper had sited and detonated in the core of each building. A succession of blast waves swept over him, rattling his teeth as a storm of dust, debris and shredded leaves and palm fronds whirled around him. When the smoke and dust cleared, there was nothing taller than a toothpick along the whole valley floor. The warlords had used Harper to send a message to Uncle Sam. This was the reply.

  Harper had a brief thought about searching for some of the bearer bonds, but if they were still on the warlord’s body they would have been incinerated along with him when the Cruise missiles detonated, and if they were hidden somewhere there was no hope finding them. He packed up his kit and began to trek back towards the border. He took a very circuitous route, first heading north, directly away from the border and then looping around to make his way south again, being careful to leave no sign as he did so. He was still travelling with maximum care to be sure of avoiding any patrols sent out by the surviving warlords to intercept those responsible for the destruction of their entire opium crop.

  Before nightfall that day, the US President had made a televised broadcast to the nation, boasting ‘My fellow Americans, we have dealt a blow to the international heroin trade that they will never recover from,’ and showing satellite imagery of the devastated area.

  Harper crossed the frontier safely and made his way back to Pattaya. His first port of call was Bee’s internet café. He logged onto the email account and opened the latest draft message from Charlotte Button.

  ‘You’re a conquering hero, Lex,’ said her message. ‘The Americans are over the moon.’

  He smiled to himself and typed out a message. ‘There’s just one problem, Charlie. I’m a conquering hero who also happens to be a junkie. Can you imagine how that feels? For the first time in my entire life I’ve come up against something that I’m afraid may be stronger than me, physically and mentally. I just hope I can beat it.’ He stared at the message for several seconds and then deleted it. He typed out a second message. ‘Just make sure the money goes into my bank account,’ he said. And then he added a smiley face for good measure.

  CHAPTER 4

  Harper went back to his apartment and gave himself just enough of a fix to stave off the tremors for a while and then sent a text from one of his burner phones. While he was waiting for help to arrive in answer to his summons, he left his apartment and, paying cash, a month in advance, he rented an empty shop with a stone cellar beneath it, in an outlying district. The cellar was piled with rubbish dumped by the previous tenant of the shop but devoid of furniture. The only break in the stone walls was a tiny, steel-barred window high up in the outer wall. The thick glass was almost opaque with cobwebs and dirt but peering upwards, he could dimly make out the shape of people’s legs and feet as they passed along the street outside.

  He drove to a supermarket and bought the supplies he thought he would need: a five gallon container, a pair of buckets with lids, cheap towels, packs of tissues, flat breads, oranges, mangoes and bananas, energy drinks to replenish his electrolytes, soda water to combat nausea, and a pack of Imodium to deal with one of the many unpleasant side-effects of what he was about to do.

  He cleared out the rubbish from the cellar and put a mattress and a couple of blankets on the floor. He filled the five gallon container with water and put it with the rest of his supplies next to the head of the mattress but he sited the lidded buckets in the opposite corner, as far from the food and water as possible. Having stacked up all his purchases, he then escape-proofed the cellar by removing the inside handle and strengthening the door by bolting stout hardwood planks to it. He finished by cutting a small hole no bigger than a cat flap near the bottom of the door with a hinged, lockable hatch on the outside.

  In response to his text, Maggie May arrived within 24 hours. A pale, dark-eyed brunette in her thirties, she was a surveillance professional who had once worked for MI5, also known as “Box 500”. At one time the agency’s postal address had been PO Box 500, and though that had long since changed, the code-name “Box 500” or just plain “Box” had never been abandoned. Her MI5 career had come to an abrupt halt after an affair with her boss led to her becoming pregnant. Although her public school educated boss would never have expressed it quite so inelegantly, his reaction to her news boiled down to an ultimatum: ‘Get an abortion or get a new job’. As Maggie May herself remarked, without too obvious a trace of bitterness, ‘That’s what you get for sleeping with your boss: pregnant and fired.’

  She had chosen the second option and was now the single mother of a young son. Harper had been very glad to hire her. She was a trusted member of his regular team of surveillance and in
telligence-gathering professionals, but he also used her as a mentor and sounding board as well as for her particular skills. Whenever he called her with the offer of a job, she was able to leave her boy with her mother, who thought she worked as a rep for a travel company. It gave her a convincing reason for her need to make frequent trips abroad. The money Harper paid her for previous jobs had already given her and her son financial security, but she carried on working for him mainly because she loved the work.

  Harper came straight to the point. ‘This is going to be a bit outside the normal comfort zones for both of us because the only surveillance I’ll need you to be carrying out is on me.’

  He told her the problem.

  ‘What does it feel like when you’re high?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s …’ He paused struggling for the words. ‘It’s the best feeling you’ve ever experienced in your life; you’re drowning in dopamine, so of course you feel that way and that’s why people use it. And when you begin to come down from it, your first thought is just “Where can I get some more?”. But if you can cast a cold eye on it, you know it’s all fake - just chemicals overloading the receptors your brain - and if you look around you, you realise that you’re knee deep in shit, and you’ll die if you don’t do something about it.’

  ‘So what’s the solution?’

  ‘I’m going to lock myself in the cellar and go cold turkey. Your job is to keep me fed and watered, and keep an eye on me. If it’s necessary - and I mean only as an absolute last resort, not just because I’ve got bad withdrawal symptoms - you can call in outside medical help. Okay?’

  He waited for her nod before continuing. ‘I’ll make the usual payment to your offshore bank, and the duties shouldn’t be too arduous, though I don’t know what this is going to be like and I can’t imagine that it will be pretty to watch. Anyway, once I’m in there, I want you to lock the door behind me and whatever I say to you, whatever noises you hear, don’t open it for a week, other than to give me fresh food and water and cast an eye over me every few hours. It’s probably better if you stay away most of the time. Just come back and check up on me and open the hatch once a day, pass some fresh water and plenty of fruit and bread through it and then close and lock it again.’