The Ambassador's wife ist-1

by Jake Needham

  Tay looked around until he found the camera. After fiddling with it briefly, he located the photographs Cally had taken and began clicking through them.

  “Where is this?” he asked.

  “It’s an apartment in a small building not far from the American embassy.”

  “Was the ambassador shot?” Tay asked without looking up from the photographs flicking by on the camera’s tiny screen.

  “Yes. Once. In the left ear.”

  “A.22?”

  “I told them where to look and what to look for. We’ll have to wait for the autopsy to be sure, but…” Cally paused. “Yes, that’s what it looks like.”

  “Restraint marks?”

  “Wrists and ankles. Same as Singapore.”

  Tay couldn’t see the photographs all that well on the tiny screen, but he could see them well enough to tell the ambassador’s face had been beaten until it looked like freshly ground hamburger. He couldn’t determine from the photographs whether the beating had been inflicted before or after the woman was dead, of course, but he had seen violence like that only once before in his entire career and it had been the violence inflicted on Elizabeth Munson.

  The ambassador’s body also appeared to have been posed in the same degrading manner as Elizabeth Munson’s. The details all looked alike to Tay, right down to the chrome-bodied flashlight protruding from the woman’s vagina.

  The same man who had killed Elizabeth Munson had killed this woman in Bangkok. Tay had no real doubt of that. No other explanation made any sense.

  “They look the same to me as the photos of your crime scene,” Cally said. “They are, aren’t they?”

  Tay shut off the camera and returned it to the back seat.

  “Yes,” he said. “I think they are.”

  Cally nodded slightly, more to herself than to Tay, but said nothing else.

  “An anonymous call?” Tay asked.

  “What?”

  “You said the Thai police got an anonymous call about the ambassador. That was how they discovered the body.”

  “All they told me was that the caller was a man who spoke English. He gave them the address and said they’d find the body of the American ambassador there. They thought it was just some crazy, until-”

  “Was the call taped?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Did they get a caller ID?”

  “Look, Sam, this is the Thai police we’re talking about here. They’ve got telephones. That’s about it.”

  Cally turned her head and looked over at Tay. “There’s something else you should know,” she said. “We’re going to sit on this for a few days.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The FBI has decided not to publicize the murder of Ambassador Rooney yet and State is going along with them. They say that a public announcement now would affect the investigation.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  “It doesn’t to me either, but it’s not my call.”

  Cally slowed the car and pulled up next to the only tollbooth that was open out of a long line of lighted booths that stretched all the way across the highway. The attendant was a fat woman with a face like a wrinkled paper bag and her brown polyester uniform stretched tightly over her heavy arms as she reached out to take the toll from Cally. A light above them changed from red to green and they shot away from the booth and slipped back into darkness.

  “Tell me again why we’re going to Pattaya,” Tay said.

  “I want to talk to a guy who lives there now. I worked with him at the embassy in Bangkok, but he’s retired. At least he says he is.”

  “You used to work here? In Thailand? I didn’t know that.”

  “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, Sam.”

  Tay didn’t say anything to that. There were a lot of things, of course. Now that he thought about it, he realized he knew hardly anything about Cally at all.

  “The embassy in Bangkok was my first posting. I was Assistant Regional Security Officer here for two years.”

  “Is Singapore a promotion?”

  “Well…” Cally thought about it. “I’m an RSO now instead of an Assistant RSO. That’s a promotion. But Singapore is a small mission and Bangkok is a big mission. I guess it’s pretty much a break-even deal.”

  “Who is this guy we’re going to talk to?”

  Cally didn’t answer immediately and Tay wondered why.

  “Look,” she finally said after a long silence, “I don’t want to sound coy, but I don’t think I ought to tell you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No, I don’t expect you do.”

  Cally cleared her throat and Tay waited in silence to see what was coming.

  “He says he’s retired, but I don’t think he is.” Cally shot Tay a look, but in the darkness of the car he missed her expression. “He was with the Agency when I was in Thailand.”

  “The Agency?”

  “The CIA.”

  “Ah,” Tay said. “That Agency.”

  “If he wants to tell you who he is, he will. But just in case he’s not really retired, I don’t want to say too much.”

  Tay thought about that while he looked out the window at the passing countryside. A huge, newly built apartment building abruptly loomed up out of the night. It rose thirty or forty floors over absolutely nowhere at all and was completely dark, apparently empty and abandoned. Beyond it were yards filled with wrecked cars and huge metal warehouses with signs in Thai script. All of a sudden two old cargo airplanes in fading camouflage paint appeared like a mirage just sitting alongside the road. Scrawny cows grazed silently around the planes.

  “Why am I here, Cally?”

  She turned her head slowly to Tay as if she was seriously contemplating his question and then, just as slowly, turned it back toward the road.

  “Because I want you to be,” she said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Does this man know I’m coming with you?”

  She nodded, but she didn’t say anything.

  “And he doesn’t mind?”

  Cally gave a little shrug. “He didn’t say one way or the other.”

  Suddenly the road was engulfed in a dense grove of palm trees and they crossed a wide, muddy river on a narrow bridge that rattled underneath them. On the opposite bank, a Thai temple was lit stark white against the black sky. It littered like fire from red and yellow glass embedded in its masonry. Then as abruptly as it had appeared the temple was gone and they were driving again through the darkness over hard, featureless scrubland.

  “What does your friend have to do with these murders?”

  “Nothing, but he knows everything that happens here. Sometimes when I was in Thailand it seemed to me that he knew everything that had ever happened here. And he’ll be honest with me. He’ll tell me the truth or he won’t tell me anything at all.”

  Cally glanced over, but Tay didn’t say anything.

  “Look, Sam, there’s something about all this that’s not right. I knew it the moment I saw the ambassador’s body. I may be in over my head and I want somebody I trust, somebody I have history with, to tell me whether or not I am. I have to know before I get in any deeper.”

  Tay weighed Cally’s words and found something in them he didn’t particularly want to find.

  “This man was a friend of yours?”

  “Yes. He was.”

  “And still?”

  Cally let a moment pass before she replied.

  “A friend. Just that now. Nothing more.”

  Tay nodded. Off in the distance the glow of lights from a town was painting the base of a low layer of clouds with streaks of orange. In at least three separate places lightning danced soundlessly across the night sky.

  “I told him we’d meet him at eleven tonight,” Cally said. “It will be late when we’re done so I booked us hotel rooms in Pattaya. I’m just too tired to drive all the way back to Bangkok without getting some
sleep first.”

  As they drew closer to the lights, the scrub fields began to fill with buildings, most of them no more than one or two stories high and none that looked to Tay to be particularly encouraging. Cally circled a roundabout with some kind of darkened sculpture in its center and turned onto a road that ran along the ocean. On one side of the road the sea was dark and quiet and the narrow beach was empty, but on the opposite side small open-air bars lined the sidewalk. They throbbed with music and pulsed with light.

  Tay could see that the customers in the bars were almost all Caucasian men, most middle-aged but some considerably older. Dressed uniformly in shorts and T-shirts, the men sat in ones and twos talking to the girls and playing with the bottles of beer in front of them. There were a great many such men and even more Thai women fluttering around them. The sight made Tay think of seagulls trailing a fishing fleet.

  The whole panorama appeared relatively benign, which surprised Tay more than he really wanted to admit. He had always assumed a hard-core place like Pattaya, a town that lived almost entirely off dissipation, would have a slimy, sordid quality to it. But now that he was here, Pattaya didn’t seem to be like that at all. No drunks sprawled in the gutter, no hookers hissed from the shadows, no pimps propositioned passers-by. Whatever was going on, Pattaya seemed to be pretty cheery about it. Tay was sure that wasn’t the truth of the place, but yet that was what he could see. He really didn’t know what to make of it.

  “I booked us at the Marriott.” Cally glanced over at Tay and scrutinized his face as the neon lights from the bars rippled across it. “I hope that’s okay.”

  Tay didn’t say a word.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Cally was waiting for Tay in a lounge chair by the Marriott’s swimming pool. It was after ten and, except for her, the pool area was dark and deserted.

  When Tay saw that Cally had changed into baggy white shorts and a black T-shirt, he felt a little embarrassed to be wearing the same dark gray slacks and long-sleeved blue dress shirt he had worn on the flight in from Singapore. He thought about turning around and going back upstairs to change, but Cally noticed him before he could decide whether to do that so he sat down on the chair next to her and began rolling up his sleeves as if that had been what he intended to do all along.

  “Where are we meeting the mystery man?” he asked.

  “A place down on Walking Street. It’s called Baby Dolls.”

  Tay gave Cally a long look.

  “I’m asking the favor, Sam. The least I can do is meet the man wherever he wants me to meet him.”

  After that they sat for a while without talking. It was a companionable silence and neither of them seemed to be in any hurry to break it. Off in the distance, Tay could hear faint music on the ocean breeze and the distant sound of voices from somewhere. He tried to decide where the music was coming from and what the voices were saying, but he couldn’t.

  “This is the first time I’ve had a meeting like this,” Tay said after a while.

  “What kind of meeting is that?”

  “One with somebody whose name I’m not allowed to know.”

  Cally chuckled and he glanced over, but it was too dark to see the expression on her face.

  “You can just call him George,” she said after a moment, “if that will make you feel less awkward.”

  “Like George Bush?”

  “No,” Cally chuckled again. “Like George Washington.”

  Tay could no longer hear the music. The voices were gone, too.

  “Why would I call him that?” he asked quietly.

  Cally caught something in Tay’s tone and glanced over before she answered. “It’s just a euphemism. The State Department has a lot of euphemisms. That’s what makes us the State Department.”

  “What is George Washington a euphemism for?”

  Cally hesitated, then smiled. “Oh, I guess it doesn’t really matter if I tell you. It’s hardly a matter of national security.”

  Tay waited.

  “It’s our all-purpose expression for the Agency guys who are posted in an embassy,” Cally said. “I’ll have to check with Mr. Washington. Send it to Mr. Washington. Like that.”

  Tay nodded slowly.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t really matter,” Cally said, waving the conversation away with one hand. “He may give you a name. He may even give you his real name. He probably will, now that I think about it, but if he doesn’t, call him anything you want to. He won’t care.”

  This doesn’t prove anything at all, Tay told himself. It could just be a coincidence.

  Who was he trying to kid? A coincidence? What were the chances of that?

  Tay now knew where Ramesh Keshar’s spare security card for the Singapore Marriott had been going. It was going to somebody at the American embassy in Singapore who worked for the CIA.

  Could the CIA have duplicated the security card and then had access to the Singapore Marriott any time they wanted without showing up on the security tapes? Yes, of course they could. Tay didn’t have the slightest doubt of that.

  But that wasn’t really any of his business, was it? What was his business was whether a duplicate security card had anything to do with the murder of Elizabeth Munson. That was another matter altogether and Tay knew full well jumping to any kind of conclusion about that on the basis of as little as he knew right then was foolish.

  How could a duplicate security card in the hands of the CIA have anything at all to do with Elizabeth Munson’s murder? It couldn’t, not unless he was ready to believe the CIA had committed the premeditated murder of the wife of the American ambassador, and that for some reason whoever had handled the job had beaten the woman’s face to a pulp in a post-homicidal rage. Tay might not like Americans very much, but there was a limit to the things he was prepared to blame them for.

  “What are you thinking about?” Cally asked.

  Tay felt like a little boy who had been caught in the bathroom with a copy of Playboy.

  “What do you mean?” he asked a bit too quickly.

  “You’re fidgeting around on that chair like you’ve come down with hives.”

  Should he tell Cally the story about Ramesh Keshar’s arrangements with Mr. Washington? No, at least not yet. Better to hold on to something than hold on to nothing, even if he wasn’t entirely certain what value there was in what he had. He could always give it up later. If he gave it up now, he could never get it back again.

  “I’m not fidgeting. I’m fine.”

  “Okay, if you say so,” Cally said. “But you are fidgeting.”

  Tay didn’t defend himself any further, but he made sure he stayed absolutely still.

  A few minutes later Cally glanced at her watch and stood up.

  “Ready?” she asked. “It’s not far. Maybe a fifteen-minute walk.You don’t mind walking, do you?”

  “No,” Tay shook his head. “That’s fine.”

  The stroll was pleasant enough; at least it was at first. They followed a broad walkway bordered with spindly palm trees along the beach side of the main road. A light breeze off the water stirred the sodden air and thinned the brackish clouds of automobile exhaust. After a few hundred yards, the traffic turned to the left and they continued walking straight ahead into a wide street closed off to vehicles and filled curb to curb with pedestrians. The street was lined on both sides with bars, more bars than Tay had ever before seen in one place.

  The ocean breezes, now blocked by the buildings, were just a memory, and a sense of languid sleaze filled the still, heavy air. A mix of sour smells hung over the street. Rotting garbage, stale beer, vomit, and sweat. It was a carnival of the lost and misbegotten. There were underage prostitutes on the hustle, over-aged hookers on the stroll, and incorruptible cops on the take. There were bar touts, flower peddlers, cigarette sellers, and vendors of genuine Rolexes for only five dollars. There was everything Tay ever dreamed could exist anywhere, and a lot he had never imagined could exist at all.

  By the time th
ey shouldered their way through the crowds to Baby Dolls, Tay’s shirt was soaking wet and sticking to his back and chest. Pattaya, God help it, was even more humid than Singapore. Baby Dolls was a blue two-story building outlined with flashing tubes of white neon. Just in front of the entrance, half a dozen young girls stood beckoning people toward the heavy black curtains covering its doorway. They were all dressed in uniforms prim enough to mark them as high-school students and they looked so young that, for all Tay knew, maybe they were.

  He stopped in front of the building and stood with his hands on his hips.

  “It’s a go-go bar,” he said to Cally, “What did you think it was going to be, Sam? A public library?”

  “You come inside, sir and madam!” one of the girls shouted and made a grab for them. “Happy hour now! No cover charge!”

  Tay evaded the girl’s clutches, but Cally let the girl take her hand and lead her to the curtain. Not knowing what else to do, he followed. From inside, unseen hands pulled the curtain open and suddenly they were through it and inside a dimly lit room vibrating with the over-amped base of a disco beat.

  “There he is!” Cally shouted into Tay’s ear.

  She pointed toward an open balcony so large it amounted to a second floor, but Tay lost track of where Cally was pointing when his eyes found the stage. At least two-dozen good-looking young girls were dancing right there in front of him. They swung from chrome poles, shuffled their feet and tossed their heads, and every one of them was as naked as the day she was born.

  Tay’s mouth was just starting to drop open when Cally grabbed his hand and towed him toward a staircase. At the top there was an alcove over the stage with a single round table in it. Sitting alone at the table was a good-looking man wearing khaki trousers and a white shirt. He seemed to be in his mid-forties, which surprised Tay.

  “I thought you said he was retired,” Tay screamed into Cally’s ear. “I was expecting an old guy.”

  The man pushed himself away from the table and stood up as they climbed the stairs. There was a sense of world-weariness in the way he did it that Tay had to admit seemed to suit him very well.