by Jake Needham
The supermarket on the other side of the Brainwake Café was a vast hive of counters and displays stretching far away out of sight. I had no doubt somewhere back there was a loading dock which would also have access to the same roadway. There was no other way a supermarket of such a size could be restocked.
As a place to stage a vanishing act, I thought EmQuartier had quite a lot going for it.
I WALKED PAST the Brainwake Café and explored the aisles of the supermarket until I found what I hoped I would find. A set of metal doors all the way in the back that looked as if they led to a stock room.
One of the advantages of being a foreigner in Thailand is that Thais are reluctant to challenge us. If we look like we matter, we can do almost anything we want without anybody saying a word to us. Even if we’re unlucky enough to bump into a security guard, we won’t be asked the question we would expect to hear almost anywhere in the west. Yo, asshole, where the fuck you thinking you’re going?
Instead, a wandering foreigner will almost inevitably be acknowledged by whoever is maintaining security with a polite wai or even a salute. Thai security guards love to salute.
I pushed through the metal doors and found myself in a medium-sized storage area with rows of tall green metal shelving stretching off in both directions. Where the aisle ended at the back wall, I turned left and saw the flicker of sunlight. As I had guessed, there was a loading dock not forty feet away, the doors standing half open. I heard male voices drifting in from outside and I guessed that was probably a popular area for smoke breaks. I decided not to press my luck by walking out to the dock from the storeroom. Whoever was out there might not challenge me, but they would remember me. Foreigners are always conspicuous.
I made my way out of the stock room and back into the supermarket without encountering anyone, and I stopped for a moment and oriented myself. From where I was I could see the windows of the Brainwake Café just on the other side of a line of checkout counters and I measured the distance with my eyes. From the areas in front of the Brainwake Café, Kate and I would have to cover no more than a hundred and fifty feet to the stock room, and then another fifty feet out to the loading dock.
Not far when strolling it on a quiet Wednesday morning. Maybe a bit farther when armed soldiers were chasing us.
I WALKED THROUGH the supermarket and went outside through the exit used as the pickup area. Turning right, I followed the sidewalk along the building in the direction where I now knew I would find the loading dock. When I got to the end of the building, I peered around it and saw a wide driveway leading to a large concrete parking pad. I was certain the loading dock opened onto that pad, but I couldn’t see it from where I stood. I put my hands in my pockets and strolled as casually as I could up the driveway. I would have whistled, but I thought that might be a little too much.
I need not have bothered to try looking so innocent because no one paid the slightest attention to me.
Just as I expected, right at the end of the concrete pad was a loading dock large enough for two medium-sized trucks to park at the same time. The dock itself was elevated about four feet above the parking area to match the height of a truck bed, and concrete steps led down from both sides of the dock to ground level. At the back of the dock, large metal doors were standing about half open and behind them in the shadows I saw the green metal shelving of the storage room.
One of the unloading slots was empty, but the other was filled with a tangle of parked motorbikes. Apparently only one slot was actually used for deliveries and supermarket employees had taken over the other one as a convenient place to park their bikes. The four young Thai males I had heard from inside sat on the edge of the loading dock, their legs dangling, smoking cigarettes.
Satisfied I had covered everything, I walked back along the driveway, went inside the mall, and found a stool at a high table at Dean & DeLuca. It was right up against their windows and offered a fine view of both the front of Brainwake Café and the aisles of the supermarket. I ordered a coffee and settled in to watch for a while, and to think.
If the opening of the Brainwake Café drew a lot of people, and with Kate as the main attraction I figured it would, the area in front of the supermarket would be packed. Since the exits from EmQuartier were all to the south of the restaurant, my guess was Kate’s minders that morning would stay to the south, too. There was nothing to the north except the supermarket, so it seemed unlikely the military would waste manpower over there. Not unless they brought a hell of a lot of it, of course. In which case, we were screwed anyway.
Having all Kate’s guards to the south effectively prevented us from reaching the front of the mall and kept us from having access to the Skytrain station. But it left the back of the mall completely unsecured. The stock room and the loading dock were clearly the key to finding a way to do this.
That still left the question, of course, of how to get us through the supermarket and out to the loading dock without Kate’s army guards stopping us. No matter how packed the area was, grabbing Kate’s hand and making a run for it wasn’t much of a plan. If I wanted to get further than fifty feet, I needed something to hold the attention of her guards for a minute or two while we slipped away. But what?
All of a sudden there was an enormous crash and everyone’s eyes swiveled in the direction of the sound. A young girl in the uniform of a supermarket employee had dropped a tray piled with glass jars of jelly. The crash echoed around the mall and everyone stared at the girl who was now shaking with embarrassment.
And just like that I had the answer to my problem.
I needed a distraction, and a loud noise would do quite nicely. Dropping a tray wasn’t a big enough distraction to hold anyone’s attention for long, of course, but the principle was still right. Produce a few loud noises, preferably somewhat menacing ones, and people would stare in the direction from which the noise came until they were sure there was no threat to them. Even the army minders who were supposed to be watching Kate would look that way.
That just left me to decide what the noises should be, and who I could get to provide them.
I drank my coffee, looked at the big glass windows of Dean & DeLuca, and had a thought.
Bashing in the window of a store somewhere south of the restaurant would certainly do the trick. Everyone would turn away from the supermarket at the sound of smashing glass and no one would be looking north when Kate and I fled in that direction.
Naturally the problem there was that the mall would no doubt take a dim view of someone bashing in one of their shop windows. Mall security people would quickly apprehend the basher and the cops would be called. I could hardly ask Jello or Alisa to go to jail just to create a distraction for us. I needed someone to do it that was accustomed to dealing with the cops, someone for whom an arrest wouldn’t really be a problem.
In short, I needed a criminal, but I didn’t know any criminals in Thailand. At least not the kind who committed violent acts. I had met plenty of criminals in Thailand, but they were all people who committed their crimes with papers and computer keyboards. Bashing in shop windows in EmQuartier was quite a long way outside their usual pursuits.
All at once I had a sudden flash of inspiration and I knew exactly who to call.
I looked at my watch. Almost noon. I had my burner phone with me in case Kate called, but I also had my own iPhone. I scrolled through the record of outgoing calls in the iPhone until I found the number I had used a few days ago to reach Mr. Wang. If you need to borrow a criminal or two, who better to call than your friends at a violent Chinese triad?
I called Mr. Wang’s office using the burner phone, but he wasn’t there. I told the woman who answered that it was an emergency and I needed to reach Mr. Wang immediately. She wouldn’t give me the number of his cell phone, of course, I hadn’t really expected her to, but she agreed to call him and pass along the message that I wanted to speak with him. I read off the number of the burner to her and asked her to tell him to call me on that number.<
br />
It rang after only a minute or two.
“Mr. Shepherd?”
“Thank you for returning my call, Mr. Wang. I wouldn’t have bothered you if it wasn’t important.”
“Do we have a problem about the material Mr. Singh gave you?”
“No, sir. This concerns a different matter entirely. I think you may be in a unique position to assist me with something quite urgent and incredibly important.”
There was a pause and when Mr. Wang spoke again I heard a note of amusement in his voice.
“You intrigue me, Mr. Shepherd.”
“May I meet you somewhere right now, sir?”
“I am enjoying quite a pleasant lunch at the moment. Can’t this wait?”
“Are you at the Pacific City Club?”
“Perhaps my habits are becoming too well-known.”
“And you’re alone?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. I promise not to take up too much of your time.”
I cut the connection, dropped enough money on the table to pay for my coffee, and added a generous tip to reward the waitress for leaving me undisturbed for so long. Then I headed outside to look for a taxi.
Mr. Wang was either interested to hear what I had to say and would be waiting for me when I got to the Pacific City Club, or he wasn’t and he wouldn’t be. Soon enough, I would know which it was.
THIRTY-FOUR
AS THE TAXI plodded west through the stop-and-go traffic on Sukhumvit Road, I began wondering if I was just about to make a really big mistake.
What did I know about Mr. Wang? His business card said he was an accountant and I knew he was somehow connected with 14K, which of course was why Uncle Benny put me in touch with him in the first place. After meeting Mr. Wang, I had learned for myself that he was an educated and charming gentleman, more British than Chinese or Thai, and I also decided he was smart and tough and perhaps even dangerous.
But that was it. That was absolutely all I knew about him.
I couldn’t ask for Mr. Wang’s help without telling him why I needed it. But if I told him I wanted him to create a distraction so I could get Kate away from her army guards and slip her out of the country, I was placing the success of the whole undertaking, not to mention Kate’s life and mine, completely in the hands of someone connected with a major criminal enterprise and about whom I knew next to nothing. When I looked at it that way, my sudden impulse to ask Mr. Wang for the loan of a couple of 14K soldiers to help me spring Kate was starting to sound downright dumb.
The taxi bumped to a stop in the heavy traffic right in front of the Holiday Inn and I sat staring out the window. Normally the traffic in Bangkok made me crazy, but on this occasion the traffic was my friend. I had to be certain I wasn’t making a mistake before I put my whole scheme to save Kate at Mr. Wang’s mercy and I needed a little time to do that.
I knew I should have thought the whole idea through more thoroughly in the first place, of course — certainly before I called Mr. Wang, jumped into a taxi, and headed off to the Pacific City Club to tell him everything — but I hadn’t. So now I had what I had. And what I had was a lot of traffic on Sukhumvit Road to make the trip take a little longer, which for the first time ever felt like a blessing to me.
In spite of my hesitation, one thing was still clear. If I was going to ask Mr. Wang for his help at all, I had to do it now. It wasn’t like I could mull the risks over for a few days before I made up my mind. Kate said she didn’t think she had much time before General Prasert ordered her arrest, and I figured she was right about that. If I had to guess, and I suppose I did have to guess, my bet was General Prasert would arrest Kate sometime over Songkran holiday when the country was largely shut down. If I thought the chaos of Songkran next week was the right distraction for my little scheme, General Prasert would be thinking the same way with regard to his. Letting the news of Kate’s detention come when most of the population was off work or away from home or simply drunk on its ass, might mute the public’s reaction enough for him to get away with it.
Okay, so the opening of Brainwake Café at EmQuartier on Friday was my best opportunity to pull this off before the army moved on Kate, maybe my only opportunity. What about the idea of staging a distraction to slip Kate out of the mall during the opening? How else could I possibly do it if I didn’t ask for Mr. Wang’s help?
Kate was going to have army guards with her at the opening, there was no doubt about that, and we weren’t going to be able just to walk away and wave bye-bye to them. A frontal assault was at least a theoretical possibility, but that would take even more manpower than creating a distraction and might lead to a battle that everyone lost. No, stealth was the only sensible choice, and the only way to guarantee stealth was to create a distraction.
All of a sudden the traffic started to move, which is typical of Bangkok. You sit frozen in gridlocked traffic for fifteen minutes with no sign that it will ever move again, and then it does. Not only does the traffic move, but it begins flowing so smoothly you forget about the jam you’ve been sitting in and tell yourself the traffic in Bangkok isn’t really so bad after all.
I had only a few more minutes now before the taxi reached the Pacific City Club. It was time to decide what I was going to do when I got there.
If I didn’t ask for Mr. Wang’s help with creating the distraction I needed, what alternatives did I have? Jello and Alisa could probably get some of their resistance friends to do the job, but then I’d no doubt end up with a few privileged kids on my hands that could easily panic and screw everything up. I only had one shot at this, and it didn’t appeal to me to have that shot depend on amateur criminals. I needed professional criminals, hard men, guys who would deliver whatever unexpected obstacles cropped up. And that took me right back to thinking about Mr. Wang.
Maybe I could find a way to feel him out a little. If he didn’t seem to be hostile to Kate and didn’t appear to be connected to General Prasert, then I would have to follow my instincts about whether to roll the dice and tell him everything or not. But if I didn’t tell him and ask for his help, I had no idea what I would do instead.
The taxi pulled up to the entrance to Pacific Place and a uniformed doorman opened the door for me. Whether to trust Mr. Wang or not might end up being a close call, but it was still a call I had to make. And I was going to have to make it in the next few minutes.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Shepherd.” Mr. Wang gestured at the empty chair across the table from him. “Please. Sit.”
At least he was there waiting for me like he said he would be. That was a start.
All the way up in the elevator, I had been trying to come up with a subtle way to draw out Mr. Wang’s views of Kate and General Prasert before I popped the question. I still didn’t have any great ideas, but whatever I ended up saying it had to be better than just blurting out my plan to spirit Kate away from EmQuartier at the opening of the new Brainwake Café. That would be incredibly stupid. If Mr. Wang turned out to be a golf buddy of General Prasert, I would be burying myself and hanging Kate out to dry.
Mr. Wang apparently sensed my hesitancy. He folded his arms on the table, leaned forward, and fixed me with a look that was unexpectedly kind.
“You said you needed my help, Mr. Shepherd, and with a matter unrelated to young Mr. Singh, but now you seem reluctant to ask for it. Have you changed your mind?”
“No, sir. It’s only that…”
I trailed off. I really didn’t know what to say next.
“May I see if I can save us both some time, Mr. Shepherd? When you and I first met, you told me you entered Thailand on a false passport and using the name John Smith because of a matter unrelated to our business. Does this matter have anything to do with our very charming former prime minister?”
My surprise at Mr. Wang’s question obviously showed on my face.
“From your expression, Mr. Shepherd, I gather the answer to my question is yes. So I will continue.”
/> Mr. Wang gave me a smile he probably meant to be reassuring.
“Your appearance in Bangkok about this unrelated matter comes only a very brief time after our former prime minister was arrested and given bail. I suspect that is not a coincidence.”
“Why would you think—”
“Come now, Mr. Shepherd. Surely you don’t imagine I met with you without first doing a little research, do you? You are a remarkable man in many ways. Somehow, in spite of being a foreigner, you have been involved with all sorts of things from which foreigners are generally excluded in this strange little country. You are obviously a very close friend, probably even a genuine confidant of our former prime minister. Is that not so?”
“Kate and I are friends.”
Mr. Wang unfolded his arms and slapped the table with his open palms. “Good,” he said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“You appear to be remarkably well-informed, Mr. Wang.”
“Oh, Mr. Shepherd, I doubt you can guess even the half of it.”
I said nothing. Mr. Wang was probably right about that.
“Then today,” he continued, “you call me and say that you need my help, and I cannot help but notice your call comes barely a day after our prime minister’s bail was revoked. I therefore conclude you are going to help her flee the country before she is taken into custody, but that you probably lack the logistical support required for such an undertaking and have decided to appeal to me to provide at least part of it. How am I doing so far?”
All I could do was stare at Mr. Wang, but at least I managed to make certain my mouth wasn’t hanging open.
“I am Chinese, Mr. Shepherd, but I am also Thai, and I fear for my country. When the army forced our elected prime minister from office, it was a dark day for Thailand, and the days since then have grown darker still. If I can offer any help to you in your efforts to protect your friend now, it would be my pleasure to do so.”
Mr. Wang gave me a moment to absorb that, and then he cleared his throat.