by Jake Needham
“When were you going to tell me about the resistance, Jello?”
Jello shifted his eyes to me. “Who you been talking to?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
“Then how about this? I’m not going to tell you.”
Jello nodded and looked away, but he didn’t say anything else.
“I need to know what I’m involved in here. I’m about to put my ass on the line, and I need to know who I’m doing it for.”
“You’re doing it for Kate.”
“Am I? Is it really that simple?”
An errant shot from the basketball game came bouncing toward us. I grabbed it, dribbled a couple of times, and then flipped it to the kids behind my back without breaking stride.
“Pretty fancy moves for an old guy,” Jello said.
“What I’m concerned about right now is what moves you’ve got, fat man. Have you put one on me? Is this really about Kate, or have you maneuvered me into helping this underground revolutionary movement your pals are trying to create?”
“Kate is in danger and I figured you’d want to help her. That’s why I came to you with this.”
“And that’s really what I’m doing here? Helping Kate?”
Jello sighed heavily, and I thought that was going to be that, but after a moment he started talking quietly. I had to run closer to him so I wouldn’t miss what he was saying.
“You know as much about Thailand as any white guy alive, Jack. You know that everything here is both a little true and a little false.”
I kept my mouth shut and waited.
“I asked you to help Kate,” Jello went on after a moment, “because she needs your help. If you do help her, will it help someone else, too? Of course it will. It will help the whole damn country because this place will fall apart if General Prasert locks Kate up. He’s just too damn arrogant to understand that. Thailand has been on the verge of something almost as long as I can remember, but we have never been closer to the edge than we are now. If we fall over, I don’t know what will become of us. And if they lock Kate up, we will fall over the edge. You can make book on that.”
“What is the resistance?”
Jello glanced sideways at me.
“Why are you asking me that?”
“Because I need to know and you’ll tell me the truth.”
“In Thailand, the truth is a very elastic concept.”
I didn’t say anything and after a while Jello started talking again as I knew he would.
“The resistance doesn’t exist. If people saw it, talked about it, pretty soon they might have to declare what they think about it, which side they’re on. So nobody sees it. That’s what it’s like now. Things aren’t there, even when they are.”
“So you’re saying the resistance does exist, but everyone pretends it doesn’t?”
“Thais aren’t very good at political movements. We haven’t had a lot of experience at them. We were an absolute monarchy until 1932, then ruled by the army, then ruled by the Japanese, then ruled by the army again. We’ve had a truly free choice of political leaders very few times in our entire history.”
“I don’t need a history lecture. What’s your point?”
“Thais aren’t very good at leadership either. If these army clowns had taken over most any other country and arrested the elected prime minister, all sorts of underground movements would be rising up and arming themselves to take action. That hasn’t happened here.”
“No opposition to the military at all?”
“Personal freedom isn’t high on the list of things Thais will fight for. Access to Facebook and Instagram, or the right to go to lunch with their friends, maybe. But fight for personal freedom? Not likely.”
I understood all too well what Jello was saying, and I knew he wasn’t exaggerating.
“Sometimes I even think most Thais hate personal freedom,” Jello continued. “They see it as a threat. Deep in our little Thai hearts, Jack, we’re a passive bunch of bastards. We would far rather somebody told us what to do than have to make decisions for ourselves, and the army is plenty happy to do that. Sometimes I really do wonder if we Thais are even fit to govern ourselves. Maybe overthrowing the absolute monarchy in 1932 was where it all started to go wrong.”
“Then you’re saying this group called the resistance doesn’t amount to much?”
“I’m saying it’s a loose group of a few hundred people who know something has to be done if we’re not willing to lose our country completely, but they have no idea what that is. They talk a lot and try to sound tough to each other, but not much happens.”
“Are you part of the resistance?”
“If you’re asking me whether I’m one of the people who think something has to be done, I am. If you’re asking me whether I’m one of the people who claim to be part of a group called the resistance that has secret meetings and calls each other by code names, I’m not.”
“But Alisa is.”
I didn’t bother to make a question out of that and Jello sighed again, something he seemed to me to be doing an awful lot of. I doubted it was because he was out of breath from running.
“Yes,” he said, “she is.”
“And Kate is leading the resistance?”
“No,” Jello answered quickly. “Kate probably doesn’t even know it exists.”
“That can’t be true.”
Jello shrugged. “I don’t think leading an underground resistance is Kate’s style.”
He looked like he was about to say something else, but he didn’t. He just trailed off and shrugged again.
“I thought Alisa stayed in contact with Kate,” I said.
“She does.”
“Close contact?”
“As far as I know.”
“Then you’re telling me Alisa is an active member of this group called the resistance, she stays in close contact with Kate, and yet she’s never talked to Kate about it?”
“Alisa’s afraid if Kate finds out what they’re doing, she will tell them to stop. They don’t want to do that, but they don’t want to defy Kate either, so they’ve approached the problem in the Thai way. They simply don’t tell her about it and she doesn’t have to deal with it.”
I wasn’t sure I altogether believed that, in fact I was pretty sure I didn’t, but there wasn’t any point in arguing about it.
“What does this group actually do?” I asked.
Jello didn’t say anything. I decided he must not have heard me so I began again.
“I asked you—”
“I know what you asked me.”
I shot him a look, but his face was empty.
“I’m not comfortable talking about this, Jack.”
“Why not?”
“I’m just not going to talk about it anymore. This is scary stuff even for a cop. Maybe especially for a cop. You want to ask questions about the resistance, find somebody else to ask. Just be real careful who it is.”
My breathing was getting a little ragged. Had we done four laps, or was it five? I’d lost count, but however far we had run I knew I didn’t have much left in me. I pointed to an empty bench shaded by a grove of trees about twenty yards off the walkway. Far enough to be private, close enough for me to get there without collapsing.
“What’s the matter, old man?” Jello chuckled. “You out of gas already?”
“We got stuff to talk about.”
“Can’t talk and run anymore?”
I didn’t have enough wind left to mount a decent counterattack so I didn’t even try. I just veered off the walkway and headed for the bench.
BY THE TIME I had caught my breath, Jello had jogged over and taken a seat next to me.
“I’ve got a plan to get Kate away from her guards and out of the country,” I said. “At least I’ve got most of it.”
“You going to tell me what it is?”
“No, I’m going to tell you what I need from you to make it happen.”
Jello said nothing.
“I need a Canadian passport for Kate,” I continued. “One as good as the John Smith passport.”
“I can do that.”
“And I need a motorbike. Nothing fancy, but not a piece of shit either. Something reliable that doesn’t stand out.”
Jello nodded.
“I need two full-face helmets with dark visors. Both of them in a backpack that’s no larger than it has to be.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, a gun. A double-stack semi-automatic. Either 9mm or .45. And a spare magazine, too. You can never have too much ammo, can you?”
Jello slowly rotated his head toward me. “You want a gun.”
I nodded.
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Not as far as I can tell.”
“Have you forgotten where you are? Have you forgotten who you are? You’re a foreigner, Jack, and this is fucking Thailand. If you get caught with a gun here, you’ll never leave.”
“Don’t you remember the advice you gave me in Hong Kong? Don’t get caught, you said. And you know I always take your advice.”
Jello shook his head and looked at me. “Who you gonna shoot?”
“Nobody, I hope. But when Kate and I make a break for it, there’ll be no going back. I don’t know what will happen after that, but I’m not about to put our asses on the line armed with nothing but my good looks and a sense of humor.”
“Do you even know how to use a gun?”
“Have you already forgotten what happened when those two shooters came after me in Phuket?”
“Don’t let that go to your head, Jack. Those were hired Burmese thugs. Nobody cares about Burmese thugs. But if you shoot a Thai soldier, these guys will never let you go.”
“I don’t want to shoot anybody, but I’m not going to leave both of us completely exposed without any way to defend ourselves.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“So then exactly what are you doing?”
“I don’t know.”
Jello offered up a chuckle, but it was only a small one.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten you involved in this in the first place,” he said.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have, but you did and now it’s a little late to worry about that. Can you get me the stuff I need or can’t you?”
Jello looked off across the park to where two older women were running together more slowly than I would have thought it possible for anyone to run, and he watched them for a while in silence.
Eventually he said, “I hope I don’t regret this.”
“I hope you don’t, too.”
“When do you need it?”
“I want you to bring the bike and everything else to the Sheraton at exactly nine o’clock on Friday morning.”
Jello nodded.
“When you get there—”
“Forget that. I’m not going anywhere near you, man. I’ll get Alisa to bring everything.”
That gave me another idea.
“Then ask her to do something else, too, will you? Ask her to pack a few clothes for Kate. Some jeans, a few t-shirts, running shoes, and… uh, the other stuff Kate will need to get through three or four days.”
“You mean underwear.”
I nodded. That was exactly what I meant, of course.
“When Alisa gets to the Sheraton, tell her to ride the bike into the parking garage and call me from there.”
Jello nodded. “How you going to get Kate out of the country?” he asked.
“You don’t want to know any more than I’ve already told you.”
“Shit, I don’t even want to know what you’ve already told me.”
Jello took a deep breath and let it out.
“Watch your ass, man.”
“Always.”
Jello nodded. Without another word, he stood up and broke into a jog out of the park in the direction of Sukhumvit Road.
THIRTY-SEVEN
BACK IN MY room at the Sheraton, I took a shower and put on a clean t-shirt and shorts. After that, I sat down and thought about what I had done and what I had left to do.
Jello coming up with a travel document for Kate and finding a bike to get us away from EmQuartier meant I now had the ingredients of at least a half-assed plan, but I was still missing two important pieces. I needed a place to stash Kate after I got her away from her guards at the restaurant opening, and I needed a way to slip her out of the country under the cover of the Songkran revelers filling the streets.
We certainly couldn’t go out in the ways people generally left Thailand, either over a land border crossing or through an international airport. Kate had one of the most recognizable faces in the country. Thailand put people though an immigration check on departure as well as on arrival and I had no chance at all to waltz her through immigration no matter how good the Canadian passport was. It would be like leaving New York with Angelina Jolie and trying to tell everybody she was really Justin Bieber.
I had briefly considered renting an oceangoing yacht and heading south out of Phuket to Penang in Malaysia. It wasn’t very far and we could hug the coastline most of the way, but there would still be the risk of encountering Thai naval patrols and I didn’t have enough faith in my skills as a sailor to be certain I could evade them.
There was also the question of how we would get to Phuket in the first place. Flying was out of the question. Even with no immigration to pass through for a domestic flight, the airport would still be filled with people who would recognize Kate in an instant no matter how she tried to disguise herself. Worse, the moment we disappeared from EmQuartier I knew the military would flood every airport with enough manpower to be certain we didn’t get to an airplane no matter how clever we were. Traveling overland to Phuket was an equally lousy idea. The drive would take at least twelve hours, and that was twelve hours of exposure to army patrols and roadblocks. We wouldn’t have a chance.
No, the only practical way out of the country was by air. Not on a commercial flight where we would have to pass through an immigration check, of course, but on a private aircraft plane flying out of a small field.
Fortunately, I had a bit of experience with that kind of thing in Thailand.
A few years back, I had been in hot pursuit of a ton of money drained out of the Asian Bank of Commerce before it collapsed. I needed to slip quietly out of Bangkok into Phuket, and I needed to do it in a hurry. A commercial flight had been out of the question back then, too, since the bad guys would have seen me coming. I couldn’t charter an aircraft for the same reason. That meant I needed a favor.
A friend of mine had put me in touch with a guy called Mango Manny because he was the kind of guy who could make all sorts of things happen. Manny owned a hip saloon called Q Bar that has long since passed into Bangkok nightlife legend, but his primary occupation was something else. He was a sort of management consultant to the major players in the Thai marijuana trade. Manny didn’t smuggle grass himself, he just helped other people set up the necessary logistics to do it elegantly.
He didn’t blink when he heard what I wanted him to do. He sent me to an American named Ike who ran something called the Thai Flying Club from a little airfield near the village of Bang Pra about an hour southeast of Bangkok. He told me Ike gave flying lessons and flew a tow plane for a glider club, but I got the impression that Ike flew other things from time to time as well. I thought I could guess what those were, of course, but I didn’t ask. Don’t ask, don’t tell has always struck me as a fine philosophy for living.
When I got to the airfield, I was startled to discover Ike was a woman, not just a woman, but a sweet-looking little old lady who had to be seventy and could have passed for Grandma Moses. I admit I was a bit uneasy at first, but Ike turned out to be a remarkable pilot and memorably sneaky. She slipped away from Phuket approach radar without making anyone suspicious, put the plane down on a road in the jungl
e, dumped me out, and got the plane back in the air before anyone noticed she had landed anywhere. It was quite a display of flying, and flying like that was exactly what I needed now.
I thumbed through my Hong Kong phone until I found the mobile number I had for her back then. With a mumbled incantation to the gods that the number still worked, I punched it into my burner phone.
The number worked. Ike didn’t even sound particularly surprised I was calling her.
She heard me out without asking any questions, thought a moment, and suggested we fly to Koh Chang, a tourist island in the Gulf of Thailand. Thai territory but just off the coast of Cambodia, Koh Chang was popular with tourists who were looking for a unique destination that everyone else they knew hadn’t visited yet. Most people went there by ferry, but Ike said she had flown there quite a bit and on a few occasions had slipped from Koh Chang on down the Cambodian Coast to Sihanoukville without attracting any attention.
I liked that. Sihanoukville was only a short train ride from Phnom Penh, and Phnom Penh had an international airport where our Canadian passports would work just fine. The Cambodians wouldn’t have the slightest interest in stopping Kate even if they recognized her. There was nothing Cambodians liked better than fucking over Thais, and no fuck you would be bigger than allowing Kate to pass through the country and blandly claiming they had never seen her.
Ten minutes later, I had a plane and a pilot on standby for next Tuesday. Now that I had a way to get Kate out of the country, I also had an idea where to stash her from the time we busted out of the EmQuartier until Ike flew us to Cambodia.
I just needed my luck to stretch a little further. But it would be evening before I could find out if it would.
AT A LITTLE after nine that night, when the time change back to America would permit me to talk to someone in New York at a reasonably civilized hour, I looked up another number in the directory on my Hong Kong phone and dialed it on my burner.
“Hello?”
The woman’s voice was soft and musical. I recognized it right away.
“How have you been, Laura?”
“Jack? Is that you, Jack?”
“It’s me, Laura.”
“What’s this strange number you’re calling on? This isn’t your phone.”