by Jake Needham
I strolled as casually as I could back out to the sidewalk and followed the walk around to the front of the mall. Before I got anywhere near the main entrance I saw the crowd piled up outside it and I had the answer to my question. The extra security was at all the entrances.
I pulled out my cell phone and went into my fake conversation routine again standing at the glass beside the main entrance. Peering inside while continuing to flap my lips, I took stock. This checkpoint looked about the same as the one at the side, except there were four cops here and they were stopping more people.
This was not good. It really wasn’t.
I needed the gun I was carrying under my shirt and the extra magazine I had in my pocket. That was why I had asked Jello to get them for me. It wasn’t remotely appealing to have to ditch them and start this little adventure armed with nothing but an appealing smile.
I looked at my watch. Ten forty-five. This morning it seemed like I had all the time in the world. Now I was down to my last fifteen minutes.
Hustling back around to the side entrance, I saw the line there was a little shorter now, but it seemed to be moving at the same speed, which is to say slowly. Being a bit taller than most Thais, each time the doors opened I got a glimpse of the action over the heads of the people in front of me. It looked as if the cops were checking about one out of three people who set off the metal detector. Not terrible odds, but not great ones either.
Less than fifteen minutes and counting.
Come on, man, place your bet.
What was it going to be? Dump the gun? Walk away? Or take my chances? If they searched me and found the gun, there was no way I could talk myself out of that. I would be completely and utterly screwed, and so would Kate.
One chance out of three. That’s not too bad.
The fuck it wasn’t.
I STUDIED THE cops without being obvious about it and tried to work out a way past them. I didn’t see one.
This was a crossroads I hadn’t anticipated and I had only a few seconds to decide which way to go. All at once I remember the advice of that great American philosopher, Yogi Berra: When you come to a crossroads, take it.
The older of the two cops was overweight and his brown spandex uniform was stretched tightly over his stomach and hips. He looked bored and sleepy, and he seemed just to be going through the motions. The younger cop appeared much more energetic. He was examining people passing through the metal detector with greater care, even with a degree of suspicion. That gave me an idea.
There were four people left in front of me now: two Chinese girls who looked like tourists carrying small backpacks over their shoulders, a middle-aged Thai man with a cheap-looking briefcase, and a large woman who looked Eastern European or maybe Russian and who was pulling a hard-shelled airline cabin bag that was bright red.
Shrugging the backpack with the two motorcycle helmets off my shoulders and swinging it around in front of me, I used it to cover my right hand while I checked that my shirt was pulled down and completely covered the Sig inside the front of my waistband. It was.
The two Chinese girls walked through the metal detector more or less together and naturally the thing buzzed loudly. The older cop waved them on, which earned him a hard look from his partner, so when the Thai man and his briefcase set off the metal detector again the young cop immediately gestured for him to place the briefcase on the table and open it. Then the Eastern European woman, if that’s what she was, pulled her bag through the metal detector and earned her own buzz. The older cop looked as if he was thinking about waving her on, too, but his younger partner shot him a look. He sighed and, appearing resigned, pointed to the bag and gestured to the woman to open it.
I went through the metal detector as closely behind the woman as I could. When it buzzed, both cops looked over their shoulders at me. I quickly unzipped my backpack, making certain to keep it in front of the holstered Sig, pulled it open with both hands, and stepped right up to the older cop. He barely glanced in it and impatiently waved me on.
I took a deep breath and walked away. No one shouted after me to come back. No one demanded I stop.
I was in.
My watch said ten fifty-five. That was cutting it a little close maybe, but I was there. I stood with my back against a wall and looked around.
FORTY-TWO
I HADN’T THOUGHT about how big the crowd might be, but it was big. Really big. Kate could still pull the voters in droves, even if they weren’t really voters any longer since the military had abolished elections.
The new Brainwake Café was a glassed-in space about forty feet wide facing the large open area in front of the supermarket. That was where people moved back and forth from the other sections of the mall to the food area and on to the garage and the exits. A great location for a restaurant.
This morning the area was jammed with people waiting to catch a glimpse of Kate. There must have been two or three hundred of them at least. I couldn’t have been happier. The more people there were, the more chaos there would be when Mr. Wang’s guys let loose at the front of the mall.
I didn’t see Kate yet. I assumed the café had stashed her somewhere so her entrance would psych up the crowd. There was a scattering of uniformed police here and there, and of course some mall security guards, but none of them mattered. The army was all that counted in Thailand anymore, and when I spotted the military uniforms out at the edge of the crowd I smiled. I couldn’t have positioned Kate’s guards any better if I had placed them myself.
There were five of them, four men and a woman, and they were all standing together in a group just beyond the entrance to Dean & DeLuca and on the opposite side of the crowd from the supermarket. Even better, they were directly in front of the walkway that led to where Mr. Wang’s guys would be staging their little performance. When it started, there would be several hundred panicked people between Kate and her army guards. I couldn’t have hoped for better.
Easing into the crowd, I worked my way toward the front without making myself too conspicuous. A wine-colored drape covered the café’s front doors and a long cord ran from it to a holder sitting on a low stage that had been constructed off to the right. Behind the stage was another area blocked with a drape and I assumed Kate and whoever else was participating in this magnum opus were almost certainly waiting back there.
I glanced at my watch: five after eleven. They were running late. Of course, they were. Nothing in Thailand ever started at its announced time. Thai time was different from real world time.
I edged to my right to get myself within a few strides of the stage. When I found a spot I liked, I checked the army uniforms again.
Three of the men were dressed in crisp fatigues with black rifles slung across their chests, most likely M-16s, and they wore red berets cocked at a jaunty angle. One of them held a walkie-talkie with an antenna sticking out of it that had to be three feet long. I was pretty sure the rifles were just for show and that none of them were loaded, but you can never tell for sure. Whether they were loaded or not, these three were clearly the working stiffs, the guys who were there to do the heavy lifting if there was any to do. The other two uniforms were officers, one male and one female.
The male officer looked like he was in charge. He was short and wide and middle-aged, and he was wearing a dark green dress uniform with enough medals on it to attest to his heroism in at least three wars. Of course, the Thai army had never actually fought any wars, not in the last few hundred years at least, so I gathered his medals were like most rewards handed out in Thailand. They represented all the times he had kept his mouth shut and done what he was told to do.
The woman wasn’t over thirty, tall for a Thai and slightly chunky. Her uniform was dark brown and tightly fitted, the skirt ending a good two inches above her knees. She had white braid over the left shoulder and wrapped around her left arm below her right shoulder was a red armband with some Thai lettering on it. I thought that designated military police, but I wasn’t absolute
ly sure. Neither of the officers was carrying a weapon as far as I could see.
I looked at my watch again. Eleven-fifteen.
Mr. Wang had promised to put a spotter in the crowd to signal his people when to start their song and dance. He understood as well as I did that nothing in Thailand ever happened when people promised it would so there really wasn’t any other way to get the timing right. I hoped he hadn’t changed his mind about that. If his guys staged their diversion before I got close enough to Kate to pull her away, the whole plan would turn to crap faster than I wanted to think about.
I was still watching the uniforms when a murmur went through the crowd and the applause began. Three people emerged from behind the drapes and stepped up on the stage. The first person was a man I vaguely recognized from somewhere, probably the owner of the café.
The second person was Kate.
And the third was General Prasert.
WHAT IN HOLY hell was General Prasert doing here?
Suddenly I understood the reason for the increased security, if you could call it that, at the entrances to EmQuartier, but why didn’t he have a bigger visible escort than the five uniforms I could see? I had no idea what the answer to the first question was, but I had no doubt at all of the answer to the second.
General Prasert didn’t go to the toilet with an escort of only five soldiers. The crowd was plainly full of plainclothes security. All of them soldiers carrying weapons, and all of those weapons would be loaded.
No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. Eisenhower is supposed to have said that. Or maybe it was Napoleon, or Sun Tzu. But who the hell cared? My carefully constructed plan had just turned into shit. What mattered now was figuring out exactly how much shit it had turned into.
Had General Prasert somehow found out that I was planning to pull Kate out of there and made his little appearance on stage just to taunt us? That didn’t make any sense. There was no way he could know what I had planned. Or was there? If he did know, a few plainclothes security men in the crowd were the least of our worries. If he really did know, the whole goddamned Thai army was about to come down right on our heads.
I didn’t have a lot of time to decide. Mr. Wang’s guys would begin firing shotguns and setting off grenades any second. And I had just discovered that to get Kate out of EmQuartier I had to outwit more than the handful of sleepy military guards I had been anticipating. Now I had to… well, I wasn’t sure now exactly what I had to do now.
Should I pull the plug and walk away? Regroup and find another way to get Kate away from the army? Even if that were the wiser choice, it came with its own set of complications. My clever plan didn’t include any way to call off Mr. Wang’s guys and tell them to stand down. In hindsight, that seemed pretty stupid, but in hindsight I’ve learned that almost everything seems pretty stupid.
There was a slight squeal of feedback from the public address system and the man who led Kate and General Prasert onto the stage began speaking. He was as I had guessed the owner of Brainwake Café and he seemed a bit nonplussed at having his newest branch opened by two people who between them possessed pretty well all the political power in Thailand. I got the impression he had been as surprised as I was at General Prasert’s appearance on his stage, which raised all sorts of interesting implications. I glanced at Kate, but her face was so impassive she might have been wearing a wooden mask.
Having no better idea what to do, I began working my way toward Kate while he talked. I was thinking too hard to pay any attention to what he was saying, but after only two or three minutes he took the end of the cord tied to the drape over the entrance to the café and handed it to Kate. By then I was less than ten feet away from the right end of the stage, just slightly outside of General Prasert’s peripheral vision.
Kate stepped forward as the audience applauded, and she gave the cord a tug.
Nothing happened.
She tugged at it again, harder this time.
Still nothing.
The applause stopped and a small murmur went through the crowd, but Kate looked completely unperturbed. She took the cord in both hands, leaned forward, and reared back with a pull on the cord that looked mighty enough to collapse the whole front of the café. Fortunately, it didn’t, but it did lift the drape away from the entry doors far enough for it to give way and crumple into a heap on the floor. The audience began to applaud again and there were a few cheers as well.
General Prasert appeared annoyed at the cheering for Kate.
Kate just looked directly at him and smiled.
And that was the exact moment Mr. Wang’s soldiers picked to start the show.
BOOM!
The shotgun report was a single raw sound, incredibly loud in the confines of the mall. The shot seemed to come from everywhere at once.
BOOM!
A second shotgun blast. The sound of shattering glass.
At the moment something unexpected and frightening occurs, most of us react the same way. We struggle to find a reason that whatever is happening isn’t really frightening at all. We strive to convince ourselves that there is no threat to us at hand.
That was exactly how it happened then. The crowd went completely still. No one moved and no one spoke. In the silence, I listened to the echoes of the shots rolling through the corridors of the mall, growing fainter and fainter like distant thunder on a clear summer day.
The crowd around me was frozen in place and all eyes went immediately to the three people on stage. These people were leaders, weren’t they? Shouldn’t they know if there was any danger?
If they did know, they weren’t sharing that knowledge. Those hopefully searching those three faces for guidance did so in vain.
That was when the flashbangs and the smoke grenades began exploding.
BOOM!
Pause.
BOOM! BOOM!
And after that, everything seemed to happen at once.
FORTY-THREE
FIRST THERE WERE the shouts, then came the screams, and after that several hundred pairs of feet began moving at almost exactly the same time. The source of the danger was uncertain, and even its direction less than clear, so all those feet moved in different directions. People were pushing and shoving and they ricocheted off each other like the little silver spheres in a pinball machine.
I held my position as well as I could and looked over the heads of the crowd toward the army uniforms I had picked out as Kate’s escort. They were moving away from us exactly as I had hoped they would be, trotting warily toward the front of the mall from where the explosions seemed to have come. I started pushing my way through the surging bodies toward Kate.
General Prasert had moved to the opposite end of the stage as if he were contemplating joining the soldiers and the mall security men running toward the sound of the explosions, but half a dozen men in civilian clothes with drawn weapons had appeared seemingly out of nowhere and formed themselves into a half circle in front of him. That was half a dozen armed men more than I had planned to cope with, but at least these guys weren’t thinking about Kate. They were there to protect General Prasert and their eyes were searching for any threat to him. If there was a threat, it would surely come from the direction of the explosions so that was where they were all focused.
Maybe I could still make this work in spite of the extra opposition.
I popped out of the crowd at the end of the stage closest to Kate and called her name in a voice I hoped would carry to her and no further.
“Over here, Kate.”
She turned her head toward me, but for a moment she hardly seemed to know who I was. I gestured with both hands, waving her toward me. It felt like an eternity before she finally willed herself into motion and walked to the edge of the stage. I glanced over her shoulder at General Prasert and his bodyguards. All of them were still staring in the direction of the explosions.
Kate held her purse in one hand and I reached up and took her other hand to help her down off the stage. It w
as slack in mine. Not a good sign.
“Jack? What—”
“Not now, Kate. Don’t talk. Come with me. Do it now.”
Her hand still felt limp. Her body language was confused, indecisive.
“Kate, don’t fuck around. We’ve got to move now.”
Had Kate changed her mind? Or, God forbid, lost her nerve? Was this all going to fall apart before we even got started?
Kate tightened her hand a little around mine. I blocked off the crowd with my body and created an open area for her to step down off the stage.
“So those explosions were—”
“They were for us. No more questions. Follow me and do exactly what I tell you to do. Can you do that?”
Kate jerked her head in what I took to be a nod. At least I hoped it was a nod.
More shotgun blasts. Four or five this time, faint and distant, but from the same direction the explosions came.
I saw Prasert’s bodyguards tighten their formation in front of him. One of them reached up and took the general’s elbow and helped him down from the stage.
Everyone was focused on finding the threat and they had forgotten about Kate entirely. That had been the plan, of course, and it appeared to be working fine. In fact, it was working so well it seemed almost too good to be true.
Kate finally jumped down off the stage next to me. I took her hand and pulled her behind me as I worked my way through the panicked crowd toward the supermarket.
Stepping around an abandoned shopping cart, I led her through a deserted checkout counter and glanced quickly over my shoulder to make certain we were still in the clear. Since I wasn’t watching where we were going, I plowed hard into a middle-aged woman trying to go the opposite direction through the same checkout counter. The woman loosed a scream so loud it sounded like a siren had gone off in my ear. By itself, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but it was also loud enough to cause General Prasert to glance in our direction. And that was a problem.
The general’s look of surprise turned quickly into one of pure fury and he began shoving his way through the crowd toward us. We had a head start of perhaps a hundred feet, but that wasn’t nearly enough. I pushed the screaming woman out of the way and jerked Kate’s hand, breaking into a trot.