by Jake Needham
“Move, goddamn it!”
We plunged into the nearest aisle of the supermarket and I risked one more glance back. General Prasert was coming hard, but he was having difficulty forcing his way through the crowd and had lost a little ground. His bodyguards had only just realized that the general was running away from them and they seemed uncertain whether to follow him or to maintain their position between the general and any possible danger.
“Where are we going, Jack?” Kate shouted over the noise.
I didn’t bother to answer, but with my free hand I swung the backpack around in front of me and unzipped it while we ran. Reaching inside, I pulled out one of the motorcycle helmets and handed it back to her. I figured that was probably as good an explanation as any.
“Okay,” she shouted, taking the helmet. “I understand.”
We got to the end of the aisle and I took a quick look around to orient myself. This part of the supermarket was almost deserted. People were searching for ways out of the mall and the back of the supermarket didn’t seem a promising escape route so no one had come this way. That was fine with me.
The door to the storage room was two or three aisles to our left. Or was it to our right?
Your first instinct is always the right one, isn’t it?
Maybe not, but it was as good a guess as any. I went left.
Two aisles over, a right turn, and all the way to the back of the store. I stopped again and looked around.
The door to the storage room was about twenty feet to our left.
“You beauty,” I murmured and tugged Kate toward it.
INSIDE THE STORAGE room, I led Kate to the walkway at the back. I stopped there and turned toward her. I put my hands on her shoulders, leaned close to her face, and spoke slowly and distinctly.
“Listen to me carefully,” I said. “General Prasert is about a hundred feet behind us.”
“I can’t—”
“Don’t talk! Listen to me!”
I pointed to the loading dock doors.
“I have a motorcycle out there,” I said, “and I have a safe house where we can hide for a few days. I’ve made arrangements to get us out of the country after that.”
Kate nodded.
“But Prasert is too close. We’ve got to open up the distance a little or we won’t get away from here.”
“How are you going—”
“I want you to stand right here,” I snapped, “and when you see Prasert I want you to scream and run out there.” I pointed down the walkway to doors that led out to the loading dock. “Before you get outside, put on your helmet and close the visor so no one can see your face. I’ll be ten seconds behind you.”
“What are you going to do?”
I took a few steps away from Kate and moved behind one of the ceiling-high storage shelves stacked with stock for the supermarket. Standing there, the general wouldn’t be able to see me when he came into the storage room. I reached under my shirt and drew the Sig.
“No, Jack, no! You cannot shoot him! If you kill General Prasert, they’ll never leave us alone.”
I reversed the Sig in my right hand and held it by the barrel.
“I’m not going to kill him. I’m going to give him a little tap on the head. Would that be okay with you?”
“Don’t hurt him, Jack.”
“Well, gee, Kate. Perhaps we should just go back and apologize and tell General Prasert this was all a big misunderstanding. I’m sure he’ll understand.”
“I just don’t want you to—”
“Stop talking to me, Kate, and stop looking at me. Watch the door, scream the moment Prasert comes through it, and run out to the loading dock. Can you do that?”
Kate looked for a moment as if she was about to say something else, but she didn’t. She just nodded, and then she turned away from me and looked back over her shoulder at the door to the storeroom. From my hiding place behind the storage shelves, I saw her mouth draw into a tight line and her eyes fill with doubt and worry.
Then all at once she screamed and ran up the walkway toward the loading dock.
I heard the door bang back against the wall followed by pounding footfalls and General Prasert appeared right in front of my hiding place. His head was turned away from me and he was looking in the direction where Kate had disappeared.
The butt of the Sig was cocked back behind my head and I focused on a spot about three inches behind Prasert’s right ear. I took two fast steps toward him and drove the gun butt toward that spot like I was swinging a sledgehammer.
But it wasn’t quite as easy as I had hoped.
I must have scraped a foot on the floor, or perhaps Prasert just sensed my presence behind him, because he started to rotate his head toward me even as the butt of the Sig was slicing through the air toward him. Instead of the gun butt making contact with the spot behind his ear that almost certainly would have taken him down cleanly, the rotation of his head caused it to hit his skull at the top of the ear instead. The blow staggered him, and by reflex his hands flew up to protect his ear, but he didn’t go down.
Was I going to have to shoot him after all? I didn’t want to do that, I really didn’t, but there was no way out for us any longer other than forward. If they caught us now, they would send Kate to prison and see that she died there, and I would simply disappear. If the only way to keep that from happening was to shoot the bastard, I would.
But maybe it wasn’t the only way.
By lifting his hands to protect his ear, General Prasert had left his back and side exposed. I cocked the butt of the Sig again and hammered him in his right kidney. He yelped, jerked his hands down, and slumped forward, disoriented by the pain. His skull was completely unprotected now and I cocked the butt of the Sig for a third time and pounded him behind his ear, right on the spot I had been aiming for in the first place.
General Prasert went down like a boxer who had taken a money shot. Just BAM, facedown on the canvas and out and gone. No chance even to get his hands up to protect his face. Lights on, lights off.
The blood oozing from his scalp and soaking his hair stopped me for a moment. I looked at the butt of the Sig and saw that it was rust-red and sticky. The idea of knocking the general out had seemed somehow abstract and clinical when I decided to do it. Blood hadn’t figured into the equation. I wiped the butt of the Sig on my pants, holstered it, and looked down again at General Prasert sprawled at my feet.
Ah, fuck it.
I ripped the second motorcycle helmet out of the backpack and pulled it on. I didn’t check to see how badly General Prasert was hurt. There wasn’t time and, to be honest, I really didn’t care all that much. He had been planning to kill Kate. Why did I give a damn if he was out cold and had a little blood in his hair?
I stepped over General Prasert and ran for the loading dock where Kate was waiting for me.
FORTY-FOUR
WHEN I BURST through the door, I saw the loading dock was deserted. Nobody coming or going, nobody taking a smoke break. We’d had a little luck, and I thought we damn well deserved it.
Kate was a few feet away looking at me, but the visor on her helmet was closed so I couldn’t see what was in her eyes. It might have been fear, and it might have been relief. After all, she had left me inside with General Prasert. She must have had at least some doubt who it would be coming out the door behind her.
I pointed toward the clump of parked motorbikes on the other side of the dock and trotted down the steps. I was happy to see no one had blocked the green bike in. I wheeled it out, swung my leg over the seat, and stuck the key in the ignition. I’d had a nightmare in which the damn thing wouldn’t start and we had both been left standing there sucking our thumbs while armed soldiers surrounded us, but like most nightmares it had faded in the light of day.
I turned the key and the engine immediately fired. I looked over my shoulder at Kate and she stepped up and swung onto the pillion seat. Fortunately, she was wearing pants and a jacket, but I silently casti
gated myself for forgetting to tell her to do exactly that. Another piece of luck. I only hoped I wasn’t using all our luck up at one go.
Kate slid forward on the seat and wrapped her arms around my waist. She tilted her helmet toward mine until the two were touching.
“Can you ride one of these things?” she shouted.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never tried before.”
Whatever Kate had to say to that, if she said anything at all, was lost in the sound of the engine as I accelerated away from the loading dock and out toward the street.
I HAD THOUGHT a lot about the best route to take to Soi Tonson. The most direct way was to turn left and go out to Sukhumvit Road, then make a U-turn and head directly west until we got there. The problem with going that way was that it would make us pretty conspicuous. If they set up roadblocks anywhere, Sukhumvit would be the first place they would do it. It was the artery that carried almost all the traffic moving back and forth between central Bangkok to the EmQuartier area. Of course, they had no way to know where we were headed, but wherever it was, it was a pretty good bet Sukhumvit Road would be the quickest way to get there.
Was there a real risk we would encounter roadblocks? I doubted it. When Prasert’s bodyguards found him in the storage room, there would be complete confusion. Even if Prasert regained consciousness quickly, and I doubted he would, it would take him a few minutes to shake off the cobwebs and begin thinking clearly. The military didn’t have the manpower in place to set up roadblocks so they would have to call on the police to do it. Even with General Prasert screaming at them like he would be, the local cops would still have to pass his demands down through the ranks, find the necessary manpower, and send it to the right places. The Thai police have never been praised by anybody for their proficiency so it would probably take a while to make all that happen.
But it might happen, and I wasn’t taking any chances.
I turned right.
THE NARROW ROAD at the side of EmQuartier led into the maze of little streets and alleyways between Sukhumvit Road and Ploenchit Road, the next major east-west artery about a mile to the north. It jogged to the left about a hundred feet past the loading dock and disappeared beyond the high wall surrounding a large private residence on the soi. Once we covered that hundred feet, we would be lost to sight. If we could cover it before General Prasert’s bodyguards got out to the loading dock and looked around, we would be gone. They would have no idea at all where we were.
Pursuit wasn’t really an issue. The army had no vehicles in place to pursue us, certainly not around the back of the mall where we were, and it would take them a while to find some. Even then, pursuit was pretty much hopeless. The reason people ride bikes in Bangkok is that they can thread their way between the lines of vehicles stuffing up every major roadway in the city and generally keep moving regardless of how bad the traffic might be. A four-wheeled vehicle didn’t stand a chance pursuing a bike in Bangkok. Even if it went full lights and siren, it wouldn’t matter. Bangkok drivers showed exactly as much regard for vehicles with lights and sirens as they did for any other vehicle on the road, which is to say none at all.
We made the jog to the left before anyone emerged onto the loading dock. From there, I headed more or less straight north, dodging from one small street into the next.
Kate rode easy behind me keeping a hand on each side of my waist. She sat upright and didn’t lean against me except in the turns when she pulled tight and leaned as I did. She rode with a natural rhythm. Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Maybe I would ask her sometime where she learned to ride the back of a bike like that. Or maybe I wouldn’t.
Once we saw a police car headed in the direction EmQuartier, but it wasn’t moving with any urgency and that made it seem unlikely an alert had been sounded yet. Regardless, Kate turned her head away, molded herself to my back, and locked her arms tightly around my waist. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for more police cars and ride as close to them as possible.
About ten minutes later we crossed a narrow bridge over one of the few canals in Bangkok that still carried boat traffic and turned west on Ploenchit Road. The traffic was lighter than I expected and there was no sign of any police or military activity. Secure in the near total anonymity provided by our helmets, we were just two riders on one of the hundreds of bikes traveling on Ploenchit Road.
We could have been anybody, but we weren’t just anybody.
I was an American lawyer from Hong Kong who had just beaten the military dictator of Thailand to the ground with the butt of a handgun and snatched the country’s last elected prime minister away from the Thai army to keep them from murdering her. And now she was squeezed against me, her arms wrapped tightly around my waist, riding through Bangkok on the back of my bike.
Looking at it that way, even I was impressed.
THE HEAT WAS rising as it neared midday. Sitting on a bike in the middle of an expanse of concrete surrounded by lumbering buses and trucks belching engine exhaust was as close to visiting one of Dante’s circles of hell as I ever wanted to get. Sweat built up in my hairline until it broke free and rolled down my face. By reflex, I reached a hand up to wipe it off and jammed my thumb into the closed faceplate of my helmet, but I only did that once.
The lack of traffic jams meant we made decent time. We rode under the Expressway, and a little past it I turned left on Soi Chidlom. Five minutes after that I pulled into the driveway of the gallery on Soi Tonson and cut the engine.
I turned my head and rested my helmet against Kate’s.
“Just in case anyone is looking this way,” I said, “don’t take off your helmet until you get inside.”
We slid off the bike and I led Kate to the front door and unlocked it. Inside, I finally pulled off my helmet and Kate did the same, and we both wiped the sweat from our faces. We put the helmets down on a table next to the front door and Kate propped her purse up between them.
“Bathroom’s in there,” I said, pointing to a closed door. “If you want to freshen up.”
“Do I look like I need it?”
I might not understand women very well, but I understand them well enough to pretend I hadn’t heard Kate’s question.
I walked into the kitchen and out the door that led to the parking area. I unlocked the gate from inside, rolled the bike in, and relocked the gate. I pushed the bike all the way to the back and tucked it behind a red Mini the owners left there to use when they were in town. Even if someone climbed the gates and looked inside, the bike would be invisible. I went back through the kitchen door and locked it behind me.
Then I just stood there for a moment.
I had managed it somehow. I had gotten Kate away from her guards and no one knew where we were. No one. Not even Jello or Alisa.
The army would be turning the city upside down looking for Kate, I had no doubt of that, but they couldn’t search every structure in Bangkok, and they had no reason at all to search this one.
Now all we had to do was lay low for a few days, and then evade the entire Thai army to ride out to the airfield where Ike’s airplane was waiting to fly us out of the country.
Piece of cake, huh?
WHEN I GOT back to the living room, Kate was standing at one of the bookshelves browsing through Laura’s titles. She had washed the sweat off her face and brushed out her hair, and I thought she looked terrific.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“It used to be an art gallery. The owner is a friend of mine. She lives in New York most of the time now and I asked to stay here for a few days.”
Kate gave me a half smile and raised one eyebrow a bit.
“A good friend?” she asked. “A very good friend?”
“Not that good.”
“So you say.”
Kate took a quick tour around the living room, looking at the paintings and examining the sculptures.
“The real gallery was in a separate section over there,” I said, poin
ting to where the gallery space sat empty on the other side of the black gravel courtyard. “This part is the residence. There’s a living room, dining room, and kitchen on this level, three bedrooms on the second floor, and a roof garden above that.”
“Do I know your friend?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Her name’s Laura Grant now. I don’t remember what her name was before she got married.”
“Does Laura know I’m here?”
“All she knows is that I’m staying here for a few days. The housekeeper has gone to the provinces for Songkran. I didn’t even tell Jello or Alisa about this place. No one in the world knows where you are right now.”
“Is the bike Laura’s, too?”
“No, Alisa brought it to me at the Sheraton with the other things I asked for.”
“The other things?”
“Some clothes for you and a passport,” I said pointing to the couch where I had stacked her clothes and left the Canadian passport lying on top of them. “I put everything over there.”
Kate’s eyes shifted to where I had put her clothes, then to where I put my own clothes on the opposite couch. I thought I saw a slight smile slide across her face, but I might have been mistaken.
“Did you bring your telephone?” I asked her.
“I only brought the burner you gave me. Isn’t that what I was supposed to do?”
“It was, but could I have it now?”
Kate got the phone out of her purse and handed it to me. I removed the SIM card and cracked it into four pieces, and then I took the phone into the kitchen and beat it to death with an iron frying pan. Scooping up the debris, I dumped everything in the trash.
When I returned to the living room, Kate was sitting on the couch. I took the extra burner phone out of my duffel and gave it to her.
“Keep this with you. I can’t imagine you’ll need it since I’m not going to let you out of my sight until we’re out of the country, but… well, just in case something weird happens.”