For the Dead

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Tell me.”

  “We’ll sit at the table,” Nguyen says, not bothering to make it sound like an invitation. A round table stands at the corner of the floor-to-ceiling windows that wall half of the living room. Beside it are four carved wooden chairs whose blue silk-covered seats have been sliced open. This was where Rafferty sat the first time he came here, eight or nine weeks ago, asking Nguyen to side with him in a war with a former American operative who had done a lot of damage in Vietnam. Nguyen had remained neutral.

  Nguyen chooses a chair with its back touching the window while Rafferty, who’s never been happy with heights, takes the one farthest away. Nguyen begins to talk even before Rafferty is seated. “My wife, as you know, has been ill for a long time. I tell you this again because it is related to what happened here this morning. Anh Duong—Andrew—and I took her to her doctor this morning at ten. That’s the only time this apartment has been empty since we took her to that same doctor four weeks ago. It’s a monthly appointment.”

  Rafferty says, “Maybe they were watching.”

  A sideways tilt of the head that’s clearly not intended to express agreement. “Maybe. But I doubt it. I doubt it because the doormen say they saw nothing while we were gone. No one, they say, came in and went up to this floor. And the video surveillance disks are missing.”

  Rafferty says, “Ahhh, shit.”

  One of the hard-eyed guys makes a sound like a stopped-up snort.

  “Chinh, Homer,” Nguyen says. “Go finish in Anh Duong’s room.” He’s speaking English, probably for Rafferty’s sake.

  When they’ve left, Rafferty says, “Homer?”

  “His mother is a Classics scholar. He has a brother named Virgil.”

  “Okay,” Rafferty says. “Only cops could operate with this kind of impunity. Scare your doormen into calling them when you leave, walk away with the video. Is the appointment always the same day?”

  “First Monday of every month.”

  “And you were gone—?”

  “A little more than two and a half hours. Plenty of time for this kind of search. If they’d wanted to be subtle it might have taken longer.”

  “But they didn’t care whether they were subtle.”

  “No, they didn’t,” Nguyen says tightly. “And that was one of their mistakes.”

  “One?”

  “The other was to chase Miaow with a knife. Destroying this apartment tells me they don’t think they can be touched. Taking a knife to your daughter tells me that they would kill my son, too. And before we go any further, I want to say something personal. It’s clear to me now that Miaow saved Andrew’s life.” He’s sitting bolt upright in the shredded chair, his knees apart, and now he dips his head slightly. “I owe your daughter my thanks.”

  “I’ll pass them along.”

  “I’ll tell her myself. If you’ll do what I suggest, I’ll have lots of opportunity.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m moving Andrew and his mother into the embassy. Immediately. We would be honored to host Mrs. Rafferty and Miaow, too.”

  Rafferty is taken so off-guard it takes him a moment to make sense of it. He says, “The embassy,” and then he laughs.

  Nguyen doesn’t laugh, but he looks like he remembers having laughed once, which is as close as Rafferty has seen him get. “Exactly,” he says. “The Embassy is Vietnam. The Thai police have no jurisdiction there. They can wipe themselves on their badges.”

  “It’s perfect.”

  Nguyen says, “It’s going to throw Andrew and Miaow together.”

  “They’ll both survive.”

  “It is important to me, Mr. Rafferty, that my son marries a Vietnamese girl.”

  “Mr. Nguyen—”

  “Captain. Captain Nguyen.”

  “Sorry. Captain Nguyen. And it’s important to me that my daughter falls in love with someone who deserves her.”

  Nguyen’s mouth tightens.

  “Nothing personal,” Rafferty says, “not any more than the way you feel about Miaow is personal.”

  “We have responsibilities,” Nguyen says, “filial and family responsibilities. As an only son, Andrew’s is to honor his family. To do that, he’ll have to marry a Vietnamese girl. This is something he needs to learn now, while he still does what he’s told.”

  “You may be right,” Rafferty says, making no effort to sound like he means it. “He’s your kid. But I’ll tell you what. The cops made three mistakes. The third one was pulling this shit in the week my wife discovered she’s pregnant.”

  Whatever Nguyen is going to say, he bites it back when one of the hard-eyed men, Homer or Chinh, comes back in, followed by Andrew, who gives Rafferty a double-take and says, “Hello, Mr. Rafferty.”

  “Hey, Andrew. How you handling this?”

  “I don’t know. What’s my choice? Is Miaow all right?”

  “She’s fine. She’s got a cop—one of the good ones—babysitting her right now.”

  “Nothing more,” Chinh or Homer says, and the other one comes in, too.

  “There isn’t anything more,” Andrew says with a kind of condensed bitterness. “They got everything.”

  “Everything what?” Rafferty asks.

  “Every computer and peripheral in the apartment,” Nguyen says. “Mine, too, which is causing some excitement at the embassy.”

  “But it’s Andrew’s they were after,” Rafferty says.

  “Of course,” Nguyen says. “They took everything he could conceivably have used to copy or store the information from that phone.”

  “All of it?” Rafferty says.

  “All of it,” Nguyen says.

  “Andrew,” Rafferty says. “Did they get all of it?”

  Something glimmers in Andrew’s eye, and then it’s gone. He says, “Not unless they closed down Google.”

  His father says, “Google?”

  “On the way home from buying the phone,” Andrew says, his eyes watching for his father’s reaction, “while Miaow was being carsick, I emailed everything to myself.”

  THANOM PUTS THE phone down and sees that the handset is smeared with his sweat.

  He feels as though the back wall of his office, three stories in the air, has just collapsed, and two of the legs of his chair are dangling twenty meters above the street. His life is over.

  He suddenly remembers the twinge of guilt he’d felt about implicating Arthit, and a hot wave of shame rises up to choke him. Not Arthit, he thinks. Him.

  It’s been him all along.

  For years, they’ve been working on this. This is a ten-year plan, one the Chinese government would envy. It must have been put into place practically the day he received the promotion that put him in charge of Sawat.

  Oh, no, he thinks. The promotion. The high point of his career. The only time his wife ever expressed any pride in him. For her, the marriage had been one long decline into unbroken disappointment until he was promoted. She had said, “Isn’t this a nice surprise?” He hadn’t told her exactly how surprised he was.

  There had been two men between him and the desk at which he now sits, two people who were more likely choices than he, who could have argued that they were more deserving than he, who could have made a fuss, in fact, about the chain of command. And hadn’t.

  Both of them have done very nicely for themselves, he realizes, both of them have moved up and sideways, like the knight in chess. Like a piece of choreography.

  And he’d been so complacent, so smug, so secure that his worth had been recognized and rewarded at long last. His career, which had begun slowly, had finally gotten the traction he deserved. His superiors had recognized him for what he was.

  A fall guy.

  The bank account had been opened about a month after he was promoted. Sawat was already active by then. The deposits had been cashier’s checks and money orders, sometimes cash. They had been deposited by someone whose identification proclaimed him to be a police captain named Sawat.

  There h
ad even been occasional withdrawals, made by someone using his, Thanom’s, name, just for verisimilitude.

  It was so nicely designed, such a tight fit, he could almost respect it.

  The person who made the deposits was in police uniform, unlikely to have been scrutinized by a low-ranking bank employee. There was some possibility, Arundee had acknowledged, in response to Thanom’s frantic demand, that at some point the identification of the person who made the withdrawals might have been scanned and copied, but probably not. He was, after all, a police officer, and the police …

  But he would look to see whether anything was there.

  Hooked and landed, Thanom thinks. All they need to do is cook him, and they can do that any time they get hungry.

  The Dancer. He knows some people in the department call him the Dancer. He’d taken a kind of pride in it, but that was when he thought he’d been leading. Now that he knows different, now that he knows he’s been maneuvered, one graceful step at a time, to the edge of a cliff, he feels the lack of affection the nickname implies. He has no allies.

  There must be someone he can trust. There must be someone with whom he can discuss this. There must be someone who can—

  His mind stops, absolutely blank, until he can finish the thought. There must be someone who can help.

  He jumps two inches straight up as the comm box on his desk buzzes. He pushes the button, and Taan says, “On line one, sir. It’s Lieutenant-Colonel Arthit.”

  32

  Teams

  “I CLEARED THE browser on the phone,” Andrew says. “Right after I sent the pictures to myself.” He’s sitting at the keyboard in an Internet cafe, and his father, Rafferty, Homer, and Chinh are gathered around him as though he were about to do a trick, which, Rafferty thinks, isn’t completely inaccurate.

  “But the browsing history can probably be unerased, right?” Rafferty says. “Miaow talks about how you can’t really erase much of anything.”

  “Well, sure. I mean, what I did on the phone wouldn’t stand up to anyone who knew what he was doing. But I sent them to a, a—” He glances uneasily at his father, licks his lips, and plunges in. “A secret account. It doesn’t have my name connected with it anywhere.”

  Nguyen says, “How many of these do you have?”

  “Just one,” Andrew says with total, unblemished sincerity, wide eyes and everything.

  “Why do you need one?”

  “Everything you do online,” Andrew says, a bit hurriedly, “it’s like skywriting. Nothing is secret. I mean, confidential. Kids at school can get through most firewalls.”

  “What’s the name on the account?” Rafferty asks, mostly to back Nguyen off.

  “It’s, uh, 13catlover@gmail.com.”

  “Catlover,” Rafferty says. Andrew goes fire-engine red. “Bet I can guess the password.”

  “You probably can,” Andrew says without moving his teeth at all.

  “Well, let’s take a look.”

  Andrew brings up Gmail. The password displays in asterisks on the screen as he types it, but Rafferty sees him hit the M, I and A keys before Andrew glances up and catches him. Andrew says, “Do you mind?”

  Rafferty says, “I wouldn’t be a kid again for anything.”

  Either Homer or Chinh says, “Me neither.”

  Nguyen silences them with a glance, and all of them go back to watching Andrew. In about eight seconds he sits back and says, “There’s the download.”

  “Only one?” Nguyen says. “I thought there were a lot of them.”

  “I zipped it,” Andrew says. “I grabbed an online utility and zipped it. And it’s got a password of its own, so even if someone found it, they’d have to work to see what it is.”

  Nguyen says, and he’s almost smiling, “What password?”

  “Julie.” Andrew waits, but no one asks.

  “After the character in Small Town,” Rafferty says.

  Andrew mutters something that could just possibly be, “Shit.”

  His father says, “Anh Duong.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Andrew says. He sticks a thumb drive into a USB port and copies the zipped file.

  “Here’s a thought,” Rafferty says, a bit ashamed of himself. “You’re our tech guy, and all your stuff just got pounded. How about we go buy you a new laptop? It was a Mac, right?”

  Andrew’s head snaps around, his eyes wide behind his glasses. “I’ll need some image processing software.”

  “You got it.”

  “And a, uh, a new iPhone.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Mr. Rafferty,” Nguyen says.

  “It’s my daughter they went after. Anyway, the kid needs a phone.”

  “Fifty-fifty,” Nguyen says. His eyes flick to Homer and Chinh, and then come back. “Since we seem to be a team.”

  Rafferty says, “A team.”

  Over him, Andrew says, “MBK Mall, you know, Mah Boon Krong. They’ve got competing shops.” He pulls out the thumb drive, clears the browser, and gets up. “Top of the line,” he says.

  Rafferty says, “Of course. What else?”

  “We can’t stay on the defensive,” Nguyen says. “That’s what they’re expecting.”

  Rafferty says, “Great.” He extends his arm and sights down it. “Aim and ignite.”

  THE DESK BETWEEN Arthit and Thanom could be a mile wide and a mile deep. They regard each other across it like Korean soldiers on opposite sides of the thirty-eighth parallel. Coffee cools untouched in front of them.

  Thanom moves things around on his desk until they satisfy him. “You called me,” he says.

  “And I’m having second thoughts.” Arthit picks up his cup, blows on the coffee, and puts it down again. He sits back in his chair and regards Thanom for so long that the other man lowers his gaze. Arthit can smell his superior even over the scorch of the coffee, can see the wet cloth beneath his arms.

  “This is unacceptable,” Thanom says. He blinks a couple of times, tantamount to a cry for help. “Just tell me what you found.”

  Arthit tastes the coffee and glares at it. Putting it down again, he says, “We’ve reached a tipping point.” He uses the English expression.

  Thanom shakes his head as though he’s being swarmed by gnats. “We’ve what? What’s a tipping point?”

  “We both know,” Arthit says, “that this thing could bite us in half.”

  Studying the surface of his desk, Thanom says, “Don’t you trust me?”

  “Of course not.”

  Thanom says, “Ah.”

  “And you don’t trust me.”

  “So,” Thanom says. “How do we start?”

  “With a goal,” Arthit says. “What do you want out of this?”

  “To handle the case properly,” Thanom says. “And to—to protect the department.”

  Arthit says, “Right.” He looks at his wristwatch and pushes his chair back.

  “I want to survive,” Thanom says, biting the words off.

  Arthit says, “Now we’re getting somewhere.” He picks up his coffee, starts to sip it, and puts it back down. He says, “Can you get your pet dragon to—”

  “Taan,” Thanom says into his intercom, “get us a pot of fresh coffee and two clean cups.” He snaps off the intercom and sits back, hunching his shoulders practically up to his ears. He swivels his spine right and left and then says, “It’s me.”

  Arthit says, “I thought it might be.”

  “I’m the sacrifice. Here’s how dumb I was. They told me it was you, and I believed them.”

  “Did you argue with them?”

  Thanom shakes his head.

  “Well,” Arthit says, “I was pretty sure it was you, and I didn’t worry about it much, either. They told you? They who?”

  Thanom points at the ceiling and then says, “Higher.”

  “Name.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  Thanom says, “Once I tell you that, what have I got?”

  “What did
you have when I walked in?”

  “A few … moves held in reserve.” He wipes his face with an open palm.

  Arthit lets it pass. “So they told you it was me and now you know it’s you. So tell me the truth. Was it?”

  “No.” The word hangs over the table as though it’s tethered there, and then Arthit nods.

  “I believe you.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” Thanom says, “why do you believe me?”

  “You’re not that stupid. You might never be policeman of the year, but you’re not stupid.”

  “The people involved in this are not stupid.”

  “Up there?” Arthit points at the ceiling. “They can be as stupid as they want. They’re untouchable. How do you know you’re it?”

  Thanom gazes at the center of Arthit’s chest for a moment, and then closes his eyes. “They’ve been building a bank account in my name. For years.” He opens his eyes, looks at Arthit, and blots his upper lip with his cuff. “Opened by someone in police uniform, using identification that said he was me. With deposits made by someone else in uniform with identification that said he was Sawat.”

  “How much money?”

  Thanom takes a deep breath and says, “At the moment, almost two million baht.”

  “Starting when?”

  “About ten years ago. When Sawat was active.”

  “When did they stop?”

  “Six months ago.”

  Arthit says, “Two million. They were serious.”

  “It feels serious to me,” Thanom says.

  “How frequent were the deposits?”

  “Months apart. Why?”

  “How do you know it was two men?”

  “How do I know what was two men?”

  “The one who opened the account and the one who made the deposits. How do you know it wasn’t just one man?”

  Thanom says, “Stands to reason.”

  “Not really. Someone opens the account in, say, February. Then, in April or May, he comes back with new ID, gets in a different line, and makes a deposit. Or uses different branches for deposits and withdrawals.”