Paying Back Jack

by Christopher G. Moore

  The marines had arrived along with a couple of thousand American military personnel who were joining hands with the Thais and a handful of Singaporeans, Malaysians, and Indonesians to squeeze some discipline and toughness into the Cobra Gold exercise, the annual military training exercise run by the Thais and Americans. Live-fire exercises, find-the-terrorist exercises, training exercises; all designed to keep men in condition for their mission. Tracer and Jarrett had driven to Pattaya and hooked up with some lifters, Tracer’s old friends from his time in the service, guys senior enough to come into town as part of the advance detail. There were other private security contractors like them mixing in, looking for recruits, talking about the situation in Baghdad and the bad old days of Desert Storm. That storm had left the desert and pretty much spread everywhere. That much everyone agreed on as they bought each other rounds of drinks and waited to crank up one more Cobra Gold exercise.

  Jarrett had bowed out of the festivities because he had stuff to do on the job in Bangkok. That was Jarrett code that meant some woman had got his attention. Tracer knew exactly who the woman was, some beekeeper’s daughter. And the other reason had to do with securing a couple of weapons, including a .308 sniper’s rifle—lightweight, good range, reliable, and efficient for work in a big city. There wasn’t a better companion for a sniper in Bangkok. Jarrett had asked for that sniper rifle because he knew Mooney could deliver. He’d take the rifle out of inventory and not leave any record that it was gone.

  Tracer checked the time. He’d bought his Rolex at the duty-free shop in Dubai on the way to Bangkok. He was proud of that watch. It made clocking the time a pleasure. Two hours had passed since he’d parked his car in the basement of the shopping mall. He walked along Beach Road. Crowds pushed down the narrow corridor, negotiating rows of parked motorcycles and vendor tables spilling onto the road, stacked with bikinis, brass knuckles, and switchblade knives. Tracer worked his way through the knots of tourists in sandals and shorts, picking at their sunburns and getting grabbed by Indian tailors moving as fast as sand-trap spiders.

  He turned down a small soi rimmed with food stalls and restaurants, parked motorcycles, sleeping dogs, and yings squatting on plastic stools, using their hands to eat som tam and smoking cigarettes. He ignored a couple of young touts who stood in front of the go-go bars. They had short hair and sunglasses and looked like they worked out, playing the part of tough guy from some pirated movie they’d seen. Finally he reached the end of the narrow lane. He stopped in front of the bar with a red and green neon dragon breathing fire and walked in. It was one of those lonely bars that didn’t bring in enough money to pay for a door tout and not much cash for the yings, either, who danced for drinks and the hope of an early bar fine. The ramshackle door and concrete step in front had all the indications of the kind of place Mooney would choose. That fact was soon enough established as Tracer pushed back the beaded curtain and glanced around.

  Two yings leaned against chrome poles, looking at their nails and yawning. Over in the corner, Mooney sat erect, hands on the table, staring at the stage. Tracer shook his head, thinking the career sergeant looked more edgy than the last time he’d seen him under fire. He gave it a couple of minutes until Mooney saw him leaning against the back wall. It was no good sneaking up on a man like Mooney. They’d done business before, during the Gulf War and afterwards, as if they were doomed to keep a fire alive that Mooney, if he had his way, would have doused a long time ago. Sometimes there’s no choice in life, thought Tracer, and you keep on dealing with people you knew a long time ago because those are the only people you can trust. They both knew that Mooney was looking to take retirement from the army and be hired by Colonel Waters’s private security company. That would have made them coworkers. Mooney caught his eye and waved him over.

  Tracer sat down and ordered fresh orange juice in a tall glass with no ice. Mooney had been drinking Singha beer. A black man in a tailored shirt and trousers with expensive Italian shoes who drank fresh orange juice at the deadest bar in Pattaya was definitely a man who had some kind of official business. Still, Tracer played it cool with Mooney. History had taught him there was no other way, unless you wanted trouble.

  “You look like a live-bait shop owner who just heard they’re gonna dam the creek ten miles upriver,” said Tracer.

  “It’s the bullshit I don’t like,” said Mooney. He lifted the Singha bottle and took a long swig, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Who does?”

  “No one’s cut an order on this thing. It’s all verbal. They say, ‘Mooney, this is a stealth exercise. You’re team leader.’ Only they leave out the part that there ain’t anyone else on the team. Unless it’s you, and brother, you don’t count as a player on my team. And Jarrett, he didn’t even bother to show up. What the fuck is that?”

  “You’ll be coming over to the company soon enough. Think about the future.”

  “You’re talking to me like I talk to a bar girl,” said Mooney.

  “We’re all playing ball, Mooney. Jarrett, me, you. You are part of the team.”

  “I’ve had Blackwater talking to me, too. Waters ain’t the only game out there.”

  “I know that. But you work with people you know. Whom do you know at Blackwater?”

  Mooney drank again, draining the bottle. He waved the empty at a dek-serve, the Thai name for a ying who served customer drinks but didn’t dance, and she scurried away for a fresh beer. “I ask myself, ‘How is this building up any expertise if I’m working alone?’ But I don’t come up with any answer. You got one, Tracer?”

  Tracer smiled, sipped the orange juice, knowing there was no point taking Mooney’s bitching to heart. “Waters says it’s because you’re good. You’re the man. You get the job done. No complications.”

  Mooney shrugged. “Something like that.” Really, Mooney liked to hear that. He did get things done. Finding out how to move weapons, ammo, supplies, and men without paperwork was a lost art. Mooney was a craftsman.

  “It’s what you do.”

  “Exactly what is it that I do?”

  They both looked at the yings on the stage, who were practicing for a zombie audition.

  “Hide stuff without anyone seeing you. I’d say that’s a skill.”

  “Not much of a skill around my wife.” Mooney had that married-to-the-Corps, married-to-the-old-lady-for-life look about him.

  “Ain’t any man who’s any good at hiding shit from his wife. You know what I’m saying.”

  Tracer got out his wallet to pay for his drink. Mooney took away his chit cup and waved off the money. “Take care of yourself. Don’t forget one thing?”

  Trace gave him a what-could-that-possibly-be look.

  “Kate comes back undamaged in three days. Otherwise …”

  “Man, there is no otherwise. We’re gonna bring her back. Promise.”

  Even in the dark bar, Tracer saw Mooney’s eyes roll. Why do white boys always come up with names like Kate for their boats and airplanes? He didn’t begin to have an answer.

  A week earlier, Mooney had gotten a phone call from his old commanding officer, who’d given no details about the counter-intelligence operation Mooney was being asked to assist. Not that he expected any information about the mission; in fact, he didn’t want to know. Knowledge was highly overrated in the military. Colonel Waters had called in a favor with a man still working inside and gotten Mooney assigned to the Cobra Gold exercise as a weapons specialist. Waters had been shuttling on the company’s expense account that covered Algeria to Zimbabwe and any other hot spot up or down the alphabet. If someone decided there was a place of interest vital to America, sooner or later Colonel Waters showed up to take a risk survey. That was what Logistic Risk Assessment Services, which everyone called LRAS, was on the books to do; the extra services provided were off the books. Waters worked on the extra services side of LRAS where, among other duties, he assembled his boots on the ground, recruited the right team of experts and briefe
d them on their off-the-book assignments.

  Two years ago, a couple of MBAs, IT, and logistics specialists at LRAS had been brought in to manage, and the old team was put out to pasture. It was a purge passed off as a generational change. Waters had survived at LRAS but in the first few months after the internal coup, the new team had buried him under paperwork. It didn’t take long for the new management to figure out that they needed Waters. By that time, Waters smiled and returned to his paperwork. He’d already put in place an inside group for the special operations assignments that were independent from the suits. Creating a secret team within the company had been his one small victory in the corporate wars.

  A month before Cobra Gold, Tracer had been in Kabul when he’d gotten a call in the middle of the night. “I might have something for you and Jarrett. It’s in Bangkok,” said Colonel Waters over a secure line. “You want it?” He’d given Tracer a name and hung up.

  The next morning Tracer had told Jarrett about the phone call, but Jarrett had just shrugged. They were in a Humvee on the way to the airport, working a security detail for an assistant secretary of state who was seated in the back wearing a vest and helmet. He was going home.

  “Bangkok,” Tracer said. “Our deal is we get ten days’ leave. No pay deduction. We split forty grand. I told him I liked it but I’d ask you.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “A bad guy needs taking down.”

  Jarrett nodded his head. “That’s what we do.”

  Three days later they were in Bangkok inside a bar, yings dancing. Jarrett had blinked as he looked at the naked bodies. Every so often a flash of their position at the airport in Kabul cross-wired through his consciousness. Tracer shook his head, let out a low whistle, and slapped his big hand against his thigh as one of the skinny yings smiled at Jarrett.

  “You need a fat mama with some shakin’ going on. That’s what you need, Jarrett. A woman needs some meat stickin’ to her bones.”

  “Tracer, you ought to be living in Samoa.”

  “I want a .308 for city work.” Tracer hadn’t discussed a backup rifle as part of the shopping list with Waters. The fine details were left to him and Jarrett to work out with Mooney.

  Jarrett looked away from the stage. The ex-football player might have passed for a Samoan in the half-darkness of the bar. “How do we get the weapon?” Tracer smiled, shaking his head.

  “He’s got it worked out with Mooney.”

  “Cobra Gold Mooney.”

  “Mooney is Waters’s man. Six months and he’ll be working for LRAS.”

  “Tell Waters I want a night scope, too.”

  Tracer nodded. “I already did that. And a silencer. And a tripod. Twenty rounds should do it.”

  “One shot, one kill,” said Jarrett.

  Jarrett stared straight ahead, his eyes no longer focusing on the yings. He said nothing through two songs. This was Jarrett’s way of thinking through his options and deciding there weren’t any real ones on the table—or on the stage, for that matter, or just about anywhere one looked in the world. Tracer understood this about his partner. The man was giving himself some thinking time. Staring at the yings without looking at them, as if some Zen answer could be found in the way they moved onstage.

  “He can find one, for sure?”

  “They’ve come as part of Cobra Gold. Mooney delivers the rifle, and then three days later we do the job, return the rifle, and go back to Kabul. And everyone’s happy.”

  Jarrett nodded. “Who’s the target?”

  Tracer shrugged. “The asshole who murdered Casey’s son a couple of years back.”

  “I thought Casey’d taken care of that himself,” said Jarrett.

  “Casey’s working in Bangkok. He can’t do something where he works.”

  “We do that all the time,” said Jarrett.

  “That’s different. What we do in Baghdad, Kabul, or the other shitholes doesn’t necessarily work in places like Bangkok. There are political considerations.”

  “That sounds like Waters talking.”

  Jarrett had nailed it straight through. Those had been Colonel Waters’s words. Casey had been transferred to Bangkok a couple of years earlier. Everyone in Baghdad who knew Casey thought he’d kill the man who’d murdered his son. When the weeks drifted into months and the months into a year, it looked like Casey had gone soft and had become meek, Christian-like in his forgiveness. Casey had been assigned along with six other private security contractors to work in a prison in Baghdad. The transfer was a promotion and more money. Everyone who knew him, including Jarrett and Tracer, thought Casey had thrown himself into his work and was working his way through his son’s death.

  “Waters couldn’t say much on the phone. He was in Bogotá.”

  Jarrett shot him a frown.

  “Hand on my heart,” said Tracer.

  “Man, you ain’t got no heart. Everyone who knows you knows that. And I thought he hated Colombia.”

  “It ain’t written anywhere they send you to the place you wanna go.”

  That much Jarrett agreed with. Even legends like the Colonel had bosses who cut them orders on the basis of certain skills in the field. Waters once said he’d rather be surrounded by Taliban than a squad of MBAs. He worked for LRAS, but he wasn’t the typical company man; he was a holdover from the old corporate culture, when veterans had run the management. Waters blamed himself for not having the right business skills to make the transition as a corporate team player. He said he’d wasted his time learning to speak fluent Spanish rather than balance sheets. It made him an asset in Latin America but a liability to the bottom line. Once during the Gulf War, Colonel Waters, then a captain, had told Tracer that his one regret was that he hadn’t studied Swedish. Six-foot blue-eyed blondes with legs as long as the New Jersey Turnpike had a powerful pull on him.

  FIVE

  WHO WAS THE WOMAN who fell to her death from the hotel? What was your relationship with her? How long have you known her? Why did she come to your room? Did you have a fight?

  That was the string of questions asked by a couple of cops, though one officer did most of the talking. The interrogation started at the front desk of the hotel. It continued in the lobby, out into the street where they showed him the body, and back in his room. Maybe they thought they could find an inconsistency in his answers. They pounded away as if he were guilty of a crime. The main policeman interrogating Calvino spoke good English. He wrote notes as Calvino gave the same answers to the same questions he’d been asked over and over until his phone rang again. Colonel Pratt was on the line. It was his turn to ask the questions.

  “Who was she, Vincent?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  “She didn’t tell me her name.”

  “But you knew her?”

  “She was lighting incense sticks in front of the spirit house outside the hotel when I arrived. A seagull startled her and she looked around and smiled. I smiled back. Does that sound like an intimate relationship?”

  “Vincent, what happened is disturbing.”

  “I’m not real happy about it either. I’m supposed to be relaxing, having fun. The idea was to keep away from Apichart’s backup team.”

  The thought had crossed Colonel Pratt’s mind that Apichart might have had something to do with the woman falling off a balcony, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t make the connection work. Apichart would have had no idea where Calvino had gone. Only the General and Ratana had known the name of the hotel.

  “I’ll drive to Pattaya tomorrow morning.”

  “Pratt, the cops are talking about putting me in jail. Someone whispered fifty thousand baht would keep me out.”

  There was a moment of silence. Someone had put the squeeze on Calvino, and the Colonel took that as a direct slap in his face and in the General’s as well. “Don’t pay anyone anything,” he said.

  “What happened has got nothing to do with Apichart and nothing to do with me,” Calvino said. “People fall off balconies all the time in Pat
taya. You read the newspapers.” He looked around the room filled with uniformed cops.

  “Those are depressed farangs, Vincent. Not young Thai women.”

  The Colonel had a point. The ying Calvino had seen at the spirit house had been in her prime. She’d had everything to live for.

  “I don’t want to spend the night in jail. I wanna pay the fifty grand.”

  Colonel Pratt hadn’t had time to phone General Yosaporn about what had happened in Pattaya. The General’s friend, after all, owned the hotel. He’d have to tell him before the owner phoned.

  Ratana had warned Calvino about the danger of using a coffin to collect the rent, and now her words rang in his ears: This is bad luck. With the body count already at three, he was starting to doubt himself.

  “You’re not going to jail. Let me work on it,” said Pratt, ending the call. He had sounded weary, upset, and yet resigned to figuring out how to keep Calvino out of jail and in his room. It couldn’t be the farang way; that never worked. It had to be a middle path, a compromise. Fifty thousand was a starting position, leaving room for negotiations. After questioning Calvino, they’d think he would understand that the figure was the opening bid. It was now Pratt’s turn to negotiate a reduction, closer to the price reserved for Thais. But a farang, now and again, given the right connections, had ways of approaching the same results.

  In the hours after the woman’s death, Calvino’s Pattaya vacation had ended with all the warning of a sunburn on an overcast day. Sitting in his room, waiting for Pratt to make a deal, he was stuck between the world of freedom and the world of jail. None of the police had been able to decide what to do with him. That was a good sign; they were cautious, firm, and suspicious. After they’d found out General Yosaporn had personally paid for Calvino’s room, their mood changed. The thermostat of their belligerence toward a farang started to drop. An hour later, one of the officers informed Calvino that he was to remain in his room, and a couple of police guards would be posted outside the door. “I wanna go out for a walk on the beach. I need some fresh air, you know what I’m saying?”