by Jake Needham
“And what did I do with all this money I’m supposed to have taken?”
“Ah, Jack…” Barry spread his hands in front of him in the classic gesture of helplessness. “I only wish I knew. If I did, honest banker that I am, I’d send the information straight to the Chinese who were supposed to get the funds in the first place. You were just too smart for me.”
And that was when I started to laugh.
Barry looked puzzled. He figured I ought to be pissing myself right about then, certainly oozing some heavy sweat at the very least, but I wasn’t. I was sitting there laughing at him.
“Laugh if you want, Jack, but I hear both the Burmese and the Chinese are looking all over for their money. And they’re looking for you.”
I sat and shook my head. This was too good to be true.
“How much did you get?” I asked him. “How much did I get?’
“Nearly $50,000,000.”
I knew I might never get another moment like this again if I lived forever.
“Actually, it wasn’t quite that much, was it, Barry? It was more like $43,600,000. Plus change.”
I stared Barry straight in the eyes and relished every second of the silence that followed. He tried briefly to look unperturbed, but the effort was a dead loss.
“How the hell did you know that?” he snapped.
I could see the fear. Barry had lost control somehow. He didn’t know why or how, and that had scared the hell out of him. Slamming him right then was like slugging a drunk, but I did it anyway. I continued to stare straight into his wide black eyes and I swung from my heels.
“The money you stole was going to China all right, Barry, but it didn’t belong to any Burmese drug producers and it wasn’t meant for building heroin refineries in China. It was a CIA slush fund. It was bribe money the CIA was laundering to keep their Chinese networks going.”
Barry went completely white. I had never seen anyone go white before and I had always thought the expression to be mostly poetic license; but it wasn’t, and he did.
“Bullshit!” he sputtered.
For a moment Barry appeared to be fumbling for some even more forceful way to put his thoughts, but if that’s what he was doing, he was spectacularly unsuccessful.
“Bullshit!” he sputtered again, spittle accumulating at the corners of his mouth.
This time he pointed a finger at me, although I wasn’t quite sure what he thought that added to his point of view.
“Makes no difference to me if you believe it,” I said and tossed out my most ingratiating smile. “My ass isn’t hanging out here.”
“The hell it isn’t!” Barry jutted out his chin and I could hear his breathing accelerate. “It doesn’t matter whose money it really was. Whoever it is, they still think you’ve got it. You’re still the patty in this burger, old buddy.”
I shook my head. “How do you think I knew the exact amount of money you had taken, Barry? A guy connected to the Agency gave me the number.” And then I leaned in and added my coldest smile. “And he told me because the Agency already knew I didn’t have their money.”
Barry made a disdainful noise, but I could almost hear him thinking.
“Then why are they still on your ass, shithead?” he snapped after a moment.
“Because they want something else from me, Barry.”
“What the fuck could they want that’s worth more to them than $43,000,000?”
And there it was. We had come to the bottom line.
I smiled broadly when I answered.
“You, Barry. They want you.”
Right in front of me I saw Barry Gale deflate. Like an old balloon man slowly losing air, his arms contracted, followed by his legs, then his shoulders pulled back somewhere into his neck and he crumpled slowly into his red leather wing chair.
“That’s why I went through all that nonsense to get here without being followed. I wanted to hear your side of the story before I made up my mind what to do.” I started to laugh again in spite of myself. “Man, oh man. I can’t believe it. You’re even dumber than the spooks.”
Barry watched me as if I was far away and needed magnification. His eyes shifted back and forth and his jaw worked. He leaned forward in his chair like he was about to rise, but then he shifted his weight and sat back again. He crossed and uncrossed his legs.
Then an expression like release appeared on Barry’s face and I felt a shift in the air. All at once he looked like a man who had just made the pleasing discovery that the law of gravity didn’t apply to him.
“Is the money really the CIA’s?” he asked in a voice so soft and controlled that it startled me after his screaming fit.
“That’s what they told me. All $43,600,000 of it.”
“I don’t know. That doesn’t sound right to me.”
“Then what do you think the truth is, Barry?
“Shoot, I don’t know, Jack. The truth is a slippery business sometimes.” Barry took a deep breath and looked away. “What do you figure it’s going to cost me to fix all this, Jack?”
“I don’t know, Barry. I’m not really the guy to ask. You probably ought to talk to the spooks about that when they show up here, but I’ll bet they can be real hard asses when they find out that some tin-pot pimp for a bunch of Russian mobsters scammed them.”
Barry looked no more concerned than if we were negotiating the purchase of a car and I had suggested a price in which he was just slightly disappointed.
“So what do you do now, Jack?” Barry crossed his legs and leaned back, like a man making social chitchat without a care in the world. “You go back to Bangkok and you meet the Agency guys you know, I suppose, and you tell them…”
Barry stopped talking and seemed to search hard for a sensible answer to his own question.
“What do you tell them, Jack?”
Is that a trick question?
“I’ll probably tell them what happened to their money and where they can find you.”
“And then you think they’ll just let you walk away? You think after that you can just go back to teaching and they’ll forget all about you?”
I said nothing and Barry shaped his face into an expression of incredulity.
“Who do you think killed Howard and Dollar, Jack?”
Barry shook his head sadly like I had just missed the last question in the lightning round and he could hardly believe my lousy luck.
“You think they had something to do with setting up this deal and I whacked Dollar and Howard so they wouldn’t tell anyone about it? Is that what you think, Jack?”
“Something like that.”
Barry shook his head some more in mock amazement at my naïveté.
“The CIA killed them both, Jack.”
“Give me a break, Barry. If you really think you can sell me that, you’ve been watching way too much TV.”
“Think about it. Why would anybody have been after Dollar and Howard? To find out where the money really went. I already knew where the money really went, Jack. It was the CIA that didn’t know. They were the ones after Dollar and Howard. Not me.”
“I can’t see that, Barry,” I said.
But I could.
Barry was right. He didn’t have to look for the money. He already knew where it was.
“So, the way I’m looking at this thing now, Jack, the spooks must have followed the money from Howard to Dollar, and now to…” Barry stopped talking and pointed his right hand at me, using his thumb and forefinger to make it into a little gun. “You see my point.”
I did. Ray Charles could see his point.
“It looks to me like you’re standing in a tricky load of goose shit here, Jack. So, just out of interest, tell me, what do you plan to do now?”
It was a good question, and right off the top of my head, I didn’t have a great answer.
Everything was going too fast. I was usually pretty good at thinking on my feet, but this was ridiculous. A half-hour of talking to Barry and I’d already accumulate
d an array of faceless adversaries big enough to throw a respectable masked ball. It was all getting so complicated that I probably should have been taking notes.
All at once Barry pushed himself out of the leather wing and strode past me. Beth had come in again and was waiting quietly for him at the end of the gallery. As he had before, Barry stood too close to her for me to hear what they were saying, but I could see Beth’s face and something that looked like disquiet in her expression as her lips moved. Barry folded his arms and glanced quickly back at me; then he said something and Beth frowned. After that, she said something else and Barry shook his head.
“I got to take care of something, Jack,” he called back to me without turning around.
“That’s okay. It’s past my bedtime anyway. I’ll probably just shove off.”
That caused Barry to turn around. It also caused him to jam his hands in his pockets and go back to chuckling.
“Nah, Jack. That’s not a choice for you right now. Make yourself at home. I’ll be back in a few minutes and we’ll get us some drinks, maybe have some sandwiches, and then we’ll cut a deal here. We’re both businessmen. We’ve done tough deals before. I’m sure we can work something out.”
Barry fixed me with a steady eye.
“That’s the truth, don’t you think, Jack?”
I shrugged and swung my feet up on the coffee table, settling back into the sofa’s deep cushions and clasping my hands together behind my head.
“The truth is a slippery business sometimes, Barry.”
Barry laughed loudly, too loudly for it to sound particularly convincing. Then he turned away and walked quickly up the gallery. Beth stayed close behind him.
FORTY SEVEN
I SAT THERE quietly for a while watching the fire burn, which felt awfully odd. Here I was on a tropical island on the edge of the Indian Ocean, so for God’s sake what was I doing staring into a roaring fire?
Come to think of it, what am I doing here at all?
When I had set out to storm the Black Prince’s castle I figured I was right on the verge of getting everything under control. Of course, I always figured I was right on the verge of getting everything under control, but this time it wasn’t quite working out that way.
Maybe Barry was right. Maybe either the Agency really was responsible for killing Howard and Dollar, either because they were trying to get the Chinese slush fund back or because they were trying to cover up the embarrassing fact that it had existed in the first place. But why did that necessarily make me the next guy on their list? Even if I could bring myself to believe that agents of the United States government really went around murdering other Americans to keep them quiet, what in God’s name would these guys accomplish by killing me?
I didn’t know shit about whatever they were up to. That was precisely my problem.
I sat there for a while on the sofa with my hands laced behind my head trying to decide what I ought to do now. Surely after Barry came back I could finesse my way past him somehow and work something out. After all, finesse was my best punch, wasn’t it? A sharply focused argument here, a glib phrase there, baffle them with bullshit then run for the door. It had always worked before. Why not now?
Eventually I got bored with thinking about my predicament and started examining my surroundings. Although right at that moment it wasn’t the décor that had my attention, it was more a question of where the exits were.
I could see two sets of double doors at the opposite end of the room and of course I knew the gallery behind me that led to the front door. Then along the right-hand wall flanking the fireplace there were a half-dozen windows covered with shades of red-and-green tartan fabric.
I walked over and pulled one of the window shades aside. Outside I could see only a small section of the compound, but it looked like I was somewhere at the back. The area was deserted and the moon was just strong enough to illuminate everything with a soft, sourceless glow that under different circumstances might have been romantic. Floodlights, maybe even a pack of snarling German Shepherds, would have seemed more fitting to me, but I didn’t see any sign of either.
I walked to the end of the room and tried the left hand pair of double doors. Locked. Then I went to the right hand pair, placed my palm against the upper panel of one of the doors, and pressed gently. It swung open without a sound and I stepped through half expecting to trip some kind of alarm. But nothing happened.
In front of me was a windowless corridor that ran straight for about twenty feet and then ended at an ordinary single door that was standing half open. From just beyond it, I could hear the crackle of a radio. I walked quickly down the corridor and through the door. There was no one in the room.
My eyes swept over the small space. On the left-hand wall there was a rack with a dozen or more guns I had no trouble recognizing. They were AK-47s with folding stocks, nasty-looking pieces of hardware that provided serious firepower. I had played tennis with a couple of SWAT guys back in Washington and one day they had taken me out to their training range and let me mess around with some stuff they had taken off a street gang which included a Chinese-made version of the AK. Barry must have been scared shitless if he had stockpiled heavy-duty weapons like that.
In front of me there was a sagging leather couch and on the opposite side of the room there was a desk pushed up against the wall with a line of five television monitors mounted above it. The first, second, and third monitors showed gray-toned pictures that were apparently coming from various parts of the compound. The fourth monitor showed the area just inside the main gates. The gates stood open a few feet and I could see several of the guards hovering together in a little knot and watching something outside. Oddly, none of the guards seemed to be carrying weapons now.
But it was the fifth monitor that drew my full attention.
That one was displaying what had to be the picture from the camera I had spotted above the gate. In the glare of the lights shining down from the top of the wall, I could see two white Toyotas and a jeep right outside the gate and a group of men who had apparently just arrived in them. There were seven or eight in all, each wearing the chocolate-brown uniform of a Thai policeman. All but one were also wearing dark green combat helmets with red stripes running around them. The only man without a helmet appeared to be the officer in charge. The left side of his chest was emblazoned with a clipboard-sized pad of ribbons and he stood apart and just in front of the others.
I slid into the black swivel chair in front of the desk and leaned toward the monitor, studying it carefully.
Barry Gale had gone outside to meet the police and the scene on the monitor looked like a tableau that had been arranged around him. Beth was standing to his left, and to his right one of the guards appeared to be talking to the senior police officer and translating for Barry. The half-dozen or more uniforms behind the officer looked ready to move into action at a moment’s notice. In the foreground I saw three of Barry’s guards backing him up, but like the guards still inside they appeared to have discarded their weapons. Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it? It would have hardly been smart to carry AK-47s out to meet the cops.
On the monitor I could see Barry shaking his head. His body language made him appear more exasperated than concerned, but I still wondered what was going on. There was something about the whole scene that didn’t look quite right to me, although I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.
As I watched, Beth turned her head away from the conversation and lifted a handheld radio to her lips. When she spoke I could hear her voice coming through a loudspeaker that was mounted above the monitor rack.
“Activity in any other sector?” she asked.
“Negative,” a male voice with a Thai accent replied immediately. I gathered it was a guard posted somewhere else around the compound.
“Negative.”
“No.”
Two more voices. Okay, so there were a lot of guards around the compound.
What was it
about the scene on the security monitor that looked so strange to me? Something was wrong, but whatever it was dangled just out of reach.
The senior police officer was talking to the translator again and pointing his finger at Barry. After whatever he had said was repeated in English, I saw Beth step forward and hold up both her hands, palms out, shaking her head vigorously. The man immediately raised a radio of his own, turned and spoke a few quick words into it.
As soon as he did, Barry turned around and started toward the gates, but several of the cops drew handguns and moved quickly to outflank him, and he stopped. I was still trying to work out what that was all about when two of the other uniforms produced folding submachine guns from somewhere and spread out expertly, covering Beth and her people through widely separated angles of fire.
Now I saw exactly what was wrong with the whole picture.
Thai street cops didn’t move like combat soldiers. Thai police generally moved more like the last customers in a pub emptying out at closing time. Regardless of their uniforms, these guys obviously weren’t police. They were military.
And they were there for Barry. I had no doubt about it.
Barry had stockpiled all this firepower and secured himself behind these walls. Then some guys showed up and he told his guards to open the gates and put away their AKs and, because the men were wearing police uniforms, the guards did it.
In Thailand, the army did all the really high-class hits. Cops were a lot cheaper to rent, of course, but they were not nearly as reliable.
What a schmuck Barry is, I thought. Stupid to the end.
FORTY EIGHT
“WAIT A MINUTE.”
It was one of the guard’s voices coming through the speaker.
I watched on the monitor as Beth raised her radio again. “What have you got?” she asked.
“More vehicles,” the same voice said. “Three. Coming up road.”
“What are they?”
“Four-wheel drives. Black ones.”
“How close?” Beth’s voice had an undertone of dread.
“Two minutes,” the guard replied.