Death in the Kingdom

by Andrew Grant

  ‘Christ,’ I muttered, pocketing the phone. That explained a lot. Bad enough I’d toasted Chekhov but killing his wife and unborn child, albeit accidentally, was guaranteed to provoke retribution of the bloodiest kind. Thing was, it was only when Bernard had pointed the finger at me that Chekhov would have even had a clue as to who had tried to tap him. Sir Bernard Sinclair and I were going to have an interesting meeting.

  Where was Sami? I asked myself as I focused back on our men in the street.

  My two Ruskies were gone. Mr Beige was no longer standing under his light and Muscles had vanished from the doorway he’d commandeered. My heart did a double take. The news from Karl had broken my concentration. ‘Fuck!’ I muttered, desperately trying to pick Beige and Muscles out from the crowd. Undoubtedly there were others there as well. Guys I hadn’t picked up on.

  I stepped forward to peer around the canvas screen formed by the awning of the drinks cart, checking out the near distance. I pulled back immediately. The two goons were forty feet away and coming towards me fast, splitting the crowd like a pair of icebreakers working thin pack ice. Muscles had his hand down the front of his trousers, fumbling with his crotch, while Beige was reaching under his shirt. I dropped my beer can and drew the Walther as I stepped back into the angle of the wall behind me. ‘Where the fuck are you, Sami?’ I whispered. The old guy from the stall was kneeling beside his trolley. He’d seen what was going down. ‘Watch your arse, old man,’ I said in Thai.

  27

  You want another Singha, Daniel?’ the old fellow was asking me as he removed an Uzi from the bottom compartment of his stall.

  ‘Sami?’ I gasped, glancing down. Sami Somsak was staring up at me. He was an old man, his face drawn and haggard under his make-up. He looked like shit.

  ‘I want one of these guys real bad, Daniel. The black guy preferably.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said as I thumbed off the safety on my automatic. The old team was back in business but this was not the time or place for a reunion celebration. The Sami Somsak who crouched at my feet was not in a partying mood. He’d lost a bunch of his people and his town base. As he said, he was hurting but then so was I. Chekhov had hit us both where it hurt. I wondered if the crazy Russian really knew just who he had coming after him. Me, he knew about, but Sami, I didn’t know. I’d seen Sami in action before many times and was thankful he and I were on the same side. Dimitri Chekhov had started something, but I was hoping and praying he wouldn’t be able to finish it. The Russian’s two goons weren’t real smart. They stayed bunched shoulder to shoulder as they approached, plowing through the crowd. Sami was below their collective line of sight, hidden by the bulk of his trolley, so all they were focused on was me. My white shirt must have been glowing like a neon sign in the gloom. I moved to my left and back into the cover of the alley.

  Clear of the nearest pedestrians, Muscles fumbled a small automatic out from between his legs. Mr Beige was now waving a big chromed something in the breeze.

  ‘Show yourself again,’ Sami whispered and I did just that, stepping forward into the light to present my attackers with a nice glowing target. I tucked back fast as Beige tried to line me up. Whether they wanted me dead or as a present for Chekhov I would never know because the game was about to change drastically.

  Kneeling, Sami leaned around the end of his cart, the Uzi clamped against his shoulder. He took a moment to acquire his targets, then fired single, aimed shots in rapid succession, shifting the muzzle of the gun from one to the other in the blink of an eye. To have used full auto with a street full of people behind the target would have meant certain death for the innocent, but at a range of ten feet and closing, it was no contest. Three rounds hit Mr Beige in the thighs, then three more copper jackets met in a three inch triangle in the centre of Mr Muscles’s beautifully formed chest. Both guys hit the street hard. Muscles didn’t move, but Beige was curled up into a ball, screaming in agony.

  ‘Grab him,’ Sami called. ‘Into the alley.’ I jammed the Walther into my belt and leapt past Sami’s cart. People were screaming in the street, and everyone was running for cover. I was on the injured man in two strides. I kicked the chromed automatic away from Beige, grabbed him under the armpits and started dragging him backwards towards the alleyway. Sami tossed something down the street towards the police vehicles. After a quick glance in that direction, I realised that the cops were in no hurry to get near us. Other figures were heading our way, however. I had to assume they were more of Chekhov’s playmates.

  ‘Tear gas,’ Sami said as he came running towards me, the Uzi in one hand.

  He bent down, grabbed a handful of trouser cuff with his free hand and helped me move the black guy who was screaming like a proverbial stuck pig. The alley was dank, dark and fucking dirty. I stopped, hit the guy hard on the side of the head with a closed anvil fist and quickly frisked him. I found a small automatic ankle gun. I stuffed it into my trouser pocket.

  Beige wasn’t moving at all and I was faced with hauling a dead weight. I knew the best way to carry someone who was right out of it was the old-fashioned way, just like I had carried Tuk Tuk to safety all those years before. I squatted to arrange limbs and then slung the injured guy head first over my shoulders, legs hanging in front.

  ‘Go,’ I yelled to Sami who was watching the mouth of the alley. He threw another gas grenade then came running back. He pushed past me and set off in the lead.

  ‘Not far,’ he called. ‘Boat,’ he added. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I muttered. ‘Me carry, you lead.’ Sami almost laughed. He increased his pace. Not far seemed to me to be a hundred gruelling yards of wet, slippery, slime-covered crap that sloped down towards the canal. I stumbled and skidded, cannoning off the alley walls at every two or three paces. I was tempted to drop my passenger and use him as a toboggan. I could hear our pursuers behind us. There was a whistle and angry shouts further back. It seemed the police were putting on a performance for the crowd but Chekhov’s goons were between them and us. Sami raised the Uzi and fired a short burst into the sky. The sound was deafening, amplified by the man-made canyon we were in. He lobbed another grenade over my head as I ran after him.

  The alley finally gave way to a narrow wooden jetty just fifty yards up the canal from the charred timbers of Sami’s warehouse. His own jetty had been burned down to the tide mark. As we neared the jetty there was enough light for me to identify the boat tied there as a low open cruiser with a fat pair of big black outboards tacked on the rear end. Sami jumped down into the cockpit and perched himself at the wheel. He started flicking switches. The sound of our pursuers was growing louder. I didn’t have time to stand on ceremony. It was five or so feet from dock to deck. Mr Beige made it in half a second flat as I pulled my Gerber and went for the ropes holding us to the dock fore and aft.

  The razor blade of my folding knife made short work of the nylon and I landed in the boat just as Sami ground the Mercurys into life. It wasn’t a coincidence that the cruiser had been parked pointing back towards the river, her engines primed and ready to go. We were moving in ten seconds. Our pursuers didn’t even make the dock before we were out of range. In our wake we left several very upset river folk who were fighting to keep their little craft afloat in our wash.

  Due to the failing light, Sami turned on the navigation lights and a spotlight positioned on the bow to show the way ahead. He throttled back and the big motors settled into a muted grumble. We could talk without yelling and there was a lot I wanted to know.

  ‘How the hell did you survive?’

  ‘I was on my way to the Gulf,’ Sami replied harshly. ‘They missed me when they hit the place. They staged an accident in the street—backed a furniture van loaded with their men into the garage door and got in. People on the street only saw it as a bit of shitty driving. They came in fast with silenced weapons and machetes. No one had a chance. They combed the place from top to bottom, looking for you and the box, and me as a bonus,’ he added grimly. ‘That’s the
thing about surveillance, Daniel. Got a feed of the whole thing in living colour on DVD at my other place.’

  ‘Was Chekhov there?’

  ‘Oh yes. Pizza Face was there all right. He personally killed half of my people with his damned machete.’

  ‘I’m so sorry I led him to you,’ I said lamely. Sami was shaking his head.

  ‘He was after me anyway. It was just a matter of time before it happened. The person we have to settle with after Chekhov is your Sir Bernard. Switch the phone off before we go much further.’ I did as he asked and left it on the boat’s dashboard while I went to deal with our guest who was beginning to stir. As I move to the rear of the boat, Sami took his own mobile from his pocket and started to make a call.

  I grabbed the very hurt Mr Beige and propped him into a seat in the stern. Both his legs were bent at odd angles. The 9mm slugs rather than the fall from the dock had probably done the damage. I pulled his arms behind his back and used a length of mooring cord to tie them to a handy cleat. I looked at the amount of blood soaking his thighs and pondered whether or not to apply tourniquets. I decided to do just that. Sami wanted him alive, and so did I. Grabbing another piece of rope, I sliced off three or four feet. I tied a quick figure of eight around the top of both his thighs and pulled it as tight as I could before tying it off. When I had done my Florence Nightingale trick I went forward and climbed onto a seat across from Sami.

  Sami was an expert with the boat. He swung the wheel effortlessly to dodge past a lumbering barge loaded with coffins coming from upstream. I couldn’t help thinking that, although coffins were a common enough cargo as any canal watcher would know, it was strangely appropriate to see them at that time. ‘I came back this afternoon to wait for them to show again. I knew they’d come looking to see if I was dead, or if you showed up. Fucking predictable.’

  ‘Russians,’ I said, ‘predictable and violent. You knew Chekhov was still alive and active.’ It wasn’t a question.

  ‘I knew,’ Sami replied as he worked the wheel. ‘The ugly son of a whore. I thought we had an arrangement.’ He had the power wound up again and we were racing up river, slicing past everything else on the water as if it were standing still. I didn’t ask him why he hadn’t bothered to tell me about Chekhov rising from the dead. I knew Sami always had a reason for what he did or didn’t do.

  Sami picked up my mobile phone from the ledge under the windscreen. ‘He’s got a tracer of some sort in here, an ELB and probably a relay bug,’ said Sami. ‘Power on and it’s live. Every conversation goes back to Bernard and he has your location thanks to a GPS bird up above.’ He transferred the phone to his right hand and from out of nowhere another boat virtually the same as ours came alongside us at speed. Sami reached across and the passenger in the front of the other cruiser took the phone. I recognised the passenger as Jo, Sami’s invisible warrior. Jo grinned and waved at me as the big black craft peeled away and headed down river. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised at what had just happened.

  ‘We’ll use it against Sir Bernard,’ Sami said as he started to throttle back. ‘Jo’s taking it to a lab. We’ll know its secrets in an hour or two and Sir Bernard will have no idea it’s been compromised.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I muttered. Sami took a Marlboro from the pack I was holding out. He seldom smoked. I lit for both of us.

  ‘Don’t blame yourself, Daniel. I meant it when I said Chekhov didn’t hit me because of you,’ Sami said. ‘He’s making a move on me—the timing was probably coincidental. You are another issue altogether. You’re personal,’ he said, drawing deeply on his cigarette. ‘He got my sister’s son and my cousin back there, and a lot of others,’ he said, sending the words into the slipstream in a curl of smoke.

  ‘Mary?’ I asked. Sami just nodded.

  ‘Chekhov wants you real bad but I want him worse.’ Sami’s voice was flat as he half-turned to look at me. In the reflected light, the pupils of his eyes looked like holes drilled through solid white marble. The holes went deeper into his soul. ‘Oh yes,’ he whispered. ‘I want him and I’m going to get him!’ The promise in his voice was absolute.

  Sami had now steered us off the main river and we were moving along a canal. There were the usual groups of tired warehouses broken by houses on stilts and docked long-tail boats. Clumps of water hyacinth floated everywhere along with the usual assortment of rubbish. This certainly wasn’t one of the more salubrious waterways in the Kingdom. It was almost totally dark, and the spotlight fixed to the bow carved a bright slash through the night.

  Sami turned off the canal we’d been running along and we moved slowly into a waterway that was only a couple of feet wider than the hull of the boat. There were no buildings along the banks of this mini-canal, just jungle. All of this in the middle of a damned city!

  The canal ended at a high concrete wall with a large pair of solid steel gates set into it, extending right across our path. Sami tapped a button on the boat’s console and the gates slid apart smoothly and silently. We moved on into the glare of powerful lights. There were lights everywhere. It was like daytime in this place. I could make out the lake we were crossing. There was a stone jetty in the foreground, and a large three-storey building behind.

  ‘Home sweet home,’ Sami said as he turned the wheel to line us up with the jetty. He touched the control on the console again and the gates to the canal slid shut behind us.

  ‘Your line of work certainly pays,’ I said in open admiration or just plain old-fashioned jealousy.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Sami replied as he nudged us into the buffers on the pier. ‘It does that. We’ll talk more about that when we sort out Chekhov and your beloved Sir Bernard.’

  I mumbled something approaching agreement and took in the amazing surroundings. There were half a dozen other boats moored at the jetty and anchored in the lake itself. They were all long, low craft with big outboards in their sterns. I had no illusions that these were fast-running drug boats designed to get from A to B very, very quickly indeed.

  More lights had come on, exposing what appeared to be a huge compound with gardens and lawns stretching off into the darkness. Half a dozen figures came out of the shadows towards us. These guys were armed with M16s and Ak47s. One held the leashes of a pair of what I took to be attack dogs. I couldn’t tell the breed, but they were big, black and had plenty of white fangs. Dogs and I had never got on.

  The first pair of guards came out on the jetty to meet us. Sami threw the bow rope to one of them and stepped onto the dock. I followed. Sami jerked a thumb at the man lying in the stern of the cruiser. ‘We want him alive. Stem the blood flow and prep him for conversation,’ he instructed. ‘A little truth juice, I think. Call us when he’s ready.’

  ‘Okay,’ came the acknowledgement. The men slung their assault rifles and dropped down into the boat as Sami and I moved off. I trailed my host as he led the way up towards the house. It wasn’t a house, it was more like a damned palace or a luxury hotel. From my perspective it appeared to be U-shaped with the open ends pointing towards the lake. It was truly magnificent. Its splendour was more than driven home when we entered a wide glass door at the base of the U. Sami and I were in a huge, high foyer. The floor was polished cream marble and there were statues and paintings everywhere. This was like Tuk Tuk’s palace for Sakura—elegant and so damned lavish.

  We didn’t loiter in the foyer. Sami led me up a wide, curved teak staircase. As we climbed the broadly spaced steps, I recognised some of the paintings hanging on both sides of the walls. I knew without asking that they weren’t copies.

  ‘Fruits of my ill-gotten gains,’ Sami said with a thin smile as I paused to check out what I thought was a Renoir. It was! I finally dragged myself away from the two-foot-by-two-foot daub that was probably worth more than I’d make in a lifetime, given I lived to eighty or ninety. I wasn’t bitter. Fucking Renoir was dead and, for the moment, I was still alive.

  I carried on after The Onion Man and eventually followed him into what appeared to be hi
s study. It was the size of a basketball court, filled with leather and more dark, beautiful wood. Antique weaponry, a dozen more paintings, ceramics and shelves of leather-bound books all vied for my attention. I didn’t give in to them but instead headed for a couch and crashed onto it. Sometimes I was on overload, and the last forty-eight hours had just about blown my circuitry to hell and back.

  Seated with a big tumbler of bourbon in my hand and a mineral water in Sami’s, we started to debate what to do. We began with the most important question: Did Sami know where to find Chekhov? He did.

  ‘Chekhov’s main base is in Ayutthaya,’ he said. ‘It is on the Pa Sak River, about 300 metres from where the Pa Sak and Lopburi rivers converge, just above the actual town. Looks like a warehouse complex, but appearances can be deceiving.’

  I knew Ayutthaya was about fifty or so miles north of Bangkok. I’d been through it a few times. It was probably as good a place as any to set up house. It was close enough to Bangkok to keep a handle on things and, being small, it was certainly a lot easier to keep tabs on who was in town. ‘He’ll know we took one of his men alive and he’ll be ready for whatever we throw at him,’ I suggested. Sami nodded in agreement.

  ‘We’ll need a lot of help on this one,’ he replied, ‘and that is being organised as we speak.’ Sami stood. ‘Relax here. I have a personal matter to attend to.’ He hesitated. ‘Daniel, we both have grieving to do, but it will have to wait until we have completed our business with Chekhov. I will be half an hour. Help yourself to whatever you want. Company is on its way and we’ll eat later.’

  Sami left. I lit a cigarette and let my eyes wander around the incredible room. Hell, this was as much a museum and a library as it was a study. There were thousands of books in the cases that lined the walls and a dozen free-standing sculptures and pieces of pottery. As I took in the eye candy, one object caught my attention. Amidst all of the magnificent artworks on display, the figure that caught my eye was positioned in the corner of the room to the left of Sami’s huge desk.