by Steven Gore
Another silence.
“Sawadi ka.”
Kai disconnected from the call.
“You guys are in big . . . I mean big, big trouble.”
CHAPTER 73
Kasa and Moby surveilled the Yunan Agricultural Transport warehouse in Kunming, waiting for the Chinese trucks to return from the north. Luck’s watchful night earned him some rest. It was his turn to sleep in the back of the truck.
Kasa signaled to Moby as two dusty gray trucks drove toward them, stopping together at the warehouse. He held his breath as the cab doors opened, then blew it out in relief when he spotted red-painted lions.
Moby turned to climb down from the cab to awaken Luck, but Kasa grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
“Let’s wait until they start making the transfer to the Thai trucks.”
Kasa watched the drivers deliver shipping documents to a warehouse clerk, who marked them with a pen and stamped them with a chop drawn from a belt holster. The clerk then woke up the Thai drivers napping in the shade after lunch. They swung their trucks around and were guided backward until the folded-down gates of theirs and the Chinese trucks almost touched.
“Now wake up Luck,” Kasa told Moby, “and give him one of the phones.”
As Luck rolled his motorbike down a wooden ramp from the truck bed to the ground, laborers began transferring the heavy bags marked fertilizer from the Chinese to the Thai trucks. He pushed the ramp back and closed the gate. Moby drove with Kasa to the hotel where the team was waiting in front with their gear bagged up and piled on the sidewalk. They tossed them up onto the bed and climbed in.
Kasa walked down the street to the van he had driven up from Thailand, waited for a break in traffic, and pulled into the street. And after Moby closed in behind him, Kasa led them south through Kunming and back down the Old Burma Road. He pulled to the side ten kilometers outside the city and waved Moby ahead, who drove the truck another five kilometers before he, too, pulled over.
A half hour later, Kasa’s mobile phone rang. It was Luck.
“I’m on my way, heading south with our friends.”
A few minutes later, Kasa saw the Thai trucks appear in his side mirror. He waited until they were a hundred meters ahead of him, then he drove back onto the road. After matching the trucks’ speed for five minutes, he called ahead to Moby.
“I think we’re about a kilometer away from you.”
As soon as Moby saw the trucks approaching, he eased out into the road in front to lead them, he hoped, all the way into Burma.
CHAPTER 74
Cobra had an uncomfortable flight from Shanghai to Bangkok, both because of the throbbing wounds in his shoulder and because he knew the conclusion Malee would draw from his age and his injury: it was time to settle down, open a business, and become a shopkeeper, a mouse. But he also knew this wounded Cobra wasn’t ready to retreat into a hole.
Kai’s trip was no less distressing for she understood there was a more than just a river to cross in traveling from a resolution made along the Yangtze to a confrontation with her husband along Bangkok’s Chao Phraya.
As for Gage, he found that he’d arrived at the contemplative state that years ago replaced celebrations of success, for he’d learned success was a matter for the future to decide, not the present. He spent the weeks peering into black boxes, catching not their totality, but only glimpses of East Wind, Sunny Glory, Ah Ming, Lew, Ah Tien, Wu, Zhang, and Eight Iron, and from those glimpses he had drawn conclusions based on experience, on patterns he had discovered in a career as a traveler in the world of crime. Nonetheless, they were black boxes, with thick walls and dark recesses.
And something was different and new and disconcerting.
He’d always been reflective, but that had never separated him from the immediacy of the world. Now that had changed. It seemed to him as though he was seeing the world not from his eyes, but from just behind them, and he was troubled about the consequences. His relationship with Faith for all these years had been nothing if not immediate and unfiltered, and he wondered, even feared, that under the force of his disease, that was about to change.
MALEE STOOD WITH KAI’S DRIVER as Gage, Kai, and Cobra passed through customs and immigration, then entered the arrival hall of Suvarnabhumi Airport. Her eyes teared up when she spotted them. Only the restraint of Thai custom kept her from embracing Cobra after he worked his way through the crowd.
Kai and Gage waited a few moments before approaching the reunion.
“You,” Malee said, looking at Gage and wiping her eyes. “I called Faith. She promised to put you in the doghouse and that’s a bad thing in America.”
“It’s a very bad thing. But by the time she lets me out, I’m sure I’ll have learned my lesson.”
“That is just what she said.” Malee pursed her lips and shook her head. “And in your condition. What did you think you were doing?”
Kai turned toward Gage. “What condition?”
“It’s nothing. I’ll explain what she meant later.”
Malee’s face reddened. “It looks like you better make room in the doghouse for me, too.”
“It’s okay, I was going to tell her before I left.”
Malee pushed through the awkward moment. “I’m going to take my husband to Dr. Mana to have him examined.” She looked at Gage. “Is there anything else you want to tell me before I find out myself?”
Gage shook his head. “I think Cobra told you everything.”
“And stop calling him Cobra. His Cobra days are over.”
“Then what’ll we call him?”
“That will depend on how he behaves,” Malee said. “There are lots of creatures in the animal kingdom, some with very unflattering names.”
WHILE MALEE DROVE COBRA TO THE DOCTOR, Kai’s driver took her and Gage back to the Emerald Hotel. Gage checked in and Kai went with him to his room.
“What is it?” Kai asked, leaning back against the desk.
“I have a kind of cancer.”
Kai’s eyes widened.
“It’s treatable. In fact, the doctor didn’t mind me coming over here before I started chemotherapy. It’s called lymphoma and it’s—”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Because I thought you needed to think things through without being any more confused about what you thought of me or felt about me. And I think I was right.”
“I think you were right, too.” She sighed. “But it hurts my feelings that you didn’t trust me.”
“You know I trust you. You’ve had my life in your hands this whole trip.”
Gage walked over to her and put his arms around her. She leaned her head against his chest.
“I’m sorry I tried to take you away from Faith. Especially now. She must be so worried about you. I thought all this time I wanted to take her place, but what I really needed was a place of my own.”
“That’s what everyone needs. Unfortunately, you live in a society that allows little room for that.”
Kai drew back and looked up at him. “It’s just going to have to begin making a little more.”
Kai walked toward the door, then looked back and smiled.
“The next time you talk to that fucking car thief tell him I miss him. Desperately.”
“He would expect nothing less.”
After Kai left, Gage did, in fact, call Zhang.
“The technician will be done by tomorrow afternoon and inform the insurers,” Zhang said.
“What about Lew and Taiwan?”
“Taiwan is recovering and Lew has been quiet.”
“If any problems develop, give me a call; otherwise, I’m out of it.”
“Good luck on your end. Perhaps we’ll meet again?”
“Perhaps.”
CHAPTER 75
As morning fog was lifting along the border, the Thai trucks carrying the payment for the heroin crossed from China into Burma. The drivers had found nothing suspicious in the unremarkable trucks, motorcycl
es, and vans surrounding them as they traveled south. There were even times when they felt a sense of connection with the others on Old Burma Road, the comfort of a convoy.
Hours later, as the lead driver approached the Wan Pai turnoff, forty miles north of the Thai border, he noticed the truck in front of him slowing. When its speed dropped to five kilometers an hour, he moved to pass, but the truck bore to the left and skidded to a stop, blocking both lanes of traffic. Five gunmen jumped down into the rising dust and raced toward the Thai trucks. Before the drivers could pull weapons from under their seats, they found gun barrels pressed against their temples.
The fifth member of the team tossed his assault rifle into the bed of the truck that had blocked the road, then ran ahead to guide oncoming traffic around what appeared to other drivers to be nothing more than a minor accident.
MOBY STRAIGHTENED OUT HIS TRUCK and let the fifth man climb aboard. He led the caravan south to the Wan Pai turnoff, then east toward the Mekong River. Before reaching the village, Kasa passed them and led them onto a one-lane dirt road ascending into the mountains. As the rain forest thickened, Kasa looked for a clearing large enough to park the three trucks. He pulled past a break in the trees, signaled the two Thai trucks to enter, then backed in behind them. Kasa and Luck parked close to the road and walked toward the trucks. The Thai drivers were standing together under guard.
“Where is it?” Kasa asked the two of them.
“We only have fertilizer,” the older of the two drivers said, transfixed by the tattoos exposed by Kasa’s short-sleeved shirt.
Kasa directed his tribesmen to unload the bags.
“We were only hired to drive the trucks,” the younger one said. “We have no idea what’s inside and we don’t care.”
Kasa looked hard at both of them, then said, “Whoever tells me where it is will leave here alive.”
The older driver looked over at the younger. “They’ll kill us anyway. There’s nothing to gain by telling them anything.”
“Yes, there is,” Kasa said. “A painless death.”
The younger driver broke free and ran toward the cover of the forest. Kasa pulled his handgun and fired one shot, hitting him in the middle of his back. He fell forward, arms flailing, clawing at the ground, trying to pull himself forward. But the loose forest floor gave way, and his grasping dirt-filled hands slid back toward his chest.
Kasa walked up to the man, now sobbing.
“I still may let you live. Which bags contain the payment?”
“Please, please, I’m just a driver.”
Kasa fired a slug into the ground next to his head.
“Lot 56. It’s in bags marked Lot 56.”
Kasa walked back and ordered the other driver bound.
When one of the trucks was half empty, Moby called out that he found one marked Lot 56. Kasa watched him cut into the bag, then wave and nod that what he hoped to find was there. They separated out twenty Lot 56 bags, piled them in the back of Moby’s truck, then filled the rest of the space with bags of fertilizer to conceal the load, leaving just enough room for one of the motorcycles.
Satisfied that he’d accomplished his mission, Kasa walked back to the young driver and shot him in the back of the head.
The older driver made no attempt to flee.
Kasa admired his courage, but he was on the wrong side. The tribesmen holding the man eased away and Kasa dropped him where he stood.
His men removed the spare tires from the Thai trucks, rolled them into a small clearing, and returned to collect the bodies. They lifted them onto the top of the tires and splashed on gasoline.
Kasa left a motorcycle with one member of the team and instructed him to set the bodies and trucks ablaze four hours later, then to make his way home.
Kasa led the caravan back to the Old Burma Road and turned south toward Thailand. He dropped off the rest of team at their home village, while Moby and Luck continued on to the border, across to Mae Sai and south to Chiang Rai. They all met up again at Eight Iron’s shopping center. Kasa took some satisfaction in the irony that it had been built by Kai’s Siri Construction. They hid the truck in an outbuilding and transferred the load to one of a different make and style.
Kasa dropped off the van at Eight Iron’s office and rode overnight with the others to a tire manufacturing company in the industrial district of Samut Prakan, south of Bangkok. Workers at the company unloaded the truck, stacking the Lot 56 bags in a secure and guarded storage room, and returned the fertilizer to the truck for the trip to an agricultural supply warehouse.
Kasa decided to leave Moby and Luck in the resort town of Pattaya. The farther they were from Chiang Rai the better. He gave them money for rooms, food, and prostitutes, left them at a beachfront hotel, then drove back north to where Eight Iron waited.
CHAPTER 76
In late afternoon, Kai picked Gage up from the Emerald Hotel and drove over to Cobra’s house.
Malee greeted Gage and Kai at the door and directed Gage to the outdoor veranda where Cobra rested in a rattan recliner flanked by three chairs and facing out toward the orchid garden.
Gage sat down, opened two beer bottles on the side table, and handed one to Cobra.
“I wonder whether Eight Iron and Kasa are ever going to get what they deserve. People call me Cobra, or if Malee has her way, used to call me Cobra, but those two are cobras with double sets of fangs.” Cobra took a sip of his beer and gazed out toward the garden. “But not into my flesh. Kai told Malee she needed a security director for Siri Construction. Malee is supposed to tell her whether I’m interested. Kai was afraid to ask me directly. She thought I would be insulted and lose face if I felt she was viewing me as a has-been.”
“You think you’ll do it?”
“I’ll wait until the hurt from these two holes goes away before I decide. Pain isn’t always the best career counselor.”
They fell silent and listened to the Zebra doves cooing in a cage behind them.
Gage felt it was all coming to an end. It was time to settle up.
“How much do you have left from what Sheridan gave you?” Gage asked.
“I think about eight thousand.”
“Keep that, and I’ll send over another fifty. And let me know what the medical bills are.”
“They’re too small to worry about. Dr. Mana just changed the bandages, checked for infections, and gave me an injection. He never even asked how I got shot.”
“Let me know anyway.”
“Maybe. When are you flying back to the States?”
“Tomorrow. The press conference in Shanghai is set for ten A.M. There’s nothing keeping me here.”
“What about Kai? You two still have an understanding?”
“One that will last this time. She’s finally starting to figure out what she really wants in life. And the first step in getting it is to divorce Somchai.”
Cobra shook his head. “This is a bad country for that. If the husband doesn’t agree, there’ll be no divorce. And even if he does agree, the terms can be ruinous for the woman.”
“Maybe that’s why she wants you as her security director. Somchai will think twice before he leans on her if he has to do it through you.”
Gage heard Kai’s and Malee’s voices coming toward them. He leaned in toward Cobra.
“One last thing. Make sure your people get a tracking device on the container before it leaves Taiwan.”
Cobra smiled. “Mai pen rai.”
Kai picked a couple of orchid blossoms, then walked over to the teak spirit house perched on a post in the garden. She reached inside and placed a small piece of mango on a dish in front of the smiling Buddha and scattered the blossoms around his feet.
She then turned around, spread her arms, smiled, and said, “Can’t hurt.”
After dinner, Kai drove Gage back to the hotel.
She didn’t ask to come in.
CHAPTER 77
Gage caught a flight from Bangkok to Hong Kong, then another to Sa
n Francisco, a route he had taken so many times it had the feel of a routine. Even though the last leg took thirteen hours, it had always been shortened by thoughts of Faith and home. But this time seemed different, for home had a puzzling sense of unreality about it. It made him wonder where he would be in his life, even who he would be and what his life would be, when he got there.
As the plane headed east from Chek Lap Kok Airport, Gage caught a parting view of Hong Kong and Victoria Island. And as the plane turned over the Pacific, Gage looked north toward the Formosa Strait knowing that among those many boats cutting through the water, one concealed in its hold many, many millions of dollars of China White heroin.
And the others? What about the others? What was concealed in them?
And who had died for it? Or had killed for it?
But that would be for another day and for someone else.
GAGE PASSED THROUGH IMMIGRATION AT SFO, then slipped through the crowd in the arrivals hall and walked out to the curb. He looked up the ramp for Faith, then for a place to sit. He found a concrete bench on which the front section of the San Francisco Chronicle had been abandoned. The top half announced a construction bid rigging investigation. An old client had been the victim. He didn’t bother reading the article, for when the call came into his firm, he knew he’d be handing it off to someone else. He then flipped over the paper and caught sight of Casey’s face looking back at him from below the fold.
HISTORIC CHIP SEIZURE IN ASIA
John Beuttler
Shanghai, China
Associated Press
The Chinese Ministry of Public Security and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation announced in Shanghai today the largest seizure of stolen microprocessors in Chinese history. The Intel chips were discovered at a northern China medical equipment manufacturer when an employee suspected that the shipping documents accompanying the chips were fraudulent.
General Zhang Xianzi of the People’s Liberation Army unit that made the seizure said the confiscation was the result of China’s intensive campaign to comply with trade and intellectual property agreements entered into with Western countries in recent years.