Red Alert

by James Patterson

  Over dinner, he bombarded us with questions about crime and punishment in New York, and he was completely entranced by the concept of a police unit dedicated to the needs of the city’s rich and powerful.

  “We, too, are a city of economic extremes,” he said. “It seems to me that our wealthiest citizens would be extremely grateful to feel so well protected.”

  “I’m sure they would,” Kylie said. “Perhaps you could schedule a visit to New York. We’d be glad to show you our model. There’s no reason why the same principles couldn’t work in Bangkok.”

  I could almost hear the cash register in his head go ka-ching. He’d just demonstrated how effortlessly he could scam money from the unsuspecting poor. And now it seemed like we were offering to show him how to bleed even more money from the ridiculously rich.

  “That would be very generous of you,” he said. “So, I understand you’re here in Thailand to question two of my prisoners.”

  “With your kind permission,” Kylie said, laying it on.

  “I would need a formal request.”

  I was about to ask him what the hell he was talking about, when David Hinds stepped in. “I have the documents right here, Mr. Minister,” he said, taking two envelopes from his pocket. “These were prepared by the embassy and signed by the First Secretary.”

  Juntasa opened the first envelope. “Flynn Samuels,” he said. “Fascinating man. Permission granted. Please tell him I asked for him.”

  “I’m very impressed,” Kylie said. “Considering the size of your prison population, I would hardly expect you to know any of them by name.”

  A cryptic smile crossed Juntasa’s lips as he opened the second envelope. “Geraldo Segura?” he said. “I’m afraid the American Embassy is sadly out of touch. Mr. Segura changed his name years ago.” He handed the document back to Hinds.

  “My apologies, sir. We must not have been notified. I can redo the paperwork and be back in an hour. What is his name now?”

  Juntasa grinned. “Rom Ran Sura.”

  Hinds stared at him, dumbfounded. “Rom Ran Sura?” he said, slowly enunciating each syllable. “Geraldo Segura is Rom Ran Sura?”

  Juntasa nodded. “It’s a fitting Thai name for such a warrior.”

  “Warrior?” I said, looking at Hinds for an answer.

  “God, yes,” Hinds said. “Rom Ran Sura is a Muay Thai legend. One of the best boxers in the country.”

  “One of?” Juntasa said. “He is the best to come out of our prison system in decades. How embarrassing that the American Embassy had no idea that our national hero was one of their citizens. Of course, the man is now forty years old. His boxing days are over.”

  “Still, you must be very proud,” Kylie said. “We look forward to meeting him.”

  “I wish I could help,” Juntasa said, “but I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have no idea where he is.”

  “But you’re in charge,” Kylie said. “How could you not know—”

  Juntasa held up a hand, cutting her off. “Detective, Rom Ran Sura has brought great honor to our country. The king pardoned him a month ago. At this point, nobody knows where he is.”

  PART THREE

  SEX SLAVE

  CHAPTER 46

  After dinner we adjourned to Juntasa’s library, where he treated us to a verbal and visual tour of the things he loved most: his native Thailand and the story of his life.

  We’d been warned to turn our phones off lest we offend our host, and by the time we were finally able to break loose from his nonstop hospitality, we each had a string of voice mails and texts.

  “You’d think the man would be content running the prison system,” Kylie said as soon as we squeezed our tired bodies back into the cramped confines of the Toyota Yaris. “But no: on top of that, the son of a bitch likes to take prisoners at dinner. I was ready to go three rounds of Muay Thai with him just to buy us a few hours of freedom.”

  Our first call was to Cates. We told her that Geraldo Segura had changed his name to Rom Ran Sura and had boxed thirty years off his fifty-year sentence.

  “He’s out?” Cates said.

  “Pardoned by the king of Thailand,” I said. “Odds are he’s in New York.”

  “He’d need a passport to get back into the U.S.,” she said. “He can’t get one of those by royal decree. He’d have to go through the American Embassy.”

  “We can check tomorrow,” I said, “but they operate with all the efficiency of the same federal government that runs Medicare, so don’t get your hopes up. Segura wasn’t on any watch list, and with two people dead, let’s just assume he managed to slip in. He’s well-known in Thailand, so I’m sure we can find a recent picture and email it to you. Have someone alert Homeland and get out a BOLO on him.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “We just got permission to interview the bomb maker tomorrow morning. As soon as we’re done, we’ll be jumping on our private jet and flying home.”

  “What about Nathan Hirsch and Princeton Wells?”

  “What about them?”

  “Have you called them and told them Segura is on the loose?”

  “They know somebody is after them, so hopefully they’re lying low. We’ll call them as soon as we finish talking with you.”

  “That would be now,” she said, and hung up.

  Kylie called Princeton Wells while I tried Nathan Hirsch. I caught him at his office. So much for lying low.

  “Oh God,” he said once I’d filled him in. “Geraldo? Geraldo killed Del and Arnie?”

  “We have no proof,” I said, “but he’s at the top of the suspect list.”

  “And I’m at the top of his hit list.”

  “You and Princeton Wells.”

  “Now that you know who you’re looking for, can’t you just put a shitload of cops on it and hunt him down?” he said.

  “We will,” I said, “but now that you know who we’re looking for, can you pack up your family and head for an undisclosed location until we find him?”

  He snorted a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. “Do you know what I do for a living, Detective?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re thinking, He’s some kind of lawyer. I’m not some kind of anything. I’m first chair on an eight-hundred-million-dollar class action lawsuit. Three years’ worth of prep is coming to a head in the next few days. I can’t just drop everything and go.”

  “Can you keep a low profile?”

  “Detective, when there’s eight hundred million dollars on the line, there are no low profiles.”

  “Do you want police protection?”

  “You mean do I want to walk into the courtroom with a couple of cops and a bomb-sniffing dog? How do you think that little tableau will play with the jury? Besides, police protection is bullshit. Del was surrounded by cops. Arnie rattled NYPD’s cage from the commissioner on down. Fat lot of good that did either of them.”

  “It’s your call, Mr. Hirsch. Just know that the department is ready to help in any way we can.”

  “You want to help?” he said. “Find Geraldo Segura, and let me get back to my fucking life.”

  He hung up.

  Kylie’s phone call had gone much faster than mine. “How did Wells take the news?” I asked.

  “First shock, followed by acceptance, and finally he uttered those same four little words he said when he found out about the murders of his two partners: ‘I need a drink.’”

  Ten minutes later, we arrived at the hotel, and Kylie looked at her watch.

  “Midnight,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “I’ve had enough assholes for one day.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Juntasa was a man of his word. Our interview with Flynn Samuels was set for 8:00 a.m. David Hinds picked us up at our hotel at seven thirty.

  “Ah, the embassy Lincoln,” Kylie said as we got into the spacious back seat. “Glad to see she’s back on the
road. I’ll bet your roommate’s happy about it, too.”

  Hinds wisely decided not to take the bait. “I’m sure you’ve been to prisons in the States,” he said, pulling out onto Wireless Road. “Klong Prem is going to be a hell of a lot uglier.”

  “None of them are pretty, David,” Kylie said.

  “I know, but the Americans at least pretend that the inmates are there to be rehabilitated. In Thailand they’re there to suffer. They sleep sixty, seventy men to a room. No beds, no mattresses—just a thin sheet on the cold, hard floor. There’s one open toilet in the room, no medical, and not enough food. The State Department did a study that says every year spent in a Thai prison is equivalent to five years in a maximum security prison in the U.S.”

  “It’s gratifying to hear that our government is finally spending our tax dollars on a study every American will want to read,” Kylie said. “Look, kid, we’re not here to judge the Thai justice system. All we want to do is talk with Flynn Samuels. What can you tell us about him?”

  Hinds shrugged. “Never met him. I just know that he’s in building five, which is where they house the hard cases—murderers, rapists, drug offenders—all of them sentenced to fifty years or more. A lot of them go stark raving mad after seven. Samuels has been there for fifteen. All I’m saying is, brace yourselves.”

  The prison itself turned out to be just what we’d expected: stone walls, barbed wire, steel doors, tight-lipped guards with sadistic eyes. Flynn Samuels, on the other hand, was nothing like what Hinds had prepared us for. He was neither undernourished nor crazy. He was a big outgoing bear of a man with a thick mop of graying reddish hair and a full gray beard. At about six foot eight and 350 pounds, he filled the doorway of the visitors’ room. And like every Aussie I’d ever met, he was likable from the get-go.

  “G’day, mates,” he boomed, plopping down on a bench on the other side of a thick steel-mesh divider. “You’re the first visitors I ever had from New York.” He laughed. “Hell, you’re the first visitors I’ve had from anywhere.”

  “Thanks for seeing us,” I said.

  “Happy to take time out of my busy two-hundred-year schedule,” he said. “Besides, I’d do anything for my boy P.J.”

  “P.J.?” I said.

  “Pongrit Juntasa. He’s my man.”

  “We had dinner with him last night. He certainly speaks highly of you.”

  “He’s a big fan. Sends me special little gifts from time to time: food, booze, smokes, a hooker for Christmas. He made sure I have a private cell with a bed and a blanket. In this hellhole, it helps to have friends in high places.”

  “You’re lucky,” I said. “He didn’t seem like the type to have favorites.”

  “Well, it doesn’t hurt that I helped him get his job. I blew his predecessor to kingdom come. So what can I do for you?”

  “We’re looking for Geraldo Segura, also known as Rom Ran Sura.”

  His face lit up, and he let out another laugh. “And since you’re NYPD, I’m guessing that little bugger is blowing up people on your side of the pond. Hot damn, I’m proud of that boy. I taught him everything he knows.”

  “How?” Kylie said. “How do you teach someone to build bombs in a place like this without getting caught?”

  “Rolling paper.”

  He paused. The man was in no hurry to tell his tale. He had two hundred years to kill. I stared at his hands while I waited. They were just as big as the rest of him. I tried to picture him manipulating the delicate mechanism of a bomb.

  He caught me looking. “I know,” he said, holding up his hands. “You’d think these giant paws would be a handicap, but no—not when you use jeweler’s tools. Nobody can build a shaped charge bomb like me. I can put one in the middle of a symphony orchestra, take out the piccolo player, and leave the entire string section intact. I never shared my technique—figured it would die with me. Then one day Rom Ran asked if I could teach him the tricks of the trade. I thought, Hell, it can’t hurt to be buddy-buddy with the toughest motherfucker in the prison. So I diagrammed the first step on a piece of rolling paper, gave him five minutes to study it, then rolled a cigarette and smoked the evidence.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I told him to redraw it for me. Of course he couldn’t. It took him weeks before he could commit that first step to memory. When I was sure he had it, I moved on to step two.”

  “How many steps are there altogether?”

  “Nineteen. I probably gave myself lung cancer waiting for that wanker to commit every step to memory, but I guess all that studying paid off. The kid gets an A plus.”

  “We need to find him,” Kylie said. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Sorry, but he didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

  “Is there anything you can tell us that might help? We’d really like to tell your pal P.J. that you were cooperative…” Kylie’s voice trailed off, the quasi threat dangling in the air.

  Samuels rubbed his thick beard. “How many people has he killed so far?”

  “Two,” I said.

  “Two,” Samuels said, repeating the number. “If I were you, I’d hurry on home, mate. He ain’t done yet.”

  CHAPTER 48

  Suvarnabhumi Airport was only a thirty-minute drive from the prison, and after spending less than a day and a half in Thailand, we were, as Samuels had suggested, hurrying on home.

  Captain Fennessy and his crew were on the tarmac, waiting for us, and once again I was reminded that the rich really do live differently.

  I spent the next eighteen hours flying back to the woman I love, and the twelve hours after that reconnecting with her. First physically, then emotionally. After a good night’s sleep, we gave physically another shot.

  At 7:00 a.m. Cheryl and I walked to the precinct. It was mid-May, one of those perfect spring days in New York when Central Park looks like it was Photoshopped by the man upstairs, and most New Yorkers on their way to work have full-blown smiles on their faces.

  And then I was back to reality: Captain Cates’s office. Kylie and I had identified the prime suspect in the Silver Bullet bombing case. Now came the tough part: catching him.

  “Did you release Sura’s picture to the press?” I asked.

  Whenever there’s a citywide manhunt, the brass debates whether or not to enlist the public’s help by releasing a photo of the suspect to the media. Most of the time we don’t. The standard reasoning is, Why let the perp know that we’re onto him?

  “Absolutely not,” Cates said. But this time the logic was different. Cates spelled it out for us.

  “Sura is Guatemalan. His mama could pick him out of a crowd, but if you flash a picture of a dark-skinned, dark-haired mad bomber on a TV screen for five seconds, you know what’s going to happen.”

  “Chinese waiter syndrome,” I said. “They all look alike.”

  Every year, thousands of witnesses identify the wrong person—especially when the felon and the witness are of different races. In a city with four million white people it was smarter to circulate Sura’s picture to trained police officers.

  “Next order of business,” Cates said. “A hundred thousand dollars of the DA’s money flew off into the sunset last week. Would you like to know how many times he’s called me since you left for Thailand?”

  “No, Captain, but did you tell the DA that we have two suspects?”

  “Yes, and he doesn’t give a shit about suspects. Nor is he interested in the fact that Detectives Corcoran and Fischer have been tailing them. All he wants to hear is that he’s getting his money back. Where are you on finding it?”

  “We’re meeting with Corcoran and Fischer as soon as we’re done here.”

  “In that case, we’re done. Go—and don’t come back empty-handed.”

  Danny Corcoran and Tommy Fischer were parked outside the precinct. “We’ve been tailing Troy Marschand and Dylan Freemont since Friday,” Danny said as soon as we got in the car.

  “Who’s watching them now?�
� Kylie said.

  Danny pulled out. “These boys don’t need watching at this hour. They sleep in till around noon.”

  “Don’t they work?”

  “Marschand, if he’s still employed, is the assistant to a dead woman. Not very demanding on his time. Freemont is an actor-slash-waiter. We followed him to a burger joint on Second Avenue on Saturday. He went inside, came out fifteen minutes later, and hailed a cab. We checked with the manager. She told us he quit. Came in to pick up his money.”

  “You think he landed an acting job?”

  “More likely he’s found a new career as a blackmailer. The two of them have been dining at some of New York’s finer restaurants, and they spent yesterday shopping on Madison Avenue. Paying cash.”

  “The tips must be good at that burger joint,” Kylie said. “So now what?”

  “You remember Jerry Brainard, the dispatcher who worked the new mobile command center? Jerry knows drones. We showed him the chopper video of the one that scooped up the ransom money, and he ID’d it as a DJI Phantom 3.”

  “Get a court order for their credit card records,” Kylie said. “See if they bought one.”

  “We did. Nothing came up, but that doesn’t prove anything. There are third-party sellers all over the lot. Or they could have bought a used one. Jerry checked with the FAA. You’re supposed to register these things with the Feds, but there’s nothing under either of their names.”

  “We can get a warrant to search their apartment for a drone with a grappling hook dangling from the bottom,” I said.

  “The hook was homemade. I doubt if they’d leave it on. But even if we found a drone on their kitchen table, the ADA said she couldn’t make a case that they committed the crime. We were about to give up on the drone connection and wait for them to hit another victim, but Jerry texted me last night, said he had an idea, and asked if we could meet him at the fire academy on Randall’s Island.”

  “What’s he doing out there?” Kylie asked.