by J C Ryan
After accomplishing his first errand and saying goodbye to Rehka just before sunrise the next morning, he visited Aarav Patel at home. His friend was surprised to see him so early, but graciously invited him to enter. Rex declined, explaining he had a flight to catch.
Aarav’s jaw dropped in astonishment when Rex handed him the keys to the van.
“My friend, your family is growing. You need this vehicle and I don’t. Please accept it as a gift.”
Aarav’s face clouded. “Ruan, I can’t accept this. It looks too much like a bribe for all my favors to you.”
“I can't remember any favors you did for me. What are you talking about?” Rex was grinning. “But let's not get hung up on details and facts. Let me speak to your wife.”
Just then, Aarav’s wife came to the door and asked why they were standing at the door instead of inside, where she had breakfast ready to serve. Rex took advantage of the situation and repeated what he’d said to Aarav to begin with.
By then, the children were awake and tumbled out the door to give Digger hugs. Aarav gave Rex a desperate look and tried to herd his kids back inside before they woke the neighbors. Rex just grinned and dropped the key into Aarav’s wife’s hands.
“I’ll see you again, my friend,” he promised.
He walked away and used his cell phone to hail a cab.
Next stop: Thailand.
Chapter Four
JOSH FARLEY AND Marissa Bisset were having what she called a vigorous discussion. Marissa was ready to throw in the towel.
“It’s impossible to even start looking for someone in this country,” she said. “There are too many people, and it isn’t as if we’ll just bump into him. We don’t even know for certain he’s here.”
“We don’t know he isn’t,” Josh countered.
She knew he wouldn’t want to let the Old Man down, and he had told her already he wasn’t going back without something to report. Now he repeated it as his mantra. “I’m not going back…”
“Without something to report,” she snapped. “I know. You’ve said that every day since we got here. Well, I say we have something to report. We didn’t find him, and the trail is not just cold. We never had a trail to follow in the first place. End of story.”
“But listen, we haven’t covered all the ground.”
“Are you serious?” she half-shouted. “Over a billion people! Hello!”
“No, that isn’t what I mean. Remember, we know he got away with a lot of cash and some diamonds, from that guy Usama, right?”
“Wrong. We think he’s the one who raided Usama’s compound and emptied the safes. We have no way of knowing.” She dropped her head in her hands and muttered through her mane of nearly black hair, “It’s a fool’s game. Brandt is delusional.”
Josh jumped to their boss’s defense immediately. It was one of the things she found endearing about the younger agent. At twenty-five, he still believed the good guys always won. Even though CRC had a remarkable record, Marissa knew they didn’t always win. Sometimes she wasn’t even certain they were always the good guys. This boondoggle could be one of the times they didn’t win, but she didn’t really want to argue with Josh.
The truth was, she’d grown a little too fond of Josh. Even though he was young and, in her view, a little naïve, there was no question he was good at what he did. So, when he hotly defended Brandt, she didn’t tell him that at ten years his senior, she had a better grasp on reality. Instead, she sighed and asked what he thought their next move should be.
“We haven’t run into him at any of the places we thought he might have gone, given his interest in history. We could have just missed him, right? I mean, we were at one place when he was somewhere else. I think we have to play the odds. How likely is it that someone else went after the guy who set up that ambush within a few hours of it happening? We, and that includes you, are in an industry where we can’t afford to believe in coincidence. But we, you and I, know that coincidence is also real. In this case we are not staking our lives on it, so why not keep on going for a while longer and see if coincidence smiles upon us?”
All right. If he’s going to play the Socratic method, I can go along.
“Admittedly, not likely. It was probably a survivor, but what makes you think it was Rex?”
“It’s just a hunch, and one The Old Man shares. So, it isn’t likely it was anyone else. And we have the reports from people who should know that Usama’s safes were full of cash and diamonds. Don’t forget, whoever it was also took the computer hard drives.”
Marissa tilted her head. “Why is that significant?”
“Because it tells us something about what the person’s intentions were. If he’d meant to stay in the area, he’d have taken the computers. He needed to travel light, which tells me he meant to leave the country.”
Not bad. I didn’t think of that.
“That still doesn’t pin it to Rex. Anyone who did that would have wanted to put distance between himself and the scene of the crime. But, be that as it may, let’s say you’re right. He’s got diamonds, a wad of cash, and three or four hard drives from Usama’s computers. How does that tell us where he’s going?”
Josh grinned, and Marissa realized he thought he had her buy-in. What he had was her interest, but it wouldn’t hurt to play along. Only now she was Socrates. She waited for his answer, which was clearly on the tip of his tongue. She didn’t know what he was waiting for.
“I’d tell you, but then…”
Oh, no, you’re not playing that game with me!
Marissa leaped at him, knocked him onto his back on the bed where he’d been sitting, and straddled his chest. “You’d have to what?” She laughed, but the next moment she found herself flat on her own back, Josh pinning her to the bed and grasping her wrists, her arms over her head.
”Get off me, and don’t get any ideas either!” she exclaimed in a mock serious tone.
He let go of her wrists and rolled off her. “Just needed to get your attention, Mrs. Farley.” They’d been posing as a couple despite their age difference, which was impossible to see. Josh was a pleasant-faced, All-American type. Not movie-star handsome, but he looked slightly older than he was. Marissa, on the other hand, looked quite a bit younger than she was, with the effect that it looked as if they were of the same age. Besides that, her beauty would be the focus of anyone looking at them as a couple in any event. If anyone were to find out that Josh was so much younger, they’d probably assume he was wealthy and she a trophy wife.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she said.
“You started it,” he retorted.
She began to laugh. He joined in, standing and then extending his hand to help her up from her awkward position.
“Okay, I plead guilty. Let’s focus. Let’s assume Rex is the person who killed Usama and relieved him of his belongings, that he has a wad of cash and some diamonds that he left the country with because he was traveling light, and that he came here. Why did he come here?” she asked.
“Easy. India’s the world’s diamond capital. He’s planning to sell them here.” Josh, still standing and now looking down at her as she remained seated on the bed, crossed his arms as if that were the end of it.
“How do you figure that?” she said. “I thought Brussels in Belgium was the diamond capital.”
“Here’s the thing, though,” he said. “Where did he get the diamonds? The drug lord he took them from, assuming it was him…”
She nodded. “We’re out of luck if we don’t assume it was Rex who killed him. Consider that a given.”
“Okay. So, my point is, they were likely as dirty as their previous owner. He can’t sell them in Belgium, where every diamond is tracked according to source. But in India, specifically in Surat, it’s wide-open by design. They’re working on illicitly mined stones right alongside legitimate ones. Where else is he going to peddle stolen stones? Especially stolen conflict diamonds, which is most likely what Usama had. By the time they�
�ve been cut and polished in Surat, no one would be able to figure out where they came from, just like all the other illicit stones on the market. Occam’s Razor.”
“Wait a minute. In the first place, you can’t cite Occam’s Razor when we’ve made a ton of assumptions. And you might have a point, but you also have some faulty conclusions. He’s got diamonds, but he’s also got cash. Quite a bit of it. How do we know he plans to sell the diamonds or that he hasn’t sold them already?”
Josh looked crestfallen, then brightened. “Because, if he doesn’t, then he’d have probably gone somewhere else. Or maybe...”
“Don’t waste your breath to even try to make sense of what you just said. I agree, we’ve got to start somewhere, and as you pointed out, Brandt thinks he’d have come here, too. So if we’re going to continue this wild-goose-chase, what’s our next move?”
“I say we go to Surat and question diamond dealers,” Josh said.
“Okay, but let’s just do a bit of research about what that would mean.”
They got on their laptops and began searching for information about Surat and the diamond industry there, and were soon depressed to learn that Surat was not only one of the world’s fastest-growing cities, with five million residents and growing, but also that half a million of them were involved in some way in the diamond trade. Inside the countless rows of crumbling, whitewashed, concrete office buildings, teeming masses were cutting, polishing, or moving stones.
They didn’t have to say it, but the facts spoke for themselves—it was as hopeless a task as running into Rex at a tourist site by coincidence.
Now that she was mildly invested in the outcome again, Marissa wondered, “What else would he be doing besides selling his diamonds?”
Josh heard and snapped his fingers. “False ID!” he crowed. “He’d need a passport, a legend, maybe more than one.”
“Good idea, but…” Marissa almost didn’t want to say it and start the argument all over again.
“But what?”
“How are we going to find the forgers who created those IDs for him? It’s not as if we can place an ad in the newspaper and ask them to contact us.”
“Marissa, you must be tired, or you haven’t operated outside the states. How would Rex have found one?”
Marissa felt her jaw drop as she realized he was right. Rex would have looked for a forger using his tradecraft. They just needed to do the same thing and work their way through the network. Forgers knew of each other. Hell, here in India they might even have a guild of their own.
Without answering, she keyed in security passwords, brought up Tor on her laptop, and began to cruise the deep web.
Chapter Five
COMFORTABLY ENSCONCED IN first-class, Rex felt bad for Digger in his cage in cargo, but it didn’t stop him from enjoying the perks. With a mimosa in hand, he reflected on the information his research had turned up.
Changing one’s looks with cosmetic surgery may sound easy, but there were numerous considerations before actually doing it. The first was how drastic a change would he want to make, and whether he’d want it to be permanent. He could assume that surgery would be permanent unless he wanted to undergo a second surgery to reverse the first, but would that even be possible?
He gave a passing thought to Catia, the stunning Mossad agent he’d met in Italy on two missions for CRC. He hadn’t had time for flirtations when he worked with her on those occasions. Now that he was not in CRC’s employ anymore and could determine his own comings and goings, he had time to think about her. In fact, he did so a lot, and he thought he might want to revisit that relationship. After all, there was certainly some serious chemistry between them on those occasions. She’d stirred feelings in him that no other woman had since his long-ago girlfriend, whom he’d alienated by withdrawing during the worst of his grief for his murdered parents.
Someday, maybe even someday soon, I might want her to recognize me.
He’d eventually decided he’d just have to make an appointment or two and get some opinions, because the questions he wanted to ask weren’t addressed in the websites he found. All he’d discovered was that Thailand was indeed a mecca for medical tourism, renowned particularly for cosmetic surgery.
Thailand was also a popular tourist destination, especially for people from Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as a popular retirement destination for people all over the world because of its high standard of living and low living costs. A peaceful country, known as ‘The Land of Smiles’ because of its friendly people, though his research indicated that there seemed to be a corruption problem with the government. But in Rex’s opinion, across the globe, the concepts corruption and government seemed to be inseparable—the only difference between countries was that in some it just received more media attention than in others.
Rex’s research showed that Thailand had a total land area of approximately half a million square kilometres. The Thai kingdom was established in the mid-14th century and was known as Siam until 1939. Thailand was the only Southeast Asian country never to be ruled by a European power. During World War II it was in alliance with Japan but became a US treaty ally in 1954 after sending troops to Korea and later fighting alongside the United States in Vietnam.
Besides the Thai language, he had some interest in their form of kickboxing, known as Muay Thai. He found it curious that such a brutal sport could have originated with such a peaceful people and looked forward to finding out the history of it as well as maybe learning some techniques for his own close-combat skills.
He was satisfied there were plenty of reasons to visit Thailand, even if he decided not to have any cosmetic surgery done after all. Even Digger would probably enjoy Thailand. Rex had discovered the medical care for pets, if there was any need for it, was on a par with veterinary care in the West, and that there were even a few off-leash parks where he could play.
The only trouble he could foresee might be in getting Digger around with him on public transportation and finding a place to stay. It seemed there were plenty of ‘pet-friendly’ hotels, but that might not mean friendly to pets Digger’s size. But he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. His research had shown that, as in most countries in the region, a little monetary incentive offered at the right time to the right person went a long way.
His research also turned up some problems, not the least of which was sex trafficking. But that was a problem everywhere, even in places where Americans didn’t expect it to be, like in their own cities. If he ran into such a situation, he’d do what he could, but he wasn’t going to put a board around his neck saying, “Any issues with sex trafficking, I am your man.” He hoped to enjoy some peace and quiet for a change and put the killing and CRC and his white armor aside until he felt ready to go to the US and pay those traitors who tried to kill him a visit.
The reason he most looked forward to was visiting several historic sites he’d identified. His destination, and the city he’d make his base while in Thailand, was Bangkok. Despite being a modern city, with its fair share of new skyscrapers and a thriving nightlife, it was also home to grand temples, historic relics, and incredible ancient architecture. He’d begin in the Bangkok National Museum and thoroughly explore the city while taking language lessons to accelerate his acquisition of Thai.
From there, he planned to take excursions out of town to places like Udon Thani and Sukhothai, both thought to have been established in the thirteenth century. The former was a World Heritage Site, believed to be one of the oldest settlements in Southeast Asia. Thailand’s extravagant and beautiful architecture were on display in those and several other cities he’d identified.
Equally interesting, though, was a much more recent site. Near Kanchanaburi, Erawan National Park was home to a seven-tiered waterfall that drew many visitors. But Rex’s interest was in the bridge made famous in a movie before he was born, whose theme song his dad had often whistled. The Colonel Bogey March, a jaunty military march tune, belied the appalling history o
f the bridge, built by prisoners of war as part of the Thai-Burma Railway, otherwise known as the Death Railway, during World War II. Rex still remembered seeing the movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai, in second-run theaters when he was a young teen. He knew the events in the movie were largely fictional, but he wanted to see the bridge anyway and visit the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery.
There were many other places to visit, too, and as the plane approached Suvarnabhumi Airport, aka Bangkok Airport, he started anticipating the landing, reuniting with Digger, and beginning to cross those bridges of his own that he’d listed. But the first stop would be for some lunch.
He was also missing Digger. There hadn’t been many days when they were separated for over four hours. Rex had come a long way since putting aside his discomfort with dogs to adopt Digger.
Chapter Six
UPON ARRIVING IN Bangkok, Rex had to contend with Digger’s papers not being in order. After that, he and Digger were both ravenous. After satisfying his and Digger’s hunger, then giving Digger a nice long run in an off-leash park to make up for the hours in his crate in the plane, Rex’s next task was to find suitable lodgings. He let his fingers do the walking, calling agents and property managers to see if they had any apartments where he could live with Digger.
After he’d amassed a list of potentials, he intended to go and look them over, Digger in tow so the managers could see him and say right away whether he’d be permitted. It’s one thing to say ‘my dog weighs sixty-five pounds’ and another to see the big, black, shaggy reality. But traveling around the city proved to be its own challenge, as he couldn’t use public transportation and several taxi and tuk-tuk operators flatly refused to take Digger aboard.
Even when he found one who was willing, he suspected the fare was heavily inflated, which he confirmed with the first agent he spoke with. That agent also looked askance at Digger and refused to show the apartment, saying Digger was far too large a dog for what their pet policy intended.