In my opinion, Rossi had made fooling people into believing she didn't know much into an art form. It was an effective disguise. I warned myself not to take her for granted.
“Well, I believe it's time for my watch,” she said. “And I bought you some food. Any movement over there?”
“No,” I replied. “Do we know yet who owns that villa?”
“Some big-shot local fisherman has his name on the paperwork — rented out two weeks ago to a dummy company in Bangkok owned by a South Korean import/export corporation, which is probably a front for North Korean interests.”
“Sounds sketchy,” I said.
“Yeah,” agreed Rossi.
The reality was that we weren't sure who was in that villa. The local CIA station believed it had spotted Boyle, Butler, and another Westerner, who could have been Dortmund, at a Muay Thai tournament in Bangkok two days before. But supposedly positive identifications of Boyle, Butler, and Dortmund had also since been made in Belfast, Rio, Mexico City, and Hong Kong.
“What does the colonel want to do?” I asked.
“Storm the place. Or bomb it. Or maybe bomb it then storm it.”
Colonel Samjai Ratipakorn from the Royal Thai Airborne Regiment was ostensibly in charge. It was his country, after all. But he'd been leaned on heavily to take advice from CIA — Rossi and Chalmers. Ratipakorn didn't like it, especially given that Rossi was a woman and Chalmers was an asshole, but he didn't have much choice. At least Chalmers hadn't made the car trip up from Bangkok — according to Rossi, Chalmers was strictly a rear-echelon jackass.
Colonel Ratipakorn headed up the Thai antiterror forces. He stood about five and a half feet tall in his boots and had less fat on him than a Thai free-range chicken. I knew this because his uniform fit like a seventies body shirt. He never removed his Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses, even at night. I hadn't seen him smile, either, and he didn't so much talk as yap. Like most Thais, he was Buddhist. Maybe in a former life, he was a chihuahua.
The hut Rossi and I were occupying was one of half a dozen scattered around the valley. It wasn't the closest to the villa we were staking out, but not the furthest away, either. It was small with an enclosed veranda, a bedroom with a double bed and two singles, a kitchenette, and a bathroom barely big enough for a generous Western-sized butt. A squad of Ratipakorn's heavily armed antiterror specialists was standing by, suited up and ready to roll three hundred yards up and over the ridge be hind us.
“Hang on,” I said. “Movement.”
“What you got?” asked Rossi, moving catlike across to the other side of the window and settling behind the thermal camera.
“How do you do that?” I asked.
“Do what.”
“Move without making a sound?”
“I float,” she said.
I watched as a huge Asian guy in a shiny suit opened a shutter on a double window, and scoped the trees from left to right. Behind him, I caught a glimpse of another sumo-sized guy, also in a polished suit.
“Shit,” I said. “There he is.”
“There who is?”
“The man seated with his back to us. You ever seen a worse haircut in your life? That's Sean Boyle.”
Rossi answered by reeling off a couple of dozen snaps for the CIA photo album, and then said, “Jesus, that's really him, isn't it?”
“Yup.”
“You sure?”
“No doubt in my mind.”
“What do you make of the muscle?”
“Gotta be North Korean. They're the only country who get their suit patterns from old Dallas episodes. Get a load of those shoulder pads.”
I heard Rossi snort in a delicate Eurasian-beauty kind of way. “You should be on the stage, Cooper.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, the first stage out of town.”
“We should pass on the positive ID to Ratipakorn so that he can do his thing,” I said.
“No, not yet. You know he'll just charge straight in there.”
“Isn't that what we want?” I asked.
“We first want to make sure everyone's present and accounted for. We don't know yet whether Mr. Big is there.”
“No, we don't,” I agreed. “Who's Mr Big?”
“The guy they're waiting around to meet.”
Rossi paused to take another look through the scope. “Like I said, it's my watch. You've been at this four hours now. Why don't you catch a little sack time, Cooper. If anything happens, I'll wake you.”
I didn't need to hear the suggestion twice. “Okay, the Starship Enterprise is yours.” I got up and stretched. Then I left the veranda, leaving behind the food. I needed sleep more than I needed noodle soup. I lay back on the double bed fully clothed and counted the lumps in the mattress…
My eyes came open with a start.
I tried to lower my arms and realized I couldn't. I tried to pull them down but all I got was the sound of a rattling chain. “Hey, what the … Have you cuffed me to the bed?”
“See what happens when you bring sex toys to a stakeout,” Rossi said as she walked out of the bathroom. I moved the cuff chain around the headboard and realized pretty much immediately I wasn't going anywhere in a hurry. Shit! I wished I'd followed my own advice not to take this woman for granted. The darkness hung like coal soot in a bunker. I couldn't see Rossi but I sensed her presence nearby. A small flashlight came on, its bloodred light peeling away the blackness in a cone in front of her face. She was kneeling on the floor, the flashlight in her mouth. I noticed she'd changed into black, urban assault-style gear. She didn't even glance in my direction and was leaning over a rectangular box that I didn't remember seeing among her gear. Rossi opened it, unfastening two clips, and pulled out a long length of pipe — a barrel, in fact — and began to assemble a rifle.
“What are you doing?” I said, asking the first truly dumb question of the day. I knew it was dumb on a number of levels, the least obvious being that I suddenly knew this was Rossi's mission — to kill.
“My job,” she replied, not looking up.
“Then what was mine?” I had believed — or been led to believe — that it was to assist the Thais in taking Boyle, Butler, and Dortmund into custody, so that they could then be extradited to the States to face an array of charges, and then spend the rest of their miserable lives in prison. Instead, I would be a witness to a state-sponsored execution.
“Probably not what you think.”
“Then set me straight.”
“Positive identification. You'd actually met the package. You pointed him out to me — confirmed the target's ID. That was your job. Mine's to show him the exit.”
“I didn't realize the CIA was still in the assassination game.”
“Don't use that word.”
“What, assassination?”
“No — game. My mother's maiden name was Tanaka. Ring a bell?”
Yeah, it did. “Dr. Tanaka didn't have a daughter.”
“No. But he had a sister,” said Rossi.
“You were his niece?” I tried to remember the briefing in D.C. What had Chalmers said about Rossi? That she had an Italian American father and a Japanese mother?
“As part of my briefing, I got a look at your case notes on the investigation into Hideo's death. Uncle and I — we were close. I think I was the only person he had any kind of relationship with. He had a problem with people. He liked fish.”