She firmly grabbed his hand, and together they moved down the row to the exit door and out into the main lobby. Seven handed him a shopping bag and pointed to the men’s restroom. A couple of minutes later, Chinapat emerged wearing a baseball cap, dark glasses, Wrangler jeans and a T-shirt with a small dolphin icon above the heart.
2.0
Where are you?
Nana Entertainment Plaza
In a small, overcrowded back room of a bar converted into an office, a couple of tables, chairs, bookcases, a filing cabinet and two enormous safes occupied the area behind a locked set of teak doors.
Sitting amid gray smoke, a heavy-set MiddleEastern man named Jaul slumped in front of a computer screen. His enormous stomach rose above the edge of the table as his right hand moved the mouse and his left hand fed a large, freshly fried chicken drumstick into his mouth. Jaul was online, working through a pirated version of an early program of an archeological dig outside Baghdad. He was the owner of the Smoke but No Fire Bar.
The bar, once a travel agency, was discreetly set back from the staircase on the second floor of the Nana Entertainment Plaza. It was early morning, and the plaza was deserted. A few delivery trucks downstairs. Otherwise only a stray cat and a couple of resident dogs occupied the narrow corridors. Jaul loved the early morning, when he was left alone to count his money. His was a popular bar, and his women tall and young and beautiful. Money, piles of cash, accumulated every night like clockwork. He had counted his money twice and made notes in a ledger. Behind the chair where he sat, the safe door was ajar. Through the door appeared rows of stacked Thai thousand and five hundred baht notes.
One of Seven’s cyber friends had struck up a friendship with Pepsi, who worked at Jaul’s Smoke but No Fire Bar in Nana. Pepsi was a dancer and she took drugs. She paid cash for some cyber work involving several foreign customers, and Seven had been a subcontractor in refining Pepsi’s network of clients. Like most addicts Pepsi had a keen awareness of where lots of money was hidden and loved to gossip. She traded information about Jaul’s safe after Seven promised a full system upgrade and payment security that her bookie couldn’t hack.
Chinapat stepped into Jaul’s office, finding crude, out-of-date furniture and equipment. The primitive quality of Jaul’s software made his computer system no better than a toy. A porn site with several naked actors on a sofa flickered on the computer screen.
“What do you want?” Jaul asked, looking at Chinapat and then at Seven. “A job?”
There was a twinkle in his eye as he mentally undressed Seven.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
Jaul understood exactly what she meant. “Pray tell me your wish.”
“The money,” Seven said. He followed her eyes to the open safe door. Pimping clearly was more lucrative than murder.
As Jaul swung around to close the safe, Chinapat caught him along the side of the head with a 9mm Glock. There was nothing like hardened plastic to send a man to dreamland. A gush of blood dribbled down Jaul’s cheek. His attempt to fall back over his keyboard was interrupted by the bulge of his stomach, leaving him in the no-man’s land of being half-suspended in space. “Someone named Jaul should make better choices,” said Chinapat.
Seven rolled her eyes, knowing that Chinapat had accessed the Arabic dictionary as he stuffed the 9mm into the waistband of his jeans.
They cleaned out the safe, stuffing Seven’s suitcase with over a million baht. Jaul remained unconscious as Chinapat left first, carrying the suitcase. A moment later Seven followed.
At the Nana and Sukhumvit Road intersection, beside the police traffic control box on the corner, they met and climbed into a taxi. “How do you know this isn’t another trap?” Chinapat asked.
Seven held the suitcase on her lap. “Soon the Japanese will be looking for you.”
He knew there was no going back to Queen Sirikit Center. “Do we have enough money?”
Seven nodded her head. “For the startup, yes. Then we’ll need financing. Worry about that later.”
Not only had she saved Chinapat from falling into a trap laid by the Japanese, but she had the most calming effect when it came to assigning worry to a future to-do list. He could love a woman like that.
3.0
Where are you?
Bangkok Port
Located at the mouth of the Chao Phraya River, Bangkok Port—people also called it the Port of Klong Toey—had been a trading hub since the ninth century. A lot of sailors, pirates, traders, merchants and adventurers had walked the docks. As the taxi pulled to a stop, the sky was dotted with large cranes like columns of dinosaur skeletons erected up and down the shoreline of the Chao Phraya. Beyond the cranes were cargo ships, rice barges and fishing ships at anchor. Waiting.
Wires from Seven’s cell phone ended inside her ears. She talked as they walked down the road. Chinapat shifted the suitcase from one hand to the other. Real cash had a certain heft; the weight of money, though, never seemed heavy. They walked for fifteen minutes, and the sun was overhead and hot. Sweat rolled down Chinapat’s face, but Seven’s skin was cool and untouched by a single drop of perspiration. That’s when they saw a skinny whitehaired farang man with a broad smile, waving, in the distance. As they came closer, the man could have passed for late forties to early seventies. He introduced himself as Mr. Shockley and led them up the gangplank of the ship with “DOLPHIN SHEPHERD” stenciled on the bow.
“Welcome, partners,” Shockley said. “Let me show you around.”
First stop, and his point of pride, was a crane equipped with a large metal claw—a giant version of the fairground arcade game. Chinapat exchanged a look with Seven.
“Are you the owner?” asked Chinapat, frowning under his baseball cap.
“I am authorized to act on behalf of the owners,” he said. “As chunks of ice shelves calf into the Antarctic, we bring the ship alongside and harvest the purest drinking water on the planet. Australia is running out of fresh, pure water. So is Japan. The future of water is locked in icebergs.”
“How do you drink an iceberg?” asked Chinapat.
“You bottle it,” Shockley said.
Seven took the suitcase from Chinapat and handed Jaul’s pimping money over to Shockley. “Aren’t you going to count it?” she asked.
“No need,” he said.
“Now that we are partners, shouldn’t we know who our partners are?” Seven asked, wondering if this was the first time that brothel money had been laundered through an iceberg business.
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Chinapat. “Partners shouldn’t have secrets from each other.”
Shockley had hoped they would have taken more interest in the machinery, the engineering work that had gone into the crane, and shown some curiosity about where the ice was stored on board and how it was transferred to the bottling plants. He loved telling others stories of the early days of trial and error, testing, equipment breakdowns and violent storms at sea, where it was like riding an eighteenstory building struggling sideways over forty-foot waves. He led them to a stateroom and sat them at a conference table. There was a huge computer screen, and Shockley clicked the mouse to fill the screen with what looked familiar to Chinapat. A fishing village in a small bay.
“That’s a village in Japan. It’s Taiji,” said Chinapat.
“Our new bottling plant will be located here,” he said, directing a cursor to a point near the village center. “We will employ most of the able-bodied men in the village.”
“Who is ‘we’?” asked Seven.
The problem with the word “we,” she thought, is that the edges break off when it comes to describing the merger of intelligences that include human interfaces. Unscrambling the nodes and networks is a messy business.
Shockley scratched his chin and smiled. “The original settlers of the Antarctic,” he said, looking at the two new partners and trying to read their reaction. “Those who know the icebergs better than anyone.”
“Dolphins,” said Chinapat. “We’re back to dolphins again.”
“We are returning to the sea,” said Seven with a smile.
“The water inside icebergs is thousands of years old. Some icebergs have drinking water older than man,” said Shockley. “There is no manmade tradition older than iceberg water. We have approached the Taiji people, who have agreed to give up killing dolphins for harvesting pure water. The new harvest carries the dignity of the past, and it is the past they worship.”
As the Dolphin Shepherd sailed from Bangkok Port, Chinapat caught a glimpse of the two rows of Japanese men with long swords and megaphones shouting slogans as they ran along the docks, waving and shouting, and Jaul waddled behind, trying to keep up. He looked like an old walrus, shaking his ham-sized flipper and barking. Bringing up the rear were hundreds of Nana Plaza bar girls. As they set sail, Chinapat grasped the railing with both hands. Seven stood beside him. They watched as the women gutted and slaughtered the black-suited men, turning the Chao Phraya River red. The swords dissolved in the hands of the Japanese. The megaphones fell silent. By the time they reached the sea, the water was again clean and pure.
Bangkok Port soon was a tiny rim on the horizon. Shockley produced a device the size of a cell phone, running his fingers across a small screen until it lit up. He offered the device to Seven. “It’s the owners. They want to communicate directly.”
She held the device close to her ear and smiled. Then she handed it to Chinapat, who pressed it against his ear, a big smile crossing his face. It was somewhere between the rush of the sound from a large seashell, running water and music coming from a thousand crystal glasses, each filled with different levels of water. The background songs registered from deep inside the electromagnetic spectrum.