Patiently he said: 'Is there a better way of making sure they can maintain contact with us, since you are the subject under their protection?'
'Why did you let them do it?'
'When an organization of good repute offers protection to one of my agents I don't refuse. You may one day profit from that.'
He was listening to her too but there was nothing useful. She must have known what kind of call it was or she wouldn't have asked us to stay while she took it.
I looked at her once and in that same second she looked back at me. To break it up I asked Loman: 'Why isn't the Cultural Attache ever in his office?'
'He's there most of the time but he lets Miss Maine bring people through there so that they can be vetted when necessary.'
'He must spend a lot of time in the lav.'
'Don't forget,' Loman said, 'that Mil. 6 have more facilities than we do. They exist.'
When she put the phone down we weren't talking.
She said: 'The first news has just gone out over Radio Thailand.'
Loman was attentive. 'Then it's a worldwide release.'
She smiled faintly. 'It had to happen sometime.' With an oblique glance at me she said: 'The ambulance has been found abandoned. It was reported as having a radio fault about an hour before the motorcade left the Palace – no one could get an acknowledgement. Half an hour later it was reported stolen. Now it's been found. The crew had their uniforms taken, then they were trussed up unconscious in a sampan on Klong Maha Nak.'
She was moving round so that the left side of her face was away from the windows. Loman asked:
'Is there a search mounted?'
'Oh yes.' She looked at him as if he ought to have known. 'Everyone's in – the Metro Police, Special Branch, CID, Auxiliary Services, Crime Suppression Division radio and anti-riot units. Even the Army – the King issued an emergency decree. Commando units are recalled to barracks.'
She was repeating what they'd been telling her on the phone and I got fed-up and said: 'Look, is your outfit going to keep on getting in my way?'
Loman looked upset and I felt better.
She moved toward me a bit, head poised at an angle on the slender neck. The eyes still flickered sometimes but she didn't look at me any more as if I were Frankenstein's pet.
'We don't want to lose you,' she said.
'You'll have to. I'm going to ground.'
I don't know what I would have said if Loman hadn't been with us. Other things. Or the same thing in other ways.
She said quietly, 'We shall still do what we can to hold you. It's important.'
It wasn't clever and I shouldn't have tried it but I couldn't stop halfway once I'd started. 'Any particular reason?'
I saw Loman go poker-faced.
She said, 'Yes. We know why the abduction was made. Do you?'
17 Lee
The city was under siege.
Roadblocks had been set up at all major points of exit and were manned by units of the Royal Thai Army. Traffic attempting to leave the city had to pass through a bottleneck of tank traps, machine-gun posts and barbed wire in depth. Outward passage was permitted only after credentials had been examined by teams from the Bangkok Special Branch and all vehicles rigorously searched.
Passenger coaches serving the eighteen international airlines operating through Don Muang Airport were given mobile police escort through the roadblocks after each passenger was examined and screened at the airline offices in the heart of the city. Bus, train, and road services were interrupted and all travelers entering Bangkok were warned that there would be serious delays before they could be permitted emergency-exit passes.
Units of the U.S. Special Forces permanently stationed in the country had been drafted into the area following the immediate acceptance of an offer by the U.S. Government to place certain troops and facilities at the services of the Thai Army. Infantry search parties were linked across the rice-field areas working in radio liaison with military helicopters flying a nonstop schedule.
Sea-going traffic moving southward down the Chao Phraya River was caught in the dragnet set up by naval gunboats on the north side of Kratumban. All ships were searched by auxiliary units of the river police. Inland from Bangkok the river was blockaded on the south side of Nontaburi with a machine-gun post on each bank and a group of armed inspection vessels patrolling the midstream lanes.
A ring of armed guards was drawn round Don Muang and every other airfield in the southern provinces, and the owners of all private airplanes were ordered by special emergency decrees to immobolize their machines by draining the fuel tanks and removing their distributor rotors, and to report immediately any attempt by strangers to approach hangars or mooring-areas.
In the besieged city the flags had been taken down. Five thousand police drawn from the North and South Bangkok Metropolitan and auxiliary forces had begun a systematic search of every room in every building in every street. Mobile patrols cruised on a twenty-four-hour schedule covering a search pattern especially devised by the city traffic-control planners. All crews were armed.
Theaters, cinemas, and dance halls had closed, and few people dined out. There was music by night. The gold domes of the temples stood among silent trees. The city was numbed by the shock of the realization that its streets were not safe, by fear for its missing guest and by grief for its dead.
Fourteen people had lost their lives when the royal car had plunged into the crowd; by nightfall three of the injured had died. A memorial service was arranged to take place in the Palace grounds on the day following the tragedy.
News of world reaction reached the city hourly by radio and cable. Little news went out.
'Naturally it will prove ineffective,' Pangsapa said to me. 'An effort must be seen to be made, and anxiety for the safety of so distinguished a person must be expressed, therefore they are throwing whole armies into the search. Well and good. But ineffective.'
He had signaled me through the Embassy before I'd left Room 6 and I had come straight to his house because I was ready to snatch at any straw, any bit of information from anyone at all that might give me a direction to follow.
I said, 'You think they've still got him here in the city.'
'Of course.'
He sat in his black robe on the cushions and there was incense burning somewhere and I felt I had come to Delphi. Inaction when action is most desperately needed begets false hopes. I didn't think Pangsapa had anything I could use.
'The nearest airfield is an hour's drive,' I said.
Too far. They had no time to reach it in the ambulance before the hunt was up, and they had no time to switch vehicles. They're still here in the city and you could deploy all the troops and airplanes in Asia quite ineffectively. Armies need room to move. The police may have better luck among the cellars and the ruined temples and the riverside wharves. But there are only two people in the whole city with any real hope of finding the man you so discreetly call "the Person." I refer to our two selves.'
Today something was different about him, about his eyes or voice or the way he sat, and I couldn't even name this difference but it was there. I began watching him more carefully.
'In your case,' he said, his tone slightly sing-song, 'you know Kuo and his cell better than anyone in the whole of Bangkok, because the police observed them for a few days and they did it in shifts, whereas you made a study of them and you worked alone. You had, after all, certain intentions toward Kuo, and these necessitated your observing him with far greater care than the police.' The topaz-yellow eyes did not glance in my direction. (Question: how much did he know?) 'In my case,' he went on in the same slightly lilting tone, 'I possess information sources which the police would find it difficult to tap, since they spring from what is called the "underworld."' Plaintively he added: 'I don't know why it should always refer to cities. Every man has his own underworld and a part of him never leaves it.'