“So? Why does that mean we have to bug his phones?”
Saxon quit fiddling with his knobs long enough to reach up and feel his partner’s forehead, then pinch one cheek and lightly slap it. “Are you running a fever? Has your little brain overheated? Wakey, wakey, Agent Hamilton.” He laughed at the way Hamilton jerked his head back and batted ineffectually at his hand. “Were you asleep last time we talked to Washington? The fucking media finally figured out we didn’t win just ’cause Bill Bennett said we did when he cut and ran. The Agency needs a win, here; it is definitely not policy that the frapping Company should get to collar the biggest-ticket ace fugitive in the history of the U.S. of A.”
“So you figure somebody’s going to call right up to Belew’s room and finger Meadows?” Hamilton said sullenly.
“I figure he’s been putting out feelers, and somebody might get back to him, if only to set up a meet. Who knows? Maybe he’ll do a deal with the Muang Thais or the Shan United Army. Sell ’em a couple juicy DEA agents in exchange for Meadows.”
Hamilton paled.
“Besides, I don’t expect somebody to just call up to his room. That’s why I got all the phones in the lobby wired too”
“Oh, shit.” Gary grabbed Lynn’s shoulder and pointed. Mistral was just emerging from the hotel lobby, moving tentatively as she came down the broad white steps to the pool, as if the fierce noon sunlight was a wind she had to walk against. “Jesus, put that stuff away.”
“Why?” Saxon demanded. “She’s a playgirl, not a cop. What does she know about surveillance equipment? We’ll tell her it’s a magic ace detector we just got from the Governor by Federal Express.”
She stopped across from them in the terrace that ran around the pool, tentative as a forest creature. She wore a lightweight dress to mid-calf, smoky gray with little abstract dabs and slashes of mauve and midnight blue in it, set off with just a couple of streaks of silver, for contrast. It was sheer enough that you could see her bra and panties through it. She was wearing her ace suit less since she’d taken up with Belew. Maybe it was the humid Southeast Asian heat.
Helen Carlysle had spent some discreet time in the sun. Her limbs shone like polished hardwood. She had lost weight; the summer-weight dress had a tendency to hang in places. But the slight loss had sharpened the definition of her collarbones and her slim, long neck, added a touch of romantic concavity to her cheeks, made her eyes looked huge and haunted in the shadow of her silver straw hat.
A gentle, stinking breeze off the Chao Phrya River ruffled her permed hair. She was a great-looking woman, there was no doubt about that.
“Too bad she doesn’t have enough tits,” Hamilton said sadly.
“More than a mouthful is wasted,” Saxon said. He clutched at the side of his head and teetered way to one side. “Whoa We got something here.”
“What?”
“Shh! The Man Himself is on the line.” He listened, a nasty predator’s grin spreading gradually across his lean, dark face.
At last he nodded, peeled off the headset. “Okay,” he said, “we’re good to go. J. Bob’s meeting his man in half an hour. And he did, too, call him in his room, so there.”
He grabbed his Black Box by the little plastic carrying handle. Mistral caught sight of them as they stood up in a hurry. Saxon gave her the thumb-and-pinky Hawaiian hang-loose salute, and they booked.
The women were out buying fish, vegetables, and fruit from the vendor-boats on the klongs, canals. As Belew got nearer the Menam Chao Phrya, the wares being cried took on a more exotic flavor.
Bangkok was not an eighties kind of place. It was probably not going to be a nineties kind of place, either, but the decade hadn’t really set its style yet. The delicate called Krung Thep — Bangkok — the “Cesspool of the Orient.” It was noisy, loud, nasty, and bright, whether by day or by night.
There’s a hoary cliché about places in the East where anything is for sale. In Bangkok it’s all for sale cheap.
J. Bob Belew liked the place immensely.
Through a day whose humid heat was so thick you practically needed a machete to get through it, he negotiated thronged and hyper streets down to the waterfront district. Nearer the river, broad avenues became narrow, crowded with bodies in motion, and the cries of beggars, peddlers, and pimps warred with Moroccan-roll, Vanilla Ice, and that Chinese popular music that sounds like the themes of old cowboy movies for the top niche in a whole vibrant ecosystem of noise. The white-boy rap was cranked so that all you could hear was the jackhammer bass, which was probably a blessing.
Belew wore baggy-cut khaki Brittainia trousers, Nike athletic shoes, a cream-colored polo shirt, light-tan jacket, dark-green Ray-Bans. He moved like a man who walked these cracked and littered streets every day of his life.
It was not the best part of town he was going into, nor the safest, and the muggers were even better armed than the ones in Central Park, if not usually so bold. That was why he wore a Para Ordnance 10mm in an inside-the-pants holster down the back of his trousers. That was why they were cut loose, in contradiction of Belew’s customary fashion statement.
The Para Ordnance Ten was basically the same thing as the old Colt Government .45, but muscled up to take the hot 10mm cartridge. It also had a magazine capacity of fifteen rounds, unlike the old Colt, which held seven. That made for a mighty hefty grip, but Belew had big hands for his size. For all that the Para was a largish chunk of iron, it suited him well, and felt very good. The feel of a piece of equipment was very important to him.
The fore-end of the Ten in its Cordura holster did tend to kind of gouge him between the tops of his buttcheeks as he walked. That was the price you paid for concealed carry. You did not want to wear a shoulder-rig in the Tropics: Rash City.
An open display of ordnance was conspicuously not a good idea. The Thai Army had taken over again in late February under the direction of a general with the — to Belew anyway — immensely satisfactory name of Suchinda Krapayoon. Though the less resplendently named General Sunthorn Komsongpong was the front man for the junta, Suchinda was known to desire to move from being the brains behind the throne to the butt seated on it. The coup — the seventeenth, successful or otherwise, since 1932 — had come in on a law-and-order theme. Since Western governments did not want their citizens armed, what could be a better way of demonstrating the junta’s commitment to the rule of law than rousting gunslinging Westerners in approved Southeast Asian style?
The prohibition, of course, did not extend to the Army, the various police agencies, or the paramilitary Thai Rangers. These latter bad boys, in their characteristic Victor Charlie black pajamas, swaggered in bands through the waterfront district with the slings of their Kalashnikovs hung around their necks along with their trademark sky-blue neckerchiefs. Belew gave them room but little thought, as an experienced jungle traveler would a cobra sunning himself on a trailside rock.
The bar was called the Headless Thompson Gunner. It had a cute neon sign with the outline in blue of a big combat-booted dude with no head blazing away with an old drum-fed Tommy 1927 A5, the same gun all the Feds back home — having discovered the hard way in numerous shootouts that, beyond being a shitty handgun round, 9mm was also a shitty submachine gun round — were lugging around in spite of its enormous weight. The sign even had a flickering red-neon muzzle flash, Belew wished the place would open a franchise in Manhattan. It would make the Park Avenue set soil themselves.