There is only one explanation. I call Lek to have him call the registry and check for me, but I’m confident I’ve finally got the picture: the registration, which at first glance seemed to be the official record of sale of one house, was in fact a record of a sale of the whole project, incorporating a total of three houses-along with all the common land. Instead of having the cab stop at the mansion, I tell him to keep going as far as the heliport, then pay him and get out.
Now I’m standing on top of the mound that forms the heliport to check out the other two houses. They were built as if to complement the main mansion. Each must have pretty good views of the Andaman Sea, but neither boasts that fantastic drop into infinity that the main property offers. I decide to ask the Buddha for help. I stroll up to each of the other houses with my mind as open as I can manage. As I suspected, it is the one on the right that causes the hairs to stand on the back of my neck. I’m not surprised it owns better security than the main property. It is surrounded by a wall about ten feet high with a gate that was originally a work of wrought iron in an open-scroll pattern, but it has been boarded up with sheet steel to prevent anyone from looking into the grounds. CCTVs perch on each corner of the wall, and more cameras are fixed to the house.
The sense of the sinister is so strong, I call Inspector Chan.
“I’m at Vulture Peak,” I tell him, and explain my theory about the other houses perhaps forming part of the estate bought by the Yips.
“Perfect,” Chan says. “Perfect. Where are you right now?”
“Outside the second house.”
“Good. Is it far back from the mansion?”
“About three hundred yards.”
“So it’s looking down at a valley?”
“Not quite. There’s a flat area.”
“Examine the flat area. What’s the vegetation like?”
I walk across to take a look, holding the phone to my ear. “Looks like it’s been planted with grass and shrubs.”
I hear a sharp intake of breath. “Okay, what about the contours? Is it unexpectedly flat, considering the shape of the mountain?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Fill. Landfill. Digging tunnels these days is easy with the right machinery, especially if you have plenty of dough and come from Hong Kong. The problem is where to dump the extracted material. What are the dimensions of the flat area?”
“More than a hundred yards long, about twenty wide.”
He whistles. “Just what I thought. Except that I was expecting them to have dumped the fill over the cliff on the sea side. That’s how I saw it, but I must have got that detail wrong. That’s why I was checking out the cliff with my scope that day on the boat.”
“You saw it?”
“I trained in the States for three months in the eighties. They let me take a remote viewing course. I’ve been trying to use it on the Yips for years. Recently I saw tunnels and landfill-and a lot of other things. But I didn’t know where in the world they were.”
“D’you want to come over here now?”
“No. This isn’t the moment. If we raid now, all we end up with is empty properties that could have been used by anyone. You can bet the Yips have plenty of backup alibis. But they have to visit Vulture Peak soon.”
“Why?”
“Because the clerk and the boat boy have disappeared. They need to know why, and they need to do the investigating themselves. They have no choice. I know they arrived back here in Hong Kong from a trip to Beijing yesterday, so they probably held consultations with their cadres. I have my nerds checking all flight bookings from Hong Kong to Thailand. It’s important that I reach Phuket before they do, so as soon as I see they’ve reserved a flight, I’ll get on an earlier one. Don’t call me again. I’ll send an SMS.” He hangs up.
Now I’m all alone on the hill without a taxi. I shrug and call the chopper company to send someone to pick me up. At the airport I go straight to the computers to access Wikipedia. Remote viewing (RV) is the apparent ability to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means, in particular, extra-sensory perception (ESP) or sensing with mind. Scientific studies have been conducted, and although some earlier, less sophisticated experiments produced positive results, none of the newer experiments concluded with such results when under properly controlled conditions, and therefore, like any other forms of ESP, constitutes pseudoscience. ^ [1][2][3][4] Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. ^ [5][6][7] The term was introduced by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974. ^ [8] Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. Although one Stargate viewer was awarded in 1984 a legion of merit for determining “150 essential elements of information (…) unavailable from any other source,” ^ [9] the program was eventually terminated in 1995, citing a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community. ^ [10]
Back in Bangkok I take a cab to the station and race up the stairs to Vikorn’s office. He listens to my breathless report without comment, nods, and jerks his chin at the door as a sign for me to leave.
27
Today Chanya is kikiat and won’t be doing any work of any kind. Kikiat is usually translated as “lazy,” which is misleading because of the disfavor into which this vital component of mental health has fallen in the work-frenzied Occident; over here kikiat is not a fault so much as a frank statement of the human condition. To fail to lend a helping hand because you have something more important to do may provoke anger in others, but to fail to perform a chore because you are feeling kikiat will, in all but the most extreme circumstances, meet with an understanding sigh; indeed, the word itself has a kind of pandemic effect, so that one person declaring themselves kikiat can cause a whole office to slow down. You may spend a lot of time over here, DFR, learn our customs, know our history better than we do ourselves, and even speak our language, but until you have penetrated to the very heart of indolence and learned to savor its subtle joy, you cannot claim really to have arrived.
Naturally, now that Chanya has declared herself kikiat for the day, I myself am thinking of spending the next few hours in bed, calling in sick, and maybe getting up around noon to go to temple. After all, I’m the one who got back from Phuket yesterday. Surely I’m entitled to be idle too?
Now my hasty declaration that I too am kikiat absolves me from the duty of getting up to boil water for coffee, so we hang there in bed for an hour or so. Sometimes Chanya hooks a leg over mine; then after about half an hour I’ll hang my leg over hers; about twenty minutes after that we will decide that too much flesh on flesh is distracting from the purity of our kikiat, so we’ll turn aside from each other as if we’ve had an argument; then Chanya will turn back, or I will, and the first one to return to the flat position will hook their leg over the other’s leg or body. We spent most of our honeymoon in this way, with breaks for beer, sex, and somtam. Of course, we went swimming in the sea from time to time, but too much exercise has a corrosive effect on kikiat. Eventually one of us will get up to boil the water, but we will do it slowly, drowsily, and resentfully, so as not to disturb the fragile condition. Communication is achieved by single words or, preferably, grunts. Try it at home, DFR-you’ll find it a perfect cure for jogging.