Tom was in the snug bedroom allocated to him by a non-CIA manager, who was responsible for mundane matters at the Ariana. It was a high-security building, but no one expected operatives or analysts to clean restrooms, and he was surprised by the number of diverse civilians who worked here.
He was stripped down to his boxer shorts, in need of a shower. He didn’t know how long it would be before he would get the chance again, and, as Crane had pointed out, he smelt like a rodent. He placed his small Buddha onto the nightstand and patted it. He would be on the move again in twenty minutes, going to what could be his death. He accepted it with a calmness that, paradoxically, worried him. He was not a risk taker; all of his training had been the opposite. A DS special agent on a protective detail was taught to eliminate risks. But he would not let the secretary go without doing what he could. Although he knew all too well that even if he successfully planted the bugs, there was no certainty that they would reveal anything useful, especially in the short timeframe.
There was a knock at the door. He slipped on a shirt and walked over to it. It was the CIA operations officer Crane had mentioned. She was a fellow Southerner with short blonde hair and a deep scar on her forehead. Her eyes were cerulean blue and as hypnotic as any he’d seen. After some brief small talk, she handed him a manila envelope containing car keys, a forged Pakistani passport and papers to enable him to cross the border, and the web address for the satellite imagery, which he hoped would result in a successful scan from the spy bug. She eased a canvas bag off her shoulder and gave it to him, too, saying it held a disposable cellphone, some clothes, a marked map, a Maglite and Pakistani rupees, together with the bugs. He noticed something about her. Something he couldn’t pin down. She seemed a little agitated; nervous, even. Crane had said she’d had a hard time here, so he decided not to dwell on it.
After she’d left, he walked across the azure tiles to the cubicle shower, feeling both lethargic and energized. He stepped in and put the showerhead directly above him, turning the dial to blue. He picked up a bar of soap and shivered as the cold water drenched him. He soaped his bruised body down. Placing the soap back into the cradle, he began to massage his aching muscles.
He’d weighed a little shy of thirteen stone for the last ten years, retaining the physique of a light-heavyweight boxer. He watched what he ate and ran most days. He’d trained in Muay Thai when he’d done a three-year stint at the US Embassy in Bangkok. He’d kept up the training, honing his techniques and working out with dumbbells or doing calisthenics when they weren’t to hand.
Bangkok had been his first long-term overseas posting. He’d been abroad on duty many times before, but he’d sampled as much of the culture as the average air steward did. It’d been a bar and a hotel room, then home. But after a week of late nights with a couple of other DS agents, he started to spend his days off exploring the city. The Buddhist temples were called wats, his cab driver said, and the best time to visit them was in the early morning when it was cooler and less busy. It was 13:02, sweltering and as packed as a subway at rush hour, the local workers being anxious to spend their lunchtimes offering the saffron-robed monks food parcels called tam boon. A way of attaining a better life the next time around, the cab driver had said with a sardonic grin as he’d driven Tom home.
The following day, the cab driver had arrived early and had taken Tom to the Grand Palace. Situated within the grounds, he explained, was the most important wat in Thailand: the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, Wat Phra Kaew. The Buddha was carved from a single block of jade, and sat adorned in garments of shimmering gold, an elaborate headdress twice its own size atop its cherub-like face.
A woman came up beside Tom. She wore canvas sandals and a purple cheesecloth dress that reached down to about twelve centimetres above her ankles. She had long, curly grey-brown hair, with lengths of beads dangling among the wildness. She looked to be in her mid-fifties with light-blue eyes glinting like sunlight on a glacier.
They had spoken to one another for a minute or two only.
But on his second visit, she’d managed to convince him to light joss sticks in memory of his mother.