IN THE DARKNESS of Casey’s living room, Calvino worked his hands behind his back to unhook the small laser pen from one of the pockets sewn into the hem of his sports jacket. He thought of how Fon had held out the laser pen, insisting he take it as a gift. The pocket had a Velcro strip that he wedged his fingers into to open it. He slipped the laser pen out, pointed it toward the window, pressed the button with his thumb, quickly released it, and repeated the sequence of three short bursts, followed by three long ones, and then three more short bursts.
“With all of their resources, they’ll find you, Casey. Wherever you go, they’ll have some connection who’ll let them know your precise location.”
“You chase around after cheating husbands. You don’t know fuck.”
Calvino sent Morse code for SOS with the laser pen again.
“What don’t I know?”
“That’d be a long list.”
“You’re settling the score for your son. Somporn’s enemy number one.” Casey coughed up phlegm and spit across the room, missing Calvino by a couple of feet. “How are you going to settle that score?”
“If your crooked friend the Colonel hadn’t paid off the Pattaya police, you’d be in jail, but at least you’d be alive. That was the idea, Calvino. But having you here works out just fine.”
“Pratt’s never paid or taken a bribe,” said Calvino.
“This place is a Mafia state. You think your colonel friend is an exception?”
“Fuck you, Casey.”
Casey laughed and pushed back his baseball cap. The anger rising off Calvino had given him some satisfaction. He had experience in knowing which buttons to push. It seemed to relax him in a strange way. He believed that an enemy is defeated with a combination of violence, fear, and surprise. Calvino, as far as Casey was concerned, was no different; his being a civilian made everything much simpler.
Calvino had no way of knowing if whomever Casey had targeted would see the flash of light, and if they did, whether it would stand out and mean something. He punched out the Morse code for SOS. A man in uniform, or a mee see in Thai, would immediately recognize an SOS message. Judging from Casey’s position, he had the target in a direct line of vision. One way to be sure the laser message was delivered was to get on the outside and on to the balcony. The first principle of communication is to eliminate the noise. With all of the lights shooting from the building, seeing one point of light wouldn’t be easy, unless someone with training was looking. Calvino decided he had to get on the other side. Calvino thought about the glass in the windows. His fingers pressed through the blind, touching the glass. There was only one way through. He started to rock back and forth in his chair.
“I’ve got to take a piss,” said Calvino. He squirmed in his chair. After a lull he started rocking the chair again.
Casey lay flat on a bench behind the rifle with his right eye pressed against the scope, waiting for the muzzle flash from Jarrett’s rifle. He hadn’t turned on the infrared scope. He’d fixed the location of Jarrett’s rifle and scope and was locked in.
Calvino thought that without the night-vision goggles, Casey looked much as he had the day he’d barged into the Lonesome Hawk for lunch and gotten under Old George’s skin.
“Stop that fucking rocking.” Casey glanced up long enough to see that Calvino had reached a critical mass in the movement of the chair. Calvino, who had been positioned beside the ceiling-to-floor window in near darkness, was outlined in a soft ray of light that streaked over his shoulder. A few feet behind where he sat, the light faded and finally disappeared.
Calvino waited until Casey had positioned himself behind the rifle again, his concentration focused as he stared through the nightscope, watching Jarrett through the crosshairs. Calvino pressed the laser pen to signal his SOS. He prayed that somewhere in the universe that mattered, someone would spot the speck of red light. Whether anyone had seen it against the backdrop of a street of high-rise buildings, Calvino had no idea. He could only hope. Because hope was all he had left.
“Then let me go take a piss.”
Calvino started rocking the chair and the front legs rose slightly from the floor. Casey trained his eye on the scope. “No time, friend. It’s rock ’n’ roll time.”
Calvino had been gift-wrapped by an expert. He examined the balcony window. He had a couple of choices. He could go headfirst and risk his brain getting damaged on the way through the shards of glass, or he could do a skateboard flip and go through feet first, risking his genitals against jagged pieces of broken glass. Calvino thought about the two possibilities for a moment and then, as most men would do, decided to go through the window headfirst. He prayed that a crooked glass contractor had gone with an unauthorized cheap sheet for the window.
Calvino inhaled, held his breath, and with all of his strength rocked the chair forward and then back as hard as he could push, flipping his feet through the curtains and shattering the glass window into a million pieces. The glass had been paper thin. But glass was glass, and going through a window clean only happened in the movies. He rolled onto the balcony with cuts biting deep into his legs and arms. An inch to the right and a shard of glass would have severed an artery. The curtain had come through the window with him and for a split second Casey’s head rose from the rifle.
Tracer had been the first to spot the dot of light coming from Calvino’s laser pen. The beam was tiny but distinctive against the wall of steel, chrome, and glass closing out the night sky. Tracer had frowned, looked again. This wasn’t any signature from an infrared scope. Whatever it was, it had come from a window on the opposite side of Thong Lo. His elbows fixed on a table, Tracer had seen the pattern in the light. Everyone in special ops knew the Morse code for SOS. He read it through his binoculars, and then someone had exploded through the window and onto the balcony. “Rooks. Alpha-side, four-nine. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
Jarrett raised a pair of night-vision binoculars to the ninth floor of Rooks and scanned from left to right, stopping at the fourth unit. He saw the glowing white outline of a person in the fetal position, legs curled up, lying on the balcony in a debris of broken glass, blinds, and a rifle.
“Sniper’s rifle,” said Tracer.
“Got it,” said Jarrett.
The man continued sending an SOS with the laser pen. Jarrett laid down the binoculars and looked through the infrared nightscope. He’d picked up the scope of a rifle and knew that he had only a couple of seconds to decide on a course of action.
Jarrett repositioned the rifle, lining up with the new coordinates. He was eyeball-to-eyeball with Casey’s nightscope when he squeezed off a .308 caliber round. The silencer largely muffled the explosion. It sounded like an old car backfiring, a car with a rusty muffler that still absorbed most of the noise.
Tracer swung the rifle around and had another look at the activity on Cat’s balcony. They were oblivious to the shot that had slammed into a building down the road. Cat continued to dance with Somporn, framed by the lights from the condo living room. She had positioned her man so that Jarrett had his choice of any number of perfect targets. Like a bullfighter with a red cape, she danced so as to remain in control of his advances.
Over on the ninth floor of Rooks, a neighbor’s light had come on. The light illuminated the smashed window, a man bloodied and struggling. Tracer switched to a normal pair of binoculars.
“Holy shit,” he said, passing them to Jarrett. “Have a look.”
“Yeah, I’ve got him. A guy on the balcony,” said Jarrett. “Am I seeing what you’re seeing?”
“Our favorite private investigator.”
“What the fuck’s he doing?”
“Looks like he’s tied up.”
“Saved our ass. That’s what he did.”
“Who’s the guy inside?”
“Who was the guy inside? Whoever it was, you were right, Tracer.”
“Fuck if I know.”
“I have a visual on the target,” said Tracer. His binoculars had picked up Somporn on the balcony. Cat had kept him dancing, though he looked like he was losing steam. They’d go inside soon.
“Jack’s gonna be paid back. But shooting Somporn isn’t the way we’re gonna do it. We’re standing down.”
Tracer nodded.
They exchanged a high five. Jarrett removed the earplugs and his hat, put on a jacket, and slipped on a necktie. Tracer stored away his earplugs, rubbed his ears good and hard, and then pulled his jacket off a chair and put it on. Together they broke down Kate and loaded it into the Pelican case. In less than five minutes they’d walked into the parking lot, opened the truck of the Benz, and put the case inside.
Jarrett drove. Tracer sat in the backseat, assuming his cover as an ambassador in an embassy car.
“We’re not going to Pattaya,” said Jarrett.
“Mooney’s going to be very pissed off.”
“You don’t know whether Mooney knew what was going down.”
Tracer wrinkled his nose, shook his head. Jarrett caught sight of him in the rearview mirror. “It don’t matter much one way or another.”
They pulled out of the condo building and onto Thong Lo, heading for Petchaburi Road, where they’d turn onto the motorway for the international airport.
The lyrics of a blues song accompanied by piano, sax, and harmonica filled the silence as Jarrett drove: “You stole my soul when you left me. You buried it where I’ll never find it. ’Cos I know you ain’t ever comin’ back. Leavin’ me on the street walkin’ around like I was dead.”