In the previous book, The Honourable Assassin, we meet Victor Cavalier as a young man trying to make the grade for admission to the elite Special Air Services Regiment (SAS). He wins every examination, physical and intellectual, but fails because of a weak Achilles tendon that may have let him down in an assignment.
After this disappointment, he joins a newspaper. But the capacities and skills in the SAS trials are so outstanding that the Australian secret services and the Australian Federal Police want to employ him for certain clandestine activities that need an untraceable lone wolf. The major difference between Cavalier and other such shadowy figures is that he suggests his own assignments, and will only take commissions that he feels are morally acceptable to him. They must be for what he judges as ‘the greater good’.
His job as an investigative journalist becomes a near-perfect cover for his secret work.
*
Thirty-five years after he joins the newspaper, his life appears a bit of a wreck. His girlfriend has just walked out on him and his editor is under pressure to fire him for his reporting on Melbourne gang wars, which brings death threats to the paper’s chairman. Cavalier’s drinking habit is also winning the war with his better angels. On top of this, his editor wants a story about a Mexican drug cartel operative, Virgillo Labasta, who has been murdered by a sniper in a Carlton laneway.
It is midnight. Cavalier is watching a replay of his football team’s defeat that night when the editor calls and demands he cover the killing. Cavalier is most reluctant, for reasons not entirely apparent at that moment. But he is intrigued to meet a stunning Thai special investigator at the scene of the crime, Jacinta Cin Lai. She is looking into the Mexican’s links to illegal drug operations in her country.
His editor now wants a story on Jacinta, a colour piece on the life and work of this mysterious beauty. Cavalier refuses the offer, just as he is finally fired from his job. But then he receives a video from an unknown source that appears to depict his daughter being guillotined by Virgillo Labasta’s boss, the Mexican drug lord Leonardo Mendez.
Cavalier is shattered. The video seems to confirm his worst fears that his daughter, who had been travelling through Mexico seven years earlier, has been murdered. This galvanises him to investigate the drug cartel in Thailand. He then takes up the offer as a freelance journalist to do a feature article on Jacinta, which means contacting her in Bangkok.
His arrival there is complicated by a sudden Thai military coup, when a junta takes over the country. This adds an element of danger. His assignment uncovers corruption in high places in the Thai elite. But the coup and its disruption also opens up leads and opportunities for the resourceful Cavalier.
*
Unbeknown to his paper, he has been gathering information on the Mexican drug lords and their cartels ever since his daughter went missing. He has shared this intel with his contacts at the Australian Federal Police. Now he has a loose alliance with the inscrutable, stunning Jacinta, who he discovers is not all she purports to be. For one thing, she is Thailand’s most feared Muay Thai boxer, who retired from this ‘trade’ years earlier to join the Thai secret police. She still performs in annual exhibition bouts. Jacinta is also known to be a crack shot, the best among the Thai police, where she is from time to time employed as a professional assassin. For another thing, she is a transsexual.
As the relationship builds, Cavalier learns that Jacinta has a similar debt to settle. Her two closest friends have also been beheaded by Leonardo Mendez. Jacinta and Cavalier both have the highest incentive to kill him. Evidence emerges from the Australian Federal Police that Jacinta may have shot Virgillo Labasta in Melbourne. But did she?
Cavalier travels to remote parts of Thailand to gather telling data on Leonardo Mendez, who has temporarily set up his organization in Bangkok and Chiang Mai to reap profits from illegal drug deals throughout South East Asia.
Jacinta aids Cavalier with information from inside the Thai Police, yet she is disdainful of what a newspaper exposé in Australia or on the Internet will achieve. She says that nothing short of getting rid of Mendez will gain them a measure of retribution for their loss of loved ones. But Jacinta is controlled by the corrupt Thai Chief of Police, Aind Azelaporn, who is assigned to protect Mendez. Her chances of carrying out his elimination are limited. Cavalier realises that any action against the Mexican is up to him. Despite her assurances that Cavalier is not being monitored by the Thai police, he cannot be sure that she will not apprehend him.
*
In the middle of the coup, a rival Thai general to the junta is shot by a sniper when making a speech to a rally of supporters in Bangkok. Chaos ensues.
Cavalier seizes the moment.
He has studied his potential quarry like an etymologist dissecting an insect. He knows Mendez’s strengths and weaknesses, right down to his pathological attraction to beheadings, and his sexual proclivities. The latter gives Cavalier the thinnest of opportunities. Mendez frequents Bangkok’s most notorious brothel centre, Nana Plaza, surrounded by his twenty cut-throat bodyguards.
Disguised as a Swedish tourist, Cavalier books a room in a hotel looking into the Plaza. During a blackout, which at first seems to stymie his minutely planned effort, Cavalier delivers the mortal blow to the psychopath who had indiscriminately slaughtered hundreds of people.
A manhunt follows. Cavalier is forced to escape Thailand via Cambodia. He seems trapped when a three-man squad from the cartel, led by its top hit man, Jose Cortez, and Jacinta chase him by boat at night from Phnom Penh down the Mekong to Vietnam. Jacinta, in a daring plan, appears to want to protect Cavalier, although she cannot expose herself as his accomplice.
Cavalier manages to evade his pursuers by bluff and expert marksmanship.
*
Questions remain. He suspects that Jacinta sent him the video of his daughter’s guillotining, which she does not deny. It pulled him into the investigation and the eventual destruction of Leonardo Mendez. Jacinta suspects that apart from Mendez, Cavalier eliminated the Mexican drug lord’s number two, Virgillo Labasta, which he too, does not deny …
Jose Cortez, who has 80 ‘kills’ to his credit in the USA and elsewhere, puts a high-priced contract out on Cavalier, who has escaped to Australia. The Federal Police advise him to ‘disappear’ for six months, the time they hope the US intelligence services will take to track and liquidate Cortez and his squad.
In the meantime, Cavalier must decide where he can hide out without detection when Cortez sets out to avenge the assassination of Mendez. Cavalier the hunter, has become the hunted.