A NEW IDENTITY
Cavalier met his good friend from the Australian Federal Police, Tommy ‘Wombat’ Gregory, at Melbourne’s Lindrum Hotel and challenged him to a game of pool. They were both exceptional players. In the best of three, they were one-all and it was down to the last few shots of game three to decide the winner. Gregory had only to slot the black to win. Cavalier still had three balls to put away. It was his shot.
‘I need to put two away at least with this,’ he said, indicating two pockets at one end of the table.
‘I’ve seen you do that once before,’ Gregory said. ‘It’s not the equivalent to a hole in one in golf, but close. Two hundred says you won’t do it again.’
‘You’re on. Don Bradman did it four times in six games when I played him at his home.’
‘You’re not the Don, Vic.’
‘Granted.’
‘Did you beat him?’
‘No. I lost six-oh,’ Cavalier said, lining up the shot, ‘got close in two games. He had the best eye I’ve ever come across in any sport.’
‘That was his secret, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, coupled with his powers of concentration. Never met a competitor so focused. He was in his late eighties and I was forty years younger when we played.’
‘He would have made a wonderful assassin.’
‘Without doubt,’ Cavalier said with a laugh. ‘Now you’re trying to put me off.’
The shot needed an exceptional ricochet off the target balls close to each other and at forty-five degrees to the pockets. He took two minutes to size up the angles, then played the shot. Both balls slid into the intended pockets but to the surprise of both, Cavalier’s third ball was also hit. It trickled into a pocket at the other end of the table.
‘Mate! I have never seen a shot like that! A triple!’
‘I can assure you that the third strike was a fluke.’ Cavalier pocketed the black to win the best of three.
‘The Don would never have made that shot,’ Gregory said, shaking his head in disbelief.
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
They took the elevator to Gregory’s suite, which he used as on office when away from his home town of Mandurah in Western Australia.
Cavalier had been lying low in the eight months since returning from Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand after he had assassinated Leonardo Mendez, the head of one of the world’s biggest drug cartels. Cavalier had been given a video that convinced him that Mendez had murdered Cavalier’s and Pin’s daughter Pon by guillotining her. It was the grotesque recreational habit of the drug boss and his henchmen. Pon had been trying her hand at freelance journalism and had been captured by the cartel in Mexico.
Cavalier had tracked Mendez in Thailand, eventually isolating and killing him at the notorious Nana Plaza in Bangkok’s red-light district. He had escaped Thailand by flying to Phnom Penh, and then taking a boat down the Mekong River to Vietnam. Cavalier had been pursued by Mendez’s top hitman, Jose Cortez, who wanted revenge for Mendez’s assassination. Cortez backed off, however, when Cavalier warned him by phone that if he and his two henchmen dared pursue him into the Mekong Delta hinterland, Cavalier would easily pick them off in the jungle.
Once in the suite, Gregory made him a coffee and told him: ‘You’ll have to disappear. Jose Cortez has put a contract out on you. If he doesn’t do it himself, he’ll hire someone in Australia. We believe it’s worth more than a million.’
‘Perhaps you should take it up,’ Cavalier said with a grin.
‘Vic, this is serious.’
‘Who is the source?’
‘Our American cousins. Their contacts within the cartel are most reliable. Since the demise of his boss and very close friend Leonardo Mendez, Cortez has become convinced you murdered him. It’s not just business; it’s personal too.’
‘What does that mean? Cortez is the most effective contract killer in the world. Eighty kills. It doesn’t compute. There must be something else.’
Gregory shrugged. ‘Whatever it is, he is coming after you.’
‘I expected it.’
‘Does it scare you?’
‘Makes me alert. I am used to death threats. It helps that you have forewarned me; thank you.’
‘I know better than most how well you can handle yourself. But here you won’t know where the killer will come from. They’ll be able to track you easily. It would be advisable for you to “depart”. Do what you do better than anyone else: become someone else and stay blended in.’ Gregory paused and added, ‘Please do it, Vic.’
‘Where would you suggest I go?’
‘Wherever you feel comfortable; I’d suggest you leave Australia.’
‘For how long?’
‘Six months at least. In that time, the cousins should have acted against Cortez. Remember his kill list is mostly Americans, some of them agency people. He is their most wanted man since Osama Bin Laden. They are finally going after him with force.’
‘A Seal op?’
‘Could be. The cartel has a considerable armed outfit. Our cousins believe he and it will be most vulnerable while they are in Thailand. The cartel has pulled out of Chiang Mai and moved to Bangkok.’
Gregory took a package from a briefcase.
‘I have a few presents for you,’ he said, handing it to him. ‘I hear your eyesight is failing.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Only kidding. I believe you broke your own range record. Congratulations—20/20 vision at your age is a modern wonder!’
‘Thank you, I think. I hate the cliché corollary “for your age”.’
Gregory handed him a pair of nerdy-looking, square, dark-framed glasses that had sides like small blinkers.
‘These will help. Very special ocular enhancements. They can make out more than just shapes from two hundred metres.’
‘Part of it, yes. CSIRO developed these especially for us. They give you more than just sight in the dark.’ He demonstrated two tiny buttons on the thick frames. ‘There is a special feature I love. Gives you the high-tech equivalent of eyes in the back of your head.’ Cavalier put them on. ‘If you press the left button, and tilt the glasses a fraction, you obtain a clear view of what is happening behind you.’
‘Hmm,’ Cavalier said with reserved admiration, ‘interesting. Have to try in the field.’
‘It’s called “real-time video”. Tiny cameras and mirrors take a video of what is going on behind you. It is played for your viewing in the glasses with a delay of a fraction of a second.’
‘Are our operatives using them now?’
‘No, they are prototypes. Operatives will practise with them and report on their effectiveness.’ Gregory handed him a second pair. ‘Here, have these for luck. They have a third function, which allows you to depict colours in the dark.’
Cavalier tried them.
‘These are confusing,’ he said. ‘The colours fuse. I can’t distinguish shapes …’
‘They work well in the dark. In any case, you’re a guinea pig. I’d like a full report on them on their respective efficiencies, please.’
Gregory handed him a third item in a small plastic box. ‘You might as well have these too.’ He lifted the box’s lid to show him what appeared to be normal mobile phone earpieces. ‘These are called extrasensory earpieces—ESEPs.’
Cavalier put them on and adjusted the volume.
‘You’ll hear a mouse fart with those,’ Gregory said. ‘Just plug them into your phone as if you are listening to music. You can pick up a conversation at fifty metres.’ He pulled out two further small items from his satchel. ‘Just a couple of other things that may be of help. Straight from the CSIRO’s special ops department.’
‘Didn’t know they had one.’
‘They don’t. I call it that because our agency has pinched some of their best scientists.’ He opened a small box. ‘I love this one too. It’s an all-purpose key. Makes the old Allen key look ancient by comparison.’ Gregory removed a small, thin key. ‘This will open anything. It has “thinking” chips that will calculate in milliseconds how to crack a lock. Just flick it against an electronic lock, or shove it into an old-style one. Works every time.’
Cavalier picked up the key, walked out of the suite and tried it against the electronic lock. It opened it.
‘Like it,’ he said, re-entering the room, ‘and thank you. You’ve become Q, as in the Bond movies.’
‘Not the latest ones,’ Gregory said with a grin, ‘the new young Q character is way behind the eight ball. The technology for field operatives is becoming better and better.’
*
Cavalier did not take long to work out where he should hide out: Chiang Mai. He was familiar with the city and its Northern Thailand surrounds. He had stayed a few days at Centara, a central tourist hotel since renamed Duangtwan, in the previous year when tracking Mendez. Thirty years earlier he had remained in the city with Pin, now his ex-wife, for several months. They had lived in other cities such as Chiang Rai, and over the years he would stay with her when she occasionally did locum work in Chiang Mai, if he were not in Australia or on another assignment.
Cavalier believed that the last place Cortez and his henchmen would expect him to be would be Chiang Mai. The Mexicans had left their massive bunker outside the city and were going to escape Thailand, or at least that was the most up-to-date intelligence. Nevertheless, he would live a low-key existence for several months.
Cavalier rented an apartment in the Riverside Condo on the Ping River, with a view from its three fourth-floor balconies that would inspire any painter. Looking left he could see trees and the river just fifty metres away, where it wound its way south-east around a small green island. On the other side of the hundred-metre-wide river there were a few unobtrusive and abandoned houses, half-hidden pagodas, more trees, and the mountains beyond. To the right he could see the white railings of the Meng Rai Bridge where he had witnessed Pin’s motorcycle accident thirty years earlier.
The place was quiet. Every morning he awoke to the cry of an orange-feathered crow pheasant. He rolled up the blinds to the sight of sun on the still river and peaceful surrounds. In late afternoons and evenings, the sun fell in a splash of red into the mountains.
The position of the apartment was pertinent. It was just outside the south-east corner of Chiang Mai, and far enough away from the more central location of incidents that nearly cost him his life six months earlier. It was also conveniently located with a Caltex fuel station and an upmarket 7-Eleven store called Tops across from the condominium entrance on the Lamphun Road. The area was mostly inhabited by Thais with few foreigners in sight outside the condo itself and the Holiday Inn next door. His new ‘home’, or ‘writer’s retreat’ as Cavalier liked to call it, was the best in Chiang Mai of twenty he had looked at on the net. The modest rental price was within his means, given that he had received a redundancy package from his newspaper.
The condo had good security. There was only one way into his place and that was by a solid front door. Leaving the elevator, the apartment was at the end of a fifty-metre-long corridor, which was marked by a permanent smell of marijuana coming from a room halfway along. Cavalier had studied the condo’s exits and entry points from lifts and stairwells and was satisfied that he could come and go without being seen. He judged that in an emergency he could even use a sheet tied to a balcony rail to rappel down a few metres to the abode on the floor below, and so on down to the ground. With that in mind, he had a hardware store three hundred metres from his condo construct a five-metre-long rope ladder.
He was very well aware that an assassin could strike onto his balconies from across the river, and it would not be a difficult shot of about two hundred metres. Cavalier used his new ESEP glasses to scour the opposite bank and the mainly obscured buildings every morning if he had breakfast on a balcony, and left the lights off if he ate outside at night.
It was an idyllic setting, into which he could fade with a new identity. He had taken the name Laurent V Blanc, which was an amalgam of two close French friends’ names. Cavalier had two false French passports and two Australian (one false), but had only changed his identity for the purposes of travelling in and out of a country. In a second French document, as Claude Garriaud, he wore his glasses, wig, false moustache and goatee beard. When using the second Australian passport, as Bert Trumper, he would have to present a totally different look: bald and with brown contact lenses. He’d worn a moulded plastic ‘cap’ to look bald in the photo but knew he couldn’t get away with this if interrogated face to face. He would have to shave his entire head of thick salt-and-pepper hair, which he detested the thought of doing.
Once through borders he shed his disguises, even dropping his French accent most of the time, only being careful when meeting some Europeans and Australians. He had chosen French because of his fluency in the language, even the nuances of colloquial speech. If he met French speakers, he would be Australian. If he met English speakers, he would be French. His Thai was good, but his height, fair skin, blue eyes, slightly gnarled nose, and square jaw prevented him from trying to pass as a native of his part-adopted country.
On his first day in the condo he wandered into the local Nong Hoi market, with its enticing smells dominated by chicken, fish, a variety of spices, and strongly scented flowers. He bought two coloured face masks—white and red—which were legitimate in fending off the vehicle pollution, one of the few drawbacks to living in the area. Whenever he walked down the street he wore cap, sunglasses and mask, which allowed him to meld into the local population scarcely identifiable as a farang. He did not himself recognise anyone in the market, which he had frequented in the distant past.
On one occasion, when he removed his mask and glasses, a middle-aged, corpulent woman named Coo kept her eyes on him as he walked away. He noticed her and did not make eye contact.
The second time he wandered near Coo’s food stall she called out, ‘Vic? You Vic?’
Cavalier was shocked that someone had recalled him decades after he had lived in the area, especially as his looks had changed and matured. He pretended not to notice, later buying pork and salad from her.
While Coo was scooping it into plastic bags, she said in Thai: ‘You look like a handsome Australian farang from a long time ago.’
Cavalier said in French and with a charming smile: ‘Merci, Madame, my name is Laurent,’ and then shook hands with her.
She said her name and frowned, still uncertain.
‘Not Vic?’ she said.
‘Laurent,’ he repeated. The name ‘Coo’ resonated. Despite her face not being familiar, he recalled using the image of a pigeon to remember her name. Cavalier was glad of the face mask just in case others in the four hundred metres of street stalls and cafes had excellent memories.
His main concern would be coming to the attention of Chiang Mai police or some of the enemies, particularly anyone from the Mendez Mexican drug cartel company—Golden Eagle Constructions—who might be left over in Chiang Mai while the rest of the gang had moved to Bangkok. He had hired a car to drive out to the company bunker, which had an abandoned look. There was security at a boom gate leading down the track to the underground entrance, which seemed to be closed and boarded up. Seeing this eased his fears, but not his alertness. Yet it confirmed that Chiang Mai was the best place for his temporary relocation, at least until he heard that the Americans had moved on the cartel’s people in Thailand.
Cavalier was sometimes on edge in the street, despite his mask. During the morning he would have coffee on the Lamphun Road, which led south to the quaint city of the same name, at one of three welcoming shops run by three sets of Thai sisters. He would randomly rotate his patronising of these cafes to avoid familiarity with the women, none of whom interfered with his privacy or asked questions beyond the normal niceties about where he was from and what he was doing in Chiang Mai. Cavalier would remove the mask and sit inside to avoid the endless stream of vehicles, which were ten times the number of thirty years earlier, belching out contaminants.
Occasionally a bike would roar up to the front of the cafe. He would look up at a helmeted rider, unable to know in a split second if it were an assailant or not. Always in his mind was the possibility of an attempt to murder him. An assassin in Thailand could be hired cheaply.