It was shortly before midnight by the time Scrimple arrived in Bangkok. He’d passed the airport on the way into town and resisted the urge to run in and try and get on a flight. Without a passport and with his details on all the immigration watch lists there was no chance of getting out of the country.
He still basically had only two choices: give himself up and try and prove his innocence or slip out of the country through an illegal route into Cambodia or Vietnam and then get into a safer country. It would be best to get into Hong Kong where the rule of law remained clear and he had enough contacts to argue a case for himself. But he needed his passport to get into Hong Kong.
He considered walking into the British Embassy and explaining his situation but the way things were these days they would do the politically correct thing and call the Thai police while apologetically offering him a lawyer. One could not really count on the right sort of help from the embassy these days. The country had gone so soft that they wouldn’t lift a finger for a British national who’d been accused of serious crimes. In the old days a man was innocent until proven guilty and the British would have sent a gunboat up the river to protect the interests of one of their own in a foreign country. It was what had happened in China in the 1840’s but now Britain was an enfeebled little island quaking in its socks and hoping not to offend any other sovereign nation with whom they might have trade or other formal relations.
Only last month China had executed a British citizen accused of drug trafficking. All the evidence had pointed to the fact that he was mentally ill and had been framed but the leaders in Beijing had cheerfully sentenced the man to death and dared the rest of the world to challenge their authority. The Prime Minister had sent a mildly disapproving letter to the Chinese Premier.
So what chance did Scrimple have?
If he had a larger chunk of money he could get hold of some contacts who’d smuggle him out of the country. That was a first step and then he could consider his further options more carefully.
He dropped the car in the large car park of one of the massage parlors on Petchburi Road then flagged down a taxi to take him to Patpong. It was close to his office and there were plenty of short time hotels he could choose from.
Traffic was bad as always and the stop and start got him nervous. He forced himself to calm down. When he got to his destination the market stalls were just coming down, the go-go bars were winding up but there was still plenty of hustle and bustle around. At the Tip-Top restaurant, which had been around forever, he got a plate of chicken fried rice and drank a large bottle of water. He kept a careful eye open in case any one of his acquaintances wandered by, but there was nobody he knew about. Not any girls he may have taken from a bar nor any friends from the expat community. Patpong wasn’t really frequented by the local expats anymore. It had fallen into serious disrepair and was a faded remnant of earlier, seedier, more glorious times. The tourists had no frame of reference so still got a kick out of coming to the famous group of roads.
He’d made the call earlier from a phone box and Jim had been guarded. Scrimple assumed there might be a tap on the phone so he’d tried to be as vague as possible. Jim had agreed to meet him.
It was only a few doors down and what Scrimple had said was “the Australian place with the vacuum cleaners.” Jim had understood. They’d gone there once before, a long time ago. It was the Kangaroo Bar where the girls were renowned for giving excellent blow jobs, kneeling on the floor as the patrons sat at the bar drinking beer. It was an old Bangkok debauchery and Scrimple had never really enjoyed the experience. Either you were drinking and talking with your mates or you were having sex with a girl. To do both at the same time wasn’t easy and you could hardly concentrate on either activity.
The bar was on the second floor and as he entered the girls swarmed him. Politely he batted them away and pointed at a corner booth where Jim was sitting nursing a bottle of San Miguel Light.
“You’re in deep shit, old boy,” Jim said as Scrimple sat down.
“Tell me about it.” He gave the waitress his drink order and lit a cigarette. “I have no fucking idea what’s going on around me. Thanks for turning up. I really need some help.”
“The wife would kill me if she knew I was here.”
Two beers arrived and Scrimple began to fill Jim in on recent events. As he described each incident his friend kept on shaking his head in astonishment.
“You have to turn yourself in, mate. It’s the only way to go.”
Scrimple shook his head and said, “They’ll throw the book at me. I won’t even have a chance to say anything. You know what they’re like here. I need to get to Hong Kong.”
“How will that help?” Jim asked.
“I can get a lawyer. I can try and figure out what this is all about. Bottle should be in Hong Kong. He’s the source of all this.”
“Based on what you’re telling me, my guess is that Cliff Bottle is long dead,” Jim said skeptically. “He crossed the bastards and they don’t forgive and forget.”
Scrimple looked despondently into the bottom of his empty beer glass. “You’re probably right. If he was still alive he would have gotten in touch by now. In any case I’ve got to get out of Thailand and for that I need my passport.”
“Haven’t the police got that?”
“No, it’s locked in the safe in my office. And the briefcase the money came in is locked in a cupboard.” He paused for a moment and fixed his former colleague with a pleading look. “I need you to go up to my office first thing tomorrow and help me get that stuff.”
Jim sighed. He avoided the answer for a moment by waving at the bar for more beers and running his hand over his shiny bald head. “I’m sure the police are keeping tabs on me hoping you’ll show up. They have us on record as being together.”
“They’re not that good,” Scrimple said. “They would have found us here by now. You just turn up at the office, hand a note to my little assistant. She’s loyal, she won’t call the police. Not until you’ve been and gone anyway. She’ll let you in the office and show you where the safe is.”
Jim nodded as he thought it through. “Yes, you need your passport and the border with Cambodia’s like a sieve. Once you’re there you can get a flight to Hong Kong. The Cambodians won’t help the Thais. They’re all pissed off about the casinos and Thaksin.”
He clapped Scrimple on the shoulder. “Yes, I’ll do it.”
They had a few more drinks and discussed how best to handle it, then Scrimple wrote the note as Jim pushed over a set of keys and said,
“This is an empty place. Totally safe, I've got the sole agency and the owner is a falang who’s out of town for three months.”
After Jim had left, Scrimple thought he deserved a bit of a treat considering all the disasters he’d faced. He chose the girl with the prettiest face and the biggest breasts and they went to the back room together. While he sat on a small towel on the PVC sofa she crouched between his knees and worked on his penis. He was surprised how fast it was over. He felt better as he lay back while the girl smiled and mopped up.
* * * *
The apartment was fully furnished so Scrimple had chosen the master bedroom and dragged some sheets out of a cupboard.
He thought that he wouldn’t be able to sleep because of all the tension but within two minutes he was gone, deep into a dreamless abyss from which he woke up refreshed but with pains all over his body. The sun was shining in between the blinds and he found it was nine in the morning.
He’d bought some supplies at the Foodland in Patpong. After a shower he felt better, swallowed some pain killers and went into the kitchen to make himself some toast and a cup of instant coffee. The apartment was silent except for the faint hum from the central air conditioning unit.
He sat on one of the black leather sofas and looked out at the Bangkok skyline. Any minute he expected the door to come crashing down, armed police swarming all over him or, even worse, William again and that devil Chisin. But he trusted Jim. His mate wouldn’t let him down and wouldn’t betray the fact that he’d found Scrimple a safe house, a small oasis of peace, a temporary refuge from the living nightmare he’d suddenly found himself in.
He looked around the room and it was obvious that this was a bachelor apartment. Everything was functional, from the furniture to the bookshelves and the Bose music player with the stacks of CD’s. Scrimple reviewed the selection and put on Run With The Pack by Bad Company. He sat on the sofa again and listened to Paul Rogers’ clear vocals while he smoked several Mild Sevens.
He took out his two mobile phones and opened them up. The night before, just after leaving Pim he’d pulled up on the side of the road and opened up the phones. The GPS tracking device William had told him about was obvious, taped to the inside of the cover of his old phone, a two-inch shiny square of metal with Cyrillic letters explaining what it was. It would have taken its power from the battery and its ability to send a signal from the phone’s transmitter, which explained how small it could be. Scrimple had taken no chance. He’d crushed it underfoot in the dirt and also checked the new phone but found nothing.
Now he put the two new SIM cards purchased with the food into the phones. He typed in Jim’s main number into one of the phones and sent him a text giving him the new number. He felt reasonably safe with the phone and thought he could leave it on. Even if the police got hold of this number they could only track him to the nearest cell tower and around here there were hundreds of apartments. He kept the other phone for backup.
Carefully he put his old SIM card away in his wallet. He wasn’t expecting any calls but there might be a time he wanted to use his old number again.
He flicked through the phone book and ensured all his old numbers were there and also the one for Pim. Scrimple had not intention of calling her. It was best to stay away from the girl because he had no idea where her loyalties lay. Her story about being an undercover journalist still sounded absurd and far-fetched to him in the light of the new day.
Suddenly an image of Nari and her dead boyfriend jumped up in front of his eyes and he had to shake his head and firmly think of something else to make the gruesome vision vanish. That had never happened before, and then he thought of the two dead Irish lads and he nearly threw up. He stared hard out of the window and listened to the melodic rock from Bad Company.
After a minute or two the reminders of death went away. There was a pause and the next song came on. He’d set the volume at low so not to alert any neighbors that there was somebody in the flat. Not that they would care. People minded their own business here, but better to be safe than sorry.
Scrimple toyed with the phone and scrolled up and down the names and numbers. He suddenly had an impulse to call the girl Pim and say sorry for running out on her. She’d arranged to get free and maybe she was on his side after all. He tossed the phone up and down and caught it a few times, then put it down on the glass table top and smoked another cigarette.
Finally he picked up the phone and made the call.
After four rings she answered in a guarded tone.
“This is Scrimple,” he said.
“Yes?” She didn’t say anything else.
“I want to say thank you for getting me away from the police.”
“Okay.” Her tone was challenging, a bit impatient.
“I’m sorry I ran out on you but I wasn’t sure if I could trust you.”
“I don’t understand. Why can’t you trust me?” she asked impatiently.
“I think you know.”
“No, I don’t. You can trust me. Where are you now?”
“Somewhere in Bangkok but it doesn’t matter.”
There was an intake of breath at the other end of the line. “Have you got the briefcase? Did you check for any papers?”
“No, of course not. I’m not going to go anywhere near my office. That’s mad. The police will be watching. No, I’m leaving. I need to hide out.”
“Let me come and meet you so we can talk. I need to explain something more to you. You don’t really understand what is happening. And you must trust me.”
Scrimple suddenly became conscious that he had been talking for much longer than he’d intended. He got the impression she was trying to keep him on the line. A paranoid niggle began at the back of his head.
Then the door bell rang and he cut off the connection with Pim.
* * * *
It was night and the scope on the rifle magnified the house and the light that fell from its windows. He was two hundred yards away so it was an easy shot.
But if his work was easy everyone would be doing it and everybody would be rich. There were plenty of dumb shits who thought all they needed was a gun, balls of steel and the conscience of a Nazi prison guard to do this job. They lasted one or two jobs and then were caught or were overcome with remorse and turned to drink or drugs.
Killing people for a living had never been an easy job, even in the days of sword and armor. It took a powerful sense of self-belief. It took strong nerves. It took a calm hand. It took courage and a coldness that wasn’t evil but single-minded.
He possessed these qualities and he never lost sleep over the death and destruction he caused. It was a necessary function in society. Like going to the toilet which couldn’t be done without causing a bad smell. There was an unpleasantness in cold calculated killing but it was unavoidable so best hold one’s nose and get it over and done with.
He was just on the outskirts of the village. He’d pulled his motorbike, a 250 cc Yamaha, off into the darkness of the trees and he wore boots that came up below his knees to protect him from any snakes. He’d taken the rifle out from the long bag which was intended for a collection of billiard cues. He’d unfolded the stock and screwed on the silencer which would suppress most of the sound and confuse them at first.
There were twenty rounds in the magazine but he intended only to use a few. What he was waiting for was for his target to come outside and visit the rough wooden outhouse where a hole in the ground served as a latrine. Next to the outhouse stood a vast vat of water. It collected the rain water and a bucket and a ladle stood next to it so that one could wash one’s hands after having squatted for a while.
He’d been waiting for a while. Ever since it had gone dark. Where he stood no light from any passing vehicle could touch him. So he was safe as long as there were no snakes or spiders in the jungle.
The target was in the house. They had been playing cards for an hour and it looked like there were two girls with them. A bored guard sat outside on the porch of the hut. He was rocking on the two back legs of his chair and the orange glow of the cigarettes he smoked was visible in the somber night.
A while earlier the killer had studied the guard carefully, using his pair of night vision goggles that now hung around his neck. They were the latest piece of kit. Gone missing from a German battalion in Afghanistan. The lenses were Zeiss and the technology had been designed for the automobile industry but discarded when the Stuttgart engineers concluded that halogen headlamps were still the best way to go.
Now they were sniper goggles. A most coveted piece of kit which the killer had paid five thousand American dollars for. Money well spent: he could see the bump in the guard’s shirt where the holstered handgun sat. But the guard wasn’t paying much attention. He was young, he seemed bored and he probably believed that his boss was all powerful and nobody would dare come and steal their product.
They made ya-baa—crystal methamphetamine—in the wooden hut and it was distributed every day to the dealers who sold it to the truck drivers, the prostitutes and the soldiers who couldn’t live without the kick and the high the drug produced.
The killer continued to wait patiently, his rifle propped on the long seat of the Yamaha as he knelt on a dark tarpaulin that would rustle if a snake came near.
Let the man come out. There were two crates of beer by the door and it was being drunk because every ten minutes the door would open and someone would step out and collect a few bottles.
* * * *
The sound of the door bell had shocked Scrimple. Then he realized it was later in the morning than he thought.
He stepped up to the small viewing glass and put his eye against it. This was the moment when an assassin would see the darkening of the spyhole and shoot through the door.
Nothing happened. It was the reassuring presence of Jim who stood outside and he seemed to be carrying a holdall that appeared full. Scrimple removed the security chain and opened the door.
Jim said, “Sleep okay?”
Scrimple nodded. “I needed it.” He eyed the bag Jim had slung over his shoulder .
“No problems. Smooth as silk,” Jim said dumping the bag on the sofa and unzipping it as Scrimple closed and bolted the front door again.
“There were two plainclothes police guys lounging around in the downstairs lobby at your office,” Jim explained. “Smoking, bellies hanging out, gun belts under their shirts. Looking bored and official. Couldn’t have been more obvious.” He grinned, excited at the adventure and his cleverness. “So I walked in, gave them a confident look to make sure they didn’t mistake me for you and took the lift up two floors then walked down. You were right. No security cameras on the floors so nobody could see me from downstairs. Got to your office front door, rang the bell, a little cutie let me in and brought me to your secretary, handed her the note and her eyes popped out practically on stalks.”
“What did she say?” Scrimple asked.
“Just wanted to know if Khun Scrimple was okay. I told her you were fine and it was just a misunderstanding and that someone was trying to get you into trouble.”
“That’s true.”
“Well, she was worried about you and hoped you would be okay.”
“Good girl, thirty percent salary increase when I get back to work.” He had a glum thought. “If I ever get back to a normal life.”
“You'll be fine mate, you’ll be fine.” Jim said soothingly. “We’ll get all this sorted and you’ll be right as rain again.”
“I fucking well hope so,” Scrimple replied and took hold of the passport that Jim handed over. He touched the faded gold seal on the front. The lion and the unicorn. The words that said Honi Soi Qui Mal Y Pense. What did that mean? Something like “shame on him who thinks evil.” How apt in this case where everybody was maligning Scrimple for things he’d not done.
He carefully put it into his shirt pocket. It was his get-out-of-jail card. Then they looked at the black leather briefcase that had been left by Cliff Bottle when all this had started.
Scrimple placed it on the glass table top next to the cigarettes and his mobile phone. He examined the briefcase from top to bottom. It was fine quality leather and excellent workmanship. It had an Italian brand name he’d never heard of but the finishing of the material made him believe it was the genuine article and not a local knock-off. He unsnapped the two gold colored clasps as Jim watched him.
Opening the lid he found nothing inside, just as he’d left it when he transferred the cash to his own bag a few days earlier. He leant into the case and smelt it. There was a faint odor of mothballs, like old winter clothes that had been stored. There was no smell of money. Contrary to popular belief money generally had no odor unless it had been drenched in perfume or stored in a smoky room.
He ran his hands over the sides and the seams, looking for unevenness, stitching errors or any bumps. He felt nothing.
Jim said, “I’ll get a knife from the kitchen.” He disappeared while Scrimple carried on his minute and detailed inspection. There was nothing in the soft calf-skin lining. There were no inconsistencies in the design.
But finally he found it.
Scrimple propped the briefcase up on its edge and examined the width and measurements. There was something off. He checked the distances with his thumb and forefinger.
“There’s a false bottom or something,” he said to Jim who was standing with a huge carving knife in his hand.
“You see here, there’s nearly an inch missing,” Scrimple showed it to Jim.
“Where do I dig with the knife?”
“Wait, wait. There must be a way to get to it.”
He pulled and tugged and prodded for several minutes and nothing happened.”
“Let me just dig the knife in there,” Jim suggested.
Scrimple shook his head. “It’s custom made. I’m sure. Special spook accessory shop or something.”
He stood up and shook the briefcase and thought he felt something moving inside.
“What about setting the combination lock in a special way?” Jim said, still holding the knife like some crazed slasher waiting for his chance.
“You mean it needs a code?”
Jim shrugged. Scrimple used his thumbs to spin the combination lock to 0000 0000. Nothing happened. He tried 1234 1234 and again it was useless. He tried 1997 twice. Nothing.
“Shit,” he commented then spun the dials to 1964 1964, the year he remembered Cliff Bottle had first arrived in Hong Kong. It was something that had been mentioned at a mess dinner.
When he pressed the hasps in the opposite direction he heard a distinctive click and on opening the briefcase lid found that a false bottom had released itself.
“Bastard,” he said under his breath. Inserting a finger in the small gap he pulled open the hinged false bottom. It was beautifully done. Not made in China for sure but by the hands of some Italian craftsman who’d learnt his skill from his father and before.
Not surprising that Bottle had told him to take care of the case, not to lose or damage it. In the false bottom were documents. Title deeds, Thai certificates with red government stamps. There was over half an inch of formal paperwork.
* * * *
The killer moved his hand from the rifle and opened and closed his fist a number of times. He took his eye away from the scope and closed, first the left then the right eye. It was hard work staring down the barrel of a gun without moving, simply waiting for the right target to appear. He rested the eyes some more and returned to his vigil.
He’d hunted in Scotland in his time and, although it was fun and recreation, it was excellent practice for his day job. A deer was somewhat larger and it could sense you if the wind was wrong. You would lie with the guide and he would mutter quiet Gaelic imprecations as the sun rose and the mist cleared and suddenly, after a freezing few hours a shape appeared in your sights, gently sniffing the breeze for danger, eyes darting left and right.
“Take the shot, sir,” the guide would hiss and you would gently stroke the trigger and wait for the recoil. Then follow through on the shot and watch the mighty beast drop dead in the heather.
Finally his man appeared, stretching his legs on the porch, then urinating in the bushes off the side. His large body appeared close up in the sights and the light from the windows made everything clear.
Slowly the killer breathed in and out, held his breath and paused for the briefest of seconds before gently tightening the index finger of his right hand over the finely tuned trigger. The rifle barely gave out a gasp but snapped against his armpit, like a spritely baby mule.
He stroked the trigger again almost instantly and the second bullet hit five inches above the sternum while the first had been just below. Shooting at the central mass was always safer but you had to hit where there would be maximum damage to the central pump.
The right kind of ammunition helped.
He watched the man collapse. For an instant he saw the shocked face, the eyes already rolling up with the onset of cardiac arrest. The chest would be a hideous mess that no trauma surgeon could hope to save, even if he happened to be standing right there.
The security guard was crouching by the body, other men came running out yelling and casting crazy looks into the jungle’s darkness.
With deliberation the assassin collapsed his weapon, replaced it in the billiard cue bag, slung it over his shoulder and kicked his bike into life with a jab on the starter button. Then he roared off down the road at a steady, civilized speed. Three miles away there was a car waiting and nobody would know where to follow him.
Another eighty thousand dollars earned. It was never cheap for the people who commissioned him but it was always value for money.