My cell phone began to ring and in the silence it sounded as loud as a siren. I trotted quickly back to the jeep, dug the phone out of the duffle bag, and flipped it open. Since I was on what looked like the dark side of the moon, I couldn’t believe it would work very well, but then a man’s voice sounded in my ear so clearly that it startled me.
“Professeur?”
“Tom?”
“Oui, Professeur. It is me.”
Captain Tom sounded happier after we had identified each other with certainty, but I thought there was still some kind of an odd note in his voice.
“Find out who owns the house?” I asked.
“That was another joke, right, Professeur? Like the shit about the bazooka?”
“Look, Tom, just tell me what you found out. All right?”
“Yes, all right.”
Tom paused a beat before he went on. There was something in the silence, but I couldn’t decide what it was.
“The land title is held in the name of a Thai company, but that company is controlled by another one registered in Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong company is jointly owned by two companies, both of them registered in the British Virgin Islands as nonresident trusts.”
“Figures,” I said. “Let me guess. The trustees for the companies are both lawyers who are somewhere else.”
“Both companies have the same trustee. And, yes, you are right. He’s a lawyer who is somewhere else.”
There was that odd note in Tom’s voice again.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Why are you fucking me around like this, Professeur?”
“I’m not fucking you around, Tom. I just want to know who the trustee is.”
“You really don’t know?”
“No, I really don’t know.”
“That’s strange, Professeur. I believe you, but that’s pretty fucking strange.”
“Why, Tom?”
“Because the fellow we use to run down this kind of stuff never gets it wrong. He says the name of the trustee for both companies is Jonathan William Shepherd. That’s you, n’est-ce pas?”
There was a long silence. I knew Tom was waiting for me to tell him exactly what was going on. Since I didn’t have any better idea than he did, I said nothing.
“You still there, Professeur?”
“Yeah, Tom, I’m here. Look, let that go. I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
And even if I did, I had no goddamned clue what I could say.
Captain Tom must have been accustomed to people who didn’t want to talk about things because he changed the subject smoothly.
“Where are you now, Professeur?”
“I followed the route you marked on the map. I’m in a spot just above the compound and I can see it pretty well. Do you know how many people are in there?”
“Why? What are you going to do? Rush the place with that faggot.45 of yours?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, shit, Professeur.”
There was a short silence before Captain Tom went on.
“I don’t know who’s in there. The place isn’t that big, is it?”
“Looks pretty big from here. You don’t know for sure?”
“Jesus Christ, Professeur, I know fuck all for sure.”
I didn’t say anything else. Captain Tom obviously hoped I would tell him what I was going to do, but he wasn’t sure he should press the point.
“Hey, I was only making a joke about rushing the house,” he eventually said.
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean… you wouldn’t really do that, would you, Professeur?”
“Nope.”
“Hey, okay. You had me worried there for a minute.”
Then Captain Tom must have played back the last bit of our conversation and noticed that I had left his original question conspicuously unanswered.
“So what are you going to do?”
“You got a phone number for the compound, Tom?”
“Ah… no.”
“Didn’t think you would. Then I guess I’ll have to go down and ring the doorbell like you suggested.”
“Hey, Professeur, now wait a minute. If I were you, I’d think about it for a long time before-”
I cut Tom off before he could get wound up.
“Ground control to Captain Tom. Over and out.”
I hit the red power button and my cell phone went dead. I shoved it into the duffle and walked back to the rock outcropping that had become my observation post; then I raised the field glasses again. The compound looked quiet and sleepy in the late afternoon sun and the guard was no longer anywhere to be seen.
So I’m the trustee for the property, huh?
Of course Barry Gale was down there. He had flown to Phuket under my name and now here he was, surrounded by armed guards and in an elaborate compound owned by companies I appeared to control. Barry couldn’t have made it any clearer if he had installed a red neon sign on the roof.
Barry Gale wanted me to find him.
And now I had.
So why wait any longer to ask Barry what the hell this was all about? I certainly wasn’t just going to drive back down to the Phuket Yacht Club now and think about it some more over a Heineken. In my experience, life generally worked out best if you just kept moving in a reasonably straight line most of the time, even if a lot of people tried to make it seem more complicated than that. For example, if you wanted to ask someone a question, usually the best approach was to walk right up to them and ask it. That way, you got your answer without a lot of unnecessary screwing around. Of course, the answer was frequently a lie; but hey, it was a start, wasn’t it?
I lowered the glasses and looked around. Barry had picked a hell of a good bolt-hole. Other than using the main road or coming cross-country like I had, the compound was unapproachable. Nobody could get within five hundred yards of the place without being spotted, and even if somebody could get up to it the walls made it a fortress that would have given General Patton pause. With the gasoline storage and the communications equipment, Barry could probably hold out in there long enough to make anyone stalking him throw up their hands in exasperation and just go away.
Waiting until dark to approach the compound probably wouldn’t make any difference, but then again, it might. The element of surprise was always supposed to be a good thing, wasn’t it?
Okay, let’s just say that I managed to get down there without being seen. Then what?
I could check the place out, of course, see if there might be a way to get past the wall and slip by the guards. Maybe I could give Barry Gale a bit of a shock that way and that would help me get the truth out of him. Okay, so it wasn’t much-in fact, it probably wasn’t anything-but it was the cleverest plan I could come up with on short notice.
On the other hand, it occurred to me that armed guards aren’t particularly relevant unless whoever is being guarded expects someone to show up, so it was possible that the primary effect of me suddenly appearing out of the darkness might be to get my ass shot off. That insight caused me to recalculate the value of the element of surprise a few times, but I couldn’t make up my mind which way the balance fell so I decided not to worry about it.
It was just after five. I walked back to the jeep and settled into the passenger seat, waiting either for darkness to fall or rational thought processes to return, whichever occurred first.
It seemed unlikely there would be any other traffic the way I had just come-I hadn’t seen another vehicle the entire time I’d been driving-but just in case, I reversed the jeep along the track until I found a good spot to swing it around. I parked it facing out toward the ocean like I was up there to watch the sunset. If anyone did come up the road, I would probably look like just another loony tourist in a tropical daze.
I unzipped the duffle and pushed the glasses inside. When I did, I saw the.45 and lifted it out. I used to shoot some at a range in the Maryland suburbs just outside of Washington, but I hadn’t touched a handgun since I had been in Thailand and I had certainly never pointed one at a human being. What the hell did I think I was going to do with this one? Use it to threaten Barry?
In my personal experience with the somewhat less violent forms of coercion routinely practiced by lawyers, threats only worked when people knew you might actually carry them out. Did I look like a guy who would coolly pull the trigger on someone? And if I didn’t, or if I wasn’t, then what good was waving a prop around going to do?
I stepped out of the jeep and slid the.45 from of its holster. I dropped the clip, hefted it in the approved two-handed grip, and bent my knees into a Weaver stance just like I had been taught. I looked down the barrel, focusing on the front sight with my left eye open just as my instructor had repeatedly reminded me. Then I racked the slide and dry-fired, feeling the solid clunk of the hammer slamming down where the cartridge ought to be.
Okay, so maybe I could use it if I actually had to.
Lowering the.45 I popped the clip back in and worked the slide to chamber a round. Then I set the safety, pushed it back into its holster, and stuck the whole rig back in the duffle bag. I could always decide what I was going to do with it later.
I fiddled with the jeep’s passenger seat until I got it as far back as it would go. Then I climbed up and settled into it, propping my feet across the driver’s seat and leaning back against the door. The sun was a huge, shimmering disk of red, and the lower rim was just nudging the Andaman Sea. It would soon be dark.
I suddenly remembered a Chinese folk tale I had once heard about a green flash that supposedly occurs occasionally when the sun sets into the ocean, a brilliant halo of emerald light that flares outward just as the upper rim of the sun sinks beneath the sea. Good fortune and eternal happiness are supposed to come to anyone who sees the green flash, or so the tale went; but that sounded like far too romantic a notion for the Chinese and I had always doubted that part of the story. Still, it was a lovely thought and I started hoping it might be true since I could certainly use some of that good fortune and eternal happiness stuff right about then.
I wasn’t going to get my hopes up. The circumstances weren’t very encouraging. I could have been in one of Phuket’s many seafront bars about then, settled comfortably among the brown-skinned girls who were always around at the end of the day, wondering if tonight would be the night I would see the green flash at last; but instead I was slumped against the passenger door of a muddy jeep, all alone on the side of a deserted hill, waiting for it to get dark enough for me to creep up on a guy who was holed up in a walled estate that looked like it had been built by the Seven Dwarfs on their weekends off from the mine. Not really the greatest choice of venue for green flash spotting.
In the last light of the setting sun I glanced up the road toward the big outcropping where I had been watching the compound. A little further along that road, no more than a half-mile away, the answers to all my questions were somewhere inside a lonely compound, perched on the rocky tip of a remote tropical island and guarded by some rented guns.
And how, drawing on the sum total of my entire lifetime’s accumulated wisdom and experience, was I going to deal with that?
I was going to wait until it got dark, try to sneak inside, and ask Barry Gale if he would mind very much telling me what in Christ’s name was going on here.
That’s your big plan?
Well… yeah.
It really sucks.
By the time I glanced back at the sun, it was gone. The night had arrived with heart-stopping suddenness and the Andaman Sea looked as if it had turned to molten pewter. The tiny atolls just west of Phuket were a scattering of pebbles flung across its surface, quick-frozen into the hardening metal.
I hadn’t noticed if there had been a green flash or not.
Rats.
I’d really been counting on that.