Beloved Enemy (11 page)

“Pyotr Legere,” Redbird said. “He’s a bookstore owner and art dealer from Moscow.”

“He’s a long way from home,” Chati said. “Plus, the art here is the shits.”

“He didn’t come for the art,” Redbird said. “He was meeting someone.”

“Does this someone have a name?”

“Leroy Connaston.”

Chati cocked his head. “Shot-to-death-twelve-days-ago Connaston?”

Redbird’s interest quickened. “Do the cops have a suspect?”

Chati laughed. “Fuck, no. This is Bangkok, man! The only time the cops can follow a lead is if they’re paid to do it.”

The drinks came, along with several plates of bite-sized snacks.

Redbird concentrated on the big man rather than the food. “Do you have any ideas?”

“You want to know who killed Connaston?”

“I might be interested,” Redbird acknowledged, “but it’s Legere I’m after.”

Chati grunted. “What’s it worth to you?”

“Plenty.” Redbird was playing with Dickinson’s money. Experience had taught him that the people Dickinson worked for had very deep pockets.

“You got a figure in mind?”

Redbird threw out a sum that left him plenty of room to maneuver.

“Huh,” Chati said dismissively, “you must not want to find him that much.”

Redbird was unfazed. “I need to know whether you can help me.”

Chati plucked up a crisp morsel, popped it between his lips. “You still sitting here is proof of that.”

Redbird wasn’t budging. “So you say.”

Chati swallowed, all the while eying Redbird calculatingly. “Because you’re a friend of Dandy’s I’ve decided not to take offense.” Without taking his gaze from Redbird, he popped another morsel into his mouth. “I’m not going to eat all this food by myself.”

Redbird ate slowly and deliberately.

“Good?” Chati asked.

Redbird nodded. “Very.”

Chati wiped his grease-smeared lips with an oversize linen napkin. “I gotta guy who will tell you what you want to know.”

“He in Bangkok?”

Chati’s face was perfectly immobile. Then, like a detonation, he threw his head back and laughed. “Maybe I know why you like this one, Dandy.” His hand waved back and forth. “Okay, Mr.—what is it? Douglas?” He laughed again. “Very good. Let’s consummate our deal. I have a very sexy lady waiting for me.”

*   *   *

Jack plunged into the teeming currents of Bangkok. With Tweet and Hitch at his side, he’d had no trouble passing through immigration, the harried officials on the freight side of International Suvarnabhumi Airport giving him scarce notice.

After purchasing a sat phone in an ultramodern mall on the outskirts of the city, he proceeded to an Internet café, paid an hour’s fee, and settled himself at a free terminal. Typing in the Internet address of the
Bangkok Post
, he scrolled back in time to the date Leroy Connaston was shot to death at WTF.

The resulting story was sparse, providing nothing in the way of the victim’s background, other than he was a British national, but it included a photo of Connaston: a middle-aged man with thin hair, a receding hairline and chin. He carried a shabby air with him like an umbrella, as if he were a solicitor down at the heels.

Jack made a copy of the photo, using the café’s public printer, and stowed it away. He checked all the Thai papers, but there was barely a mention, and no other photos. Before he left the terminal, he accessed the Options menu on the browser and deleted both the history and the cache, erasing any vestige of his searches.

Outside the mall, he grabbed a taxi. On the interminable crawl into the city, he used his sat phone to call Nona and was relieved when she answered her mobile.

“It’s me,” he said tersely.

“Hold on.”

He could hear noise—people talking, mostly—fading out of the background and knew she was moving to isolate herself from whomever she was with, in order to talk securely with him. “Are you okay?”

He heard the anxiety in her voice. “Unharmed. I’m down.” Meaning on the ground.

“That’s a relief.”

“How are things there?”

“Worse. The manhunt has intensified tenfold.”

Jack tried to block the rapidly deteriorating situation out of his mind. “I need some help.”

“Tell me.”

“See if you can find information on a man named Leroy Connaston.”

There was a small silence, during which he could hear someone speaking softly, but urgently to her.

A moment later, she came back on. “What can you tell me about him?”

“He was a British national, shot to death in a Bangkok nightspot called WTF eight days ago.”

Another small silence. “That’s it?”

“I’m afraid so.” He took a breath. “Listen, Nona, it’s okay if you can’t—”

“Stop right there,” she said. “I’ll get right on it.”

Relief flooded through him. “I call back in an hour.”

“You’re giving me that much time?” she said archly. “Really?”

He laughed grimly. “Thanks, Nona.”

“Thank me when I get you something you can use.”

Forty minutes later, he had the taxi drop him off on Phaholyothin Road, in Soi Aree. There, he found the area jammed with an insane number of people, jostling and laughing, hurrying, hanging out and smoking. He joined the flow, finding it impossible to go at his own pace. Within a four-block radius, he spotted six massage parlors, any one of which could have been visited by Leroy Connaston, Pyotr Legere’s murdered contact, before their fateful rendezvous. He didn’t want to go poking inside them until he had as much intel on Connaston as he could get.

Dusk had laid its velvet hand across the city, the neon lights brightening the streets in a rainbow of flashing colors. He chose a small restaurant because it was playing American rock music through its tinny speakers, went in, and sat down. He decided that he might as well take advantage of the wait to fill his stomach, which had started growling the moment he had successfully passed ghost-like through the airport.

A stick-thin waitress, who might have been twelve or eighteen, dropped a laminated menu onto the table. He ordered a beer. A cursory glance at the offerings was all he needed, and when she returned to set the bottle in front of him, he pointed to the dishes he wanted. She swept the menu up and took it away.

Opening the photo of Connaston, he stared at it again. It was far from ideal, a smudgy copy of the already blurred newspaper picture, but for the moment it was all he had and it would have to do.

He was still staring at Connaston’s face when Otis Redding began to sing “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now).” It had been one of Emma’s favorite songs. He remembered listening to it on her iPod for months after she had died. Like a film he couldn’t stop playing in slow motion, he saw the car she had been driving smashed into a huge tree off the side of the road. He had arrived just after the paramedics had used the jaws of life to pry her out of the wreck. It didn’t matter; his daughter was gone the moment her car struck the tree. Staring down at her bloody face, fending off the paramedics, all he could think of was her voice on the phone, just—what?—forty-five minutes before, asking for his help. But he had been up to his eyeballs coordinating an ATF raid and had not concentrated on what she was telling him. How many times since then had he played that scene over and over, hoping this time he would listen, that he would save her.

“I love you, I love you in so many different ways…” Otis sang, and Jack wept bitter tears for all he had lost.

*   *   *

“Leaving us so soon?” Police Commissioner Lincoln Dye said with one eyebrow lifted.

Nona Heroe, at the head of the alley in NW Washington, turned back. “I won’t be long.” She glanced at the three bodies in the midst of the crime scene she had been studying for the last fifteen minutes. A triple homicide involving Senator Herren’s aide; no wonder Dye had made an appearance. “I’ve got as much as I’m going to get until the autopsies come back.” She glanced over her shoulder at the gathering news media. “Anyway, it’s your press conference, not mine.”

Dye shook his head. “Uh-uh. I want you by my side when I step up to the podium.”

He was a solid-looking individual, whose face the camera loved. Being telegenic was part of his job description, but Nona, checking up on him, had been impressed with his CV, which included stints at a prestigious law firm and with IA. It was a cliché that everyone hated internal affairs, but the truth was the dirty cops hated them the most. Dye seemed cut from a different bolt of cloth, at least so far as she could observe.

“The department needs a united front,” Dye continued. “That was part of the problem with my predecessor, he had no idea how to get all the gears to mesh.” He checked his watch. “We’re on in ten minutes. That’s all I can give you.”

Nona ducked under the yellow tape, went past the uniforms guarding the crime scene, into the maelstrom of reporters demanding exclusives and face time, trying to attach themselves to her like remoras to a passing shark. She wished she had a shark’s powerful tail to flick them away.

Finally making it into her car, she pulled the door shut, locked the doors, and powered up her new iPad, another of Dye’s innovations. He wanted all his chiefs to be networked, able to talk strategy at a moment’s notice.

But this allowed Nona to have her own network up and running. Tapping an icon, she established a network connection to Deckard. It was of his own design, meaning that not only was it encrypted, but both their IP addresses were shielded from prying software.

A moment later, his face swam up out of the gloom of his laboratory, his halo of golden hair standing up as if he’d just received an electric shock.

“Hey, how’s it going?” Deckard was not his real name, but the moniker he used, one he’d chosen from
Blade Runner
, his favorite film.

“I need intel.”

“Of course you do.” Deckard’s fingers were poised over one of the multiple keyboards that surrounded his workstation. He had touch screens as well, but they were mainly for aggregating and manipulating JPEG and video files. “Shoot.”

Nona related the sparse details on Leroy Connaston that Jack had given her.

“What do I concentrate on?” Fingers already dancing over the keys, his heavily freckled face looked spectral in the LED light from his computers.

“Anything and everything.”

“And you need it three minutes ago, yes?”

Nona laughed. “Yes.” She was keeping one eye on the time, another on Deckard’s expression, with occasional glances at the head of the alley, where the scrum of press had ratcheted up a couple of notches, as the victims, invisible inside body bags, were taken out to waiting meat wagons to be transported to the ME’s cold room, to be picked apart, discussed, and argued over.

“Hey,” Deckard said, “I can do that.”

“That’s because you’re a replicant.”

“Damnit, Nora,” he said good-naturedly, “I told you Deckard isn’t a replicant!”

“You should’ve called yourself Roy Batty.”

“The head Nexus-6. Ha ha! Maybe you’re right, but it’s too late now.” Deckard’s head nodded like a bobble toy in the back of a car. “Okay, I’ve wormed my way into the Bangkok police files.”

“And?”

“Well, it’s notable for what’s
not
in there.”

“Meaning?”

“The investigation into Connaston’s murder was slow in starting and then abruptly cut short.”

“Cut short? By whom?”

“Someone high up in the Thai Royal Police.”

“The Central Investigation Bureau?”

“Well, you would think so,” Deckard said. “But no. It was the head of Naresuan Two-sixty-one.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Naresuan Two-sixty-one is a special operations unit of Special Branch, in charge of counterterrorism.”

“Jesus.”

“Right response,” Deckard said. “Was Connaston a terrorist—or a spook?”

“I’m hoping you’re going to tell me,” Nona said.

“Yeah, well, if there was a Special Branch file on him or his murder, it no longer exists.”

“Great,” Nona sighed. “I’m chasing a ghost.”

Deckard switched to another screen. “Not quite. Okay, here we go. Connaston, Leroy. Age, forty-six at time of death. Body repatriated to Yorkshire, England, requested by his younger sister, Penelope Barrowwood, but everyone seems to call her Penny.” He gave Nona a date two days ago. “Married to Duff Barrowwood—do you believe these Brit names? Anyway, Sir Duff is a solicitor of some repute in Yorkshire. No other family, it seems.”

“What did Connaston do for a living?” Nona asked.

“Good question. Whatever it was, it earned him a boatload of money. The guy had a townhouse in Belgravia—veddy posh, don’t you know,” he said, at the end slipping into a deliberately over-the-top upper-class English accent. “But that’s not all. He also owned a house in Tuscany and—get this!—a fucking castle in the south of Spain.”

Nona frowned. Her time was getting short. “Are you telling me he had no visible means of support?”

“Not immediately visible, anyway.”

“Maybe he inherited.”

“His father was a Yorkshire coal miner, died of the black lung, and the mother came from farming stock, so cross that notion out.”

The crowd had thickened around the neck of the alleyway. The uniforms were standing at attention, at any moment Commissioner Dye would appear, and her time alone with Deckard would be at an end.

“Come on. There must be—”

“Of course there is,” Deckard said. “But considering the tangled web the intervention of Naresuan Two-sixty-one has made, it’s going to take a bit of specialized digging.”

“Deck—”

“I know, I know, time is of the essence.”

“If you’ve got a clear photo of Connaston—”

Deckard made a show of striking a key. “Done. You’ll have it inside thirty seconds.”

“Now—”

He sighed theatrically. “Nona, because I love you like no other, I’m going to link up with Ripley.” Another geek of his caliber who lived in London. She’d named herself after the lead character in the
Alien
trilogy. “Even though she’s a royal pain in the ass.”

“You’re the best, Deck.”

“You got that right!”

“I gotta break off now. Shoot me the intel as soon as—”