Out of Orange (12 page)

Throughout the day at various intervals I could hear the Muslim
call to prayer coming from several directions around the city. Some were so close I could hear the crackle of the audio projecting them, others were a faint wailing from the distance, echoing across the city so I couldn’t really tell where the sound came from. It was interesting how different Jakarta felt from this new perspective, definitely farther from home.

That evening Craig called to let us know they had arrived at their destination and to make a confession. We discovered that Henry had shared secret plans with our friends to return to the United States without us and with the heroin-stuffed luggage Phillip and I were babysitting. Henry hadn’t counted on Craig’s apprehension or that he would tell us what Henry and Bradley had been plotting behind our backs. Craig’s confession was incomplete; he tried to say this information was all presented in a phone call he had received from Henry when they’d gotten to their current destination. That was impossible, since Henry wouldn’t know how to reach them without prior arrangements to do so, and Henry and Bradley were still on the eleven-hour train ride to Yogyakarta.

I realized this had probably been under way before Craig’s current change of heart, but I didn’t see any point in calling him on it. I asked Craig to think about what he thought Henry had at stake in their safe return home and to compare it to what he imagined Phillip and I had to lose. I wasn’t talking about the money alone. I reminded him that we all came from the same place and had some of the same friends. Their fate would follow us all the way home. I asked him if he even knew how to contact Henry when they got back. If they thought Henry would be more likely to get them back safely and pay them, then they should go with him, by all means. But I asked him not to answer. I wanted him to really think about it. We would call them back in one hour.

Phillip only heard my side of the conversation, but he knew essentially what was happening. He and I faced the fact that our grand plans had failed miserably and they would never work. It had been naïve to think we could get away with this with the million things that could go wrong. We would have to take the bags ourselves
and hope Craig and Molly would be happy to have gotten a two-week all-expenses-paid trip to Indonesia as their consolation prize and go home without trying to reconnect with Henry. If they did that, they would end up in the same exact boat we were in and it would be all our fault.

Henry’s problem with me and Phillip had turned him into a loose cannon. His behavior was increasingly unpredictable from the day he’d found out we had people there, up to this latest development. If he thought he was better suited than us to get these guys home safely, it no longer mattered. We would never believe his efforts were anything but self-serving and deceitful. He had planned this last trick, I guessed, when he pretended to have reached a détente with us to end the dissension created by our mistake with Craig’s passport. That brief peace had been a charade. What I couldn’t figure out was how he expected to get the heroin-loaded luggage from us. We still had it.

I realized then that they had not escorted us to the Marcopolo to help us find it, to see what the place looked like, or to store the crap they didn’t want to have to drag along on their trek to the other side of Java. Henry had wanted to get a key to our room and he had gotten one. I opened the closet and looked at their two pieces of personal luggage, the ones they had left with us. The two cheap suitcases we had assumed held clothes and personal belongings they would pick up when they returned were still there.

I started laughing hysterically. Phillip looked at me with worry but then understood what was so funny when I popped one of their bags open to reveal it was almost empty. Phillip understood what I was thinking. He ran to the bed we had stowed the heroin-filled luggage under and dropped to the floor, announcing that they were still there. I was relieved but pissed off. The call from Craig had been one thing. It had ruined any hope of making the stand-in thing work. But something about this made it feel like such a personal slap in the face. I could imagine how pleased Henry must have been with himself, as he left these props for their subterfuge in our closet and walked away.

I guessed he planned to come back to the Marcopolo, retrieve the three pieces of drug-packed luggage we had already collected, and leave us with the empty suitcases, the suitcases that supposedly contained his and Bradley’s personal belongings—the suitcases that made his coming with us to the Marcopolo and getting a key to the room seem perfectly logical and harmless.

Phillip and I packed our stuff, gathered the three other bags, and immediately left the Marcopolo Hotel. We needed to buy ourselves a little time to think. We left Henry and Bradley’s empty suitcases behind, exactly where they had been, and took the heroin-filled luggage with us to the Grand Hyatt. Once there, we asked for adjoining rooms, as if we were coworkers on a business trip, and checked in with cash and aliases. The best they could do were two rooms across from each other, but that would still work. Phillip and I could at least find out how badly Henry had really screwed us, while we were not so easy to locate and discard.

We could keep our eyes on the heroin without sitting in the same room with it. Without a credit card, they asked for a cash deposit to cover incidentals. This was the last cash we had. Stupid or not, we would have to use Phillip’s American Express from that point on.

We couldn’t simply pack it in and go home, not yet. If Henry took our luggage, Alajeh would have expected someone to stay and collect what would have been intended for Henry and Bradley to carry. Henry knew that I recognized that much, even if he did think I was as stupid as a box of hair. It wasn’t enough to assume Henry thought we would just wait for his luggage to arrive and do nothing about his trickery. We had to know for certain if he had covered his own ass and told Alajeh what was happening. He could have easily made us out to be a problem he had solved for Alajeh, rather than risk being caught lying to him.

But if Henry believed Alajeh was really dangerous, that meant Henry was willing to potentially sign our death warrants, as well as spoil his own opportunity to use a stand-in. That would make the whole thing pointless, unless Henry really believed we were too stupid to do what we were doing, and he really was trying to save
Craig and Molly from us. It didn’t matter why he did what he did anymore, though. We just had to know if he told Alajeh about it. We thought the answer to that would determine if we were in real danger, not just saddled with the bags we had hoped to not carry because we thought we would get busted. We had an advantage as long as we had the three bags packed with heroin and nobody knew where to find us. But we couldn’t count on that to last long. I also had a funny feeling Henry and Bradley were much closer than we had thought. All bets were off as soon as Henry found out his diabolical plot or his intended rescue had failed, whichever it was. I had no idea what to expect from him when that happened.

If Alajeh already knew what was going on, the bags weren’t just our advantage; they were our hostages for our own safety and our ransom for control over Molly and Craig’s fate for as long as Alajeh and Henry did not know where in Jakarta to find us. I didn’t know what the bags were worth to him, but if he had already been told what we had attempted to do, we had to assume that Henry and Bradley weren’t going to be the only ones who would have surprised us. Absconding with the bags might make Alajeh want to put a stop to it all. That is what the second room was for, a place to scoot after we made a phone call. From there we might have an opportunity to untangle the mess we had made before it got worse than it already had.

We checked out one last detail, a sound check of sorts. Then Phillip sat down in the chair opposite me at the desk in our new hotel room. We were on the twentieth floor and had a view of the blue sky—no telltale signs of the huge, dirty, and stinky city we were in. Jakarta didn’t exist, unless we walked right over to the window and looked right down into it. I had done that and realized we were too far up from the street to clearly identify the people down there. Our other room would have nearly the same view but of the entrance side of the Hyatt. But I figured we would recognize Bradley’s shock of blond hair even from up here if he walked anywhere below where our view was not obscured. If anyone else was coming for us, we wouldn’t know who to look for anyway.

I dialed the Benin number for Alajeh, and he didn’t answer. His assistant picked up and asked me to identify myself. I told him who I was, but I knew that he already knew exactly who I was. This was Alajeh’s special phone, by the way, the number we used to conduct our quick business calls. He always answered this phone. His assistant took a quick breath and for some reason that breath is what made my spider senses tingle. He asked for my telephone number and room number, and told me he would have Alajeh call me back. Why he did that only made sense if Alajeh thought they didn’t already have that information. But Alajeh already had our phone number and room number at the Marcopolo.

These two pieces of information, if combined, were more precise than GPS coordinates: one defined the exact address we were at on planet Earth, the other the exact room in that address. Without the room number, the closest they could get to finding us was the building we were in, and the Hyatt was huge.

I provided the information Alajeh’s assistant had asked for—my room number and the telephone number—shook my head, letting Phillip know that Alajeh had not come to the phone, and hung up. I turned the ringer’s volume up and left the phone I had just hung up as close to our room door as its cord permitted. We quickly went into our other room. We had already confirmed that we could hear the phone ring from our other room, even with both doors closed. The new room bought us very little time, but that was all we needed. I hoped.

This had the potential of being a very big mistake, but we didn’t know what else to do. It was the fastest way we could think of to find out what we needed to know. If the phone rang within a few minutes, I would run like hell to answer it. In that case, it would be safer to assume that Alajeh hadn’t been told anything, otherwise we figured we would get an unexpected visit, not a call. We had to accept the possibility that both might happen, in that case we would only have a few minutes to talk to him and alter our fate, but at least we would have that. If it took long for him to call back, then I would have to remain at the window watching the hotel entrance
and Phillip would have to stay with his eye stuck to the peephole until either a call or a visitor did come. The plan wasn’t perfect and it did not guarantee our safety, but it was the best we could do.

Unfortunately, the phone didn’t ring back. It took only fifteen minutes, but it felt like an eternity waiting there in silence with our eyes glued on the entrance and peephole. Then Phillip backed away from the door and waved at me to come over. The expression on his face told me more than I wanted to know. He motioned for me to be quiet and pointed to the peephole. I looked out, just in time to see two young Asians or Indonesians turn and walk away from our other room door, down the hall, and back to the elevators. One of them had been with the guys who had delivered the first three bags. I had never seen the other guy, but he was not a hotel employee. Phillip and I sat in the quiet for a while, checking the peephole every few seconds to see if they came back. They did not.

I hoped to God the desk wouldn’t give any information out to people who couldn’t even tell them the name of the person supposedly residing in room number 2022. Alajeh would know we had tricked him now, and he would have to assume we knew he had sent two of his people to the room we were supposed to be in.

It was time to call Craig back. I didn’t want to talk to him now. I was so afraid that he might have talked to Henry again, and who knew what else might be happening on his end of the line? My hands weren’t shaking anymore and I had a weird kind of serenity flooding over me while Phillip and I sat in the silence. I had been praying to myself. “A bad Catholic” is what my mom would have called me years before when I would go to church only on Christmas and Easter, but I didn’t even do that anymore. That didn’t mean I couldn’t pray my heart out now.

“Craig.” I listened carefully for anything other than Craig’s voice.

“Hi.” He sounded tired but not false.

“So what are your thoughts?” I asked instead of launching into hysterics and telling them to get the hell out of there as fast as their feet could run.

“Well, we want to apologize first.” I thought he was about to tell
me that they were going with Henry. “I was just freaked out about the whole passport thing. He told me you guys had lied to us about important shit and that you had no idea what you were—” I cut him off.

“It’s okay. I know this shit got crazy. If I had known he was coming to Jakarta, I would have warned you. But listen. I need you guys to get out of that hotel. Go check into the other place you were thinking about.” I said this and instantly realized there may have been no other place; it may have been part of the ruse. Then I remembered the brochures they had shown me.

“We are already packed up and got a driver.” They had planned on returning to meet us at the Marcopolo. They didn’t know we were no longer there.

“Okay. Hang on a second.” I covered the phone and updated Phillip, asking him what I should tell them. They couldn’t go to the Marcopolo and they couldn’t come to the Hyatt, where we were now. We didn’t know what was going to happen yet. I didn’t want to freak them out or get them caught up in the middle of the shit we were in. Phillip looked at his watch and he took the phone from me.

“Go back to the Hilton resort. Do not go to the Marcopolo. We are not going to be there when you get back. Check in under the name Adam Douglas and stay in your room. We will be there by midnight, but don’t leave your room till then. Seriously, dude. Henry has some shit going down and you do not want to get involved. If we don’t get back there tonight, go home.” He handed the phone back to me. I told Craig I would talk to him later and hung up.