White Ghost (17 page)

C
obra came to Gage's Bangkok hotel room after flying in from Taiwan. He took a chair at the dining table, poured him a cup of tea, and also sat down.

“The container is at Sunny Glory,” Cobra said. “But probably not for long. In the old days, we never let anything stop moving, and they won't either. They'll just add whatever goods they want to send on to the next stop and then haul it back to the port.”

Cobra's cell phone rang. He listened, snapped orders in Taiwanese, then hung up and looked at Gage.

“The container just left.”

“You were right.”

“Not exactly. It was empty.”

The flowchart in Gage's mind of the possible routes the chips could follow and how the deal might be structured went fuzzy.

“Are they on to us?” Gage said. “Or was this the plan all along?”

Gage felt his fists clench and then a flash of panic that he'd wasted the last weeks, foolishly gambling with his health and his life. Time now felt like a vise. The past completed, fixed in place, and the time moving at him, closing the gap between the present and the future, squeezing him.

He pushed past the thought. “Or worse. Maybe the chips weren't in it in the first place.”

Gage heard a knock on the door. He opened it for Kai and filled her in. They could do nothing but wait for more information from Taiwan, so he turned to the problem of Eight Iron.

“Kai and I both think Eight Iron is up to something,” Gage told Cobra. “If he grabs the heroin, all our work was for nothing. Ah Ming will freeze everything in place until he sorts it out.”

“I'm willing to head up there, but I'll be outnumbered. The area is crawling with Shans connected to Kasa.”

“And I'm not sure I want you guarding a heroin shipment, or worse, going to war over it, either against the Wa or against Eight Iron.”

Cobra smiled. “I don't think my wife would forgive me if I ended up with new holes in my body.”

And Gage knew he wouldn't forgive himself.

“What's stopping Eight Iron from just grabbing it on the trail from the lab?” Kai asked.

“It would make it too obvious that he's behind the theft,” Gage said. “A guy shows up who's been out of the business for a long time, then a huge load gets snatched.”

“So it's a matter of timing,” Cobra said. “He needs to make his move in a way that will disguise that it's him doing it.”

“As soon as the heroin leaves the lab,” Gage said, “assuming we can catch up to it, we'll make a decision on how to play it. Which means you'll have to hook up with Kasa and stick with him until the heroin shows up.”

“Which means I'm not sleeping at home tonight.”

“At least you'll have some company.”

“What company?”

“Kai. Kasa won't make a move against you if she's around. He knows her husband would use the police and army to crush his whole organization.”

“And not because of love.” Kai smirked. “He just needs me to manage the harem.”

“I'm glad you still have your sense of humor,” Gage said, “and of adventure. I'll have to stay here. A white ghost hanging around this deal would be taken for DEA.”

Cobra nodded. “
Mai pen rai.
”

“I wouldn't say ‘no problem' so fast. We still don't know where they'll be moving the heroin.”

Cobra's cell phone rang. He answered, listened, then disconnected. “A truck backed up to the loading dock. It could be they're transferring the chips into it.”

Gage pictured his map again, this time from the perspective of southern Taiwan and the South and East China Seas. “I wonder if their plan is to slip them into another company's container in Kaohsiung to give them an additional layer of insulation.”

“But if it's going by container anyway,” Kai said, “why not make the exchange here in Bangkok. Haul the container to a local warehouse, take out the chips, substitute in the heroin, and send it on to the U.S.”

Gage thought for a moment. “No. That couldn't be it. Too risky. The last thing they'd want to do is ship the heroin directly from a source country. That's like asking for it to be searched by customs.”

They all fell silent. They knew they were just floating, drifting from speculation to speculation, hypothetical to hypothetical, and there was only one way to find solid ground.

Kai and Cobra rose and headed for the door.

A
fter Kai and Cobra left, Gage took a cab to the Jira Medical Center on the first floor of a high-rise in central Bangkok. It was the office of the doctor Cobra's wife had chosen. The few steps across the sidewalk felt to him like he was fighting through dirty, gray cotton. Crossing the threshold and into the air-conditioning was like breaking free.

“My name is Gage,” he told the receptionist. “I have an appointment with Dr. Mana.”

She smiled. “Yes, of course.”

She gestured toward the bank of chairs on the opposite wall of the empty waiting room, then reached for her intercom.

A few minutes later Mana entered through the door next to the reception counter. He brightened when he spotted Gage, then extended his hand, Western fashion.

“Khun Malee told me to expect you.”

“I appreciate you taking the time to see me.”

Mana signaled a nurse to follow, then escorted Gage into an examination room.

“Just sit up there,” Mana said, directing him to the exam table. “And I'd like you to remove your shirt.”

“I can just roll up my sleeve. I only need blood drawn.”

“How about I'll be the doctor and you be the patient,” Mana said in an I-won't-take-no-for-an-answer tone and matching Thai smile.

Gage gave Mana a look of surrender, then removed his shirt and pulled himself up onto the end of the table.

Mana extracted two vials of blood from Gage's arm, then handed him an e-mail. It was addressed to Gage.

Dear Graham:

I met Dr. Mana at a conference at the Mayo Clinic a few years ago. He attended the best university and medical school in Hong Kong and teaches oncology at the Chulalongkorn Medical Faculty.

He is also following my instructions.

Do what he says.

By the way, Faith and I had lunch. She tried to explain you to me. I'm not sure I got it. She promised to try again.

Please be careful.

Louisa Stern

Gage smiled and laid the e-mail on the table behind him.

Mana performed the same examination of his neck and arms that Stern had done.

“Nausea?” Mana asked.

“A little.”

“More or less?”

“Less.”

“Dizziness?”

“None since Hong Kong a couple of days ago.”

“Appetite?”

“
Rad na gai
for lunch.” Gage smiled again. “You can tell Dr. Stern I ate the whole thing.”

Mana smiled back. “I will. She decided to cut out the middleman and she asked me to send your blood results directly to her.” He raised his eyebrows. “Any objection?”

Gage shook his head.

Mana passed Gage his shirt. “If you're here in a week, please come back. Otherwise, good luck to you.”

As Gage stepped back onto the sidewalk, he decided to walk at least partway back to the hotel. He needed to think outside the confinement of a cab creeping through traffic. He paid off the waiting driver, then started toward his hotel, winding through lottery ticket sellers, fruit vendors, and noodle carts. Workers heading toward buses and Skytrains jostled him, and businesspeople elbowed him aside as they fought for taxis.

His nausea ratcheted up in the exhaust blasts from tuk-tuks and motorcycles, and as it faded, the chaos of sounds, smells, and movements provoked an inner anarchy of images: Faith, Ling, Kai, Casey, Stern, Sheridan. And that morphed into anger, a molten heat that spread inside his chest, not directed outward toward the world jarring him, but at himself, or at least at that part of himself that was killing him.

Questions rose like street signs in front of him:
Why not earlier? Why not on the day of the diagnosis? Or on the day of the bone marrow biopsy? Those would've been good days for rage.

Walk down to the basement of his house, pound the heavy bag until he was drained.

Gage answered the question as soon as he asked it. The fury had now emerged because he had become a bystander, his work not yet completed, but out of his hands, and his mind was now loosed to wander uncontrolled. A frightening image came to him of a flashlight rolling down a hillside from a dead man's hand.
Whether or not he'd fulfill his obligation to Linda Sheridan and whether or not Ah Ming would win in the end would be answered solely by Kai and—

Fingers reached into his back pocket. He grabbed the wrist and twisted the arm it was attached to. He took back his wallet. He found himself gripping a skinny street kid with up-country tribal features, wearing a dirty T-shirt and shorts. He searched the boy's pockets and found no other stolen wallets or money, only a gold candy wrapper folded like a keepsake. He released his grip, but the boy didn't run. He just stood there with his shoulders hunched, head down, waiting to be beaten or handed over to the police.

Gage turned and walked away. He didn't look back.

At least it hadn't been a knife held at my throat or a gun barrel pointed at my chest.

He continued into Lumpini Park, passing old women engaged in tai chi and aged men playing
makrook thai
and finally a vendor selling fresh snake blood drained from disemboweled cobras lying in a bucket next to his wooden cart.

Gage thought about his conversations with Stern and the research he and Faith had done and now admitted to himself a truth that had only been inert words before. There was no secret about the course the disease would follow or how it would end and when: give or take a margin of error, he knew how long he would live.

He paused in front of a pagoda clock tower housing an old Swiss Heuer and looked up at its rusting face.

It's not a knife or a bullet that I have to fear. It's a ticking clock.

Gage wondered why death hadn't been constantly on his mind, why even the nausea and dizziness hadn't distracted him from what he had set out to do.

But no answer came.

He left the park and found himself in front of a small Ther
avada Buddhist temple, its triangular red roof sweeping down toward gold, birdlike chofas at the corners. A disabled man with twisted arms and legs loped along the sidewalk like a dog. He stopped in front of the temple and offered small garlands of white flowers for sale. Gage bought one, sniffed the scent of
malik
and
dok ruk,
and then gave it to a hunched woman shuffling toward the entrance. She draped it over withered hands formed into an arthritic
wai,
then bowed and hobbled inside.

An indistinct thought began forming in Gage's mind, then evaporated. It was something about the work he did and the reasons he did it. He grasped for the wisp as it dissipated, then looked up at the
phra chedi,
the domed pagoda housing images of the Buddha and photographs of revered teachers. Then came a bitter thought that didn't escape his grasp: even the devout, those who prayed, lived, and finally died for nirvana, couldn't accept the oblivion that was its aim and essence. No different from those European Catholics who venerated fragments of saints' bones, they needed their idols, their photos, and their images to bow to.

What am I ready to accept?
Gage asked himself as he turned away.
And how will I know it?

And when?

I
T WAS AFTER DARK
by the time Gage got back to his hotel room. An e-mail from Faith arrived as he lay down on the bed. It was about her teaching day and about the estimates for the new retaining wall below the house, and about her not being able to find the juicer they'd received as a Christmas gift from her mother ten years earlier. He smiled as he read it. Somehow she knew when it was all going to hit him, and why, and how to pull him out of it. He imagined her sitting on the couch in front of the fire place sipping wine—

His cell phone rang, wrenching his mind back to Bangkok.

It was Cobra. Gage could hear the rumble of car tires on pave
ment. They were heading north. He'd learned from his agents in Taiwan that Sunny Glory had loaded unmarked boxes on a junk-style coastal fishing vessel at the port of Taichung. It then broke for the open water of the Formosa Strait and the East China Sea.

“We got a partial hull number, but there was no way we could install the tracking device.”

Gage felt his body tense and then a feeling of floating, almost of disassociation, of having broken free of what had anchored him and his plan in place.

“That's the bad news,” Cobra said.

“And the . . .”

But Gage didn't need to finish his question and Cobra didn't need to answer it. The only reason Sunny Glory used a smuggling boat was because they had something to smuggle.

They'd found and lost the chips in the same instant.

A
fter collecting a change of clothes, a driver, and a bodyguard, Kai and Cobra had headed toward the Thai-Burmese border, aiming for Mae Sai, east of the lab Eight Iron had described. They'd swung by a branch of Siri Construction at the north end of Bangkok and picked up shortwave radios as backups to their cell phones. Assuming they could locate and follow the heroin, there was no way to guarantee the entire route would have cell service. They might even end up on the open sea. They'd slept on and off during the ten-hour drive and arrived midmorning at an empty roadside café on the outskirts of Mae Sai where Kasa was waiting.

As Kai introduced Cobra to Kasa, they squared their shoulders as men who knew each other by reputation, then sat down and leaned over the worn teak table.

“We followed the heroin all night,” Kasa told them, in Thai. “The mule train is no more than two hours from town. At this point, we don't know which warehouse they'll take it to or where it will go from there.”

“How will we follow it?” Cobra asked.

“A truck of our own. Drivers on the highway treat each other like comrades. We'll fit in.”

Cobra cast a glance toward Kai. The reason to use a truck was so that Eight Iron could transport the heroin back once he grabbed it.

“And if ours breaks down?” Kai asked.

“That's a risk we'll have to take.”

“Why not carry motorcycles in the bed?” Cobra said.

“I'll call Eight Iron.” Kasa rose to his feet. “It's up to him.”

He returned a few minutes later.

“Eight Iron says you can send one motorcycle rider and we'll send one.”

“I'll do it myself,” Cobra said, “and Kai will ride with the driver in the cab.”

Kasa shook his head. “Eight Iron won't allow it.” He looked at Kai, but spoke to Cobra. “Her husband will blame Eight Iron if something happens to you and he doesn't need that kind of trouble.”

Cobra and Kai knew they couldn't force the issue, so they let it go.

Kasa directed them to his Land Cruiser parked in front of the café and got in behind the wheel. After Cobra took the front passenger seat, Kai signaled her driver and bodyguard to follow in her car, then climbed in behind Cobra. As Kasa drove them toward the outskirts of Mae Sai, Kai called Gage, speaking in English, knowing Kasa couldn't understand.

“I have two things for you,” Kai said. “First, Cobra's people are working their sources in Taiwan. The only thing they're certain of is that the boat turned north instead of south. They're trying to find out exactly where it's headed, but for security reasons sometimes the captains of these boats don't even know where they're supposed to land until they're already way out on the water.”

“Ah Tien's address books suggests he had connections all along the coast,” Gage said, “from Bangkok all the way up to Shanghai.”

“That means we have less than three days to find the boat in a hundred thousand square miles of ocean.”

“More if it the storm my yacht guy in Hong Kong warned Cobra about forces them to take a wide route.”

“And second, Eight Iron won't let me go along.”

“Then we'll have to come up with a way to protect ourselves that he will accept.” Gage thought for a moment, and an idea to apply an old method to a new situation came to him. “Do you have people who can hold Kasa for a few days?”

“My driver and bodyguard. They won't like it, but they'll do it. They can hide him in the Siri Construction warehouse near Chiang Rai.”

“Then pull over. Give Cobra your phone and Eight Iron's number. Tell him to walk far enough away so that Kasa can't overhear. He can call Eight Iron on his own phone and translate for me.”

Once Cobra had walked twenty yards from the cars, he put both his own and Kai's cell phones to his ears.

“I've got Eight Iron on the other line,” Cobra told Gage.

“Tell him we have some security concerns and we need to be businesslike about it.”

Cobra translated for Eight Iron.

“He understands.”

“Tell him that you'll be riding in the surveillance truck and that Kasa refused to allow Kai to go along.”

“Okay . . . He says he doesn't want to take the risk.”

“I'm not going to argue with him. I want Kai with me anyway. Tell him we need a guarantee he won't steal the heroin.”

“Okay . . . he understands.”

“Now tell him we want to hold Kasa as security, but we'll
release him when we're satisfied that the heroin is out of his reach.”

Cobra translated. “He agrees.”

“Why'd he give in so easily? He must know how much the deal is for and that the load will be worth at least sixty million dollars wholesale when it arrives in the U.S.”

Gage heard Cobra speak a few words in the background.

“He says he trusts you when you say you'll bring down Ah Ming.”

“That's not a very good reason to pass on that much money. Tell him we want Kasa to surrender to us before the heroin leaves Mae Sai.”

“He says okay and wants me to put Kasa on the phone.”

“Listen in and then take Kasa's phone away from him.”

A few minutes later, Kai called Gage with the news that everything was settled.

“Eight Iron was way too agreeable,” Kai said.

“Which only means we don't understand what he's up to. Make sure your people take seriously the kind of guy they're dealing with. Regardless of how Kasa is acting now, he can strike any time. Remember what happened when Ah Ming ripped off Eight Iron. There was lots of blood in Bangkok and most of it was on Kasa's hands.”

“What about the fishing boat?”

“I'm working on an angle. Have Cobra call his people in Taiwan and get the names and hull numbers of all the boats that sailed out of that port around the same time as the one carrying the chips.”

“That's assuming that they don't repaint or renumber the one with the chips while it's on the water.”

“If they do, then I guess we'll be looking for the one with fresh paint.”