Fringe 03 - Sins of the Father Read online

  With the occasional temporary company as needed, of course.

  Most of his relationships had been so brief that he had little memory of them at all. With one exception—a girl he had met when he was just a kid. A blond girl who’d had something to do with his father’s research in Florida. Even she was a blur, but he remembered her green eyes, and her drawings, and how she didn’t really seem to fit in. That was something he could understand.

  And something about tulips, a field of white tulips…

  Where did that come from? he wondered, shaking his head as if that would dismiss the fleeting memory. Peter stood and padded over to the bathroom. It was cramped, windowless, and fully tiled—including the ceiling, which made it look kind of like a combination shower and toilet stall. Or a tiled coffin. There was a drain in the middle of the floor and a shower nozzle sticking out of a seemingly random spot on the wall.

  If he angled that showerhead correctly, he could wash his hair while sitting on the john.

  Instead, he opted for a more conventional, standing shower, his third since around noon, local time—when he’d awakened with a brutal hangover. It didn’t seem possible to take enough showers in Bangkok. Before he could finish toweling off, though, he was already sweating again, the gritty, toxic breath of the city settling back into his pores like a houseguest who wouldn’t leave.

  He grabbed his knock-off Rolex from the nightstand, slipped it around his wrist and checked the time. Just after 1 a.m. He had a little over an hour and forty-five minutes to get everything in place, and get his ass where it needed to be for the 3 a.m. meet.

  Once he was dressed in respectable but comfortable, unrestrictive clothes and his favorite high-end running shoes, he slid a pair of identical briefcases out from under the bed and set them side by side. He checked the contents of both cases several times and made a few minor adjustments to the weight, then snapped them both shut and headed out into the steamy Thailand night.

  * * *

  The Sweet Orchid Hotel was located right around the corner from the Soi Cowboy district. As he hit the street, Peter’s brain was blasted with euphoric multi-sensory overload. Visually, it was a fever dream of throbbing neon signs and mirror-ball glitter, painting exposed skin and leering faces in eye-searing, unnatural colors.

  His ears were assaulted by a dozen competing Thai and American pop songs all playing simultaneously, warring against the thumping, bass-heavy dance music that was blaring from the doorways of bars.

  A miasma of clashing scents filled his lungs, sweat and perfume and spilled beer mingling with the meaty smoke and exotic spices, wafting from mobile grills serving late-night street food.

  As he passed, bar girls in skimpy club wear tried to lure him in, waving English signs advertising cheap beer. Flushed and grinning Caucasian men reeled from bar to bar with their sunburned arms slung around each other’s necks. Competing club touts called out in a variety of languages while stone-faced, silent bouncers broke up a sloppy, half-assed drunken shoving match and gave the bum’s rush to a pickpocket who should have known better than to mess with the geese that laid the golden eggs.

  Because Soi Cowboy was, for all its lurid tease and titillation, really just a sanitized and benign amusement park for foreign men. If you wanted a real walk on the wild side, there were plenty of sleazier, more dangerous areas in Bangkok where you could get your freak on. This place was relatively safe and non-threatening—an utterly artificial environment created solely for the purpose of separating tourists from their baht, yen, euros, or dollars.

  Peter loved it.

  He’d been travelling constantly, ever since he was a teenager—picking up odd jobs, engineering a variety of scams, and then moving on. Everywhere he went, he always found himself most attracted to the flashy, lurid, tourist-filled areas of the bustling cities. Because he felt inexplicably at home in places like this. Places that were no one’s home, where everyone was a stranger from somewhere else. Places like this made him feel paradoxically at ease. Unnoticed.

  Conversely, he hated small communities and rural areas where he was easily spotted as the blatant outsider. They reminded him far too much of the strange period of his childhood in which he’d found himself feeling like an alien in his own hometown.

  As he walked the gaudy length of Soi Cowboy, he was just another big Caucasian guy from somewhere else, towering over gaggles of glammed-up farmers’ daughters from backwater villages in the rural interior. Some of the bar girls he’d met were from as far away as Laos or Cambodia. After more than a dozen visits to this district, he’d met only one person who was actually born and raised in Bangkok, and that was Jaruk.

  Jaruk was sharp and fiercely intelligent. A crackerjack hustler who could con a dollar out of the devil with one hand tied behind his back. He always had multiple schemes going at any given time, and was always willing to cut Peter in on a juicy setup. In exchange, Peter lent his American credibility to the pitch.

  They’d met at the Classy Lady two years ago, and had been trying to run numbers on each other for about ten minutes before it had dawned on them that they were kindred spirits. Now Jaruk was Peter’s local fixer, his go-to guy for any kind of action in Bangkok.

  And Jaruk was going to be pissed when he realized that Peter wasn’t going to cut him in on this latest deal. Sure, Peter was throwing his friend a healthy fee for the loan of a motorbike, a couple of cell phones, and a few discreet arrangements. But he’d been extremely squirrelly about the exact nature of the transaction in question. He told himself that he was looking out for his friend, that he didn’t want to expose Jaruk to the very real risks that were involved. But he knew better. It wasn’t about that at all.

  It was about the money.

  It was about Big Eddie Guthrie.

  If Peter cut Jaruk in on the deal, he wouldn’t have enough left over to pay off Big Eddie. And if he didn’t pay off Big Eddie soon, well… that wasn’t something he wanted to think about. He had to stay focused on the job at hand.

  “Here comes trouble.”

  Jaruk was standing at the back door of the Classy Lady, and spoke as Peter walked up, setting the two briefcases down on the pavement between his feet. A nearby pile of trash smelled like fish.

  His English was flawless, with a slight British accent. He was short and wiry with a tousled, bed-head haircut and intense dark eyes like those of a peregrine falcon. He looked like a former teen idol gone bad, his good looks marred by years of hard living and a missing front tooth that had been knocked out by an angry Muay Thai champion.

  But he more than made up for it with wit, charisma, and charm.

  “How’s it hanging?” Jaruk asked, reaching out a scarred brown hand and slapping palms, then bumping fists with Peter.

  “To my knees,” Peter replied with a smile.

  “That’s not what I heard,” Jaruk said with a wink, extracting a cigarette from a crumpled pack and lighting up.

  “Aw, man,” Peter said. “Your mom swore to me it would be our little secret.”

  “My mother has been married six times,” Jaruk replied. “She would eat you alive.”

  Peter laughed.

  “How’s life at the Classy Lady?” he asked.

  A topless girl in a pink, zebra-striped G-string staggered out through the back door, wobbling on her clear plastic heels and nearly crashing into Peter before she started throwing up into an overflowing trash barrel. Then she slumped down into the trash.

  “Classy as ever,” Jaruk said, with a dryly raised eyebrow. He took a drag from the cigarette pinched between his forefinger and thumb. “But enough about me,” he added. “I want to talk about this big deal of yours. You’re not holding out on your old friend Jaruk, are you?”

  “Trust me,” Peter said, fishing a cash-filled envelope out of his pants pocket. “The less you know about this one, the better.”

  “When a guy like you says ‘trust me,’” Jaruk replied with a skeptical squint, “That usually means I shouldn’t.”
/>   “Fair enough,” Peter said, holding out the envelope. “It’s just that I’m taking a hell of a risk on this one. I don’t want to put you in any more danger than you already are.”

  He attempted to shore up his less-than-total sincerity by letting Jaruk see just a little bit of fear in his eyes. But once he allowed himself to think about how dangerous this deal really was, that fear started to feel real.

  He dropped his gaze and looked away.

  “Are you sure about this?” Jaruk asked, taking the envelope and making it disappear.

  Am I? Peter wondered.

  It didn’t matter. He didn’t have a choice.

  “Sure I’m sure,” he said, looking his friend in the eye.

  “Because if anything bad happened to you in my city,” Jaruk said, shooting him a look of stern warning, “then I’d be forced to admit that I actually care what happens to you.”

  “Chiew-chiew,” Peter said with what he hoped was a relaxed, bemused smile on his face. “It’s not that big a deal.”

  “So which is it?” Jaruk asked. “Too dangerous for me to know about, or not a big deal?” He laughed, and shook his head. “You know what, don’t answer that. You’re right, I don’t want to know.” He tossed a ring of keys, which Peter caught one-handed out of the air.

  “Motorbike is there, at the end of the alley,” Jaruk said, pointing. “Cell phones are in the left saddle bag, clean, charged and ready to go. Also, I left you a little something extra. A present. Sounds like you’re going to need it.”

  “You’re in my will,” Peter said, hand on his heart.

  “Good,” Jaruk said. He pitched his cigarette butt into an oily puddle and turned to help the semi-conscious drunk girl back into the club. “At least I’ll get something out of this mysterious scam of yours.”

  * * *

  The motorbike was an orange-and-black Honda Click with hard, locking saddlebags. There was a holographic skull sticker on the left one. Peter unlocked it with a small key on the ring Jaruk had given him, and surveyed the contents.

  As promised, three disposable cell phones—and the extra gift Jaruk had mentioned. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be a Kimber 1911 Ultra Carry, and it came with a spare clip. Peter took out the pistol and two of the phones. He checked the gun, found it loaded, then reached around his back and stuck it down the sweaty waistband of his pants, covering it with the tail of his loosely fitting shirt.

  He put the extra magazine and one of the two phones in his pockets, and used the other to make a call. Someone picked up immediately.

  “Moshi moshi.”

  The man on the other end spoke Japanese with a distinct Korean accent. They had compromised on Japanese because the man on the other end didn’t speak English. Peter had always had a gift for picking up languages, but his Korean was limited to a few amusingly off-color slang phrases that were good for making bar girls giggle—rarely useful during serious negotiations.

  He confirmed the location of the meet, and assured the man on the other end of the line that everything was going according to plan. Then he ended the call and dialed a second number, switching to Russian. His Russian wasn’t as fluent as his Japanese, but he understood it better than he spoke, and he could speak well enough to get the message across.

  “Privet,” a voice said. The person on the other end had a Chechen accent, and spoke with whispered, barely contained urgency, like a man making an obscene phone call. Talking to him made Peter’s skin crawl, but he kept his tone calm and friendly, telling him the same thing he’d just told the Korean.

  When he ended the call, he dropped the phone to the ground, crushing it under his heel. He closed and locked the saddlebag, and then stacked and used a bungee cord to secure the two briefcases onto the package carrier. He took a moment to center himself, and let the surging adrenaline cycle through his system.

  Then he mounted the motorbike, strapped the half-helmet under his chin, and keyed the machine to life, heading out toward the mouth of the alley.

  As far as he was concerned, riding a motorbike was the only way to get around Southeast Asia, for a variety of reasons. It was easier to squeeze through narrow streets and zigzag through congested, erratic, and generally dangerous traffic. But for Peter, he just loved the raw realness of it. The feeling of independence, of the wind on his face and the olfactory overload of exotic scents both delicious and repulsive. Being in a limo or a car was like riding around in a fish tank, isolated in an air-conditioned bubble. Being on a motorbike made him feel alive, and he wanted to savor that feeling, drink it in.

  Considering what he was about to do, he might never get another chance.

  The Infinity Towers Hotel was located in the upscale Embassy Row neighborhood, surrounded by shopping malls, five-star restaurants, and exclusive nightclubs. A far cry from Soi Cowboy. The conjoined oval towers were designed to look like the infinity symbol, when viewed from above, but from Peter’s lowly point of view as he pulled the motorbike around to the service entrance, their double-barreled shape was more reminiscent of an old side-by-side shotgun pointed into the starless sky.

  He dismounted, took the cases off the package carrier, and handed the motorbike over to a twelve-or thirteen-year-old boy who was there waiting for it. The boy acknowledged him with a silent nod. Peter pressed a sweaty handful of baht into the kid’s outstretched hand and told him in halting Thai not to park too far away.

  A brace of young men in cooks’ whites squatted against the wall by the service entrance, smoking and talking smack. They ignored Peter completely as he entered as nonchalantly as he could manage.

  The door led into the narrow offshoot of a long, cement corridor that cut through the center of the west tower like an artery, providing stealthy access to all areas of the ground level. It allowed service personnel to appear—seemingly by magic—any time one of the esteemed guests knocked over a drink, or needed help finding discreet company, or asked for advice on where to buy cocaine or overpriced designer handbags.

  To the left was a double door that led into the spicy sauna of the kitchen. To the right was the employee locker room, and as Peter passed, a trio of pretty young girls emerged, having just traded their drab maid uniforms for flashy club wear.

  Once he reached the junction with the main corridor, Peter was greeted by a tiny, obsequious older man with a glossy black toupee and an immaculate cobalt-and-black Infinity Towers uniform. He flashed clearly fake white teeth in a smarmy smile, unleashing a cloud of strange breath that smelled as if he’d been drinking the blue liquid from that jar where the barber puts his combs.

  “Good evening, Mr. McClane,” the man said. “So glad to have you with us again.”

  Peter was going to have to kick Jaruk, and tell him to lay off the Die Hard movies. But if the little man had a clue, he didn’t show it. He just reached out, offering a heavy, embossed envelope. Peter set the cases down and accepted it.

  “Inside, you will find the key to your usual suite,” the man with the toupee said. “As you are a preferred platinum member, that key card will also allow you access to the Black Pearl Lounge, the spa, the gym and”—he leaned in, sparse eyebrows lifting significantly—“the rooftop garden.”

  There was no rooftop garden at the Infinity Towers.

  “Thank you,” Peter said, checking the unmarked key card inside the envelope and then stashing it in his pocket and picking the briefcases back up. “Keep your people off the top floor until 4 a.m.”

  “Use the service elevator,” the man with the toupee replied, tipping his chin toward a large steel door down the hallway on the left. “And enjoy your stay, Mr. McClane.” Was that a hint of sarcasm?

  He turned and slipped away into the bowels of the hotel, leaving Peter to his fate.

  “Yippee-ki-yay, ai hee-ah,” Peter muttered to himself, checking his watch.

  Two-fifteen. Right on schedule.

  He walked down to the elevator and pushed the button.

  When the massive textured steel doors
slid open there was a waiter with a rolling cart stacked high with dirty dishes. He gave Peter a knowing nod, and then rolled the cart out of the elevator and down toward the kitchen.

  Peter stepped in. Unlike the showy exterior glass lifts that ferried guests up to their luxury suites, this one was dull and utilitarian. The floor was textured rubber and the walls were scratched and dented steel. It was large enough to stable a bull elephant, and there were doors on two sides. When Peter got in, he pushed the button marked 30E, so that when the elevator arrived on the thirtieth floor, the rear door would open, discharging him into the east tower.

  As the elevator rose, he closed his eyes, breathing slowly and trying to relax the bunched up muscles in his neck and shoulders. He had everything planned down to the millisecond. Clockwork. It was going to be perfect. No worries.

  When the elevator reached the top floor, the back door slid open, letting Peter out into a service area. It was a stubby white hallway with a supply closet, an employee restroom, and a holding area used to stash housekeeping carts between shifts. At the end of the short hallway there was a doorway that led into another world.

  Whereas the hidden service areas were unremarkable and strictly functional, the areas of the hotel which had been designed for guests were all sleek, subtle luxury. The hallway Peter entered had that velvety, cocoon-like hush shared by expensive places all over the world. It was as if the vulgar bustle and noise of the city below had been muffled by an insulating layer of hundred-dollar bills. Subtle, recessed lighting spotlighted minimalist, monochromatic flower arrangements in angular, ultra-modern blue glass vases. The immaculate cobalt-blue carpet was thick as quicksand, silencing Peter’s footsteps completely.

  * * *

  The suite he’d selected sat directly in the middle of the wasp waist that connected the two towers. It was precisely equidistant from the places where he had arranged for each group to wait while the deal was in progress. There were two such suites—one in each of the conjoined buildings, located at the narrowest point. The door to his suite pointed east, and its twin faced west.