Trader of secrets

Chapter Fifteen

Liquida sat in a chair near the window of his room on the third story of the small hotel and listened to the prattle of motorbike engines, watching the traffic as it streamed by on Second Road.

He had arrived in Bangkok, Thailand, three days ago and had been planted in the city of Pattaya ever since.

He settled into the hotel because of its location. For a few extra Thai baht, he was able to get a room with a good view of the building across the street. It was the place where the lockbox was located.

The old charm of the block-long cream-colored colonial facade with its small curved balconies and masonry balustrades had become buried behind a vast picket of painted metal business signs. These jutted out over the sidewalk in such a bewildering array of sizes, colors, and shapes that it was almost impossible to focus on any single message. A thick tangled vine of black wires and cables meandered across the front of the building until the messy snarl reached over the sidewalk and snared the wooden power poles along the street out in front. The building sported corrugated metal add-ons on the front and the roof, where the penthouse looked like a flattened-out army Quonset hut.

At ground level the building housed small retail shops, restaurants, and a grab bag of other businesses, some of them open air, others sealed behind the comfort of air-conditioned walls. On the sidewalk out near the curb, street vendors reduced the normally broad walkway to a narrow path, setting up business under canvas awnings or sheets of plastic to peddle their wares.

Through all of this confusion, Liquida’s attention was riveted on a single green-painted wooden door. It was situated across the street about half a block south of the window in his room.

The green door was located between a Pakistani tailor shop and a small pharmacy. It seemed almost invisible set against the harried sea of commerce taking place on the sidewalk in front of it.

But every once in a while someone would either come or go, entering or leaving the building through the green wooden door. Whenever they did, Liquida would use his field glasses to study them closely. He looked at their faces to see if they were Asian or if they looked Caucasian, what the Thais called farang — foreigners. If they were leaving the building, he watched to see if they talked to anyone out on the street. He examined them for bulges on their ankles, heavy fanny packs on their sides, or coiled wires growing out of their ears.

He had been doing this for two days. So far he had seen nothing unusual. There were no obvious signs of surveillance. Which only meant that if they were doing it, they were doing a good job. And, of course, the whole point of surveillance was not to be seen.

Once we got up, got dressed, and got out, it took Harry, Joselyn, and me only a few minutes to find the right building. The concierge at the Marriott was able to give us some pretty fair directions and by 3:30 we found the place.

It wasn’t an office building in the sense that I had envisioned. There was no main entrance with double glass doors and street numbers over the top. From the outside it looked as if the upper three stories could have been either apartments, condos, or commercial office space. Across the front of the building, French doors opened onto small balconies. But from where we stood about a block to the south on the other side of the street, it was impossible to tell what kind of furnishings might be inside.

After watching for several minutes and by process of elimination, we concluded that the way in had to be a single door tucked away between two stores on the ground level.

“Unless they put the main entrance in the back of the building,” says Harry.

“Why would they do that?” asks Joselyn.

“Look at the place; they’ve tacked on everything else, why not that?” says Harry.

The privacy of the single lonely door unnerved us a bit. There was no way to tell what might lie beyond it without going in.

“There could be security,” says Harry.

“Or worse,” says Joselyn.

“Or it could be locked,” I tell them. “So what do you think? Should we try it?”

Beyond the green portal, up on the second floor, was another wooden door, this one with a translucent glass panel on top. There was no lettering or name on the glass other than the number 208.

Liquida had seen the inside of the office only one time, the day he first established the account with the company known as TSCC Ltd. Some people used it as a place to store business records or other private papers that for one reason or another they didn’t want to keep at home or in their office. For others, including Liquida, it was an address of convenience.

For a reasonable fee, TSCC, like any other private parcel service, would take receipt of packages or letters addressed to clients and hold them in a locked box or, in this case, the steel drawer of a filing cabinet assigned to the client. Unlike other parcel services, TSCC distinguished itself by not being particularly scrupulous in checking to see whether customs declarations and clearance documents accompanied packages coming in from abroad. This was particularly true when an item was hand-delivered by special messengers, otherwise known as mules.

The company’s fee schedule also offered additional services, including use of its automated voice-mail system. This allowed gift givers and recipients to leave messages for one another; a message that a present was on the way and a verbal thank-you from the happy beneficiary were often well received. Clients and their friends were usually careful to employ obscure terms when communicating their largesse or happiness in these matters.

Best of all, TSCC maintained its own courier service to forward items on to those clients who, for reasons of survival, preferred not to pick up their own mail. For this purpose, the company maintained a complete stable of global mules able to travel to the ends of the earth to deliver private parcels. You could get overnight service to your cave in Afghanistan if you wanted it. Depending on the paranoia of the client, TSCC’s couriers were also adept at sleight of hand, magic acts, and games of chance, this to entertain any government workers who might be watching for the handoff at the time of delivery. They could play “package, package, who has the package” all over the New York subway system if you had the time, inclination, and money to pay for it.

Liquida had a key to the office as well as the locked cabinet drawer inside. But he was never stupid enough to use them, not in his line of work. He always used the forwarding courier service, and he never had anything delivered to the same place twice.