The Fourth Watcher

30

"You,” Rafferty says. “He wants you.” Frank’s eyes are lowered slightly. He sits, once again, on

the edge of the bed, seemingly unaware of Arthit’s glare. Given its intensity, Rafferty wouldn’t be surprised to see two smoking holes appear in the center of his father’s chest.

“Only me?” Frank says without even glancing up. He looks like a man listening to music from a distant room. “Not Leung? Not Ming Li?”

“Only you. Mr. One and Only.”

“He doesn’t know about Ming Li,” Frank says. He turns his head slightly, but his eyes remain fixed on a point in the middle of the floor. “He knows she exists, but he doesn’t know who she is, who I’ve trained her to be. He probably thinks she’s with her mother. I’m surprised about Leung, though.”

“I’ve been thinking about that myself,” Rafferty says. Leung, sitting on a rickety wooden chair, gives him a startled glance and looks away.

“You can’t give Frank to him,” Ming Li says.

“And why not, exactly?” This is Arthit.

“He’ll kill them all,” Ming Li says as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Your wife and daughter.” She looks over at Arthit. “His wife. Anything else would be too much work.”

“I don’t know,” Frank says. “If you give me to him, I mean. He might not.”

“He’ll kill you,” Ming Li says.

“Of course he will. But he might not kill the others.”

Rafferty stares at his father. Ming Li follows his lead. A silence stretches around them.

“He’s not stupid,” Frank continues. He still has not looked at anyone in the room. “He just needs a reason to let them live.”

“What kind of reason?” Arthit asks.

“Something to his benefit.”

“Like what?” Ming Li says. “If he gets you, if he gets the box, he’s got everything he wants.”

“No,” Frank says. “Not quite. He hasn’t gotten out alive.” He leans back against the wall. “Give me a minute.”

Arthit pushes himself away from the wall, the shoulders of his uniform dark with the rain that has begun to fall again. He and Rafferty had gotten wet changing vehicles four times on their way to Khao San Road.

While Frank thinks, Ming Li asks, “You’re supposed to call him?”

“Yeah. Let it ring a couple of times and hang up. Then, within thirty minutes, he’ll call me back.”

“He’s on a cell, and we’ve got the number,” Arthit says. “Wherever he is, he doesn’t want to get triangulated. So he’ll get as far as he can from his base and then call back.”

Ming Li says, with an edge in her voice, “So, older brother, why didn’t you just tell him where we are? If you don’t care about Frank, what kept you from handing us to him?”

Rafferty and Arthit share a glance. “Because I agree with you. We deliver Frank and he kills them all.”

“And that’s the only reason?” Ming Li asks.

Rafferty shakes his head, deflecting the question. “So I told him I’d talked with Frank once but had no idea where he was and no reason in the world to want to find out. He thought that was funny.”

“He has a keen sense of humor,” Ming Li says. “People die laughing.”

“Wrong word,” Rafferty says. “He thought it was peculiar.”

“Just to go on record,” Arthit says, “I’m not certain he’ll kill them. I’m only about sixty percent sure he would. If I could get that down to, say, forty percent, I’d hand Frank over like an old pair of gloves.”

“Guanxi,” Frank finally says.

Arthit says, “What?”

“Connections. It’s the thing he understands most in the world. For Chu, life is just guanxi. That’s his map: who’s got the power, who doesn’t. He already knows you’re a cop. What he doesn’t know is that you’re a massively connected cop, a cop with so much guanxi in Thailand that he has no chance of getting out of this country in one piece if anything happens to your wife.”

“I’m not,” Arthit says.

“Yes you are,” Frank says. “You’re connected with the other police forces-all of them-and with the military. With the administration. He set a twenty-four-hour deadline. He can’t possibly learn otherwise in that amount of time. And, Poke, you tell him that the cops will turn this whole country upside down if anything happens to the hostages before the exchange.”

They all listen to the implication in what Frank has said.

It is Ming Li who voices it. “So then what? We scare him into not killing them, and then we give you to him?”

“Maybe,” Frank says. “One thing at a time.”

“I wish to shit,” Arthit says, looking like he’d enjoy kicking a hole in the wall, “that we could read Miaow’s note.”

Frank looks up at Arthit. “What note?”

Arthit hesitates, and Rafferty says, “Why not?” Arthit reaches into the breast pocket of his uniform and pulls out a photocopy of the note. Frank and Ming Li bend over it. For what seems like a long time, no one speaks. Ming Li is tracing the line of numbers with a graceful finger. Finally she says, “This is infuriating. It’s familiar, somehow. Like an alphabet I used to be able to read.” She squeezes her eyes closed. Rafferty can see them moving, left to right, behind her lids. “I don’t know,” she says, opening her eyes and flicking a corner of the note. “It feels so close. It feels like it’s perfectly clear but there’s a layer of dust over it, and I should just be able to blow it away and read it.”

“It doesn’t make any sense to me at all,” Frank says. “What’s in your frame of reference that’s not in mine?”

“Hip-hop? MTV?” Ming Li looks at her father and shakes her head. “The Internet? Can’t be Internet addresses, can’t be chess moves.”

“I’d recognize chess moves,” Frank says. “If you’re right, if you’re close to being able to read this and I’m not, then it’s something generational. Something you do, something you know, that I don’t.”

“I’ve been trying to reach a guy who works with codes,” Rafferty says. “I could try to phone him again.”

Ming Li looks up. Her eyes are slightly glassy. “Phone?” she says.

“Yeah,” Rafferty says. “You know, small object, you push a bunch of buttons and put it to your ear. Then somebody says-”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Ming Li says. She extends a hand. “Give it to me.”

Rafferty passes her his phone. For a moment her eyes go back and forth between the phone and the note, and then her face splits into a wide grin.

“Your little girl is really smart,” she says. “And you guys are so old.” She looks at the phone again, her lips moving. “It’s a text message,” she says. “Somebody get me a pencil.”

“Once you see the pairs, it’s obvious,” Ming Li says. “There are no three-digit numbers, there’s no second number higher than four. I should have recognized it the minute I looked at it. Look. The first number in each pair is the number on the button. The second one is the number of times you push to get to the letter you want. So ‘6’ is the six button, and if you push it one time, you get M. Push it twice, you get N. Three times is O.” She points at the paper, isolating the one pair of numbers. “Here, the first time she writes it, it’s ‘61,’ so that’s M.” They are all gathered around her. “And the ‘4,’ the one that’s not in a pair?” Rafferty asks.

“It’s just what it looks like, silly,” Ming Li says. “It’s a four.” She finishes writing, puts dashes between the words, and pushes the pad away so they can all see it.

It says: 4-men-guns-mole-kl

Tears spring to Rafferty’s eyes. He turns his head to blink them away, but he can’t do anything about the sudden catch in his throat. Miaow.

“You should be proud of yourself,” Ming Li says. “That’s some kid.”

He swallows, hard. “I can’t take the credit,” he says.

“She was interrupted,” Arthit says, bent over the pad.

Rafferty grabs a ragged breath. “She needed time to fold it, time to put it someplace, probably hide it in her hand, so she could drop it.”

“KL,” Ming Li says. Her eyebrows are contracted so tightly they almost meet.

“Look what she gives us,” Arthit says. “Everything is important. A count, a description. She tells us there are guns. She’s got no time. What else is that important?”

Rafferty says, “Destination.”

Leung speaks for the first time. “Kuala Lumpur?”

Rafferty and Ming Li say, in unison, “No.” Then Rafferty says, “He’s here, obviously. And he’ll stay here for this swap or whatever it’s going to be.”

“It has to be a destination,” Frank says. “Maybe. .” His voice trails off.

“I’m not even sure Miaow knows Kuala Lumpur is two words,” Rafferty says. “I think she probably would have started with Ku or something.”

“I know where it is,” Frank says. “I know what she was writing.”

“So do I,” Arthit says. “Klong Toey.”

“Where their ships come in,” Frank says. “Where they offload everything. Illegal immigrants, illegal pharmaceuticals, endangered animals, aphrodisiacs made from endangered animals, weapons, truck parts, hijacked American cars, Korean counterfeit money. They’ve got three warehouses down there, prime position near the docks.”

“Three,” Ming Li says. “Two too many. We could watch all week.”

“No,” Rafferty says. “All we have to do is get some eyes on them and then pull him out.”

“Pull him out?” Frank says. “How?”

“He’s set it up himself.” Rafferty holds up his phone. “I call him.”