Chapter 13
Talat Noi was a gritty Chinese-Thai neighborhood on the edge of Chinatown. It was permeated with the constant smell of oil, river water, and hot metal. Above an old warehouse jammed between a machine shop and an auto parts yard was the loft belonging to Tommy Sombat.
Sombat was an oleaginous underworld figure who made his living as one of Bangkok’s more ruthless black-market fixers.
He wasn’t big-time, but he also wasn’t small-time.
He occupied the juicy middle where most of the crime in the city happened.
Almost anything you wanted, within reason, he could get for you.
And anything you wanted to get rid of, including bodies, he could do that for you too. All you had to do was meet his price.
What had landed him on Morrell’s radar and eventually his payroll, however, was his information gathering capability.
Whether it was his call girl connections, the drug dealers he knew, or the crooked Thai police, Sombat seemed to have eyes and ears everywhere.
That made him exceedingly valuable to Morrell—who was under no illusions as to how many other payrolls he might be on.
After a slow pass in front of the building, Morrell turned at the next corner and nosed his Land Cruiser into a spot about half a block down.
Turning off the ignition, he looked at Harvath, who was now riding shotgun. Everyone else had been dropped off at a CIA safe house in Suan Phlu. “Like I said, Tommy’s no altar boy, but he’s not going to give us any trouble.”
“And the fact that you haven’t been able to get ahold of him since the bombings, and only knew he was back because you paid a local shopkeeper to keep an eye on his place? That doesn’t bother you?” asked Harvath.
“I didn’t say it didn’t bother me,” Morrell replied. “I just said he wasn’t going to be any trouble.”
Shaking his head, Harvath removed his SIG Sauer, did a quick press check to confirm a round was chambered.
He may have developed a grudging respect for Morrell, but that didn’t mean he trusted him—not fully.
After all, the last time they had operated together, Morrell had left him for dead.
Tucking the pistol back beneath his shirt, Harvath exited the vehicle.
“How do you want to do this?” he asked, once the CIA man came around and joined him on the sidewalk. “You take the front and I’ll take the back?”
“He’s not going to run. Don’t worry.”
Shaking his head again, Harvath gestured for Morrell to lead the way.
With all of its neon light, Bangkok—particularly at night—resembled a noir graphic novel. It reminded Harvath of the movie Blade Runner, minus the flying cars and bioengineered replicants.
At the corner, they paused and looked down the street toward Tommy Sombat’s darkened loft.
“Either your shopkeeper lied to you,” said Harvath, “or your guy doesn’t want anybody knowing he’s home.”
“I’m going with option two,” Morrell responded, heading toward the building like it was just another day and he had been here a thousand times before.
Harvath was more cautious. His head on a swivel, he kept his eyes peeled.
At the entrance to the building, they slipped under a metal roll-up gate that was halfway down, and headed toward a narrow staircase. Whatever the warehouse had once been used for, it reeked of rust and old fish.
As this was Morrell’s “trusted” guy, when they arrived at the steps, Harvath didn’t fight to be the first one up. He continued to let the CIA man lead. If anything went down, Morrell would make a much better bullet catcher.
Climbing the crumbling stairs, they began to hear something. A muffled pleading, interspersed with wet coughs. Even as they neared the landing, Harvath had no idea what was being said.
Someone was asking cold, short questions, which were met with more pleading and more wet coughs.
Pausing at the last stair, Morrell leaned forward and strained his ears. “They’re not speaking Thai,” he whispered over his shoulder. “It sounds like Mandarin.”
Suddenly, the questioner raised his voice and shouted in anger. It was followed by a high-pitch, mechanical whine and unmistakable screams of absolute agony.
Neither Harvath nor Morrell needed to hear anything else. In unison, both men drew their pistols. With a rapid series of hand gestures, the CIA operative laid out his plan.
When Harvath nodded, Morrell counted down from three and kicked the door in. That was when all hell broke loose.
A horrifically beaten, half-naked Tommy Sombat had been tied to an old drafting table at the far end of the dingy loft.
He looked like a medieval torture victim splayed out on the rack.
His face was covered in lacerations. His lips were split open.
Both of his eyes were nearly swollen shut.
And there was blood. Lots of blood. Everywhere.
Standing above him were two large men with jet-black hair who didn’t look Thai to Harvath. If anything—they looked Chinese.
The major tell, however, wasn’t their features, it was their look: tight, military-style haircuts, no jewelry, latex gloves.
It spoke to a level of uniformity and professionalism.
These guys didn’t read like underworld figures.
They looked like pros. And whatever was going on, they’d done this before.
One held a small sledgehammer and the other an electric concrete cutoff saw, which was biting halfway into Sombat’s thigh, just above his left knee. This wasn’t a beating, it was a deadly serious interrogation.
Beyond that, Harvath had no idea who these guys were and he didn’t care.
Bringing his pistol to bear, he pressed his trigger and fired off two rounds in lightning-quick succession.
The first round hit the man right between his eyebrows, killing him, while the second went directly through the bridge of his nose.
Before Harvath could refocus on the other assailant, Morrell had already fired four rounds. Two hit dead center mass, tearing through his heart, with the other two ripping through the suprasternal notch at the base of his neck, between his clavicles.
Just like Harvath’s shot placement, the first round had been fatal. Everything thereafter was simply icing.
The bodies of the assailants dropped to the floor as Morrell rushed toward Sombat. He was only halfway across the loft when Harvath noticed movement at the rear of the apartment and yelled, “Gun!”
Before the third assailant could get a shot off, Harvath fired multiple rounds in his direction, forcing him to retreat from view.
He then took cover behind a concrete pillar, inserted a fresh magazine into his SIG, and glanced backward at Tommy Sombat. The blood was gushing from his leg.
Morrell had received the same combat-medicine training Harvath had. He knew that if he didn’t get some sort of tourniquet on Tommy’s leg, the man was going to bleed out.
But before they could give the man any medical attention, they needed to make sure that the threat had been neutralized. Where there was a third assailant, there could easily be a fourth, or even more.
This time, as Harvath had a better fix on where their target was, he gave the hand signals, instructing Morrell on how he wanted to attack.
He was about to conduct his own rapid countdown, when there was the sound of breaking glass, like a window had been shattered. The third assailant was trying to escape.
“I’ve got Tommy!” Morrell shouted. “Get that asshole.”
The idea of chasing an unknown number of attackers through a darkened apartment didn’t exactly fill Harvath with joy.
These weren’t street thugs. They felt like operatives—either intelligence or military.
They’d shown up at exactly the same time looking for exactly the same thing: answers from Tommy Sombat.
Harvath didn’t believe in coincidence. If these men were connected to the bombings, he needed to know how and why.
Readying his pistol, he took a deep breath, peeked around the edge of the pillar, and then charged after his quarry.