Chapter 48
Hang Shuo despised being dependent on other people. It was one thing to command them, or to measure and exploit their weaknesses. It was another thing entirely to be reliant upon them for something as simple as putting on a shirt.
He sat upright on the edge of the bed, his injured arm held away from his body, while one of his men helped guide the sleeve over it.
The shoulder had been cleaned, irrigated, and stitched by the embassy physician who had been dispatched by the Chinese ambassador and knew better than to ask any questions.
The bullet had passed through, but the wound was deep and ugly.
He had lost a great deal of blood, and every movement sent a blade of pain through his upper back and across his chest.
Getting up to use the toilet, he had caught sight of his reflection.
At forty-seven, Hang looked older than he had forty-eight hours earlier.
The skin around his eyes had drawn tighter.
His face, slim to begin with, had acquired a sharper, more hollow appearance.
Even his mouth looked different—grayer at the edges, as if the blood he had lost had drained something from him.
He had been born in Shanghai, a city that valued refinement and appearances—two traits he had learned early to use to his benefit.
Though he was still lean and muscular, his carefully combed black hair was beginning to show the faintest thread of silver at the temples.
Pain, however, had a way of rippling to the surface.
In the mirror, he no longer looked like the polished commercial attaché or unassuming trade representative he could so easily impersonate.
He looked like what he was—a man under strain, held together by discipline and force of will.
When the shirt was finally in place, he buttoned it one-handed and let the operative settle his arm into the sling the doctor had provided.
He slipped his good arm into a dark suit jacket, which was draped carefully over his injured shoulder.
Though his team would not have cared, Hang did.
As commander of the unit, he insisted on looking like one.
Stepping out of the back bedroom, he walked down the short hallway to the main room of the safe house.
The apartment occupied the second floor above a dingy print shop whose best days were long behind it.
Dust filmed the front windows, behind which cardboard boxes had been stacked in the display space and left there long enough to have bleached unevenly in the sun.
It was the kind of sad, forgettable property no one bothered to look at twice.
Upstairs in the apartment, the curtains had been drawn against the late-morning glare.
A television mounted in the corner carried nonstop coverage of the explosion at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club.
It didn’t matter that the sound was off.
Hang could read enough from the images alone—the smoldering clubhouse, the emergency vehicles, the sea of media—so far, the attack was right on track.
A second strike had always been part of his design. The first bombings were meant to terrify Bangkok; the next was meant to direct its anger. Once he had seen how the city had recoiled—and which symbol of the Thai establishment still lay within reach—he had chosen his target.
Around the dining table, which his team had converted into a temporary operations center, sat seven men.
Three were intelligence officers from the Ministry of State Security, selected for experience, languages, and the ability to operate in the field for long stretches without supervision.
They were lean and muscular like their boss.
Their eyes sharp and alert. Their hair cut short and neat.
The other four belonged to a compartmented support element whose existence would have been denied by every layer of the Chinese state, including the senior leadership that had deployed them.
These were the harder ones. Less polished in manner, they were not there to recruit sources or cultivate influence. They were there for the uglier tasks.
The remainder, Hang thought to himself as he crossed to the table.
A city map of Bangkok had been spread out beside three laptops, a cluster of burner phones, and several handwritten pages covered in times, locations, and Thai names.
One operative monitored police radio traffic.
Another cycled through local news sites and social media feeds.
A third refreshed his encrypted app, waiting for word from Hang’s Thai law enforcement source who was close to the evidence recovery chain.
At the moment, that was the only report that mattered.
Even more than confirmation of the blast itself.
Hang looked up at the TV again. The bombing at the club had only achieved its mechanical purpose.
By all accounts, it had killed, maimed, terrified, and even humiliated.
It had struck precisely where it needed to strike—directly inside the protected world of Thailand’s military, political, and business elite.
The RBSC hadn’t been chosen simply because it was prestigious.
It had been chosen in order to shatter the illusion that the kingdom’s ruling class was insulated from the horror and pain being felt by the rest of the country.
Now that illusion was gone, but the explosion itself did not make the operation a success.
For the bombing to do real political work, the Cambodian evidence their American bombmaker had planted in the device had to be found.
The SIM card fragments. The munitions signature.
The clues placed carefully and subtly enough that Thai investigators would believe they had uncovered something authentic, rather than something left for them to find.
Once that happened—once that evidence was logged, briefed up the chain, and quietly circulated, then the leaks would begin.
They would be repeated and amplified until anti-Cambodian outrage hardened into national certainty.
Then and only then would the bombings begin doing what Hang had designed them to do.
Thai nationalists on television and online would demand retaliation.
Senior military officers would begin raging in private that the civilian government had failed to protect their fallen brethren.
Ministers would stammer in front of microphones while the army’s confidence in them would curdle into contempt.
The citizenry would be paralyzed by fear wondering when and where the next attack would come.
That was how it would unfold. The pressure would build in layers. First fear. Then anger. Then blame. And once blame took hold, the government would begin to buckle under the weight of its own weakness.
Hang turned his attention away from the television and looked down at the map of Bangkok. All of the bombing locations, including the latest, were circled in green. But that wasn’t the color that most concerned him.
Circled in red was the damage the Cambodians had inflicted. Teens. Tommy Sombat’s. The periodontist building.
It represented three shocks or, more accurately, three losses of control. And it meant that something much deeper was wrong.
At Teens, the assault on his meeting with the American bombmaker had been disciplined, direct, and thoroughly professional.
They had entered fast, using the element of surprise to their advantage, and had killed without hesitation.
According to one of his Thai intelligence sources, several of the dead discovered at the scene were believed to be Cambodian nationals.
That alone had been enough to unsettle him.
Cambodia’s sole role—whether they knew it or not—was to absorb blame. The idea that Phnom Penh and its inept intelligence community might ever catch wind of his plot, much less try to interfere with it, had never entered his mind.
The obvious explanation had been Tommy Sombat.
Whether the Thai fixer had sold out the meeting, had been turned, or had simply been under surveillance, Hang needed an answer.
And he had sent his three best interrogators to get it.
Two of them had been killed at Sombat’s, but the third had somehow managed to get away. Then his watch had signaled.
Hang had responded exactly as he was supposed to respond. A recovery team had been sent to the periodontist building, only for that to become another disaster.
Details remained maddeningly incomplete.
He knew members of his team had died on-site.
He knew the embassy security officers he had requested to go in had also died, with one remaining unaccounted for.
Had the Cambodians tracked the surviving interrogator from Sombat’s?
Or had his people collided with some other unforeseen force?
The only thing Hang hated more than the uncertainty was the pattern.
Three violent disruptions in rapid succession? The only explanation was that the Cambodians had penetrated his operation. He wasn’t facing a tactical problem. It was structural.
A phone vibrated on the table and every head turned. The MSS officer monitoring the encrypted app picked it up and read the incoming message. “Our source says the evidence technicians at RBSC have identified the Cambodian signatures.”
Hang held out his hand. “Let me see it.”
Taking the phone, he read the message for himself.
Recovery teams at the club had confirmed the SIM card fragments as Cambodian.
The component signatures in the bomb had also been matched to matériel previously tied to Cambodian military stockpiles.
Senior investigators were being briefed and word was beginning to move up the chain.
Hang read the message a second time. Slower this time. At last, the explosion had done its real work.
He handed the phone back. “Tell him we want a copy of that report right away.”
The officer nodded and began texting a reply.