Chapter 49 #2
“Warehouses, workshops, storage yards, river traffic, that sort of thing. But unless he climbed into the back of a vehicle completely off-camera, Davi’s people have a high degree of confidence that he hasn’t come back out.”
Harvath let that sit for a moment. “So he’s either still in there, or somebody moved him clean.”
“Exactly.”
The afternoon traffic was thickening. Behind them in the second Land Cruiser, Staelin held close on their bumper. To their right, the muddy Chao Phraya flashed between buildings and tangles of utility wire.
“How big an area are we talking about?”
“Big enough that we’re not going door to door,” Morrell said. “Small enough that Davi thinks it’s worth a try.”
“Any drones up?”
“Negative. No helicopters either. If he’s inside their box, they didn’t want to risk tipping him off.”
“Good,” Harvath replied. “We keep it that way unless he rabbits.”
Morrell nodded. “That’s her thinking too.”
Fifteen minutes later, Morrell slowed down and eased the Land Cruiser to the side of the road behind a dark blue van lettered in Thai for a broadband internet provider.
Along its side was a large faded decal advertising fiber installation and same-day service calls.
Thirty yards beyond it, near the mouth of a side street lined with machine shops, two unmarked Thai sedans sat with their engines idling.
They were the only vehicles Harvath could see, but he assumed there were plenty more plainclothes ISOC assets tucked into the surrounding blocks.
“She’s in the van,” the CIA man said.
Harvath checked his mirror and saw that Staelin had already brought the second Land Cruiser in behind them. Everyone inside looked alert and switched on.
Davi stepped out of the van before they had even put their SUV in park. She had a phone in one hand and a slim tablet in the other. She looked tightly wound and as if she was moving on adrenaline.
Harvath and Morrell got out as the rest of the team debussed from the second vehicle behind them.
Davi wasted no time. “Follow me.”
She moved to the back of the van, where one of her men opened the rear door.
The interior had been turned into a rolling command post—screens, keyboards, radios, and a wall of weapons that included TASERs, tear gas launchers, short-barreled shotguns, compact submachine guns, and a range of other tools of the law enforcement trade.
Clipped in the corner was a small fan that did almost nothing to move the air.
Cueing the screens via her tablet, Davi brought up a sequence of stills.
“This is your man leaving the hospital campus bordering the RBSC,” she said, increasing the size of the first image. “Baseball cap. Surgical mask. Black backpack.”
She then transitioned to her next image.
“This was taken two blocks from his building in Khlong Toei. By the way, our bomb squad was able to defuse the door and overhead light booby traps at Koebler’s bolt-hole.
There’s no telling how many officers that might have killed. Thank you again for the tip.”
“You’re welcome,” Harvath replied. “After the shooting, where does he go?”
“Several blocks over,” she answered, pulling up a series of new stills. “We don’t have constant coverage, and he disappears multiple times. But when we pick him up again, he’s changed clothes. New pants, shirt, hat, even sunglasses. Still wearing the face covering though.”
“And he has a new backpack,” remarked Morrell.
“Yes, he does.”
She continued to narrate as she cycled through more images.
“He catches a motorbike taxi, rides for a while, and then is back on foot. Eventually, we believe he ends up at a luggage storage business just beyond view of this camera. When we see him again, he has picked up a second bag. Not long after this, we lose him.”
Harvath asked if he could have her tablet so he could cycle through the images himself.
He took his time. Zooming in and out where needed.
The one constant was that Koebler never looked flustered.
Even when the images were blurry or he was half-turned away from the camera, he looked like a man operating on a plan.
When he handed the tablet back to her, Davi enlarged the final still and also brought up a map where a cluster of streets were lit up in red.
“This is where he falls off the board,” she said. “After this, we’re relying on our best guesses.”
Harvath studied the map. “And what do your best guesses tell you?”
“He’s not going to be anywhere that he needs to show ID. That means no hotels, no hostels, and no rooming houses. He knows he’s blown and should expect that soon enough we’ll be pushing photos of him to every lodging and accommodation in town.”
“Agreed. He wants to avoid his face being seen. That means he’ll be looking for a place without people. Anywhere he can stay out of sight for a few hours, keep an exit open, and move when it gets dark.”
One of Davi’s men pulled up a satellite image of the search area and slowly panned across it.
Harvath watched for several seconds until something caught his eye. “There,” he said, pointing at a property pressed right up against the river.
It was a cluttered boat-repair yard that sat between what looked like a sheet-metal warehouse and a fenced storage lot.
Ten or eleven vessels were scattered across it.
The majority were dry-docked workboats up on blocks.
There were also a couple of long-tail river craft under patchwork tarps, as well as a squat barge sitting half out of the water near a slip.
A travel lift stood near the river, with scaffolding, stacks of timber, and open-sided sheds spread across the property.
Leading down from the street, a service road bent through the yard before curling back toward the water.
Davi looked at the image, then back at him. “Why that one?”
“Because it’s the perfect place to disappear,” said Harvath. “Lots of clutter. Lots of places to bed down unseen. There’s only one route in that he needs to watch. If things go bad, he can sneak out via the business on either side or, ultimately, the river. It’s the spot I’d choose.”
Morrell nodded. “I would too.”
After radioing a series of orders, she turned back to Harvath and Morrell. “My people will keep the perimeter soft. We’re pulling the uniforms back, redirecting through-traffic a block or two out, and our plainclothes teams are watching anything coming out.”
“Good,” Harvath replied. “The last thing we need is Koebler hearing sirens or seeing a wall of cops.”
“If he goes for the river, we’ve got an unmarked interdiction boat holding nearby,” she said. “They stay out of sight unless he runs.”
“That works.”
“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” Davi replied. “After that, I start squeezing the box.”
“Understood,” said Harvath, who gave the signal to his team to mount up.
He looked back at the screen with the satellite imagery one last time. If he was right, Koebler was hiding less than two klicks away. If he was wrong, they were about to give him fifteen more minutes to disappear.
“Let’s move.”