Chapter 18
BANGKOK
When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?” Staelin asked, stripping open a dressing and going to work on Harvath’s wound.
They were sitting at the banged-up kitchen table of their CIA safe house, just off Sathorn Soi in the Suan Phlu area. They were tucked away on a quiet street, three klicks from the U.S. Embassy, with Lumphini Park in between.
“Got all my shots before my honeymoon,” he replied.
“For S?lvi’s sake,” Haney interjected, pulling a Singha beer from the fridge, “I hope it included penicillin.”
With his left hand behind his head so Staelin could access his injury, Harvath raised his other hand and flipped him off.
His eyes then shifted to Morrell, who was fingering the seam on the Faraday bag.
“You’re not going to open that thing here, are you?”
The CIA man shook his head. “We’ve got an RF-shielded cage at the embassy. I think one of our tech people should take it apart. That way, if the beacon gets triggered, the signal won’t go anywhere. In the meantime, do you have a burner phone you can use?”
“Mike?” Harvath inquired.
“On it,” said Haney, setting his beer down and retreating to the bedroom where their gear was stored.
“So who the hell were those guys at Tommy Sombat’s?” he continued.
“Based on everything we saw, plus the Mandarin? Could be some sort of PLA unit, but the more I think about it, the more I’m leaning toward Chinese intelligence.”
“What would Chinese intelligence want with a guy like Tommy?”
“Probably the same stuff the CIA does,” Morrell admitted.
“Enough to cut him into pieces?”
“The Chinese don’t fuck around. If Tommy screwed them badly enough, who knows how they might respond.”
Harvath thought about that for a moment. “What about the word he gave you? Any idea what it means?”
“There’s a bar near Chinatown called Teens.”
“Did Tommy hang out there?”
Morrell shrugged. “Tommy was like mold. He was all over Bangkok.”
“Is there anything else he might have been referring to? Prostitution? Sex trafficking?”
“I suppose. But why would you use your dying breath to cough up some nonsense word?”
Harvath knew people lied all the time, even with their dying breath. Tommy Sombat didn’t seem like the type of guy that merited much benefit of the doubt.
He also knew that Morrell had been around the block enough times to have a similar opinion. “What’s your gut tell you?”
The CIA man didn’t take long formulating his response. “If a couple of guys had just tortured me with a ball-peen hammer and a concrete saw, I’d want to fuck them in the ass as hard as I could. No mercy. And absolutely zero lube. But that’s me.”
It definitely was him, all right, and Harvath was once again reminded of Morrell’s penchant for colorful scene setting. He wasn’t wrong, however.
Tommy Sombat had no obvious reason to take his killers’ identities to the grave. If he could out them as a final fuck you and get some modicum of justice, even posthumously, why not?
As far as Harvath was concerned, this was a textbook situation where Occam’s razor should be applied.
Unless and until they could come up with a better explanation, they’d take the most obvious route.
What’s more, any chance to screw with the Chinese, and possibly disrupt an ongoing operation, was always good by him.
“Is Teens a locals-only spot?” he asked. “Or do they have enough Western patrons that we’d blend in?”
“They get plenty of farangs in there. We’d be okay.”
Harvath looked at his watch. “In that case, let’s get our act together. I want to be wheels-up in fifteen.”