Chapter 54
Beyond the temple walls, traffic trundled across the Memorial Bridge as the river slipped like black glass beneath it.
From where Harvath stood, just inside the grounds, he watched as the temple complex—its prayer halls, low walls, and trees shifting in the humid air—began to darken. A bell sounded once and then was still.
There was a serenity to it, which Harvath supposed was the point. Had he come looking for peace, this might have been the type of place he could find it. Harvath, however, hadn’t come looking for peace.
He checked his phone screen again. No new messages. Morrell and the rest of the team were in place. They were spread well beyond visual range and under strict instructions to stay that way unless things went bad. The man had said to come alone. Harvath had no intention of honoring that.
The complex had another hour before closing and there were still people about.
Across from him, a pair of ochre-robed monks moved along a walkway, heads bowed, speaking too softly to be heard.
Near the entrance, an old woman knelt before a shrine, incense smoke threading around her like the tail of a dragon.
A young couple passed near the pond, the man pretending not to notice how often she was looking at her phone.
Not everyone, not even here, could disconnect from the outside.
Harvath kept his hands visible and his posture loose. He didn’t reach down to reassure himself that his pistol was still there; chambered and ready to go. He knew it was.
His eyes took in the various sight lines, bottlenecks, and distances to cover. There were too many places for a backup team to hide and more than one route they could use to approach without being seen until the very last minute. Which was probably why the Cambodian had chosen it.
Or maybe it was because temples were neutral ground. Harvath had no idea if the man he was meeting believed in neutral ground.
A vibration buzzed in his pocket and he activated the call via his earpiece. “Status,” he said quietly.
“Nothing moving from the west entrance,” said Haney. “A couple of tourists. One groundskeeper. So far, no obvious surveillance.”
“North side clear,” Ashby said.
“South wall’s quiet,” Palmer added. “One guy smoking by the street. Hasn’t moved in six minutes.”
“All clear here,” said Morrell.
“Ditto,” Staelin replied.
“Everybody continue to keep your eyes open,” Harvath said, before disconnecting the call.
As he did, he heard a footstep on the gravel behind him. Removing his earpiece, he slid it into his pocket and turned.
The man approaching wore dark trousers and a pale open-collar shirt. He was medium height, compactly built, and moved with the kind of economy Harvath associated with men who had spent a long time around violence.
His face was composed, but there was strain in it too. It wasn’t fear. It was fatigue—the kind that came when operations went bad and problems, along with bodies, continued to mount.
By all appearances, the man had come alone. But Harvath had been at this game long enough to know that appearances were almost always deceiving.
He let his eyes sweep past the man once. There was no one in the distance; no shadow lurking in the trees.
The Cambodian stopped ten feet away, and for a moment each man stood assessing the other. Neither spoke.
Harvath was almost certain this was the same man he had seen at the boatyard—the figure who had lingered at the water’s edge as if weighing whether to go back for his fallen comrade, until the rush of Thai security forces had made the decision for him.
“As you asked for this meeting,” the Cambodian said, breaking the silence, “perhaps you should go first.”
His English was excellent. His tone strictly business.
“Your operator is still in surgery, but I’ve been told he is tough, and they expect him to pull through,” said Harvath, relaying the update Morrell had gotten from Davi.
“What hospital?”
Harvath shook his head. “I can’t give you that.”
“Why?”
“I guarantee you, the Thais will have cops watching his room. If I give you the hospital and you send men there, they’re going to get spotted,” Harvath replied. “Then I’ve burned you, your operator, and any chance we have of a relationship.”
“You assume there’s a relationship to have.”
“I assume you wouldn’t be standing here if there wasn’t.”
A faint grin touched the man’s mouth and disappeared. “And what would the nature of this relationship be?”
“Temporary,” Harvath answered. “Transactional. And probably over the second either one of us gets what we need.”
That seemed to satisfy the man. At least enough to move on. “Why were the Chinese at the boatyard?” he asked. “Who was the man they extracted?”
“He’s a bombmaker. He’s also American.”
“Two facts we already knew,” said the man. “What else can you tell me?”
“His name is Kevin Koebler,” Harvath replied. “He’s an ex?Navy SEAL. Before that, he was an explosive ordnance disposal technician. He’s got a lot of experience with explosives and he now rents that experience to the highest bidder.”
“Like the Chinese,” said the man.
Harvath nodded. “Your turn. Why would the Chinese want to detonate bombs across Bangkok?”
The Cambodian was quiet for a moment, as if deciding how much to say. “Because bombings do more than kill people,” he eventually replied. “They unnerve survivors. Entire populations. They can be a way to erode confidence; to make governments look weak and incapable of protecting their citizens.”
Harvath was good at not filling silences. He said nothing and waited for the man to begin speaking again.
“Bangkok is the center of gravity for this country,” the man continued. “Strike it hard enough and you do more than create fear. You create pressure. On the police. On the cabinet. On the prime minister. Even the military.”
“To what end?” Harvath asked.
“Instability,” the Cambodian stated. “You create public anger. And a belief that civilian leaders can’t maintain order.”
Harvath studied him. “And Cambodia?”
“Is a useful villain. The enemy next door; a monster under the bed. We’re an easy sell to frightened people by ambitious men.”
“Maybe I can help make that sale a little more difficult,” said Harvath.
The Cambodian looked at him. “How?”
“At this morning’s bombing at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, the Thais recovered evidence that points to Cambodian involvement.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“Fragments of a Cambodian SIM card and munitions signatures tied to Cambodian military stockpiles. Not enough to close the case, but enough to start shaping assumptions.”
The man’s expression hardened. “Go on.”
“At a recently abandoned Chinese safe house, we found empty blister packs for two Cambodian SIM cards.”
“So they’re building a trail and making sure it leads right to us.”
Harvath nodded.
The man nodded too, as if something had just been confirmed for him. “The team you’re dealing with is not ordinary Chinese intelligence,” he said. “They’re an elite unit from the Ministry of State Security. External operators, who are highly compartmented and very disciplined.”
“If they’re so disciplined, how have you been able to track them?”
“We have a source close to the inside. That’s all I am prepared to say.”
“Who’s we?” Harvath asked, familiar with some of Cambodia’s intelligence operations. “Military intelligence?”
The man shook his head. “Our Military Intelligence Department is filled with way too many Chinese spies. My unit is from the Ministry of National Defense. Off-book. I assume you are CIA?”
“Off-book as well,” Harvath stated, withholding the full picture.
Thailand was an ally. Cambodia was not. What’s more, it was better that the man thought he was working with a CIA unit.
It was an organization that foreign intel services recognized and respected.
It also tended to make them a lot more cooperative.
“How reliable is your source?” Harvath asked, steering the conversation back to the Chinese.
“It has been intermittent,” the Cambodian replied.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I don’t know all the members of their cell, I don’t know all of their safe houses, and I don’t know where they took Koebler after the boatyard. Not yet.”
“Any idea what they plan to do with him?”
“None,” the man replied. “But they didn’t pull him out under that kind of fire to let him sit idle.”
Harvath agreed. Considering what the Chinese had risked to extract Koebler, more bombs were probably in the offing. He let that sit for a moment.
Finally, he said, “So you think Beijing wants to push Thailand toward a coup?”
The Cambodian chose his words carefully. “I think they want Thailand unstable enough that stronger hands begin to look attractive.”
“Stronger hands. As in the military?”
The man nodded.
“To what end?”
“That,” he replied, “I don’t know yet.”
For a moment, once again, neither of them spoke. The traffic continued over Memorial Bridge and another bell could be heard.
“When either of us gets more information, how do we contact the other?” Harvath asked.
“The radio,” the Cambodian said, removing a slip of paper with a new frequency written on it. “We’ll monitor that channel seventeen minutes past and seventeen minutes before each hour.”
Harvath took the paper. “I just have one more thing.”
“Which is?”
“What should I call you? Now that we’ve met, Boatyard doesn’t fit you anymore.”
The man was quiet for a beat. Then he said, “Tevy.”
Harvath extended his hand. “Scot.”
As the men shook hands, the Cambodian said, “You asked for this meeting because you want Koebler. Understand that I want him too. At Teens, I lost men. At the boatyard, more. Before the Royal Bangkok Sports Club bombing, two of my operators hit a storage unit tied to this operation. It exploded before they could secure it.”
“We heard about the explosion. I’m sorry. I didn’t know those were your men.”
“Koebler is the center of all of this,” Tevy replied. “Which means he’s not just your problem. He’s mine too.”
“Find the Chinese and we’ll find Koebler. After that, we can begin eliminating our problems.”
The Cambodian nodded, then disappeared back the way he had come.
Harvath watched him go, slipped the paper into his pocket, and headed for the gate.
Somewhere out there, Koebler was still one step ahead of all of them.