Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

“This is Miaow, right?” Arthit demands.

“No question.”

Arthit holds the paper up to the light. A bright yellow illustration of a cheerful duck bleeds through from the other side. “Why periods?”

“They’re fast,” Rafferty says. “Anything else, like asterisks, would take too long.”

“The numbers,” Arthit says. He screws up his face. “Nothing higher than the eighties, nothing lower than the thirties.”

“The second digits in the pairs,” Rafferty says. “One, two, three, four.”

“Nothing above four.” The two of them sit, shoulders touching, heads bent over the note.

“She took the time,” Arthit says. “She hid somewhere and took the time to do this.” He looks up at Rafferty. “She was sleeping in the guest room. Maybe they came in through the kitchen. Noi and Rose are there, about to share a cup of coffee. Miaow is awake, down the hall. She hears something, sees something. She hides-” He blinks. “The front door,” he says, his face suddenly soft. “If they came in through the kitchen, she could have gotten out through the front door. Maybe even gotten away. Instead she hid and wrote this.”

“My girl,” Rafferty says. The words, heavy and rough-edged, scrape the inside of his throat. “Brave as a fucking lion.”

Arthit makes a sound that might be a sob. He makes it once. Then he wipes his face with a fist like a ham and says, “Next steps.”

Poke takes another look at Miaow’s note. “Arnold introduced me to a guy,” he says. He pushes the picture of Prettyman from his mind. “He does codes.”

“Get him.” Arthit stands and crosses the room. Looks out the window at the front yard as though he half expects to see them there, laughing and waving at him. Pleased with their joke.

Rafferty pulls the phone from his pocket, and it rings. He snaps it open and pushes the “answer” key so hard the phone flips out of his hand, and he has to scrabble beneath the table to recover it. He picks it up and puts it to his ear.

“Mr. Rafferty,” a man’s voice says. “My name is Colonel Chu.”

"You,” Rafferty says. “He wants you.” Frank’s eyes are lowered slightly. He sits, once again, on

the edge of the bed, seemingly unaware of Arthit’s glare. Given its intensity, Rafferty wouldn’t be surprised to see two smoking holes appear in the center of his father’s chest.

“Only me?” Frank says without even glancing up. He looks like a man listening to music from a distant room. “Not Leung? Not Ming Li?”

“Only you. Mr. One and Only.”

“He doesn’t know about Ming Li,” Frank says. He turns his head slightly, but his eyes remain fixed on a point in the middle of the floor. “He knows she exists, but he doesn’t know who she is, who I’ve trained her to be. He probably thinks she’s with her mother. I’m surprised about Leung, though.”

“I’ve been thinking about that myself,” Rafferty says. Leung, sitting on a rickety wooden chair, gives him a startled glance and looks away.

“You can’t give Frank to him,” Ming Li says.

“And why not, exactly?” This is Arthit.

“He’ll kill them all,” Ming Li says as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Your wife and daughter.” She looks over at Arthit. “ His wife. Anything else would be too much work.”

“I don’t know,” Frank says. “If you give me to him, I mean. He might not.”

“He’ll kill you, ” Ming Li says.

“Of course he will. But he might not kill the others.”

Rafferty stares at his father. Ming Li follows his lead. A silence stretches around them.

“He’s not stupid,” Frank continues. He still has not looked at anyone in the room. “He just needs a reason to let them live.”

“What kind of reason?” Arthit asks.

“Something to his benefit.”

“Like what?” Ming Li says. “If he gets you, if he gets the box, he’s got everything he wants.”

“No,” Frank says. “Not quite. He hasn’t gotten out alive.” He leans back against the wall. “Give me a minute.”

Arthit pushes himself away from the wall, the shoulders of his uniform dark with the rain that has begun to fall again. He and Rafferty had gotten wet changing vehicles four times on their way to Khao San Road.

While Frank thinks, Ming Li asks, “You’re supposed to call him?”

“Yeah. Let it ring a couple of times and hang up. Then, within thirty minutes, he’ll call me back.”

“He’s on a cell, and we’ve got the number,” Arthit says. “Wherever he is, he doesn’t want to get triangulated. So he’ll get as far as he can from his base and then call back.”

Ming Li says, with an edge in her voice, “So, older brother, why didn’t you just tell him where we are? If you don’t care about Frank, what kept you from handing us to him?”

Rafferty and Arthit share a glance. “Because I agree with you. We deliver Frank and he kills them all.”

“And that’s the only reason?” Ming Li asks.

Rafferty shakes his head, deflecting the question. “So I told him I’d talked with Frank once but had no idea where he was and no reason in the world to want to find out. He thought that was funny.”

“He has a keen sense of humor,” Ming Li says. “People die laughing.”

“Wrong word,” Rafferty says. “He thought it was peculiar.”

“Just to go on record,” Arthit says, “I’m not certain he’ll kill them. I’m only about sixty percent sure he would. If I could get that down to, say, forty percent, I’d hand Frank over like an old pair of gloves.”

“Guanxi,” Frank finally says.

Arthit says, “What?”

“Connections. It’s the thing he understands most in the world. For Chu, life is just guanxi. That’s his map: who’s got the power, who doesn’t. He already knows you’re a cop. What he doesn’t know is that you’re a massively connected cop, a cop with so much guanxi in Thailand that he has no chance of getting out of this country in one piece if anything happens to your wife.”

“I’m not,” Arthit says.

“Yes you are,” Frank says. “You’re connected with the other police forces-all of them-and with the military. With the administration. He set a twenty-four-hour deadline. He can’t possibly learn otherwise in that amount of time. And, Poke, you tell him that the cops will turn this whole country upside down if anything happens to the hostages before the exchange.”

They all listen to the implication in what Frank has said.

It is Ming Li who voices it. “So then what? We scare him into not killing them, and then we give you to him?”

“Maybe,” Frank says. “One thing at a time.”

“I wish to shit,” Arthit says, looking like he’d enjoy kicking a hole in the wall, “that we could read Miaow’s note.”

Frank looks up at Arthit. “What note?”

Arthit hesitates, and Rafferty says, “Why not?” Arthit reaches into the breast pocket of his uniform and pulls out a photocopy of the note. Frank and Ming Li bend over it. For what seems like a long time, no one speaks. Ming Li is tracing the line of numbers with a graceful finger. Finally she says, “This is infuriating. It’s familiar, somehow. Like an alphabet I used to be able to read.” She squeezes her eyes closed. Rafferty can see them moving, left to right, behind her lids. “I don’t know,” she says, opening her eyes and flicking a corner of the note. “It feels so close. It feels like it’s perfectly clear but there’s a layer of dust over it, and I should just be able to blow it away and read it.”

“It doesn’t make any sense to me at all,” Frank says. “What’s in your frame of reference that’s not in mine?”