Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

“Get them. Just leave the phone alone.”

“I heard you.” Once the glasses are in place, Elson sits a little straighter. He puts his hands on his knees, fingers spread. He has a pianist’s hands.

Rafferty sits and puts the gun down beside him on the bed, lifting his own hands to show that they’re empty. Elson doesn’t even register it, just watches and waits. “First,” Rafferty says, “I’m sorry. I’m not consumed with guilt, it’s not keeping me up nights, but I’m sorry for the way I treated you. You came on wrong, and you threatened someone I love, but I shouldn’t have been such a smart-ass. You can accept the apology or see it as weakness or do whatever you want, but I’m making it anyway.”

Elson offers a stiff-necked nod, more a punctuation mark than anything else. His left hand fingers one of the little clocks on his pajamas as though he’s curious about the time printed there.

“Second. Here’s a present. Late last night the government you work for lost an asset here, or at least a former asset-God knows which. Have you heard about this?”

Elson tilts his head an inch to the right. “Prettyman. The CIA guy.” He shrugs. “I know about it, but so what? Not my business.”

“It’s your business if you clear it up.”

For a moment Elson’s eyes lose focus and slide down to Rafferty’s chest, and then they come most of the way back, with quite a lot going on behind them. “Marginally, I suppose.” He is talking to Rafferty’s neck.

“If you’re going to lie, at least choose a lie I might believe. A former CIA guy gets killed in Bangkok, the American government loses face, and in Asia that’s important. Even this administration is smart enough to know that. The man who comes up with the killers is going to get a little gold happy face on his lapel.”

“Maybe.” Elson shifts his weight uncomfortably. His eyes are making tiny motions, as though he is counting gnats. “You’re saying you know who did it.”

“I know exactly who did it, and I can give him to you.”

He puts a hand on the bed behind him, leans back slightly, and eases one foot forward with a small grimace of relief. “How?”

“I’ll tell you, if this chat gets that far. But I can promise you he’s somebody you want anyway. Somebody who is your business.”

Elson straightens his glasses, which already look like they were positioned by someone using a carpenter’s level. “I need to know who it is and why he’s my business.”

“A thousand baht is worth a million words,” Rafferty says. “Catch.” He dips into the canvas tote. Elson brings his hands up far too slowly, and the six-inch brick of money hits him in the middle of the clocks on his pajama top and bounces to the floor. He stares down at it, his mouth open.

“Take a look,” Rafferty says. “That’s your second present.”

Elson bends forward and comes up with the packet of thousand-baht notes. His eyes flick up to Rafferty, and then he flips through the stack, pulls a few out from the middle, and looks at them closely. He blinks twice, heavily enough to make Rafferty wonder if it’s a tic. “I need to get up,” he says.

“It’s your room.”

Tucking the brick of money beneath his left arm and clutching the loose bills in his right hand like a little bouquet, Elson goes to the desk near the window and snaps on the lamp. He holds the bills in the pool of light one at a time, inspects them front and back, and then he removes the shade from the lamp. He chooses a bill at random and positions it in front of the naked bulb, as though trying to see the bulb through it. Dropping it onto the desk, he picks up another and then another, examining each of them for several seconds. He runs a thumbnail over the front of two bills, feeling for texture. Then he shapes the loose bills into a stack and yanks a few more from the brick, repeating the routine with each of them.

“There are some American hundreds at the bottom,” Rafferty says.

Elson gives him a sharp glance and then finds the bills and gives them a moment of scrutiny. When he has finished, he turns to Rafferty and says, “You have my attention.”

“Good. There’s another sixty million baht where that came from.”

“ Sixty? ”

“Give or take. That’s about a million seven in U.S. All brand new and uncirculated. And two hundred thousand in American hundreds, fresh as milk. The North Korean who was passing them out is getting stitched up right now, but he’ll be good enough to travel.”

Elson squints as he replays the end of the sentence. “Getting stitched up?”

“He got shot.”

“Did you shoot him?”

“He was shot by a schoolgirl. Listen, none of this matters. What matters is that you can have him.”

“I can’t have him if I don’t know where he is.”

“You’ll know in a few hours. By then it’ll all be available: the money, the North Korean who’s been passing it, and the guy who murdered Prettyman.” He studies Elson’s face. “He’s in the same business as the North Korean, but on a much bigger scale.”

Elson’s eyes drop to the spill of money on the surface of the desk. He stands there, studying it, and then he picks up the bundle and riffles through it, making a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled. Without turning to Rafferty, he says, “I’m pretty much by the book. I don’t go outside the lines much.”

“I guess it’ll depend on how badly you want what’s on the other side.”

“I want it. I’m just telling you, my comfort level is low when it comes to playing cowboy. And I don’t like surprises.”

“Then you’re in the wrong city.”

Elson slaps the money against his thigh, then brings it up and looks at Rafferty over it. “How far outside the lines am I going to have to go?”

“Some unpleasant things may happen, but I don’t think you’ll have to do any of them. You won’t even be on the scene when they go down, if they do. You’ll have-what’s the phrase? — plausible deniability. Your end should be pretty much inside the lines.”

Elson nods. He has the distracted expression of a man evaluating a position on a chessboard: if this , then what ? Finally he says, “Even assuming this is something I can do, I need a cop. I can’t do anything here without a Thai cop. That’s a rule I can’t screw with.”

“I can get you a cop.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” With a quick movement, he folds the money in half, one-handed, and his thumb pages idly through it. Elson has obviously counted a lot of money in his time. He lifts the bundle and fans it expertly, as though preparing for a card trick. “Should be a cop who’s been assigned to me.”

“It won’t be.”

Another nod, confirmation rather than agreement. “If this is big enough, I can probably get the Thais to say they assigned me whoever it is. Especially if we can prove that Petchara is dirty. They’ll be embarrassed about that.”

“Petchara put the bag in Peachy’s desk. You saw his reaction when you pulled out the old money.”

A gust of wind makes the window shiver, but Elson doesn’t seem to hear it. When he speaks, his voice has been hammered flat. “The bag. You mean the paper bag. The bag you didn’t know anything about.”

“It was originally full of counterfeit, thirty-two thousand worth. Peachy found it on Saturday, and I changed it for the real stuff.”

“She found it on Saturday?”

“She goes into the office a lot.”

He shakes his head. “But then. . why bother to exchange it? Why not just move it? Put it someplace we wouldn’t find it?”

“I needed reactions. I needed to know who was setting us up.”

Surprise widens Elson’s eyes. “You thought it was me ?”