Steve Martini - Trader of secrets

“Maybe they don’t get that much for an arm or a leg off over here,” I tell him.

“You think?” says Harry.

“Not everybody has a jackpot tort system like ours. Why do you think all of our manufacturing jobs moved over here twenty years ago?”

“I figured that was because of the thirty-cent-a-day minimum wage.”

“That too,” I tell him.

“Pretty soon I suppose the doctors will figure out a way to do intercontinental robotic surgery. Then we won’t be able to reach them anymore. And the way Washington wants to tax the rich, they’ll all be picking up and moving over here. Pretty soon there won’t be anybody left to sue. So why should we bother going home?” says Harry.

“I don’t know. You got me.”

We pass under a high gold arch that spans the road. A short distance farther on, the road swings to the left. Here there are multiple lanes in each direction separated by a wide grass-covered median strip. We travel on this road for a few miles, moving at high speed. There are commercial buildings and businesses on both sides of the road, and traffic is starting to get heavy. It looks as if we’re getting close to the center of town.

We come to a stoplight. The driver maneuvers into the far right lane, getting ready to cross traffic and make a turn. The light turns green; we go a couple of blocks and find ourselves stopped in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The sidewalks here are crowded with pedestrians, vendors selling fruit, fish, chicken, anything you can eat from the sidecars of parked bikes. Now the slower two-wheel motorbikes get the upper hand as they stream between the stopped cars. They jump to the front of the line at each stoplight.

“How much longer?” says Harry.

“Not far. Maybe ten minute.”

“That’s what you said a half hour ago,” says Harry.

“You give tip?” says the driver.

“I give tip if we get there today,” says Harry.

The driver maneuvers into the left lane and a few feet farther up he turns into a narrow alley and starts to move. We twist through a maze of backstreets, dodging kids and dogs, Asian women with pushcarts selling food, and potbellied white men in tank tops and T-shirts hanging out in the beer bars, some of them tattooed like scrimshaw.

A few more minutes and two more turns and we find ourselves on a broad four-lane one-way street with shops and businesses on both sides. Here the traffic is heavy once more. There are vendors all along the street and beer bars on every corner. “Seccon Road,” says the driver. “Marriott.” He gestures with his head up the street.

Harry turns to glance at me from the front seat. I’m looking out the window to see if I can catch any street numbers. According to the note, the office for “Waters of Death” is somewhere along Second Road.

“I don’t see any numbers,” I tell him.

“Don’t worry about it. We can check with the front desk when we get to the hotel. Show them the address. I’m sure they can tell us where it is,” says Harry. “I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna get some sleep before I go anywhere.”

I look at my watch. “It’s a quarter to two. Hope to hell our rooms are ready.”

“They better be,” says Harry. “Otherwise I’m gonna crawl over the counter and kill the clerk.”

Liquida sat in a chair near the window of his room on the third story of the small hotel and listened to the prattle of motorbike engines, watching the traffic as it streamed by on Second Road.

He had arrived in Bangkok, Thailand, three days ago and had been planted in the city of Pattaya ever since.

He settled into the hotel because of its location. For a few extra Thai baht, he was able to get a room with a good view of the building across the street. It was the place where the lockbox was located.

The old charm of the block-long cream-colored colonial facade with its small curved balconies and masonry balustrades had become buried behind a vast picket of painted metal business signs. These jutted out over the sidewalk in such a bewildering array of sizes, colors, and shapes that it was almost impossible to focus on any single message. A thick tangled vine of black wires and cables meandered across the front of the building until the messy snarl reached over the sidewalk and snared the wooden power poles along the street out in front. The building sported corrugated metal add-ons on the front and the roof, where the penthouse looked like a flattened-out army Quonset hut.

At ground level the building housed small retail shops, restaurants, and a grab bag of other businesses, some of them open air, others sealed behind the comfort of air-conditioned walls. On the sidewalk out near the curb, street vendors reduced the normally broad walkway to a narrow path, setting up business under canvas awnings or sheets of plastic to peddle their wares.

Through all of this confusion, Liquida’s attention was riveted on a single green-painted wooden door. It was situated across the street about half a block south of the window in his room.

The green door was located between a Pakistani tailor shop and a small pharmacy. It seemed almost invisible set against the harried sea of commerce taking place on the sidewalk in front of it.

But every once in a while someone would either come or go, entering or leaving the building through the green wooden door. Whenever they did, Liquida would use his field glasses to study them closely. He looked at their faces to see if they were Asian or if they looked Caucasian, what the Thais called farang — foreigners. If they were leaving the building, he watched to see if they talked to anyone out on the street. He examined them for bulges on their ankles, heavy fanny packs on their sides, or coiled wires growing out of their ears.

He had been doing this for two days. So far he had seen nothing unusual. There were no obvious signs of surveillance. Which only meant that if they were doing it, they were doing a good job. And, of course, the whole point of surveillance was not to be seen.

Once we got up, got dressed, and got out, it took Harry, Joselyn, and me only a few minutes to find the right building. The concierge at the Marriott was able to give us some pretty fair directions and by 3:30 we found the place.

It wasn’t an office building in the sense that I had envisioned. There was no main entrance with double glass doors and street numbers over the top. From the outside it looked as if the upper three stories could have been either apartments, condos, or commercial office space. Across the front of the building, French doors opened onto small balconies. But from where we stood about a block to the south on the other side of the street, it was impossible to tell what kind of furnishings might be inside.

After watching for several minutes and by process of elimination, we concluded that the way in had to be a single door tucked away between two stores on the ground level.

“Unless they put the main entrance in the back of the building,” says Harry.

“Why would they do that?” asks Joselyn.

“Look at the place; they’ve tacked on everything else, why not that?” says Harry.

The privacy of the single lonely door unnerved us a bit. There was no way to tell what might lie beyond it without going in.

“There could be security,” says Harry.

“Or worse,” says Joselyn.

“Or it could be locked,” I tell them. “So what do you think? Should we try it?”

Beyond the green portal, up on the second floor, was another wooden door, this one with a translucent glass panel on top. There was no lettering or name on the glass other than the number 208.

Liquida had seen the inside of the office only one time, the day he first established the account with the company known as TSCC Ltd. Some people used it as a place to store business records or other private papers that for one reason or another they didn’t want to keep at home or in their office. For others, including Liquida, it was an address of convenience.