Russell Blake - Betrayal

Jet watched as he took careful steps down to the street and slid into his waiting car, the driver holding the rear door open for him before trotting around and climbing behind the wheel. When the car pulled off, she felt a palpable sense of relief.

The package contained everything. She methodically scrutinized the contact information and committed it to memory, absently rubbing the spot on her arm where the chip had been recently implanted. She went to pack.

It would be a while before the courier would arrive, but Jet wanted to be ready at a moment’s notice.

Jet peered out through the window as the huge plane banked over the Gulf of Thailand on final approach to Bangkok Suvarnabhumi International Airport, on the outskirts of the city. The serpentine brown of the Chao Phraya River poured its polluted rush into the sea, turning the blue water gray as it pervaded the coast. One of the region’s near-constant cloudbursts had just rolled through, and the runway was slick with evaporating moisture as the wheels struck the tarmac and the behemoth decelerated down the long, black strip.

A buzz of energy circulated the cabin as the jet taxied to the stainless steel and glass terminal. The flight had been a long and turbulent one, and the travelers were glad to be on the ground. About half appeared to be Thais returning home, and the others were tourists or business travelers, groggy and restless after nearly eighteen hours of flight time from Los Angeles.

Even before the flight attendants opened the fuselage door, the atmosphere had changed to the exotic. Small differences in the way the passengers interacted with each other hinted at social norms that were markedly different than in the Western world. The Thais executed small bows from the waist with their palms pressed together to each other as they terminated their in-flight discussions and reached to help with overhead bags. She had spent the flight immersed in a primer on the culture, and the wai was one of the first items discussed — a bow that was combination traditional greeting, farewell, and ‘thank you’ gesture. One of the countless ways that Thailand was different. She would need to adapt quickly to the culture if she was going to fit in.

The language would also be a problem for her. She didn’t speak Thai, but her reading had assured her that many natives in larger metropolitan areas spoke English due to the massive tourism trade that catered to English-speaking visitors from New Zealand and Australia, as well as from the United States and England — many of whom came to Thailand for sex tourism — a libidinous attraction the country was infamous for.

As she waited in customs, an older Thai man approached her and wai ’d, then began speaking to her in the native tongue, mistaking her for a local due to her features. She smiled but shrugged, and he switched to English, embarrassed, apologizing profusely. That boded well for her ability to blend in, and she hoped it would make her relatively invisible in the bustling city.

Once through immigration she collected her sparse luggage and set out for the taxi stand, where again, the attendant rattled off a question in Thai, and then, realizing his error, he switched to English before blowing on a shrill whistle and waving a car forward.

The driver placed her suitcase into the trunk and waited expectantly for direction. She told him to take her to the Dynasty Hotel, located a few hundred yards from the entrance of the Nana Plaza — one of the five major sex tourism destinations in Bangkok — and near the site of Lap Pu’s main brothel. He nodded and opened her door for her, then rounded the car and jumped into the driver’s seat.

Driving in Bangkok was more of a suicidal rite of passage than mere transportation. She was convinced they were going to collide with motorcycles, bicycles and other cars at least a dozen times every few blocks, and by the time they reached the hotel, she’d concluded that the locals had a death wish.

Jet checked in, noting the predominantly Caucasian male clientele, many accompanied by young Thai females. She was pleased to find that her room was nicely appointed — and quiet. Her travel had taken over twenty-six hours between getting to Los Angeles, the layover and then the Thailand flight, and because of the turbulence, she hadn’t gotten much rest. She turned down the bed, unpacked her suitcase and locked her valuables in the safe, and then set out the Do Not Disturb card on her doorknob.

The Bangkok skyline was breathtakingly beautiful, with skyscrapers beaming out every color of the rainbow. The recent rain had scrubbed the city clean, for a time, and it was as radiant a jewel as any she’d seen. She took in the display from her window for a few minutes as she sipped a bottle of mineral water, and then pulled the curtains closed, ready for some serious sleep. Tomorrow would be a big day. She was supposed to touch base with Arthur in the morning and arrange a meeting with the CIA operative who ran the Bangkok station. Hopefully, he’d been productive over the last twenty-four hours while she’d been in the air.

Jet had agreed to meet Edgar, the CIA’s point man, at one o’clock at Benjakiti Park, a half mile south of her hotel. When she arrived, she spent five minutes reconnoitering the rendezvous spot before moving to a cluster of trees on the edge of the expansive pond, where a group of children were playing under the watchful gazes of their mothers. She was there an hour early, wearing sunglasses and a forest green baseball cap she’d bought from a sidewalk vendor.

Dressed in jeans and mauve blouse, she blended in easily with the office workers eating lunch on the grass — she could have been a low-level clerk or a shopkeeper on her break. The rental boat pier that was the meeting place teemed with tourists, milling about and taking photographs of each other with the impressive edifices of the skyline as a backdrop.

At the agreed-upon time, a man matching the description she’d been given walked to a bench and sat down, taking off his red windbreaker and folding it by his side. He removed a bag from his satchel and unwrapped a sandwich. Jet watched as he munched on it and then walked by as he was finishing.

“The boathouse, thirty seconds,” she said in English and continued ambling towards the pier.

He rolled his wrapper into a ball and dropped it into the bag, then stood and picked up his windbreaker and walked to the boathouse, Jet now out of sight. He waited expectantly, but was still surprised when she materialized behind him, seemingly out of thin air.

“Damn it. You scared me,” he said with a grin, then hugged her. She returned the hug and then moved down to the rental boats, holding his hand with the abandon of a lover.

“I rented one. Come on,” she said playfully, and within two minutes, they were pushing away from the dock in a floating swan-shaped contrivance, pumping the pedals with their legs.

Once they had traveled several dozen yards from the pier, he began speaking.

“I’m Edgar. You must be Kyra.”

“Correct,” she lied. “What do you have for me?”

“We’ve narrowed down our man Hawker’s likeliest associates to Lap Pu. We think he’s definitely in regular contact with him and that they meet once every few weeks up in Myanmar or Laos. Our intel says Hawker is now involved in facilitating human trafficking — girls from Laos or Myanmar, sometimes just children, for sex work in Thailand. Lap Pu has a host of bordellos here, most of them masquerading as ping pong clubs with motels or rooms available for rent by the hour.”

“Ping pong clubs? That wasn’t covered in the file.”

Edgar explained the concept — a sex show involving everything from ping pong balls to snakes.