Jake Needham - Laundry Man

“Why don’t we just forget all this for now, Jack? If you haven’t talked to Howard recently, you haven’t. Just let me know if he calls. Will you do that for me?”

“What’s going on here, guys?” I looked back and forth between Dollar and Just John. “Why don’t you just lay it out for me?”

Dollar said nothing. It was Just John who answered me.

“Howard’s gone and done something stupid, Jack. We need to straighten it out.” John lifted his arms from his sides, palms up. “That’s all. We just want to be sure nobody gets hurt when we do.”

I didn’t understand what that meant, but at least one thing was coming through loud and clear.

“Is there something you’re not telling me here, guys?”

Dollar looked exasperated. “Jack, there’s a ton of shit we’re not telling you. Do you think we’re completely stupid?”

“If you’re not going to tell me what we’re talking about, then why in the world are we having-”

Dollar pointed a finger at me, cutting me off. “Keep your nose clean,” he interrupted. “We’ll be in touch.”

Then Dollar turned and walked away. Just John tossed me a little salute, half-smiled, and followed him without a word. Within a few strides they were moving crisply in lockstep. They looked to me like they were making directly for Phayathai Road. I figured Dollar’s driver was hovering somewhere there, idling in Dollar’s big Mercedes and ignoring the traffic backing up behind it, waiting patiently for the boss to appear.

I stood there and watched them go and I wondered for a moment if I would eventually find out what Dollar was talking about. Then I asked myself the really important question. I asked myself if I really wanted to know.

As I walked slowly back to my office I pushed Dollar, Just John, and Howard the Roach firmly into the back of my mind. They weren’t my problem right then. It was this guy who claimed to be Barry Gale who required my attention.

Would I be naive to meet whoever called me just because he had pitched a tale that tickled my sense of the bizarre? But then, what could be the harm in it?

I couldn’t think of anyone I had offended enough to want to do me harm, at least not recently, and it seemed unlikely that anyone would mount such an elaborate ruse even if they did wish me harm. Someone could certainly get to me easily enough without going through all this. And what kind of mischief could take place in a supermarket crowded with other people anyway?

As improbable as it might seem, maybe my caller really had been Barry Gale? Who else could have known the things he knew?

Whoever turned up at Took Lae Dee tomorrow night — whether it was Barry Gale or not — he would have some kind of a story to tell. And then he would no doubt want something from me. I couldn’t imagine what that might be, but I figured I had better be prepared for anything. That is, of course, if I went down there at all. I still had a little time to make up my mind. Maybe the place to start doing that was with finding out more than I knew right then about Barry Gale and the body that had been found in that Dallas swimming pool.

I flipped through my mental Rolodex looking for somebody who might be able to help me and several good possibilities came to mind. Fortunately Bangkok was a dream of a location for people in the information business whether they were working for governments or involved in some private enterprise or, as was not infrequently the case, doing both at the same time. The city was the doorway to Southeast Asia, and the Thais didn’t much care what anyone did there as long as it didn’t involve them. That made Bangkok an irresistible base of operations for almost anyone who was up to anything they didn’t want too many people to know about.

I turned the alternatives over in my mind while I walked, but there was really no reason to do that. I already knew exactly who I needed to see.

When I got back to the building where my office was, I went straight down to the garage and got into my Volvo. A few minutes later I was headed north on Phayathai Road.

Darcy Rice lived in one of Bangkok’s older neighborhoods that was out near Chitralada Palace where the king maintained his official residence. It was a part of town where you seldom saw foreigners, and that suited Darcy just fine.

Her house was at the end of a tiny soi that branched off Wisut Kasat Road at an Esso station. If you didn’t know exactly where you were going, it didn’t look like a street at all, but just part of the station’s driveway. Behind the Esso station the soi made a sharp bend to the right and ran along a row of nondescript shop-houses for about a hundred yards until it dead-ended at a green metal gate set into a high ginger-colored wall. Thick stands of rangy bamboo tumbled over the wall from inside and gave the whole area a slightly overgrown appearance, but the bamboo had a very specific purpose. Concealed within it was a sophisticated security system that encircled the entire property. It was an exceptionally thorough piece of technology and it effectively ensured the total privacy of the occupants.

After Darcy retired from more than thirty years of working for the US government, some of it in Washington and the rest in various postings around Asia, she took her whole pension in a cash settlement and headed straight for Bangkok. I met Darcy shortly after she set up shop here. She had made it her business to look me up and introduce herself. At first I wondered why, but after I got to know Darcy better I understood perfectly well.

Darcy was in the business of collecting information and so she also collected people who had information. For a few months I heard from Darcy only occasionally, mostly when she needed me to explain some arcane twist of international finance, but gradually the calls and our visits increased in frequency and a friendship developed. Darcy had never spoken to me about her background except in general terms; however, I had no difficulty reading between the lines. CIA would have been an obvious guess, but I doubted it. My own theory was that Darcy had been with the NSA, the National Security Agency.

NSA was so secretive that it made the CIA look like the New York Times. What’s more, they did the stuff that few people even knew was going on-the computer break-ins, the telephone and email intercepts, the satellite surveillance, and the other black arts wizardry almost anybody out of the know would have been inclined to dismiss as paranoid fiction rather than real life. That was exactly the kind of stuff Darcy seemed to know all about.

Her computers occupied all of a two-story cottage across a swimming pool from the main house, and they were fat with data. There was little Darcy could not get access to. She could nail down details about intelligence networks and the activities of individual agents that conventional corporate investigative agencies had never heard of. The end of the Cold War had scattered a welter of unemployed, freebooting intelligence operators across the globe. A lot of them had tried to do the same thing Darcy had, but there were few others who could claim the sophistication of the operation she had created in Bangkok. It was nothing less than a private intelligence agency, one with capabilities equal to any competitor and to not a few governments.

At the end of the soi I stopped in front of Darcy’s gate and lowered the driver’s window. Before I could push the button on the intercom box, the gate split into two panels and began to swing inward. I gave a little wave in the direction where I knew the security camera was and the intercom speaker click-clacked in acknowledgment.

Parking on the gravel of the circular driveway, I got out and made my way up the short brick walk between rows of tropical plants so carefully tended and perfectly formed that they might have been shot out of plastic injection molds. Darcy opened the door and stepped onto the house’s wide front porch. She was a smallish woman, a few years past sixty, trim with a pleasant but forgettable face, and she wore her silver hair in a tightly fitted, masculine crop. As always when she was at home, she was dressed in a white silk blouse and an ankle-length sarong, today’s selection being in the brightest shade of saffron I had ever seen.