Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

The three took coffee together in a nearby lounge. Meier made no attempt to talk and merely sat with his coffee mentally devouring the girls. They did not mind and chattered merrily enough. When Meier rose, straightening the front of his safari jacket to cover any visible sign of his state of mind, the girls took his hands and, giggling, led him to the lift and thence to an upstairs room, on the way collecting condoms, key and hygiene items from a fat floor lady.

The room was plush with sofa, bed, bath, and, on a section of tiled floor, an outsize air bed. Tui explored Meier’s mouth with her tongue while Voraluk undressed all three of them and bathed Meier thoroughly.

With a sweet-smelling unguent, Tui anointed the air bed and her own body. Meier was laid on the bed and the girls alternately massaged his body with great care and total intimacy. Voraluk lay beneath and facing Meier while the lighter Tui snaked her oiled body up and down over his back in the time-honored fashion of the Thai body-body massage. Her pubic mound, her stomach and breasts took over the work of the hands of a European masseuse. In a while the wonderful movement from above caused Meier to penetrate Voraluk, but Tui seemed to sense the event. She rose, disengaged them and turned Meier around. Then, with Voraluk still below him, she continued her massage for a further ten minutes. Her expertise lay in keeping her client at the very brink of release.

The two girls dried Meier down, led him to the bed to attend his instructions and afterward showered him before returning him to the general manager’s office. He paid 6,000 baht and praised his host for the continued excellence of the Cleopatra.

Tui reappeared in a smart blouse and skirt and drove Meier in her own Toyota to the Fish Supermarket in Sukumvit Road. With a trolley, they plundered displays of red mullet, snapper, grouper, sea bass and many other species. A uniformed attendant cooked the fish on the spot and they drank their meal down with glasses of local sanuk amid a bustle of farangs. Meier took his leave of Tui, for the urge was again upon him, and summoned a three-wheel tuk-tuk to take him to the Grace Hotel, locally known as the Pussy Supermarket. This adjoins the Arab ghetto in Soi Nana Nua, an ugly block of dirty skyscrapers sprinkled at base level with a smattering of mosques and pseudominarets.

Meier passed through the dingy lobby of the Grace wrinkling his nose at the shish kebab and curry odors from the adjacent Arab restaurant, a place of rice and belly dancers. He descended a staircase and entered a dimly lit basement lined with a long, narrow bar and prowled by over two hundred freelance prostitutes.

Every manner of client dallied at the bar, drank in the many small booths or propped up the pillars that gave the Coffee Shop its aspect of subterranean nastiness. Cigar smoke swirled around these pillars like fingers of mist about stalagmites, and everywhere were hungry eyes and stiffened loins. It was the sort of noisome chamber of erotica Meier loved. He took a whiskey to a vacant booth and let the atmosphere sink in.

The low, predatory babble of Western businessmen and robed Arabs was punctured from time to time by the crude shouting of British, Dutch or German yobs and crescendos of “yeah, yeah” from the jukebox.

Lone druggies and alcoholics were out of place, for this was the court of the sex goddess. Tarts of every age and background were on offer, slowly sweeping the cavern for business. Many were part-timers moonlighting for extra cash, to buy a car perhaps, or new clothes for their children. In Bangkok there are over 200,000 girls and an unknown number of boys living wholly or partly by sex earnings. Since an income from prostitution can be ten times that of a standard city job, small wonder many succumb to the temptation despite the dangers.

For an hour Meier turned down the callers at his booth, narrowly eliminating a dark thirty-year-old with large firm breasts and wasp-waist clad in a crocodile jumpsuit. He settled for an elfin-featured thirteen-year-old in a school uniform. She led him to a tiny room, some blocks away from the Grace Hotel, where she kept a baby in a brightly colored cot.

Meier stayed until 1 a.m. and marveled at her skill. She spoke passable American English in her singsong way and told him he was big. Many farangs, she said, were smelly, and Japanese so small she had to use a special small condom like a finger stall; normal-sized ones, she said, just slid off.

Back at the Hilton, Meier was welcomed by the general manager, a charming man who had recently moved from a major Hong Kong hotel that he had run for many years. Meier ordered a Mercedes for the morrow to take him to Pattaya Beach, down the coast of the Gulf of Siam: a place of sun and sand as well as sex.

At 10:30 a.m. he was woken with breakfast and the Bangkok Post. He was especially interested in the London kidnapping of Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu and extremely annoyed when a loud knocking on the door of his suite turned out to be an unexpected call by de Villiers.

“Try to look happy to see me.”

Meier grunted and wiped crumbs from his lips.

“To what do I owe this enormous pleasure?”

De Villiers, it transpired, had been at work in Melbourne when a call had come through from Davies. He had decided to fly via Bangkok just in case Meier proved reluctant to withdraw from his Thai pursuits, as had happened on previous occasions.

“We leave for London on this evening’s flight.”

Meier canceled his Mercedes, silently cursing both Davies and de Villiers…

Douggie Walker had managed the Antelope pub for a good many years. Like his soppy black labrador, Sam, who loved the clamor and life of the main downstairs bar, Douggie was a large and amiable figure. The Antelope’s clientele on the evening of Thursday, October 30, 1986, was as rowdy as ever, a mix of all backgrounds, with always a good many strangers to add to the atmosphere.

At the bar Douggie recognized a gang of ex-Army Regulars and accepted the offer of a pint from Keith Ryde, one of several Oman Army officers who used the pub as a rendezvous, usually at lunchtime.

The talk was of a yuppy named Jeremy Bamber who two days earlier had been jailed for life for the callous murder of five members of his own family. Hoping to inherit a fortune, he had intended that his sister be blamed. A heated conversation developed on the topic. Douggie, Ryde, “Smash” Smith-Piggott and Jackson could be counted on, under the gentle influence of Benskin’s draft bitter, to escalate the most unlikely of subjects into a major debate. Mike Marman was normally in the thick of it all but that evening he felt a touch subdued and decided to go home for a quiet read and an early night.

On the wrong side of forty and unemployed, he was temporarily feeling a touch sorry for himself. His mood probably stemmed from his last meeting with his fiery but beautiful ex-wife, Rose May. The previous weekend he had called at her Kensington flat to take their sons out for the day. There had been a fierce argument that still tasted bitter to him. Sometimes they seemed to hate each other but then he would notice afresh her blond hair and goddesslike figure, her classic Slav features and those lovely, faraway eyes and wonder how he and Rose May had ever grown apart.

She was born Rose May Cassel-Kokczynska, of a Swedish mother and a dashing Polish officer who had taken part in the last recorded cavalry charge against German tanks in 1939, spent the war years in Soviet camps, then settled in England, where Rose May was born. When Mike met her, on vacation in Sardinia, she was head teacher at her own Montessori school in Kensington.

He was at first everything that Rose May had dreamed of: a charming, handsome cavalry officer, regimental skier, communist-fighter, and an unashamed lover of the good life. When she knew him better she found he needed mothering and this was doubly attractive.