A different minion handed him a briefcase.
“Do you mind if I count it?”
Chao-tak wasn’t listening. Like a greedy child on Christmas morning, he was attacking the general’s backpack, clawing at the Bubble Wrap protecting Entemena.
“Be careful with that!” The general couldn’t stop himself. “There’s over two thousand years of history in that bag.”
The squat little Thai turned the statue over in his hands, like a monkey examining a troublesome nut. Ignorant peasant.
Suddenly something happened. Chao-tak’s face darkened. He shook the statue hard, like a baby with a rattle, then started shouting something in Thai. Two of his men rushed forward. Each examined the base of the statue. Then all three glared at General McPhee.
“You try to cheat me!” Chao-tak spat.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous? You ridiculous. Two-thousand-year-old statue, you think I’m stupid?” Snatching the Entemena back from his henchmen, Chao-tak threw it at the general, who only just caught it in time.
“For Christ’s sake! What are you doing?”
“Look at bottom. Look at base!” Chao-tak commanded.
The general’s face drained of color.
“They have serial number two thousand year ago? They have bar code?”
“I . . . I don’t understand,” the general stammered. “This is a mistake. Someone must have switched the statues somehow.” He thought about the robbery on the train, but that made no sense. It couldn’t be. I had the statue with me on the Kwai. It was never in the room.
“Look, I’ll straighten this out. You can keep your money.” He closed the briefcase and pushed it back across the desk. “I don’t know how this happened but—”
Four hands gripped his arms from behind. Before he could react, someone brought a metal crowbar slamming into the back of his knees. He screamed and slumped to the floor.
“You try to cheat me.”
The Harvard-educated American war hero looked into the eyes of the illiterate Thai drug dealer and saw his own black, compassionless heart staring back at him.
Tears welled up in his eyes.
He knew there would be no way out.
TIFFANY JOY HAD BEEN waiting at the table for over forty minutes when the champagne and note arrived.
She smiled. About time.
She waited until the waiter had opened the bottle, poured her a glass and left before she opened the note. When she read it, the smile dissolved on her lips.
The General is dead. I paid your check. Get out of Bangkok now or they will kill you too. Don’t pack. Your friend. T.B.
T.B.
Thomas Bowers.
Tiffany Joy got up from the table and started running.
JEFF STEVENS WAS AT the boarding gate, about to board Qantas flight 22 8419 to London via Dubai, when a Thai police officer pulled him roughly to one side.
“Is there a problem?”
The officer said nothing. Snatching Jeff’s carry-on out of his hand, he unzipped it and pulled out a Bubble Wrapped package.
Jeff’s palms began to sweat.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a statue,” said Jeff. “A gift for a friend of mine.”
“Really?” The guard made a gesture. Three of his colleagues approached. In addition to their handguns, each one had a vicious Alsatian dog straining at the end of a leather leash. The dogs went nuts as they approached Jeff, barking wildly and baring their teeth.
“Passport!” the first officer barked.
Jeff handed it over. What the hell was happening?
“Are you familiar with the drug laws in this country, Mr. Bowers?”
“Of course I am,” said Jeff. He could barely hear himself over the dogs. He’d heard the stories of innocent travelers having bags of heroin planted on them, of course, but he’d been so careful. For obvious reasons, his bag had never left his sight for a second. Unless someone at security . . .
The policeman tore off the Bubble Wrap and held the statue of Entemena high above his head. “Maybe the gift for your friend is inside, hmm?”
Jeff’s heart stopped. He’s going to smash it! He’s going to shatter two thousand years of history. “NO!”
Without thinking, he lunged for the statue.
Three pistols were instantly raised and pointed at his head. Jeff closed his eyes and waited for the sound of shattering stone. Instead he heard a man shriek in agony. Opening his eyes, he saw that one of the dogs had leaped onto the man standing next to him and sunk its formidable jaws into the poor guy’s crotch. A melee ensued, with much barking and screaming and waving of firearms. Eventually a plastic bag containing a small amount of white powder was produced from somewhere inside the man’s pants.
The first policeman calmly handed the statue back to Jeff.
“Sorry, sir. Our mistake. We hope you enjoyed your stay in Thailand.”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, JEFF finally exhaled as the Airbus A380 soared and juddered its way into the sky.
Reaching down, he stuck his hand into the bag at his feet and touched the statue lovingly.
That was close. Too close.
He thought about Francine, the Frenchwoman on the E&O. It was she who’d tried to steal the Entemena while both Jeff and the general were at the Kwai. Jeff recognized her from a job he and Tracy had tried to pull years ago in Paris. He was sure she was on the train with the same intention as he had. She’d beaten them to the punch in France—a lovely Dutch still life, if Jeff remembered rightly. But not this time. Once the general was distracted by dear, sweet little Minami on the Japanese raft, his outrage had gotten the better of him. It had been preposterously easy to switch his backpack for the one Jeff had brought with him, packed with a worthless fake statue, as sold in museum gift shops all over Europe.
He thought about Tiffany Joy and wondered whether she’d taken his advice. He did hope so. Chao-tak was not in the habit of leaving loose ends, and Miss Joy didn’t deserve the fate of her heartless lover.
He thought about General Alan McPhee, and about Aahil Hafeez, and about the collector in Switzerland who was eagerly awaiting the arrival of his treasure.
He thought about Tracy, and how nothing was quite as much fun without her.
Then he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER 11
OH MY GOD! THAT’S Zayn Malik!”
Nicholas’s eyes were on stalks. He’d never been to Los Angeles before, or to any big city other than Denver, and that was only for a day-trip. His mother had brought him to Cecconi’s on Melrose for lunch, a celebrity watcher’s heaven.
“Who’s Zayn Malik?” Tracy asked.
“Zayn Malik? One Direction?”
Tracy looked blank. Nicholas gave her a look that was half pity, half disdain.
“Oh, never mind. Can I have another sundae?”
It was July and ninety degrees outside. While the Angelenos wisely headed to the beach, or locked themselves inside their air-conditioned cars and offices, Tracy and Nicholas had spent the morning pounding the streets, rushing from one tourist attraction to the next. In prior years, Tracy had sent her son to a local summer camp in Colorado called Beaver Creek. Nick spent his vacations swimming and fishing and kayaking and camping, and always had a great time. But this year she decided it was time he saw a bit more of the world.
Blake Carter was against the idea.
“I don’t see what Los Angeles has to offer that Steamboat doesn’t.”
Tracy raised an eyebrow. “Variety?”
“Them freaks on Venice Beach, you mean?”
“Come on, Blake. I know you’re not a city person. But there’s Hollywood, all that movie history. There’s museums and theme parks. I’ll take him to Universal Studios and maybe a Lakers game. He’s so sheltered here.”
“Kids are supposed to be sheltered,” grumbled Blake. “Maybe if he were a teenager. But he’s too young, Tracy. You mark my words. He won’t enjoy it.”
Nicholas loved it.
Everything about L.A. excited him, from the food and the blazing heat to the streets full of Lamborghinis and Ferraris and Bugattis and Teslas and the Venice Beach freaks that Blake Carter so despised: silver-sprayed mimes and snake charmers and transvestite stilt walkers and fortune-tellers with their faces covered in exotic tattoos.
“This place is awesome!” he told Tracy, night after night in their suite at the Hotel Bel-Air. “Can we move here, Mom? Please?”
A sundae arrived, Nicholas’s second. He attacked the mountain of whipped cream and fudge with the same enthusiasm he’d shown its predecessor. Tracy was sipping her coffee, content simply to watch him, when a party walked in and caught her attention.
The first thing Tracy saw was the necklace. Once a jewel thief, always a jewel thief. Although in all honesty, this one was hard to miss: a string of rubies, each one the size of a baby’s fist, hung around the scrawny neck of an otherwise unattractive, middle-aged woman. It was the most dazzling, over-the-top piece of jewelry that Tracy had ever seen. And she’d seen quite a few.