The Assassin on the Bangkok Express Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Roland Perry OAM started his writing career as a journalist on The Age from 1969 to 1973, after which he moved to the UK where he spent five years making documentary films. In 1979 while still in London, he wrote his first book, a novel and international bestseller, Program for a Puppet. He is now one of Australia’s most prolific writers with 30 books to his name in a range of genres from biography, politics, espionage, history, to sport and fiction, many of which are bestsellers. His 30th book and fifth work of fiction, The Assassin on the Bangkok Express is a sequel to The Honourable Assassin which was published in 2015. His non-fiction books include The Aus­ tralian Light Horse; Monash: The Outsider Who Won a War; Bill the Bastard, voted one of the 50 top reads in 2013 in the national Get Reading! program; Changi Brownlow, which was short-listed for the Australian Booksellers Industry Award for non-fiction in 2010; Celeste; The Queen, Her Lover and the Most Notorious Spy in History; The Fifth Man; and many more.

  In 2011, Perry was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia ‘for service to literature as an author’, and in 2012 he was appointed adjunct professor at Monash University and ‘Writer-in-Residence’ in the University’s Arts Faculty.

  Roland Perry divides his time between Melbourne and Chiang Mai.

  ALSO BY ROLAND PERRY

  Fiction

  Program for a Puppet

  Blood is a Stranger

  Faces in the Rain

  The Honourable Assassin

  Non-fiction

  Celeste

  The Queen, Her Lover and the Most Notorious Spy in History

  Horrie: The War Dog

  Bill the Bastard

  The Fight for Australia

  The Changi Brownlow

  The Australian Light Horse

  Last of the Cold War Spies

  The Fifth Man

  Monash: The Outside Who Won a War

  The Programming of a President

  The Exile: Reporter of Conflict

  Mel Gibson, Actor, Director, Producer

  Lethal Hero

  Sailing to the Moon

  Elections Sur Ordinateur

  Bradman’s Invincibles

  The Ashes

  Miller’s Luck: the Life and Loves of Keith Miller, Australia’s

  Greatest All-Rounder

  Bradman’s Best Bradman’s Best Ashes Teams

  Don Bradman

  Captain Australia: A History of the Celebrated Captains of

  Australian Test Cricket

  Bold Warnie

  Waugh’s Way

  Shane Warne, Master Spinner

  THE ASSASSIN

  ON THE

  BANGKOK EXPRESS

  ROLAND

  PERRY

  To Jo Butler

  Published by Wild Dingo Press

  Melbourne Australia

  [email protected]

  www.wilddingopress.com.au

  First published by Wild Dingo Press in 2017

  Text copyright © Roland Perry

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Perry, Roland, 1946– author.

  The assassin on the Bangkok Express / Roland Perry.

  ISBN: 9780987381392 (ePub)

  Drug dealers—Fiction.

  Murder—Investigation—Fiction.

  Suspense fiction.

  Cover design: Katarina Ozegovic & Emma Statham

  Editing: Jackey Coyle

  Typesetting: Midland Typesetters

  Preview

  In the previous book, The Honourable Assassin, we meet Victor Cavalier as a young man trying to make the grade for admission to the elite Special Air Services Regiment (SAS). He wins every examination, physical and intellectual, but fails because of a weak Achilles tendon that may have let him down in an assignment.

  After this disappointment, he joins a newspaper. But the capacities and skills in the SAS trials are so outstanding that the Australian secret services and the Australian Federal Police want to employ him for certain clandestine activities that need an untraceable lone wolf. The major difference between Cavalier and other such shadowy figures is that he suggests his own assignments, and will only take commissions that he feels are morally acceptable to him. They must be for what he judges as ‘the greater good’.

  His job as an investigative journalist becomes a near-perfect cover for his secret work.

  *

  Thirty-five years after he joins the newspaper, his life appears a bit of a wreck. His girlfriend has just walked out on him and his editor is under pressure to fire him for his reporting on Melbourne gang wars, which brings death threats to the paper’s chairman. Cavalier’s drinking habit is also winning the war with his better angels. On top of this, his editor wants a story about a Mexican drug cartel operative, Virgillo Labasta, who has been murdered by a sniper in a Carlton laneway.

  It is midnight. Cavalier is watching a replay of his football team’s defeat that night when the editor calls and demands he cover the killing. Cavalier is most reluctant, for reasons not entirely apparent at that moment. But he is intrigued to meet a stunning Thai special investigator at the scene of the crime, Jacinta Cin Lai. She is looking into the Mexican’s links to illegal drug operations in her country.

  His editor now wants a story on Jacinta, a colour piece on the life and work of this mysterious beauty. Cavalier refuses the offer, just as he is finally fired from his job. But then he receives a video from an unknown source that appears to depict his daughter being guillotined by Virgillo Labasta’s boss, the Mexican drug lord Leonardo Mendez.

  Cavalier is shattered. The video seems to confirm his worst fears that his daughter, who had been travelling through Mexico seven years earlier, has been murdered. This galvanises him to investigate the drug cartel in Thailand. He then takes up the offer as a freelance journalist to do a feature article on Jacinta, which means contacting her in Bangkok.

  His arrival there is complicated by a sudden Thai military coup, when a junta takes over the country. This adds an element of danger. His assignment uncovers corruption in high places in the Thai elite. But the coup and its disruption also opens up leads and opportunities for the resourceful Cavalier.

  *

  Unbeknown to his paper, he has been gathering information on the Mexican drug lords and their cartels ever since his daughter went missing. He has shared this intel with his contacts at the Australian Federal Police. Now he has a loose alliance with the inscrutable, stunning Jacinta, who he discovers is not all she purports to be. For one thing, she is Thailand’s most feared Muay Thai boxer, who retired from this ‘trade’ years earlier to join the Thai secret police. She still performs in annual exhibition bouts. Jacinta is also known to be a crack shot, the best among the Thai police, where she is from time to time employed as a professional assassin. For another thing, she is a transsexual.

  As the relationship builds, Cavalier learns that Jacinta has a similar debt to settle. Her two closest friends have also been beheaded by Leonardo Mendez. Jacinta and Cavalier both have the highest incentive to kill him. Evidence emerges from the Australian Federal Police that Jacinta may have shot Virgillo Labasta in Melbourne. But did she?

  Cavalier travels to remote parts of Thailand to gather telling data on Leonardo Mendez, who has temporarily set u
p his organization in Bangkok and Chiang Mai to reap profits from illegal drug deals throughout South East Asia.

  Jacinta aids Cavalier with information from inside the Thai Police, yet she is disdainful of what a newspaper exposé in Australia or on the Internet will achieve. She says that nothing short of getting rid of Mendez will gain them a measure of retribution for their loss of loved ones. But Jacinta is controlled by the corrupt Thai Chief of Police, Aind Azelaporn, who is assigned to protect Mendez. Her chances of carrying out his elimination are limited. Cavalier realises that any action against the Mexican is up to him. Despite her assurances that Cavalier is not being monitored by the Thai police, he cannot be sure that she will not apprehend him.

  *

  In the middle of the coup, a rival Thai general to the junta is shot by a sniper when making a speech to a rally of supporters in Bangkok. Chaos ensues.

  Cavalier seizes the moment.

  He has studied his potential quarry like an etymologist dissecting an insect. He knows Mendez’s strengths and weaknesses, right down to his pathological attraction to beheadings, and his sexual proclivities. The latter gives Cavalier the thinnest of opportunities. Mendez frequents Bangkok’s most notorious brothel centre, Nana Plaza, surrounded by his twenty cut-throat bodyguards.

  Disguised as a Swedish tourist, Cavalier books a room in a hotel looking into the Plaza. During a blackout, which at first seems to stymie his minutely planned effort, Cavalier delivers the mortal blow to the psychopath who had indiscriminately slaughtered hundreds of people.

  A manhunt follows. Cavalier is forced to escape Thailand via Cambodia. He seems trapped when a three-man squad from the cartel, led by its top hit man, Jose Cortez, and Jacinta chase him by boat at night from Phnom Penh down the Mekong to Vietnam. Jacinta, in a daring plan, appears to want to protect Cavalier, although she cannot expose herself as his accomplice.

  Cavalier manages to evade his pursuers by bluff and expert marksmanship.

  *

  Questions remain. He suspects that Jacinta sent him the video of his daughter’s guillotining, which she does not deny. It pulled him into the investigation and the eventual destruction of Leonardo Mendez. Jacinta suspects that apart from Mendez, Cavalier eliminated the Mexican drug lord’s number two, Virgillo Labasta, which he too, does not deny …

  Jose Cortez, who has 80 ‘kills’ to his credit in the USA and elsewhere, puts a high-priced contract out on Cavalier, who has escaped to Australia. The Federal Police advise him to ‘disappear’ for six months, the time they hope the US intelligence services will take to track and liquidate Cortez and his squad.

  In the meantime, Cavalier must decide where he can hide out without detection when Cortez sets out to avenge the assassination of Mendez. Cavalier the hunter, has become the hunted.

  PART ONE

  30 YEARS AGO

  1

  RE-ACQUAINTANCE BY ACCIDENT

  A woman on a motorcycle sped over the Meng Rai Bridge on the Ping River. The traffic light was green, but in Thailand’s Chiang Mai this was often merely an invitation to negotiate with drivers running red lights. A Toyota sedan clipped the bike, spinning it and throwing the rider several metres. Victor Cavalier, on his early-morning jog, was about to cross the bridge. At the squeal of brakes, he turned to see the woman hit the ground. He smelled the burning rubber from hard-braking vehicles as he dodged the traffic and reached her.

  The woman lay motionless and crumpled in the middle of the road. He eased off her helmet, and felt her pulses at neck and wrist. He called in Thai for someone to phone for an ambulance. Then Cavalier noticed a tattoo, poking through the torn back of her dress. It was a phoenix, and seemed familiar. He mentally pushed it aside and concentrated on the stricken woman’s condition.

  ‘The hospital is on the Chang Klan Road,’ he said, pointing, in Thai to the young male driver of the offending vehicle. His voice was calm and authoritative. ‘Move fast!’

  The driver stood frozen, either dumbfounded or in two minds about doing a runner. Seeing his hesitation, a female on a motorcycle volunteered to fetch an ambulance. In the fifteen minutes it took to arrive, the young victim stirred, opened her eyes and tried to sit up.

  ‘Serena …’ she mumbled, ‘Serena … is she okay?’

  Cavalier looked around. A doll was lying on the ground a few metres away, its legs crushed. Mud was smeared on its face and head.

  ‘She’ll survive,’ he said softly. The woman looked dazed. He wiped blood from her nose. Then he recognised her.

  ‘Pin!’ he said in surprise, ‘it’s you!’

  ‘Victor!’ she cried, scrutinising him.

  They had first met four years earlier when she was a medical student in Chiang Mai. She was funding her studies by working for a tour company, and she had driven him to the notorious Golden Triangle, in Thailand’s north-eastern corner.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s you,’ Pin said. Still confused, she looked about and asked, ‘What happened?’ She grimaced and flexed her shoulder.

  The ambulance took her the few kilometres to the hospital, where a wheelchair was waiting. Paramedics placed her in it. Cavalier pushed her into an emergency room.

  ‘This is crazy!’ she said. ‘This is my hospital. I work here.’

  ‘Not today,’ Cavalier said gently.

  ‘I have patients to see.’ Pin looked up at him, aggrieved.

  ‘You were unconscious when I reached you,’ he said. ‘Better let a colleague examine you.’

  ‘Never! They are all quacks!’

  Cavalier couldn’t help smiling, unsure if she was joking or not.

  ‘My bike!’ she cried.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ he said.

  ‘My baby!’

  Cavalier was startled. Had a child been thrown clear? he wondered for a second.

  ‘My Serena!’ she said. ‘My doll!’

  He was driven by tuktuk back to the bike on the side of the road, where it had ended up after the hit. The rear fender was dented. The key was still in the ignition. He started it, all the while looking for the doll. He spotted it off the road and retrieved it. Satisfied the bike was rideable, he drove it to the hospital, gave the doll to a nurse and waited an hour for Pin to be examined.

  She came to him with a bandage across her nose and face. Her left shoulder was also strapped. She clutched her doll, its crushed legs dangling by threads.

  ‘They think I have mild concussion,’ she said, with a roll of the eyes. ‘My shoulder has a bit of bruising, but I’m fine. I’ll take the day off. Back here at work tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll book you a taxi.’

  ‘Thanks for saving Serena,’ she said, hugging the doll. ‘Sorry you have to see us like this.’

  ‘You’re still easily the most beautiful woman in Thailand.’

  ‘What about my Serena?’

  ‘She … she has some interesting features,’ he said, glancing at the big-eyed doll, with its scrawny hair and a lifelike look that he found eerie.

  ‘Interesting? She is very beautiful and special.’

  Cavalier scrutinised Pin and wondered if she was serious.

  ‘A doll is a doll,’ he shrugged.

  ‘Not dolls like Serena. They are important in the Thai culture.’

  ‘Important in what way?’

  ‘They have been blessed with special powers.’

  ‘Blessed?’

  ‘By certain monks.’

  Cavalier remembered, vaguely, reading a feature article about this strange, centuries-old belief, which he considered was superstition. He decided not to pursue the discussion.

  ‘You haven’t changed,’ she said.

  ‘Nor have you, Miss Thailand University.’

  ‘Sweet mouth!

  ‘You have changed in some way …’ he said, looking closely at her features.

  ‘I have to appear professional.’ She chuckled. ‘I even have to advise young couples on their sex lives. My hair was blonde. I’ve gone back to my natural colour, and it’s
shorter.’

  ‘You still have that tattoo …’

  ‘Oh, you noticed …’ She paused. ‘I must hide it under my clothes as much as possible. It’s a bit risqué for my patients, not to mention my rather stiff fellow medicos.’

  She touched his nose.

  ‘You are even better looking than before. Fuller in the face. But what happened to your nose? It was like a Thai’s with a bump in it.’

  ‘I’ve broken it a few times.’

  ‘Not that stupid game you love so much?’

  ‘Once from that, yes,’ he said. After hesitating, he asked, ‘Would you have dinner with me?’

  ‘Too busy at the moment, sorry.’

  Cavalier tilted his head, wanting an explanation.

  ‘Look,’ she said, observing his reaction, ‘I’ve had some issues recently. I’m working through them. I had a bad relationship with my very bad ex-husband.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

  ‘No. Maybe later.’

  Cavalier shook hands with her.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ he said, patting the doll on the head.

  2

  PIN’S PASSION

  Cavalier could not push Pin from his mind. He was confounded by their chance meeting. He believed he loved her on their first encounters four years earlier. She was unattainable then. If anything, she had even more appeal now. Cavalier had not come across anyone with anywhere near Pin’s attraction. Apart from her outstanding looks and forceful personality, he recalled the good conversations they had had, punctuated with sharp humour—well beyond the monosyllabic discourse he’d experienced with other Thai women.

  His Thai was fair; her English was good. Pin had been educated in Australia and was exceptionally bright, having been equal dux of her school. Yet her preoccupation with a doll seemed weird and out of character for such a worldly young woman. At first, he thought she may have joking, but her solemn comments about Serena suggested otherwise.

  After a few polite letters and some difficult phone calls, they had lost contact, as was often the way with long-distance relationships of that era. Now, seeing Pin again, his passion was reignited.