The Assassin on the Bangkok Express Page 11

  Cavalier walked to his bike, drove it fifty metres down the road, parked it in front of the clearing in front of the royals’ billboard and waited to see the result of his ambush. Both men got to their feet uncertainly. They looked about but could see no one. From their nervous words to each other, Cavalier believed they were concerned they would be killed. They gingerly removed their helmets and dragged their broken bikes clear of the road.

  Cavalier mounted his Harley and drove slowly to within ten metres of the stricken men. They backed away. Cavalier removed his gun and aimed it at them.

  ‘I won’t direct bullets at your bikes next time,’ he said. ‘If you chase me again, it will be your last rides.’

  With that, he revved the bike and drove off down the mountain. He would have to wait until another night to wai the Golden Buddha at mountain top.

  18

  THE SILENCER

  That next day, Cavalier walked home from a quiet cafe on the Chang Klan Road near his apartment after a light meal of duck and mixed vegetables, and water. In his mind the project was almost certain and this meant lifting his regimen to what he noted in his dairy as ‘SAS-level’. He would increase his running, gym work, yoga and aerobics to two hours a day, cut his sugar and alcohol intake to zero and reduce his daily meals. He also went to the local shooting range for practice, especially with handguns. On his second visit, he engaged the manager, who called himself ‘Maverick’. Furtive and gaunt-faced, he wore dark mirror glasses. His otherwise bald head had a foot-long ponytail and a smaller rat’s tail at the base of his skull. Cavalier said he wished to buy a silencer.

  ‘We can make them to specification,’ Maverick said, seeming to look directly at Cavalier. ‘It must be recorded, along with all your details.’

  Cavalier took out his wallet and laid a thousand baht on the counter.

  ‘Could it be done quietly?’ he asked.

  The Thai nodded, looked around and pocketed the money. ‘I’ll need the gun,’ he said.

  Cavalier took it from his satchel and handed it over.

  ‘Hmm,’ the manager said, ‘haven’t seen one of these for a long time.’

  ‘It works.’

  ‘May I ask why you need a silencer?’

  ‘Are you a red shirt?’ Cavalier asked, referring to the main political force in Thailand’s north.

  Maverick took off his glasses and blinked in surprise.

  ‘I am, yes,’ he said.

  ‘I am going to chase yellow shirts with it.’

  Maverick stared for a moment, forcing Cavalier to say: ‘I’m only joking. I don’t want to wake up the neighbourhood, if I use it.’

  Maverick gave a short laugh, exposing a big gap in his teeth.

  ‘I’ll need it for forty-eight hours,’ he said, and scribbled down his address, ‘could you come there at say nine p.m. in two days?’

  As requested, Cavalier gunned his Harley to the manager’s smart, two-level home in the Serene Lake Estate close to Chiang Mai airport. The noise from planes taking off was barely tolerable. The fumes from jet fuel were noticeable.

  ‘All the houses around here are empty,’ Maverick volunteered. ‘The owners have been driven away. This makes it easier for me to do my other business.’

  ‘Which is?’ Cavalier asked, as he was led down steps into a large basement with weapons-making and -repair equipment, and target boards. An array of guns, in various states of dismemberment, were scattered on benches. Two crates of automatic weapons sat in one corner.

  ‘I think you can work that out from this,’ Maverick said, sweeping his hand around the room, ‘many people want arms. It is very handy to be close to the airport for shipment. And buyers come from all over the world to inspect my handiwork and products.’

  ‘You live alone?’ Cavalier asked casually.

  ‘Yes. I take girls here when I want them. But only for a short time. They snoop around, smell the cordite and ask too many questions.’

  ‘Some are buried in the back garden, no doubt,’ Cavalier said, more as a statement than a query.

  Maverick tugged at his ponytail and was speechless for a moment.

  ‘Now look here,’ he said finally, ‘are you some farang cop or something?’

  ‘No, no, of course not. Your burial rituals are safe with me.’

  Maverick was now uneasy.

  ‘Relax, Pal,’ Cavalier said, ‘I’m only kidding. And I don’t care even if you have gold buried in the back garden. It’s not my business.’

  After making direct eye contact for the first time since they had met, Maverick considered him with a nervous expression for a few moments.

  ‘The silencer?’ Cavalier prompted.

  Maverick sighed, picked up Cavalier’s Glock 17, placed four bullets in the chamber and fired at a human-like wooden target with painted-on eyes, nose and mouth. Its dents made it appear from ten metres like Emmental cheese. The gun made a soft ‘phut’ sound and splintered the wood around the chest level. Maverick handed it to Cavalier. He aimed and fired twice.

  ‘You missed!’ Maverick said, squinting at the target.

  ‘Don’t think so,’ Cavalier said walking to the target, ‘the eyes have it.’

  Maverick was staggered by the accuracy as he put his finger into the holes where the fake eyes had been.

  ‘You’re a professional,’ Maverick said, trying not to sound in awe.

  ‘Just a better than average shot.’

  Cavalier pulled out his wallet.

  ‘How much?’ he asked.

  Maverick blinked. ‘For a professional like you, just five thousand baht. That includes twenty bullets, gratis.’

  Cavalier counted out five notes.

  ‘Of course, you keep this business quiet,’ he said.

  Maverick took the money, looked at the floor and said, ‘Well, that depends.’

  ‘Depends on what?’ Cavalier asked as he picked up his gun and slid it into his satchel.

  ‘Nothing, really.’

  Cavalier smiled, but not with his eyes. He mounted his Harley.

  ‘Just remember I know what is buried here,’ he said with a sharp grin, before revving the engine. Its roar, despite the special muffler, blanked out that of a plane taking off.

  *

  Cavalier had a love–hate attitude to the rigour of his training, and he likened it to slipping into the zone of writing a book. He hated the isolation and the high level of discipline, but loved the endeavour with the prospect of a successful operation. He would have worked just as hard to free his daughter for no payment at all, but with his shaky finances, the prospect of a big payday was an additional, if less emphatic, motivation. He believed he had stayed within his own moral code of not being able to be bought for an assignment. Cavalier would have planned this current mission regardless of the DEA’s payment. Taking such a fat fee was a welcome bonus. He was careful not to admit to his personal motivation, which he believed would have given Melody Smith an upper hand in the ‘project’.

  His few months stay so far in Chiang Mai, as low cost as it was, made him realise that his freelance writing and newspaper severance payout were not going to give him much of a living. In the past, while employed by his newspaper, he had avoided even taking a bus ticket for his secret work. Cavalier could not be suborned. He took quiet pride in no one being able to ‘buy’ him. Now it was different. He had actual formal contract work for the first time in a long career. It was on his terms and in that respect, he was keeping his independence, although he did not delude himself that there could be consequences for accepting payment.

  All his energies had to go into the assignment for which he had only partly formulated a plan. He had spent every day mulling over it. Jacinta had sent some good information on the train and its design, which he would follow up on with a phone call to the engineer. These, plus details on how the Mexicans would use the train, along with passenger lists, were just a few of the issues he had to factor in. The main question to start with was, how would he board the tra
in? Booking and appearing as Cavalier was out of the question.

  He reached the condo after his meeting with Maverick and was alert to any movement in the car and bike park surrounding the ground level. He put on his special glasses and was again overwhelmed by the movement they picked out, especially of rodents in corners and near drains. The biggest animal was a cat. It tripped across his path. Cavalier took off the glasses to observe it. Was it the black one he had seen sitting in the wheelchair? It did not stop to communicate as the one on the chair had. Cavalier parked his bike next to the chair, always a forlorn reminder of his departed friend.

  He made a mental note to ask the condo management what it was going to do with it.

  *

  In the late afternoon of the next day, he ventured for the first time in daylight to a favourite eating place, the Garden Restaurant on the Loi Kroh Road, not far from the Duangtwan Hotel, formerly Centara, where he had stayed on previous visits. He had spent four months holed up at the condo and venturing during the day only into the local market, and cafes, in a radius of three hundred metres from his apartment. Even his Thai language course at Pantip Plaza had been in night classes. Cavalier had been feeling claustrophobic and he decided to take a risk of being noticed by someone in the more central location frequented by foreigners and Thais alike. He ordered coffee from a cheerful mama-san and went again over how he might carry out a scheme to save his daughter. As hard as he thought and sketched things in a notepad, he could not figure a way to do this on the Bangkok Express. The venture seemed next to impossible to achieve, even if Jacinta could manage to assist. He kept thinking he had to be on the train, but was tormented by how.

  Just as he reached a mental impasse, he sipped his coffee and looked up to see a couple across the road moving past on the broken footpath. They were in animated discussion. It was Doug and Irina, the two suspected terrorists. They happened to glance at Cavalier, but looked away and avoided further eye contact. He wondered what they might be up to and whether Gregory would take action against them. He finished his coffee quickly and left. The sighting had put him on edge again and he regretted leaving the condo and village area.

  19

  SCORES OF A PSYCHOPATH

  That night Cavalier had the most powerful dream since his nightmare about decapitation. This one had him waking up feeling disquieted. He stepped up to the front door of a house and could see his mother and father inside talking to each other and acting as if they were expecting a visitor. Cavalier woke up before he entered the house. Both his parents had been dead for some time. Cavalier’s first fully conscious thought was that the dream was forewarning him, or forecasting that he would soon be joining them, in death. That shook him. He never considered that he was dicing with his own demise. He had always believed that he took calculated risks and prepared for any mission so well that he invariably limited the chances of ultimate failure. He never thought he had nerves of steel, and that was why he did everything to remove the major risk elements from any assignment. He did not think his courage had been corroded by too many dangerous projects, although he admitted to becoming unhinged after or before the odd project. On these rare occasions, as with the believed beheading of his daughter in the previous year, he turned to the bottle for solace.

  Unlike his late friend Ted, he had never been tormented by a kill. Cavalier’s golden rule had always been that if he did not execute, then the proposed target would go on destroying others. He told Tommy Gregory it was his ‘Pol Joe Adolf’ rule. If someone had assassinated them—Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler—before they did damage, hundreds of millions of lives would have been saved, not to mention the untold misery that enveloped families and friends of all those who died or were injured by these monsters. He felt not a second of remorse for his targets before or after his work. Not even the murder of Pin’s husband caused him a moment’s anguish.

  Cavalier as a boy was the family executioner if a beloved pet or a farm animal had to be put down. He told his diary that he had more feeling for those animals than he ever did for his human targets. He had recurring nightmares about a cat he had to chloroform and bury when it was half-crushed by a car. He was then fifteen. He cried as a twenty-one-year-old after he had to take the family dog to the vet when it was crippled by arthritis. At fifty, he recalled the look of safety and security in the eyes of his mother’s dying poodle when he held it as a vet injected it into oblivion. That minute stayed with him for years, and it hurt. Those events lingered around his psyche for decades.

  In more recent human projects, a success only raised his heartbeat to about a hundred and twenty. In his earlier projects, his rate soared as high as a hundred and ninety and he admitted being afraid to the point of shaking, even losing control. Over the decades, he learnt how to prepare himself for the emotional reaction of a kill. He factored in the fear element and how to manage it.

  Gregory once asked if he ever had self-doubt about a project, or a moment when he wanted to pull out.

  ‘Of course,’ Cavalier replied. ‘In recent years, I’ve overcome this by telling myself an aphorism expounded by a great football coach, who happened to be an atheist: “If it is to be, then it is up to me.” No superbeing’s will, or anything else, comes into it. This simple but wonderful line has always bolstered me, sometimes just before the end of an assignment. I have always done the preparation, justified in my own mind by what I am about to do. I don’t need to go over all the reasons. I just recall that line and go on with it.’

  In the last twenty-five years, he could not recall his heightened emotion ever spoiling his aim or intent. His physical recovery from a mission was quick, as it was from exercise. Cavalier had built an exceptional constitution into his body, which he believed kept his mind active and sharp.

  A year earlier he had wondered if he were a psychopath, although he never enjoyed actually killing. Cavalier treated it simply as a job, and he did it as well as he could. He had studied psychopaths and serial killers and had done all the tests (under the supervision of psychiatrists and Gregory) to calculate if he were, indeed a cold-hearted, mental defective of some sort.

  ‘You scored a miserably low score,’ Gregory told him when they reviewed his test results, ‘six out of forty. This means you are the opposite of a psychopath. Our analysis and yours came up with similar figures and the mean was six. Under “glib and superficial charm” you score nought. On “grandiose self-worth” you failed to register. None of the shrinks or I, who studied you, ever heard you brag or pump yourself up.’

  ‘I must have hit the scoreboard on the category “need for stimulation”?’

  ‘Do you want to be known as a psychopath?’ Gregory asked with a grin.

  ‘It would be kind of fun to know one, wouldn’t it?’

  Gregory chuckled. ‘I believe you’ve eliminated quite a few,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t really know them, though.’

  ‘True, true …’ Gregory said, as he adjusted his glasses and looked at the result sheet, ‘you scored on “taking chances and doing risky things”. Yet psychopaths have low self-discipline. I don’t know anyone with your level of self-discipline. You follow through. You are dogged even when the routine is dull, such as when you impersonate someone else over a certain period of time.’

  ‘That’s because I want a successful end result.’

  ‘Psychopaths don’t have that capacity. They fail to finish tasks.’

  ‘So sad,’ Cavalier said with a mock frown.

  ‘You are not a good liar either, Vic. Psychos are.’

  ‘The category mentions “shrewd, crafty, cunning”.’

  ‘Okay,’ Gregory conceded, ‘you have those traits on the job.’

  ‘You once called me a cunning linguist.’

  Gregory laughed. ‘You do have language skills!’ he said.

  ‘The lying category also covers being “deceptive, deceitful, underhand, manipulative and dishonest”.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I can b
e all those things on assignment. I often behave unethically and misrepresent myself to acquire information. I receive a few points there, don’t I?’ Gregory tilted his head in a further sign of concession. ‘And how about “lack of remorse and guilt”?’ Cavalier added. ‘What if a killer doesn’t care about his victims?’

  ‘Yes, okay, agreed. But in your case those victims are worthy of elimination.’

  ‘Semantics! I am dispassionate and cold-hearted. I have disdain for targets.’

  ‘You really want a higher score, don’t you?’ Gregory said, observing him over his glasses with a slight grin.

  ‘I don’t like being outscored by anyone, even psychopaths.’

  Gregory shook his head and laughed. ‘You’re a real competitor, Vic. Okay, you gained a point for “impulsivity”.’

  ‘That’s not a word. Sounds like an American management school make-up.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘No credibility.’

  ‘Where do you fit into this?’ Gregory asked. ‘It says, “unable to resist temptation, frustrations and urges”.’

  They looked at each other and laughed.

  ‘Well?’ Cavalier said, ‘and how about “foolhardy, rash, unpredictable”.’

  ‘Yes, but that is in relation to “erratic and reckless”, which is decidedly not you.’ He paused. Then, with a more serious expression, he asked, ‘Is it?’

  Cavalier ignored the question and remarked: ‘I’ve had trouble in long-term commitments.’

  ‘You’re only thinking of your relationships with women. You are very committed in all other things.’

  ‘True. But you must give me a point here.’

  ‘Half a point, maybe.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘The doctors and I wondered about the only two answers you did not respond to. The first was: When did you know you were cut out for your kind of specialist work?’