Crackdown Read online

  Osborne leaned over the table, stuck a fork into the lamb rack on Calvino’s plate. He picked up a knife and cut meat off the bone, picking up the cooked flesh with his fingers and feeding it to Cesar and Charlie.

  “I love the honesty of dogs. They never have any moral problem eating what is offered. Ballard was not that different from Cesar and Charlie in that regard.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”—Graham Greene

  OSBORNE RECOUNTED HOW he’d spent time, capital and old IOUs to bring rough justice to the mastermind who’d ordered the murder of his son, Rob. In planning for the revenge killing, he’d discovered a mutuality of interest with Ballard. He decided they were two of a kind. Osborne needed to square accounts over his son’s murder in Rangoon. Ballard seemed to have no problem working with a man like Osborne if it meant eliminating a common enemy, and he’d seen an opportunity. An influential person with a good personal reason to bring down a big-time illegal drug smuggler had appeared out of nowhere. A black bag operation was set in motion to get the dealer. It had been a work in progress when Ballard had suddenly been pulled off the case and reassigned to gather intelligence on Dr. Marley Solberg. Only Ballard hadn’t told Osborne of the sudden change of his assignment. He’d only told him he had to sort out a couple of problems first.

  “I didn’t even know he’d come to Bangkok,” Osborne told Calvino.

  Calvino let that information sink in as a waitress arrived with another basket of bread. Osborne’s two dogs took no notice.

  There had been a number of things that Osborne hadn’t known about Ballard, but that hadn’t seemed to matter at the time.

  “I sized up Ballard the first time we met as one of those men who worked for himself. It didn’t matter what it said on his name card. Ballard was self-employed.”

  Osborne had passed information on to Ballard about how Calvino had had his own teddy bear moment with Marley. Calvino had also been in Rangoon when Rob Osborne had been killed. From Ballard’s point of view, it must have seemed as though Calvino’s name just kept cropping up in unexpected ways. Osborne, who couldn’t let go of his son’s murder, played along. Osborne had seen too late that, for Ballard, the chance to bag a big player in a major drug smuggling operation could wait. The pressure had shifted to finding Dr. Marley Solberg. He had come to Bangkok not to arrange a deal with a smuggler but to find the rogue software programmer that DARPA had at the top of their “persons of interest” list.

  Osborne had first laid eyes on Ballard at an airport in Madagascar. It was sheer chance. If the timing of their flights had been off by a few minutes, they would never have crossed paths. But Osborne’s flight was running late, and Ballard’s arrived early, giving fate a chance to set the clock so that Ballard arrived in a private plane a few minutes before Osborne landed his private jet. Osborne had heard traffic control give the go-ahead to Ballard, so he had circled the airfield, waiting for Ballard’s plane to land. He wondered who this person was to merit priority landing.

  “I’m in the shipping business,” Ballard had told him as they walked through immigration and customs. “And your line of business is...?”

  “Night entertainment.”

  “Brothels?”

  “I also sell alcohol. I find most men need alcohol before sleeping with a whore. I’m a middle man,” said Osborne, “the one who introduces the buyer and seller.”

  Ballard smiled and nodded.

  “You tie both ends of the rope.”

  “I take it you don’t build ships,” said Osborne. “You procure ships.”

  “Procuring is a term more appropriate to your line of business.”

  “All business is the same. Give a man enough rope and his competitors will drive him to hang himself.”

  They exchanged enough information to size each other up. Giving away just enough but not so much as to destroy the mystery. What sealed the friendship was Ballard asking if he could bum a cigarette. Osborne tapped a cigarette from his pack, handed it to Ballard and lit one for himself, passing the lighter’s flame in front of Ballard, who leaned into it.

  “Almost everyone I know who smokes has quit or is dead,” said Osborne.

  Only later did Osborne discover the reason Ballard had flown into Madagascar. He was on the trail of a drug smuggler who controlled a supply network operating between Bangkok and Los Angeles. Intelligence reports showed that the market was expanding. Osborne explained that he was in Madagascar to spend time with a local French-speaking woman named Sylvia whom he’d recruited into his personal breeding program on a previous trip. Sylvia was nineteen years old, green eyes, dark skin—a mulatto, with a black mother and a French father. Sylvia spoke no English, and Osborne had planned his trip to coincide with her ovulation cycle. He was determined to get Sylvia pregnant.

  The trifecta—plane arrival, smoking and hotel—was enough to bind them. Osborne was booked at the same hotel as Ballard. The first morning in the hotel dining room, there was Ballard again. Osborne caught Ballard’s eye, which was difficult as his eyes were trained on Sylvia. Osborne invited him to join their table.

  “Do you speak French?” he asked Ballard.

  “No,” he said.

  “Good, join us. Sylvia speaks no English. Communication with women should be limited to meaningful glances.”

  Osborne’s Madagascar wife sat mute at the table, occasionally asking Osborne something in French. She lasted ten minutes before drifting back to their room to change into her bikini for a swim.

  Once she’d gone that first morning, Ballard had opened up. He didn’t need much persuasion and even came across as someone who didn’t have many friends he could confide in. Every man comes to a point in his life when he can’t keep it all inside and the first person who is prepared to listen is going to hear something normally heard only by a priest at confession. That first morning he got to know Ballard over fresh-baked croissants and double espresso at the hotel café. They swapped stories about music, women and wine in Bangkok, London and Rangoon, and they smoked cigarettes and talked about private airplanes in foreign airports and, finally, cargo ships.

  Over the course of five days, like a cat with a ball of yarn, Osborne had unspooled Ballard’s personal story. Each day Ballard waited until Sylvia kissed Osborne on the cheek and left the two men alone at the table. He’d pick up his story where he’d left it the morning before. In high school Ballard had played tenor sax in a jazz band in Spring Lake, New Jersey. The band, called the Lemurs, had five members. Ryan, the lead singer, disappeared one day into a daytime TV show and didn’t return their calls. Ryan’s sudden departure left a gaping hole in the band and a lot of hard feelings. Ballard and the others were still basically kids with big dreams, and it looked like the dream had ended.

  Abandonment has never been a medicine anyone can swallow without tasting the bitterness rising up in the back of their throat—something you can spit out but can’t stop from poisoning your opinion of life. The band unraveled like a cheap suit. Gradually the band members lost contact with one another. Ballard graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in Southeast Asian politics. The DEA recruited him, saying he had a bright future in making the world a better place. For a year or so he actually believed that was possible.

  In his first year with the DEA, he set up a sting operation. The targets included two members of his old band—Willy Joe, a black guitar player, and Arnold, a keyboard player who’d moved to San Diego. The two of them walked into a trap. They had half a kilo of cocaine and at the point of sale were arrested with half a dozen agents pointing guns at them. Ballard had stayed undercover and wasn’t present when his ex-band members were arrested, but when their trial came up, he testified against them. Of course, it came out in cross-examination that they knew each other from high school and had played in a band together. Ballard received a commendation for putting his friends in prison. That was the day he figured out there was no such th
ing as a bright future in friendship.

  His testimony had locked up two old his friends in a federal prison. Both of them were released a few years later and disappeared from the grid. It worried Ballard some; he found himself looking over his shoulder. Their prison time had hardened them, he heard on the grapevine, setting them up with the right contacts in the drug business. During their nine years in prison, the drug world had changed in a dozen ways. There was a lot of money to be made online.

  “Are they in Madagascar?” asked Osborne.

  Ballard shrugged.

  “Don’t know. Don’t really care.”

  The last DEA intelligence report on them, slipped to Ballard by a friend, indicated that Willy Joe and Arnold had been active in Macau, Phnom Penh and Bangkok.

  “I saw Willy Joe at the Bali jazz festival a few months ago,” Ballard told Osborne. “He threatened to kill me.”

  Osborne’s eyes brightened.

  “But he said it wasn’t necessary, that I’d get what was coming to me.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning a hooker name Christina.”

  “I thought drug pushers were stupid,” said Osborne. “This one seems quite brilliant. Finishing off someone with a hooker. Not original but still brilliant. I often wondered who fell for that scam.”

  “I suspect your business worked on a similar model.”

  Ballard had been planning his resignation from undercover work for more than a year. He’d saved money from selling cargo ships. He worked in the same part of Asia as the friends he’d betrayed and had figured it was just a matter of time before they ran into each other again. In Southeast Asia, settling a score cost less than a bottle of 1986 Lafite.

  “Just quit,” said Osborne. “You have enough fuck-you money. Walk away.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve been fired.”

  He told Osborne the story about Christina Tangier, the hotel room in London, the teddy bear, the photographs, the conceptual art exhibitions and the hedge fund manager. Christina had bought Ballard’s act that he was one of the super-rich. His mission was to get information about a Colombian cartel boss she’d slept with. And he’d bought her story that she was just another high-class hooker. Two liars were fucking each other for their own reasons that had nothing to do with sex. Ballard played the big shot; he bragged about his shipping interests. He didn’t disabuse her of the fantasy she’d built around him in the first half hour of their exchange. He liked playing the international jet setter and had used the role as a cover. Impressing her was a collateral benefit. She’d sworn an omertà to him, an oath of silence, which turned out to be a lie. She didn’t tell Ballard the oath only applied to Christina the hooker, and Christina the artist had no obligation to follow an oath that interfered with her art.

  “Have a cigarette,” said Osborne. “I certainly need a smoke.”

  On their last day together in Madagascar, Sylvia had lingered at the table. Ballard, though he had obviously been attracted by her beauty at first sight, seemed disappointed that she made no effort to leave.

  “If you’re ever in Bangkok, look me up,” said Osborne.

  “And if you ever come across anyone wanting to buy or sell a ship, here’s my card,” said Ballard.

  Osborne studied the gold-embossed business card, which showed both New York and London addresses. He pocketed it.

  “I don’t carry a business card,” said Osborne, “although that’s bad manners in Asia, I know. Frankly I don’t want people calling me about the next deal of a lifetime. As it happens, I do know rich people who might be in the market for a yacht, but since you’re in the cargo ship business, that’s not going to help you very much. Why don’t we joint-venture a contract on the man who was responsible for the murder of my son? He’s the major drug guy in Southeast Asia.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Ballard.

  Having finished the story, Osborne stroked Charlie’s neck as he ate the last rib from Calvino’s rack of lamb. Cesar had fallen asleep on his chair with a belly full of buns.

  “But you didn’t eat,” said Osborne.

  Calvino smiled, thinking McPhail had said the same thing. It hadn’t been the tacos. He just lived in a time and place that robbed him of his appetite.

  “When Ballard phoned,” said Calvino, “he told me he’d come to Bangkok with a deal to sell a ship to someone in Phuket. Any idea whether he was telling the truth?”

  “An American named Damon was introduced to me at a party. It turned out that he wanted to buy a yacht. He made his money in show business and had a luxury home in Phuket. I said I knew someone I’d met in Madagascar who might be able to help him get a good deal. I passed along Damon’s information to Ballard.”

  Osborne poured the last of the wine into Calvino’s glass.

  “If I’d known Ballard was in town,” said Osborne, “I’d have assumed he was here to kill the man who killed Rob. That would have been good news. But it wasn’t to be. Is that enough for your friend, the general? Ask him to order the army to release Sky and send her home.”

  Cesar and Charlie slept off the buns and lamb on separate chairs. Osborne was a little drunk. Calvino didn’t need to tell him that no one in the police or anywhere was ordering the army to do anything that the army didn’t want to do.

  There was an old saying about letting sleeping dogs lie, but Calvino knew it wasn’t the kind of fable that Osborne wanted to hear.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “Sooner or later... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”—Graham Greene, The Quiet American

  GENERAL PRATT’S WARNING that the US embassy was pushing the department to make an arrest of Ballard’s killer haunted Calvino. He knew he was on their short list. It was just a matter of time before he received a visit. The best strategy was to convince your enemy to underestimate your available resources and capability. Calvino’s law on ego swallowing—show less than you possess to stroke the ego of your enemy, feed his sense of superiority. Never starve it. In the digital age, the act of returning his office to its pre-digital splendor of twenty-five years earlier made him appear as a housefly caught in an amber tomb. Or as the Thai said, he looked like a frog trapped in a tropical coconut shell. The trick was not to overdo the show. For that reason, Calvino decided against the fedora and double-breasted suit.

  Instead he dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, one with a pattern of dark blue leaves and vines among the large white Hibiscus blooms, the top two buttons undone, showing neck and the hint of chest. A five-baht gold chain, a Buddha amulet in a small case rested just below his throat. His beige slacks were freshly press and he wore a pair of new brown dockers without socks. The choice had been between the dockers and bedroom slippers given to him by an old Chinese client. He’d never worn the slippers. Inside his closet, pristine white slippers, tiny red dragons on the sides, were still in the box. He wanted the man-out-of-time look. The bedroom slippers would have pushed him over the edge into the crazy man category. That wouldn’t work. When he had examined himself in the mirror, Calvino saw a man who could have passed for a late middle-aged captain washed ashore from the old analogue world.

  Ratana assisted in the removal of his computer. In its place was an electric typewriter positioned on his desk. She was wearing a sleeveless, hip-hugging silk dress with a narrow red belt showing off her waist and red high-heel shoes. The hemline reached around a full hand above the knee. She looked far too plugged into the digital age to fit the image of an old-fashioned private eye’s office.

  John-John, her luk krueng son sat in a chair facing her desk. John-John was reading a book. Not just any book. But Ronald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Calvino had given him the book for his seventh birthday. Ratana had helped him choose his clothes: a grey T-shirt with a silhouette of T-Rex on the front, green baggy shorts, and yellow racing shoes.

  He waied Calvino as he came into the office, “Hi Uncle Vinny,” he said.

  �
��Found that golden ticket?” asked Calvino.

  “Still looking,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  Ratana said, “The school is closed for a teachers’ outing.”

  He walked into his office. Having John-John in the office, Calvino decided, worked to his benefit. It would downgrade his operation in the estimation of the agents from the embassy. A seven-year-old was an analog bonus.

  He sat at his desk. Ratana had plugged the typewriter into the wall socket and watched as he threaded in a piece of A4 paper and typed: “The only Lafite is a Rothschild. Good nose. Elegant and sensual body. The ’86 is superior to the ’73. Both bottles should be decanted for an hour so they can breathe.” He stopped, satisfied with what he’d written, smiled and looked up at Ratana who had slipped inside.

  “The touch of the keyboard comes back quickly,” he said.

  “You don’t need to convince me. You’ll need to convince...”

  She broke off.

  “Who is it you need to convince, Vinny?”

  “Your dress.”

  She stood with her hands on her hips.

  “What about my dress?”

  “It looks like you belong behind a computer.”

  “That’s because I work behind one.”

  “Not for the next few days.”

  “You want me to go home and change?”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s okay. It’s not important. I don’t mean your dress isn’t important. I mean... I don’t know what I mean.”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen a typewriter in years,” she said.

  Calvino nodded, looking at the machine.

  “That’s the point. We judge time by technology. We judge information by the date of the technology. Time is an exact messenger. I’ve decided to be a typewriter fundamentalist. I don’t change with the times. You don’t hear much about us, but of course you wouldn’t. We’re not online or in a chat room. But we know we’re out there.”