The Solitary Man (Stephen Leather Thrillers) Page 10

  Bird shrugged uninterestedly. ‘Thirty-eight.’

  Winter peered at the girl wearing badge number thirty-eight. ‘Good choice,’ he said.

  ‘And twenty-two,’ added Bird.

  Winter nodded. ‘Another cracker. I had her a couple of weeks ago. Great mouth. She’s got these razor scars all over her left wrist, long cuts but not deep. She did the first three when her mother died when she was a kid. The second group of three was after her brother crashed her motorcycle and the third lot was when she caught her farang boyfriend in bed with her sister. Now her wrist looks like a cheese-grater. What do you reckon to that, Hutch?’ Hutch said nothing. ‘Self-mutilation brought on by low self-esteem,’ said Winter. ‘Who said that Open University course was a waste of time?’ He laughed and beat on the bar with the flat of his hands. ‘Bloody playing at it, she was. I saw a guy slit his wrists for real in Durham. Red stuff all over the place. Dead in a minute. What about you, Hutch? See anything you want? Any last requests?’

  Hutch didn’t look around. The last thing he wanted was a massage. What he wanted was to be back home in Hong Kong with his dogs. ‘How are you going to do it? How are you going to get me inside?’

  Winter moved his bar stool closer to Hutch’s. He put his arm around his shoulder. ‘Piece of cake, old lad. Bird and I’ve got it all worked out.’ He waved Bird over, who joined them in the huddle. ‘We’re gonna fix it so that you get arrested on a drugs charge. They’ll throw you in with—-’

  ‘What!’ said Hutch.

  Winter patted him on the back. ‘Hear me out, will you? We set you up. We put a small package of drugs in your luggage, then grass you to the cops. They pull you in, you say it’s not down to you, but they’ll throw you in the clink until they get the stuff tested.’

  ‘Billy, they put you away for life for drugs here. Life and some.’

  Winter wagged a finger at Hutch. ‘That’s the kicker: it won’t be drugs.’

  ‘So they find out I’m carrying talcum powder? They’re not going to put me into prison for talc, are they?’

  ‘They’ll send the stuff away to be tested, Hutch. That’ll take time.’

  ‘What if they test it there and then? It’s not going to taste like heroin, is it?’

  Winter smiled thinly. ‘You’ve been watching too many movies,’ he said. ‘The cops don’t stick in a finger and suck it. It’s evidence, right, and evidence has to be uncontaminated. It’s sealed and sent off to a lab. And it’ll take them at least five days to get the tests back.’

  Hutch looked across at Bird. Bird nodded reassuringly. ‘There’s a backlog,’ he said. ‘Five days, maybe six. Seven at most.’

  ‘Then what?’ asked Hutch. ‘They find out that it’s talc or chalk dust, then what? They’re going to wonder what the hell I’m playing at.’

  ‘We’ve taken care of that,’ said Bird. ‘A man will come forward and claim that he did it, that you two had had a row and he was trying to get revenge. He’ll get six months, a year at most.’

  ‘That’s the worst possible scenario,’ interrupted Winter. ‘We’ll spread some money about and he’ll get away with a fine. There’ll be apologies all round, the chief of police’ll probably shake you by the hand. But it’ll be too late, you’ll have cased the joint from the inside and briefed our man. Then you can fuck off back to Hong Kong, no hard feelings.’

  ‘No hard feelings!’ repeated Hutch in disbelief.

  ‘It’ll be a breeze,’ said Winter. ‘I’ll even throw in a few grand for expenses.’ He patted Hutch on the back. ‘Seven days, Hutch. Maximum. You can do a seven-day stretch.’

  Hutch shuddered. ‘I don’t know, Billy. It’s the door clanging shut. The bars on the windows. The walls. It’s . . .’

  ‘It’s seven days, Hutch. I know what you mean, I know what it’s like inside, but last time you were facing life, with no parole date set. This time you’re going to know that you’ll be out in a week.’

  ‘Do you know how many people are in that prison?’

  ‘Fifteen thousand. Give or take.’

  ‘So how do you expect me to find him? A needle in a haystack doesn’t come close.’

  Winter finished his drink and waved the barman over and ordered another before speaking. ‘They put all the foreigners in the same place. Zone two. You’ll be able to find him.’

  ‘You haven’t thought this through,’ said Hutch. ‘Even if you get him out, he’s going to be trapped in Bangkok. They’ll watch the airports, the ports . . .’

  ‘I’ve got that in hand,’ said Winter. ‘We’ll go up north and across the border into Burma. I’ve got contacts there. Good contacts. I can get us new passports there and get a ship to anywhere in the world. We’ll be home free.’

  ‘It isn’t as easy as that,’ said Hutch.

  ‘This is Thailand. It’s exactly as easy as that. There’s a town up near the border called Fang. We’ll pick up a guide there and he’ll take us across. It happens all the time, every day. It’s one of the most active smuggling routes in the world.’

  Hutch shook his head. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said.

  Winter took his hand off Hutch’s back. He looked across at Bird and raised an eyebrow. Bird went over to stand in front of the window and peered at the girls.

  Winter and Hutch sat in silence. ‘You don’t have any say in the matter,’ Winter said eventually. ‘You’ll do as you’re fucking told.’

  Hutch leaned forward, his hands clasped together either side of his glass. ‘Billy, I wouldn’t be able to take it. I’d crack up.’

  ‘You’re exaggerating.’

  Hutch shook his head. ‘You don’t know me, you don’t know what’s inside my head.’

  ‘I shared a cell with you, Hutch,’ said Winter, his voice a menacing whisper. ‘You know what we went through in choky. I know you better than you know yourself. All you need is the motivation, and I’m giving you that. If you don’t do it, I’ll slap you harder than you’ve ever been slapped in your life. And then I’ll slap your kid.’ He paused and stared at Hutch with cold, hard eyes. ‘You’re going inside.’

  Hutch’s hands began to shake and his beer sloshed over the side of his glass. Winter put a hand on Hutch’s shoulder in a father-like gesture of concern.

  Hutch shook him away. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he hissed.

  NIKOLAI KONOVALOV WIPED HIS forehead with a grubby handkerchief. He doubted that he’d ever get used to the heat and humidity. Or the mosquitoes. He’d studied for his degree in Kiev and completed his PhD in St Petersburg and he was more used to sub-zero temperatures and snow drifts than he was to the unrelenting sauna that was the Golden Triangle. He tucked the wet handkerchief into the pocket of his lab coat and checked the timer on his workbench. Fifteen minutes. Long enough for the morphine and acetic anhydride to bond together. Simple chemistry, the sort of process he’d done at school, never mind university. A child with a chemistry set could do the same, provided he had access to morphine. Konovalov had access to morphine, enough morphine to keep a thousand people in euphoria for a year.

  He turned off the gas burner and waited for the mixture to cool. The heat of the burner made the air inside the hut almost unbearable. The walls and ceiling were of corrugated iron, and while there were large holes cut in the walls to allow ventilation, it was still an oven. A floor-mounted fan at the end of the bench did its best to keep the air moving, but it was fighting a losing battle. Konovalov picked up the fan and put it closer to the huge glass flask containing the mixture to speed up the cooling process.

  When the flask was cool enough to touch, he called for his assistant, a young Thai boy who was waiting outside. Together they wrapped a thick cloth around the neck and swivelled it down, carefully pouring the contents through a carbon filter to remove the impurities. It was ironic, Konovalov thought as he watched the clear liquid bubble through the filter, that he was going to such trouble to keep contaminants out. By the time the drug reached its end users, it would probably have been adulterated with ch
alk, talcum powder, brick dust, or any one of a dozen other substances. That was no reason for him to take any less care. Nikolai Konovalov was a professional, and he took a pride in his work.

  The boy removed the filter and put it in a bin in the corner of the hut. He helped Konovalov lift the twenty-gallon glass flask off the floor and on to the bench. Konovalov had already weighed out the sodium carbonate and he nodded for the boy to proceed. The boy sprinkled the crystals into the liquid and stirred it with a long wooden pole. Konovalov peered at the flask, watching as the crude heroin particles solidified and dropped to the bottom. More basic chemistry, he thought. A child could do it. In fact, he hoped to get to the stage where his young assistant did most of the work. The boy was eager to learn, and he had steady hands. Konovalov nodded and the boy grinned, pleased at the approval.

  Together they waited until all the heroin had been deposited at the bottom of the flask, then they poured the mixture through a large filter. Konovalov used a stainless-steel spatula to scrape off the crystals and deposit them in another flask, this one containing a slurry of alcohol and charcoal, another step in the purification process. He filtered out the charcoal then put the flask on the burner.

  There was an extractor fan set in the roof above the bench and Konovalov flicked on the switch. The fan growled and began to spin and only then did he light the burner. The alcohol fumes could be explosive in a confined space, and more than one of Zhou Yuanyi’s jungle laboratories had gone up in flames before Konovalov had arrived on the scene. That was why he was earning fifty thousand dollars a month, paid into a Swiss bank account; not to carry out basic chemistry, but to ensure that the conversion from opium to injectable heroin went off without incident. Konovalov worked for eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and he’d been in the jungle for eight months without a break. He didn’t resent the long hours, not when he was being paid so well. As an industrial chemist in Russia it would have taken him ten years to earn fifty thousand dollars. It had taken him only minutes to accept the offer made by Zhou’s representative in a bar in St Petersburg. Konovalov was single, his father had died of liver cirrhosis years earlier and his mother had remarried and moved to a Moscow suburb. He had no reason to stay, and fifty thousand reasons to go.

  It took an hour for the alcohol to evaporate, during which time he prepared a new flask of morphine and acetic anhydride, ready to start the process again. The laboratory functioned as a production line – it had to if the Russian was to keep up with Zhou’s demands for the finished product. Zhou had three such laboratories at different locations within the area of the Golden Triangle he controlled.

  At the far end of Konovalov’s laboratory were the drums of chemicals Konovalov needed, most of them with Chinese labels, the quality as good as anything he’d be able to buy in Russia. In some cases Konovalov reckoned the Chinese chemicals were better than he’d be able to buy in his own country because black marketeers in Russia weren’t above adulterating their wares in the same way that street pushers diluted their drugs with whatever was available.

  With the alcohol gone, Konovalov was left with white granules of heroin. The final stage in the preparation of No. 4 heroin was the most dangerous. It involved dissolving the granules in alcohol once more and then carefully adding hydrochloric acid and ether. Ether vapour was even more explosive than alcohol and had to be carefully handled. The boy stood at Konovalov’s shoulder as he poured in the acid. White flakes began to form in the mixture. Konovalov put out his hand and without being asked the boy gave him the wooden pole, like a nurse assisting a surgeon. As Konovalov stirred, more flakes began to form, like a snowstorm. All that remained was for him to filter and dry the flakes and he’d have another batch of pure heroin. So far that day he’d produced five kilograms and it wasn’t even midday.

  HUTCH LOOKED AT HIS watch. It was almost three o’clock. Bird was coming around to the guest house at four. He paced up and down at the end of the bed. The room was claustrophobic and the lack of a window made it feel like a prison cell. He wondered if that was why Winter had booked him in that particular guest house. Hutch shuddered.

  ‘Seven days,’ he whispered to himself. ‘It’s only seven days.’ He’d done two months in solitary confinement after an early escape attempt from Parkhurst, and he’d got through that. It hadn’t been easy, but he’d done it.

  He stood with his back to the door and gently banged his shoulders against the wood. ‘Seven days,’ he said. Like Winter had said, he’d be able to do it standing on his head.

  He couldn’t face waiting alone in the room with its cheap furniture and blood-flecked sheets any longer so he went downstairs. He wandered aimlessly through the hot, crowded streets, his mind in turmoil. He kept thinking about the boy he hadn’t seen for more than eight years, and his wife Kathy, who he’d loved with all his heart and who’d dropped him like a stone when he’d been given his life sentence.

  He walked by a line of small stalls where women were diligently threading orchids and flowers into garlands. As he turned a corner he came across a small outdoor temple. Worshippers, mainly women, lit sticks of sickly-sweet incense and prayed, and half a dozen young Buddhist monks in saffron robes were engaged in earnest conversation at the entrance. A group of motorcyclists was ranged in front of a red traffic light, and while most gunned their engines impatiently, several had their hands together in prayer as they stood astride their machines.

  Hutch peered through the black and gold railings which surrounded the temple. It was a long time since Hutch had prayed. A long time. And he doubted that a prayer to any god would solve his present problems. Nevertheless, he was touched by the intensity with which the Thais went about their worship, totally focused on the shrine and the trappings of their religion and ignoring the heat and noise and pollution. He held on to the railings with both hands as he watched the Thais at prayer.

  A few paces along to his left, close to the entrance to the temple, an old woman sat next to a metal table on which was a stack of small red-painted wooden cages containing tiny birds. A good-looking woman with a Chanel bag on her arm handed the old lady some money and was given one of the cages. She carried it into the grounds of the temple and opened it. The birds flew skywards and the woman watched them go before handing the empty cage back. Hutch guessed that releasing the birds was some sort of tribute or celebration.

  The old woman saw him looking at the caged birds and she smiled, revealing a gap where her two front teeth had been. She said something to him in Thai but Hutch knew as little of the language as he did the religion. He returned her smile and went over to her table. There were six cages in all, each containing six birds.

  ‘How much?’ he asked, picking up one of the cages.

  The old woman’s smile widened and she held up five fingers. Hutch had no way of knowing if she meant five, fifty or five hundred baht. He took out his wallet. The woman pointed at the cage he was holding. Hutch shook his head and waved a hand over the table. ‘All of them,’ he said. The old woman frowned, not understanding. Hutch pointed at the cages one at a time. She nodded enthusiastically. Hutch gave her a handful of banknotes, then he picked up the first cage and set its occupants free. He smiled as they flapped upwards in a flurry of brown feathers, chirping furiously. He opened the second cage, and the third, releasing the birds.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ said a voice behind him.

  Hutch whirled around. It was Bird, smiling good naturedly.

  ‘Are you following me?’ Hutch asked.

  Bird shrugged but didn’t answer. ‘They put something in the food that they get addicted to. Like heroin. The birds return to her and she puts them back in their cages and sells them again.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Hutch looked at the three remaining cages. He picked one up. He realised that it didn’t matter. He wasn’t doing it for them, he was doing it for himself. He opened the lids and set the last of the birds free. They flew upwards and he shielded his eyes with his hands to protect them from the glare
of the sun as he watched them go.

  ‘What is it, Bird? Did Billy tell you to keep an eye on me? Did he tell you I’d run?’

  ‘It’s time to go,’ said Bird. He was wearing a light blue safari suit with short sleeves.

  Together they walked back to Hutch’s guest house and up to his room. Bird took a plane ticket from his inside jacket pocket and gave it to Hutch.

  ‘Is Billy coming?’ Hutch asked.

  ‘No. He doesn’t want to be seen here. The police will come around later and ask questions. We don’t want anyone to tell them that you had a farang visitor.’

  Hutch looked at the ticket. It was to Hong Kong. ‘What if the police don’t put me into the prison?’ Hutch asked. ‘What if they give me bail?’

  ‘They won’t,’ said Bird. ‘They take drug smuggling very seriously here, more seriously than murder. You will be carrying what appears to be a kilogram of pure heroin. They will discover that you have been staying here, and they know that this guest house is often used by drug gangs as a recruiting centre for couriers. You won’t get bail.’

  ‘And what do I tell them?’

  ‘You can say that you were here on a short holiday, or for a business meeting. You stayed here to save money. And you’ve no idea how the drugs got in your bag. You play the innocent tourist. Of course, they will not believe you.’

  Hutch wrapped his arms around his waist as if he were hugging himself. ‘How can you be sure they’ll put me in with this guy Harrigan?’

  ‘We can’t, but you’ll be able to find him.’ Bird took a photograph from his jacket pocket and showed it to Hutch. ‘This is Ray Harrigan.’

  Hutch studied the picture. It was six inches by four inches but it looked like a passport photograph, and the pale blue eyes stared out blankly as if the man’s thoughts were elsewhere when it was taken. He had black, curly hair that was drapped across a broad forehead, and a narrow, almost pointed chin. The lips were thin and tightly set, and the over-riding impression Hutch had was that it was a cruel face, the face of a man who would enjoy inflicting pain.