Eventually he felt the gurney slow, and then he was moving through a pair of steel doors. The chilled, relatively dry air changed to warm humidity, and he realized he was outside. The mechanism below his body made a series of loud clacks and pops, and then he felt himself lifted. He opened his eye again and saw that he was now in the back of a vehicle — an ambulance. So they weren’t taking him to get his legs cut off. But if not, why was he being put through the trauma of a move?
Before he could muddle through the puzzle, the engine started and one of the orderlies closed the rear doors. Alex tried to move his arms to assess the damage, but all he managed was to flop his right one around like a beached smelt.
The ambulance began moving and he stopped trying. There would be time enough to learn how badly mangled he was. He suspected it wasn’t pretty, but there wasn’t much he could do about it now.
The ride was smooth, for which he was grateful, and he didn’t even notice when he slipped from the present into the narcotic dream state in which he’d spent the last few hours. When he was jarred back to consciousness, he wanted to complain, and then realized that the ambulance had stopped.
The rear doors opened and two men lifted the gurney out. He heard them speaking to each other — but again it sounded odd, distorted. He drifted away as the opiate warmth washed over him, and this time dreamed of being a child, running through a field back home in Texas — he was five or six, he thought, because his family had moved to Ohio when he was seven, and the landscape had changed for the worse. Someone was running ahead of him, and he could make out his father, his gait confident and strong, his bristly hair thick against the vivid blue of the summer sky.
The scene darkened as the sun’s warming rays changed to something more ominous, and then he was in a different place — another hospital room, but this time holding his father’s hand, which was now frail as a bird’s wing, the skin nearly translucent, the tremor in his desperately clutching fingers a byproduct of the poison the doctors had pumped through him in an effort to arrest the malignancies eating him alive. Alex’s gaze roamed down an arm bruised beyond recognition from IV cannulas, shots, and blood draws, and he could almost taste the salty tear that worked its way down his unlined cheek, young and idealistic as his father’s had once been; and then the scene seemed to accelerate away from him, down a long tunnel whose walls were closing in as his speed increased to a dizzy blur.
He came to with a start, pain lancing through his head. For an instant he didn’t understand what had happened, and then he realized that something — no, someone — had slapped him. He forced his eye open and found an Asian man in street clothes glaring down at him. Alex fought to force his reluctant lens into focus and, in spite of the drugs, felt a chill creep up his ruined spine. The man’s eyes were the color of lead, flat and uncaring, and Alex knew in an instant that this was no doctor.
Jiao nodded slowly at the realization he saw in the CIA man’s stare. When he spoke, his accented English was musical with the singsong cadence of his native tongue.
“The pain meds will be out of your system within a few hours, my friend. Then we will have a talk, and you can share with me everything you know about your operation.”
Alex’s eye widened in horror at the words, which his brain had no problem deciphering, and realized with dismay that his ravaged body was now the least of his problems. There was no question about the man’s intent, and Alex offered a prayer to a God he didn’t believe in to spare him the torment that would surely come — before he told the Asian everything, which he knew he would eventually.
In the end, Alex died a hundred times before he finally stopped breathing.
Chapter 16
The mood at the hotel was glum as Spencer, Drake, and Allie waited for Uncle Pete to arrive. Spencer had called their guide after returning to the hotel and told him about Alex. The Thai was shocked, and explained to Spencer that he’d need to confer with his superiors before any action could be taken. An hour later, Uncle Pete left a message for them all to be in the lobby by no later than two — they were shipping out.
“Any idea how long it will take to get to Chiang Rai?” Spencer asked.
“I can look it up,” Allie said, waggling her phone at him. She tapped in her query and waited for the answer. “Says here… hmm… once we’re out of Bangkok, maybe eight to ten hours, depending on how fast we drive.”
“You’ve already seen Uncle Pete’s skills,” Spencer said.
“So we’ll be there about midnight,” Drake guessed.
“Midnight tomorrow, more likely,” Allie added.
“Why don’t we fly?” Drake asked. “I wonder if we can get a charter that doesn’t require us to go through a security scan?”
Allie checked her watch. “I can ask the concierge to make some calls.”
Drake shook his head. “How are you going to manage that? You can’t really say we’re gunrunning and want to dodge the authorities, can you?”
“Let’s ask Uncle Pete,” Spencer suggested. “Not that I don’t want to spend the next ten hours on the road. But it seems like we’re wasting time we don’t have. Whoever ran Alex down is out there, and for all we know, we’re next.”
“Why, though? It makes no sense,” Drake said.
“Maybe someone recognized him? Someone with a grudge?” Allie speculated.
“There are only a few possibilities,” Spencer said. “The first is that it was an accident — someone either drunk or not paying attention while they were texting, who lost control and freaked when they hit Alex. The second is that it was deliberate and they wanted to take him out, either because they recognized him or because of something we haven’t been told about our little jaunt.”
“Sounds like you think there might be a third possibility,” Drake said.
“Yeah. If I hadn’t gotten lucky, the car would have hit both of us. So it could have been that I was the target all along, and Alex was just in the wrong place at the right time.”
“Why would anyone want to flatten you, Spencer?” Allie asked.
“God knows. I mean, I made plenty of enemies in past lives, but nobody comes to mind in Bangkok.”
“Angry ex?” Drake suggested.
“I’m serious. I mean, it’s a very low probability, which is why it’s number three. I actually think it’s likeliest it was an accident.”
“Why?”
“Because if they wanted to off either one of us, they could have just shot us. Few pros would opt for a car as a murder weapon.”
They mulled over Spencer’s words until Uncle Pete appeared through the oversized entry doors, his face tight and his usual half smirk missing.
“We go now,” he said by way of greeting.
“Uncle Pete, we have an idea, and you’re probably just the man for the job,” Spencer said.
Uncle Pete’s face was unreadable. “What you want?”
“We were thinking it was a nice day to fly instead of drive.”
“You crazy. Can’t fly with stuff. Remember?”
“We were thinking you might know someone with a plane we could charter to take us there, including our luggage, without getting too curious about what we were carrying.”
Awareness dawned in Uncle Pete’s eyes. “Ah. I see. Maybe. But gonna be lot of baht.”
“I’m not feeling price sensitive, in light of the uncertainty on the ground here at the moment,” Spencer said. “Just get us a plane. We’ll take care of the rest.”
Uncle Pete busied himself with a flurry of calls, and showed up in the lobby with a triumphant expression half an hour later. “We got plane. Leave in two hours. Take maybe that long get to airport with traffic. Terrible. We go now.”