Court wondered if this guy could possibly be either Nattapong or Kulap Chamroon, who were brothers and the sons of Panit Chamroon, the man who’d founded the Syndicate thirty-five years earlier by bringing various disparate criminal enterprises in Thailand under one umbrella. He’d seen pictures of both brothers, but they looked so much alike Court couldn’t tell who he was looking at across the smoky dance floor. Brewer’s dossier on the group, which Court had just finished reading in his hotel room when he got the call that his car had arrived, told him Nattapong spent more time in Bangkok while Kulap traveled regularly on syndicate business, so odds were this was the former, but it didn’t really matter to Court. He felt certain either one of the Chamroon brothers would know where Fan Jiang was being held.
Once Court established that he had eyes on people who could tell him what he wanted to know, he scanned the crowds both below him and up there with him on the mezzanine for any glimpse of others interested in this information. This was third-party awareness: the simple personal security act of realizing you and your target aren’t alone in the world, that someone else might be watching them, or watching you. Court had been surprised twice in the past week by others moving on the same objective as he, and he didn’t want it to happen again.
He looked in the best places in the bar to get eyes on the VIP section. Court himself had a good view, but he was relatively exposed in the center of the mezzanine above the dance floor. A better location to surveil the VIP area was up on the mezzanine but tucked into either corner where the lighting wasn’t as good.
Court looked idly to his left and then to his right, his head still thumping along with the music.
And then his head stopped. Well, that didn’t take long.
A Western-looking man in his forties, dressed not unlike Court himself, sat in the dark corner on Court’s right, just beyond the staircase down to the dance floor. His eyes were on the VIP section below, just as Court’s had been.
And also like Court, the man in the corner lifted his head and began scanning his surroundings.
Just then, a Thai girl who had tried and failed to get free drinks from Court a half hour earlier passed by with a girlfriend. Court reached out and took her by the arm, pulling her playfully towards him and down on his lap.
“Where have you been?” Court asked, suddenly interested in talking.
“Oh… hi,” she replied, pleasantly surprised that she’d finally managed to get this rich-looking foreigner’s attention.
Court said, “I seem to remember from our earlier conversation that you really like Cristal.”
She smiled. “I do.”
He looked at her friend now, who was already slipping into the seat across from him. “And how about you?”
She smiled herself. “Of course.”
“You both enjoy expensive champagne? That’s crazy! What are the chances?”
His new friend’s name was Sky, or that was her story anyway, and her friend claimed that her name was Nicki.
Court saw their bullshit and raised them, telling them his name was Bob and he was a yacht salesman from Florida in the “U.S. of A.” He ordered a bottle of 2006 Cristal Brut from a passing waitress, and while they waited they mostly listened to the music, because this wasn’t exactly a venue where people could chat easily, even if they had something to talk about.
Court was glad that he didn’t have to make too much idle banter. He was already thinking about the man in the corner, who, he felt certain, was here in an operational capacity. He had a slightly Slavic look to him, so Russian was his best guess, but he thought the man looked older and heavier than he would expect for a Zaslon operator, which meant he wouldn’t have been one of the men he’d seen in Vietnam.
Still, he could have been SVR.
Either way, Court knew what he had to do. He needed to get closer to the VIP area to identify key personalities, and to decide how he would go about separating one of the top dogs of the Chamroon Syndicate from his bodyguards.
So for one of the first times in his operational life, Court decided he needed to get up and dance.
The Cristal came and Court and the two ladies each downed a flute of champagne, Court thinking all along about how he was glad he didn’t have to turn in an expense report to Colonel Dai, because this five-hundred-dollar purchase of bubbly would probably result in Don Fitzroy getting one of his feet lopped off. When they finished with the drink, Nicki moved on to find a sucker of her own, and Court took Sky down to the dance floor, passing near the lone man in the corner by the stairs as they did so. Court snuck a glance in the man’s direction when he reached the stairs and saw that the man’s attention was fully fixed on the VIP section and the large contingent of Thai men and non-Thai women sitting there.
And, Court noticed, the man had a bottle of vodka on ice next to his table and a glass in his hand. This didn’t necessarily mean he was Russian, but it didn’t hurt the chances that Court had him pegged correctly.
On the floor Sky and Bob pressed in with hundreds of others, but within minutes, without Sky having any clue she was being used as cover in an intelligence operation for the United States, they found themselves near the roped-off VIP section.
Court noticed that several of the men and women had left the tables, presumably to dance themselves, but the floor was too tight for Court to see any of the known subjects of his surveillance. It didn’t matter, though, because the one Thai man still sitting behind the rope was most definitely twenty-eight-year-old Nattapong Chamroon.
Chamroon still had the six women sitting close to him, pouring his drinks and leaning in close whenever he spoke. Court put five of them as Central or Eastern European, and the other as African, African-American, or perhaps even from the Caribbean because of her dark skin. In their stilettos the women were all probably taller than Nattapong when they stood up, and one brunette was a full head taller, but gauging by the cool grin on Chamroon’s face he seemed fine with the height disparity.
The women appeared to all be in their twenties and they wore a lot of makeup, just like all the women in the nightclub, but even up close there wasn’t one who was not breathtaking.
As Court and Sky got a little closer — now it was Sky who was pulling them in the direction of the VIP section because she wanted to see the exotic women and their flashy clothes — Court noticed all six ladies had dark and serious faces. Despite their bright and luminous clothing and outwardly poised mannerisms, Court read the eyes of a couple of the girls, and he determined in an instant they weren’t here of their own volition.
As he and Sky made their way back towards the stairs up to the mezzanine, Court realized he’d seen expressions like these before in his career traveling through various terrible places.
These women were victims of human trafficking. Prostitutes, certainly working here in Bangkok for Chamroon’s own organization. Brewer’s notes on the syndicate had told him hundreds of young Central European women each year were offered good jobs in the hotel or hospitality industries in Asia, and when they arrived they were drugged, threatened, beaten, and forced into prostitution. Their passports were taken from them; local police were often in on the scheme, so the young girls had no one but one another to rely on. Soon, though, they would be moved around and administered huge quantities of drugs and alcohol, and they would give in totally to their situations.
Some would make their way back home after a time, but many would not.
Court didn’t get a close look at all the girls around Nattapong Chamroon, but he saw enough in the compliant dead eyes of a couple of them to know the score. They wouldn’t like Nattapong, but they’d be dependent on him, and this meant the girls could pose a problem if Court wanted to get him out of here, because they were all over him, and he wasn’t sure they’d even leave his side if he went to the bathroom.