The armed gangster slammed hard, then crumpled down to the floor of the stall unconscious.
The man in the next stall called out in Thai, his voice filled with alarm.
Court knelt over the unconscious guard and ran his hands through the man’s clothing. He pulled a Glock 17 pistol and two extra seventeen-round magazines, slipped the gun into his waistband at the small of his back, and dropped the mags into his pocket.
He also extracted the radio from the man’s belt and pulled his wired earpiece. Court didn’t speak a word of Thai, but he knew what it sounded like when people were freaking out about something, so he slipped the earpiece in his ear and the radio under his coat so he’d be alerted when word got out that this guy had been found.
The man in the next stall called out again, no doubt asking what the ruckus was three feet away from him.
Court went back to the sink and washed his hands. He heard the toilet flush in the stall next to his victim, and then the door to the hallway opened, and five young men with spiked hair entered, laughing and talking. Three of them stepped up to the urinals, and a fourth approached the stalls at the same moment the stall door opened. Court was already heading to the exit, but behind him he heard a quick and concerned exchange in Thai, and then a shout of surprise.
Court pushed quickly out of the bathroom as more men entered, and he pointed back inside, well within earshot of the bouncer, just ten feet away at the bottom of the stairwell.
And then Court said the one word all bouncers, all over the world, love to hear. “Fight!”
The man at the stairs quickly took a waist-high velvet rope barricade off a hook in the wall and brought it across the stairs, where he hooked it onto the banister. Then he took off into the bathroom in a run, transmitting in Thai on his headset mic as he moved.
Court looked back up the hall towards the front of the club, saw only a couple there making out and not facing his direction, then used the banister to vault the rope.
He shot up the stairs unnoticed.
CHAPTER
FORTY
As far as Nattapong Chamroon was concerned, he ruled the world. Well… he and his brother did. He was twenty-eight years old and handsome; his father owned a transnational criminal enterprise that raked in over 240 million U.S. dollars a year, plenty of money to keep Nattapong and his older brother, Kulap, knee-deep in the best cars, clothes, houses, booze, and friends.
And women—lots of women, but Nattapong wouldn’t count the girls in his life as expenses; in fact, he considered them revenue generators who just happened to provide additional benefits whenever he desired.
He was the cold and cruel son of a cold and cruel father, and he used the foreign girls in his stable as accessories in public, and as toys in private. And tonight was nothing out of the ordinary for him. He’d had six of the nicest-looking women delivered to his house, and from there they had all traveled to the Black Pearl in a stretch SUV limo braced by a pair of SUVs filled with capos and bodyguards of the Chamroon Syndicate. The girls had spent the last hour sitting with him while he drank and got in the mood, and now he’d taken them up to the spa’s wet area on the fourth floor: an ornate and massive marble-tiled pool and hot tub facility larger than a basketball court and designed to look like an opulent Roman bath.
Here Nattapong would really get this party started.
He lay shirtless on a lounge chair in front of the pool; large stone statues of lions and nude figures surrounded him, ornate marble columns lined the pool in front of him and ringed the hot tub behind him, and fountains shot streams of water in arcs from one side of the pool to the other in front of him. The lighting in the room was a moody dim blue haze, and a simulated starscape was projected on a ceiling above the pool.
The music piped into the room was ethereal and atmospheric, bouncing around the tile in the windowless space.
The six women sat or knelt on the marble floor in front of Nattapong in a semicircle. Some drank champagne, one snorted some coke, another popped pills. A couple of the ladies looked uncomfortable, but others appeared as relaxed as Nattapong himself.
He knew that the ones who’d not been drugged or demoralized into submission — the three new girls — would rather shoot themselves than have sex with him, but the eight bodyguards positioned around the Roman bath were always ordered to keep an eye on Nattapong’s orgies: partially for Nattapong to get a few extra kicks by demonstrating his sexual prowess to his underlings, but primarily to make certain none of the girls tried to bite his manhood off. All his personal bodyguards were armed with Uzi Pros, a micro-sized 9-millimeter select-fire machine pistol that could dump 1,050 rounds per minute, but for the girls the guards rarely needed more than a hard look or the back of a hand.
Nattapong Chamroon regarded this evening’s selection of entertainment appreciatively, and he knew this was indeed a special night. While he sometimes found some eights or even an occasional seven snuck into his orgies, this night every one of his girls was a ten.
It was clear to Nattapong that this group had been selected for both their beauty and their dissimilarity from one another. Tonight’s potpourri included a short redhead from Poland with ample curves; an impossibly tall raven-haired Ukrainian with a runway-model body; an athletic platinum blonde from Hungary with muscle rippling from her tanned bare arms, shoulders, and legs, and dramatic eye makeup that made her look vaguely Middle Eastern. Next to her lay a spectacular ebony Namibian, a true rarity in Thailand and a top earner for Chamroon; then a brunette Moldovan with her hair in a short bob who looked no more than eighteen but might have been even younger. Lastly in the semicircle was an auburn-haired stunner from Russia whose distant dead eyes reminded Nattapong that she’d been working for him for a while, but he saw this as a plus, because that meant her skills had been properly developed.
The crime boss smiled at all the choices in front of him, then lifted a hand mirror off the floor and snorted two lines of coke from it. He rubbed his nose and his eyes, downed a shot of whiskey from a crystal shot glass, and called for his girls to come to him.
This was going to be one hell of a night.
Court slid open a second-floor window on the east side of the building and looked out to the fire escape. It had a retractable ladder so no one at ground level could reach up and grab it, but from here at the second floor he could ascend to the higher levels of the four-story building, or even the roof if he wanted to.
He passed the third floor after looking through the window and finding a single bodyguard walking down the hall, a headset over his shaved head. Court imagined the bodyguards were not on the same channel as the bouncers in the nightclub, which came as no surprise. Court flipped the dial on his stolen radio and found Chamroon’s security channel.
Even without speaking Thai, he’d derived enough from the radio transmissions in the nightclub to figure out that the bouncers had found the unconscious man in the bathroom. Perhaps they could tell he’d gotten his lights knocked out by another patron, but either he hadn’t come to yet or hadn’t mentioned that someone had stolen his pistol, because the radio traffic didn’t seem overly excited. Court felt certain he’d made it up the stairs without anyone alerting the bodyguards, because otherwise he was sure there would be a lot more agitation out on the net.
As soon as Court made it to the fourth-floor landing of the outdoor fire escape, he looked in the window and saw a dark hallway. A doorway across from him had a sign on it, so Court took a chance and shined his flashlight through the glass so he could see what it said.