I paused. I wasn’t sure if the display was to warn me off, or if he intended to close. Maybe killing me was the backup plan if snatching me didn’t work out. No way to know. Regardless, I didn’t want to fight him. I just wanted to get away. I would have been happy to kill him to make that happen, but obviously if he was armed, killing him might no longer be the easiest means of exit here.
He started circling, moving closer. His footwork was smooth and balanced. He was just inside the distance that I would have judged safe for turning and running. I moved with him, conscious of my flanks in case the two who had run off reconsidered. I held my knife in my right hand with a saber grip, close to my waist, with my left hand open and partially extended to block and trap if we closed. If we did, I didn’t know if I would make it. What I did know is that he surely would not.
I heard a voice booming from behind me. “Partner, get down!”
It was Dox. I dropped into a squat, keeping the knife close to my body, and glanced over to see the giant sniper moving in with a wooden chair raised over his head. I ducked down lower. He lunged forward and let the chair go like it was an F-14 being catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier.
When a man of Dox’s size and strength throws a chair, there are many places you might want to be. In front of the chair is not one of them. In this sense, Perry Mason was unlucky. The chair caught him full in the chest and blasted him to the ground.
Dox and I were on him in an instant. Dox grabbed his knife and something else, whatever it was that I thought I had seen in his left hand, both of which had clattered onto the sidewalk next to him. I knelt across his chest and almost cut his throat to finish him, but then I saw that he was already helpless. He was grunting and starting to cough blood.
I did another perimeter check. Still okay. Returning my eyes to Perry Mason, I said to Dox, “Quick, give me a hand.”
Dox knelt next to me. I saw that he was scanning the street and sidewalk, and I was gratified to know that, this time, the behavior had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with survival.
“What do you want to do with him?” he asked.
I inclined my head in the direction of the alley, about twenty feet away. “Pull him over there. The dark.”
We grabbed him under the arms and hauled him up and over. He tried to resist, but the chair had broken him up inside and he didn’t have much fight in him.
There were no streetlights over this stretch of sidewalk, as is the case throughout most of Bangkok’s lesser thoroughfares, and once we had moved off to the side of Brown Sugar we were enveloped by darkness. In the alley, just in from the sidewalk, someone had parked a white Toyota van. The sliding door on the van’s passenger side was open, facing the clubs to the left. I saw this and instantly understood that their plan had been to drag me into the vehicle, then drive away and interrogate me at their leisure.
We shoved Perry Mason up against the front passenger-side door and patted him down. He had a Fred Perrin La Griffe with a two-inch spear point blade hanging from a neck sheath-obviously backup for the folder. I cut the neck cord and Dox pocketed the knife and rig. In his front pants pocket, we found a Toyota car key and a magnetic key card for the Holiday Inn Silom Bangkok. I pressed the “open” button on the car key and the van chirped in response. Yeah, the vehicle was definitely his. Beyond all this, and a Casio G-Shock wristwatch, he was traveling sterile.
I pocketed the keys and looked in his eyes. Blood was flowing steadily from the sides of his mouth. He was still conscious, though, still with us. Good.
“How did you find us?” I asked.
He shook his head and looked away.
Dox grabbed his face and forced him to look at me. “How did you find us?” I said again.
He gritted his teeth and remained silent.
I reached down and started probing his abdomen. He winced when I got to his ribs. Either they were broken, or there was some damage underneath, or both. I pressed hard and he grunted.
“We can do this easy or we can do it hard,” I said. “Answer a few questions and we’ll be gone. That’s all there is to it.”
He looked away again. He was trying to focus on something else, to let his imagination carry him away from here.
I knew the technique. There are ways of resisting interrogation. I’ve been schooled in them, and so, I had a feeling, had this guy. What they teach you is that you have to accept that you are in a position you can’t survive. Your life is over. There will be some hours of pain first, yes. Your body is going to be broken and ruined. But then death will deliver you. Concentrate on that coming deliverance, let your imagination go forth to meet it, and use the anticipation of that impending rendezvous to hold out for as long as you can. If you can do this, you can detach yourself from what’s happening to your body and make your mind much harder to reach.
I had to interrupt his reverie. Shake his confidence that his acceptance of death had put him in paradoxical control of the situation. Shock him out of his assumption that we were playing a binary game of live or die, life or death, with no other possibilities in between.
I pulled out my folder with my right hand and flipped it open. I grabbed his face with my left and forced him to look at me.
“No matter what happens here,” I said to him, “you are not going to die. We’re not going to kill you. You are going to live.”
I pressed the knife against his cheek, so that the point was resting just below the bottom edge of his left eye. “But if you don’t answer my questions,” I said, “I’m going to blind you. One eye, then the other. Now. How did you find us?”
The guy didn’t answer, but I could tell from his increased respiration that I had his attention, that I had hauled him back some distance from the relatively safe place to which he had tried to flee.
“Your choice,” I said, and started slowly driving the knife upward.
He squeezed his eyes tightly shut and tried to jerk away. Dox shoved his head against the side of the van and I kept the knife slowly going north.
The guy’s breathing worsened, approaching the cadences of panic. His eyeball was moving upward ahead of the knife. Another millimeter and it would reach the limits of its give and be skewered.
“Cell phone,” he said suddenly, panting. “We tracked a cell phone.”
I paused the knife but didn’t lower it. “Whose cell phone?”
“His. Dox’s.”
Goddamnit, I thought, I told him to keep that fucking thing off. Then: Not now. Deal with that later.
Dox said, “Hey, asshole, how do you know my name?”
I shot him a murderous shut the fuck up this is my show glance, then looked back at Perry Mason. “How did you get the number?”
“I don’t know. It was just given to me.”
Bullshit it was just given to you. “If I have to ask you again, you lose this eye.”
There was a pause, then he said, “I don’t know for sure. I was told it came from some Russian outfit.”
I knew Dox had done some work with the Russians not so long ago. I glanced at him, my eyebrows raised. He gave me a yeah, I guess that’s possible shrug in return.
All right. I had deliberately started with a question about tools and tactics, something this guy could give up without feeling he was compromising his integrity. This would warm him up, help him rationalize his responses to the tougher inquiries that would follow. We’d started with how, and that had gone well. What I really wanted to talk about was who. But I sensed he still wasn’t ready for that, not even at the cost of his eyes. As a bridge between what we had accomplished and what still remained to be done, I decided to use why.