“Call me.”
“Oh…about dinner. How about—”
London didn’t hear another word. She ended the call the moment she saw a limousine pull up to the entrance of the tower across the street. A tall, statuesque woman in an orange silk dress shirt exited the back seat and turned in her direction, taking a moment to adjust herkebaya.
She recognized her at once.
Nadya Sun Sukarno. Indonesia’s minister of finance.
Chapter 25
Bangkok
Twelve o’clock. Embassy of the Kingdom of Spain.
Simon looked at Adamson’s text and put away his phone. He stood at the entrance to a city park a block from the embassy, surrounded by children and teachers and pedestrians on their way here and there. The day was hot, hotter than any he could remember, the midday sun beating down on his head like a branding iron. And humid, the moisture clinging to him like cellophane wrap.
He wore a cap and sunglasses. A surgical mask covered his nose and mouth to filter out the particulates that fouled the air. He did not look out of place. Every third person was wearing a mask today. A headline in the morning paper announced that Bangkok’s air quality ranked as third worst in the world behind only Dhaka and Delhi. “Haze,” the government called it, preferring the innocuous term to “smog.” Call it what you want, thought Simon. He could hardly make out the tops of skyscrapers a mile away.
Fifteen minutes to go.
He’d woken at the break of dawn, seized by a dread and certain thought.
He’d been followed last night.
He hadn’t seen anyone, not really. There were too many people and he had been moving too fast. Still, he knew.
Several times, as he’d hesitated at a street corner or slowed to check his directions, he’d sensed a ripple in the flow behind him. A shadow. A flicker. Something.
If he had any particular skill at this kind of thing, it came from his days on the streets of Marseille. Seventeen years old, a hood on the lookout for his next score, lifting a wallet, boosting a car, maybe rolling a tourist. But also on the lookout for theflics,who were on the lookout for him.
In the half-light of dawn, he’d closed his eyes, thinking back. There it was. A tan face. A slash of blond hair. The heavy neck and shoulders. Was it real or the figment of an anxious imagination? Even now, wide-awake, all of his senses firing, he wasn’t sure.
Still…
Simon had learned to question his instinct at his peril. If he’d felt it, it was real.
He’d been followed. A blond man, first on the way to the prison and again after he’d left Delphine’s hotel. Not a local. A professional.
If not Tan’s man, then whose?
Unable to go back to sleep, he’d showered and walked to the river, where he took breakfast at an outdoor café. A strong chai tea bucked him up enough to call George Adamson and give him a rundown of his activities the night before. The lawyer reiterated Tan’s displeasure at his disappearance but was not unhappy that Simon had retrieved the stolen information.
“And Delphine?” Simon had asked.
“Left on the seven a.m. Cathay Pacific flight to London.”
“You should have told her to go immediately after his arrest.”
“I tried. She wouldn’t listen.”
“You should have tried harder.”
“Did you look at it?” Adamson asked. “The material he stole.”
“Password protected,” said Simon. “Rafa may be dumb, but he’s not stupid.”
“All I care is that he gives Tan what he wants, takes his check, and gets the hell out of here.”
