Something encased his body, preventing him from moving any farther. Water continued to rush past, a torrent lifting his head clear. He looked to either side. A filter of some kind, a metallic net designed to keep larger debris from fouling the turbines. He was wedged against it, his feet tucked inside one of the perforations, somehow upright. A miracle.
The closest tower was ten yards upstream. He could see shadows moving inside the control room. He shouted. He screamed. No one could hear him. Nor could they see him. In the dead of night, he was invisible, made more so by the water rushing past him, a frothing turbulent shroud.
Chapter 31
Ratchaburi Province
Time passed. Minutes. Hours. He shivered until he could shiver no more. Cold left him. He grew numb. He couldn’t feel his feet, his hands, nothing. He was aware of his heart slowing. His thoughts grew fuzzy. He knew he was slowly dying of hypothermia, but the thought caused him no fear. His brain had grown as numb as his body.
Consciousness came and went. At some point he began to dream. He saw a beach and a woman on it and the sun. It was very pleasant. The sun grew brighter. He wanted to look away but couldn’t. It grew brighter still, until it was blinding him.
He opened his eyes and stared into the beam of a spotlight. He heard men shouting, was vaguely aware of a commotion on the walkway that circled the tower. The water passing him slowed, then grew calm. The thrum of the turbines ceased. A motor launch approached. Two men tried to lift him out of the water but were too weak to pull him aboard. One clutched his arm as the other drove the boat back to the dock, towing him alongside. As they slowed, a third man jumped into the water and cut his ropes.
Simon’s feet touched bottom. Silt flushed between his toes. He tried to stand, and immediately toppled into the man’s arms, the pain unbearable as blood rushed to his extremities. Tears ran from his eyes. He buried his face in the man’s shoulder to keep from crying out. After a minute, he regained his strength and walked onto the riverbank. He was naked. The current had ripped off his clothing hours before.
He saw that it was almost dawn. In the growing light, the three men gathered around him. His skin was so pale as to be translucent, wrinkled like a prune. But it wasn’t his skin or his pallor they were interested in. They were scrutinizing the latticework of scars crisscrossing his torso. Knife wounds, burns, bullet holes, the gash he’d suffered jumping out of the embassy window. He saw himself through their eyes. A foreigner bound hand and foot found caught in the power plant’s filters, dead but for the grace of God, his body covered with evidence of extreme physical violence, a garish tattoo running the length of one forearm that all but screamed “gangster.” What could they think but that he was a criminal caught out on the wrong side of a deal gone bad?
They said none of this.
“Are you able to walk inside?” one of the men asked in fluent English.
Simon nodded, discovering that he was unable to speak.
With kindness, they led him inside the tower, one man assisting him on either side. Over and over, they asked if he was all right, if he needed to go to the hospital. Simon shook his head, making an okay sign with his fingers, though he was far from it.
They went to a locker room, where a shower was already running. Simon spent five minutes beneath the hot water. Gradually, he regained his strength and his senses. Then, a memory:You chipped me. He ran his fingers across his upper arms and shoulders. There, a hard nodule where none should be. An RFID transmitter had a limited range, no more than five miles, and a limited life span. Odds were that it was no longer functioning. But Simon was in no position to play the odds.
He finished showering and wrapped a towel around his waist. He found the men huddled in a conference room. Politely, he asked if any of them had a knife or, better yet, a razor blade. “A splinter,” he said, by way of explanation.
Finally, one of the men rose and accompanied him to the snack kitchen. Simon found a paring knife in one of the drawers. Ten seconds over a gas flame sterilized the blade.
“Where is the splinter?” asked the engineer.
Simon pointed at his shoulder. “In here.”
“I see nothing.”
Simon sat on a chair and, with the knife in one hand and a paper napkin in the other, excised the transmitter. One, two, three, and it was out, bouncing on the linoleum floor.
The engineer picked it up, a titanium grain of rice. “What is it?”
“Top secret,” said Simon. “You don’t want to know.”
A few seconds later, the transmitter landed in the kitchen sink and was washed down the drain. As far as Shaka was concerned, Simon was at this very moment floating his way into the Gulf of Thailand, there to stay forever.
Back in the shower room, he found a set of clothing folded neatly on a bench. Gray T-shirt, dark work pants, socks, a pair of boots, a cap. All fit him, more or less.
A bowl of noodles and a cup of hot tea waited in the conference room, complete with a napkin and utensils. Simon sat, sipped the tea, devoured the noodles. A map on one wall showed the locations of power plants across the country. One was colored with a red dot. Ratchaburi Hydroelectric Plant #2. He believed this to be his present location, some hundred kilometers southwest of Bangkok.
“The police are on their way,” said one of the men, bald with thick glasses, a patient smile, and a frank manner, who’d introduced himself as “Steve.” “It will take a while. We are some distance from the nearest town. I imagine you will want to tell them who did this to you.”
“Yes,” said Simon, though it was more of a croak. He drank some more tea and felt his throat relax. “Thank you.”
He gazed out the window onto the parking lot. Four cars. A motorcycle. His mind switched into gear. He began to plot his escape. He could overpower the men, steal a car, make it to someplace where he could obtain a new passport—a false passport. Find out where London Li was, contact her, or, better yet, go there. The police could never protect her from someone like Shaka. Maybe he couldn’t either.
“What happened?” asked Steve.
Simon put down his tea. He’d been working up a story, something about a waylaid tourist, a robbery…or was it a kidnapping? He was too tired to keep the facts straight. He looked at the men. All were well educated, engineers or the like. He knew his story wouldn’t fly. He made a radical choice. The truth.
