18

It was the most prosaic transportation to begin a headlong plunge into the unknown Annja could imagine—Eddie Chen’s venerable Subaru, which was blue sunburned to gray and silver at various points. But it ran reliably and had all-wheel drive. Eddie claimed it had made the run before. At least, as far as they could safely take a car.

The drive from Bangkok north to Nakhon Sawan and beyond offered little by way of adventure. Except, of course, for the ever-present hazards of traffic, including unexpected vehicle-swallowing potholes in the middle of what looked like a modern superhighway, errant livestock, peasants in pursuit of errant livestock, big rigs and brightly colored Thai buses piloted by drivers with lead feet, loud horns and unshakable faith in reincarnation. All were real enough as dangers went.

The green woods and swamps of the central plains scrolled past outside the windows. These were rolled up; for a wonder, the air-conditioning worked. The cargo space was stuffed to the ceiling with supplies.

Patty Ruhle was the ringleader of a sing-along. She was to have appointed herself tour director for the voyage. She seemed able to pull it off, so Annja wasn’t complaining.

Besides, it was better than brooding. Eddie, negotiating the traffic on the modern superhighway, pounded the heel of his palm on the steering wheel. “‘The bastard king of England!’” he half sang. “How cool is that?”

“It was supposedly written by Rudyard Kipling,” Patty said. “His literary partisans deny it. Of course, they all have sticks up their butts. Like all academics.”

Annja took no offense; studious as she was, she’d always been more comfortable in the field or a collection in some exotic and remote location than safely at home on campus. Phil Kennedy stiffened. It only made Ruhle laugh.

“Don’t even bother, Phil,” she said. “You already pulled the rug out from under your own feet.”

He looked out the window. Annja suspected it was to hide something very like a grin. “You’re incorrigible,” he said.

“And you do such a good job of incorriging me,” Patty said.

Eddie laughed and pounded his hand on the wheel some more. Although in his early thirties, he had the appearance and general manner of what Annja took him for at the outset—a big schoolboy. Nonetheless, both his father and Phil vouched for his extensive experience penetrating Myanmar. He spoke several local dialects and could fill in gaps in Kennedy’s knowledge.

She presumed that all added up to smuggling. Eddie and his father both disavowed involvement with drugs. They admitted they feared the drug armies, usually ethnic based, that dominated the trade in Southeast Asia. They were too big, well armed and ruthless. And they had powerful friends. Annja figured Eddie and his father were probably involved in running goods that themselves weren’t controversial to avoid customs.

That wasn’t the sort of thing she was bound to fight. Besides, the whole point of the expedition entailed violating innumerable laws in furtherance of what was right, as opposed to merely legal. Busting the border into Myanmar was going to be a crime, as would be everything she did afterward.

If I’m going to be a criminal, she thought, I might as well have good accomplices.

Patty was telling another joke to Eddie, who laughed uproariously. He seemed to be a perfect audience, endlessly appreciative of her rough-edged and often foulmouthed humor. It was possible those behaviors would start to wear. Still—

Annja glanced back at the supplies. “Quit fretting,” Patty said.

Annja looked quickly around. The red-haired photographer regarded her calmly. She hadn’t seemed to be paying any attention to Annja at all a heartbeat before.

It occurred to Annja that it might behoove a professional photographer to miss very little of what went on around her. Especially one who specialized in working innumerable crisis zones.

“Don’t worry,” Patty said. “We’ll be fine.”

Annja shook her head. She was not negating what the woman said, just expressing her own doubt and internal turmoil. “I can’t seem to help myself,” she said. “We need to travel as light as possible. We can’t hire porters for security reasons. So I keep running everything over in my mind wondering if we’ll really be able to carry enough.”

“The biggest burden in any expedition like this is water,” Kennedy said. “With the purification tabs we have, keeping ourselves supplied shouldn’t be a problem at the tag end of the monsoons. Even on the plateau, water is not particularly hard to find.”

Annja glanced at him. He gazed out the window at a passing algae-grown pond. White-bodied water birds with black heads and tails waded through it. Annja was somewhat surprised. Kennedy didn’t seem the sort to say encouraging things. That in itself encouraged her—he was definitely not going to offer up empty positive thoughts.

“You said it’s quick in, quick out,” Eddie said. He had what Annja thought was a Southern California accent. “Should be no problem.”

He switched on the radio. “No comment intended on the dirty folk songs,” he said. “I just want to give my vocal cords a rest.”

FROM BANGKOK IT WAS less than two hundred miles to Nakhon Sawan. Given the frequent delays, despite the breakneck pace of traffic when it did flow, the journey took them the better part of the day. The others were surprised when Annja insisted they press on to Kamphaeng Phet.

“Had a bad experience in Nakhon Sawan,” she explained.

“Sweetie,” Patty said, “you knock around Asia long, you’ll wind up having bad experiences everywhere. Still, you’re the boss.”

Shadows stretched long across the land when they finally approached the small city of Kamphaeng Phet. With girlish excitement Annja saw her first elephants since entering the country, a pair bathing in the Ping River amid a flock of frolicking children.

Traffic started to clot well short of town. It was dark when they entered the city proper. The streets were full of celebrants, waving banners, playing music cranked up into indistinguishable, vaguely modulated screeches of distortion, hopping around in gaudy costumes and setting off fireworks. Annja winced whenever a string cracked off; it not only sounded too close to full-auto gunfire for comfort, but also these festivities were likely as not, in her experience, to feature real automatic-weapons fire. Sometimes in the spirit of the celebration.

And sometimes not.

The car had long since started to overheat with the stop-and-go of getting into Kamphaeng Phet. Eddie turned off the air-conditioning. He gave off regaling his companions with tales of Malibu surfing to roll down the window and shout in Chinese to some passersby with faces painted in dramatic winglike swoops of scarlet and blue and wearing pointy golden headdresses. They answered back.

“What’s going on?” Patty Ruhle asked. She didn’t respond quite as jumpily as Annja did to the sporadic outbursts of firecrackers, but her eyes had narrowed and her voice held an unaccustomed edge. Only Philip Kennedy seemed serenely indifferent to the proceedings. Presumably he found them no more distasteful than any other manifestations of the modern, urban world.

Eddie pulled his head back in the car. “Banana festival.”

“Banana festival?” Annja said.

“It’s nutritionally sound, anyway,” Patty said.

Eddie shrugged. “They grow a lot of them around here. What can I say?”

“We’re not going to find any room at the inn tonight,” Patty said. “That’s for sure.”

Anxiety jabbed at Annja. That was silly, she knew. She’d spent nights in low dives, half-flooded ditches, tents in howling dust storms, interrogation rooms and on the run from people eager to kill her. Yet she always felt a little uneasy when she didn’t have some secure, known base to go to ground in. Even if it were literally that: a hideout under some bush somewhere. She just felt better knowing it was her bush.

Eddie turned a big toothy grin back over his shoulder. “No worries,” he said. “I got it all under control.”

He turned the car around, almost knocking over a kiosk selling satays on sticks plucked sizzling from oil. By leaning on the horn and shouting—mostly good-naturedly—out the window in what Annja guessed were four different languages including occasional profane English, he managed to get them out of the great crush of pedestrians and into less-crowded side streets headed toward the outskirts.

They found themselves in a tenement of dire tumbledown shacks. Annja kept looking around nervously, concerned she might be called upon to use her sword to protect them. As far as she knew, none of the others carried a weapon of any kind. She was pretty sure Kennedy would scoff at the notion. She was much less sure about either Patty or Eddie. But she didn’t know.

But they saw scarcely a soul or even a light. It seemed the slum dwellers had all piled into the joyous, raucous crush of humanity in the middle of town to celebrate the glorious banana. Meanwhile the shantytown around them tumbled straight along the riverfront so that the boundary between water and land was impossible to detect, what with hovels on stilts and sagging makeshift piers and houseboats with curved roofs all crowded together.

Eddie drove with more confidence than Annja thought could possibly be justified through alleys so narrow the haphazardly leaning fronts of the shacks seemed to threaten both sides of the little car at once. The smell of the river and all that decayed in it was overwhelming. The shacks were redolent of mildew, stale cooking oil and sewage.

Lights suddenly blazed before them. Rising right out of the midst of the shantytown was what looked to be almost a medieval Thai fortress, with swooping dagger-eaved roofs rising above high stone walls topped with thoroughly, and depressingly, modern razor-tape coils. Eddie pulled out his cell phone, hit a quick-dial number and spoke quickly.

A heavy gate slid to the side ahead of them. A small but sturdy-looking little man in a dark uniform gestured them forward. He carried an M-16 slung muzzle down and wore a turban. As Eddie drove into the compound, more men, similarly attired, came into view on either side.

“Karens,” Eddie said. “Refugees from Burma. They get used as mercenaries a lot this close to the border.”

Reflexively Patty raised her camera. Then she caught herself and reluctantly lowered it. “I guess I’d better get permission from our host first,” she said sheepishly.

“It might not be that good an idea to go firing off your flash in the faces of armed men, either,” Phil said.

None of Annja’s companions showed any more sign of being disturbed by the presence of heavily armed men than she felt herself. Then again, none of them would have strayed so far off Southeast Asia’s tourist paths if that sort of thing got to them. As long as they weren’t pointing the things at you, Annja had long ago learned, it wasn’t worth worrying about. If they were pointing them at you—well, you did what you had to do, in the full understanding that you weren’t in very much less danger if they were friendly than if they were actively hostile.

“Who is our host, Eddie?” Annja asked.

“Ma Shunru,” he said, “factor of the North Wind Trading Company. They’re—they’re, ah, based in China.”

“China,” Patty said. “That’s People’s Republic?”

“That’s right.” Eddie pulled in beside an outbuilding where a turbaned man gestured him to go. “We do a lot of business with them. They know me.”

Kennedy, currently sitting in the front passenger seat, turned to give Annja a sharp look.

“Hey,” Patty said, “what’s with that? You’re the one who set us up with him.”

“I think this is kind of what we hired you for,” Annja said. “Good job, Eddie.”

The look he gave her as he got out into the muggy night air gratified her. She only hoped he really had done well by bringing them here. It struck her uncomfortably as the sort of place you could all too easily come in by the front gate and leave by the water gate—facedown floating on the Ping, waiting for the local crocodiles to drag you under. If they had big crocodiles around here. She wasn’t sure.

When the double front doors opened, permitting even more light to spill out of the manor house into the grounds, the master’s apparition did little to reassure Annja. That he was the master she had no doubt. He carried himself with obvious authority.

“Is it just me,” Patty whispered to Annja, “or does he look just like the bad guy in Enter the Dragon?”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Annja said, swallowing hard. “Let’s just try thinking of him as the guy who hosted the original Iron Chef from Japan, shall we?”

“I’m not sure that’s such a huge improvement,” Patty said. “He was pretty scary, too. He looked like just the sort to have a basement full of kidnapped hookers, just like Master Han in the movie.”

The man in question, having shaken Eddie Chen’s hand, embraced him. The apparent fervor of the gesture was belied by the extreme stiffness with which the master held his tunic-clad upper body. Annja later learned he had three fused vertebrae in his back, the legacy of a car accident two years before. But out here in the yard, surrounded by high walls and razor tangles and with what sounded like a pitched battle going on for downtown Kamphaeng Phet, it did nothing to diminish his sinister air.

Then he turned toward the three waiting Americans and approached with a big smile on his narrow face. His iron-gray hair swept back from aquiline features. His eyes were curved slits.

“If he unscrews his hand,” Patty whispered, “I’m bolting.”