For Mayhem or Madness
11
First Contact
THE RECORD LOW TEMPERATURE in Chiang Mai during August is seventy degrees. But the daytime highs only range in the mid-eighties. I woke up to what I could expect for my entire stay: rain. August is the rainiest month of the year in northern Thailand and I was drenched to the bone by the time I’d run the seventy-five feet from my bungalow to the main house where David had fresh-baked raisin bread and cut up fruit on the big table.
I sat in the congenial atmosphere with my cell phone in front of me, like most others who wandered in. Everyone had arrived at the kitchen soaking wet and had pulled off their sodden T-shirts. Bikinis were the order of the day. I pretended to search for activities and maps while I listened to the other residents. A couple from the Netherlands, Nils and Helene, were laughing as they told of attempting to feed and wash elephants in a downpour the first day they arrived.
As we sat and chatted, I weighed each person against the thought that he or she might know Terry. I knew he wasn’t at breakfast. I poured hot water over another packet of Nescafé Red and was thankful that at least there was an alternative to the three-in-one blend. David noticed.
“There’s a little espresso shop up on the main road, right across from the temple. That’s also where you’ll find a grocery and can stock your kitchen,” he said.
“Where can I get that khao soi that Sujit brought yesterday?” I asked. “I might go broke just eating that every day.”
“Not likely,” Elise laughed. She was a tall British girl who was backpacking through Asia and spending a break here at the Village. “When Sujit brought it to me the first day I was here, I was sure he was treating me to an expensive meal. There’s a tent next door to the market up the road where a woman makes it. It costs thirty-five baht.”
I calculated and thirty baht to a dollar, I’d eaten just over a dollar’s worth of soup. Yes, I’d be eating a lot of that.
“She makes a vegetarian curry version, too!” Gretchen announced. “I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to eat here. But the food is so good. They are even giving me a cooking lesson at the school. I’m going to cook durian.”
“I thought you just tore it apart and ate it raw then smelled like a dead body for the rest of the day,” Helene said.
“We’re cooking it into a pudding with coconut milk and pandan leaves. It’s really very good,” Gretchen sniffed.
“Not in my kitchen,” David said with finality.
The rain let up and we started moving into the steamy garden. I hadn’t yet found a clue to Terry’s whereabouts.
That’s when I saw Char. She went straight to David and gave him a little kiss on the cheek. Then she prepared a paper plate with bread, jam, and fruit.
“What are we baking tonight?” she asked.
“We’re doing a pretzel twist.”
“Yum. I’ll see you at eight.”
I tried to look busy examining brochures on the porch as she swept past me and on past the pool, turning in at the last bungalow on the west side of the village.
I needed to buy food before I could eat in my tiny kitchen, so I borrowed a bicycle with a basket and rode the three-quarters of a mile to the little shopping area David directed me to. Of course, other than Pocky, I couldn’t tell one item from another in the store. I ended up with half a dozen dried soup bowls—a kind of glorified ramen—and some cold cuts, cheese, and crackers. Eating khao soi was likely to be a necessity, not just a pleasure.
Next, I found the little espresso shop. The barista, who also owned the shop, was more than happy to make my Americano the way I wanted it. I also ordered a small pastry. She had me sit and brought me the coffee, pastry, a cookie that came with the coffee, a cup of tea, and a glass of water. Then she gave me the log-in information for her WiFi and charged me the equivalent of five dollars. And the coffee was exquisite.
I’d decided that I’d need help analyzing the traffic on the Village WiFi. I connected to my office via VPN and downloaded a couple of tools from the servers. Using a clean connection that involved a hard reboot, I tapped into the Village network and uploaded my spiders. Then I disconnected and rebooted again. I have my tablet configured to wipe all my browsing and online history each time I shut down. That makes it virtually impossible to track back to my computer after any incursion.
I thought back nine years to when I turned in my boss and several others for embezzling from and basically bankrupting the company I’d worked at for fifteen years. With them had gone my life savings. Company policy at the time was that all computers on the network were backed up during the night every night. We’d had instances where locally stored data had been corrupted during a major acquisition and instituted the policy immediately.
Without that policy, my bosses would have escaped cleanly. If they’d shut down their computers before the scheduled backups, I wouldn’t have had the evidence that I turned over to Jordan Grant. I wasn’t making that mistake. If I wasn’t actively using my device, it was shut down. Completely.
“So intent.” The voice was a delightfully soft British and I half expected to look up and see Elise. Instead it was the dark young woman I’d seen make arrangements with David to bake bread. Her voice captured me. Her eyes set the trap.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t see you come in. Won’t you join me? I’m Stefan.” I’d practiced enough that I could say Stefan Nilsson as easily as Dag Hamar. If I was on this trip for very long, I’d forget my former identity.
“Ah, yes, Stefan. I’m Char and before you ask, I’m Persian by blood, but born and raised in London. David said I might run into you when I came for my daily cup.”
“You come over here every day?” I asked. I might make this my routine.
“Yes. It’s terribly wicked to spend so much on a personal vice, but I finally feel like I’ve paid my dues and can indulge in a small luxury.”
“And how have you paid your dues?” I asked, hoping the smile on my face was reflected in my voice.
“I’ve been traveling southeast Asia for nearly two years joining doctors in Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Batam, Sumatra… you name it.”
“You’re a doctor?” Up close it was obvious that she wasn’t quite as young as I first imagined, but it seemed she was still younger than most doctors I’d met.
“A nurse. Médicins sans Frontières. The doctors treat disease and injury. I vaccinate against it. Or whatever else is needed. I taught swimming in Viet Nam. Did you know one of the leading causes of child death there is drowning? Simply because no one has taught them to swim,” she said. I’d clearly touched on a subject about which she was passionate.
“I had no idea. Nor that a person could do it for two years without a break. That’s remarkable.”
“I was supposed to finish after a year but was recruited to do personal nursing soon thereafter. Still, even living with mosquitoes and lice is an improvement over what my father intended.”
“Your father?”
“He is a devout Muslim. When I was sixteen, I discovered he had already promised me in marriage to a man in Tehran I’d never met. He was ready to send me off. My mother intervened and persuaded him to wait until I was eighteen, by which time, I’d arranged to escape his household and go to college in Canada.”
“So, you became a nurse and felt you had to pay back a debt to society?” I asked.
“You might say so. My father tried to convince me to return, even after I was licensed. That was when I discovered I had a sizable dowry promised by my mother’s father. My father was using my proposed marriage as a means of buying favor in a powerful family in Iran. I refused to play nice. When I discovered two men watching my apartment in Toronto with intent of kidnapping me and carting me off to my new husband, I slipped out of the country again. It took a while before I found Doctors without Borders and joined them. In the meantime, the old man my father contracted me to passed away. I’m free.”
I was wondering at how open this young woman—she was still young by my standards, though she said she was nearly thirty—was being with me. It was a great deal of unsolicited information. I wondered what she wanted in return.
It was beginning to cloud over again and I suspected we were in for another downpour. “I think we’d better head back or we’ll get drenched again,” I said. I paid the bill and Char thanked me for taking care of her coffee as well. She had walked to the shop so I pushed the bicycle along beside her as we chatted.
“I was doing web security for a dozen different clients,” I said when I finally relented to answer her questions about me. I’d practiced my spiel dozens of times but had not had such an in-depth test of my cover. “I woke up one morning in the middle of winter with the realization that none of my clients were in Sweden. It was a real epiphany. I could do what I do anywhere, so why was I sitting in a basement in Stockholm where the day was only six hours long?”
She laughed as we wheeled into the village and the first drops of afternoon rain started to fall.
“Let’s go swimming!”
“It’s raining,” I said astutely. She looked at me with an expression of utter shock.
“You mean we’ll get wet?”
I soon discovered that the afternoon rain was often a time for denizens of the village to hit the pool. I don’t actually swim—even after my time in the Navy—but the water was only chest deep from end to end and the company, all of them, was delightful. I had a new appreciation for the beauty of the tropics.
The next morning, I sat at the kitchen table in the main house with other digital nomads, drinking coffee and eating pretzel twist. Everyone had their own method of eating it. Some toasted it, some with butter, some with various preserves or marmalades. It was an education in international culture. I was waiting over another cup of coffee, trying to decide what time of the morning was a decent hour to try to visit Terry. I was certain now that he was in the end cabin and that Char was his nurse. She breezed in and gave Dave her typical greeting kiss on the cheek but, instead of loading a plate and heading back, she sat opposite me. Everyone else was heading off to various activities and in just a few minutes, we were alone at the kitchen table.
“Have you been into the temple district?” she asked.
“No. I haven’t managed much sightseeing yet.”
“Why don’t we go today? It looks like the rain will be lighter today. The ruins at Wat Chedi Luang are interesting to look at,” she said. Before I could object, she continued. “We can call a tuk-tuk and it takes about fifteen minutes to get downtown.”
“Uh, Char… I was going to visit…” I made a gesture with my head toward her bungalow. She shook her head.
“Not today, Stefan. He’s having a bad day.” So, he and she both knew I was there to visit Terry. “He asks that you give him a day to rest.”
“I see. It’s pretty bad then.”
“It won’t be much longer.”
“I don’t want to miss the opportunity to talk to him, but I won’t insist today.”
“And since you’ve nothing else to do?” she asked.
“Why don’t we figure out how to call that tuk-tuk.”
“How long has he been here at the Enchanted Village?” I asked as we strolled around the temple grounds. Wat Chedi Luang is a huge pyramidal ruin and all we could do was walk around it. However, there were shrines and smaller temples surrounding the ruin and we went into many of them. A thirty-foot-long reclining Buddha was a highlight. We stopped in front of another small temple but it had a sign outside that specifically stated “No Women Permitted.” As it was, Char had been wrapped in scarves over her shorts and T-shirt all day. Women were asked to have their legs and shoulders covered on the grounds.
“It’s been ten months now,” she said.
“Doesn’t that mean his visa has expired?”
“He has a medical visa. As long as he keeps paying for treatment, he can stay.” She sighed and looked at a golden Buddha in a niche. “He desperately wants to finish his life’s work, he says. I don’t know exactly what it is. When he is awake, he’s in front of his computer. I don’t understand anything that is on the screen.”
“That’s what I want to talk to him about.”
“He told me three months ago you would be coming. Though he didn’t know your name. He just said we’d know you when we saw you.” She looked at me intently. “You won’t hurt him, will you?” There was a look of fear and concern in her eyes.
“No. I want to protect him as much as possible but it requires my getting information regarding exactly what he has planned.”
“I’m sure he’ll be happy to have someone visit who understands what he’s talking about. I don’t. Let’s go down a couple of blocks to restaurant row and get some dinner.”
I readily agreed and we found a place that served several local dishes I’d never heard of. I had Kà-nŏm jeen nám ngée-o. I copied that out of the menu. It’s a dish of fresh rice noodles served with a pork-and tomato-based broth. Very rich and meaty.
I was really getting to like Char, which was a danger sign to me. She could lead me on for days and Terry might not even be there. It was difficult to ignore her appeal, though. With the scarves all tucked away in her bag, she was devastating in her shorts and T-shirt. And it was clear that her fashion style did not include a bra. That had been easy to ignore when we toured the temples, which is why, I suppose, the poor monks require extra covering for women.
It was still before dark when we caught a tuk-tuk back to the Enchanted Village but rain slowed us and the rest of the evening traffic up. It took nearly an hour to get back. By then it was full dark and there were only a couple other people talking in the sheltered cabanas around the pool.
“Shall we swim?” Char asked.
“Sure. I’ll get my suit and meet you out here.”
“Why waste time?” she asked. With that, she pulled her T-shirt over her head, dropped her shorts and dove in. I stood staring at the nymph in the water. “Are you coming in?” I’d hesitated too long. I stripped as quickly as I could and slid into the pool, making sure my feet touched bottom before I let go of the side.
“You don’t have to know how to swim in this water,” she giggled, gliding up next to me. “They don’t chlorinate here. The water is treated with salt. Not as much as an ocean, but it’s enough to improve your buoyancy. Just lie back and relax.” She demonstrated. I realized what a pig of a man I was when she caught me fixated on her breasts above the water line.
She smiled and floated over next to me. She pulled herself upright with her hands on my shoulders and pressed herself against me, lightly kissing me.
“I hope you will be here long enough for this to lead to something,” she whispered. She slipped under water and broke the surface again at the pool’s edge where we’d laid our clothes. She didn’t dress and I watched her as she walked past and to her bungalow. I had no choice but to get out of the pool using the steps. I gathered up my clothes and my hat and walked back to my bungalow where I had a towel.
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