Paying Back Jack (14 page)

“Goddamit, why'd they have to kill Jack?” asked Harry. He juggled a lot of death in his day, and each time, thought, “You don't pick which tomorrow you are going to live, it picks you.” He'd invited Jack to Hua Hin and promised to take care of everything. He'd taken care of everything but it wasn't the way he wanted it.

WATERS HAD RECEDING blond hair and the build of a middle-weight fighter. A small pelt of trimmed beard worn under his lower lip drew the eyes, as if he were a stage actor. In a way, that wasn't too far from the truth. With pale skin and blue eyes with pupils like hollowed-out nine-millimeter rounds, Waters had the kind of face that never seemed to change. He looked pretty much like he had when he was twenty-five years old. And he had an odd talent for accents. Depending on his mood and the context, he would riff in Irish, East London, Cape Town, or Delhi English. On the phone, he could fool a native of these places. No one was ever certain what his real accent was—not that it mattered much in his line of work. His ability to take on any persona had given him an edge.

Several months before Jarrett and Tracer received the assignment, Waters and Casey scheduled a meeting in Bangkok. Naked except for a white towel wrapped around his waist, Waters sat in a sauna, sweating. Seated next to him with his back to the wall, Casey leaned over, took the scoop from a bucket, and threw water on the hot stones, sending a fresh spiral of steam through the small room. On the bench next to him Waters had a cell phone and another device that looked like a phone, but was a scanner for electronic listening devices. Waters was a cautious man. Even in a Bangkok massage parlor he assumed someone might be listening. Having witnessed firsthand the capabilities of those who issued orders, Waters understood that in their impersonal world there were never any hard feelings. There
were never any genuine feelings at all, only objectives, road maps, and zones that needed to be made secure.

“Christ, aren't you hot enough?” asked Waters.

“Sweat gets rid of all those impurities.”

“A bit hotter and you can get a confession out of me.” Waters was hitting close to the bone. But that was his way of shadowboxing in the field.

Waters got up from the bench and pushed open the door. A few minutes later, Casey found him drinking a beer at the ground-floor restaurant, leaning forward, hands folded on the table. He'd changed into his green windbreaker with gray piping around the collar, a red sweater, black slacks, and a Rolex, his hair combed back, freshly shaved, a glint of mischief in his blue eyes. People in the company said Waters should have his own TV show.

Waters spoke French, German, Italian, and Spanish. His Spanish had been refined to pass for Argentinean, Mexican, and Colombian. Casey had known Waters long enough to wonder what his baseline was. Who was Waters when he closed the door and took off his stage makeup?

The massage parlor had been Rick Casey's idea, a place to relax, with no one with five words of English, six miles away from the farang ghetto on Sukhumvit Road. On his way to work each day, Casey passed the large neon sign with the sexy young woman in a low-cut evening gown, her red lips in a perfect
O,
and long black hair falling over her shoulders. Waters had made a special trip from Baghdad to meet with Casey, and the sauna in the massage parlor was Casey's revenge.

As they soaked in the sauna, Casey was thinking about the last time they'd met; Waters had chosen the location: a bookstore on Broadway in New York City.

“Ever get laid in a bookstore?” Casey had asked.

Casey saddled up to a chair at the table as Waters flipped through a photo album of the yings working at the massage parlor. Some looked Chinese and others had a Japanese appearance, but most were overly made-up Thai women.

“Find anything you like?” asked Casey.

Waters closed the album.

“The target's high-profile,” said Waters. He was in the mood to talk business.

“I'd look at it a different way. He's a high-value target.”

That had become a familiar term among the private contractors. Working in a secret prison, that kind of talk made a private contractor feel good about what he did at his day job and gave him a moral justification for the persuasion used to unlock a man's plans, secrets, and information about colleagues.

Casey explained the details of what had happened to his son, Joel—a thirty-four-year-old accountant with one of the major firms, a man on his way up, a man with a bright future. A man who had gotten himself killed. Waters knew the broad strokes of the story but not the specifics of the murder.

Rick Casey leaned forward over his coffee, his Lakers cap pulled down just above his eyes. He wore a pair of dark aviator glasses and a black leather jacket unzipped to the sternum. The same gear he'd worn for their meeting in New York, except in Bangkok it was blast-furnace hot; the jacket only worked inside heavily air-conditioned rooms. Rubbing his three-day-old salt-and-pepper stubble, Casey asked Waters if he'd read the
International Herald Tribune
. Waters said he hadn't. Besides, this was Bangkok, not New York, and didn't people in Thailand read the
The Bangkok Post
? This bounced off Casey like a bullet off Superman. He had a copy of the newspaper and turned the page as Waters sipped his coffee.

“Another nine soldiers killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad. If we didn't have a facility in Bangkok like the one I work in, we'd never get these fanatics to cooperate. They truly hate us. There would be a hundred times that number if it weren't for the work we're doing,” said Rick Casey. He folded the newspaper and put it on the empty chair. “But let me tell you a secret. It's just so many numbers unless one of them is your own son.”

Waters nodded, thinking about the old Stalin quote that a single death was a tragedy, while a million deaths was a statistic. Both Waters and Casey had jobs working inside the death industry. Early on they'd learned to distinguish between tragedy and statistic.

Casey removed the aviator glasses. His eyes were a web of tiny red veins, and the skin underneath puffy, loose, and dark. His were the eyes of a man who'd seen too much, felt too much, and suffered too many losses. Waters had seen such eyes before hundreds of times
among men he had served with, and among the families of men who hadn't come back.

“I miss my boy,” Rick Casey said. “He shouldn't have died the way he did.”

“What happened was a bad thing, Casey. It's not been easy to put this through channels. Leaning on people sends the wrong signal, Rick. People might get the idea that you are out to cause some damage. I tell them that that isn't the Rick Casey I know, that you're owed for what they did to your son.”

“Then it's approved?”

“One of the finance guys wasn't happy about it. But he's never happy. Yeah, we got the approval.”

Casey pulled a briefcase from the floor and set it on the table.

“I've brought along forty grand.”

Waters shook his head and in a New York accent said, “It's not about cash.”

It was rare to hear that line in Bangkok, where almost everything was about cash, or the lack of it. Casey tried to think of a place where cash wasn't the driving force behind a yes. He couldn't think of one.

“I heard what you said,” said Casey with a lopsided grin.

“Then why did you bring the briefcase to a whorehouse?”

“A man agrees to do a job, then that man should get paid upfront.”

“My men like upfront payments. But the point isn't the money,” Waters said. “Jarrett is who I have in mind. He once said that payback is the second best thing after sex. But there needs to be a good reason for payback, beyond the money.”

“A father has lost his son. His killer walks around a free man. If anyone has earned the right to payback, it's me,” said Casey.

Waters had heard several versions of Harry Jarrett's story about paying back Jack. Harry, who was Jarrett's father, had raised his son on the original Nepalese story that over years had taken on legendary proportions. Twenty-five years later, Harry fulfilled a promise to his son, Alan, and organized a reunion with Jack. Father, son, and Jack flew in from three separate places for the silver anniversary celebration in Bangkok. But things went sideways and the celebration had
been cancelled. What had been two stories, separated by an ocean of time, became stitched together into one and Jack's name had become a code word for special assignments, ones that fell outside the scope of normal contracts and were included in a miscellaneous category of work done for extra pay.

When such an assignment came through, Harry Jarrett's influence was clear in the first words spoken about it: “I've got a new assignment. It's paying back Jack. You interested?”

After 1990, the code words “Paying Back Jack” acquired a different spin on paying back, with interest, a moral obligation, especially a selfless debt of honor. But that was getting ahead of the original story of how Harry and Jack initially met.

In 1965, Harry had got himself into some serious trouble in Nepal. He was in his early twenties when he decided that Everest was God's personal challenge to him. What he hadn't counted on was the speed of his climb. Having gone up the mountain far too quickly, he came down with a serious case of altitude sickness. Harry needed immediate medical attention, and he was alone on the mountain. Another climber found him, carried him down the mountain, and took him to a doctor. Harry always credited this guy, named Jack, with saving his life. Jarrett liked telling Tracer “Harry was unmarried at the time, so if he'd capped it in Nepal, I wouldn't be sitting next to you.”

From an early age, Jarrett knew one thing about his father: he had a special place in his heart for Jack. It especially had to do with Jack sticking around the clinic for a week, waiting for Harry to recover fully. When he found Jack packing his gear for a return climb up the mountain, Harry stopped him. “I owe you. Give me your address so I can send you some money when I get home.”

Jack smiled, lit a joint, and shook his head. “No need, man,” he said.

“You saved my life,” said Harry. “You gotta let me do something in return.”

A big grin crossed Jack's face as if something special had occurred to him. “You can pay me back.”

Jack had taken off his gold wire-rimmed glasses and was cleaning them with the end of his shirt. He squinted as he stared at Harry (who wasn't that old then) and said, “Whenever you find someone who has a serious problem, you stop and give them a hand, help them
out. And you know what, Harry? That will be my payback. Do what you need to do, and when they want to give you something for your trouble, you just tell them, ‘I'm paying back Jack.' You think you can do that for me?”

After that, the highest purpose of Harry's life was to find a person in desperate need, who had no way out, about to be dragged under by the forces of life, and then extend his hand. As he pulled such a person free from harm's way, the guy would have that same grateful look Harry had had. He'd ask Harry what he could do in return, and Harry would tell him, “No need, I'm paying back Jack. And you can pay him back as well by helping the next guy.”

Then Jack got himself killed on Harry's watch. It would be more dramatic if I told you that Harry and Alan had rowed the bodies of two men who killed Jack a mile offshore and dumped them in the sea. But that's not exactly the way it happened. They loaded the two dead guys into a powerboat and set off in the dark. What did Harry know about the Gulf of Thailand? He didn't need to know much; he was a gifted sailor. He knew boats. So did Alan. They had revved up the four-stroke outboard engines and headed off. Harry said there'd been a million stars in that clear night sky. But Harry said that night there hadn't been any moon. The surface of the sea had been calm. In the distance Alan spotted some lights on a freighter. It was too far off for the freighter to see them. They sailed ahead without any lights. Once Harry cut the engines, he said how quiet it had been sitting there in the dark with his son, feeling the forward motion of the speedboat slow. Once the boat stopped, he'd thought about saying something about Jack. But the words wouldn't come. So Harry and Alan wrapped chains around one body, dumped it over the starboard side. Harry paused for a cigarette, saying nothing before he helped Alan thread heavy links of chains around the waist of the second dead guy. After a nod, Harry held the legs and Alan lifted by the armpits, lowering the body over the side. There was a splash, bubbles, and after a few minutes the surface was as smooth as glass. They sat in the boat, both of them thinking about Jack. His body was somewhere in the sea. Now his killers had joined him. Alan said, ‘Dad, it wasn't your fault.' Harry said he looked up at his son, trying to see his features in the dark. He knew that he was crying, and said, ‘Son, it will only be my fault if we let Jack's memory die.'

Waters paused after telling Harry's story, waiting for Casey to react. It was a crucial moment. No commitment followed without an acceptance of the basic ground rule. Money couldn't override the debt to be paid back to Jack. “They do the job, and the money goes to the foundation.”

“What's the foundation got to do with it?”

“You've heard of cyclones, tsunamis, earthquakes? Natural disasters happen all the time. The money goes to people caught in the eye of the storm. The kind of people Jack would have wanted to help. Are you with me?”

“I'm hearing you,” Casey said. “The forty grand is in the briefcase.” He slid it across the table.

Joel Casey had been murdered in Thailand. His death had been in the newspapers for a couple of weeks, and then the story had disappeared completely. No follow-up, no mention of the investigation into the killing. It was as if the murder had never happened. The man who had masterminded Joel's murder had never been charged with the crime. The police had said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. Case closed. Joel had been killed just as he was about to disclose irregularities in the accounts of a company owned by Somporn and his friends and family. Joel had gone through all the company records and computer files. He'd unearthed a second set of books, confronted Somporn, and demanded (never a good idea in Thailand) that Somporn tell him what was going on.