Salty (8 page)

Somporn shook his head in dismay.

“But your white skin … it's so beautiful.”

Somporn reached a hand out to touch her breast. Sheila stepped back against the wall.

“Please, Captain. I'm trying to wash.”

Somporn caught himself.

“I apologize.”

He walked back to his spot on the floor and sat down. He refilled his whiskey and lit another cigarette. Sheila watched him. She could sense that he was suddenly troubled by something.

“Where are you from?”

“The United States.”

“But there are black people, brown people, in your country. Not everybody is white like you.”

Sheila nodded.

“My mother was from Denmark. My father is Norwegian.”

Somporn considered that for a moment as the water in the shower slowed to a trickle and stopped. Sheila grabbed a towel—a nice one, pilfered from a four-star hotel—and began to dry herself. Somporn was watching her, entranced, and yet she could tell that his thoughts were elsewhere. Finally he spoke.

“Scandinavia.”

He said it like it was a magical word.

Turk's head was spinning. His nerves were jangly, his hands quivering in a kind of speedy tweaker palsy, and he had a splitting headache. Maybe it was all that iced tea he'd guzzled. Turk got cottonmouth when he was nervous, and he must've sucked down a gallon of the stuff. He should've stuck to beer, but somehow that didn't seem like the right thing to do as he talked on the phone with Heidegger and then with the guy from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. If people saw him drinking beer they might not think he was taking this kidnapping seriously.

He was taking it seriously, very, but he didn't know what to do, he was out of his league. He didn't have the skill set or the temperament for dealing with a crisis like this. He was a rock star, for fuck's sake. He had people who handled things for him. Your flight gets delayed, you call the tour manager or Marybeth. They call someone or something, whatever it is they do, and you're on another flight. If there's a problem with that flight, they charter you a fucking plane. It's all taken care of. You just have to sit in the executive lounge at the airport, watch ESPN, and drink cranberry juice. If the gigantic Mack truck pulling your gear gets stuck in a snowstorm while
you're on tour, nobody calls you and says that your equipment won't make the gig; somehow equipment arrives and is set up, ready for you to rock. You don't even hear about it until days later, when it's become a funny anecdote about how the stranded crew were kept entertained by a couple of truck stop whores; they even made an amateur porn video about it. That's why you keep an army of managers, tour managers, booking agents, lawyers, trainers, nutritionists, travel agents, and roadies on the payroll. The real world starts to burst your bubble or bum your party head and, snap, someone's there to deal with it. It's all taken care of; it's handled. That's how rock stars roll.

Turk lay down on the bed in his hotel room. He kicked his flip-flops off and adjusted the pillows. He tried to relax, taking a deep breath of air in through his nostrils and letting it whistle out through his lips; he tried to let his thoughts go. He wasn't sure what that meant, exactly, but that's what the yoga teacher Sheila had hired to help him “open up” had said to do.

He knew he should calm down; a U.S. official was on his way. He was going to liaise with the Thai authorities. By “liaise” Turk assumed he was going to talk to them or tell them what to do. Having the American government take over should've put his mind at ease. But it didn't. At the end of the day, Turk just didn't trust “the man.”

He remembered the time he and the other members of Metal Assassin got in trouble in Tampa Bay. They'd had a bit of a sex party with a group of willing young women, only to find out that the oldest was fifteen. The police were called. Charges were filed. It looked like they were in the soup for sure. They even considered going on the lam and relocating
to Düsseldorf or Hamburg. There was a big audience for metal in Germany. But their manager and lawyer and record company were on the ball. Turk never got the full story of what happened or how they did it but suddenly the charges got dropped. They vanished. Disappeared. Expunged from court records. The press never got wind of it. No one was the wiser. Even the parents of the fourteen-year-old that Turk and Bruno had banged in the limo—Turk taking the front end, Bruno the back—were all smiles, asking for autographs, getting their pictures taken with the band. They seemed to understand that no one in Metal Assassin, not Turk, Steve, Bruno, or Chaps the drummer, knew the girls were underage. Later, in therapy for his sex addiction, Turk wondered if it would've mattered to him if he'd known.

But who was going to handle Sheila's abduction? The guy from the embassy? The Army? The President? Jon Heidegger? Somebody had to do something. Turk could feel the stress building inside him. There was a tightness in his chest that worried him. He was supposed to live a nonstress kind of life. Being stressed was part of the problem that led to his addictions. The shrinks had warned him that stress triggered something in his brain that could make him fall back into his old cycle. Turk didn't want to fall off the wagon. He'd spent too much time and money and energy trying to get right.

Why did Sheila have to go ride an elephant?

Why did they have to kidnap Sheila? If someone else he knew was kidnapped and he was stressed out about it, he could have sex with her. Now he was on his own. Turk thought about calling his sponsor, then decided he'd do it in the morning.

He sat up, climbed off the bed, and went over to the minibar for a Singha. The Thai beers were pretty good—cold
and slightly bitter; the brew gurgled down his gullet and soothed his sizzled nerves.

Feeling somewhat better, he went into the bathroom and rooted through Sheila's toiletries until he found a bottle of prescription sleeping pills. He couldn't remember if you were supposed to take one or two, and the label on the bottle was all smudged. He didn't want to just feel groggy, he needed to
sleep
, so he popped two, washing the pills down with the rest of the beer. The subsequent burp tasted faintly of pharmaceuticals.

Turk lay back down and made himself comfortable. He wanted to get a good night's sleep. He had to be sharp for his meeting with the authorities in the morning.

He waited for the drugs to knock him out.

Ben Harding, ICE agent, had never been to Phuket. He'd never been to the other “hot” tourist destinations either, like Krabi, Ko Phi Phi, or Phang Nga Bay, with its bizarre limestone spires jutting up out of the water. Even if he'd wanted to go, the tsunami fixed that. No way was he going near the ocean, not after the pictures he'd seen. It wasn't the idea that you could be asleep in your bed when the ocean suddenly decides to rise up and destroy everything that freaked him out. That would, at least he hoped, be a quick way to go; swept out to sea, drowned under millions of gallons of water. It was the aftermath of the tsunami that caused his skin to crawl. The stink of corpses left on the beach, the dead animals hanging from trees. The sewage systems—already primitive at best—overwhelmed and spewing fecal matter everywhere. From Ben's point of view, the tsunami was bacteria's best friend. If he thought about it long enough, imagined being trapped in that germ-intense environment, he'd break out in a cool sweat and feel tingles of imaginary fever—cholera, smallpox, yellow fever—beginning to spread through his body.

For most of his tour of duty he'd been in Bangkok, and while the capital city had its share of fetid and scary places, it was for the most part modern, with hot running water, antiseptic soap, Western toilets—all the things you needed to keep from getting sick. Armed with a bottle of antibacterial hand gel, he could go out into the city with confidence and slowly acclimate to the strangeness, the clamor, humanity, and humidity of life in Southeast Asia. Now he was going out into uncharted waters. Even though it was only a one-hour flight, he'd be leaving the quasi-sanitary comforts of the big city.

To prepare for the trip south, Ben had started taking a course of antibiotics as a prophylactic. Be prepared.

…

It didn't surprise him that tourists had been kidnapped. The south of Thailand butts up right next to Malaysia, and, as everyone knows, Malaysia is a Muslim country. And a Muslim country is a place teeming with potential terrorists. It would be easy for one of these “terror cells” to go up to Phuket and assault tourists from the developed world. Like the disco bombing in Bali, where hundreds of Australians were killed, Ben was just surprised it hadn't happened sooner.

Ben was surprised by the mix of people on the plane: Thais, Saudis, Norwegians, Swedes, Brits, Australians, French, German, Chileans. He was the lone American. Mostly they were families or couples going on their honeymoon. People ready to lie around on the beach, snorkel, and get sunburned.

Ben didn't understand it.

People paying good money to fly on germ-infested airplanes and land in germ-infested countries where they'd sit around and eat food that was guaranteed to teach them the ABCs of hepatitis. A honeymoon, an anniversary trip, a vacation spent soaking in a pandemic soup.

The sex tourists were the worst. Didn't they know that HIV infection rates were soaring in Southeast Asia? Why did they arrive in droves and head, salivating, to the seediest brothels in the world? Why did they risk their lives? Was Thai pussy that good?

…

The airport in Phuket was small and tidy, like an airport in Duluth or Boise. The only strangeness was a large section of rows of identical orange chairs with a sign saying:
RESERVED FOR MONK
. Ben didn't see a monk anywhere.

He followed the rest of the passengers down corridors lined with ads for undersea adventure, coral reef exploration, Thai dining and dancing, parasailing, deep sea fishing, and other assorted resort activities. The good life. A perfect target for terror.

At baggage claim, a driver from the resort was standing by the door wearing a khaki uniform and white pith helmet. He held a little sign that read:
MR. HARDING, USA
. Ben shook his head in dismay. If the terror cell was watching the airport, his cover was blown.

Ben nodded to the driver.

“I'm Harding.”

The driver bowed stiffly and handed him a manila envelope.

“This is for you, sir. Do you have any bags?”

“Just this.”

The driver took Ben's small carry-on.

“The car is waiting.”

…

It was hotter in Phuket than in Bangkok. But at least the traffic was mellow. It was rural, relaxed. The roads were clear and the streets seemed clean. Ben was glad that the driver had left the car running, the air-conditioning blasting at maximum, turning the interior of the little Toyota into an icebox. Ben sat in back and opened the manila envelope. It was the information he'd requested on the kidnapping victims. He immediately set aside the information on the British couple—they weren't his concern—and concentrated on the Americans. Although he'd heard of Metal Assassin—who hadn't?—he couldn't claim to be a fan. Ben didn't have many CDs; he just listened to whatever was on the radio. But he did remember a power ballad by Metal Assassin that he'd liked. Though he couldn't remember the title, he did recall the chorus. It had something to do with love breaking a chain or smashing a door. Maybe that was the name of the song, “Unbroken.”

He was relieved that the musician from Metal Assassin, Turk Henry, hadn't been kidnapped. How could he keep that away from the media? They'd be on it like piranhas. And what do terrorists like more than killing Americans? Publicity. For all their talk about injustice and Islam, they were really just egomaniacs, media whores with bombs strapped around their waists. Sign them to a good PR firm and give them a couple hours on
Oprah
and they'd probably stop blowing people up.
But it wasn't Turk Henry who was abducted; it was his wife. Apparently she had been famous about ten years ago, but was now just a footnote on the back page of
Vogue
. Ben was certain that he could get Mr. Henry to cooperate—there was always the veiled threat of an IRS audit to keep people in line—and keep things on a need-to-know basis until he'd sorted this out.

…

Turk heard a banging on his door. Or maybe he was dreaming of someone at the door. No. That was really someone at the door. Turk croaked.

“Wait.”

The banging didn't stop. Turk tried again, only louder.

“Fucking hold on a second.”

That stopped the banging. Turk sat up, his head still swimming from the sleeping pills. He heard a muffled voice on the other side of the door.

“Mr. Henry. Mr. Henry. They are waiting for you in the manager's office.”

Turk stood, steadied himself, and waddled over to the door. He pulled it open to reveal a young man holding a tray with a pot of coffee, a cup, and some kind of fruit juice in a little glass sealed with plastic wrap.

“Compliments of the hotel.”

Turk stepped aside and the young man slipped in and deposited the tray on a little table.

“They are waiting for you.”

“Who?”

“The American government man. USA.”

Turk nodded. He didn't know what the fuck this guy was talking about, but whatever, coffee sounded good.

“Give me a half hour.”

“Half hour. Okay.”

And then he was gone. Turk closed the door and blinked. He opened the door again and looked out. There were the coconut palms, the beach, even a couple of topless Dutch women out for an early-morning tit bake. He wasn't dreaming. He poured himself a cup of coffee—he had trouble opening the sugar cube wrappers, but eventually wrestled the cubes free—and then sat on the bed and let the sweet lukewarm goodness slide down his gullet.