Assignment Bangkok Read Online Free PDF Page A

his battered travel bag. It was not yet ten o’clock in the evening. From the high windows came sluggish traffic noises— samlaw bells, the shuffling of pedestrians along the river front, where elegant white yachts were moored beside water taxis and rice barges. He cleaned his gun and dropped extra cartridges into his pocket, added a small, heavy sleeve knife to his right arm, and then stood on a chair and from the wooden fan in the ceiling, just above the bulky motor, he took down a tiny tape recorder and started it going.
    He spoke quietly into it, recording his attempt to find the sleeper agent, Kem Pasah Borovit, who had been living as a bhikkhu , a Buddhist monk, for four years under K Section’s orders. He noted his imprisonment, his references to Mr. Chuk and his bully boys, and then hid the tiny mechanism again above the fan motor.
    The telephone rang.
    No one, in theory, knew he had checked into this hotel.
    He ignored the rings and examined the two tall windows facing the river embankment, flipped back the cushions on two Bombay chairs, and opened the brown teak wardrobe. The phone kept up its clamor. He felt his way down the back of the high Chinese bed, his fingers moving swiftly. Almost at the floor, he found a small metal attachment and a length of wire. He pulled it loose, saw it was a tiny microphone bug, then tore it entirely free and dropped the transistor into his shirt pocket.
    The telephone had gone silent.
    He picked out a dark blue linen jacket, changed his wet shoes, and was ready to go out again when the phone rang once more. This time he lifted the receiver, but said nothing.
    “Sam?” It was a woman’s voice. “Sam, is it you?”
    “Hello, Benjie.”
    “By Buddha’s navel, what’s the matter with you?” “Nothing, Benjie. How did you know I was in town?” “Everybody knows, Cajun. Listen, I must see you.”
    “I’m busy,” he said bluntly.
    “This is your business, Cajun.” The voice was fairly deep for a woman, crisp and taut, without the usual overtones and inflections that a woman uses when talking to a man. “I must see you and discuss things with you.”
    “Is it about Mike?”
    “Of course it’s about Mike.”
    “I thought you were through with your brother.”
    “I owe him something. Loyalty, maybe. Pity. You name it. It disturbs me, and I’ve got to do something about him.”
    “That’s why I’m here.”
    “Good, then. Come see me.” It was an order.
    “Where?”
    “I’m going to the sawmill,” Benjie Slocum said. “The foreman is drunk, and one of the sawyers got his arm sliced off, the idiot. Can you meet me there? You’ve been at the mill before, haven’t you? Remember, a few years ago—”
    “I remember. Have you heard from Mike?”
    Benjie Slocum’s crisp voice hesitated. “That’s the whole thing. You sent him in. He simply hasn’t come back.”
    “No word at all?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Give me a couple of hours.”
    “All right, Sam. It will be good to see you. I’ve got your favorite bourbon.”
    “Mekong will do just fine.”
    She rang off. Durell held the phone for a moment, then cradled it thoughtfully. He stood for a full minute, thinking it out.
    He had no difficulty recalling Benjamina Slocum. It was her inherited money that started her brother Mike here in Thailand, lifting him from a light-hearted, devil-may-care charter pilot in a mortgaged Piper Apache to a big businessman, with interests in rubber down in the Kra Isthmus, teak forests and lumbering up near Chiengmai, a tea plantation in the northern highlands by the Laotian border, and the Thai Star Air & Shipping Co. that had rim Benjie’s stake into millions. Whatever their prosperity, however, Mike remained the same. He did odd jobs for K Section, and two weeks ago, in Washington, Durell had yielded to Mike’s plea for action. Big business bored him, he said. Durell suspected that his efficient, strict older sister also bored him. He had agreed to send Mike into the