“Right. Er, yeah.”

Saxon bobbed his head. “Okay, now. When we found out Meadows was headed east with the gunrunners, we all agreed he was going to try to set himself up in charge of a drug lab for some big Asian operation, probably in the Golden Triangle. Now, we’ve been sweltering in this combination steam-bath and sewer two whole days now, and J. Bob has been running around playing Secret Agent Man and slipping the old Spam Loafski to Mistral, while all we do is sit by the pool sipping Mai Tais, playing with our wing-wangs, and praying for the Eurasian babes to fall out of their swimsuits. You following this?”

In fact the very different personalities of Belew and Helen Carlysle had caused both to be extremely discreet about their nascent affair. But Saxon had noticed that the two had begun to adhere into a mini-bloc opposed to him and Hamilton. Carlysle had certainly shut Saxon down in no uncertain terms, and what that added up to for Saxon was that either Mistral was getting it from Belew or she was a dyke. She hadn’t exactly dropped her drawers in response to Hera’s come-ons in Athens. That left one possibility. QED.

“I suppose you think Belew is in cahoots with Meadows,” Hamilton said sullenly.

Saxon flipped his shades up on top of his dark hair and gazed at Hamilton for a long moment before flipping them down again. A corner of his mouth worked. Hamilton wanted to yell at him. Saxon did that with his mouth when he was being clever. Hamilton hated it when he was clever.

“Well-ll,” Saxon said, “I guess we can’t entirely discount that little possibility, now, can we? I mean, he is with the Company after all, and who set most of these ethnic-army drug lords up in business in the first place? Can you say, C-I-A? Sure. I knew you could.”

At that point a five-foot-tall woman with red hair hanging to a perfect butt and green eyes shaped like almonds dove off the board. Water droplets hit Saxon on the hand and cheek. One splattered on the precious Black Box.

“Hey, you stupid cunt!” he shrieked when she surfaced. “Watch out what the fuck you’re doing!”

Treading water, she glared for a moment, then laughed and dogpaddled away, her mostly naked rump protruding slightly from the water and just working away. “Stuck-up bitch,” Saxon snarled. “If we were back in the USA

Hamilton cleared his throat.

“Oh. Yeah.” Saxon rubbed his upper lip where the stubble from his returning mustache itched him. “So anyway, the real deal with our friend J. Bob is that this is his old playground, and he knows a lot of the big kids on it, and he knows a lot of the little ones too. If Southeast Asia really is where Meadows has gone to ground, you and me and the dink shining shoes over there all know J. Bob’s gonna sniff him out first.”

“So? Why does that mean we have to bug his phones?”

Saxon quit fiddling with his knobs long enough to reach up and feel his partner’s forehead, then pinch one cheek and lightly slap it. “Are you running a fever? Has your little brain overheated? Wakey, wakey, Agent Hamilton.” He laughed at the way Hamilton jerked his head back and batted ineffectually at his hand. “Were you asleep last time we talked to Washington? The fucking media finally figured out we didn’t win just ’cause Bill Bennett said we did when he cut and ran. The Agency needs a win, here; it is definitely not policy that the frapping Company should get to collar the biggest-ticket ace fugitive in the history of the U.S. of A.”

“So you figure somebody’s going to call right up to Belew’s room and finger Meadows?” Hamilton said sullenly.

“I figure he’s been putting out feelers, and somebody might get back to him, if only to set up a meet. Who knows? Maybe he’ll do a deal with the Muang Thais or the Shan United Army. Sell ’em a couple juicy DEA agents in exchange for Meadows.”

Hamilton paled.

“Besides, I don’t expect somebody to just call up to his room. That’s why I got all the phones in the lobby wired too”

“Oh, shit.” Gary grabbed Lynn’s shoulder and pointed. Mistral was just emerging from the hotel lobby, moving tentatively as she came down the broad white steps to the pool, as if the fierce noon sunlight was a wind she had to walk against. “Jesus, put that stuff away.”

“Why?” Saxon demanded. “She’s a playgirl, not a cop. What does she know about surveillance equipment? We’ll tell her it’s a magic ace detector we just got from the Governor by Federal Express.”

She stopped across from them in the terrace that ran around the pool, tentative as a forest creature. She wore a lightweight dress to mid-calf, smoky gray with little abstract dabs and slashes of mauve and midnight blue in it, set off with just a couple of streaks of silver, for contrast. It was sheer enough that you could see her bra and panties through it. She was wearing her ace suit less since she’d taken up with Belew. Maybe it was the humid Southeast Asian heat.

Helen Carlysle had spent some discreet time in the sun. Her limbs shone like polished hardwood. She had lost weight; the summer-weight dress had a tendency to hang in places. But the slight loss had sharpened the definition of her collarbones and her slim, long neck, added a touch of romantic concavity to her cheeks, made her eyes looked huge and haunted in the shadow of her silver straw hat.

A gentle, stinking breeze off the Chao Phrya River ruffled her permed hair. She was a great-looking woman, there was no doubt about that.

“Too bad she doesn’t have enough tits,” Hamilton said sadly.

“More than a mouthful is wasted,” Saxon said. He clutched at the side of his head and teetered way to one side. “Whoa We got something here.”

“What?”

“Shh! The Man Himself is on the line.” He listened, a nasty predator’s grin spreading gradually across his lean, dark face.

At last he nodded, peeled off the headset. “Okay,” he said, “we’re good to go. J. Bob’s meeting his man in half an hour. And he did, too, call him in his room, so there.”

He grabbed his Black Box by the little plastic carrying handle. Mistral caught sight of them as they stood up in a hurry. Saxon gave her the thumb-and-pinky Hawaiian hang-loose salute, and they booked.

The women were out buying fish, vegetables, and fruit from the vendor-boats on the klongs, canals. As Belew got nearer the Menam Chao Phrya, the wares being cried took on a more exotic flavor.

Bangkok was not an eighties kind of place. It was probably not going to be a nineties kind of place, either, but the decade hadn’t really set its style yet. The delicate called Krung Thep – Bangkok – the “Cesspool of the Orient.” It was noisy, loud, nasty, and bright, whether by day or by night.

There’s a hoary clichй about places in the East where anything is for sale. In Bangkok it’s all for sale cheap.

J. Bob Belew liked the place immensely.

Through a day whose humid heat was so thick you practically needed a machete to get through it, he negotiated thronged and hyper streets down to the waterfront district. Nearer the river, broad avenues became narrow, crowded with bodies in motion, and the cries of beggars, peddlers, and pimps warred with Moroccan-roll, Vanilla Ice, and that Chinese popular music that sounds like the themes of old cowboy movies for the top niche in a whole vibrant ecosystem of noise. The white-boy rap was cranked so that all you could hear was the jackhammer bass, which was probably a blessing.

Belew wore baggy-cut khaki Brittainia trousers, Nike athletic shoes, a cream-colored polo shirt, light-tan jacket, dark-green Ray-Bans. He moved like a man who walked these cracked and littered streets every day of his life.

It was not the best part of town he was going into, nor the safest, and the muggers were even better armed than the ones in Central Park, if not usually so bold. That was why he wore a Para Ordnance 10mm in an inside-the-pants holster down the back of his trousers. That was why they were cut loose, in contradiction of Belew’s customary fashion statement.