‘We will wait here with Anna until we can make arrangements for her.’ Mann stood. Jake looked up at him in panic as if he were about to leave him. Mann put his arm around Jake’s shoulders. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere, not until I get you home.’

121

Mo was waiting for them, dressed all in black, a rifle over the crook of her arm.

‘Thank you for agreeing to see us.’ Mann greeted her as the boatman steered towards the jetty. ‘I wanted my brother to meet one of the greatest soldiers in the longest civil war in history, and to thank her.’

The boat came to a stop. Mo nodded and smiled as she held up her hand.

‘I am not alone,’ she said, glancing to her right. Mann looked at the dense undergrowth. A shadowy figure was lurking there. Someone stepped out.

‘Wassup, dude.’

Jake nearly fell out of the boat with the shock of seeing Lucas.

He looked at his friend, pale, sick, but very much alive.

‘I found him near to death.’ Mo squeezed Lucas’s shoulders. ‘He needs feeding up, but he will live.’

Lucas and Jake hugged whilst Mann shook Mo’s hand.

‘I hope we meet again one day, Mo.’

She shook her head. ‘There is nothing left of my village.’

‘I am sorry, Mo. Where will you go?’

She shrugged and turned her eyes to the distant hills. ‘Somewhere. The days of the Karen are numbered, deals will be struck between the Thai government and the Burmese junta and we will be wiped out.’ Mann nodded his head sadly. ‘But for me, there is only one way to live and to die. “Never give up, never surrender”…Churchill was a good man.’ She turned and disappeared into the jungle. Mann looked up and on the bank he saw Phara, waiting. She raised her hand and waved a sad farewell.

122

‘You okay, Riley?’ Mann had gone to visit him at the hospital. Gee was sleeping in the next bed.

Riley nodded. But his eyes said otherwise.

‘I should have stopped Sue years ago. I always thought I contained it in her. She was diagnosed in her late teens.’

‘She must have had some serious religious issues to have used a sharpened crucifix.’

‘Yes, her paranoia was always based on religion. Something to do with her parents. She heard voices. Sometimes imaginary, other times they were real. Katrien—she could make Sue do anything. I am sorry I didn’t speak out sooner, I might have saved Louis, and the murdered soldier at Mo’s camp. She liked to flirt and turn men on, but she killed them when they tried to touch her. But I loved her, she listened to me—most of the time. When did you suspect she was involved?’

‘When I met with Hillary at Mary’s. She told me it was Sue who told her not to pick the kids up from the camp that day. I knew you were over-protective—I figured you were covering for Sue, but I didn’t know the rest of it.’

Riley lay back exhausted.

‘Will you be okay?’ asked Mann.

‘The refugees need me more than ever. We have to rebuild and we won’t be getting any more money for a while.’

There was a knock on the door. Shrimp came in.

‘Hey, boss. I wanted to see you before I go. What do you want me to do with this?’ Shrimp held the case with the two million dollars in his hand.

‘Give it to Riley here. He’ll put it to good use.’

For a moment Mann thought Riley was going to cry. But instead he reached over and shook Mann’s hand.

‘I’m grateful, mate. Really grateful.’ Mann could see his resolve returning.

‘Shrimp and I are going now, but we’ll see you next time we’re in Thailand.’

‘Uhh…boss. That’s what I wanted to say. I’m going back down to Phuket. I have loads of leave owed to me and I am going to help a few friends in need of my legal expertise.’

‘Would that be Summer?’

‘Summer, June and July.’

‘Sounds like some girls I used to know,’ said Gee, opening his eyes and grinning sleepily. It was the first time Mann had seen him without his hat. He was as bald as a baby.

‘Glad to have you back with us, Gee.’ Mann went to sit on his bed. ‘You’re a man of many secrets. Shrimp told me you felt indebted to Deming.’

He nodded. ‘I have been waiting for my chance to repay my debt. I knew you would come when your brother was kidnapped. I told my cousins in the Chinese dragon shop to watch over Magda. They told me they had seen you at Casa Roso. Then I made sure to be in Chiang Mai for when you arrived.’

‘He must have meant a lot to you.’

‘Yes, Deming was my friend. I didn’t tell you before because I felt I could serve you best if you didn’t know my history. The past is not always welcome in the present.’

‘How did you know him?’

‘Deming gave me hope when I had none. I was nothing. He gave me the Golden Orchid so that I could take over for him. We stopped heroin production and moved back into village crafts. He gave me the lock-up at Mae Sot. He kept the refinery and the land. He said it would never be used for anything but destruction. It was a place of ghosts and he said, in years to come his sons would decide its fate.’

‘Whatever you feel you owed Deming it is definitely repaid now.’

Gee nodded his head thoughtfully. ‘Ah ha. I agree. But I will never stop being grateful.’ He looked at Mann curiously. ‘I know you have learned much that you did not want to know about your father on this journey. I understand your mistrust but in one thing you can believe—your father tried to change. He tried to make amends for his bad ways. It was Deming who wrote the inscription on the Buddha outside the lock-up. We are what we think. What we think, we become.

‘He tried to become someone better.’

123

Mann sat in King’s bar and ordered a vodka. He played with the phone in his hand and stared at the screen. He finally rang Ng.

‘Tell me it straight.’

‘Okay, Genghis…Your father was one of a syndicate, the Golden Orchid. They had business concerns in Burma and Thailand. They traded in teak, artefacts, toys, anything…’

‘And opium.’

‘Yes, and opium. Deming handled the distribution at the Amsterdam end. He was responsible for getting it out to the rest of Europe.’

‘Who else was in the syndicate?’

‘The only one left alive is Split-lip Lok. He said that when the books started not adding up and the money dried up they realised what he’d done. He’d been giving the money away, turning the company back to selling locally-made produce: toys, baskets, you know the kind of thing. Split-lip said something happened to Deming in Amsterdam. That’s when it all changed.’

‘Shit, Ng. Who the hell was he? I feel sick to my stomach when I think of my father.’

Ng paused at the other end of the phone. ‘He was a Hong Kong businessman who got in too deep. Getting out cost him his life. He was naïve.’

‘He was a triad,’ said Mann. ‘Once a triad always a triad. He should have known that. No one leaves a society. They killed him because he went against orders. They killed him because he tried to get out.’

Mann closed his phone, finished his drink, and asked Eric to call him a cab. He had one last place to go.

124

Mann took off his shoes and entered the temple in the grounds of the Enlightenment Centre. The monk smiled at him as he entered and greeted him with a small bow of the head. Mann bowed low.