Postmistress of Nong Khai

Frank Hurst

Description

Mike Rawlin, an ambitious Customs Intelligence officer, is posted to the British Embassy in Bangkok, where he is tasked with infiltrating a dangerous band of drug smugglers in the infamous and remote Golden Triangle. His work consumes him and he becomes increasingly isolated from his family as he takes more risks, throwing himself recklessly into his new life. With the help of the Thai police and an Australian counterpart, Mike tracks down a notorious Dutch drug lord, Bart Vanderpool, who he has been hunting for years. Bart is masterminding an elaborate plot to smuggle heroin from the Golden Triangle to Britain. After tapping Bart's phone as part of his surveillance operation, Mike is introduced to Lek, a beautiful Thai Airways hostess, from the Mekong River city of Nong Khai, who has inside information about the drug ring. With Lek's help Mike steals ever closer to trapping Bart, but in the process Lek becomes the object of his desire and the two embark on an emotional affair. Mike's personal and professional values begin to disintegrate as his infatuation for her grows. Mike's investigation leads to a climatic ending in which he must choose between the woman he loves and the capture of a man he has been hunting for over ten years.Passion, deception and intrigue provide a heady mix in this fast-paced crime thriller set in London and Thailand. A highly entertaining read,The Postmistress of Nong Khaiis full of fascinating and elusive characters and will appeal to readers who enjoy being kept guessing until the very end.

Sujets

• Gran Londres
• Greater London
• Bangkok
• Thriller
• Grand Londres
• London

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 février 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781785894794
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE POSTMISTRESS OF NONG KHAI
FRANK HURST
Copyright © 2016 Frank Hurst
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
For my wife Kate, who has stoically endured my many weaknesses.
“ There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn’t there.”
Thomas Hardy
“Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.”
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
“ Everything you look at can be turned into a story, you can make a tale out of everything you touch.”
Hans Christian Andersen (The Elder Tree Mother)
Any work of fiction based on the classified activities of a secretly minded government service will inevitably contain a substantial facet of make-believe, as a true to life account would, in all probability, contravene some section of some official secrets act. This book is a work of fantasy. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and any character resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
CONTENTS
Part One
Chapter One
Part Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Bangkok, Thailand – 14 April 1988
‘Are you quite sure you can trust your informant, Mike?’ Head of Station enquired languidly. He had asked me the same question the day before and it irritated me.
Pompous prat.
‘No problems, Jim – it’s all A1 and verifiable,’ I replied wearing my best smile.
‘OK, it’s just that it seems to us that you are the only one with a handle on the intelligence.’ He fixed me with a cold, oily stare; his face reminded me of a long dead codfish. I knew he expected me to elaborate but I resisted and just stared benignly back. After a few moments of awkward silence, he cleared his throat uneasily and said, ‘Just checking. Nothing meant by it. Understand fully.’
It was uncalled-for and he knew it. It was a deliberately nasty prod, motivated by petty jealousy. He knew, only too well, that I had to do things by the book; there could be no careless shortcuts now, no sloppy tradecraft. If I had not been sure of my source, we would not be congregating now – I would not be wasting everyone’s time.
Although I liked to pretend otherwise, there was a limit to what I could do single-handedly. The business of intelligence is often a solitary one, but with selective support from a few proven colleagues, I could control my cases up to a point. In my heart, I knew that working alone could only take me so far and that sooner or later I would have to involve others. That’s where the trust came in. This had been such a long-running investigation already, winding its curious and unpredictable course over ten years. Parcels of time filled by collecting scraps, listening to fragmented conversations, and watching – endless watching. There had been other cases, of course, but this one had become special.
Recently, the early wake-up calls; the late nights in noisy, smoke-filled bars and tedious airport concourses; the monotonous legwork spiked with intermittent, adrenaline-rush moments had cost me. My mind was deadened and my body creaking. So, I smiled a lot in a struggle to mask my disintegrating appearance, but the truth was that I was not looking my best. Embassy colleagues had begun to notice; a few of the closer ones had observed politely that I looked a little tired. I had brushed things off valiantly, but I felt exposed and psychologically debilitated, unable any longer to camouflage my puffy and lined features, caused by lack of sleep and too much alcohol. I did not look well. And there had been the assignations and the anxiety – the emotion-sapping interludes – the passion.
But I could see the end now. The briefing had been the penultimate scene in the last act – only the finale remained and I welcomed it; I wanted closure. The time for scheming was over. The embassy had not been helpful, constantly reminding me that I was a guest in the country with limited official powers to act. Her Britannic Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office could support me only so far and did not welcome unpleasant surprises. It had been the FCO that had coerced me into assembling this mixed bag, most of whom had been invited just to satisfy protocol. Thankfully, there were a few key players in attendance; ones I knew and felt I could count on, locals mostly. They deserved the facts and I had done my best to impart my knowledge to them as fully as I dared. I would require their expertise and home-grown wisdom to help me deliver a workable plan.
There could be few secrets now. Like a gambler playing a decisive hand, I had put nearly all my intelligence chips on the table. The ones in my pocket were for self-preservation – to keep me in the game if my fortunes went awry. The two Thai specialists in the audience understood this. They accepted that I would conceal a few choice morsels from them – maybe the particulars of some clandestine methodology or the identity of my most coveted source. Officially, making such economies with the facts amongst allies was frowned upon. But everyone did it; they kept secrets from me and I did from them. It was a game – we knew that and we consented to it.
I chewed my lip and responded pleasantly to the diverse questions the small group had dreamed up. Most of their enquiries had been wearisomely brainless, asked only to justify their attendance. But slowly, their reservations had turned into support and even the Head of Chancery, a naturally cynical human being and very much one of the protocol invitees, was now upbeat.
‘Looks spot on to me, Mike,’ he puffed.
When the probing finally finished, those with any private doubts about the quality of my intelligence chose to remain silent and I took this as a green light to proceed. The Thais left quietly and the others returned to their air-conditioned offices, presumably confident that the operation was in good hands and mentally drafting the cables they would send to their various departments in London and Canberra, claiming all the credit when it was over. If the case collapsed, most of them would scuttle into the long grass and it would mean conspiratorial whispers and sideways glances at the Ambassador’s weekly meeting for months.
As I tidied my papers and watched the others trundle contentedly out of the room, my Aussie colleague, Sonny, had shuffled up alongside to tell me he would catch the six thirty flight down to Phuket and we agreed to meet at the hotel later that evening. I had a more pressing engagement, however, and had booked an earlier aircraft. There remained some final fragments of information I had to collect; tiny facts which only my informant could provide. It was to be our final contact and I was already experiencing an overpowering sense of loss.
En route to Don Muang Airport, I reflected that the next twenty-four hours would be a major turning point, not just for the investigation, but for me also. I knew that the operational master plan would, almost certainly, be chucked in the bin within an hour or two – it pretty much always happened that way. We couldn’t plan for a whole host of imponderables, but I found myself concerned less about the case than about my own personal demons. They worried me the most; the thought of them made me retch. There was no doubt – I was scared.
The hour-long flight south was annoyingly delayed to wait for a couple of connecting passengers from Copenhagen. I glared at them as they bumped down the aisle, overloaded with hand baggage, but they were clearly in holiday mood and showed no signs of remorse. I refused the coffee and cake proffered and called for a cold Singha beer instead. As we descended over the northeast coast of Phuket Island, I could see the tiny, sand-fringed, volcanic outcrops that sprouted out of the blue of Phang Nga Bay like a scattering of fallen petals from a frangipani bloom. The aircraft slid further downwards and the specks of billowing yachts and other small, littoral craft became increasingly visible as they left tell-tale white trails in their wakes, noiselessly plying the dappled shoreline.
That is where it’s all going to play out. That expanse of dark water with its sprinkling of islands will be a witness to my fortun