Free Bangkok Rules by Harlan Wolff Page A

didn’t like it. He left his cigar in the ashtray to go out on its own. Havana cigars go out quickly because they are chemical free whilst all other cigars burn evenly like cigarettes. Carl went into the sitting room and let Bruch put him to sleep on the sofa.
     
    When Carl woke it was already evening. The house was silent and he was in total darkness apart from the fine lines of orange light given out by the tubes on top of the amplifier. He checked his phone for messages and found one from the colonel saying he had sent the information to Carl’s email address. Carl turned the lights on and went into the office having picked up and relit the cigar. He switched on the computer and started printing the reports and attachments.
     
    The first document he studied was the ID card printout of the managing director. A Somchai Poochokdee aged sixty-nine. The printout showed the face of an old respectable foreigner. Carl had him! The target had used his money and influence to become a Thai citizen. That was how he had solved his problem of arriving on someone else’s passport.
     
    He would have had to establish himself as a tax-paying businessman and then after a few years of regularly queuing up at the immigration department would have paid his way to speed up the process of becoming a Thai citizen. It would have taken a few years and he would have had to learn to sing the national anthem. Thus his identity problem would have been solved. He’d become a Thai person and so carried a Thai passport. The name he had chosen was Somchai Poochokdee. ‘The ideal man who is lucky’ was the best translation Carl could come up with. It was very corny and yet typical of the sort of Thai name people gave themselves when they applied for citizenship.
     
    The next thing Carl looked at was the target’s travel record that had been attached to a second email. The airport immigration report showed that Somchai Poochokdee made trips to Macau and a lot of them. He was obviously still in the poker game. Macau had become a Chinese Las Vegas and recently opened several new casinos run by large corporations. There were public poker rooms there now and Carl had heard there was a lot of action at the tables. He took the details from the ID card document and started putting together a plan to meet the curious character in Macau.
     
    A further look in his email inbox showed Carl the usual spam telling him he needed an extra-large penis and a pill to keep it permanently hard. He deleted those first, then he deleted the Nigerian scam mails advising him of an unexpected windfall. That left two unread emails. One was from a woman he had known telling him that she was unhappy and her husband was not treating her as well as she had hoped. The other email was an offer of work performing a character assassination of somebody that the would-be client claimed had annoyed him.
     
    Carl ignored both of these emails, as he saw no point in replying. The first was standard Internet flirting from an old flame. Carl’s grandmother had told him never to reheat old romances or dishes containing mushrooms. The second email was from a man trying to buy an attack dog but Carl never chased or fetched sticks.
     
    Then Carl had to do what he had been avoiding. He Google searched the Bangkok murders. Gruesome stories of how several young girls, mostly university students, had left the world. They would have suffered terribly before they died. Whoever perpetrated the crimes was highly skilled in acts of sadism. The final act was always stiletto stab wounds to their lungs through their ribs, causing them to drown in their own blood, followed by the removal of both of their ears. Carl then did a search on the Nevada murders. There was not much there as so much time had passed. However, what he did find was striking in similarities. Also of interest was the fact that authorities had questioned a Tony Inman, real estate broker.
     
    The next thing Carl did was Google search