The Tsunami File (24 page)

Two short lengths of fine wire ran from the microphone to the heavier electrical cables that disappeared into the wall. The microphone wires had been crimped securely into the main cables. The bug was neatly, expertly placed and the implications were profound.

Smith had seen listening devices before at Scotland Yard and elsewhere when he was called out to sweep crime scenes for fingerprints. This one was of very good quality. Not all of them were. They came in all shapes and sizes. Some were cheap, amateur affairs, easily obtained at stores for electronics enthusiasts on Tottenham Court Road or elsewhere if one were in London and wanting to plant bugs in hotel rooms. Such things could be purchased in almost any big city in the world.

This one, very compact and very effective, was something that professionals would use. It was called an AC sender. Smith knew from his experience at Scotland Yard that a device like this would take a small amount of power from the main electrical wiring of a room and use the same wiring to send a sound signal out. Usually, a listener would tap into a wire on the same electrical circuit somewhere else on the target's floor or somewhere else in the building, and listen from there. Or the listener could install a transmitter on the circuit somewhere, so conversations could be heard on a receiver outside, in a car or in another building close by.

For the next hour, the old Jonah Smith, fuelled by beer and anger and an increasingly justified paranoia, proceeded to methodically and completely examine every electrical socket, light switch, lamp and fixture, every electrical device or telephone or radio or TV or other appliance in his rooms and among his personal possessions. He lacked the tools for a proper police sweep, but he knew what he was looking for and he was a very thorough man. As thorough as he had always been at crime scenes.

He found just one other bugging device. It was in his bedroom, similarly placed behind a wall socket. It was the same model AC sender as the one in the main room. He did not remove the bugs. He simply, for the moment, revealed them. And when he thought he was done with his sweep he sat down on the sofa, very still, very thoughtful. He pondered paranoid scenarios for a very long time.

Smith cast his mind back over all the possible conversations he had had in these rooms since the beginning of the
Deutschland
file affair. He tried to imagine at what point someone would have deemed it necessary to plant listening devices behind wall sockets in his room. He tried to imagine what important conversations with Delaney or Zalm or with Conchi the listeners might have heard in his hotel room in recent days. He also imagined, with the intense embarrassment of a good Englishman, what sounds of lovemaking and intimacy those listeners might also have heard in recent days.

Smith, usually, was not a man who drank to excess. But in this case, as he sat for hours alone in his room, pondering scenarios and watching the light fade slowly over the Chalong Bay, he drank to excess. The entire situation—from the time he had first noticed irregularities with the
Deutschland
file, to his conflicts with colleagues over the file having gone missing, to the warnings he had started to receive, to the beating he had endured, to the attempt on Delaney's life, to the most recent threatening behaviour by Horst Becker in Conchi's room—was, he thought as he drank too much bar fridge whisky and beer and fought paranoia, getting completely out of hand.

Smith had not uttered a word since he first noticed the telltale smudges near the wall socket. Silence, now, was crucial.

He decided he would not follow his first impulse, which was to simply rip the listening devices from where they had been placed. He decided that he would not alert his listeners by doing this just yet, though he feared the very act of unscrewing switch plates and rummaging around for other devices in his room may have alerted them in any case.

Instead, he decided, he would carry on as before, but extremely careful now about what he said to anyone in his room or on the telephone. At least until he decided on a better strategy or until the entire situation was resolved. He hoped that Conchi would not call him on the telephone to say goodnight.

He got up from his sofa as night fell and somewhat unsteadily, given his unaccustomed overindulgence in alcohol, replaced switchplates and arranged appliances and restored order to his room. He did so as quietly as possible, in the uncomfortable awareness now that someone was likely listening to every move he made, every scrape of a knife blade on a screw, every click of a lamp or closing of a door.

When a semblance of order was restored and in the evening silence of his room, oddly oppressive now, Smith sat before his laptop computer and got online. Delaney had given him his email address and Smith now had important information to convey.

Frank,
Smith wrote,
there's trouble here. I'm drunk and in my hotel room and what do you think I've found in here tonight? A bloody bug, two of them, good quality too. They were planted in some electrical wall sockets. Some bastard has been listening to my conversations in here, can you imagine? It must be Becker, who else could it be, the bastard. I'm not sure what to do and I can't call you from here anymore. I'm not sure where I should call you from actually. I've just left the damn things where they are for now. Also, Becker went over to see Conchi at her hotel the other night and basically told her there would be trouble if we all didn't back off. The fool also accused her or us or someone of stealing his bloody DVI identification pass, can you imagine? Who on earth would want to steal the man's ID badge? He's lost it, the bloody fool. He scared her, Frank, and I'm getting madder by the minute. I'm also drunk and it's getting late and I've got to go back in there tomorrow and match fingerbloodyprints all day as if nothing's happened. Mrs.

Stokke leaves tomorrow. What are your thoughts? Have you found out anything good in Berlin? I haven't seen Becker myself. Best regards, Jonah.

Smith hit “Send” and shipped the message to Delaney in Europe. The drinking had started to make him morose and somewhat reckless. He felt another message coming on. He decided this was entirely the right moment to write a letter to his wife. Not via email, but on proper Bay Hotel stationery, a formal document, a confession, duly signed.

He drunkenly pawed through various items in the slim drawer of the hotel desk, eventually coming up with writing paper and an envelope. He laid the paper out on the desk, raised his pen and contemplated ice cubes melting slowly in the glass of whisky before him.

My dear Fiona
, he wrote eventually.
I have something extremely important I need to tell you. I'm drunk and in my hotel room and I'm writing this letter to you at long last because it's time for us to be honest about a number of extremely important things. You really need to know some things about the sort of man I've become over here. I'm not at all who you think I am . . .

Smith's letter to his wife—long, maudlin, extremely jumbled in syntax and structure—was never mailed. As the fingerprint man regained consciousness the next morning, almost sober, alone in his hotel bed, he saw the letter on his desk, sealed and ready to go. It went, instead, directly into the wastebin.

He showered listlessly, hangover symptoms sapping his energy. He was scheduled to go out to the mortuary compound that morning with a larger than usual group of DVI people to see off Mrs. Stokke and her dead daughter. Something about that prospect, and about dead daughters generally, had in all probability contributed to his reckless mood the night before.

There were no email messages yet from Delaney on the laptop. Smith looked at his watch. It was after midnight in Berlin. Perhaps, he thought, Delaney was at that very moment alone in a silent hotel room somewhere, drinking too much and composing reckless emails, letters, confessions to wives, lovers, enemies, friends.

The intense sunlight outside the hotel made his hangover worse. Smith was not a man taken to wearing sunglasses. He squinted painfully against the sun as he hailed a taxi from the rank in the parking lot. The doorman who usually hailed cabs for guests was nowhere to be seen this morning. The taxi driver was too friendly, far too cheery, for a man in Smith's condition.

“The container compound, thanks,” Smith said. All the Phuket drivers knew all the DVI operation venues; it was their new bread and butter. Tourism had collapsed and disaster victim identification was now a going concern.

“Everybody go there this morning, thank you, thank you very much,” the driver said. “Is big day there, yes?”

“Yes. Big day,” Smith said.

The fact that the sendoff was for a child, and a child that everyone had worked so hard to identify, and the fact that it was Mrs. Stokke, whom the DVI teams had gotten to know all too well, were strong drawing cards. Several dozen people crowded under the sun canopy in the open gravel area near the mortuary buildings. Smith had not been in the compound since the night he and Delaney broke in on their fingerprint expedition.

The Norwegian ambassador had flown in from Bangkok with his wife and some officials for the ceremony. Magne Vollebaek, of course, was there. He and the ambassador wore old-fashioned dark, European-weight suits. They were black blots in the intense tropical sunlight. The rest of the embassy delegation wore stylish summer clothes in light colours. The DVI teams were in a mixture of team shirts and T-shirts and standard pathologistissue smocks.

Delaney's American photographer was there, too, with his prematurely grey pony-tail very neatly tied back with a black ribbon for the occasion. A BBC cameraman was there, too, and a couple of reporters carrying standard reporter-issue notebooks.

Conchi was there. Smith went to stand by her side. He wondered how many such ceremonies she would have attended marking significant junctures as part of her United Nations DVI work in the mass graves of Bosnia. She looked tired this morning and smiled wanly at him when he came up. Smith doubted that her sleepless nights had anything to do with solitary bouts of excessive drinking.

As with all significant sendoffs in Phuket, the authorities had somehow managed to find a man of religion from the home country in question to share a few words of wisdom. The Norwegian priest they had found wore no clerical robes. He was young, not yet 40, Smith thought, and looked quite unpriestlike in a short-sleeved white shirt and casual slacks.

There was a silver crucifix hanging from his neck, however, and he did carry a large black Bible. He read some passages from it in Norwegian and he said a few prayers and made a few signs of the cross over the small flag-draped coffin and over Mrs. Stokke and over anyone else he seemed to think needed a blessing of some sort. The ambassador spoke in Norwegian and in English, expressing official condolences, thanking all concerned, wishing Mrs. Stokke a safe trip home to Oslo.

Mrs. Stokke looked better than Smith had seen her in weeks. She no longer had the haunted look the DVI teams had come to dread encountering as they left the management centre most days during her vigil. She looked calmer than Smith had seen her in weeks. Just before her daughter's coffin was loaded into the back of a station wagon, she, too, thanked everyone for their efforts. Her voice was faint, but did not falter.

“My family came here together at Christmas time to enjoy ourselves and to be happy,” Mrs.

Stokke said. “That is not what happened to us. Nor did it happen to the other families who came here from around the world for Christmas. And now I'm going home to Oslo after Christmas with my daughter. At least my little Charlotte and I are going home together. Thanks to all of you. And especially, you, Magne.”

Vollebaek began to cry. He brushed his tears away roughly with the backs of both hands at once. Detectives very rarely cry in public, though Smith knew several who cried, when required, in private or with trusted friends or colleagues in certain dimly lit drinking establishments in London.

Mrs. Stokke began to cry. The ambassador's wife began to cry. Conchi began to cry. Some of the international police rubbed their eyes. Smith refused, however, to cry. If he allowed himself to cry about this dead Norwegian daughter, the ghosts of other dead daughters, and particularly a dead British daughter he had never met, might completely overwhelm him. This was not allowed.

The young priest asked Vollebaek if he had anything to say. The detective shook his head. No one else took up the priest's invitation to speak, so the coffin was loaded into the car, Mrs. Stokke and some of the embassy officials got into other cars and the ragged little procession pulled away for the short drive to the airport.

None of the spectators moved for a moment. Two Thai policemen folded up the Norwegian flag.

The BBC and Tim Bishop stopped taking pictures.

Then Vollebaek, still roughly rubbing his eyes with his fists, strode purposefully into the closest mortuary building. This was a welcome signal to everyone that public displays of emotion were no longer allowed.

Smith stayed where he was with Conchi until everyone had dispersed. A gravel parking area in a sweltering mortuary compound on the outskirts of town was not at all likely to be bugged.

He told her about the eavesdropping device he had found. Her eyes widened. He had expected her to be angry, as she had often been in all of this to date. Instead, Conchi simply looked afraid. She actually looked more frightened then she had looked after his beating or Frank's narrow escape from under the wheels of a car.