Fighting the Dragon Part Three

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Inside the house our mark was tied to a stout chair naked and gagged with duct tape. Sweat dripped down pooling on the floor and he gave off a foul odor that reminded me of old gym clothes forgotten in the locker for the summer. His eyes were wild with fear and looking everywhere at once. Marco retrieved a small black case from his wet sack and opened it to reveal a medical instrument resembling a pneumatic vaccine injector. Lined up in very small glass tubes were little pellets smaller than the size of a peppercorn. Looking at our mark he carefully loaded six of these pellets into the injector and then donned latex gloves. By now our mark was really squirming and making whining noises. I silently hoped his heart didn’t give out during the next step.

Because of this worry I though it best to tell him what was going to happen. I looked him in the eye and said “We need to be able to trust you 100% but you’re not a trustworthy guy. To earn your trust we’re going to inject these small pellets into the base of your penis, four of them to be exact and then two more inside your scrotum. They will sting going in but soon the pain will stop. In exactly 48 hours they will release fast acting nanobots that will frankly eat your penis and testes right off while at the same time moving into the central part of your body.” By now his eyes were wide open and he was staring at the injector and that was when his bowels let loose and a brown ooze started dripping from all sides of the chair onto the white tile floor. Man, this is the part of the job you really learn to hate. I continued “See this device?” I held up a small device that looked like an electronic stud finder. “If you do as you’re told we’ll tell you where to find this device and instructions on how to use the frequency it emits to deactivate the nanobots after which they’ll break down in your system and go away forever.”

Suddenly Marco reached out and grabbed his penis and pulling it out taught brought the injector to his penis and like a nail gun shot it in the base on all four sides, and then quickly pulled his scrotum taught and shot it twice as well. It was over in seconds and our mark had fainted but not before releasing a stream of urine that Marco barely managed to avoid. He looked down at the man, disgust clearly written on his face. No matter, we had his cooperation and he’d do as instructed. We woke him by pouring pitcher of tea from the refrigerator over his head and continued our briefing. After making sure he understood Marco injected him with a sedative that would last a few hours, cut the duct tape, and we left.

Days before I’d already reserved a series of hotel rooms across different areas of Pattaya via an internet café and on-line booking services using names and credit card information provided by a local Bangkok hotel receptionist.

While working a case for the Citibank fraud department (decent retirement work to keep busy) a few months earlier I’d discovered a young receptionist named Ta was recording ID and visa card information of customers and then sitting on them for months. Once the customer had been gone for months and probably used their visa card in hundreds of other places she’d sell the information to a friend of her boyfriend who would then craft new cards and use them locally to order expensive electronics on-line having the items delivered to an apartment used as a front for the deliveries. If it was a visa/debit card she got the PIN and they’d use these to withdraw cash directly from ATM’s.

At the same time other cards were Fedex’d off to associates in Taipei, KL, HK, and other places in SEA to give the appearance the cards weren’t all being stolen and used from one location. This was actually a brilliant scheme and very hard to track down and if I didn’t get lucky and catch the main card maker trying to blackmail a local embassy official I might never have caught these guys. He was quick to give up his card operation and his off-shore associates in exchange for not being prosecuted for his blackmail scheme. More I think he was afraid the official just might decide to seek justice outside the judicial system.

Wrapping up both the blackmail and visa card case in one operation allowed me to leave the young Ta and this card operator ‘on the hook’ to me personally. I allowed them to operate on a very low key level provided they now worked for me. Now when I need ID or visa cards for temporary use which aren’t associated with my current employers I get quality products fast. More, Ta had proven very adept at providing discreet free rooms at her five-star hotel and several others where she had friends and arrangements. These rooms have proven to be very useful for meetings, debrief, and the like.

Why did I need these extra rooms in Pattaya, especially when Blackwater had already provided us with sets of fake ID and plastic? Because they knew the names and numbers and could track us. It always pays to have resources no one else knows about, several layers if you can arrange it. These sort of precautions might only buy you extra days or hours but often that’s all you need to get out of a situation. In this case I’ve already mentioned I didn’t much care for the three stooges they sent me when I requested some hired help.

While checking their records I found several fabricated time periods and this indicates to me that at a minimum Blackwater was unwilling to share their entire histories. Worst case was these were NSA operatives here to make sure the new encryption system was never passed on to anyone for any reason, any way they could. Blackwater had grown from a small high integrity security company to a major defense department contractor with hundred of millions in government contracts complete with lobbyists, political contacts, and probably those they’d want to protect in exchange for who knows what.

The obvious point is that Marco and I were expendable to Blackwater at the first sign of trouble and having a network of rooms and other resources available that only we knew about could help get us out of Dodge if everything went bad. Unknown to everyone but myself and Marco before I’d flown to KL and on to our contact with the luxury yacht I’d made a quick trip to Pattaya where I’d quickly arranged for three cars which I placed around the city in carparks with a trunk full of equipment we might need if things went bad. Pre-positioning equipment and resources is old habit for those of us in the trade, everything from battlefield surgery kits to ID and cash to weapons and clothes. If everything went smoothly I’d return to Pattaya next week, retrieve the contents of the trunks, and return the cars. No one would ever know. If we needed to use the cars the rental agencies would all remember a farang (foreigner) of different names and descriptions if they remembered anything at all.

To be continued...