Little Girl Gone - Brett Battles

Logan nodded. “You don’t remember me, but I remember you. I went to Cambria High School with your sister. Anka was a few years behind me, but we were there at the same time for a while. My father owns Dunn Right Auto Repair. Maybe you remember that. He and Tooney are best friends.”

She stared at him. “I’m sorry. I don’t…I don’t remember you.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said, shrugging. “I was fifteen.”

“I still don’t understand why you are here.”

“Elyse was supposed to visit your father several days go. When she didn’t show up, he became concerned, and asked me to see if I could find her.”

“You’re a long way from California,” Khin said.

“I haven’t found her yet.”

Sein frowned. “This only happened because of my father.”

“How do you figure that?” Logan asked.

“Elyse wanted to go to school in Los Angeles. She wanted to be close to him. If she’d gone somewhere else this wouldn’t have happened.”

Her words took him by surprise. “Do you really think the reason she was taken was because she decided to live close to Tooney? They took her to silence you, not your father.”

She pushed herself off the bed. “Are you trying to say it’s my fault?”

Taw took a step forward. “I’m sorry. I should not have brought them up.” He grabbed Logan’s arm, intending to usher him out.

But Logan wasn’t budging. “No. I’m not saying it’s your fault at all. You’re doing what needs to be done. I’m just saying that’s what happened. It’s not about blame.” He paused. “You do know they almost killed your father because of this, right?”

She scoffed. “Is that what he told you? Another of his cowardly lies, I think.”

Now Logan was pissed. “No, he didn’t tell me. He didn’t have to, because I was the one who walked in and saw the gun pointed at his head. I was the one who stopped it from happening. I was the one who made sure he got medical attention.”

She hesitated, then said in a voice more tentative than before, “Why would they want to kill him?”

“Can’t you see why? Because your daughter was going to visit him. If she didn’t show up, he’d raise an alarm. But if he was dead, no one would know she was gone until well after they got her out of the country.”

“But…but they still got her out.”

“Yeah, that’s true. But they brought me along. That, I guarantee you, is not something they planned on.”

“What can you do?” she asked. “You’re already too late. The only thing left is for me to trade myself for her.”

 “That’s exactly what they’ve wanted from the beginning. Don’t you see that?” When Harp had told him she was coming to Thailand, he realized the target had never really been Elyse at all. It had been her mother the whole time. The troublemaker.

“It doesn’t matter what I see,” she told him, power returning to her voice. “She’s my daughter. I have no choice.”

“I can get her free.”

“How?”

“I just need to know where the trade is supposed to happen.”

“And if I tell you this, what are you going to do?”

“Get her away from them.”

“What if whatever you try goes wrong? What if they keep her? What if she dies?”

“You need to trust me.”

Daeng began talking in the language he’d used with Taw. Burmese, Logan assumed. But he only got a few words out before Sein held up a hand, stopping him.

“I’m sorry,” she said in English. “I can’t take the chance.” She nodded at Taw, and turned her back on Logan and Daeng.

“Please,” Logan said. “At least tell us where it’s supposed to happen.”

Without turning, she said, “Tell my father you did everything you could. Good bye, gentlemen.”

Daeng and Logan continued to protest, but she said nothing more. Taw called out, and the man in the hallway came in. Between the two of them, they got Logan and Daeng outside, and forcibly guided them to the stairs.

Logan’s mind was churning. They only choices left now were to either follow Sein or Bell’s group to the meeting point, and hope an opportunity presented itself.

They’d only gone down a couple of steps when Taw paused. He looked back at Logan and Daeng, then whispered, “Wat Doi Suthep. Three forty-five.” He immediately turned around and continued down the stairs.

Logan glanced at Daeng. “Do you know—”

“Go, go,” Daeng whispered, cutting him off.

39

Wat meant temple in Thai. And Wat Doi Suthep was the most famous temple in the Chiang Mai area. It was located about twenty minutes outside of town, in the hills overlooking the city.

Logan and Daeng were able to get there by 1 p.m., a little more than two and a half hours prior to when Sein was supposed to exchange herself for her daughter.

The temple was not exactly street side. After walking through a windy area packed with vendors selling food and souvenirs, they came to the foot of a three-hundred-step-long staircase that led up a steep hill to the actual wat. Lining both sides of the stairs were three-foot-high walls, each shaped in the form of a vibrant, snake-like dragon, colored by green and orange titles.

They passed dozens of people on the way up, an equal mix of tourists and Thais. At the top was a building with a wide passageway that ran underneath it into an open-air courtyard.

“Is this it?” Logan asked, once they were in the courtyard. If it was, he was underwhelmed.

“No. Over there.”

Daeng pointed at another, considerably shorter, set of stairs, this one only about twenty steps. There were dozens of pairs of shoes sitting on and below it.

“You need a ticket first, though,” he said.

 “You don’t need one?” Logan asked.

Daeng shook his head. “Only farang.”

Once Logan had his ticket, they left their shoes at the bottom of the staircase and proceeded up to the main part of the temple.

This was more like what he expected. It, too, was basically a courtyard, but there the similarities ended.

Everything here seemed to be covered in gold. There must have been a hundred Buddha statues in different sizes, standing and sitting and lying down. In addition, there were bells and elephants and latticework on the building, all of it in gold.

And then there was the stupa, or as Daeng called it, the chedi. This was the bell shaped tower that rose into the sky in the middle of the temple. Logan had seen them in the other temples they’d passed. While this one wasn’t the largest, it was definitely the most golden.

Daeng took him quickly around the grounds. It was basically a square. The stupa was in the middle, and had a narrow area directly surrounding it for devotees to circumnavigate in prayer. A few people were doing so, their hands clasped together in front of them and holding several sticks of burning incense. Outside this was a larger area that also went around the stupa. That’s where the majority of the people were, the tourists in the crowd snapping pictures of almost everything in sight. Between this pathway and the walls containing the grounds were several enclosed areas. Some were small shrines, while others housed larger displays of Buddhas. As they walked around, Logan noted several doors that appeared to lead out from the temple, but all of them seemed to be closed to tourists.

The problem was he had no idea what mattered here, and what didn’t.

For all he knew, Bell wasn’t planning on coming all the way up to the actual temple. Maybe the switch was going to happen in the area where Logan had bought his ticket. Or maybe down below before the steps, where the vendors were.

“We’re going to need help,” he told Daeng. “There’re just too many places to watch on our own. Do you think your friends from earlier can give us a hand again, and be our eyes.”

“I have a better idea, but I need to check first,” Daeng said. “Can you give me thirty minutes?”

“Help?”

“I hope so.”

“Sure. Do it.”

“I’ll meet you at the bottom of the steps when I’m done. Near the food vendor selling the fried rice cakes.”

With that Daeng was gone.

Logan spent fifteen more minutes familiarizing himself with the layout, and fixing the locations of every potential exit in his mind. As he walked back down the long stairway, he couldn’t help but think that this was an odd place for a foreigner to choose. If he were Bell, he would have wanted a quiet place on some empty side street to exchange daughter for mother, not a crowded temple at the top of a mountain. Though there were several Western tourists around, if something happened, Bell and his men would stand out.

Unless…

…unless Bell wasn’t the one who picked the location.

Logan stopped halfway down, his hand resting on the dragon’s back.

What if this wasn’t just where Bell was going to exchange Elyse for Sein? What if this was also the place he was suppose to deliver Sein to the ultimate interested party—which, Logan was confident, had to be a representative of the Myanmar generals?

It was brilliant. This way Bell not only avoided detaining a known public figure in Sein, he also bypassed the even trickier proposition of having to transport her internationally. Instead, he had made her come to Chiang Mai on her own. All he had to do was grab her considerably lower-profile daughter. It was much easier to make sure Elyse’s disappearance wouldn’t be noticed for days. If Logan hadn’t walked into the back of the Coffee Time when he had, that’s exactly what would have happened. Tooney would have been dead, and no one would have known a thing. Still, as Sein had pointed out, even with that foul up, Bell had managed to get both of the Myat women to Chiang Mai.

And as far as choosing the temple?

Chiang Mai was only a fifty mile helicopter flight from the Burmese border. And the temple itself would provide the cover of camouflage and confusion. If trouble occurred, the Myanmar contingent could easily blend in with the crowd, and disappear with their prize, not caring at all what happened to their Western counterparts.

There was no way to know for sure if Logan was right, but he felt like he was. And it certainly fit with everything else he now knew.

He finished the steps, then found a spot near the rice cake vendor to wait.

When Daeng showed up, the first thing Logan did was tell him his theory. Daeng was nodding by the time he was done.

“That fits with something I heard,” Daeng said.

“What?”

“There were some men here yesterday and again this morning. They spoke Thai fluently, but their accents were a little off. They claimed to be from the government in Bangkok, and were given a full tour of the wat.”

“Why would they be given a tour if they weren’t who they said they were?”

“The wat is a Buddhist Temple. It’s the people’s place. Even if they weren’t from the government there was no reason not to show them around.”

“So you think these men were from the generals?”

“Probably secret police,” Daeng said, nodding. “They’re the only ones the generals would trust to send out of the country.” He paused. “I was told they were particularly interested in the different ways to get into and out of the central temple grounds.”

Of course they were. “Were you able to arrange for any help?”

“I was.”

“Enough?”

“More than.”

“Really? Who are they?”

When Daeng told him, the first thing Logan said was, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” The second was, “I know what we’re going to do.”

40

Given the interest the men from Myanmar had shown in the actual temple grounds, Logan decided that it was probably the most likely spot for the hand off to occur. So the plan was for both he and Daeng to be in the wat prior to 3:30, in case things started early.

Some of Daeng’s arranged help would be around, too, while a few others would be at the bottom of the steps with instructions to both tell Daeng when Bell and his team arrived, and to delay Sein as soon as they spotted her.

Right after Logan and Daeng worked all this out, they sent Daeng’s driver into town to purchase several cheap digital video cameras. He got back just after 3:00 p.m., and they passed the cameras out to several of Daeng’s contacts both at the top and at the bottom, keeping one camera each for themselves. The idea was that if they could videotape as much of the—hopefully failed—hand over as possible, it would be damning evidence that could be released later.

As a final precaution, Logan had asked Daeng to contact the Burmese refugees they used at the compound, and have them waiting in a couple of cars at the bottom of the hill.

Having done everything they could to prepare, he and Daeng headed back up the steps, then staggered their return into the temple so that they didn’t arrive together.

Logan felt anxious. He knew they’d done all that they could, but he couldn’t help worrying that it wasn’t enough. Consumed with these thoughts, he barely heard a voice behind him say, “Hey, it’s the train walker.”

“It is, isn’t it?” a second voice said, this one belonging to a girl. Like the guy, her accent was Irish. “Hey, train walker. Enjoying Chiang Mai, are you?”

Logan forced on a smile and looked over his shoulder. Sure enough, standing off to the side were Barry and Saoirse, two thirds of the Irish backpacking trio he’d hung out with on the train the night before.

“Having a good time so far,” he said. “How about you guys?”

“Yeah, great,” Barry said. “This is our fourth temple already.”

“But the best,” Saoirse added. “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?”

“Definitely. Where’s your other friend?” Logan asked.

“Who? Brian?” Barry said. “He saw all those steps and decided to stay at the bottom and get something to eat.”

“Can’t believe he’s missing out on this,” the girl said.

Logan made a face like he couldn’t believe it either, then said, “You know, there is a tram hidden around the side, too, for those who don’t want to do the stairs.”

Barry laughed. “Yeah, we didn’t tell him about that. Thought the exercise would do him good. But when he saw the stairs, he said, ‘No way.’ His loss.”

“Definitely is.” Logan smiled again. “Well, my friend’s in here somewhere, so…”

“Sure. Of course,” Barry said. “Have a good time. Maybe we’ll see you around town.”

Logan gave them a wave, then headed toward the stupa.

There were a lot more people there now than when they’d done their earlier walk through. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad. It would certainly be easier to lose people this way, but he also thought it might make the others think twice before resorting to deadly force.