Biowar by Stephen Coonts Page B

sex?”
    “Now I know you’re putting me on.”
    Karr laughed at him. “You could have a screwed-up disk, or just the muscles pulling it are out of whack. Massage’ll loosen it up. Or sex. Those don’t work, see a chiropractor.”
    Deavor looked at him, trying to figure out if he was on the level or not.
    “Thanks, Doc,” he said finally.
    “Don’t mention it.”

    The embassy put Karr up in a house occasionally used by Marines assigned to the security detail. Karr knew it would be bugged, but he was surprised to find not only American and Thai devices, but a Chinese pair as well—an interesting fact that Rubens would no doubt relish passing along as a less than subtle dig against the CIA, which would have certified the lodgings as clean.
    The sheer array of bugs was impressive, but none presented a real problem; he disabled them all, then fired up his handheld and retrieved the latest dossier prepared by Desk Three.
    The NSA had found an old credit card account, since closed, that Kegan had used on a visit to Bangkok about a year before. They had also been able to connect Pound, the lab assistant, to a $300 cash withdrawal from an ATM in the arrival hall of Terminal 1 at Don Muang Airport two weeks ago; he’d used his mother’s account. But so far they hadn’t been able to locate any records indicating what he had done after that. His mother, in a nursing home in Kentucky, didn’t know where he was. An Alzheimer’s patient, she didn’t really know where she was.
    One of the E-mails Pound had sent to Kegan had been posted from a kiosk in Bangkok a few blocks from the hotel Kegan had stayed at. The other had been tracked to a small Thai military unit on the border with Myanmar.
    A wild-goose chase, but one with promise.

    Karr had never been in Thailand until today. Had he been asked what he expected, he probably would have drawn a verbal picture of small huts and rickshas in crowded, muddy streets. The streets here were crowded and there were rickshas—here called samlors. But there were also a variety of motorbikes, slightly larger motorcycles (though still small by American standards), tuk-tuks (three-wheeled motorcycles with roofs that had no real counterpart in the West), cars, truck-buses (pickups with double-deck standing-room-only spots in the rear), ordinary buses, and a range of delivery vehicles and trucks. There was also an elevated rail system called Skytrain and any number of ferries and boats plowing through the waterways that crisscrossed the city.
    Karr stared at the city through the front seat of his car, rented with a driver by the Art Room through a fictitious account. Luc Dai, the driver, was a former freelance newspaper writer who’d found it much more lucrative to rent out his car than his typewriter. A Vietnamese national who’d spent considerable time in America, Luc Dai was exactly the sort of person who’d be “rented” by various intelligence agencies, though if he was working for any, the Art Room hadn’t told Karr.
    The light rain that had greeted him at the airport was gone. They threaded through the congested streets and found the Bangkok Star Imperial Hotel, which was among the most expensive in the city. Karr told the driver he’d be inside for a while, then hopped out as a uniformed doorman reached for the door.
    The hotel had some claim to its fame, or at least its high cost. Outrageously ornate, its ceiling glowed with a thick layer of gold leaf, showing off what was said to be up to a million dollars’ worth of precious stones and jewels encrusted in a design that imitated the visible constellations. Below the stars an elaborately designed handwoven rug depicted the earth as a mythic kingdom of gods and dragons. The carpet was not merely spotless but also seemed to have been woven only the day before. The hotel desk sat beyond several groupings of lushly upholstered chairs, its massive beak like the hull of a boat. The wooden trim and accents were inlaid and highly