The Tsunami File by Michael E. Rose Page B

asked.
    â€œYou sound exactly like Braithwaite now,”
    Smith said.
    â€œYou think the world wants to know about this?” Delaney asked again.
    â€œI think the families of the people who got killed out here on a Christmas holiday would want to know if someone is stealing files. I’m sure the world would want to know if someone is trying to prevent identifications out here.”
    â€œWho would want to do that, Jonah?”
    â€œI have been asking myself that question for several weeks now, Delaney,” Smith said.
    â€œWho do you think would want to do that? Prevent an identification. Seriously.”
    â€œPedophiles,” Smith said. “That’s one possibility.”
    â€œPedophiles,” Delaney said.
    â€œFriends of pedophiles. Or family. People with something to lose if a body turns up here and someone like me comes across a fingerprint record and a conviction back in Europe. Maybe one that isn’t too widely known. I don’t know. It’s a possibility. I’ve thought a lot about it.”
    â€œPedophiles,” Delaney said again.
    â€œWe’ve already identified a few of these guys out here,” Smith said. “It was easy once we started getting antemortem prints from criminal records back in Germany or Belgium or Sweden or wherever. Any number of countries back in Europe.”
    Delaney pondered this.
    â€œYou know what we call the Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Bangkok?” Smith said. “What we call it at Interpol?” “No. What?”
    â€œThe Pedophile Express. Service seven days a week.”
    â€œPolice humour,” Delaney said.
    â€œIt’s a well-known fact,” Smith said. “Those flights always full of fat, middle-aged German men heading out here to prey on kids.”
    â€œDeutschland,” Delaney said.
    Back at the Metropole that night, Delaney did up his notebook after the interview as he had done too many times before, in too many silent hotel rooms all around the world and back again. He drank Jameson’s whisky from the room’s minibar and munched overpriced peanuts as he added details and possible angles to his notes. He sat for a long time and emptied too many tiny bottles pondering angles and scenarios.
    Eventually he closed his notebook and went onto his balcony and into the languid tropical air. Down and to his right, a TV crew on another balcony bantered at top volume in Portuguese and rattled beer bottles and ice buckets as they dissected the day’s journalistic takings. In the parking lot, an aging Thai man in a white uniform with gold braid and epaulettes sat alone on a battered aluminum chair beside a boom gate, listening to a transistor radio. The night man saw Delaney on the balcony and raised a hand in greeting.
    Delaney waved back; suddenly, once again, he felt the raw loneliness that now came too often while working alone in hotel rooms somewhere in the world. He thought of the obsessively neat, antiseptic apartment in a Montreal highrise where he cocooned himself between assignments. He thought of calling Kate in Montreal, alone in her own cocoon, and then quickly thought better of it. She was growing tired of impulsive late-night phone calls from assignment hotels, again. She had told him so. She was growing tired, again, of waiting for Delaney in Montreal and of waiting for him to decide, as she put it, who he wanted to be when he grew up, who they could be together when he grew up.
    One day soon, when he finally decided who he wanted to be, he would quit the game forever, leave the field clear for Tim Bishop and a new wave of information gatherers. He could see that coming, had known it was coming ever since his first disastrous departure from straight information gathering into the not so straight world of spies. Tonight, however, with Jonah Smith’s story developing in his notebook and his curiosity engaged, he was reasonably certain, reasonably hopeful, that this time