ready to drive Logan to the airport, then take his car back up the coast.
“Thanks for all the help,” Logan said once they were on the road.
Dev shrugged like it was no big deal. “I assume you just want us to hold onto everyone?”
Logan hesitated. “Eventually we’re going to want to turn them over to the police, but I don’t want to do that yet. Let’s see if I can learn anything that can help us out first.”
“Okay.”
“That is, unless your people do mind.”
“They don’t mind.”
They fell silent for several blocks.
“Dev, I need to ask you for a little more help,” Logan said. “I’m hoping someone you know might have contacts in Bangkok that can assist me. Probably someone who—”
He stopped as Dev pulled a piece of paper out of his shirt pocket, and handed it to him.
“What’s this?”
“What you just asked for,” Dev said. “A phone number. When you get there, call it.”
“A friend of yours?”
“A friend of a friend.”
Logan hoped he’d say more, but in typical Dev fashion, that was it.
“So you were expecting me to ask for help,” he said.
“If you didn’t, I would have given it to you anyway. Tooney’s a good guy. Find his granddaughter, Logan. And if you can, make the ones who took her pay.”
• • •
Logan wasn’t sure how long after his plane had taken off that he fell asleep, but he knew they hadn’t reached cruising altitude yet. Barney’s pills really worked. By the time Logan woke, he’d been out for seven hours. Which was nice until he realized he still had about another seven to go before the plane was due to land in Hong Kong.
He filled some of the time by working on his laptop. In the morning before he’d left the motel, he’d received an email from Ruth containing Forbus’ latest information on Burma. Not having time to look at it then, he’d saved it to his hard drive. He’d also found some stuff online about Elyse’s mother, Sein, and saved those to the computer, too. Now that he had nothing else to do, he was able to go through most everything.
Ruth’s Burma info didn’t really add much to what he already knew. Decades of repression, peppered with occasional bouts of protest that were always put down. The latest had been in the fall of 2007 after the government had raised fuel prices, putting further strain on a population that had very little money in the first place. This time the Buddhist monks in the city of Rangoon had gotten involved, leading the protest, until government thugs had put a stop to that. Logan could understand why Sein had such a passion for trying to free the people of her birth country.
When he’d looked her up online there had been hundreds of links. Human Rights websites, Burma-centric websites, news articles, interviews. There were also several dozen videos of talks she had given, and a couple of television interviews. He hadn’t downloaded everything, but those he did, he watched.
He was surprised that she didn’t look much different than the girl he remembered from twenty years before, and was impressed by her intelligent, matter-of-fact delivery. He’d expected more emotion, more rhetoric, but her calm, confident demeanor was so much more effective than any ranting would have been.
She talked about the crimes the Myanmar generals had committed, the deaths they had been responsible for, and the stranglehold they had on Burmese lives. Then she talked about her mother, how Thiri had gone to support Aung San Suu Kyi in hopes of making Burma a place her children could come back to without fear.
“Though they took her life, they did not take what her life was about. Her dream is still alive in me, like it should be in you. When tyranny and oppression are imposed on one person, they are imposed on us all. We must not stop until our brothers and sisters enjoy the same freedoms as we do.”
It was all pretty heavy stuff. Logan was almost glad when his battery ran out of power.
After a few hours layover in Hong Kong and a second flight, this one only two and a half hours long, he finally landed in Bangkok.
It didn’t take long to clear immigration and customs, and soon he was in a taxi on the way to a hotel his dad had booked for him online.
Logan had been to the country once before, in the summer between the Army and college. It was long enough ago, though, that