"Archer, Geoffrey - The Burma Legacy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Archer Geoffrey)

He half smiled. "Getting personal all of a sudden
"Always like to know the score."
"Well, for the record, I have a girlfriend back in London."
She stared ahead again. "But you're living in Singapore."
"That's right."
"Tricky. What's her name?"
"Julie."
"Ever see each other?"
"Not often enough."
A few days ago Julie had threatened to give up on him unless he
relocated to London soon.
"Offering to fill the gap?" he asked.
"Techh!" She turned away, opened a bottle of sun cream and started
applying it to her shoulders.
"What about you?"
"I live with someone in Sydney." It was a woman she rented a room to,
but she wasn't going to tell him that.
"Can I help?" He pointed at the bottle.
"No thanks." She gave him an old-fashioned look. "And, just for the
record and since my assessment of the accommodation arrangements on
this little ship tells me we'll be sharing a bed tonight - when I work with
guys it's strictly no touching. Under any circumstances. Okay?"
"Just trying to be helpful."
"Yeah, well, as my old granny used to say, give a man an inch and he'll
stick the rest in."
Sam smiled. "Some granny."
"Opened beer bottles with her teeth."
He laughed. "That you're making up."
Midge pulled a tense smile. It was the first one he'd seen on her. And it
was an improvement.
Sam Packer's knowledge of the Golden Triangle heroin trade had been
superficial until this morning - his normal focus being the profits from
arms, not drugs. Midge had briskly filled him in on the ethnic-Chinese Wa
tribes who controlled the Shan border area of Myanmar - formerly Burma
- shipping heroin through China and Thailand to the wider world. And in
particular she'd told him about a man called Yang Lai whose distribution
network they suspected Jimmy Squires was attached to. Suspected. That
was the problem with the Australians" case. They had nothing strong
enough to convince a jury.
The event a couple of days ago which had triggered this attempt at
entrapment was the opening of a small suitcase containing wads of cash.
The yacht broker in Phuket, who'd received the $280,000 in payment for a
luxury powerboat, had tipped off Thai Customs and they'd called the
Royal Thai Police money laundering squad. The cash itself had proved
clean, but when the name of the boat purchaser - Vincent Gallagher - was
fed into a database at the Narcotics Suppression Bureau, it had come up as a
pseudonym used by jimmy Squires.
The sun disappeared behind a line of cloud, turning the sea slate-grey. As
they raced towards the main island of Phuket, the water had become less
open. Dark humps dotted the surface now, limestone outcrops jutting from