ONE
She had no choice, really.
Chloe Silver picked up her vibrating cell phone and turned it off, slipping it into her cargo-pants pocket. She didn’t have time for a check-in with her sister. Sure, she wanted to know how Selah was faring two weeks after a train derailment followed by a crazy off-road adventure in Washington State, but...
Well, Selah’s boyfriend, North Gunderson, had rescued her, so probably, yeah, just fine.
And Chloe had her own timeline?—
“Miss Chloe! We need to go!” Malai, calling up from where he stood on the street below her guest apartment, his voice rising through the clutter of street sounds of Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand. Motorcycle engines whining. Vendors hawking their wares in Thai and Burmese. The occasional blast of a car horn when someone’s patience snapped in the snarled, never-ending gridlock.
Her home base for her current freelance investigation.
“I’m on my way!”
She shoved her last field shirt into the canvas duffel—a beat-up bag that had survived three war zones and a category-five hurricane. Sweat already beaded along her hairline thanks to the sluggish ceiling fan that barely stirred the afternoon heat.
She’d already packed her camera bag—telephoto lens, extra batteries. Memory cards sealed against the humidity that turned everything to rust. Three years of dangerous assignments had worn the leather strap smooth under her touch. But the camera did the job. Caught the images that backed up her stories and put her on the map of investigative journalists.
And this time, she hoped to save lives.
Six months. Six months of interviewing grieving families in stifling huts, smoky with incense. Six months of photographing symptoms that made no medical sense.
And this story... this story might win her a Pulitzer, if she could get to the bottom of it.
And, of course, live to tell it.
She’d be fine. Just fine.
Don’t think about it.
Diesel exhaust drifted through her apartment window and mixed with the ever-present smell of fish sauce and the scent of the white champaca trees outside her building.
A soft knock, barely audible over the street noise, interrupted her packing.
She opened the door. Malai now stood on the second-story verandah that circled the house. One of Captain Wong’s Free Burma Rangers, he was shorter than her and looked about twenty. A lie. He’d been an FBR for over a decade, since his teens, and knew how to move in and out of the jungle like a panther. His smile, however, made it easy for him to walk into villages, earn trust. Frankly,shetrusted him with her life.
He ate arotifilled with banana and sweetened condensed milk wrapped in paper.
“We’re late.”
“I need to stop by the hospital first.” She shouldered her backpack. “Ten minutes.”
“The captain will not be happy.”
“The captain will understand.” She locked her door, the metal key slippery in her palm. “There’s a boy I need to see.”
She headed along the deck of the Thai house where she sublet the guesthouse apartment. A find, really—in the middle of a busy street, but behind it, a garden filled with bougainvillea, jasmine trees, and a small pool.
Not a terrible place to hide out between her missions for truth.
She caught her landlord, a woman in her mid-seventies, in the garden as she headed down the stairs and called out to her. “I’ll be back in a day or two, Mrs. Saetang.”
The woman stood, nodded under her wide-brimmed hat. “Be safe, Miss Silver.”
Malai’s motorcycle waited outside, the engine ticking as it cooled under a tamarind tree. The vinyl seat burned through her pants as she climbed on, gripping his tactical vest to keep from sliding off as they merged into traffic.
Chiang Mai’s late-afternoon assault hit every sense at once. Grilling meat from roadside vendors created a haze that made her eyes water. Engines, horns, shouting voices competed with tinny Thai pop bleeding from shop speakers. Street vendors called out in sing-song voices—fresh fruit and cell-phone cards for sale to anyone with enough baht.