Chapter One

On the twenty-seventh of April, in the year of the rat and four days before the end of days, rivers swelled and concrete began to melt. It was a time between two monsoons. Beyond Wat Chaiwatthanaram and the mountains, on the great alluvial plain and the Singu Plateau, in the land of the junta and disreputable options, the heat was oppressive. Some said it was like nothing anyone had experienced before. Still, hardly anyone complained, but that was not unusual because in Burma, an abysmal place where the quality of life was determined by the sharpest knife, where brutality was a metaphor for currency and every man was the target of another man with a bad attitude, nothing made sense.

Stavros Papadopoulos was drunk, and he was exhausted; every muscle in his body ached, and he was pissing blood. But he wasn't complaining. It was Saturday night, and it was his birthday, and what a birthday it was. The pint-sized whores in the brothels in Bangkok, by far the best in the East, or anywhere else for that matter, had performed feats of magic. He'd had the time of his life, the best sex ever, anywhere, anytime. If there was a little pain and suffering, as far as he was concerned, it was a small price to pay for his pleasure.

He was asleep by the time his head hit the pillow. Ten minutes later, he was dreaming of upside-down houses and little women. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang. It was Chinn, his erstwhile patron. Chinn was the number-two man in the Royal Thai Tourist Police, the de facto bureaucracy that held sway over the illicit trade of goods and services within the three contiguous borders of the Golden Triangle. He was a

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