The 13th Tablet

He switched on the WIFI connection on his laptop and picked a few signals from various modems in the neighbourhood. One of them was not password protected, so he connected his laptop to it. He clicked on the same special website he’d used the other day to track Wheatley’s whereabouts but typed a different character combination. This website was a backdoor into an hour-by-hour satellite photographic coverage of various regions of the world. He typed in the longitude and latitude coordinates of Patong Beach, 7° 53? 24? N, 98° 17? 24? E, and was almost immediately offered a choice of fifty high resolution satellite photographs from the past five hours. As soon as he glanced at the first two, he knew his hunch was the right one. There was only one yacht of the kind Wheatley could be interested in and the detail of the photographs was such that he was able to identify men guarding the yacht, carrying submachine guns. He checked the last position of the yacht and it hadn’t moved from its location in the past four hours. He had to go and check. Maybe that’s where they were being held. He noticed the barman had returned but hadn’t wanted to bother Jack while he worked. He gestured for the man to approach. He handed Jack the printed photograph and asked an exorbitant amount for it, which Jack paid without a murmur. The barman returned to his customers, a happy man. Jack called him again.

‘Yes Sir?’ asked the barman.

‘I need a small boat, a rowing boat. Any ideas? I need to rent it for a few hours,’ Jack said.

‘With motor?’

‘Yeah. Why not,’ Jack replied.

‘OK. No problem. You come with me and I show you,’ said the barman.

Jack packed the laptop and the photograph into his rucksack and followed the barman, who was busy making a phone call. He hesitated about returning to the bungalow, to wake up Mina and let her know where he was going. But he guessed he would be back before morning, so there really was no point scaring her unnecessarily. The barman was waiting outside on his moped. Jack climbed on the back and off they went. He’d tried to find out how much this rental would cost him, but the barman had conveniently gone deaf. After a ten-minute ride, they drove down a path that lead back to the sea front. Jack could see a small boat, moored to a pier, made of a few odd planks of wood thrown together. They got off the moped. The barman walked over to the boat, followed closely by Jack. ‘Here is boat,’ said the man.

‘But where’s the motor?’ asked Jack.

As he said these words he heard the approaching sound of another moped.

‘My friend brings it now.’

Jack waited for the other man to fit the motor, start it and show him how it worked before paying his favourite barman. The price was as before, overwhelming, and Jack thought of the multiple ways he could knock out both men and disappear with the boat, but in the end he shoved a hand in his pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled dollars.

Once both men had left, he stepped onto the boat and turned on his laptop. He needed to take another look at the satellite photographs he’d saved, comparing them to a coastal map he’d downloaded. He could roughly estimate how far he had to go to find the yacht. Hopefully it was Wheatley’s. He couldn’t bear the idea of navigating in the dark for an hour or more, covertly boarding the yacht to find a group of drunken Japanese businessmen playing cards. But did he have a choice? He started the motor and slipped away into the night. It was a good thing there was a relatively powerful torch at the front of the boat, but as he got closer to the yacht he would have to be discrete, which meant turning off the torch and also the motor.