KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)

by Jake Needham

  Darcy balled up her fist and popped me on the shoulder, then looped her arm through mine.

  “I’ve arranged for dinner to be served by the pool. Not too hot outside for you tonight, is it, baby?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Darcy led me off the porch and along a graveled walkway that circled around the house. Geraniums outlined the path on both sides, their bright red blossoms so perfectly formed that they might have been made of plastic.

  “You have any luck with that disk?” I asked, unable to contain my curiosity any longer.

  “It’s like I told you before, baby. People underestimate the Thais. They seem stupid and lazy and corrupt, but generally they’re not that bad.” Darcy seemed to reconsider for a moment. “Well, some of them are, but mostly they’re in the government where we can keep an eye on them”

  I laughed. Darcy didn’t.

  We rounded the house until we came to a courtyard paved with red brick laid in a herringbone pattern. At its center was a rectangular swimming pool. The underwater lights were on, which caused the pool to glow and pulse as if possessed by some otherworldly source of energy. Two places had been set at a round glass table next to a grove of banana trees and the candles on the table flickered in rhythm with the wind.

  “You realize, of course, I read what was on the disk, Jack. Can I ask what interest you have in Plato Karsarkis?”

  It was a good question, of course, maybe even a better one than Darcy imagined. A girl who looked about eighteen and was dressed in sharply creased dark trousers and a white shirt helped us with our chairs and poured white wine while I thought about what a good answer to Darcy’s good question might be.

  “Did you copy the disk,” I asked after the girl had left us alone again, “or just read it?”

  Darcy gave me a long look.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That came out wrong.”

  “Uh-huh. It did.”

  “Obviously you read the file, Darcy. I meant for you to. I’m just asking if you were able to get a hard copy, too.”

  Darcy picked up her glass and tried her wine. Apparently it met with her approval because she drank some more of it before she put the glass down and cleared her throat.

  “Avoiding the copy restrictions was child’s play,” she said. “I already told you that’s just off-the-shelf stuff. The timer was a little harder. The NIA put a routine on the disk that works like an email destruct timer. You trigger it by opening the file, then you have an hour to read everything before the destruct routine goes active. After it does a simple algorithmic will run and corrupt all the files on the disk by changing the data into random characters. It’s really very clever, very thorough. They wanted to make sure everything disappeared after you read it.”

  “But you beat it.”

  “Sure, I beat it, darling. You know I did.”

  “You get a hard copy?” I asked. “Or just a clean copy on another disk?”

  “Got both.”

  “Damn you’re good.”

  “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

  I chuckled appropriately. “Well, Darcy, let me at least tell you I appreciate it.”

  “I want you to tell me a lot more than that.”

  “I’m sorry?” I asked.

  “What I said, darling, is that I want you to tell me more than that you appreciate it. I want you to tell me why the hell the NIA is giving you files about Plato Karsarkis.”

  I thought about that briefly.

  “Are you just generally curious, Darcy?” I asked carefully when I was through thinking. “Or do you have some specific reason for wanting to know.”

  “I don’t think you realize what you’re getting into here, Jack.”

  “I’m not getting into anything.”

  “The hell you’re not. I read the newspapers. There’s a copy of today’s International Herald Tribune right inside on my desk.”

  I played with my wine glass and wondered how much I ought to tell Darcy. She wouldn’t usually ask questions like this, but I suppose I should have been prepared. Plato Karsarkis was hardly a usual subject.

  “Look, Darcy, the NIA asked me to do something for them. I told them I wanted to see some of their internal files before I made up my mind whether I would do it or not. They gave me that disk, and frankly I have no idea what’s on it.”

  “But you do know it concerns Plato Karsarkis.”

  It was a statement, not a question, so I didn’t say anything. I just sat quietly and watched Darcy nod slowly as if she was putting some things together.

  “They know where Karsarkis is,” she said after a moment, “but I guess you already realize that.”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  There was a pause and in the silence I listen to the low hum of the pool pump in the distance and the rhythmic buzzing of the cicadas in the trees.

  “I’m worried about you, baby,” Darcy said very quietly after a minute or two had passed. “You’re playing in the big leagues with stuff like this. I’d like to watch your back, but I can’t if you won’t trust me.”

  “It’s not a matter of trust, Darcy. I wouldn’t have given you that disk if I didn’t trust you. I just don’t want you to get involved. It can’t be a good thing.”

  “Then why are you involved?”

  I had no answer for that so we both sat in silence while the young girl returned and served us both from a large wooden salad bowl heaped with greens and slices of chicken topped with croutons and smothered in Caesar dressing. As I cut a sliver of chicken and rolled it through the dressing, Darcy selected a bread stick from a basket on the table.

  When Darcy snapped the breadstick, the sound of it cracked in the silence like a shot.

  THIRTY ONE

  “LET’S DO IT like this, Jack. I’ll give you the printout of the file that was on the disk. After you read it, you can decide how much more you want to tell me.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, popping some chicken into my mouth. “Sounds fair enough.”

  “You want to read it now?”

  “How long is it?”

  “Thirty, thirty-five pages. Not long.”

  “Now’s good then,” I said.

  Without another word Darcy pushed back her chair and walked past me into the house. When she came back she placed at my elbow an unmarked manila file folder. I flipped it open and eyed the neat stack of pages stapled together inside it.

  Darcy picked up her wine glass and tipped it in my direction. “Take your time, baby,” she said.

  I worked my way methodically through the first twenty pages or so while I ate my salad and drank white wine. Normally salads weren’t my kind of dinner, but this one was extraordinary and the deep sweetness of the chicken’s richly charcoaled flavor more than made up for the piles of rabbit food I had to negotiate in order to get at it.

  Darcy didn’t say a word while I read and ate, but I wouldn’t really have minded if she had. There wasn’t much in what I was reading and conversation wouldn’t have been any real distraction. The first ten pages could have been a transcription of some broadcast on CNN. It was nothing but a routine biography, a summary of Karsarkis’ indictment, and a few notes on his subsequent disappearance. I had read deeper stuff in People Magazine.

  The second ten pages were a little more interesting, but not much. They consisted of excerpts from something that looked like a transcript of a pretrial deposition, but since the preparations for Karsarkis’ trial had taken place several months before and been extremely well publicized, it contained nothing explosive. The excerpts were all from the testimony of Cynthia Kim, Karsarkis’ personal assistant who was later murdered in Washington, and they concerned various technical details about the organization of Karsarkis’ corporate empire. What’s more, I saw nothing in any of them that seemed to bear one way or another on Karsarkis’ claim he had been acting at the personal request of the President of the United States when he sold
embargoed oil for the Iraqis.

  I finished reading the transcripts, pushed my salad bowl away, and wiped my mouth with my napkin.

  “Seems like a bunch of useless garbage,” I said, speaking for the first time since I had begun to read.

  Darcy finished her wine and looked past me, nodding almost imperceptibly to someone. The young girl immediately reappeared and began to clear the table.

  “How far have you gotten?” Darcy asked.

  “To the end of the deposition transcripts. Does it get any better?”

  Darcy ignored my question. “We’ve got some pretty good double chocolate cake from the Oriental Hotel,” she said instead. “Can I tempt you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nope. With the summer heat and everything else, I haven’t been running very much. I can feel the flab already. Just coffee for me.”

  “Gafair dam song,” Darcy said to the girl. Two black coffees.

  coffees The girl bobbed her head without raising her eyes and slipped away with such gliding grace that I watched her until she disappeared into the house.

  “They get younger all the time, don’t they, Darcy?”

  “Or we get older, baby,” she murmured. “Or we get older.”

  Darcy looked away and drifted off into some private reverie, and I went back to reading the file while the girl returned and served coffee. I skimmed the printout as I finished my first cup, but after only a few pages I was lost.

  “What the hell is this stuff?” I asked, glancing up at Darcy. “It looks like some kind of email, but it doesn’t have anything to do with Karsarkis.”

  “It’s email all right. At first I thought it was Carnivore product they had been collecting on Karsarkis, but now—”

  “What’s Carnivore product?” I interrupted.

  “Carnivore is a program developed by the FBI to monitor email. It’s like a wiretap placed on an email account. The problem with it is the software has to be physically installed on the servers of the provider that has the email account you want to tap. It’s so easy for the target to shift providers that the process only works if the operation is entirely covert and the target has no reason to suspect he might be tapped. That would obviously be a problem in monitoring Karsarkis.”

  “I guess I’ll start being more careful what I put in my email.”

  “You should. In God we trust. All others we monitor.”

  I chuckled. “You just make that up?”

  “Nah. It’s an old Cryptocity line.”

  Cryptocity was the way people in the know referred to the NSA headquarters complex at Ft. Mead in Maryland, just north of Washington. It was the closest I had ever heard Darcy come to admitting she had indeed been an NSA spook, but I didn’t comment.

  “So what is this stuff?” I asked instead, tapping my forefinger on the printouts Darcy had made from the disk.

  “Well…”

  Darcy hesitated and I watched her carefully. She seemed to be weighing up something, but I had no idea what it was.

  “I think this is Carnivore product, but not from surveillance of Karsarkis, and certainly not by the FBI.”

  “I’m sorry, Darcy. You lost me.”

  “Let me ask you something before I say any more, Jack.”

  Darcy pursed her lips and looked out across her pool. She took her time and I didn’t rush her.

  “Karsarkis is here in Thailand, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He is.”

  “And the feds know it and they’re after him?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What brand?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What brand of feds. Is it the FBI? The Secret Service? Who’s out here after Karsarkis?”

  I hesitated briefly, then I decided there was no reason not to tell her, so I did.

  “The US Marshals.”

  Darcy nodded slowly as if I had justif I had confirmed her worst suspicions.

  “They don’t intend to bother with extradition.” She made a statement out of it, not a question.

  “I don’t know that,” I said. “Not for sure.”

  “But you think you do. You think they’re here to kidnap Karsarkis, don’t you?”

  “Maybe,” I answered carefully.

  Darcy nodded again and for a moment she studied a grove of banana trees over my shoulder.

  “What you’ve got there,” Darcy said after a moment, inclining her head at the sheets of paper stacked on the table, “is the product NIA obtained from intercepting email between somebody who is out here and somebody who is back in Washington.”

  “You mean the Thais have the FBI’s software and they’re using it to tap the marshals’ email?” I laughed out loud. “Damn.”

  “I told you not to underestimate them, Jack.”

  “So then they know all about the kidnapping plan.”

  I thought I was beginning to see why the NIA was trying so hard to enlist me in bailing out Karsarkis’ sorry ass. If the marshals kidnapped the world’s most wanted fugitive from right under the Thais’ noses and spirited him back to Washington, the loss of face would be almost unthinkable; and if there is one thing the tolerant Thais absolutely cannot tolerate, it is loss of face. On the other hand, if Karsarkis were pardoned, then there would no longer be any need for a kidnapping and the whole problem would just go away. Neat.

  “Now that you know what you’re looking at, read it again, Jack.” Darcy seemed to think for a time, then her expression hardened and she exhaled audibly. “Read it all again and tell me what you think it really says.”

  The girl returned and refilled out coffee cups and I read the last dozen pages of the file again in silence.

  This time I started to get a queasy feeling about halfway through. I glanced up at Darcy but she was looking away, apparently consulting the banana trees again. Then I went back and read it all a third time. I shifted in my chair, stretching my legs first one way and then another, but I couldn’t seem to make myself comfortable.

  There was nothing explicit in the emails, of course. Whoever had written them had been very careful. There wasn’t a single sentence there I could quote to prove anything, certainly nothing that made it clear in so many words; but now I had no doubt at all what it was that I was really reading.

  After the third time through I gathered all of the pages into a stack, squared them up at the edges, and put them back into the manila file. Then I moved my coffee cup to one side, clasped my hands together, and placed them on top of the file.

  “You read this stuff the same way I do, don’t you, Darcy?”

  “Yeah, baby, I do.”

  I studied Darcy’s face, but it gave nothing away.

  “Maybe this is a fake,” I said. “Maybe the NIA put it all together just for my benefit.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “No, I don’t,” Darcy said. “What motive would they have for that?”

  “Well, for starters…” I trairdquo; Iled off and thought about it.

  “I don’t know,” I finally said.

  Darcy smiled without humor. “Neither do I.”

  “So you think this is all the real stuff.”

  “I’d say so.”

  I could tell Darcy was weighing her words carefully.

  “The form looks right,” she said, “and the text feels right. But there’s no way to be absolutely certain, Jack. There’s just no way.”

  I nodded and we sat together in silence for a while as I considered what I knew now that I hadn’t known a few minutes before.

  “Even if the email is genuine, isn’t there the possibility of some other interpretation?”

  “Sure,” Darcy nodded. “I guess there’s always that possibility.”

  “But you think we’ve got it right, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Darcy spoke as if from behind a mask, “I do.”

  I nodded slowly and looked away.

  The intercepted emails left everything
clearly understood without making it explicit. Whoever sent the emails and whoever received them were both operating on exactly the same understanding. They both knew there was only one possible outcome to the manhunt for Plato Karsarkis.

  None of this was about arresting and extraditing Karsarkis anymore. It wasn’t even about kidnapping him. Washington didn’t have the stomach any longer for trying to lock him up. Karsarkis had already shown them how pointless that was.

  No, this time it was different.

  This time, when they got him they were going to kill him.

  THIRTY TWO

  DRIVING HOME THAT night I kept the air conditioner on high and the windows rolled up tight. A hot breeze was blowing in from the south and warm tropical evenings ripe with possibilities were generally a perfect time to cruise the city with the wind in your face. On this particular warm tropical night, however, there was something I liked a whole lot about the feeling of security I got from traveling in a closed-up car.

  Someone had coolly laid in wait with a sniper rifle right in the middle of Bangkok and put a bullet in Mike O’Connell’s head, and I knew from Doug at Bourbon Street that Marcus York had been in town the night O’Connell died. From what I had just learned about the real reason the US Marshals were in Thailand it was all too easy now to add that up; and I didn’t like the answer I got when I did.

  What the hell was going on here? Was I really ready to believe that the cornpone Texan I met in Phuket was actually leading a band of stone killers stalking Karsarkis and all the people around him? Surely not.

  But somebody killed Mike O’Connell; and if it wasn’t CW and his United States Marshals, who in God’s name was it?

  Darcy and I had stayed out by the pool until just after ten. We sipped coffee and Darcy sat silently over a brandy while I smoked a Montecristo and told her the whole story of my entanglement with Plato Karsarkis. When I finished, she hadn’t said much. She only warned me again to be careful and promised to keep her ears open and let me know what she heard. From some people, of course, that would have been nothing but a kiss off, but from Dar cy, it was a pledge of support solemn enough to put in the bank.

  I took the expressway home. Gliding along on its elevated structure always made me feel like a ghost skimming over the sprawling yellow glow of the city. Part of the place, yet separate and invisible. It was a feeling I liked a lot.