His.
“Aw crap,” Shepherd said.
Jello took Silom Road past the Holiday Inn, then turned left on Charoen Krung Road toward the Taksin Bridge. The Taksin Bridge over the Chao Phraya River is one of Bangkok’s main arteries and links Sathorn Road, where many of the largest foreign embassies are located, with the city’s western districts.
“A lot of people probably have my cell number, Jello. Just because it’s this phone doesn’t mean I know the guy.”
“You look at the notes?” Jello glanced over. “Push the button with the notebook on it.”
Shepherd pushed the button Jello described. The address book disappeared from the little screen and was replaced by a cream-colored background that was apparently supposed to look like a notepad. The page was entirely blank except for three lines at the top.
EK418
Wednesday, 1805
Grand Hotel
“That’s your flight number, your arrival time, and the hotel where you’re staying, isn’t it?” Jello asked.
Shepherd nodded slowly. EK was the international airline code for Emirates Airways and 418 was the number of the flight he had taken to Bangkok. The day and time of his arrival and the name of his hotel were right, too.
“What’s going on here, Jello?”
“I was sort of hoping you could tell me. Who knew which flight you were on?”
“Nobody. I booked it myself.”
Jello shrugged and inclined his head toward the black Motorola Shepherd was holding. “Try again.”
Shepherd thought about it as he looked out the window at the sidewalks of Charoen Krung Road. Even at this hour, street vendors were setting up their carts and stoking their cooking fires. In another hour the sidewalks would be crammed with office workers grabbing a quick bite on the way to work.
“I didn’t tell anybody, Jello. But if someone knew I was flying from Dubai to Bangkok yesterday, it wouldn’t have been too hard to guess which flight I was on. There aren’t that many and this is the one with the best schedule and the private suites in first class.”
“You fly first class?”
“Just until they invent something better.”
Jello shook his head. They drove another block or two in silence, then Jello turned right on to Sathorn Road.
“How many people in Dubai knew you were flying to Bangkok yesterday?” he asked.
“I don’t know. A few. It was no secret.”
“General Kitnarok knew?”
“Of course.”
“Anybody else?”
“Like I said, a few people. Maybe a lot of people. I just don’t know for sure.”
“What about the hotel?” Jello asked. “Who knew where you were staying?”
“Nobody really. But I lived at the Grand for several months last year and I haven’t stayed anywhere else since. You know that. Anybody who knows me knows that.”
“Why are you in Bangkok, Jack?”
Shepherd hesitated. That was a tricky one. He didn’t want just to flat out lie to Jello, but he wasn’t particularly keen on telling him the truth either.
“Then let’s try it this way,” Jello said, while Shepherd was still trying to make up his mind what to say. “Who did you come to Bangkok to see?”
Shepherd had just met with a senior executive of Bangkok Bank through whom he had arranged to bribe a deputy governor of the Bank of Thailand to allow him to move hundreds of millions of dollar offshore. Not something he really wanted to share with a high-ranking officer from Special Branch.
“Nobody,” he finally said. “Just stopping over for a few days on the way back to Hong Kong.”
Jello cut his eyes at Shepherd. It was plain what he thought of that story. Shepherd couldn’t blame him. It smelled like horseshit to him, too.
Then the obvious occurred to Shepherd and he wonder why he had been so slow to see it. He had come to Bangkok to meet Tanit and get Charlie’s money out of the country. So Tanit knew he was coming to Bangkok, and maybe somebody had given him the flight number and he had somehow guessed the right hotel.
Was he about to meet Woody Allen again, but this time neatly laid out and very dead? If so, he could hardly stick to that ridiculous story he had just told Jello. He would have to tell him something that was a little closer to the truth without telling him everything. That wouldn’t be easy.
And if the body really was Tanit’s, that put another uncomfortable question on the table as well. Who would have wanted to kill Tanit the night after Shepherd had met with him about getting Charlie’s money out of Thailand?
Shepherd thought back to Agent Keur’s claim that he, not Charlie, had been the real target of the attack in Dubai because somebody was trying to disrupt Charlie’s finances. Suddenly that claim didn’t sound so ridiculous. Or maybe it still was. He was getting way ahead of himself.
Shepherd looked around. “What are we doing on Sathorn Road, Jello? Where are we going?”
“The Taksin Bridge. That’s where the body is.”
“Somebody dumped a body on the Taksin Bridge?”
Jello gave him a look, but he didn’t say anything else.
The Taksin Bridge is a twin-spanned structure that arches the Chao Phraya River right in the center of Bangkok. Shepherd knew the bridge was gridlocked with traffic pretty much day and night, but he still couldn’t believe the snarl of cars and trucks he saw in the westbound lanes just ahead of them. When they hit the backup, Jello calmly bumped the Toyota up over the curb, drove across Sathorn’s broad esplanade, and then bumped back down into the deserted eastbound lanes. He continued toward the bridge as if driving on the wrong side of the road was the most natural thing in the world for him to do. Maybe it was.
“The body’s on the eastbound side of the bridge,” Jello said as they drove in solitary splendor down the middle of the empty roadway. “We’ve stopped the traffic at the other side of the river.”
“Was it just dumped in the roadway?”
“It was hanging under the bridge. Somebody spotted it from a barge going downriver and we pulled it up.”
That was interesting, Shepherd thought. Had Tanit been overcome with remorse at his involvement in a bribery scheme and hung himself? Surely not. The only Thai banker likely to commit suicide was one who hadn’t been offered a bribe.
“Somebody hung himself from the Taksin Bridge?” Shepherd asked.
“The body was roped around the ankles and the rope was tied off on the rail almost exactly in the center of the bridge. Somebody killed this guy and hung him over the side.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Jello glanced at Shepherd, but only for a moment.
“Okay, so you’re serious. But that sounds pretty damn weird.”
“You think?” Jello glanced over again. “It gets weirder.”
“What could be weirder than somebody hanging a dead body by its ankles from the railing of a bridge right in the middle of Bangkok?”
“The body was decapitated,” Jello said. “And we can’t find the head.”
TWENTY-ONE
THE BODY WAS on a white sheet somebody had spread out in the roadway at the very center of the eastbound span of the Taksin Bridge. A collection of brown-uniformed police, some civilian hangers-on, and a few of those knuckle-draggers who seemed to appear everywhere at the first sign of death—even in the middle of a bridge at five o’clock in the morning—moved back to give Shepherd and Jello room.
“You know him?” Jello asked Shepherd.
“Not without a head.”
The body was that of a male who was slightly built and not very tall. He was wearing black cotton slacks and a black golf shirt with a new-looking pair of Air Jordans and heavy black athletic socks. Without a head, it was hard to tell much else about the man with any certainty, but as far as Shepherd was concerned he could see enough to answer the main question on his mind right at that moment. Tanit was tall. Even with the head missing, it was obvious the corpse wasn’t Tanit.
> Shepherd had never seen a decapitated body before and, now that he had, he was surprised to discover the experience was oddly bloodless. Nothing about the corpse looked real. The man had bled out, and his skin was now so pale it was almost translucent. Even the open cavity that used to be his neck seemed artificial, like plastic that had been melted and then cooled back into strange-shaped lumps and whorls. Shepherd could have been looking at a headless mannequin some kid had dumped out of a car to give the punters a thrill. Only he wasn’t.
His eyes drifted away from the corpse and out over the bridge’s railing. He traced the twisting course of the river to the north. Where Shepherd stood everything was in gray-green dimness, but on the eastern bank of the river Bangkok sparkled with an astonishing radiance. Most of the city’s towers were brightly lit, etched into the night sky by lights so blindingly white that they seemed to drain the color from everything around them. The rank of luxury hotels standing watch along the riverfront glistened with jolly red, gold, and blue lights, shards of which snaked over the surface of the water and reached out toward them.
A small boat roared by heading downriver. It was a long tail, one of the narrow, canoe-like vessels powered by salvaged automobile engines that were the usual form of transportation on the rivers and canals of Thailand. The little boat skimmed through the streaks of light like a stone, glancing lightly off the chop and misting the air with dark fans of spray.
***
“HAVE YOU EVER seen anything like this before?” Shepherd asked.
Jello took his time before he answered.
“There are a lot of decapitations in the south,” he said after a moment of silence. “But this is the first one I’ve heard of in Bangkok.”
For decades the Thai military had been fighting a dirty little war in the south of the country. Most of the world didn’t seem to know anything about it, or maybe it was just that the rest of the world didn’t care. Thailand is an overwhelming Buddhist country, but the three provinces in the far south closest to the Malaysian border are mainly Muslim. Over the years, the calls from the Muslims for greater autonomy had increased and the Thai response was mostly brutal repression. For the last half dozen years in particular, shadowy bands of rebels had been fighting back against the Thai military and doing it effectively. Demands were now being heard for the formation of a new Islamic state entirely separate from Thailand.
Machine gun mounted Humvees scour the roadsides for bombs. Thai soldiers sweep through villages suspected of harboring insurgents. And helicopters clatter above an idyllic tropical landscape over which the Thai military has cast a security net more dense than the U.S. Army ever did in Iraq. The provincial towns under siege have names like Pattani, Songkhla, and Narathiwat, but outside of Thailand almost no one has ever heard of any of them.
It was just another dirty little war, fought in places few Westerners could pronounce, between people with funny names. But the bombings and shootings went on day after day. Thousands had been killed on both sides, maybe tens of thousands. And however funny their names might be, the dead left fatherless and motherless children alone in the half-empty villages fending for themselves.
The Muslim rebels had recently turned to terrorizing those who did not wholeheartedly sympathize with them. Probably not by coincidence, their tactics mirrored those used by the Iraqi and Afghan fighters against American troops. Taking captives and beheading them was particularly stylish. Hundreds of men, women, and even children had been killed that way. Maybe thousands.
Shepherd glanced back down at the corpse. Maybe, he thought, Thailand’s homegrown terrorists were tired of being ignored.
Jello cut into Shepherd’s reverie. “So you don’t know who this is?”
“I guess you’ll have to be a real detective and figure it out yourself.”
“It would help me a lot if you had any idea at all.”
“It would help you even more if you had a head.”
Jello just nodded and Shepherd didn’t say anything else.
“So that’s it?” Jello nudged after a moment.
“That’s it.”
“You don’t have any idea why this guy had your phone number and travel details in his phone?”
“No idea at all.”
“He didn’t have them because you were supposed to meet him here in Bangkok?”
Shepherd shook his head.
Jello knew there was something Shepherd wasn’t telling him, of course. Maybe even a lot he wasn’t telling him. But he let it pass for the moment. He could see that he wasn’t going to bully anything out of Shepherd. At least not right then.
“Do you think this guy was killed by the decapitation,” Shepherd asked, “or was he decapitated after he was dead?”
“We don’t know yet.”
Shepherd tried to imagine what death by decapitation must be like.
“Somebody must have seen something,” he said after a moment. “There’s traffic up here all the time. You can’t stop a car, pull out a dead body, and hang it off this bridge without somebody seeing you.”
“Seeing and coming forward to tell the police about it are different things. I’m not holding my breath waiting for volunteers.”
Jello squatted down next to the corpse and Shepherd heard his knees crack. “The phone was in his right trouser pocket.”
“Anything else?”
“Some money in a plain gold clip. Not a lot. Thai baht and US dollars. In the other pocket he had a handkerchief. White. Unused. Nothing else.”
“No wallet?”
Jello shook his head.
“No ID of any kind?”
Jello even didn’t bother to respond.
“What did you find on the phone’s call list?”
“Empty.”
“All his calls were deleted?”
“Not deleted. Empty. We checked the SIM. The phone has never been used. There’s nothing on it but the note you saw and those listings in the address book.”
“You can trace the numbers, can’t you?”
“They’re all prepaid SIMs. No registered names. Other than you, of course.” Jello gave Shepherd a look. “You’re all we’ve got, Jack.”
Shepherd didn’t much like the sound of that
“My guess,” Jello went on, “is that he loaded those numbers into a clean phone specifically to use while he was here. Why would he have loaded your number if he didn’t intend to call you?”
Shepherd ignored the question and asked one of his own. “How do you know he was a visitor? Maybe he was local.”
Jello shook his head. “We’ve traced the phone. It was part of a batch shipped to Pakistan about a year ago.”
“And the SIM card?”
“Registered in Dubai.”
Shepherd nodded his head slowly.
It would have to be Dubai, wouldn’t it? Why couldn’t the frigging thing have been registered in Cleveland?
“If I ask you why you were in Dubai, Jack, would I get a straight answer?”
Shepherd shrugged, which was pretty much what Jello expected him to do.
“Were you there when they tried to kill General Kitnarok?”
“Yeah, I was there.”
“Anywhere close to him?”
“You could say that.”
“Then the guy CNN said was the assistant he dragged to—”
“Right. That was me.”
Jello thought about that for a moment.
“Did General Kitnarok really save your life?” he asked.
Shepherd shrugged again. When people asked him questions about Charlie Kitnarok, that was generally his gesture of choice.
“I didn’t think so,” Jello said. “I’m glad you’re okay, but I’m not sure I feel the same way about that guy you work for.”
Shepherd considered going into his usual song and dance about the difference between working for someone and having someone for a client. Under the circumstances it seemed like a particularly petty distinction, so he just let it go.
/> Shepherd walked over to the railing and stood there, looking off toward the horizon. In the rising half-light of dawn, a long train of teak rice barges slipped silently underneath the bridge and wallowed slowly downriver toward the Gulf of Thailand. The air was heavy and breathless, the dim light cold and mauve colored. He leaned there and looked down at the dark, greasy surface of the Chao Phraya River trying to imagine a headless corpse dangling just above it at the end of a rope. It was easier than he expected.
Jello walked over and leaned on the railing next to him.
“What’s going on here, Jack?”
“I’ve got no idea,” Shepherd said. “None.”
“What would be your guess?”
“That it’s some kind of a message.”
“Got to be,” Jello said. “Why else would anyone do something like this? Killing a guy is one thing. But killing him this way? Then hanging his corpse off a bridge in the middle of the city? Couldn’t be anything but a message.”
“So who do you think the message is for?’
Jello said nothing. But he turned his head and looked at Shepherd, his face completely empty.
“Yeah,” Shepherd nodded, “I was afraid that was what you thought.”
“There’s one other thing, too.”
“Is this the part of the conversation when you tell me ‘Don’t leave town’? Because unless you lock me up, that’s exactly what I’m about to do. I’m going home today.”
“You have a home?”
“Yeah. In Hong Kong.”
“That’s home now?”
“I guess,” Shepherd shrugged. “At least for a while.”
They stood quietly together there at the rail for a while just watching the river.
“What time does your plane leave?” Jello asked after a while.
“About ten,” Shepherd said. “This morning.”
Jello nodded.
“Be on it,” he said.
In the east, out beyond the city, the day began to break in earnest and a washed-out moon slipped into hiding back behind the Oriental Hotel. A cold, white spot of light appeared just on the eastern horizon and then spread slowly until it became a broad grey band stretching from one side of the city to the other. It looked thick and metallic, like the blunt edge of a sword.
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