World of Trouble (9786167611136)

by Needham, Jake

  When the car reached the concrete pillars of the Expressway, the driver turned underneath them and drove along a narrow road with very little traffic. They passed a string of junkyards and construction dumps, then made a right and a left and came to a T-junction in front of a run-down hotel. Shepherd knew roughly where they were, but not exactly. They were somewhere near the center of the city, in a warren of narrow streets just to the north of Sathorn Road. They made a left in front of the hotel and then almost immediately took a right and pulled into a small parking area in front of a nondescript apartment building.

  “Let’s go,” Tommy said as soon as the car stopped.

  He got out and Shepherd got out with him.

  The air was still and heavy and the city stunk. Shepherd looked up at the building where they had stopped. It was a dozen or so floors high and indistinguishable from the hundreds of other characterless apartment buildings that dotted Bangkok. A few lights were on in the gathering dusk, but the building was mostly dark. He assumed Kate was somewhere up there waiting for him. Maybe she would tell him what was really happening in Thailand, but maybe she wouldn’t. After all, he was just a foreigner. Even at the best of times, Thais didn’t have much interest in cutting foreigners in on the intrigues that powered their secretive society. And these were a long way from the best of times.

  “She doesn’t have much time for you, Jacko,” Tommy snapped. “So let’s get your ass upstairs and get this over with.”

  “You don’t sound very happy about this meeting, Tommy.”

  “If it was me, you wouldn’t be here. But she’s the boss and I’m not.”

  “And you’re not likely to be, are you?”

  Tommy stepped close to Shepherd and leveled a finger at his chest.

  “Watch your mouth, Jacko.”

  “Step away, little man. Don’t push your luck.”

  Tommy let a second or two go by without moving. Shepherd knew he was just saving face, but saving face was important to Thais, so Shepherd said nothing. After a moment or two, Tommy lowered his finger, turned his back, and walked into the lobby of the apartment building.

  Shepherd took a deep breath and followed him.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE APARTMENT TO which Tommy led him was on the seventh floor. It was completely nondescript. Worn gray carpet, bare walls, and a few generic furnishings that looked like they had been bought at a tent sale after the closing down of a Holiday Inn somewhere in Ohio. Tommy pointed Shepherd toward a chair upholstered in some kind of nubby-brown fabric and took a seat on a couch set at a right angle to it.

  On the other side of the room, standing half in and half out of a pool of yellow light cast by a green-shaded floor lamp, Kate was talking on a cell phone. Her back was to them, which gave Shepherd a moment before he had to say anything. He figured that was probably his good luck. Men tend to babble when they talk to beautiful women, and he knew he wasn’t any exception. As much as he liked to think of himself as the reincarnation of Humphrey Bogart, most of the time he suspected he sounded more like Joe Biden.

  Kate glanced back over her shoulder as Shepherd sat down. She waggled her fingers in a little wave, then she went on with her conversation in a low voice. She was wearing a yellow silk suit with a straight skirt that ended just at the tops of her knees. She had on no jewelry other than a single strand of grey pearls and a gold watch with a brown leather strap, a model so exclusive that Shepherd couldn’t immediately identify the make. Her legs were smooth and bare and slightly tanned, and she had on a pair of green pumps exactly the color of a ‘57 MG Shepherd had once owned. He noticed that her shiny black hair was cut much shorter than it had been the last time he had seen her. Instead of a neatly shaped bob that fell to her shoulders, it was now closely cropped all around and hugged her head like a helmet. Shepherd wondered what that meant.

  An old girlfriend whose name he had long forgotten once told him that when a woman made a big change in her hairstyle she was actually saying she wanted to change a lot of other things, too. Shepherd assumed then the woman had just been tweaking his male ego, feeding his conceit, that eventually he would piece together enough clues to figure out what the women around him were really thinking. But as the years passed, he suspected more and more that she had been telling him the truth.

  So what then was the real story behind Kate’s radical chop? Was it a sign she was looking for a change in her life? And if it was, what kind of a change did she have in mind? Shepherd thought he just might have to give that question some careful thought.

  ***

  KATE CLOSED HER phone and walked over. She sat down on the couch opposite Shepherd, crossed her legs at the knee, and smiled. What a great smile, Shepherd thought. But then Kate had always had a great smile so he wasn’t going to read anything into it.

  “How have you been, Jack?”

  “Good,” he nodded. “Good.”

  “You’ve gone back to practicing law I hear.”

  “Yeah, more or less.”

  “And I also hear you have some rather interesting clients.”

  Shepherd shrugged and said nothing.

  “Want something to drink? We’ve got beer and wine in the fridge, I think.”

  “A beer would be good.”

  Kate looked at Tommy and lifted her head slightly. “And a glass of wine for me, please, Tommy.”

  Tommy scurried off without a word into what Shepherd assumed was the kitchen. He liked the idea of the little turd being sent off to fetch drinks. He liked it a lot. He and Kate sat in silence while they waited for Tommy to return and he liked the comfort of the silence, too.

  Shepherd and Kate had trusted each other not long ago when something big and dangerous had come unwound around them. At first, it was because they had to. Later, it was because they wanted to. That was when their moment had come. But then it passed. Maybe their timing was lousy or maybe it was something else altogether. Either way, what did it matter now? Their time had come. And it had passed. Simple as that.

  Shepherd had never been one to attempt CPR on the past. Trying to breathe new life into yesterday was a lousy way to deal with tomorrow. Besides, he didn’t know anyone who had ever succeeded at it, no matter how much they might have wanted to. Still, Shepherd couldn’t help speculating a little as he and Kate sat quietly there together. I could have been a contender, he thought. Once upon a time, I could have been a contender.

  Tommy came back and set out their drinks.

  “I think it would be better if Jack and I talked alone, Tommy,” Kate said when he was done. “Could you wait downstairs, please?”

  Tommy didn’t look particularly happy about that and Shepherd couldn’t really blame him. It had to be embarrassing to be dismissed that way, but Tommy covered it reasonably well and just nodded and left the room. Shepherd almost felt sorry for him, but then he quickly came to his senses and the feeling passed.

  Kate began.

  “It’s good to see you, Jack.”

  “It’s good to see you, too,” Shepherd said. “I mean it’s really good.”

  Prattling already. He bit his tongue.

  If Kate noticed, she gave no sign.

  “All the same,” she said, “I gather you’re not here just to say hello to an old friend.”

  Shepherd shook his head. “No, I’m not.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Kate’s purse was on the floor next to the couch and she reached down and lifted it into her lap. It was the same green color as her shoes and looked expensive. Shepherd watched as she felt around inside and then took out a red and gold box of Dunhill Filters and a gold lighter.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.

  “I stopped and then started again. And then I stopped a few more times and started a few more times.” Kate shrugged. “You know how it goes.”

  Shepherd made a noise he hoped sounded sympathetic.

  Kate broke the cellophane around the box with her thumbnail and flipped up the top. He watch
ed her fingers extract a cigarette and decided they were without a doubt the most graceful fingers he had ever seen. Long and slim, elegantly shaped, nails neatly trimmed and varnished in deep red. He followed the cigarette with his eyes. She lifted it to her mouth and slid it between her lips. He heard rather than saw the top of her lighter snap back and her thumb spin the wheel. He saw her lips pucker slightly as they shaped themselves around the filter and sucked gently at it.

  Watching her, Shepherd thought back a year or so to when he lay in a hospital bed in Phuket recovering from two bullet wounds he had acquired when a ham-fisted hit man had confused him with one of his clients. He had lost a lot of blood and passed out at the side of the road. He might have bled to death if Kate hadn’t found him and gotten him to a hospital in time.

  Kate had stayed at his bedside all of that first day, and when she left that night she had bent down and brushed his lips with hers. He wanted to tell her right then how that made him feel, but he was so tired he wasn’t sure what he had said to her. He had tried, he could remember clearly that he had tried, but he didn’t know how much he had been able to put into words before sleep took him. Kate never mentioned it, and he had never figured out a way to ask without sounding like a complete jerk. Whatever he had said, or hadn’t said, this obviously wasn’t the time to talk about it.

  Kate took a long draw on her Dunhill and exhaled slowly, uncrossing her legs and then re-crossing them in the opposite direction. She returned the cigarettes and lighter to her purse and put it back on the floor.

  “Okay, Jack,” she said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I need to know if I’ve got to watch my ass.”

  Kate pursed her lips and took another draw on her Dunhill.

  “If you’re asking me to watch it for you, perhaps we can come to some kind of an arrangement.”

  Shepherd looked away. One sentence out of his mouth and the conversation was already spinning completely out of control.

  “Let me start again,” he said. “I’m sure you know all about the attack on Charlie in Dubai.”

  Kate nodded.

  “And you know that a couple of days ago somebody decapitated his personal assistant and hung him under a bridge here in Bangkok.”

  She nodded again. “You think there’s a connection?”

  “There has to be. It can’t just be a coincidence.”

  “Do you know what the connection is?”

  “I think so. Somebody wants to be certain Charlie gets the message.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Somebody is telling him they have a lot of ways of getting to him and there isn’t anything he can do about it.”

  “And you think they may be planning to send that same message a few more times.”

  “It’s possible,” Shepherd said.

  “And I gather you also think next time your name may be the one in the subject line.”

  “That also seems possible.”

  Kate looked away and smoked quietly, lost in her cigarette. After what felt to Shepherd like about an hour but was probably more like a couple of minutes, Kate stubbed her cigarette out in a heavy glass ashtray. Then she shifted her eyes to his.

  “How involved with General Kitnarok are you, Jack?”

  “He’s a client. I manage money for him. I shuffled corporate papers and talk to banks and accountants. It’s not very exciting stuff.”

  “You moved nearly half a billion dollars out of Thailand three days ago for General Kitnarok. That sounds pretty exciting to me.”

  Shepherd shrugged, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Do you know what the general’s plans are?” Kate asked after a moment of silence.

  “Plans for what?”

  “His political plans,” Kate said with what sounded to Shepherd like just the slightest touch of impatience. “Do you know what his political plans are?”

  “I don’t do politics.”

  “So you’re telling me you have nothing to do with what’s going on in Thailand now?”

  Shepherd thought back to the young faces wearing red shirts he and Tommy had passed on the drive into town. He thought back to the anger in their eyes.

  “I’m not only telling you that, Kate, it’s true. I really don’t have anything to do with Charlie’s politics. Nothing.”

  Kate considered that and let her eyes drift to the wall over Shepherd’s head. It was a while before she spoke again, and when she did, it was in a voice so soft he had to lean forward to hear her.

  “Do you like him?” she asked.

  “Charlie?”

  Kate nodded.

  “Yeah,” Shepherd said. “I like him.”

  “How far would you go for him, Jack?”

  “He’s a client. I respect his confidences. I do the job he pays me to do. Everything else, if there is anything else, is beyond my pay grade. What are you really asking me here?”

  “I need to know whose side you’re on.”

  “I’m on my side.”

  Kate didn’t say anything. Shepherd tried to wait her out, but eventually he gave up.

  “I’m here to ask for your advice, Kate. I just need to know how much risk I’m taking in representing Charlie. Call it personal advice if you like. This is for me, not for Charlie.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me, Jack. You didn’t pull something like this out of thin air.”

  Shepherd hated playing poker with women. Every time he tried he ended up feeling like he was made out of Plexiglas. He thought about it for a minute and decided he had gone this far and might just as well go all in. So he told Kate about Special Agent Keur. And he told her about Keur’s claim that he had been the real target in the Dubai ambush, not Charlie. And he told her how he had shrugged off the whole idea as fanciful until Adnan was murdered. That had made him reconsider Keur’s claim in a new light.

  “If Keur is right,” Shepherd finished, “maybe somebody is trying to cripple Charlie by knocking off the people he relies on. Killing Charlie might even energize the very movement that whoever this is wants to damage. But killing people like Adnan—”

  “And you.”

  “And me,” Shepherd nodded. “Killing us would make it harder for Charlie to operate. It might even stop him altogether.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Kate said. “I wish I’d thought of it.”

  Shepherd wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to laugh at that or not. Before he could decide, Kate stood up and smoothed her skirt down with one hand. Then she picked up her purse.

  “Let’s take a drive, Jack. Safe houses aren’t always that safe. We need to talk.”

  THIRTY

  IT WAS DARK and quiet in the forecourt of the apartment building. Off in the distance, Shepherd could hear the city humming with energy and he wondered again what was really going on out there.

  Tommy was leaning against the front fender of the black Mercedes, his arms folded and his legs crossed at the ankles. He straightened up as soon as Shepherd and Kate appeared and started walking toward them, but Kate waved him off. Instead, she went over and said a few words to him. Then she turned away, crossed the courtyard, and slid in behind the wheel of a blue BMW 7 Series parked just past the building’s main entrance. Tommy shot Shepherd a hard look. Shepherd ignored him and got into the BMW’s passenger seat. He wondered where Tommy thought he and Kate were going.

  Kate drove out of the courtyard, turned left, and wound her way through the gloom of a series of tiny back streets until they reached the expressway. As soon as she saw the strings of orange lights marking the entrance ramp, she took a deep breath, let it out again, and jammed the accelerator to the floor. The big car jumped, and by the time they hit the top of the ramp they were doing sixty. Kate quickly settled them into a cruise in the inside lane at what Shepherd figured had to be at least a hundred.

  Kate looked over at him and smiled. “Alone at last.”

  Shepherd liked that smile. It really was a wonderful smile. But right the
n he would have been a lot happier if Kate had been watching where they were going instead of looking at him, even if she was smiling. He pointed his index finger at the road and smiled back.

  Kate laughed. “Still a real candy-ass, aren’t you, Jack?”

  But at least she shifted her eyes back to the road.

  The expressway traced the edge of Bangkok’s deep-water port on the Chao Phraya River. Dozens of huge container cranes were lined up side by side along the eastern bank, each of them etched against the black sky by strings of tiny yellow lights. They made Shepherd think of a long train of circus elephants tied nose to tail. After two or three miles, they shot through a ramp curling off to the left and joined the Bagna-Trat Road that ran southeast from Bangkok, lifted fifty feet above the barren, swampy coastal plain on a forest of thick concrete pilings. Six lanes, nearly empty, and dead straight for almost thirty miles. Shepherd knew exactly what was coming next.

  Sure enough, Kate floored the accelerator and Shepherd could have sworn they went slightly airborne. It felt exactly like they were in a helicopter flying low over the marshy ground.

  “This car was swept two hours ago,” Kate said. “It’s as good a guarantee as you’re ever going to get that this conversation is entirely between us.”

  Shepherd nodded and waited.

  “Have you ever heard of a company called Blossom Trading?” Kate asked.

  The question blindsided Shepherd and he hesitated.

  Kate caught his reaction. “Are you involved with Blossom Trading, Jack?”

  “No,” he said, “I’m not involved with Blossom Trading.”

  “But you obviously know something about it.”

  Shepherd thought about that for a moment and then nodded. “The Kitnarok Foundation operates out of a floor of their building in Dubai. Charlie has some kind of interest in the company, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “Go on,” Kate said. “You know more than that.”

  Shepherd hesitated again. He played back Keur’s claims that Blossom Trading was running guns to Iran. He didn’t really know whether it was a good idea to tell Kate about that or not, but he told her anyway.