“Keur’s right,” Kate said. “Your client is an arms dealer. You didn’t know?”
“Blossom Trading isn’t my client and I don’t know any such thing. And I don’t know any such thing about Charlie either.”
“Blossom Trading sells guns all over the world, most of them off the books. Kitnarok owns half of the company. So there you go.”
“Who owns the other half?”
“Robert Darling.”
Shepherd smelled the rain coming, although he couldn’t see it. Lightning rippled like quicksilver across the sky to the east and he saw they were headed directly toward a solid wall of thunderclouds. The wind rose, thrashing at the rice stalks in the fields along both sides of the road, and the first big drops splashed onto the windshield.
Kate switched on the wipers. “How well do you know Darling?”
“He’s the other trustee—”
“I know that. Other than as a trustee of the Kitnarok Foundation, how well do you know him?”
“Not very well. Hardly at all, I guess.”
“Look out for him, Jack. Robert Darling is a dangerous man. He’s connected to people, a lot of people, in ways we don’t quite understand.”
“Like who?”
Kate shook her head.
Shepherd listened to the swish-swish of the wipers and the hiss of the tires against the wet asphalt. He summoned up a mental image of Robert Darling and examined it carefully. It was difficult for him to think of someone who wore bow ties as a dangerous man.
“There’s something else, Jack. It’s not something I should tell you, but you need to know it.”
The big car flew on through the darkness. Shepherd took a deep breath and waited for Kate to go on. Eventually she did.
“Do you know anything about the insurgency in the south?” she asked.
“A little,” Shepherd said. Then he thought it over. “Not very much actually.”
“Neither does the rest of the world.”
That was true enough, Shepherd thought.
“Blossom Trading has been supplying the Muslim separatists with arms and ammunition for the last couple of years,” Kate continued. “We think the Muslims were asking Blossom for larger shipments and heavier weapons. We think that’s why Adnan was in the country when he was killed. To negotiate a bigger deal with them.”
“Are you saying that Adnan was killed by Muslim rebels from the south? That’s why he was beheaded? So you would know they were responsible?”
“Either that or somebody was trying to make it look that way,” Kate said. “My guess is something went wrong with a deal he was working on. Maybe the separatists wanted more guns than he could deliver. Maybe Adnan had his hand out and got greedy. Maybe it was something else altogether. Whatever it was, Adnan must have pissed off his customers.”
“So they beheaded him and hung him under the Taksin Bridge.”
“Like you said, it was a message. When your business is selling military weapons to murderers, you need to be careful how you treat your customers.”
The rain picked up and Shepherd listened to it pound against the car.
“Did the Muslims organize the hit on Charlie in Dubai?” he asked after a while.
“That would have been quite a stretch for them. They’ve never operated outside of Thailand before.”
“Then who was it?”
“We don’t know, but it wasn’t them.”
The rain was coming down in torrents now. It was an angry bombardment, but Kate didn’t slow down. Their headlights disappeared into an uncertain void.
“You’re saying you think there’s no connection? The attack on Charlie in Dubai and the murder of Adnan in Bangkok were unrelated?”
Kate nodded.
“So there’s no plot to kill off Charlie’s advisers.”
“Not that I know of.”
“And I’m in the clear.”
“That very much depends on how you look at it, Jack.”
Shepherd wasn’t sure what that meant, but he let it ride.
“Why would Charlie be in the arms business?” he asked instead. “He’s got more money than God. Why would be get involved in something like that?”
“General Kitnarok isn’t in it for the money.”
“Then why is Charlie peddling guns?”
Kate glanced over again. “I really don’t know how much I can say, Jack. I don’t know how deep into this you are.”
“Oh for God’s sake, how many times do I have to tell you? I’ve got nothing to do with Charlie’s businesses.”
“But you do. You’re involved with them on a daily basis.”
“I just shuffle papers. I move money around.”
“You make the trains run on time.”
“You don’t have to make it sound like that,” Shepherd said. He watched the water streaming back from the windshield and listened to the slap of the wipers. “Not unless you want to.”
“There’s going to be a civil war in Thailand, Jack. General Kitnarok is going to make sure of it. That’s why he’s selling arms to the Muslims in the south.”
“Oh, horseshit. Charlie Kitnarok leading a Muslim army into battle against the rest of you? What a load of crap.”
“General Kitnarok doesn’t care about three provinces in the south. He’ll give them an Islamic republic if he thinks it will help him achieve his real goal. What Kitnarok wants to do is stir things up. He thinks he can tie the government down fighting the Muslim separatists, then come at us from a different direction.”
“What are you talking about? What other direction?”
Kate glanced over at Shepherd again.
“General Kitnarok is arming the red shirts, too,” she said.
“Arming the red shirts? You can’t really think—”
“There have been two weapons shipments so far that we know of,” Kate interrupted, “both from Blossom Trading and both delivered to an airstrip in the south that is under Muslim control. We missed the first one, but we got the second one when they tried to move it to Bangkok for distribution. Two hundred AK-47s with ten thousand rounds of ammunition. We think the one we missed may also have included some rocket launchers and incendiary devices. We don’t know where it is now.”
Shepherd said nothing. Kate was wrong about Charlie. He was pretty sure she was. But, he had to admit to himself, he wasn’t absolutely sure.
“What time is your flight?” Kate asked.
“Not until 2:00 A.M.”
“Good. Then there’s something I want to show you. It won’t take long.”
Kate blew past a pickup truck in the inside lane. Shepherd glanced over at her as the truck’s lights washed through the BMW, but she was as expressionless as if she were waiting for a bus.
A mile or so further along, a highway interchange appeared out of the darkness although there didn’t appear to be a highway connected to it. There were only entry and exit ramps that went nowhere and an overpass arching high over the Bangna-Trat Road. Shepherd had seen senseless pieces of construction like that scattered all over Thailand, the product of a public works system designed primarily to generate payoffs to politicians rather than to provide anything of value to the country.
Kate swung off on the exit ramp, U-turned across the overpass, and re-entered the elevated roadway heading back the way they had come. She punched on the CD player and adjusted the volume and a moment later one of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos filled the car. Shepherd had no idea which one it was, but as they listened to it together Shepherd could see Kate’s whole body relax.
The asphalt glistened in the headlights and the lights of Bangkok beckoned in the distance. As suddenly as it had begun, the wind died and the rain stopped. The moon appeared from behind the clouds off in the west. It was as bright and white as a flame.
THIRTY-ONE
A LITTLE LESS than an hour later Kate turned into a parking garage next to a hospital. She drove to the top floor, nosed the BMW in against the wall, and cut the engine. She go
t out, walked behind the car, and opened the trunk. Shepherd got out, too. He looked around at the largely empty parking garage.
“What are we doing here?” he asked.
Kate didn’t say anything. Instead, she took a pair of powerful-looking field glasses out of the trunk. She handed them to Shepherd and pointed to the waist-high concrete wall that surrounded the top floor.
“Have a look,” she said. “Tell me what you see out there.”
Shepherd took the field glasses and walked over to the wall. They were just south of the old Bangkok airport, Don Mueang. It had been shut down when Suvarnabhumi Airport opened a few years before and now, except for the Thai military and an occasional private flight, the field was mostly deserted. The predictable scuffle within the bureaucracy had been rolling on for some time, rival ministers each seeking control over the process of disposing of the land. The bribes generated by selling off hundreds of acres of prime urban land near the center of Bangkok would eventually be a prize cash cow for some politician.
“Look right below us. That building with the flat black roof.”
Shepherd focused the glasses and swung them back and forth until he found the building Kate was talking about. It was roughly square, perhaps a hundred feet on each side, and looked to be the equivalent of three or four stories high. It had a mirrored surface that appeared black or dark blue in the fading light. He could see no specific source of illumination and the walls reflected the building’s surroundings so perfectly that it was both there and not there at the same time. Neither of the two sides he could see appeared to have any windows or doors, but he supposed they were there and the mirrored surface just made them difficult to pick out.
The building appeared dim and deserted, but Shepherd doubted it was. There was a razor wire fence all around it that separated it from the rest of Don Mueang, and a single gate with a guardhouse. The windows of the guardhouse were made of the same reflective material as the building and it was impossible to tell if there was anyone inside. The gate was closed and inside the fence about thirty parking places were striped out in white against a blacktopped surface. Half of those parking places were occupied, mostly by new looking pick-ups and SUVs.
“It looks like it was built recently,” Shepherd said.
“It was.”
“Why would anyone build a new hanger at a closed airport?”
“It’s not a hanger.”
Shepherd lowered the field glasses and looked at Kate. “Why don’t you just make this simple and tell me what I’m looking at?”
“Look just to the left of that building,” she said instead of answering him. “What do you see there?”
Shepherd gave Kate a long stare, but after a moment he lifted the field glasses again. There was an aircraft parked where she told him to look. It appeared to be a 737, probably a cargo-only conversion since it had no windows. The entire aircraft was painted white and had no logo on its tail or any other visible markings.
“I call it Harvey,” Kate said.
Shepherd lowered the glasses again and looked at her. “You give airplanes names?”
“Not all airplanes, just that one. You never saw the movie?”
Shepherd said nothing.
“It was back in the fifties,” Kate said. “Jimmy Stewart had this imaginary friend called Harvey. Harvey was a six-foot tall white rabbit that went everywhere with him. Only nobody else could see Harvey.”
“You’d think it would be pretty hard to miss a six-foot tall white rabbit.”
“You’d think it would be pretty hard to miss a white airplane with no markings, too. But that’s exactly what everybody seems to be doing.”
Shepherd hadn’t seen a registration number anywhere on the aircraft, but it had to have one. Every aircraft flying anywhere in the world carried a registration number. It was often called a tail number since it was usually painted on the aircraft’s vertical tail surface, but the 737’s tail surface was as white and clean as new snow. He raised the glasses again and examined the airplane carefully.
“Where’s the registration number?”
“Look above the forward door.”
He shifted the glasses. Sure enough, there it was. In black letters so tiny he had missed it.
“A6-NSU,” he read. “Where is that from?”
“The United Arab Emirates. Dubai, to be precise.”
Shepherd lowered the glasses again. “You’re not going to tell me this plane belongs to Charlie, are you?”
“No.”
“Okay, so I give up. Who does Harvey belong to? Some rich Arab who just loves the local massage parlors?”
“Unfortunately, no. The plane is registered in the UAE, but it’s chartered to a company called Trippler Aviation. Trippler is based at a private airstrip in central Florida. You ever hear of them?”
“It sounds familiar,” Shepherd said, “but right off the top of my head—”
“Trippler Aviation is a CIA proprietary, a front company for the CIA. Trippler got a lot of public attention when they were running guns into Angola for the CIA in the late 1980s and one of their planes crashed.”
“This plane belongs to the CIA?”
“It’s being operated by one of their front companies. That’s more or less the same thing.”
“What’s it doing here?”
“For the last five or six years, Trippler Aviation has been in the torture taxi business.”
Torture taxi was a catchy expression somebody had coined for the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. The program involved the moving of high-value prisoners, mostly Muslim extremists, among so-called black sites to prevent interference with their interrogation.
“You’re telling me this airplane I’m looking at right here is used by the CIA to transport secret prisoners to secret prisons?”
“Yes,” Kate nodded. “Along with a lot of other things.”
“Then what is it doing in Thailand?”
But before Shepherd had finished speaking the question, he figured out the answer on his own.
“The new building?” he asked. “That building belongs to the CIA?”
“That’s right,” Kate said. “The CIA has very close links with the Thai military. The CIA needed a secure place to put a new interrogation facility and the Thai Air Force was happy to provide it.”
“Do you really expect me to believe that the CIA is torturing people right here in the middle of Bangkok?”
“Believe what you like, Jack. All I know for sure is that your Central Intelligence Agency—”
“It’s not my Central Intelligence Agency.”
“—is housing prisoners in that building down there as well as conducting other operations out of it. I have no idea what they do with the prisoners, but I doubt they’re teaching them English.”
“Even if you’re right—”
“Oh, I’m right, Jack. That’s what I do around here, remember? I gather intelligence. I may not know what they are doing in the goddamn building, but at least, by God, I know who’s going in and out of it.”
“Okay, calm down.”
“This is calm.”
“Even if you’re right,” Shepherd repeated slowly, “why are you showing this to me?”
“Because I want you to understand what you’re into.”
“I guess I just don’t get it. Why does this have anything to do with me?”
Kate rested her palms on the wall and looked out at the 737 parked on the airfield beneath them.
“We know that Harvey sometimes flies into a field close to the Malaysian border that’s under the control of the Muslim separatists,” she said. “We know that it has flown weapons there for the separatists. And we also know that at least twice it has flown weapons into that field that were then moved on to another location. It was after the second flight that we intercepted the cargo of weapons I told you about, the one that was moving north toward Bangkok. The load from the first flight has disappeared.”
“I thought you said
that the weapons going into the south were from Blossom Trading.”
“They are from Blossom Trading. The CIA is transporting them.”
Shepherd took a deep breath and thought about that. He turned around and leaned back against the wall.
“This is all a little hard for me to believe, Kate. The CIA isn’t normally in the business of arming Muslim separatists.”
“Oh no? How about the Taliban in Afghanistan when they were fighting the Russians instead of you? The CIA even gave them shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. Stinger missiles for a bunch of rag-tag fighters bent on dragging their country back into the sixteenth century? Good God, what were you people thinking?”
“I imagine somebody was thinking they could hang a killing defeat on the Soviet Union. They were thinking they were getting something valuable enough to make the risk worth taking.”
“And exactly the same thing is happening again right here in Thailand. Your guys think they’re getting something pretty valuable this time, too.”
“They are not my guys.”
Kate shook her head and looked away, but she didn’t say anything.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Shepherd said. “What does the CIA think it’s getting by helping Blossom Trading run guns to your Muslim rebels?”
“General Kitnarok is in bed with the Thai military and the Thai military is in bed with the CIA. Kitnarok supplies guns to the rebels through Blossom Trading and uses the profits to pay for weapons to arm his red shirts, which he then brings in through areas in the south controlled by the rebels and ships north. In return for the Thai military permitting the CIA to operate a secret facility here, the CIA provides transportation for the weapons.”
“But why would the CIA want to help Charlie start a civil war in Thailand?”
“Because they don’t like this government. They’d much rather have Kitnarok and the military running things again. If a strong civil government can endure in Thailand, they’re afraid that will be the end of their cozy little deal with the military and they’ll get thrown out on their asses.”
World of Trouble (9786167611136) Page 18