World of Trouble (9786167611136)

by Needham, Jake

  “I need to hear that,” Shepherd said, pointing at the monitor.

  Both Keur and Rachel glanced at the screen. Then Rachel took a remote control off her desk and tossed it to Shepherd. He found the mute button, clicked it, and the sound popped on. Shepherd was only vaguely aware of Rachel murmuring hasty goodbyes into the telephone.

  “…nothing more about the real seriousness of the situation here in Bangkok until tomorrow morning,” a woman’s voice Shepherd recognized as Liz Corbin’s was saying on CNN.

  “Do you know yet exactly how many explosions there were?” a male voice asked.

  “The government is saying officially that there were four, Keith, but I am hearing unofficially that it was almost certainly many more than that. Perhaps as many as a dozen. What has caused real panic here, however, is not the number of explosions, but the apparently well-coordinated nature of the blasts. The initial explosion at Government House was followed within ten minutes by those at the Hyatt and the Four Seasons, and then shortly after that by those at other international hotels, two major shopping malls, and of course at the airport. The attacks appear to have been planned to kill and injure as many foreigners as possible and, by doing so, to strike a fatal blow at Thailand’s vital tourism infrastructure.”

  “Is the government providing any casualty figures?” the man prodded.

  “No, none at all. At the moment, the government’s reaction seems to be to try to keep a lid on everything as long as possible. They are saying very little and they certainly aren’t giving out any figures. My sources, however, say that more than a hundred are dead and hundreds more, perhaps thousands, are injured.”

  “Where are you now, Liz? Can you see any of the damage from your location?”

  “Right now I am about two hundred yards north of the Grand Hyatt. The air is heavy with smoke and dust and I cannot see very clearly. But I can tell you that the hotel appears to have collapsed right in the center and is almost wholly demolished. It would not surprise me if the casualty toll from that one bombing alone was many hundreds of people.”

  “What is the mood there in Bangkok?”

  “It’s almost impossible to move around the city right now so I have spoken to very few people. The military has appeared in the streets, but they don’t seem to be doing much of anything. The Four Seasons Hotel is only a few hundred yards south of here. I’m going to try to make my way to it on foot and see what the level of destruction is there.”

  “Have there been any claims of responsibility yet, Liz?”

  “As you know, Keith, the Thai government is locked in a bitter struggle with the supporters of former strongman General Chalerm Kitnarok, who was forced out of office with a blizzard of corruption charges. At the same time, they are fighting an increasingly violent Muslim insurgency in the south. The assumption here, of course, is that these explosions are a clear attempt to destabilize the government and therefore the most likely culprits would come from one of those two camps, but there is no specific information as yet concerning who actually is to blame.”

  “Has the new prime minister made a statement yet?”

  “Prime Minister Kathleeya Srisophon has been in office for less than a day, having been chosen by the governing coalition immediately after the murder of former prime minister Somchai in an attack on his motorcade yesterday morning. She has made no statements of any kind as yet and reports are that she is in an undisclosed location for security reasons. It is easy to understand why. In a country seemingly poised on the brink of chaos, the murder of a second prime minister would almost certainly send it tumbling over the edge.”

  The image on the monitor shifted to a studio shot of a blow-dried newscaster who looked to Shepherd more like an actor in an unsuccessful daytime soap opera than a journalist.

  “Thank you, Liz,” the man said. “That was Elizabeth Corbin of The New York Times on the telephone from Bangkok, where an unknown number of apparently well-coordinated explosions shook the city just after five o’clock this afternoon, Bangkok time. Initial reports are that there are many dead and injured, including a large number of foreigners. CNN is urgently trying to gather more information and we will have it for you as soon as we can. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the federal budget crisis shows no sign of ending with…”

  Shepherd clicked the mute button on the remote and looked at Keur.

  “It’s started,” he said.

  FORTY-ONE

  SHEPHERD STOOD UP, found the field glasses, and walked back to the window. He scanned the field and found the hanger with the green roof. But he didn’t see the plane any longer.

  “I think Harvey’s gone,” he said.

  “They couldn’t have taken off that quickly,” Rachel said. “They would have to fuel after the flight from Thailand. It can’t be done that fast.”

  She walked over and took the glasses from Shepherd, then studied the place where they had seen Harvey park.

  “The hanger doors are closed now,” she said. “They must have towed the plane inside.”

  “How do you get off the field from there?” Shepherd asked. “Would the passengers have to go over to the passenger terminal to clear immigration?”

  “Theoretically, yes,” Rachel said, “but there’s an exit gate in the airport boundary right behind the hanger. Since the facility actually belongs to the UAE government, it’s accessible from there.”

  “That means people can come and go from that hanger without any interference at all, right? No customs or immigration?”

  “Yes, that’s right. That’s what it means.”

  “Is the gate manned?” Shepherd asked.

  “No, there’s not enough traffic for that. Access is by a security card and a code entered into a keypad. You’ve got to have both to get through the gate and we change the code weekly.”

  “Who changes the code?”

  “I do.” Rachel pointed to the computer sitting on her desk. “From right there.”

  Shepherd thought about that for a moment.

  “I guess you probably have trouble with the gate occasionally,” he said.

  “Not really.”

  “I mean with it breaking down and jamming so that people can’t open it to get out.”

  “No, as far as I remember, that gate has never…”

  Rachel trailed off into silence and looked at Shepherd.

  “If the code were changed,” he said, “and nobody knew it, the gate wouldn’t open. To anyone who tried to use the old code, it would seem like the gate had broken down, wouldn’t it?”

  Keur roared with laughter again. “Damn, Jack, I do like your style.”

  “What would happen if somebody came out of that hanger, tried to operate the gate, and discovered it didn’t work?” Shepherd asked.

  “They could go across the airport and exit on the other side, or go through the freight facility and get off the field that way,” Rachel said. “But they would have to get permission from ground control to move around the field. It would be a bit of a nuisance and it might take a while.”

  “So the odds are they would just call somebody instead. They would tell them they were waiting there to leave the field and to send somebody to fix the goddamn gate right the hell now.”

  Rachel nodded slowly. “That would be my guess.”

  “How interesting,” Shepherd said. “And would you be informed if that happened?”

  “I might be. Particularly if I had arranged to be informed.”

  “Who would you send to fix the gate?”

  “You have anybody in particular in mind?” Rachel smiled.

  “Now that you ask,” Shepherd said, “I just might.”

  Rachel used her computer to change the gate code. Then she called someone and told them to route any complaints about that particular gate directly to her. She also found a light cotton jacket and a blue baseball cap in her closet and gave them to Shepherd. As disguises went, it wasn’t much, but it didn’t have to be. He wasn’t intending to fool anyon
e for very long.

  A few minutes later, Shepherd’s phone binged. He checked his email and found a message from his new anti-American lawyer. The guy’s pet judge had already signed an emergency order impounding Harvey pending a full hearing on a claim that the lease payments were in default. That hearing had been set for the next day, but the lawyer said he had heard a rumor the judge felt a bout of flu coming on and would probably be forced to postpone it for a day or two. That was about as much as he could do, he said. How sick could one judge actually be before eyebrows were raised?

  Shepherd and Keur sat back to wait. They kept an eye on CNN for any further reports about the explosions in Bangkok, but something called World Sport was on instead of the news. As far as Shepherd could tell, World Sport meant extended coverage of any sport not played anywhere in the United States. The planet’s twenty-seventh largest city was in flames and all CNN could talk about was Italian league soccer.

  Rachel did paperwork at her desk and took several calls during the next half hour. As each call was put through to her she shook her head at Shepherd. Then she took a call and didn’t shake her head.

  “Here we go,” she said.

  When the call was put through, Rachel murmured apologies for the gate malfunction in a throaty voice with just a trace of an accent. She sounded pretty good to Shepherd. If he heard a voice like that coming down the telephone line, he figured he would accept an apology for World War II. From the look on Rachel’s face, however, whomever she was talking to was far less enamored by the sound of her voice than Shepherd was.

  When she put down the telephone, she gave Shepherd a long look. “You didn’t tell me how charming your Mr. Darling was.”

  “He called you himself?”

  “In person, the asshole. He wants me to send someone to fix the gate. He seems to be in a hurry.”

  “Well then. Let’s not keep the man waiting.”

  They all trooped downstairs to the garage and got into Rachel’s official vehicle. It was a Toyota Land Cruiser with a blue bubble light on the roof and a couple more blue lights behind the front grill. It took only a few minutes for them to cross the main road and enter the airport through a manned security gate right on the other side.

  Once on the field, Rachel switched on her blue lights and turned into a perimeter road just inside the fence. The road circled around the runways to the other side of the field where Robert Darling was fuming in front of a gate that wouldn’t obey him.

  “This is fun,” Shepherd said. “Let’s switch on the siren, too.”

  “I don’t have a siren.”

  “Damn.”

  A big commercial jet passed directly overhead and the thunder of its engines enveloped them like a rainstorm. The plane was so close that Shepherd could pick out the individual rivets peppering its skin. They looked like a bad attack of metallic acne. He knew all the scientific explanations about why airplanes flew, of course, and he believed them. Up to a point. But when he was a couple of hundred feet directly beneath one of those aluminum monsters, watching it hang there in the air without any visible explanation for the apparent miracle of it all, he could only hold his breath and hope that science wasn’t just blowing one out its ass.

  When the engine noise had died away, Keur cleared his throat. “I think I should be the one to talk to Darling, Jack.”

  “Too late,” Shepherd said, holding up the jacket and baseball cap. “I got the disguise.”

  “That’s not going to fool anyone.”

  “It will just long enough for me to walk up to his car.”

  “And then what are you going to do?”

  It was a good question, but a little embarrassing since Shepherd hadn’t worked that part out yet.

  “Look, Jack, I’m a trained law enforcement officer. I do this kind of thing for a living.”

  “It’s my play, Keur. Don’t try to pull rank on me.”

  “But what do you think you’re going to accomplish?”

  Damn, another good question.

  “Make up your minds, boys,” Rachel said. “ETA three minutes.”

  Shepherd twisted around in his seat and looked at Keur.

  “I know Darling,” he said. “Even better, I irritate him. I’m going to ambush him and piss him off and see if he screws up.”

  “Screws up what?”

  “Look, Keur, think about what we know here.”

  “That won’t take long.”

  “Darling owns half of Blossom Trading,” Shepherd went on undeterred, “which you say is really an arms dealer. He’s just arrived in Dubai from Thailand, which seems to be on the verge of civil war. He arrived on an airplane operated by a CIA front company, which I’m told is being used regularly to run guns into Thailand. Charlie owns the other half of Blossom Trading. He’s disappeared. Three days ago, Charlie’s assistant turned up in Thailand hanging beneath a bridge with this head cut off. Now what connects all of that?”

  “I don’t know,” Keur said. “You tell me. What connects all of that?”

  “I have no goddamned idea either. So I’ll ask Darling. Maybe he’ll explain it to me.”

  “There’s the car,” Rachel interrupted.

  A white Mercedes sedan was sitting in a driveway that ended at the airport’s perimeter fence in front of a closed gate. Next to the gate was a small grassy area shaded by a half dozen palm trees with a white picnic table and two benches. It looked like the quarantine area for smokers. No one was in sight, so Shepherd assumed Darling had to be inside the Mercedes. The question he really ought to be asking himself, he knew, was who else might also be inside the Mercedes?

  But he didn’t ask. He already had a matched set of questions he couldn’t answer. What use was one more?

  “Stop in the blind spot on the driver’s side,” Shepherd said to Rachel.

  He pulled on the jacket and pushed the baseball cap down on his head.

  “Block him in against the gate, but don’t be too obvious about it.”

  Rachel glanced at Shepherd. She looked like she might be about to say something, but instead she just nodded.

  As soon as the big SUV stopped, Shepherd pushed the door open and jumped out. He tilted his head down so that the bill of the cap hid his face and pretended to study something in his hands as he walked quickly toward the Mercedes.

  The driver’s door started to open just as Shepherd reached the car, but he shoved it shut and pushed his hip against it. The driver lowered his window and Shepherd bent over to look inside.

  Darling was in the driver’s seat. And he was alone.

  FORTY-TWO

  “HELLO, ROBERT.”

  “Shepherd?”

  Darling appeared completely bewildered.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “The very question I was going to ask you, Robert. The very question.”

  Shepherd had never before seen Darling wearing anything but a suit with a bow tie. But now he was wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. It took a little getting used to. Darling tried again to open the car door, but Shepherd kept his hip against it and Darling stayed inside the Mercedes.

  “Easy question first, Robert. Where did Tommy go?”

  If Darling had begun to recover from his shock at finding Shepherd standing on the airport driveway and pinning him inside his own car, the mention of Tommy took him all the way back downhill again. His eyes shifted first one way and then the other. He seemed to be trying to convince himself that he had misunderstood Shepherd’s question.

  “Look, Shepherd, I haven’t a clue what you’re—”

  “I saw Tommy with you when you left Harvey.”

  “What are you talking about? Who in the everlasting fuck is Harvey?”

  Shepherd decided it wasn’t the best time to start talking about a six-foot tall white rabbit and made a mental note not to use the name Harvey with Darling again.

  “I saw Tommy leaving the plane with you. A white 737, all-freight configuration, tail number A6-NSU. The one that’s…”<
br />
  Shepherd turned and pointed at the hanger with the green roof.

  “…in there.”

  Darling remained expressionless, but Shepherd was watching his eyes. He was pleased to see the shock there. Shepherd had hoped to see at least some fear, too, but he didn’t, so he laid out his best card.

  “With that impoundment order in place,” Shepherd said, “you’re not going to be flying that arms delivery back to Thailand for a while. You do know about the order, don’t you?”

  Darling’s face stayed as flat as a dinner plate. He didn’t even blink.

  “What the hell’s going on here, Shepherd?”

  “I’ve arranged for your plane to be impounded. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “I’ve got a lot of friends.”

  Actually, Shepherd figured he probably only had two friends right then. And they were both in the SUV with the stupid looking light going around on top of it like somebody was about to announce a K-Mart blue light special.

  He stepped away from the Mercedes and pulled open Darling’s door.

  “Come on, Robert. It’s come to Jesus time. Let’s go sit under that tree over there and have a good old fashioned heart-to-heart.”

  They left the Mercedes where it was and walked over to the picnic table. Darling sat down on one of the benches. Shepherd took off the baseball hat and jacket and sat on the other.

  “All we need is some potato salad and fried chicken,” Darling said.

  He glanced again at the darkened windows of the Land Cruiser.

  “Would your friend like to join us?”

  “It’s just an airport security man they assigned to drive me. Forget about him.”

  Darling nodded slowly, but Shepherd saw some uncertainty in it. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Maybe it would even help.