“They’re about to light the fuse, Keur, and I can’t even reach Kate to warn her.”
Keur just nodded, but he didn’t say anything.
“I’ve got to find Charlie,” Shepherd said. “I’ve got to get to him before everything turns to shit. He can stop it. Maybe he’s the only person who can stop it.”
“I thought you’d say something like that.”
“Charlie is either in Thailand now or he’s going to be soon. Either way, there’s no point in hanging around Dubai any longer. All roads lead back to Thailand. That’s where I need to start looking.”
“I think you’re right.”
Shepherd fell silent. He was fresh out of things to say.
“You want some help?”
“Help with what? I have no idea what I’m going to do.”
“Neither do I, but judging on how you’ve handled yourself so far, I’ll bet it’s going to be something that kicks ass. I want to be there for that.”
“Then thanks,” Shepherd said. “I accept.”
“I’m your man, Jack. You can count on me.”
Keur stuck out his hand and they shook.
***
KEUR DROPPED SHEPHERD at the Dusit Thani Hotel where he showered and packed while Keur went off presumably to do the same thing. An hour later, Shepherd took a cab to the airport and just before nine he and Keur met again in front of the Thai Airways check-in counter. Shepherd had already booked first class tickets for both of them on the 10:40 P.M. nonstop to Bangkok, and he brushed off Keur’s offer to pay for his own ticket. He had charged the tickets to the Kitnarok Foundation, so what did he care?
Shepherd felt lousy to be back in an airport again. As they walked to the first class lounge, he started thinking about the amount of time he had spent in airports just in the last week. Maybe he ought find a new way to earn a living.
Shepherd and Keur sat in the lounge until the Bangkok flight was called. They were hungry and tired, too tired to look for real food. They made do with some bags of pretzels and a couple of Diet Cokes they scrounged out of the self-service bar. So much for the glamour of international air travel.
Finally, boarding was announced and Shepherd and Keur walked to the gate. They were calling for first class passengers when they got there, so mercifully they walked straight onto the airplane without having to hang around in the gate lounge. Later, Shepherd worked out that the flight had probably taken off right on schedule, but at the time he didn’t have a clue it had taken off at all, let alone when. He was fast asleep before the cabin door even closed.
FORTY-FIVE
WAKING UP ON an airplane was always a disorienting experience for Shepherd. His muscles ached in strange and novel ways, and the sounds, the smells, and the light all seemed completely alien. He didn’t know how it would feel to suddenly realize he was dead, of course, but his best guess was that it would feel exactly like waking up on an airplane.
Shepherd brought his seat upright, reconnected his brain to his lips, and glanced across the aisle at Keur.
“How long before we land?”
Keur looked up from the book he was reading and consulted his watch. “About an hour.”
“Don’t you sleep?”
“I drink, I eat, I read. But I stay awake just in case the pilot needs my help.”
“Nervous flyer, huh?”
“Don’t we have anything more important to talk about?”
Shepherd held up his hands, palms toward Keur.
“Coffee first,” he said. “Lots and lots of coffee. No conversation without coffee.”
Keur nodded and went back to reading his book.
Shepherd searched around for the call button and gave it a push without having much conviction it was actually connected to anything. Much to his surprise, a lovely Thai woman wearing a green and yellow silk sarong materialized almost immediately in the aisle next to him. She had smooth brown skin, a dazzling smile, and didn’t look a day over twenty, but with Thai women he had long ago learned you could never really tell for sure. He asked for water and black coffee, and she hit him again with that smile and went off to get them.
He stumbled out of his seat to the bathroom where he emptied his badly overloaded bladder, washed his hands, threw some water in his face, and combed his hair. There was a straw basket of toothbrushes on one side of the washbasin, so he unwrapped one and gave his teeth a few quick swipes as well. Much against the odds, he found he was feeling vaguely human again.
When Shepherd got back to his seat, he found coffee and a glass of ice water waiting for him. The smiling vision in the silk sarong had also covered his table with a starched white cloth and set out a plate of exotic-looking fruit and a basket of muffins. Suddenly he remembered how hungry he was and dug in. Three cups of coffee, a half dozen glasses of ice water, two muffins, and a plate of completely unidentifiable fruit later, he was finally capable of coherent conversation.
“Why are you doing this, Keur?”
Keur put a bookmark at his place and closed the book on his lap. “What do you mean?”
“It’s not your fight.”
“It’s not your fight either.”
“I know,” Shepherd nodded. “But I’ve got nothing better to do.”
“So there’s your answer,” Keur shrugged.
“If Darling is working for the Agency, trying to arrest him will be a waste of time for you. What would you charge him with?”
“Maybe… being an asshole? That would be easy enough to prove.”
“If we can get proof that Darling is directly connected to these arms shipments, I think Pete Logan would move on it. He’s one of the good guys.”
Keur bobbed his head, but he didn’t say anything.
They sat in silence for a long while after that. Shepherd still didn’t understand exactly why Keur cared so much about taking Darling off the board. He knew what Keur had told him, of course, but that hardly seemed enough to account for his single-mindedness. Still, Shepherd could see that Keur didn’t really understand what was driving him either. And he could hardly blame Keur for that. He wasn’t absolutely sure either.
He had no dog in this fight and yet here he was, about to jump directly between the two biggest dogs in Thailand. On one side was a man he liked, even admired. A friend who was tangled up in ways Shepherd didn’t yet understand with the CIA and a cast of characters no one would want to invite to dinner. On the other side was a woman who he probably should have fallen in love with. But he had hesitated, and that had been that.
So what did he hope to accomplish now by getting between Charlie and Kate? To become their mutual hero and earn their eternal gratitude and respect?
That wasn’t likely to be the outcome, and he knew it. The man who tries to stop a fight usually becomes the enemy of both combatants. More often than not, he ended up being blamed by both sides, and by everyone else, for the whole uproar. Shepherd knew that full well. And yet here he was, his course still set, no doubts in his mind.
So what the hell was he thinking?
He wanted to believe it was his sense of righteousness, his dedication to justice that was driving him. But maybe he was just kidding himself. Maybe all he was doing was trying to prove he was still a big-time guy, that he still mattered. Maybe he was just showing off for Charlie and Kate. Maybe he was just trying to be one of them again.
Through the window Shepherd looked down at Bangkok. Out there in the grey half-light of dawn, millions of people were facing another day. They were hoping for the best, fearing the worst, and doing what they could to survive and look after the people they loved. Most of them deserved better than they were getting. Certainly they deserved better than they would get if Robert Darling and his pals had their way and pulled the whole country down around them in a misguided effort to keep it from falling under Chinese influence.
The golden spires of what seemed to be a hundred temples gleamed as they reflected the first rays of the rising sun.
PART FOUR
———
PHUKET
Now I’m hiding in Honduras
I’m a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan.
—Warren Zevon
‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’
FORTY-SIX
IN THE EARLY 1970s, the Thai government announced it was building a new, technically advanced international airport for Bangkok. They began purchasing land in the middle of what was locally known as Cobra Swamp, an unpromising area of marshy terrain about twenty miles southeast of the city, and said that construction would begin shortly. However, the new Suvarnabhumi International Airport was not completed for nearly thirty-five years. It eventually opened in 2006.
During the more than three decades it took to build the new airport, the Thais were anything but idle. On the contrary, the project spewed money like a broken fire hydrant and they exuberantly collected every last drop of it. The new airport became a seemingly inexhaustible fount of bribery, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, patronage, graft, and embezzlement. Entire generations of political figures, government bureaucrats, military officers, their families, and friends and acquaintances saw the new airport as little more than a source of jewelry for their wives, condos for their girlfriends, and Mercedes for themselves. That Suvarnabhumi Airport ended up as a badly designed, poorly built, thoroughly screwed up mess came as no surprise to anyone in Thailand. Nor did anyone in Thailand seem to care all that much.
As for Shepherd, this was one morning on which he cared a great deal. It was barely 7:30 A.M. He was cranky and sore from the six-hour flight from Dubai, he really needed to pee, and there wasn’t a toilet anywhere that he could see.
The nearly mile-long crowded walkways through which he and Keur were forced to elbow their way in order to wedge themselves into a hot, confused, and overcrowded immigration hall reminded him why otherwise normal people became mass murders. He found himself fondly thinking back to his last trip to Thailand when Tommy had picked him up right next to the airplane in a chauffeured Mercedes and they had driven directly off the airport with no stops for any irritating nonsense like clearing immigration and customs.
They were shuffling slowly forward in one of the interminable lines snaking toward some immigration counters off in the far distance when Keur gave Shepherd a nudge.
“How long do you think this is going to take?” he asked.
“Long enough for me to figure out what we’re going to do when we get out of this hell hole.”
“That long, huh?” Keur mumbled.
***
SHEPHERD AND KEUR took a taxi to the Grand Hotel. They didn’t have reservations, but with the country on the verge of civil war, hotels in Bangkok weren’t exactly overflowing and Shepherd was sure Mr. Tang would have no trouble finding a couple of rooms for them. He didn’t.
“I’ve got to get some sleep,” Keur said as they dragged their luggage into the elevator and bumped slowly up to the third floor. “I’m dying.”
“I think I’ll go out for a run,” Shepherd said. “I need to clear my head.”
“You can’t possibly be serious.”
“I always run after a long flight. It gets me going again.”
Keur just shook his head and they stood in silence until the elevator doors opened.
“Besides,” Shepherd added as they got out, “I’ve still got to figure out where we start looking for Charlie. Running helps me think.”
“Then go by all means. I’ve been waiting to hear the master plan ever since we left Dubai. You’ve promised one more often than a politician promises to cut taxes, and produced it exactly as often.”
Keur found his room, gave a little wave over his shoulder, and closed the door behind him.
Shepherd’s room was down at the other end of the corridor. He threw his bag on the bed, pulled out his running gear, and changed. He glanced around and thought about the way somebody had tossed his room the last time he had been at the Grand, but this time there wasn’t anything for them to find other than his dirty underwear. If they really wanted to look at that, it was okay with him.
He did a few grudging stretches and quickly got bored, so he shoved his key and his cell phone into his pockets and headed out to try his luck on the streets of Bangkok.
***
THE NEIGHBORHOOD AROUND the Grand is made for running. The streets are quiet and mostly empty of traffic. The sidewalks are dappled with shade from the rows of big-leafed eucalyptus trees that overhang them along both sides. The high walls around crumbling villas capture the warm breezes redolent with smells of charcoal cooking fires and fresh fish. The rest of Bangkok is not made for running.
It was barely 10:00 A.M. when Shepherd got to Silom Road, but it was already choked with traffic. Waves of heat radiated from the pavement and reflected off the trucks, buses, and taxicabs stalled in the gridlock. He dodged a street vendor selling counterfeit DVDs and a tout offering massages from beautiful young girls and settled into a gentle lope along the sidewalk heading eastward toward Lumpini Park.
Most of the shops along Silom were closed and steel gates had been pulled down over their windows. Shepherd saw no obvious evidence of damage anywhere. Apparently this area had been spared bombings like those that had laid waste to the Hyatt and the Four Seasons. Air conditioners hummed and dripped from high overhead. He passed the Duke of Wellington, the only thing around that looked like it was open, and took a shortcut through the parking lot of the Dusit Thani Hotel. Security guards were stopping every car entering the parking lot and checking identification.
Just as he hit the big intersection on Rama IV Road, the traffic light went green and he crossed the road without slowing and jogged through the big iron gates into Lumpini Park. He turned onto a wide sidewalk and looked around. Everything about the park seemed normal enough. No colored-shirted rioters, no sounds of explosions, no tanks grinding into position to fire on local landmarks. Just vendors here and there selling snacks and cold drinks, a few people strolling the walkways, and one guy napping on his back in the grass with a newspaper over his face.
As he circled the park, Shepherd thought about what he was going to do. It took him three circuits to convince himself that the obvious thing to do was also the right thing to do. He had to talk to Kate. He still didn’t understand exactly how Tommy and Robert Darling were connected, but he really didn’t see how it could be in any good way. Whatever it meant, Kate had to know about it. And she had to know a fresh shipment of arms was almost certainly on its way to Charlie’s red shirts in Bangkok.
But how was he supposed to reach Kate? Tommy had always been his contact and that obviously wasn’t an option any longer. He could keep ringing the two cell phone numbers he had for Kate, but she hadn’t answered either of them recently. Somehow he had difficulty imagining the new prime minister rummaging around in her handbag when her cell phone began to ring. He could always just call the prime minister’s office and leave a message for Kate, of course, but he doubted that a call from an unknown foreigner claiming to be a friend of the prime minister would be taken very seriously by anyone.
That just left one possibility that Shepherd could see. He would have to do what everyone else in Bangkok did when they needed to get something done. He would have to call somebody who knew somebody. And the obvious man to call was Jello, since he was not only a high enough ranking policeman to command a lot of respect, he also knew just about everybody in Thailand who was worth knowing.
Shepherd slowed to a trot and headed for the shade of a stand of palm trees just off the sidewalk. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and leaned against one of the trees catching his breath and rethinking his plan one more time.
Was there any reason not to tell Jello that he needed to speak to Kate? None that he could think of. Jello would want to know why he needed to speak to her, of course, but Shepherd was sure he would understand and accept that he couldn’t tell him. He was eq
ually sure Jello would find a way to help him regardless. After all, they were friends, weren’t they? Friends trusted friends. And friends helped friends, too, didn’t they?
***
“YOU WANT ME to do what?” Jello bellowed when Shepherd explained to him why he was calling. “What is this all about?”
“Look, Jello, you know I’d like to tell you, but—”
“Never mind,” he interrupted. “Don’t even start. There is no way you’re going to get me involved in whatever you’re up to. Do you have any idea what’s going on here right now?”
“Yeah, I can see it for myself. I’m in Bangkok.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Look, you have to trust—”
“I don’t fucking have to do anything, Jack. You work for the wrong people.”
“I don’t work for any—”
“Fuck you don’t. And don’t try to tell me you just have clients. You’re General Kitnarok’s man and everyone knows it.”
“I’m not anybody’s man, Jello. Now are you going to shut the hell up long enough for me to talk?”
Jello cleared his throat. “So talk.”
Friends trust friends, Shepherd reminded himself. So what can you do when you need one of your friends to do you a favor and they don’t like the idea of doing it? Easy. You tell them a good lie.
“Kate isn’t answering either of the cell numbers I have. I need for her to know I’m here. I need her to know that I want to talk to her. That’s it. This is personal, Jello. It’s got nothing to do with politics.”
“Personal? What does that mean?”
“Well, it means…” Shepherd trailed off into a silence that he hoped sounded embarrassed. “You know.”
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