by Jake Needham
When the bullets are flying, it’s the gun that makes the impression, not the man behind it, but now that Shepherd was safely tucked up in his hotel room it was the man who held his attention. Each time the shooter’s face turned toward the camera, Shepherd leaned forward and studied it.
The man looked younger than Shepherd recalled and the expression on his face was puzzling. Shepherd wasn’t sure what he expected. Rage, fanaticism, triumph perhaps. But it was none of those things. The man looked amused. That was the only word for it. Amused.
The security man was on the left side of the courtyard charging directly at the gunman, firing as he ran, but the shooter never moved. The muzzle of his .45 stayed where it was, pointing directly into the camera lens. It was like a scene from a movie. The big, black handgun pointed straight at the camera; the muzzle opening looked as big as the Lincoln Tunnel; and the eyes of every viewer were drawn straight into it. The gunman held that pose, not firing. He looked more like a man posing for the camera than he did a killer.
The driver was on the opposite side of the courtyard from the security man, running and firing across his body at the same time. He was spraying bullets everywhere. Shepherd saw at least three shots go high, catch the concrete façade of one of the shop houses, and ricochet away.
That’s how the producer got hit, he thought. The shooter didn’t target her. One of Charlie’s bodyguards shot her by accident.
When the shooter jerked, lurched a couple of steps away from the camera, and crumpled to the ground, it was impossible to tell whether the security man or the driver had hit him. He just went down. That’s all there was to see. After that, the security man sprinted straight at the gunman and kicked the .45 out of his hand. Then he dived behind a pile of cardboard boxes and crouched down while the driver flattened himself against the crates on the opposite side of the courtyard.
That was when the silence fell, the one that Shepherd remembered so well, and it was a full minute before the security man broke it. Rising up from behind the cover of the stack of boxes, he lifted his weapon and fired methodically into the motionless body of the gunman sprawled on the concrete. He kept firing until his gun was empty and the slide locked open, and then he dropped the clip and used the heel of his hand to slap in a fresh one.
Right after that, in the background beyond where the gunman lay dying, Shepherd could see something bobbing along just above a wall of burlap-wrapped bales. If he hadn’t already known what it was, he might not have been able to guess, but of course he knew very well. It was the top of two heads, his and Charlie’s, as they scuttled away to safety.
Everything that happened after that was new to Shepherd so he watched the rest with particular care every time the film was broadcast. But each time he did, he understood what he was seeing even less than he had before.
HE AND CHARLIE had been gone no more than a few seconds when there was a sudden flash of white just beyond the security man. A dishdasha-clad man wearing a blue Yankee’s cap had suddenly appeared from somewhere and was running across the courtyard. It was the same man Shepherd had seen with the Iranian-looking shooter when they entered the courtyard. Was he looking for a new angle from which to attack, or was he trying to escape? It was impossible to tell.
From the white folds of his dishdasha, Yankee Cap produced what Shepherd could see was an Ingram MAC-10. He held it high as he ran, out away from his body with the muzzle up. The MAC-10 isn’t a particularly accurate weapon, but it’s cheap and it’s reliable and it lays down a thousand rounds a minute. Fire a thousand rounds a minute in a confined space and you don’t have to worry a hell of a lot about accuracy.
About halfway across the courtyard Yankee Cap twisted toward the camera and began to lower the muzzle of the Ingram. Charlie’s security man pulled back behind his cover, but the cameraman held firm, his lens never wavering. He was either the bravest man Shepherd had ever seen, or the dumbest.
Yankee Cap started shooting. His gun was firing so fast that the individual reports merged into a single continuous noise. The sound of it was deafening. The muzzle of the MAC-10 tracked inexorably downward. Moving lower and lower, it swung toward the cameraman. Then, abruptly, the noise stopped.
Yankee Cap stopped running, turned the MAC-10 slightly to one side, and stared at it with a confused expression on his face. That was when the driver stepped out from behind the crates with the Korean writing and fired six evenly spaced shots. All six appeared to hit Yankee Cap in the chest and the man jerked from left to right like he was trying out a new dance step. Big stains blossomed his stark white dishdasha. They made the garment looked like a choir robe printed with red flowers.
Charlie’s security man rose up and targeted his own volley. He fired four shots that punched Yankee Cap straight back into a pile of white canvas rice bags. The cap fell off his head and he sat slowly down right on top of it. Leaning back against the rice bags, his legs out in front of him, Yankee Cap jerked a few more times and a thin line of blood appeared between his lips.
Then, as if resigned to his fate, perhaps even a little embarrassed by the way it had come upon him, the man turned his head discreetly away from the camera, pulled his knees to his chest, and died.
CNN AIRED THE story over and over. It must have been seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Journalists are never more tireless than when they cover each other so the death of the network’s producer in the attack gave it real legs. Every television news broadcast in the world led with the story and it stayed at the top of the news cycle hour after hour.
Until then, most of the world had never heard of Charlie Kitnarok, the former prime minister of Thailand now living in exile in Dubai. Maybe a good part of the world had never heard of Thailand either. But everyone certainly knew about Thailand now, and they knew exactly who Charlie Kitnarok was.
Charlie was the man who had stood up to the killers sent by his political opponents to prevent him from restoring democracy to Thailand. Charlie was the man who had bravely faced down a hail of gunfire. Charlie was the man who had risked his own life to pull an unidentified assistant to safety. Shepherd shook his head every time he heard that last part. The unidentified assistant, of course, would be him.
The CNN story included a few words from Charlie. They didn’t amount to much, just a quick sound bite. CNN was good at that, reducing everything to a sound bite. All they used was Charlie responding to a question about the bandage on his forehead. He had just been grazed, he said, nothing worth talking about. Charlie gazed steadily into the camera when he said it, clear-eyed and square-jawed, looking every bit the old soldier. Trust Charlie to turn an assassination attempt into self-serving publicity, Shepherd thought. And trust CNN to merchandise Charlie’s bullshit without even blushing.
“THE MOST EXHILARATING thing in life,” Winston Churchill is supposed to have said, “is to be shot at without effect.” Shepherd had just been shot at without effect, but he didn’t feel particularly exhilarated. He just felt tired, more tired than he could ever remember feeling before.
The sky began to darken and the afternoon turned into evening. Shepherd remembered he hadn’t eaten anything in a long time. He started to work out how long it had actually been, but he decided it didn’t really matter and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a beer from room service. They asked him what kind of beer he wanted and he told them he didn’t care. The room service guy sounded like he didn’t believe him.
When the food came, Shepherd ate the sandwich and drank half the beer. Then he got undressed, left his clothes on the floor, and got into bed. It was not long before jet lag and exhaustion overwhelmed him and he fell asleep. It was a restless, uneven sleep and he woke repeatedly through the night. Each time he did, he felt even more ragged and exhausted than he had before.
A WORLD OF TROUBLE
FIVE
THE NEXT MORNING Shepherd showered and shaved while he waited for room service to deliver breakfast, then he watched CNN some more while he ate. There w
as really nothing new about the attack on Charlie and no information at all about the identity of the gunmen, which seemed odd. He wondered if the information was being withheld for some reason and, if so, by whom, and why. That was something he would have to ask Charlie.
Along with a whole hell of a lot of other things, of course.
Shepherd got dressed. Then he went downstairs and hired a hotel car to take him out to Charlie’s villa on Palm Jumeirah.
PALM JUMEIRAH IS a palm-shaped projection into the Persian Gulf which, like much of Dubai, is entirely artificial. In a spectacular demonstration of either inspiration or hubris, Shepherd could never decide which, tens of millions of tons of sand had been dredged up from the sea bottom, compacted into a series of graceful arcs resembling palm fronds, and then connected to the mainland by a slightly wider spit of sand representing the trunk.
The trunk of the tree is filled with cheesy apartment buildings, but the arcs of land representing the fronds of the palm tree are given over exclusively to private houses expansively referred to as villas, more because of their outrageous cost than any grandness of design. The houses are laid out on each palm frond in two lines along opposite sides of a single roadway. Most of them are undistinguished, even tacky.
Charlie owned both houses at the very end of Frond G, where he had created a small compound by building a high wall and placing a security gate across the end of the road. With the wall forming one side of the compound and the Persian Gulf surrounding the other three sides, the place was as secure as any private home in Dubai could be. Shepherd sometimes wondered what it had cost Charlie in gratuities to local government functionaries to pull that off, but he had never asked.
When the hotel car pulled up at Charlie’s security gate, Shepherd got out and a brown-uniformed guard directed the driver where to park. The guard gestured for Shepherd to raise his arms and ran a wand over his body. Then he asked for Shepherd’s passport and inspected it carefully. Eventually the guard handed it back, tilted his head, and murmured something in Arabic into a shoulder mike. The gate slid open just far enough for Shepherd to walk through.
The two houses in the compound were very similar. Two stories, high-pitched red-tiled roofs, tan stucco siding, a great many arched windows, double front doors of polished wood, and a few fake pillars and gables stuck here and there for decoration. The house on the left where Charlie lived with his wife Sally looked to be the more hospitable of the two since it had a long terrace paved in dark brown ceramic tile that ran the length of the second floor. The house on the right that had been converted into an office had nothing to recommend it. It was as plain as a self-storage warehouse.
Shepherd rang the bell at the house where Charlie lived and a maid who appeared to be Filipino opened the door and showed him into Charlie’s study. After a few minutes she returned with a pot of coffee and two china cups on a silver tray, then she closed the door behind her and disappeared. Shepherd poured himself some coffee, sat down one of the two facing love seats upholstered in yellow silk, and waited.
CHARLIE CAME THROUGH the door talking on a cell phone. He said uh-huh a couple of times while he poured himself some coffee with his free hand, then he said uh-uh once more, hung up, and put the phone in his pocket. He settled himself on the other love seat, took a sip of coffee, and looked at Shepherd over the rim of the cup.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Charlie nodded absentmindedly, his mind apparently on things more important than the current state of Shepherd’s health.
“How’s your head?” Shepherd asked.
Charlie looked puzzled. “What are you talking about?”
“Your head,” Shepherd said, tapping his own with his finger just in case the word was unfamiliar to Charlie. “The cut you got when I pulled you down.”
Shepherd didn’t mention hearing Charlie say on CNN that his injury came from being grazed by a bullet.
Charlie shrugged and looked away, but he didn’t say anything. Shepherd would have liked to think he was embarrassed, but he doubted it. Charlie had just been a politician milking the moment and politicians were hard to embarrass.
“There was a lot of coverage,” Charlie said after a moment. “CNN, Fox, BBC, ITN, even Al Jazeera.”
“It was entertaining television.”
“Great stuff!” Charlie said. “Great!”
Maybe Churchill had been right after all. Charlie, at least, seemed to lend support to his theory.
“Have they identified the gunmen yet?” Shepherd asked.
Charlie shook his head.
“Nobody’s taken credit?”
“You think credit is the right word to use here, Jack?”
“Sorry. You know what I mean.”
Charlie sipped at his coffee again. He didn’t say anything else, but Shepherd wasn’t ready to give up. Lawyers ask questions. It’s what they do.
“Were the gunmen locals?”
Charlie shrugged.
“You have no idea where they came from?”
“Probably imported. Iraqis maybe.”
“If somebody was going to bring in a couple of hitters to go after you, why would they hire two boobs like that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, Charlie. Those had to be the world’s lousiest assassins. The attack was stupidly planned and badly executed. Those idiots didn’t even hit anybody.”
“They killed the woman. That news producer.”
“No, they didn’t. Your bodyguards killed her. They weren’t much better shots than the guys who came after you.”
“It’s hard to get good help these days.”
“Maybe that’s it,” Shepherd said.
But he didn’t think it was.
“Anyway, that’s not really the point,” Charlie said, looking genuinely annoyed.
“No? Then what is the point?”
“The point is who hired those guys.”
“Okay, so who hired them?”
Charlie shot Shepherd a hard look. “You know who it was as well as I do.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
“Oh, come on, Jack. You of all people ought to know exactly who it was. You understand what’s happening in Thailand now.”
“Pretend I don’t. Explain it to me.”
Charlie smiled slightly at that. He put his cup down on the table between them, leaned back, and folded his arms.
Shepherd nodded encouragingly. Not that Charlie really needed any encouraging.
“It’s a mess. It’s been a fucking mess ever since I left.”
Shepherd said nothing.
“A lot of people want me to become prime minister again. But there are other people who would kill me to prevent something like that from happening, to stop me from coming back.”
“I didn’t know you were thinking of going back.”
“I was just speaking hypothetically. As long as I’m alive, I could go back to Thailand. If I did, I’d be prime minister again in a week. You know how many people want me to do that?”
“How many exactly?” Shepherd asked. “Not counting the army.”
Charlie gave him a half smile. “I thought you were on my side, Jack.”
“I am on your side, Charlie. You pay me a lot of money to be on your side.”
“Would you be on the other side if they paid you a lot of money?”
“It depends on how much it is. I’m a lawyer. I’m always paid to be on somebody’s side.”
Charlie laughed, but Shepherd could also see him wondering if he was serious about that. That was understandable. He was wondering, too.
Charlie’s cell phone rang and he pulled it from his pocket and glanced at the screen.
“I’ve got to take this, Jack. Would you excuse me?”
Shepherd stood up. When he left the study, he closed the door behind him. He noticed Charlie remained silent until after he did.
A WORLD OF TROUBLE
SIX
SHEPH
ERD WAITED IN the hallway outside Charlie’s study until he began feeling foolish just standing there doing nothing, then he walked to the end of the hall and out onto the big terrace behind the house. The terrace was paved in glazed titles the color of Hershey Bars and dotted with outdoor furniture, all of which looked uncomfortable. Shepherd chose a high-back rattan chair that seemed slightly better than the rest, dragged it around until it faced the sea, and propped his feet up on a glass-topped coffee table with an iron base.
It was a nice day by Dubai standards. The air was warm without being hot and there was a light breeze off the sea. Just beyond the breakwater, two black rubber boats filled with UAE commandos drifted on the glassy smooth surface of the Persian Gulf. Each of the boats carried four men dressed in black, automatic weapons slung over their chests. One of the men peered at him through a pair of field glasses. Shepherd gave him a friendly wave, but the man didn’t wave back.
After about ten minutes Charlie walked out and sat down next to Shepherd. He had put on a pair of sunglasses with gold metal frames, which caused Shepherd think of the tortoise shell sunglasses Charlie had worn in the souk, the ones that had fallen off when he went down behind the burlap-wrapped bales and hit his head. Shepherd had no doubt those damned glasses would turn up on eBay someday.
“There’s obviously something on your mind, Jack. What is it?”
Shepherd couldn’t see Charlie’s eyes through the sunglasses, but his face looked earnest enough and the question seemed to be entirely serious. Shepherd stood up and walked to the edge of the terrace. He doubted there were any lip readers among the commandos in the rubber boats but, if there were, it certainly wouldn’t have been the weirdest thing he had ever encountered in Dubai. Just in case, he turned his back to them before he spoke to Charlie again.