World of Trouble (9786167611136) (23 page)

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.”

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 then 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.

“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.”