World of Trouble (9786167611136) (25 page)

“That sounds like way too much to me.”

“It’s maybe ten times what the plane is
really worth on the charter market.”

Shepherd thought about that while he looked
at Harvey sitting next to the black-mirrored building on the empty
airfield. “Then I gather what you’re really telling me is that the
CIA is using the charter arrangement to funnel money to
somebody.”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

“Who?”

“Harvey’s legal owner.”

“Who is that?”

“A shell company in the Cayman Islands.”

“That’s a dead end then.”

“No, it’s not a dead end.”

That surprised Shepherd. Obscuring the actual
ownership of Cayman shell companies wasn’t particularly hard. He
had done it a few times himself. Either somebody got careless, or
they just didn’t care enough to try very hard.

“Some friends of ours used their sources in
the Caymans. We know who really owns the shell company. So we also
know who owns Harvey and who’s getting the CIA’s money.”

Shepherd was curious about who those friends
might be, of course. It could have been anybody but, if he had to
bet on it, he would go with the Chinese. Still, he didn’t bother to
ask Kate who had cracked the ownership for her. It didn’t really
matter and she wouldn’t have told him anyway. Instead, he asked her
about Harvey, which was apparently something she
did
want to
talk about.

“Okay, I give up,” he said, spreading his
hands. “Who’s getting the sweet deal from the spooks? Who owns
Harvey?”

“
You
own Harvey, Jack.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The Kitnarok Foundation owns Harvey’s and
you’re a trustee of the foundation. The CIA’s been funneling money
to an organization you’re presumably supervising.”

KATE DROVE SHEPHERD from Don Mueang to Suvarnabhumi
Airport to catch his flight to Dubai. Neither one of them said much
during the drive. When they got there, she pulled to the curb at
the Emirates Airways entrance.

“Tommy’s going to bring your stuff out. He’ll
see that it gets on the plane.”

“After what you’ve told me, I’ve got more
important things to worry about than my luggage.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let me think about
it.”

Shepherd opened the door and got out of the
car. To his surprise, Kate got out as well. He didn’t know what he
was expecting. He supposed he thought Kate would just drive away
when he closed the door, but she didn’t. Instead she walked around
the car, put her arms around him, and gave him a hug. Maybe it was
a sisterly hug, and maybe it was something else. Standing there in
the harsh metallic wash of the airport lights and breathing the
carbon monoxide from the idling vehicles all around them, Shepherd
couldn’t decide.

“Watch yourself,” Kate said. “I’m not asking
you to do anything about this. I just wanted you to know. It’s not
your responsibility to fix it. It’s mine.”

Shepherd said nothing.

Kate broke off the hug, took half a step
back, and gave him a look.

“The truth is I told you what I did to
convince you
not
to get involved. Not to entice you into
it.”

Shepherd said nothing.

“They’re not going to let you get in their
way, Jack. There’s too much at stake. You wouldn’t have a
chance.”

“I’m not going to get in their way. I just
don’t like being lied to. If I was.”

Kate hesitated at that. She seemed to think
about saying something else, but she didn’t. She just nodded,
walked back to the driver’s side of the BMW, and got in. She bent
down and smiled at Shepherd through the window, then straightened
up and drove away. Shepherd thought about that hug for a moment,
maybe two, and then he turned around and walked into the
airport.

***

THE FLIGHT TO Dubai didn’t leave for another couple
of hours so after Shepherd checked in he went to the Emirates
lounge, got himself a large whiskey, and found a seat by himself
off in a half-darkened corner. Airports are bleak places in the
middle of the night. They are not great places anytime, of course,
but in the hours after midnight airports are particularly desolate.
Shepherd didn’t know if there was a waiting lounge to catch the
ferry over the River Styx, but if there was, he had no doubt it
would feel and smell exactly like an airport at one o’clock in the
morning. The scotch helped, a little, so he swung his feet up onto
a low table, stared out the window into the darkness, and thought
about what Kate had told him.

Was Blossom Trading really in the arms
business? Keur was clearly a man with contacts and he had claimed
Blossom Trading was running guns to Iran. Kate, someone who was
probably even better informed than Keur, had added that Blossom
Trading was supplying arms to both the Muslim rebels in the south
of Thailand and to the red shirts in Bangkok. Two people like that,
with information like that, were pretty hard to ignore.

Okay, so maybe Blossom Trading
was
selling arms. And the company was presumably owned in equal shares
by Charlie and Robert Darling. So what? It isn’t necessarily
illegal to sell arms. Arms are legally sold every day, both by
private companies and governments. Just because a company sells
weapons, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s involved in criminal
activity any more than a pharmaceutical company is automatically
involved in criminal activity because it sells drugs.

The question was whether Blossom Trading was
breaking any laws with regard to how they did their selling and to
whom they did it. But whose laws? Was there any law in Thailand
against selling arms to Muslims in the south? And, even if there
was, did that law necessarily apply to a company in Dubai that had
no office or other place of business in Thailand? And what about
the red shirts? Maybe there was no law in Thailand saying ordinary
people couldn’t buy guns. Surely the issue was what the red shirts
did with those arms after they bought them, and how could the
seller be responsible for that?

Shepherd took a long pull on his whiskey and
thought about the many benefits of a legal education. He could turn
pretty much anything upside down, couldn’t he? He remembered
Charlie had once said he could make chicken salad out of chicken
shit. Maybe it was a natural talent. Maybe he hadn’t even needed
the three years at Georgetown Law to learn how to do it. But he was
pretty certain they had helped a whole lot.

Thoroughly disgusted with himself, Shepherd
knocked off the rest of his whiskey and went to find his
airplane.

***

THANKS TO THE drink, he slept all the way through the
six-hour flight. But it was 5:30
A.M.
local time when he arrived in Dubai, and sleep or no sleep, he felt
like shit.

Airports aren’t any more attractive at 5:30
A.M.
than they are at 2:30
A.M.
If dawn brings hope and rebirth in most places,
airports aren’t most places. In airports, dawn brings mobs of dirty
people in rumpled clothing dragging various kinds of wheeled
containers behind them. It’s like being caught up in an army of the
homeless suddenly on the move. Which, in a manner of speaking, is
exactly what it actually is.

A very large bearded man in round
silver-framed glasses was working the immigration counter where
Shepherd lined up. He was wearing a
dishdasha
and
ghutra
so white they hurt Shepherd’s eyes to look at them.
The man peered at Shepherd doubtfully and took his time about
examining his passport and immigration card. Eventually he stamped
the passport and returned it to him. Shepherd followed the crowds
through to the baggage hall. To his complete astonishment, his bag
was there waiting for him. He wondered briefly if Tommy had
examined it before passing it over to Emirates Airways. Of course
he had. Shepherd hoped his dirty laundry had smelled awful.

He hauled his bag outside to the taxi line
and for a few moments he just stood quietly in the softness of the
dawn light letting the warm desert air wash over him. It was dry
and pungent, filled with fragrances he could not identify and
brimming with hints of enigmatic events occurring somewhere just
out of sight. When he made it to the front of the line, he got into
the cab while the driver stowed his bag in the trunk. It wasn’t
until the man got back behind the wheel and asked where he was
going that it occurred to Shepherd he didn’t have a clue.

He hadn’t made a hotel reservation. He was
there only because Charlie had demanded he come. He glanced at his
watch. Barely 6:00
A.M.
To hell with it,
he thought, and he told the driver how to get to Charlie’s
villa.

***

THERE WAS VERY little traffic at that hour so they
made it to Palm Jumeirah in less than thirty minutes. The cab
stopped at the security gate in front of Charlie’s compound and
Shepherd paid off the driver and collected his bag from the trunk.
It surprised Shepherd that no one emerged to check him out. Maybe
Charlie’s security guys weren’t very alert that early in the
morning.

The taxi drove away and still no one came
out. Shepherd walked over to the gate and slapped on it a couple of
times with his open hand. The sound of his hand against the metal
echoed in the morning quiet. The first thing Shepherd noticed was
that the gate was green-painted aluminum rather than iron as he had
always assumed. The second thing he noticed was that the gate was
unlocked. It drifted open a few inches from the impact of the
slaps.

“Hello!” he shouted through the opening.

He got no reply.

Pushing at the gate, he swung it back far
enough to stick his head through. He did so very cautiously. He was
not wild about the idea of surprising guys who carried guns.

“Hello!” he shouted again.

Still no answer. Where were Charlie’s
security guys? Shepherd dragged his bag through the narrow opening
and glanced around. Everything about the compound looked normal
enough, but both the main house and the house that Charlie had
converted into an office gave off that particular air that deserted
buildings do.

What the hell is going on here?

Even if Charlie had suddenly decamped for
somewhere without telling him, there would still have been people
in the office. Shepherd walked all the way around the villa where
the offices were. Then for good measure he made a circuit of the
main house, too. Both were empty and locked up tight. There was no
one there. No one at all. He made his way back to the courtyard and
stood for a while just opposite the security gate. It was still
early morning, but the desert sun was already pitiless. The
compound looked small and flat and exposed. It lay there as if
stunned by the hard morning light.

“You want a ride somewhere?”

Startled, Shepherd whirled around.

Special Agent Leonard Keur was standing just
inside the security gate with a half smile on his face. He was
wearing a light blue seersucker suit with a white shirt and a dark
tie.

“They cleared out last night,” Keur said.
“All of them.”

Shepherd was too nonplussed to respond.
Where the hell had Keur come from?

“You look as if you could use some coffee,”
Keur said. “Come on. I’ve got a rental car. There’s a Starbucks not
far away.”

SHEPHERD PEELED THE top off his coffee and looked
around the room. They were on the ground floor of a black glass
building facing another almost identical black glass building on
the other side of a huge but otherwise unremarkable concrete plaza.
The plaza was broken here and there with a few palm trees and stone
arches of varying sizes that were apparently supposed to make it
look warmer and more human-scale, but they didn’t. They just made
it look bleaker and more desolate.

The Starbucks was exactly the same as every
other Starbucks Shepherd had ever been in. The colors were the
same; the signs were the same; the wall decorations were the same;
the displays were the same; the bags of coffee and overpriced mugs
were the same; the furniture was the same. Even the view through
the floor-to-ceiling glass windows was pretty much the same. He
could have been anywhere in the world.

But he wasn’t just anywhere in the world. He
was somewhere called Dubai Internet City, a complex of buildings
that like most buildings in Dubai were bland, monotonous, and new.
About two miles away, out on Palm Jumeirah on the other side of
Sheikh Zayed Road, Charlie’s compound sat quiet and abandoned. And
he was at a table in Starbucks calmly drinking coffee with an FBI
agent who was trying to recruit him as an informant. It was one of
those moments that would cause almost anybody to look around and
ask himself the same question:
How in the hell did I get
here
?

“Where’s Charlie?” Shepherd asked.

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“No idea.”

Over Keur’s shoulder something about two men
just settling themselves down at another table caught Shepherd’s
eye. Both were middle-aged Caucasians wearing wrinkled shirts and
baggy khakis, but their short haircuts and solid-looking builds
screamed either military or ex-military private contractors.
Shepherd didn’t much like the way they kept looking in his
direction, but he sipped at his coffee and turned his eyes back to
Keur.

“You sure you don’t know where the general
has gone, Jack?”

Shepherd said nothing. The two men were
staring openly toward him now and he shifted his eyes just enough
to keep them in his peripheral vision.

“Why don’t I believe you, Jack?”

“Because you’re an unhappy and deeply
suspicious person?”