World of Trouble (9786167611136) (28 page)

“Oh hell, I fucking knew it.” Keur pushed
back his chair and threw his arms in the air. “You’re going to
bring peace to the country and earn the everlasting gratitude of
the little brown people. Shit, I really don’t need all that
do-gooder crap right now.”

“That’s the difference between you and me,
Keur.”

“What? You’re a starry-eyed sap and I’m a
realist?”

Shepherd looked away. This wasn’t going
exactly the way he had hoped it would. He was getting nothing but
attitude from Keur. Shepherd took a deep breath and went on
anyway.

“Harvey’s here,” he said. “I want to stop it
from taking off, or at least stall it for a while.”

For a second Keur looked confused. “You’re
talking about this plane you named after a rabbit?”

“Kate named it.”

“Whatever. But you’re saying the plane is
here in Dubai?”

“More or less. It should be landing in about
an hour and a half. If I’m right, they’ll take on a load of arms
and fly right back to Thailand.”

“Maybe they’re picking up General Kitnarok.
You ever think of that?”

“Yeah, I thought of that. But I doubt it.
Going back to Thailand in a cargo aircraft isn’t Charlie’s style.
He’d want to make a triumphal entry, not sneak in.”

Keur looked at Shepherd and looked away. Then
he looked back again.

“Just spell it out, Jack. What are you
telling me?”

“You want my help nailing Darling. I’m
telling you I’ll give it to you. I don’t give a shit about Darling.
You help me stop that plane and I’ll help you nail Darling.”

“How are you going to do that?”

Shepherd kept quiet. He figured he had said
about all he could. If Keur wouldn’t go for it, he wouldn’t, but
anything else he might say now wasn’t going to help.

“Look,” Keur said after a moment, “even if I
were far enough out of my mind to be willing to get involved with
this, you don’t seriously think I can just—”

“I don’t know what you can do. Charlie’s
apparently got the CIA on his side. All I have is you. So I’m
hoping for the best.”

There was a pause. Keur looked away and
tapped his fingers against his empty coffee cup. After a minute or
two he shifted his weight and leaned forward on his forearms.

“I know somebody at the airport here,” he
said. “Maybe—”

“There you go!” Shepherd shouted. He jumped
up from the table and slapped Keur on the shoulder.

The man at the next table slowly turned his
head to see what the commotion was all about. He was a large, heavy
man with a pointed beard who was dressed in flowing white robes and
a white headdress. Shepherd caught his eyes and wished he hadn’t.
They were dead and unblinking, so black that they seemed
bottomless. The man stared hard at Shepherd. He looked as if he was
memorizing his appearance, just in case.

“For God’s sake,” Keur said. “Sit down and
lower your voice. If this all goes tits up, I don’t want some
fucking Arab putting us together.”

Shepherd didn’t give a damn what anybody put
together as long as he could stop that plane. At least stop it
until he could find Charlie and convince him to abandon the plan he
was apparently hatching to force his way back into power in
Thailand.

If he couldn’t do that, people were going to
die. Maybe a lot of people. Maybe even Charlie and Kate, too.

WHEN KEUR SAID he knew somebody at the airport,
Shepherd pictured a brawny Arab baggage handler wearing baggy
shorts, a wrinkled T-shirt, and floppy socks. What he did not
picture was a tall, blue-eyed German woman with long blond hair, a
white suite that looked like Armani, and white pumps that looked
like Jimmy Choos. And he
really
didn’t picture someone with
a front porch on which you could park a helicopter.

“Jack Shepherd, meet Rachel Rein,” Keur said.
“Rachel is Emirates Airlines Group Vice-President of Security.”

“Why have you never told me you have such a
good-looking friend, Lenny?”

Lenny? Shepherd shot Keur a quick look. He
remembered Keur introducing himself as Special Agent Leonard Keur,
of course, but somehow ever since he had stopped thinking of Keur
as the sort of person who had a first name. And he absolutely
didn’t seem the sort of person who had a first name like Lenny.

“Are you with the FBI, too, Mr. Shepherd?”
Rachel asked.

“Nope,” Keur cut in before Shepherd could
answer her. “Jack’s a bag man for a corrupt Thai politician.”

“Ah Jesus,” Shepherd muttered.

“A bag man?” Rachel smiled. “How fascinating.
I have never met a bag man before.”

Shepherd wanted to say something in his own
defense, but he wasn’t quite certain what it would be. Sadly
enough, Keur’s characterization of his occupation wasn’t completely
inaccurate. He settled for doing his best to look indignant and
said nothing.

“Look, Rachel,” Keur said, completely
ignoring Shepherd’s display of umbrage, “I’m sorry to drop in on
you unannounced like this, but—”

Rachel cut Keur off with a hug and a kiss on
the cheek. “Nonsense, Lenny. You know I am always happy to see you.
Sit down.”

Shepherd had expected to be in a smelly
freight shed in some forgotten corner of the airport talking to a
baggage handler who smelled more or less like the shed. Instead,
here he was in a snazzy office at the headquarters building of
Emirates Airways ogling Miss Deutschland of about 1995. He settled
back on the butter-soft leather of one of Rachel’s very expensive
sofas and awaited developments.

“Coffee?” she asked.

Keur and Shepherd both accepted. Rachel
called somebody to serve it and while she was on the telephone
Shepherd looked around her office. One entire side was
floor-to-ceiling glass with a panoramic view of Terminal 1, the
building occupied entirely by Emirates Airways. He had always
thought the Emirates terminal was an odd-looking structure, long
and thin and half round on the top, like a bead of toothpaste that
had been squeezed across the field from a giant tube of Crest.
Rachel’s office looked a lot better: cream-colored leather sofas,
thick carpet the exact shade of a correctly made cappuccino, and
two giant Sony flat panels mounted on the wall opposite her desk.
One was showing CNN and the other was showing BBC News, both with
their sound muted.

Keur sat down next to Shepherd. Rachel hung
up the telephone and smiled at him.

“So what can I do for you, Lenny?”

“I’m calling in that favor you owe me. I need
some information, but I can’t tell you why I need it.”

“Ah,” she said, “a mystery. I love a mystery.
Are you some kind of a spy, Lenny? You say you are FBI, but I have
never really believed you. I have always wondered if you are really
a spy.”

Keur looked away and cleared his throat.

“What do you think, Mr. Shepherd?” Rachel
asked, turning those big blue eyes on him. “Is our friend Lenny
here really with the FBI? Or do you think he is some kind of a
spy?”

“I certainly hope not.”

“Rachel sees spies everywhere,” Keur cut in.
“She was a deputy director of the BKA before she joined
Emirates.”

Shepherd had no idea what Keur was talking
about and it apparently showed.

“The
Bundeskriminalamt
,” Keur
explained. “The German Federal Criminal Police.”

“The BKA is like the FBI, Mr. Shepherd,”
Rachel said. “Only much, much smarter.”

There was a knock on the door and a chubby,
middle-aged woman entered carrying a wooden tray with three cups of
coffee. They fell silent until she had served. Then she left again,
closing the door behind her.

“Could we get back to the point now?” Keur
said after she did.

“Oh, you had a point, Lenny?” Rachel winked
at Shepherd. “And what might that have been?”

“There is an aircraft we are interested in
that we think will be landing here very soon. Probably at
about…”

Keur stopped talking and looked at
Shepherd.

“At about two-thirty,” Shepherd said, picking
up the story from there. “It’s a 737. An all-freight configuration.
And it will be coming from Thailand, I think.”

“Bangkok?” Rachel asked, sipping at her
coffee.

“I don’t know for sure. The flight originated
in Bangkok, but they filed for Phuket first. Then from there to
Dubai. But the plane never landed in Phuket. My guess is it landed
somewhere else, probably at a private strip not far from Phuket.
Wherever it went, I think it will be coming to Dubai from
there.”

Rachel didn’t ask any of the obvious
questions. Shepherd assumed that was because she had some kind of a
relationship with Keur that made her think she could trust him. He
hoped she was right about that.

She just pulled a pad toward her and picked
up a pen. “Do you have a tail number?”

“A6-NSU,” Shepherd said.

“A UAE registration.”

It wasn’t a question, so Shepherd said
nothing.

She wrote down Harvey’s registration number
and then glanced back up and held Shepherd’s eyes for a moment.

“Whose aircraft is this?” she asked.

“It’s being operated on charter by Trippler
Aviation.”

Rachel tapped the point of her pen against
her pad a couple of times, then put the pen down. “Do you know
anything about Trippler Aviation?”

“A little,” Shepherd said. “Enough
probably.”

Rachel looked at Keur. “Do you know who
actually owns this aircraft, Lenny?”

Keur pointed at Shepherd.

“Well then, Mr. Shepherd,” Rachel said,
shifting her eyes to his. “Can
you
tell me who owns this
aircraft you’re so interested in?”

“No,” Shepherd said, “I can’t.”

“Can’t?” Rachel asked, “Or won’t.”

“Let’s just say it would be better if I
didn’t. Better for you.”

Rachel nodded and looked down at her desk.
She picked up the pen again and went back to tapping the point
against her pad.

“We think the aircraft is coming into Dubai
to pick up cargo,” Keur said after a minute or two had passed in
silence. “All we need is to find a way to delay its departure until
we’re certain what’s on it. And where it’s going.”

“That’s
all
?” Rachel laughed.

Neither Keur nor Shepherd said anything.

“Is this official, Lenny?”

“Depends what you mean by official.”

Rachel looked from one to the other and
thought about that.

“Is this aircraft bringing cargo
into
Dubai?” she asked after a moment. “Or just carrying cargo out?”

“We don’t know for sure.”

“Are we dealing with drugs here?”

“No,” Keur said. “Arms and ammunition.”

Rachel’s face showed no reaction.

“Do you know who’s servicing the aircraft in
Dubai?”

“No.”

“Do you know where on the airport it will be
parking?”

“No idea.”

“For two reasonably intelligent men, you
don’t know very much, do you?”

Keur and Shepherd both shifted their eyes
away to the windows and said nothing.

Rachel pursued her lips and made little
popping sounds. Abruptly she dropped her pen, looked straight at
Shepherd, and pointed at him with her index finger.

“What’s
he
got to do with all this,
Lenny? Who is he really?”

“I’m his lawyer,” Shepherd answered before
Keur could say anything.

Rachel actually chuckled at that.

“It’s true,” Shepherd said. “I really
am.”

“
Lieber Gott
,” Rachel said, shaking
her head. “Another spy.”

SHEPHERD AND KEUR sat without speaking while Rachel
tapped at the keyboard on her desk. The flat panel monitor was big
and white and it faced away from them so they couldn’t see what she
was looking at, which left them nothing to do really but to watch
Rachel while she watched the screen. Either that or look out the
windows at the airport. Shepherd chose to watch Rachel. He hoped
Keur was smart enough to make the same choice.

“According to the flight plan, A6-NSU left
Phuket at 1136 local time today,” Rachel said after a minute or
two, reading from her screen. “It is estimated Dubai at 1423.”

“I have information the plane was never in
Phuket,” Shepherd said. “And I trust the source of my
information.”

Rachel looked up and shrugged. “The pilot
didn’t file until twenty minutes after take off. He might have
taken off from another airport near Phuket instead, I suppose. That
is possible.”

She studied her screen for another moment or
two, and then said, “Here’s something that’s a little odd.”

“What?” Keur asked.

“A6-NSU is scheduled to park at remote bay
211A.”

“Why is that odd?”

“Well…” Rachel studied the screen a little
longer. Her tongue poked at the inside of her cheek, flicking
rhythmically up and down.

“It’s not a normal parking bay for a cargo
aircraft. It’s around the side of the cargo terminal. There’s not
much there but a government hanger.”

Keur and Shepherd exchanged glances.

“Do you have an exact time of arrival yet?”
Shepherd asked.

Rachel’s eyes flicked across her screen and
traveled up to one corner. Then she glanced at her wristwatch as if
to confirm what she had seen on the screen.

“You timing is really quite remarkable. It’s
probably on final right now.”

Rachel pointed to the windows.

“You ought to be able to see it land any
minute.”

Rachel bent down and opened a desk drawer.
When she straightened up, she was holding a pair of
powerful-looking field glasses. She held them out toward Keur, but
he shook his head and pointed to Shepherd.

“Mr. Shepherd then,” Rachel said. “I gather
you are the officially designated plane spotter for today.”

The glasses were Leica 10x52s. Big and tough
and expensive. They were exactly the kind of glasses Shepherd would
expect Rachel to have. He took the glasses from her and walked over
to the windows.