World of Trouble (9786167611136) (3 page)

A right and two lefts brought them into
another courtyard. It looked a lot like the one in which they had
just been ambushed, but it wasn’t. There was a shadowy passageway
at the opposite end right next to a windowless stucco building
exactly the color of sand. Shepherd headed straight for it. The
gloom of the souk was now their friend. If Shepherd could lose them
in it, they would probably be safe. He tightened his grip on
Charlie and pulled him along.

***

THEY WENT ON like that through the twisting
passageways of the souk, making random turns every so often.
Shepherd thought they were moving further and further away from the
place where they had been attacked, but he wasn’t absolutely
certain. What he
was
certain of was that he would know the
right way to get them out of this when he saw it.

And then he did see it.

Shepherd and Charlie emerged suddenly onto a
wide boulevard. Just on the other side of the boulevard were the
aqua waters of Dubai Creek. Dubai Creek isn’t really a creek at
all, but rather a narrow inlet from the Persian Gulf that for
centuries has been a port of call for small traders and a refuge
for smugglers. The Creek was cluttered as it always was with its
usual traffic of broad-beamed
dhows
while, between them,
tiny
abras
darted like water bugs ferrying small groups of
people from one side to the other.

Shepherd didn’t hesitate. Dragging Charlie
behind him, he broke into a lope across the road and headed
straight for the Creek.

There was a line of
abras
tied up at
the bank right in front of them and Shepherd made straight for the
nearest one. He jumped down into the boat, steadied himself for a
moment as the little craft rocked from his weight, and helped
Charlie to climb down behind him. The boatman was a dark-skinned
fellow in blue shorts and a dirty white shirt. He was sitting in
the stern of the boat methodically peeling and eating an orange. He
regarded the new arrivals with curiosity.

“Go!” Shepherd shouted at the boatman. He
pushed Charlie down onto the hard wooden bench in the center of the
little boat. “Go, for Christ’s sake!”

The boatman didn’t move. He just sat there
and stared at the crazy white guy screaming at him.

Everyone in Dubai might not speak English,
but Shepherd spoke another language he was sure would be
understood. He pulled a wad of currency out of his pocket and waved
it at the boatman. The man responded immediately. Dropping his
orange, he shoved the boat off the wharf with one hand and fired
the engine with the other. They sputtered into the Creek and the
boatman turned downriver toward the wharf on the opposite bank
where
abras
usually put in.

Shepherd shook his head and pointed upriver.
He could see the Sheraton Hotel in the distance and right now an
American hotel looked pretty damn good to him. The boatman just
stared at him, so Shepherd did the thing with the money again and
pointed to the Sheraton. The man quickly swung the bow toward
it.

Shepherd sat down on the wooden bench next to
Charlie. “Are you okay?” he called over the throbbing of the boat’s
engine. “Were you hit?”

When Charlie didn’t answer, Shepherd ran his
hands over Charlie’s chest and neck looking for gunshot wounds. He
was sure Charlie hadn’t taken a direct hit, but maybe a ricochet
had caught him. The cut on his forehead wasn’t serious, Shepherd
could see that now, just bleeding like a son of a bitch the way
head cuts do.

“Are you okay?” he shouted again.

Charlie grunted, shook off Shepherd’s hands,
and straightened up a little. He wiped a hand over his forehead and
it came away covered with blood. Charlie held up his hand and
looked at it for a moment.

“Stop screaming,” he said. “I’m bleeding. I
haven’t gone fucking deaf.”

“I thought maybe you’d been—”

“I’m fine except for this shit,” he said and
wiggled his bloody hand.

Charlie fished in his pocket with his other
hand and came out with a white handkerchief. He used it to wipe
some of the blood away and then he folded the handkerchief
lengthwise and pressed it against the cut on his forehead to stop
the bleeding. As the boat wallowed up Dubai Creek toward the
Sheraton, Charlie shifted himself into a more comfortable position
on the hard wooden seat.

“Fuck,” he muttered, “I would have been
better off letting those guys shoot me than getting rescued by
you.”

Shepherd didn’t know what to say to that, so
he said nothing at all.

ALONE IN HIS hotel room later that afternoon,
Shepherd watched CNN as they ran the story over and over. It was
spectacular, of course, all the more so because the really dramatic
parts were in slow motion. Shepherd saw everything he had seen only
a few hours before all over again, but now he saw it from the point
of view of the cameraman who had been at the other end of the
courtyard. It was an odd feeling watching himself from the opposite
direction. There was a sense of unreality to it, like he was part
of a video game.

The footage started with an innocuous view of
the narrow passageway through which they had entered the courtyard.
There was a slight motion at the bottom of the frame and the camera
panned down. A brown and white cat, scrawny and mean looking,
snarled at the camera and moved away at a deliberate pace.

Exactly at the moment the cat disappeared
from the frame there were several loud noises. Although the sounds
weren’t recognizable on the film as gunshots, that’s what they
were. The camera jerked slightly in reaction to the first shot or
two, then the image started to bounce as the cameraman ran toward
the sound. He rounded the bend in the passageway and entered the
courtyard, and his lens went straight to the Iranian-looking
shooter with the .45.

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.