World of Trouble (9786167611136) (30 page)

Keur burst out laughing. “You’re going to use
the Kitnarok Foundation to stop Harvey from flying back to Thailand
to deliver arms to Charlie Kitnarok’s troops?”

Shepherd nodded.

“That’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful,”
Keur said. “I love it. I fucking
love
it.”

“I know a local lawyer I could call for you,”
Rachel said. “Sharp guy, and he’d never bat an eye at doing
something like this. He really hates Americans.”

Wonderful
, Shepherd thought.
I’ve
got to have somebody I can rely on here, somebody whose tact and
discretion I can depend on absolutely, and I’m about to trust a
big-busted German woman I met an hour ago to put me into the hands
of an anti-American Arab lawyer
.

That was what he thought, but that wasn’t
what he said.

“Get the guy on the telephone,” he told
Rachel.

RACHEL PLACED THE call and made the introductions,
then she put Shepherd on the telephone. Shepherd explained to
Rachel’s anti-American lawyer pal what he wanted to do. He thought
the guy sounded young, smart, and capable, and he seemed to get it
immediately. So Shepherd decided not to worry about the lawyer’s
political views. As long as he delivered on the impoundment order,
he could have all the fun he wanted.

The guy didn’t seem to think it would be any
problem at all to get an order issued. He casually mentioned that
he would take it to a judge who was a good friend of his. Shepherd
got the idea without making him say it a second time. After all, he
had lived in Thailand. He knew how this kind of thing worked in
third world countries. The price the lawyer quoted was
astronomical, of course. Having a friend who’s a judge tends to run
up the bill pretty quickly in almost any country. But Shepherd
didn’t care. The bill was going to the Kitnarok Foundation
anyway.

The lawyer asked Shepherd to email him a
statement of facts and an affidavit. He said that if Shepherd could
do it immediately he would file the petition before the end of the
day. Shepherd wrote down the guy’s email address on a pad on
Rachel’s desk. Then he thanked the lawyer and gave the telephone
back to Rachel.

While she and Shepherd’s new pal were talking
about something else, Shepherd pulled out his telephone and drafted
an email with the materials the guy had asked for. Since he was
making most of it up, it didn’t take very long. He added the email
address he had written down and hit send. Rachel and the lawyer
were still talking when he was done, so he and Keur just sat and
stared at the flat panel monitors on the wall on which CNN and BBC
continued to flicker in complete silence and waited for her to
finish.

***

THE DEPRESSING MONOTONY with which people all over
the planet were laboring to kill each other seemed slightly less
horrific when it was reduced to a silent movie, but Shepherd wasn’t
entirely certain whether that was a good thing or not. Maybe it
would actually be better if somebody could find a way to make it
more
horrific instead. Perhaps that way some of the
hideousness of mankind’s collective savagery might eventually
penetrate people’s desensitized minds and shame them into behaving
like human beings again.

Shepherd and Keur sat quietly like that for
several minutes while Rachel continued to murmur into the
telephone. Keur didn’t seem anymore interested in conversation than
Shepherd was, each of them content to wait silently in the company
of their own thoughts, until after a few minutes of sitting like
that something on CNN caught Shepherd’s eye. It registered
immediately as familiar, but it took a moment or two for his brain
to catch up with his eyes.

When it did, Shepherd realized that CNN was
broadcasting a headshot of Liz Corbin, the Bangkok bureau chief for
The New York Times
. Below Liz’s picture was a single line of
white type:
On the Telephone from Bangkok
. And across the
bottom of the screen was a much larger caption, all in red letters.
It read:
TERROR IN THAILAND
.

“I need to hear that,” Shepherd said,
pointing at the monitor.

Both Keur and Rachel glanced at the screen.
Then Rachel took a remote control off her desk and tossed it to
Shepherd. He found the mute button, clicked it, and the sound
popped on. Shepherd was only vaguely aware of Rachel murmuring
hasty goodbyes into the telephone.

“…nothing more about the real seriousness of
the situation here in Bangkok until tomorrow morning,” a woman’s
voice Shepherd recognized as Liz Corbin’s was saying on CNN.

“Do you know yet exactly how many explosions
there were?” a male voice asked.

“The government is saying officially that
there were four, Keith, but I am hearing unofficially that it was
almost certainly many more than that. Perhaps as many as a dozen.
What has caused real panic here, however, is not the number of
explosions, but the apparently well-coordinated nature of the
blasts. The initial explosion at Government House was followed
within ten minutes by those at the Hyatt and the Four Seasons, and
then shortly after that by those at other international hotels, two
major shopping malls, and of course at the airport. The attacks
appear to have been planned to kill and injure as many foreigners
as possible and, by doing so, to strike a fatal blow at Thailand’s
vital tourism infrastructure.”

“Is the government providing any casualty
figures?” the man prodded.

“No, none at all. At the moment, the
government’s reaction seems to be to try to keep a lid on
everything as long as possible. They are saying very little and
they certainly aren’t giving out any figures. My sources, however,
say that more than a hundred are dead and hundreds more, perhaps
thousands, are injured.”

“Where are you now, Liz? Can you see any of
the damage from your location?”

“Right now I am about two hundred yards north
of the Grand Hyatt. The air is heavy with smoke and dust and I
cannot see very clearly. But I can tell you that the hotel appears
to have collapsed right in the center and is almost wholly
demolished. It would not surprise me if the casualty toll from that
one bombing alone was many hundreds of people.”

“What is the mood there in Bangkok?”

“It’s almost impossible to move around the
city right now so I have spoken to very few people. The military
has appeared in the streets, but they don’t seem to be doing much
of anything. The Four Seasons Hotel is only a few hundred yards
south of here. I’m going to try to make my way to it on foot and
see what the level of destruction is there.”

“Have there been any claims of responsibility
yet, Liz?”

“As you know, Keith, the Thai government is
locked in a bitter struggle with the supporters of former strongman
General Chalerm Kitnarok, who was forced out of office with a
blizzard of corruption charges. At the same time, they are fighting
an increasingly violent Muslim insurgency in the south. The
assumption here, of course, is that these explosions are a clear
attempt to destabilize the government and therefore the most likely
culprits would come from one of those two camps, but there is no
specific information as yet concerning who actually is to
blame.”

“Has the new prime minister made a statement
yet?”

“Prime Minister Kathleeya Srisophon has been
in office for less than a day, having been chosen by the governing
coalition immediately after the murder of former prime minister
Somchai in an attack on his motorcade yesterday morning. She has
made no statements of any kind as yet and reports are that she is
in an undisclosed location for security reasons. It is easy to
understand why. In a country seemingly poised on the brink of
chaos, the murder of a second prime minister would almost certainly
send it tumbling over the edge.”

The image on the monitor shifted to a studio
shot of a blow-dried newscaster who looked to Shepherd more like an
actor in an unsuccessful daytime soap opera than a journalist.

“Thank you, Liz,” the man said. “That was
Elizabeth Corbin of
The New York Times
on the telephone from
Bangkok, where an unknown number of apparently well-coordinated
explosions shook the city just after five o’clock this afternoon,
Bangkok time. Initial reports are that there are many dead and
injured, including a large number of foreigners. CNN is urgently
trying to gather more information and we will have it for you as
soon as we can. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the federal budget
crisis shows no sign of ending with…”

Shepherd clicked the mute button on the
remote and looked at Keur.

“It’s started,” he said.

SHEPHERD STOOD UP, found the field glasses, and
walked back to the window. He scanned the field and found the
hanger with the green roof. But he didn’t see the plane any
longer.

“I think Harvey’s gone,” he said.

“They couldn’t have taken off that quickly,”
Rachel said. “They would have to fuel after the flight from
Thailand. It can’t be done that fast.”

She walked over and took the glasses from
Shepherd, then studied the place where they had seen Harvey
park.

“The hanger doors are closed now,” she said.
“They must have towed the plane inside.”

“How do you get off the field from there?”
Shepherd asked. “Would the passengers have to go over to the
passenger terminal to clear immigration?”

“Theoretically, yes,” Rachel said, “but
there’s an exit gate in the airport boundary right behind the
hanger. Since the facility actually belongs to the UAE government,
it’s accessible from there.”

“That means people can come and go from that
hanger without any interference at all, right? No customs or
immigration?”

“Yes, that’s right. That’s what it
means.”

“Is the gate manned?” Shepherd asked.

“No, there’s not enough traffic for that.
Access is by a security card and a code entered into a keypad.
You’ve got to have both to get through the gate and we change the
code weekly.”

“Who changes the code?”

“I do.” Rachel pointed to the computer
sitting on her desk. “From right there.”

Shepherd thought about that for a moment.

“I guess you probably have trouble with the
gate occasionally,” he said.

“Not really.”

“I mean with it breaking down and jamming so
that people can’t open it to get out.”

“No, as far as I remember, that gate has
never…”

Rachel trailed off into silence and looked at
Shepherd.

“If the code were changed,” he said, “and
nobody knew it, the gate wouldn’t open. To anyone who tried to use
the old code, it would seem like the gate had broken down, wouldn’t
it?”

Keur roared with laughter again. “Damn, Jack,
I do like your style.”

“What would happen if somebody came out of
that hanger, tried to operate the gate, and discovered it didn’t
work?” Shepherd asked.

“They could go across the airport and exit on
the other side, or go through the freight facility and get off the
field that way,” Rachel said. “But they would have to get
permission from ground control to move around the field. It would
be a bit of a nuisance and it might take a while.”

“So the odds are they would just call
somebody instead. They would tell them they were waiting there to
leave the field and to send somebody to fix the goddamn gate right
the hell now.”

Rachel nodded slowly. “That would be my
guess.”

“How interesting,” Shepherd said. “And would
you be informed if that happened?”

“I might be. Particularly if I had arranged
to be informed.”

“Who would you send to fix the gate?”

“You have anybody in particular in mind?”
Rachel smiled.

“Now that you ask,” Shepherd said, “I just
might.”

Rachel used her computer to change the gate
code. Then she called someone and told them to route any complaints
about that particular gate directly to her. She also found a light
cotton jacket and a blue baseball cap in her closet and gave them
to Shepherd. As disguises went, it wasn’t much, but it didn’t have
to be. He wasn’t intending to fool anyone for very long.

A few minutes later, Shepherd’s phone binged.
He checked his email and found a message from his new anti-American
lawyer. The guy’s pet judge had already signed an emergency order
impounding Harvey pending a full hearing on a claim that the lease
payments were in default. That hearing had been set for the next
day, but the lawyer said he had heard a rumor the judge felt a bout
of flu coming on and would probably be forced to postpone it for a
day or two. That was about as much as he could do, he said. How
sick could one judge actually be before eyebrows were raised?

Shepherd and Keur sat back to wait. They kept
an eye on CNN for any further reports about the explosions in
Bangkok, but something called World Sport was on instead of the
news. As far as Shepherd could tell, World Sport meant extended
coverage of any sport not played anywhere in the United States. The
planet’s twenty-seventh largest city was in flames and all CNN
could talk about was Italian league soccer.

Rachel did paperwork at her desk and took
several calls during the next half hour. As each call was put
through to her she shook her head at Shepherd. Then she took a call
and didn’t shake her head.

“Here we go,” she said.

When the call was put through, Rachel
murmured apologies for the gate malfunction in a throaty voice with
just a trace of an accent. She sounded pretty good to Shepherd. If
he heard a voice like that coming down the telephone line, he
figured he would accept an apology for World War II. From the look
on Rachel’s face, however, whomever she was talking to was far less
enamored by the sound of her voice than Shepherd was.