World of Trouble (9786167611136) (4 page)

When the food came, Shepherd ate the sandwich
and drank half the beer. Then he got undressed, left his clothes on
the floor, and got into bed. It was not long before jet lag and
exhaustion overwhelmed him and he fell asleep. It was a restless,
uneven sleep and he woke repeatedly through the night. Each time he
did, he felt even more ragged and exhausted than he had before.

THE NEXT MORNING Shepherd showered and shaved while
he waited for room service to deliver breakfast, then he watched
CNN some more while he ate. There was really nothing new about the
attack on Charlie and no information at all about the identity of
the gunmen, which seemed odd. He wondered if the information was
being withheld for some reason and, if so, by whom, and why. That
was something he would have to ask Charlie.

Along with a whole hell of a lot of other
things, of course.

Shepherd got dressed. Then he went downstairs
and hired a hotel car to take him out to Charlie’s villa on Palm
Jumeirah.

***

PALM JUMEIRAH IS a palm-shaped projection into the
Persian Gulf which, like much of Dubai, is entirely artificial. In
a spectacular demonstration of either inspiration or hubris,
Shepherd could never decide which, tens of millions of tons of sand
had been dredged up from the sea bottom, compacted into a series of
graceful arcs resembling palm fronds, and then connected to the
mainland by a slightly wider spit of sand representing the
trunk.

The trunk of the tree is filled with cheesy
apartment buildings, but the arcs of land representing the fronds
of the palm tree are given over exclusively to private houses
expansively referred to as villas, more because of their outrageous
cost than any grandness of design. The houses are laid out on each
palm frond in two lines along opposite sides of a single roadway.
Most of them are undistinguished, even tacky.

Charlie owned both houses at the very end of
Frond G, where he had created a small compound by building a high
wall and placing a security gate across the end of the road. With
the wall forming one side of the compound and the Persian Gulf
surrounding the other three sides, the place was as secure as any
private home in Dubai could be. Shepherd sometimes wondered what it
had cost Charlie in gratuities to local government functionaries to
pull that off, but he had never asked.

When the hotel car pulled up at Charlie’s
security gate, Shepherd got out and a brown-uniformed guard
directed the driver where to park. The guard gestured for Shepherd
to raise his arms and ran a wand over his body. Then he asked for
Shepherd’s passport and inspected it carefully. Eventually the
guard handed it back, tilted his head, and murmured something in
Arabic into a shoulder mike. The gate slid open just far enough for
Shepherd to walk through.

The two houses in the compound were very
similar. Two stories, high-pitched red-tiled roofs, tan stucco
siding, a great many arched windows, double front doors of polished
wood, and a few fake pillars and gables stuck here and there for
decoration. The house on the left where Charlie lived with his wife
Sally looked to be the more hospitable of the two since it had a
long terrace paved in dark brown ceramic tile that ran the length
of the second floor. The house on the right that had been converted
into an office had nothing to recommend it. It was as plain as a
self-storage warehouse.

Shepherd rang the bell at the house where
Charlie lived and a maid who appeared to be Filipino opened the
door and showed him into Charlie’s study. After a few minutes she
returned with a pot of coffee and two china cups on a silver tray,
then she closed the door behind her and disappeared. Shepherd
poured himself some coffee, sat down one of the two facing love
seats upholstered in yellow silk, and waited.

***

CHARLIE CAME THROUGH the door talking on a cell
phone. He said
uh-huh
a couple of times while he poured
himself some coffee with his free hand, then he said
uh-uh
once more, hung up, and put the phone in his pocket. He settled
himself on the other love seat, took a sip of coffee, and looked at
Shepherd over the rim of the cup.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

Charlie nodded absentmindedly, his mind
apparently on things more important than the current state of
Shepherd’s health.

“How’s your head?” Shepherd asked.

Charlie looked puzzled. “What are you talking
about?”

“Your head,” Shepherd said, tapping his own
with his finger just in case the word was unfamiliar to Charlie.
“The cut you got when I pulled you down.”

Shepherd didn’t mention hearing Charlie say
on CNN that his injury came from being grazed by a bullet.

Charlie shrugged and looked away, but he
didn’t say anything. Shepherd would have liked to think he was
embarrassed, but he doubted it. Charlie had just been a politician
milking the moment and politicians were hard to embarrass.

“There was a lot of coverage,” Charlie said
after a moment. “CNN, Fox, BBC, ITN, even Al Jazeera.”

“It was entertaining television.”

“Great stuff!” Charlie said. “Great!”

Maybe Churchill had been right after all.
Charlie, at least, seemed to lend support to his theory.

“Have they identified the gunmen yet?”
Shepherd asked.

Charlie shook his head.

“Nobody’s taken credit?”

“You think credit is the right word to use
here, Jack?”

“Sorry. You know what I mean.”

Charlie sipped at his coffee again. He didn’t
say anything else, but Shepherd wasn’t ready to give up. Lawyers
ask questions. It’s what they do.

“Were the gunmen locals?”

Charlie shrugged.

“You have no idea where they came from?”

“Probably imported. Iraqis maybe.”

“If somebody was going to bring in a couple
of hitters to go after you, why would they hire two boobs like
that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, Charlie. Those had to be the
world’s lousiest assassins. The attack was stupidly planned and
badly executed. Those idiots didn’t even hit anybody.”

“They killed the woman. That news
producer.”

“No, they didn’t. Your bodyguards killed her.
They weren’t much better shots than the guys who came after
you.”

“It’s hard to get good help these days.”

“Maybe that’s it,” Shepherd said.

But he didn’t think it was.

“Anyway, that’s not really the point,”
Charlie said, looking genuinely annoyed.

“No? Then what
is
the point?”

“The point is who hired those guys.”

“Okay, so who hired them?”

Charlie shot Shepherd a hard look. “You know
who it was as well as I do.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“Oh, come on, Jack. You of all people ought
to know exactly who it was. You understand what’s happening in
Thailand now.”

“Pretend I don’t. Explain it to me.”

Charlie smiled slightly at that. He put his
cup down on the table between them, leaned back, and folded his
arms.

Shepherd nodded encouragingly. Not that
Charlie really needed any encouraging.

“It’s a mess. It’s been a fucking mess ever
since I left.”

Shepherd said nothing.

“A lot of people want me to become prime
minister again. But there are other people who would kill me to
prevent something like that from happening, to stop me from coming
back.”

“I didn’t know you were thinking of going
back.”

“I was just speaking hypothetically. As long
as I’m alive, I
could
go back to Thailand. If I did, I’d be
prime minister again in a week. You know how many people want me to
do that?”

“How many exactly?” Shepherd asked. “Not
counting the army.”

Charlie gave him a half smile. “I thought you
were on my side, Jack.”

“I
am
on your side, Charlie. You pay
me a lot of money to be on your side.”

“Would you be on the other side if
they
paid you a lot of money?”

“It depends on how much it is. I’m a lawyer.
I’m always paid to be on somebody’s side.”

Charlie laughed, but Shepherd could also see
him wondering if he was serious about that. That was
understandable. He was wondering, too.

Charlie’s cell phone rang and he pulled it
from his pocket and glanced at the screen.

“I’ve got to take this, Jack. Would you
excuse me?”

Shepherd stood up. When he left the study, he
closed the door behind him. He noticed Charlie remained silent
until after he did.

SHEPHERD WAITED IN the hallway outside Charlie’s
study until he began feeling foolish just standing there doing
nothing, then he walked to the end of the hall and out onto the big
terrace behind the house. The terrace was paved in glazed titles
the color of Hershey Bars and dotted with outdoor furniture, all of
which looked uncomfortable. Shepherd chose a high-back rattan chair
that seemed slightly better than the rest, dragged it around until
it faced the sea, and propped his feet up on a glass-topped coffee
table with an iron base.

It was a nice day by Dubai standards. The air
was warm without being hot and there was a light breeze off the
sea. Just beyond the breakwater, two black rubber boats filled with
UAE commandos drifted on the glassy smooth surface of the Persian
Gulf. Each of the boats carried four men dressed in black,
automatic weapons slung over their chests. One of the men peered at
him through a pair of field glasses. Shepherd gave him a friendly
wave, but the man didn’t wave back.

After about ten minutes Charlie walked out
and sat down next to Shepherd. He had put on a pair of sunglasses
with gold metal frames, which caused Shepherd think of the tortoise
shell sunglasses Charlie had worn in the souk, the ones that had
fallen off when he went down behind the burlap-wrapped bales and
hit his head. Shepherd had no doubt those damned glasses would turn
up on eBay someday.

“There’s obviously something on your mind,
Jack. What is it?”

Shepherd couldn’t see Charlie’s eyes through
the sunglasses, but his face looked earnest enough and the question
seemed to be entirely serious. Shepherd stood up and walked to the
edge of the terrace. He doubted there were any lip readers among
the commandos in the rubber boats but, if there were, it certainly
wouldn’t have been the weirdest thing he had ever encountered in
Dubai. Just in case, he turned his back to them before he spoke to
Charlie again.

“What did you mean inside when you said
people were willing to kill you to keep you from going back to
Thailand?” he asked.

Charlie glanced over Shepherd’s shoulder at
the two rubber boats full of UAE commandos.

“This is neither the time nor the place to
talk about that,” he said.

“Are you going back into politics?”

“This is neither the time nor the place to
talk about that.”

“I don’t do politics.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“I’m a lawyer. I shuffle papers. I organize
corporations. I argue with banks. That’s all I do.”

“I understand that.”

Shepherd could feel in his bones that
something was about to happen here that he wasn’t going to like. He
thought about telling Charlie right then he didn’t want any part of
whatever it was. He thought about it, but he didn’t tell Charlie
that. Later, looking back, he would always wonder how differently
things might have turned out if he had.

Charlie stood up and moved to a different
chair, one that put his back to the watching commandos. He swung
his feet up onto the glass and iron table and took off his
sunglasses.

“Sit down, Jack. There’s something we need to
talk about.”

Charlie pointed to a chair that would put
Shepherd’s back to the commandos as well and Shepherd walked over
and sat down.

“Some guys are trying to fuck me,” Charlie
said.

“Some guys are trying to kill you,” Shepherd
said. “In my book, that’s a lot worse than fucking you.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Charlie
said, waving away Shepherd’s wisecrack. “I mean those pricks at the
Ministry of Finance in Thailand. They’re trying to grab my
money.”

“I didn’t know you had any money in
Thailand.”

“It goes back to before we started working
together. There are some accounts at Bangkok Bank and some more at
SCB. I need for you to sort them out for me.”

Bangkok Bank was Thailand’s largest bank and
SCB was Siam Commercial Bank, the second or third largest. They
were both good places to have money in Thailand, if you had to have
money in Thailand at all.

“Sort it out how?” Shepherd asked.

“Get it out of the country. All of it.”

“How much are we talking about?”

“Maybe in all, say, five or six hundred
million.”

Six hundred million Thai baht was a little
less than twenty million US dollars. Not an insignificant sum, of
course, but less than Shepherd was often called on to handle for
Charlie.

“Five or six hundred million baht shouldn’t
be any problem,” Shepherd said.

Then he noticed that Charlie was looking at
him like he had suddenly begun speaking in tongues.

“Not baht, Jack. I wouldn’t care if it was
just baht. Dollars. US dollars. Five or six hundred million US
dollars.”

Oh, right, US dollars. Five or six hundred
million US dollars. Of course
.

“I want you to get your ass to Bangkok. I’ll
get everything gathered up in Bangkok Bank for you. I’ve got a
contact there. You talk to him and get everything shifted to Hong
Kong, then you can bury it in some nominee companies.”

“Look, Charlie, I don’t—”

“Leave tonight. Those pricks are really
trying to fuck me.”