World of Trouble (9786167611136) (44 page)

“Some people think you may have been the one
who shot him.”

“Do you?”

“I’m just following my instructions here,
Jack.”

“To arrest me for shooting Charlie?”

“No, to arrest you for shooting an FBI
agent.”

“So if I didn’t shoot Charlie, who did?”

“I’m just following my instructions,” Pete
said again.

“I should have saved him, Pete. I was there
and I should have saved him.”

“What could you have done?”

“I don’t know. Something. What good are
people if they can’t do something for their friends at a time like
that?”

“I don’t know how to answer that.”

“Neither do I.”

Charlie was murdered,
Shepherd
thought,
and I didn’t do a damn thing to save him.

Now Peter was giving him the bureaucratic
runaround and it didn’t look like he could do a damn thing about
that either.

“Fuck you, Pete. Keur was CIA. He’d been told
to kill Charlie if Charlie didn’t take a dive for them. I tried to
stop him and so he tried to kill me, too. I shot him in self
defense with his own gun.”

“Then it sounds to me like you have nothing
to worry about.”

“But you’re going to arrest me anyway.”

“Yeah, I am. Those are my instructions and
that’s my job.”

Shepherd gave up arguing with Pete. He knew
he was wasting his breath.

SHEPHERD WAS A little surprised that the facilities
at the embassy were so good. It made him wonder how often they did
this kind of thing. Somebody had even gotten a few clothes and
toiletries together for him.

His room reminded him of a small-town motel
somewhere in the Midwest, right down to the orange and brown plaid
bedspread and the plastic drinking gasses wrapped up in little
cellophane bags. Then there were the two young marines standing
guard outside the door with sidearms on their hips who told him he
was not to leave the room. That part did
not
remind him of a
small-town motel in the Midwest.

At least he had cable TV so he watched an NBA
game on the American Forces Network while he waited for somebody to
tell him what was going to happen next. He didn’t really mind all
that much lying around for a while watching sports on TV. He wasn’t
all that used to getting shot and he needed the rest.

It was the middle of the second quarter and
the Knicks were already down by eighteen when one of the marines
opened the door and gave Shepherd a stack of newspapers, a couple
of Diet Cokes, and a cardboard bucket of ice. Shepherd told the
marine he was kind of hungry, too, and asked him to send up the
room service menu, but the kid acted as if he hadn’t heard.

The papers were the two English-language
Bangkok dailies as well as the
International Herald Tribune
and the
Asian Wall Street Journal
. Shepherd went through all
of them carefully but he didn’t find a word about Charlie being
killed. He wondered if the story had already come and gone while he
was in the hospital. He hadn’t been in the hospital
that
long, had he?

He had no trouble coming up with great
questions. He just didn’t have many great answers. None at all, to
tell the truth.

For instance, who the devil was Leonard
Keur? Was he really a CIA agent? He had told Shepherd and Charlie
he was CIA, but then he had also told Shepherd and a lot of other
people that he was FBI. Were either of those things true? Maybe
Leonard Keur was really somebody else altogether.

And where did Robert Darling and Tommy fit
into everything? Were they Agency, too, or was there somebody else
pulling the strings? Somebody else he had never seen a trace
of?

Shepherd was absolutely sure of at least one
thing. Somebody wanted Charlie dead for refusing to stick to the
script. And Keur had used him to set-up Charlie.

He had set out to save his friend from a life
of notoriety as the man who had started a civil war in Thailand.
Instead, he had gotten him killed.

However else he might look at everything, he
kept coming back to that.

***

THE KNICKS WERE down by more than thirty in the
fourth quarter when someone knocked politely on the door. Shepherd
opened it and an average-looking middle-aged man he had never seen
before was standing there. The man identified himself as an FBI
agent and handed Shepherd a plastic badge on a chain and told him
to wear it around his neck. The badge was a laminated card with a
red ‘V’ on both sides, which Shepherd knew stood for visitor. He
took that as a good sign. He supposed it could have been a ‘P’ for
prisoner.

The man escorted Shepherd to the end of the
corridor. They made a right and went all the way to the end of
another corridor, through a grey steel door, and up two flights of
stairs to the second floor. Right at the top there was an unmarked
brown laminate door that looked just like most of the other doors
in the building. The man opened it without knocking and gestured
Shepherd inside. Then he closed the door behind him.

Pete Logan was sitting by himself at a grey
metal desk that had nothing on top of it. The room was windowless
and the walls were bare other than for a slightly yellowed travel
poster bearing a large picture of the Statue of Liberty overprinted
with the command,
VISIT NEW YORK!
Right then, that sounded
to Shepherd like a really terrific idea.

The only furniture other than the desk and
the chair on which Peter Logan sat was a single straight chair,
also grey metal, with a black plastic seat. Shepherd gathered that
was for him so he sat down on it.

“You hungry?” Pete asked.

“Not really.”

“Anything else I can get you?”

“How about a Hendricks martini? Very dry.
Shaken, not stirred.”

Pete just looked at him.

“You asked if there was anything you could
get me,” Shepherd shrugged.

“The doctors say no alcohol for forty-eight
hours. Not until the pain killers wear off.”

“The pain killers are going to wear off? Oh,
shit.”

Pete looked away and studied the travel
poster with more care than Shepherd thought it merited. After a
minute or so of silence, Peter cleared his throat and shifted his
eyes back to Shepherd.

“What the hell is this really all about,
Jack?”

So Shepherd told him.

All of it.

Right from the beginning.

Shepherd thought he was a reasonably engaging
storyteller, and he figured he had a pretty good story to tell, but
he couldn’t help but notice that Pete didn’t seem all that
interested. He just sat there with his arms folded and nodded every
now and then, possibly to show he hadn’t fallen asleep. It was easy
to tell Pete was just going through the motions. It was a lot
harder to figure out why.

“That it?” Peter asked when Shepherd
finished.

Shepherd nodded.

“Nothing else you want to add?”

He shook his head.

“Okay,” Pete said. “Sit tight. I’ll be back
in a minute.”

***

PETE WAS GONE for no more than five minutes. When he
came back into the room, he resumed his seat behind the metal desk
and folded his arms.

“I’m sorry to have to do this,” he said, “but
I’ve got to read you your rights. Then I’ll get somebody to take
you back to your room.”

“Wait just a goddamned minute, Pete. You ask
me to tell you what happened, but you clearly don’t give a shit.
There’s nothing in the papers about Charlie. There’s nothing on TV.
What the fuck is going on here?”

Pete said nothing.

“Charlie was executed in cold blood. And now
you’re telling me nothing is going to be done about it?”

“We’re doing something. We’re arresting
you.”

“Very fucking funny.”

“There were three guys in that room and the
other two are now dead. So what do you think I ought to do? Arrest
the dead guys?”

“So that’s it, is it? I’m the only survivor
and somebody’s got to take the fall.”

“No, Jack. That’s
not
it.”

Pete made a face like he was smelling
week-old fish. But he didn’t say anything else.

“Who sent Keur to kill Charlie?” Shepherd
asked. “You
know
who sent him, don’t you?”

“I’m not going to talk to you about this,
Jack.”

“You talk to me all the time about things
you’re not supposed to talk to me about.”

“Not things this big.”

“So how big
is
thing?”

“The size of a motherfucker.”

“You’re telling me somebody in the United
States government ordered a federal agent to kill a foreign
national who had suddenly become inconvenient?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“The United States government murdered my
client because they were afraid he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut and
we’re all supposed to shrug and just forget it?”

“Maybe not everybody, Jack, but
you
are. That’s sure as hell what
you’re
supposed to do.”

“And you think I’m going to do that?”

“I don’t know. But I hope so. For my sake,
for
your
sake, I hope so.”

There was a silence in which they each
studied opposite corners of the room for a while.

“What happens now?” Shepherd asked.

“I wish I could tell you.”

“So tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t.”

“Can’t. I really don’t know what happens
now.”

“Still waiting for your bosses to tell you,
huh?”

Pete said nothing.

“Good dog,” Shepherd said. “Roll over. Can
you play dead, too?”

Pete cleared his throat. “Like I said before,
I’ve got to read you your rights. You ready?”

Shepherd started to say something else, but
he knew he would be wasting his breath. So he just nodded and Pete
Logan started reading him his rights.

They sounded to Shepherd exactly the way they
do on television.

FOR THE FIRST couple of days, my detention followed
the same unvarying routine. I read the papers. I watched
television. And I waited for somebody to come in and tell me what
was going to happen to me.

The only breaks in the monotony were my
meals in the embassy cafeteria. The evening after my session with
Pete, the same FBI agent who had escorted me to Pete’s office came
back and took me to the cafeteria for dinner. We sat off to one
side by ourselves at a big round table that could have accommodated
eight people. I tried engaging the man in conversation, but he
ignored me. He didn’t even eat. He just sat there. Eventually I
gave up trying to make conversation and finished my meal in silence
while watching CNN on one of the television monitors mounted high
up on the wall.

For the next two days we repeated the
identical procedure for every meal. At breakfast, at lunch, and at
dinner my escort took me to the embassy cafeteria. We sat silently
at a big table that was empty other than for us, I had my meal
while watching CNN, and my escort took me back to the room when I
was done. I wasn’t taken to see Pete again, and Pete didn’t come to
see me.

The third day, however, was different.

I was at lunch with my escort. I was eating
a cheeseburger and paying very little attention to CNN since I was
sick to death of it. They were showing film of some buildings
burning somewhere in the world that hadn’t even registered with
me.

Then all at once it
did
register
with me.

I was looking at Charlie’s compound in
Phuket. I was watching Charlie’s house burn on CNN.

I jumped up from the table and walked over
and stood under the monitor so I could hear the sound that went
with the pictures. I couldn’t hear all of it, but I could hear
enough.

“…
started from unknown causes around four
this morning,” an announcer was saying. “General Kitnarok has owned
the house for several years and there had been speculation recently
that he might be in seclusion there preparing to lead his followers
in an uprising against the present Thai government. There is no
direct indication at this time whether General Kitnarok was
actually in the house when it caught fire, but sources in the
American Embassy in Bangkok tell CNN that at least two badly burned
bodies have been recovered from the wreckage. Neither of those
bodies has yet been identified, but US government forensic
specialists are assisting the Thais in their efforts to do so as
quickly as possible.”

With all that helpful assistance from the
United States government, I had no doubt at all that the two bodies
would indeed be identified very soon. One of the bodies would turn
out to be Charlie, of course. That was easy enough to guess. But
who would the other one be? Jack Shepherd perhaps? That would tidy
everything up rather neatly, wouldn’t it?

It might be neat, but I couldn’t believe an
ending like that was actually in the cards. Pete Logan might be a
loyal bureaucrat, but he was also a good FBI agent. He wasn’t the
kind of man to stand around doing nothing while somebody killed and
buried his old friend Jack in order to cover this whole mess
up.

At least I didn’t think he was.

***

WHEN I GOT back to the table, my escort had
disappeared and Pete sat picking at the French fries I had left on
my plate. It looked like I was going to find out soon enough what
kind of man Pete Logan was.

“
These are terrible, Jack.”

Pete slathered a French fry in catsup and
swallowed it.

“
How can you eat shit like this? It’ll
kill you.”

I just looked at Pete.

“
Okay, bad choice of words,” he said.
“Sorry about that.”

“
You here for any reason other than to eat
my French fries?”

“
I have a message for you.”