KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)

by Jake Needham

  “I’d like that,” I said after a moment.

  “Good, twelve noon then?”

  “Fine. Where shall we meet?”

  “I’ll pick you up.”

  “Am I allowed to ask where we’re going?”

  “Of course. It’s a nice day, so I thought we might drive to Pattaya.”

  That seemed a little strange. Pattaya was what passed for Bangkok’s local beach resort, a smallish town of dubious reputation nearly a two-hour trip east along the Gulf of Thailand.

  “That’s rather a long way to long wadrive for lunch,” I said, “isn’t it?”

  “Not the way I do it, Mr. Shepherd.”

  THE BIG BLACK Mercedes had barely cleared the entrance ramp to the expressway before it was hitting a hundred miles an hour. We were passing other vehicles as if they were parked and the sound of the speed warning strips beneath our tires blurred into a single, drawn-out note, a raspy buzzing sound that seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

  Contained as we were in the cool, quiet womb of the big car, the outside world seemed far away. Kathleeya was wearing a silk suit just as she had been the first time we met, but the color was a vibrant shade of purple rather than the more conservative cream she had chosen then; and while it may only have been my imagination, I could have sworn her skirt was a bit shorter, too. We sank back on the soft leather of the backseat and made small talk while the driver continued his low-level flight to Pattaya. There was a second person in the front passenger seat, but he neither turned nor spoke so I assumed he was security rather than another luncheon guest.

  I had no doubt the murder of Mike O’Connell was very much on Kathleeya’s mind right then, but she didn’t mention it. Instead she asked questions about my classes and she showed an apparently genuine curiosity as to the subjects in which university students now had the most interest. From there the conversation rambled effortlessly into slightly more personal territory. I told her some of my stories and she told me some of hers.

  We made the two-hour drive from Bangkok to Pattaya in one hour flat. When the driver left the expressway and slowed down to make his way into town, it felt as if the car had come to a sudden stop. He took South Pattaya Road toward the beach and, passing the Marriott on the left, cut across to Pattaya Beach Road and turned south when we reached the water.

  To our left was an unbroken strip of tacky cafés, open-air shopping areas, tourist hotels, go-go joints, beer bars, and shabby souvenir stands. To our right, across a narrow strip of coarse, hard-packed sand was Pattaya Bay, flat and brown in the afternoon light. Pattaya may have been world famous for a great many things, but glamorous buildings, great beaches, and sparkling water were not three of them.

  After a few hundred yards we came to the entrance to Walking Street, a narrow road running right along the water. After dark, when it was completely closed to all traffic, Walking Street turned into a mile or so of uninterrupted debauchery, but during daylight hours the area was a bit more benign. The car stopped in front of one of the street’s vast seafood restaurants, one that was built on a large but rickety pier extending out into the bay. It was the sort of place popular in Thailand where glass tanks displayed live fish, shrimp, crab, and lobster to prospective customers. You inspect the day’s selections, pick what you want from the tanks, and describe to a hovering attendant exactly how you want it cooked. Normally places like that aren’t really among my favorites. Looking a fish in the eye, pointing to it, and saying, “Kill that one,” had never struck me as a particularly appealing way to begin a meal.

  The tables out on the pier were covered in pink fabric of some uncertain type and the chairs were green and looked like lawn furniture. Plastic palm trees lined the railings, although with so many real palm trees around I wasn’t sure why they were really necessary. After Kathleeya and I had ordered the deaths of several species of seafood, a woman who looked Chinese led us past the kitchen and all the way across the pier to a table by the rail, one that was well awaywas well from the entrance. I asked her for a Heineken and looked around while Kathleeya examined the wine list.

  The sky was overcast and the breeze from Pattaya Bay blew in gentle ripples over the pier, which made the hot afternoon almost comfortable. The oily waters of the gulf sloshed rhythmically against the pier’s pilings and from somewhere I heard a boat engine start up. It knocked badly with a throaty rasp that reminded me of a smoker too many packs gone. After a while the engine caught and settled into a steady rhythm and I listened to the hypnotic putt-putt sound, counting the beats to myself as I watched Kathleeya’s driver and security man cross the pier and sit down a table positioned on a direct line between us and the entrance.

  Kathleeya consulted with the Chinese woman and ordered a bottle of some Australian chardonnay I had never heard of. Then my Heineken arrived and the sound of the boat engine faded into the distance.

  “You’re not a wine drinker, Mr. Shepherd?”

  “I’m not really much of a lunchtime drinker at all,” I said. “One drink in the middle of the day and I’m ready to go straight to bed.”

  Kathleeya smiled and looked away.

  “I think,” I said, “that may have come out wrong.”

  That kind of conversation could go nowhere good, so I changed tacks as quickly as I could.

  “Every time you call me Mr. Shepherd I feel about a hundred years old. Would you mind just calling me Jack from now on?”

  “I wouldn’t mind at all, Jack. And, please, call me Kate. Not Khun Kate. Just Kate.”

  Khun is a polite form of address used by Thais, mostly among each other. It is prefixed as a gesture of courtesy to the first names of both men and women alike, indicating that the person being addressed is roughly equal in stature. Like most indicators of status used by Thais, and there are a great many of them, the basic rules sound simple enough, but the concepts are nuanced in so many ways that westerners are usually helpless to grasp anything but the simplest variations. Asking me to abandon the use of Khun altogether was Kate’s way of telling me we were about to have a western conversation, not a Thai one. I was both pleased and relieved at that, but now even more curious what the subject of our little chat would turn out to be.

  “Thank you for coming today,” Kate said. “I know this isn’t a particularly good time for you.”

  I didn’t ask her how she knew that, and I certainly didn’t ask her exactly what it was she thought she knew.

  “I’m glad you called me,” I said instead, leaving it at that.

  Then I went straight to the subject that so far we had both been circling like two airport guards around an abandoned suitcase.

  “What do you know about Mike O’Connell’s murder?” I asked her.

  “You do get to the point, don’t you, Jack?”

  “I try to.”

  “Did you read the files on the disk I gave you?” Kate asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Probably what you want me to think.”

  “Which is?”

  “That the marshals aren’t here to arrange for Karsarkis’ extraditquo; extion, or even to kidnap him. They’re here to kill him.”

  Kate nodded slowly. I wondered fleetingly if she was agreeing I was right, or just agreeing I was indeed thinking what she wanted me to think.

  “Is that why O’Connell was murdered?” I asked when I got bored with her nodding. “Are they starting with Karsarkis’ people and working up to him? Or did somebody mistake O’Connell for Karsarkis and just screw up?”

  Before Kate could answer, a young boy materialized beside us carrying a metal tray as big as he was. A woman in a rumpled blue sarong and a white blouse rushed over and began transferring pink plastic plates from his tray to our table. There were half a dozen of them and they all seemed to contain either fish or prawns in some form. I assumed these must be the dishes we had ordered when we had run the gauntlet of fish tanks on our way in, although to tell the truth I wa
sn’t absolutely sure. The woman completed her task by placing a plate of rice in front of each of us, and then she and the boy withdrew as quietly as they had come.

  Kate reached across, took my plate, and spooned small portions of each of the dishes around my rice. Then she set the plate back in front of me, lifted her own plate, and served herself. The gesture really meant nothing in particular—Thai women frequently did that sort of thing whether they were dining with men or even with other women—but the sheer gracefulness of it still charmed me every time I experienced it.

  “We don’t know exactly what happened, Jack. Mike O’Connell could have been killed by mistake, or it might have been intentional.”

  “Do you think the marshals shot him?”

  While she considered the prospect, Kate chewed thoughtfully on a bite of something that was unidentifiable, at least to me.

  “Possibly,” she said after a moment. “But it’s hard for me to see a US marshal coldly murdering someone with a silenced sniper rifle.”

  Kate glanced at me as if she was asking me to confirm her impression of what United States government agents might or might not do. I kept my features neutral. If she wanted to presume the essential morality of the kind of guys I had known back in Washington, that was okay with me, but she was on her own.

  “Then who?” I asked.

  “How much do you know about Plato Karsarkis’ business operations, Jack?”

  “Not very much.” I thought a moment. “Not anything really, except for what I read in the newspapers.”

  “And what is that?”

  “That Karsarkis was indicted by a federal grand jury for doing deals with the Iraqis back before the war. He used one of his trading companies to barter embargoed oil or something like that.”

  Kate leaned forward, lifted one of the serving spoons, and pushed at a fat prawn on one of the plastic plates.

  “What do you know about the structure of his operations?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That surprises me. I thought the transcript I gave you would be quite enlightening to a man with your background.”

  So that’s why the excerpts from Cynthia Kim’s deposition had been on the disk, to illustrate the company structures through which Karsarkis had worked. I had skimmed over all that at the time without appreciating its significance.

  “Never mind,” Kate continued. “You want the high points now?”

  “Sure.”

  Kate put the spoon down and left the prawn where it was.

  “Plato Karsarkis controls a web of companies with operations in forty-seven countries. We have identified sixty-one of those companies so far, and we know there are a number of others we haven’t yet traced. A company called Icon Holdings seems to be at the center of everything. It was registered in Luxembourg in 1987, and it has since taken over control of most of Plato’s operating companies.”

  “Does Karsarkis personally control Icon?” I asked.

  “We think so, but of course it’s not straightforward. Icon’s stock is actually registered to seven different trusts located in the Cayman Islands, Monte Carlo, the British Virgin Islands, and the Netherlands Antilles, and each of those trusts has a different bank as its trustee, most of those banks registered in Hong Kong and Panama. Tracing the real ownership of Icon would be almost impossible, which is of course the whole point of establishing that sort of structure in the first place.”

  “What do these companies controlled by Icon actually do?”

  “A fairly usual range of things: oil trading, commodity brokerage, real estate, banking, pharmaceuticals, mining, air transportation, shipping. The sort of diversified commercial operations typical of large multinational companies, at least on the surface.”

  I said nothing.

  “Those are also the sorts of businesses frequently used to conceal a whole range of other activities, Jack. Arms dealing, money laundering, bribery. Sometimes worse.”

  “That’s a pretty big stretch, Kate. By that logic General Electric could be the world’s largest terrorist organization.”

  “Plato Karsarkis’ companies started dealing smuggled Iraqi oil around the time the United Nations embargo was imposed on Iraq before the first Gulf War. As far as we can tell, Icon controls a Panamanian oil trading company called Sedco that was the primary vehicle for those sales. We also have reason to believe Sedco had close links with Iraqi intelligence. It may even have been a major source of barter funding for the Iraqi weapons procurement program.”

  “I guess I’m not following you. Why does the Thai National Intelligence Agency have any interest in a Panamanian oil trading company even if it actually did have some kind of link to Iraqi intelligence at one time? That’s old news. There is no Iraqi intelligence service anymore.”

  “Back then Iraqi Intelligence also had a lot of operations here, Jack.”

  “Where?” Now I was sure I had lost her. “Surely you don’t mean in Thailand?”

  “Yes, here in Thailand. Also in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The same countries where Karsarkis sold most of the embargoed oil.”

  A mobile telephone began to ring and Kate retrieved her purse from beneath her feet and took out her phone.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, glancing at its screen. “I have to take this.” She stood up and moved off until she was out of earshot, then lifted the phone and turned her back.

  I noticed her driver and security man both stand at the same time and spread apart slightly. They kept a professional distance while she talked, but they stayed directly bed directtween Kate and the restaurant’s entrance. They looked as if they thought a terrorist hit squad might charge into the restaurant at any moment.

  I could only hope they were wrong about that.

  THIRTY FIVE

  THE WOMAN IN the rumpled sarong returned and refilled Kate’s wine glass.

  “One more beer?” she asked, pointing to my empty Heineken bottle.

  I nodded. Why not?

  I didn’t really have anything important to do for the rest of the afternoon so getting a little sleepy from the beer wouldn’t be a complete disaster. Besides, I figured having a beautiful master spy whispering exotic tales of shadowy international intelligence operations into my ear justified at least a modicum of flexibility.

  Out over the Gulf of Thailand thunderheads were building and the afternoon light had turned thin and watery. I watched as lightning danced among towers of gunmetal-colored cloud somewhere very far away. The breeze kicked up a notch and brought with it distant smells of dead and dying fish. It rippled the plastic palm trees lining the railings and they made a sound like tape being ripped from a box.

  A young boy brought me a fresh Heineken. At almost the same moment, Kate returned to the table.

  “Does the name Ramzi Yousef mean anything to you?” she asked, sitting down and watching the boy until he had gone.

  “Didn’t he have something to do with the first World Trade Center attack? The one back in…” I hesitated, searching my memory for the right year. “Was it 1993?”

  “That’s right. In 1992, Yousef entered the United States on a fake passport supplied by Iraqi intelligence and made contact with a group of Iraqi immigrants who had grandiose plans for attacking Americans on their own soil. Yousef organized those people into the operation that eventually became the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.”

  “Okay,” I nodded.

  I had absolutely no idea where Kate was going with any of this, but it was a nice afternoon and I was on my second Heineken so I was willing to listen to her pretty much as long as she wanted to talk.

  “The Americans didn’t get Yousef until 1995,” she continued. “During the two years following the first World Trade Center attack, Yousef spent most of his time here in Southeast Asia mounting elaborate operations to kill westerners.”

  I scooped up a spoonful of rice with a spiral of garlic calamari in it and chewed unhurriedly, waiting for Kate to get to whatever point she wante
d to make.

  “Do you remember a couple of months after the attack on the World Trade Center there was an attempt to assassinate George Bush with a car bomb in Kuwait?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Two hundred pounds of Portuguese PE-4A was packed into the door panels of a Toyota Landcruiser, but the Kuwaitis got wind of the plot and grabbed the Landcruiser before it made it anywhere near Bush. They also arrested seventeen people who were connected in one way or another with the plan. The two ringleaders eventually admitted to your FBI that they were acting under the instructions of the Iraqi intelligence and they named Yousef as their contact. The batch of plastic explosives they used was identified as having come from Malaysia.”

  “That doesn’t mean much,” I said as I sipped at my Heineken. “The stuff could have passed through dozens of hands before it ended up in that Landcruiser.”

  “It could have, but it didn’t. Do you remember the attempted bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok?”

  “No.”

  “That was in 1994. A stolen water truck packed with explosives was in a traffic accident very close to the Israeli Embassy and the Arab-looking man who was driving it abandoned the truck in the street and ran away. The police towed it off and never bothered to look inside, at least they didn’t until it began to smell. When they finally opened the back, they found the decomposing body of the truck’s owner and enough explosives to take a square kilometer out of the middle of Bangkok. We can put Yousef in the room in the Nana Hotel where the detonator was built and the bomb assembled.”

  All of a sudden Kate was hitting a little close to home. The Nana Hotel is a third-rate tourist dump immediately across the street from a complex of go-go bars and burger joints where every western male in Bangkok has gone at least a few times, although most refuse to admit to it.

  “Then after that came Project Bojinka,” Kate said while I was still trying to calculate the exact distance between the Nana Hotel and my apartment in Chidlom Place.