DON'T GET CAUGHT (The Jack Shepherd Novels Book 5)

by Jake Needham

  I said nothing. It was true I knew a few people. Not nearly as many as I once had known, but some. Where was Jello going with this? If he wasn’t asking me to provide legal support for Kate or to try to organize diplomatic pressure on her behalf, I didn’t see what that left.

  Then Jello told me what that left.

  “I want you to get her out of the country. With the help of your friends in the United States, I want you to come up with a plan to grab Kate away from the army and slip her out of Thailand before General Prasert puts her in prison.”

  I sat and stared at Jello.

  “You’re not serious,” I said when I eventually regained the power of speech.

  “I’m completely serious.”

  “But that’s ridiculous, man. The United States government isn’t going to get involved in a domestic political dispute in Thailand.”

  Jello said nothing.

  “Forget it,” I said with a firm shake of my head. “There is no fucking way that’s going to happen. None. There must be something else we can do.”

  “I can only think of one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We find a way to get her out of the country ourselves without any help from the United States.”

  I looked away and shook my head again.

  “My God, Jello, listen to yourself, man. That’s crazy. We’re only two guys. We can’t take on the entire Thai army.”

  “We have to, Jack.”

  “Bullshit. We’d just make everything worse. Let them have their stupid little trial and maybe—”

  “They’re going to kill her, Jack.”

  I’m sure Jello knew that would shut me down and it did.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “They’re going to murder Kate, Jack. There’s no doubt about it. They’ve made up their minds.”

  I examined Jello’s face. He appeared to be completely serious.

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said after few a moments of complete silence. “Whatever you think you know, that’s not going to happen. If the army kills Kate, they’ll set off a civil war. Surely they understand that.”

  “Of course they do. That’s why they’re putting her on trial for corruption.”

  I shook my head. “I really don’t follow what you’re telling me here.”

  “Look, Jack, it’s going to go down this way. She’ll go to trial and be convicted, and she’ll go to prison.”

  “You already told me that, but what does—”

  “And when she’s in prison, a prisoner to whom General Prasert has promised a pardon will kill her. Then some guards will kill that prisoner and all the loose ends will be neatly tied up. Kate will be dead and General Prasert’s hands will be clean.”

  “You don’t know that. You couldn’t. You’re only guessing.”

  “I’m a senior officer in Special Branch, Jack. We collect intelligence. We have sources. I’m telling you, it’s all been planned. This is how it’s going to go down. There’s not the slightest doubt.”

  The silence stretched on for quite a while after that. I simply had no idea what to say. Suddenly I found myself thinking I wanted more coffee, but I didn’t feel like walking back down to the Pacific Coffee Company. I had no idea what Jello was thinking. He just sat there like a gigantic Buddha figure with his hands folded over his belly.

  “How long are you in Hong Kong for?” I eventually asked.

  “I have to go back tomorrow. If I stay away any longer than that, people will start asking question about where I’ve been.”

  I sighed and rubbed at my face with both hands.

  “Look, let me make a few calls. I don’t have much hope it will accomplish anything, but I’ll talk to some people in Washington and see what happens.” I glanced at my watch. “It’s the middle of the night there now. I can’t reach anyone until sometime tonight here in Hong Kong.”

  Jello nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Do you have my cell number?” I asked.

  Jello nodded again.

  “And I have yours so—”

  “No, you don’t.”

  I cocked my head at Jello. “What?”

  “I don’t want Jack Shepherd’s number to show up on my call records. You’re not a real popular man in Thailand these days.”

  That was true enough.

  Jello fished a white card out of the front pocket of his Hawaiian shirt and handed it to me. A telephone number was written on it, one with a Hong Kong country code.

  “I picked up a local burner for you to call,” he said.

  “So you assumed I would agree to call you and you had a burner phone all set up and the number already written on a card to give to me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I looked at Jello. He looked back at me.

  “Okay,” I shrugged. “I’ll call you tonight.”

  AFTER JELLO LEFT, I roused myself to walk back down to the Pacific Coffee Company and get another large coffee. There was a wooden counter facing the window that looked out onto Hollywood Road and I pulled up a stool. I sipped my coffee and sat watching people walk past on the sidewalk for a long while.

  Hollywood Road wasn’t much like the rest of Hong Kong. It was the polar opposite of a neighborhood like Mongkok that was filled with surging hordes of the urban poor hanging on by their fingernails. Hollywood Road was lined with trendy restaurants and expensive antique shops and it drew the cream of the ladies who lunch. I had spent more than one late morning perched on a stool at the Pacific Coffee Company with a large cup of black coffee contemplating the passing parade of the well-dressed and vacuous.

  There wasn’t much to do in Hong Kong except make money, and one way the rich and powerful men of Hong Kong displayed how much money they had made was by maintaining a stable of well-turned-out young women whose every whim they expensively indulged. These young women spent their days having lunch with other well-turned-out young women they didn’t particularly like and buying expensive things they didn’t particularly want. The men who supported them were of course far too busy making more money to join them.

  Whatever my personal views on the social consequences of all that might be, I had to admit Hollywood Road gained a certain luster from the daily attendance of the indulged and bored, and I was not so foolish as to turn my back on beauty and elegance anytime I stumbled across it. There wasn’t all that much of it around in Hong Kong.

  After a while I sloshed the last of my coffee around in the bottom of the red paper cup and began to replay my conversation with Jello in my head.

  The military coup that deposed Kate’s government had been, like most military coups in Thailand, bloodless. The army removed elected governments in Thailand with monotonous regularity and the coups went down about the same way every time. The military rolled a few tanks into the streets, announced that the civilian government had been removed from power, and formed a committee of generals to rule the country. Sometimes the committee was merely a fig leaf for one-man rule, and sometimes it really was a committee. Either way, the civilian government always folded up and slunk away without fighting back. After a year or two of military rule, elections would be held and a new government voted into office, quite often one headed by the same general who led the coup in the first place.

  The one good thing you could say about military coups in Thailand was that they seldom involved any physical violence. After all, if the civilian government always gave up when the army announced it was taking over and walked away without fighting back, there was no need to shoot anybody, was there? It might seem strange to westerners, but that was the way of the famously non-confrontational Thais.

  Thais liked to brag that Thailand was the only country in Asia that has never been conquered by a foreign power, which was true in a sense. The Thais have always surrendered so fast whenever a possible conqueror appeared on the horizon that no fo
reign power had ever been quick enough to manage a good conquering. When a civilian government was overthrown by the military in Thailand, it worked exactly the same way. A complete surrender came so fast no one ever got hurt.

  So Jello couldn’t possibly be right about General Prasert setting up Kate to kill her in prison, could he? Nothing like that had ever happened in the entire history of Thailand. When prime ministers were deposed, they didn’t get killed. They just moved to Switzerland and started drawing on the Swiss bank accounts they had built up over their years in office. Surely, I told myself, the claim that Kate’s life was in danger was a bit of hysteria Jello was throwing around to stampede me into doing something he wanted me to do for reasons that he wasn’t telling me. But what could it be?

  I stood up and launched my empty cup toward a trash barrel. It swished in dead center. Yes! I shot both arms straight up in the signal for a successful three-pointer. Two Chinese girls sitting at a nearby table looked at me and shrunk away. Another crazy foreigner, I could almost hear them muttering.

  Maybe my three-pointer was a good omen. Maybe it was a sign I had this figured out.

  Jello was probably trying to bullshit me into doing something for his own reasons, and Kate wasn’t in anything like the danger he claimed. I still had two cell phone numbers for Kate somewhere. I’d find them and call her to be certain I was right, of course, but I was already pretty sure I was.

  I pushed through the glass door out to Hollywood Road, turned right, and headed back to my office.

  NINE

  I FOUND THE numbers I had for Kate, but when I called them I discovered both had been disconnected. That didn’t necessarily indicate anything sinister, did it? I hadn’t spoken to Kate in a while. Perhaps she changed her numbers to prevent annoying telephone calls from people she didn’t want to talk to anymore.

  Like, maybe, me.

  I drummed my fingers on the library table and thought about what to do. Then an idea occurred to me, and I decided it was a pretty good idea. I kicked back in my chair, swung my feet up on the table, and scrolled through my address book until I found Pete Logan’s number.

  Pete Logan is a cantankerous son of a bitch who’s been the legal attaché in the American Embassy in Bangkok for several years, and we’ve been friends for most of that time. I’ve always thought legal attaché is a terrific title since it sounds terribly old world to me and invokes baroque visions of cutaway coats, red sashes covered with medals, and formal parties in enormous, gold-trimmed ballrooms. Sadly, as with a lot of titles, the reality is considerably less than the appearance. Legal attaché is simply the way the State Department identifies the resident FBI man posted in every American embassy.

  And that’s what Pete is: a special agent of the FBI posted in Bangkok. At least, that’s what Pete says he is. Sometimes I wondered. Pete has a habit of turning up right in the middle of all kinds of strange stuff and offering lame explanations about what he’s doing there. Was Pete really a CIA guy operating under FBI cover? Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit.

  “Goddamn,” Pete barked into the phone when he answered. “Is this really the internationally famous Jack Shepherd calling me?”

  “Obviously you’ve got your caller ID cranked up to full volume. How are you, Pete?”

  “You in Bangkok?”

  “Nope, Hong Kong.”

  “Uh-oh. If you’re not calling to buy me booze, you must want something.”

  “Well…”

  “Yeah, I thought so. It’s too much to hope you might be calling out of sincere friendship to find out how your old pal is feeling these days. You’re calling because you want something and you know I’m a generous guy who’s always ready to help a friend.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re a self-absorbed prick whose first question about everything is what’s in it for him.”

  “Okay, I was just confirming that it’s really you, Jack. And that deeply hurtful response absolutely proves it’s really you. No doubt about it.”

  Pete could go on like this all night. I’d heard him do it. But today I didn’t have the patience for his bullshit so I got right down to the reason I was calling.

  “What do you hear about Kate these days?”

  “In what context are you asking?”

  “Context?”

  “Do you mean what do I hear about your old girlfriend’s sex life—”

  “She wasn’t my girlfriend, Pete.”

  “Oh… well, if you say not. Can you see me winking over the phone?”

  “You really can’t stop being a prick, can you?’

  “I tried once. The worst ten minutes of my life.”

  “Can we get back to the subject here?”

  “Sure.” Pete paused. “What was the subject here?”

  “Kate.”

  “Right.”

  “I asked what you’ve heard about her recently. What she’s been doing since the army forced her out of office. Like that.”

  There was a silence so long and so complete I thought we had been disconnected.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m here, Jack.” Another pause. A grunt. “Given the timing of this call, I’m going to take a wild guess you know Kate’s been arrested.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve got good contacts. I only found out myself yesterday.”

  “Do you know exactly what arrested means in her case?”

  Pete paused again. There something he was trying to avoid saying. But what was it?

  “She’s under house arrest. From what I hear, it’s not a very rigorous detention. She’s more or less free to move around wherever she likes as long as she doesn’t leave the country. But of course that could change anytime.”

  “What is she charged with?”

  “That’s not entirely clear, but it’s got something to do with government corruption.”

  “Are they claiming she took money when she was in office?”

  “No. It looks like they’re saying some of the members of her cabinet were taking bribes in connection with a government scheme to support rice prices and that she knew and did nothing about it.”

  “Is that true?”

  “I honestly couldn’t tell you.”

  Another small silence fell and in it I could hear Pete waiting for me to go on. I knew he wouldn’t lie to me, at least not directly, but he might not tell me the truth either unless I asked exactly the right questions. And he was waiting to see if I was going to do that.

  “What happens now, Pete?”

  “There’ll be a trial, of course, and—”

  “When?”

  “You well know these things sometimes take years in Thailand. The justice system here isn’t exactly noted for its efficiency.”

  “That’s not exactly an answer to my question.”

  “No, it isn’t, is it?” Pete grunted again. “Honestly? I’m hearing this time may be different. This time the trial might be soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “A month.”

  “A month? Are you serious?”

  “That’s what I’m hearing.”

  “Is she going to be convicted?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure she will be,” Pete sighed. “General Prasert isn’t going to charge the former PM with corruption and hold a show trial just to find her not guilty.”

  “So then what?”

  “Why are you so interested in all this, Jack? Are you planning on offering your services to represent her at her trial?”

  “I doubt that would work in her favor.”

  “Just as long as you understand that. So why all the questions?”

  “She’s a friend, Pete. I’m concerned about her.”

  Pete sighed again. He sounded tired.

  “I think they’ll send her to prison, Jack. At least for a token term. There’s no reason to go through all this and then send her home. Some prison time seems to me to be inevitable.”

  “Is she safe?”

  “Sure. They wouldn’t
dare harm her. That would set off unrest they might not be able to put a lid on. Even ignite something close to a civil war. These guys aren’t that stupid.”

  “And you’d bet her life on that, so to speak.”

  “I’ve got nothing to do with any of this, Jack. You asked me what I’ve heard and I’m telling you, but I’m only an interested observer. The FBI’s not involved in any way.”

  “Are you going to get involved?”

  A note of caution crept into Pete’s voice. “What are you talking about?”

  “I think it’s a clear enough question. Is the government of the United States going to try to put a stop to all this before it turns nasty and people get hurt?”

  “Now hang on there. I never said anything was going to get nasty, and I never said anyone was going to get hurt.”

  “Kate is. If they send her to prison, she’s certainly at risk of getting hurt or worse, and you know it.”

  There was another long pause. When Pete finally spoke again he sounded like he was speaking for the record. I suddenly wondered if he had been recording our entire conversation from the beginning.

  “As far as I know, the government of the United States has no plans to intervene. This is strictly an internal matter and something for Thailand to deal with as it sees fit. The United States should stay completely out of it. That will certainly be my recommendation if anybody asks me, which I doubt they will.”

  “So let me see if I’ve got this straight. In a month or so, Kate will be put on trial for corruption. You think she’s going to be convicted and sentenced to prison for an indeterminate term. And the government of the United States isn’t going to try to help her in any way. Right?”

  “That about sums it up.”

  Maybe it did, and maybe it didn’t. I thought about Jello’s insistence Kate would be killed in prison to keep General Prasert’s hands clean, but I decided not to mention it to Pete. I didn’t see what telling him would get me, and I didn’t like giving away things I knew, or even thought I might know, without getting something in return.

  “My advice to you, Jack, is that you shouldn’t get involved either. Having you on her side wouldn’t help Kate. You’re not very popular around here. You’ve been connected with too many of the wrong people.”