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

by Jake Needham

  A few months after our meeting at Sotheby’s, Anita simply packed up her whole studio and moved from London to Bangkok. After that, her career really took off. Anita always said it was the lush sensuality of Thailand that had given her work the push it needed, but naturally I held to the theory that I might have had at least a little something to do with it.

  I glanced back over my shoulder at the big painting hanging on the wall facing my desk, the only one of Anita’s paintings I still had. That painting was Anita the way I remembered her.

  I said I had lived some of the best days of my life in Bangkok, but I had also lived some of my worst days there, too. When I lost my job and my wife, those were as bad as any days I had ever lived anywhere. Jack’s big adventure ended with the proverbial whimper, and every time I thought about those times they still sucked.

  Walking away from the wreckage in Bangkok, I rebuilt my life in Hong Kong, and I had only been back once since then. I had known it was a bad idea before I went, but I had gone anyway because it was what I had to do not to let a client down. It turned out to be considerably less than my finest hour. The mess I was trying to fix went from bad to very bad to almost unbelievably bad and some people ended up dead, mostly the wrong people. When it was all over, I was held incommunicado at the American Embassy for several days and then unceremoniously hustled out of the country.

  I had always assumed I wouldn’t be welcome back in Thailand again, but I had never tried to enter the country after that and hadn’t been certain that I was actually on the black list. Now I was certain. Jello knew stuff like that, and that was why he had given me the Canadian passport. If Jello thought I had to enter Thailand using another passport and another name, the consequences of entering Thailand again as Jack Shepherd wouldn’t be pretty.

  I winced when I realized I was standing there at least half seriously thinking about going to Bangkok. Was I out of my damn mind?

  I WENT BACK to my library table and sat behind it. I pushed the coffee away and looked at the last bit of egg tart lying there on a napkin. The edges of the soft pastry had crumbled and the yellow custard of the tart quivered at me in invitation. Without another thought, I popped it into my mouth. Then I wiped my mouth on the napkin and dumped it into the wastebasket.

  AND, JUST LIKE that, I knew that I had decided to go to Bangkok.

  I would talk to this accountant and meet the IT guy who wanted to screw Eddie Lo, and I might even try to talk to Kate and see if there was something I could do to help her after all.

  I opened my laptop, logged onto the Cathay Pacific website, and found the reservation Jello made for me… well, for John Smith. I rebooked it for a flight the next morning. After scrolling back and forth through TripAdvisor a few times, I booked a room at the Sheraton on Sukhumvit Road for myself… well, for John Smith. Finally, I emailed the car service I use when I have to go to the airport in Hong Kong and arranged for them to pick me up tomorrow morning at Freddy’s apartment.

  I was all set.

  I was going to Bangkok.

  I was going to Bangkok tomorrow, and I would see what happened from there.

  A hell of a plan, wasn’t it?

  SEVENTEEN

  THE CAR WAS waiting when I went downstairs the next morning. The service had sent a big black Tesla sedan driven by the smallest Chinese man I had ever seen. It looked like a car he might use to drive people to a funeral. I hoped there wasn’t a message in that somewhere.

  As soon as I settled into the back seat, the driver proudly announced that the car had wi-fi. It also had an Air Supply CD and he played it all the way to the airport. Every time I asked him to cut off the music, he bobbed his head, grinned hugely, and said, “Air Supply!” After a while I gave up and hummed along.

  Cathay Pacific’s business class offers individual seating modules down both sides of the cabin so I avoided having to endure the torture of sitting next to someone who talked all the way to Bangkok. The flight time was only about three hours. That was just long enough for me to think about what an idiot I was for doing this, but not long enough for me explain to myself why I was doing it.

  I had a bad case of nerves about handing some Thai immigration officer a fake passport. I had never done anything like that before and I concentrated on calming myself so I wouldn’t look nervous when I got to the immigration counter. I accomplished that with meditation, deep breathing, and two very large whiskeys. The first two techniques were useless, but the whiskeys did the job just fine.

  To be on the safe side, I slipped my American passport into one shoe and my own credit cards into the other. Not the most comfortable arrangement for walking through an airport perhaps, but when I put both shoes back on I discovered it was less uncomfortable than I expected it to be. All those times I had entered Thailand before, surely more than a hundred, I had never once had a bag opened by customs or even spoken to a customs agent. There was still a first time for everything, of course, and today would have been a really lousy day for that to happen. I couldn’t imagine how I would explain having a passport and credit cards in a different name from the one I used to enter the country.

  Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport is a beautiful glass and steel structure laid out in the shape of a huge H, but it is so stuffed with shops and restaurants that you feel more like you’ve landed at a shopping mall than an airport. Even the walkways are clogged with vendors and it’s always a real battle to make your way through the place. The immigration halls are famously thronged, and waiting in line for an hour or more after arrival is common. Since I flew in business class, I was spared at least part of the arrival hassle. Cathay Pacific provided me with a priority pass to a special section of the immigration hall reserved for airline crews, diplomats, and the annoyingly well off. I enjoyed being in the short line for a change. I enjoyed it even more when I thought about Jello paying for it.

  Up at the immigration desk I pushed John Smith’s Canadian passport across the counter along with my entry card. I waited apprehensively for red lights to flash and alarm bells to ring. Of course, nothing happened. The young and quite attractive woman behind the counter who was dressed in a crisp military-looking uniform took the passport and entry card without even glancing at me, and I heard the click of computer keys as she set to work doing whatever it is that immigration officers do when they type stuff into computer terminals.

  There wasn’t a visa in the passport. Canadians receive a thirty-day entry into Thailand without a visa. I had looked it up just to be sure.

  After a few moments, the young woman lifted an arm and flapped a perfectly manicured hand in a gesture that could have meant anything. Was she calling the SWAT team to take me into custody? Surely she had an alarm button under the counter to summon help if she detected a problem with a passport. She wouldn’t do that by sticking a hand in the air and waving it, would she? I still hadn’t decided what the gesture meant and how immediate a threat it was when the woman glanced up with an annoyed frown on her quite lovely face and pointed to a camera mounted above the glass partition separating us.

  Every visitor to Thailand is photographed on entry and the woman only wanted me to move into the right position for the camera. A photograph shouldn’t be a problem for me. Not unless somebody went through the photographs and recognized me or ran them all through a facial recognition algorithm and got a hit, but what were the chances of that? At least there was no fingerprint scanner. It would have been easy to out me that way. Thank God for small favors.

  I shifted my feet onto the outlines of footprints on the floor that were there to tell visitors where to stand for the camera, and I was so relieved nothing was apparently amiss that I had an enormous smile on my face. The woman frowned even harder. Perhaps you weren’t supposed to smile in an immigration photograph.

  The woman’s stamp went clicky-clack on my entry card and again on a page in the Canadian passport. She ripped off part of the entry card and stapled it into my passport, and then she tossed the passport back on the co
unter and pushed it through the slot in the glass partition without bothering to look up at me again.

  “Thank you,” I said as I picked it up.

  The female immigration agent said nothing.

  I had gotten into Thailand without being arrested. It was a start.

  I stopped at a kiosk outside the baggage hall and bought a local prepaid SIM card for my phone loaded with enough talk time and data access to see me through at least a week. The girl behind the counter asked for identification, and I handed over the Canadian passport and watched her record John Smith’s details as the purchaser of the SIM. Suddenly it occurred to me that having an untraceable SIM card was a pretty cool idea. And if having one untraceable SIM card was pretty cool, then having three untraceable SIM cards would be even cooler yet. I held up three fingers, and the girl smiled and nodded as if every visitor to Bangkok bought a whole pile of untraceable SIM cards for their phone when they got off the plane. For all I knew, maybe they did.

  I paid for the SIMs in cash from the wads of Thai baht in my briefcase. I had exchanged a big pile of dollars for Thai baht at the airport before I left Hong Kong. Since I could only use Jello’s MasterCard for identification, I figured I would burn through cash pretty fast, and exchanging a large amount in Hong Kong would attract less attention than it might in Bangkok.

  In the taxi, I slipped off my shoes as discreetly as possible and put Jack Shepherd’s American passport and credit cards back in my briefcase. Maybe I wasn’t going to get into as much trouble with this little drama as I feared. Maybe I was even starting to get the hang of all this international-man-of-mystery stuff.

  Checking in at the Sheraton was as uneventful as my arrival at the airport. The polite young man behind the desk accepted the Canadian passport and the Royal Bank of Canada MasterCard from me. A couple of minutes later I signed the registration card, and he handed everything back with a card key for my room.

  “Thank you, Mr. Smith,” he said. “I hope you have a nice stay with us.”

  A bellman stepped forward to take my luggage, and five minutes after that I was in a very nice room on the ninth floor closing the door behind the departing bellman.

  I had never realized before how easy it was to pass myself off as somebody I wasn’t. Of course, I had a passport attesting to me being a Canadian named John Smith, a passport Jello insisted was genuine, and I even had a credit card to match it. That caused me to begin wondering how many other people had done exactly the same thing I had. Maybe some people staying in this very hotel right now. I guess if you have the right paper you can be anyone you want to be. There was a lesson there, but it was one I wasn’t certain I wanted to think about too much.

  The room was stuffy so I turned the air conditioning down to its lowest setting. It probably didn’t matter. Hotels didn’t let guests set their own air conditioning temperature anymore. Too expensive. Instead they try to make you believe you have control by giving you a dial to twist, but it’s really the hotel that controls the amount of air conditioning you get in your room and they give you as little as they can get away with. That was another lesson about how life worked in the twenty-first century, and I didn’t much care for it either.

  Unpacking my briefcase, I gathered up Jack Shepherd’s American passport and credit cards and put them in one of the envelopes the hotel had provided in the center drawer of the room’s desk. I also took out the three local SIM cards I had bought at the airport, put one in my iPhone, and dropped the other two into a second envelope. Jack Shepherd’s Hong Kong SIM went into a third envelope. After that, I locked all three envelopes in the room safe.

  I took the accountant’s business card Uncle Benny had given me over to the desk and picked up the phone. Then I thought for a moment and put the phone down again.

  Using the room phone would put the calls into the hotel’s telephone records. In Bangkok, anyone willing to make a small payment to a member of the hotel staff would have access to those records. Since I was about to telephone a man connected to a Chinese triad, leaving a record of that call in a database as public as a hotel’s was a lousy idea.

  I picked up my iPhone instead. Since it was using one of the SIM cards I had bought at the airport with John Smith’s passport, now even my telephone was vouching for me being John Smith. And who was going to tell an iPhone that it was full of shit?

  All I knew about Wang Chou Lee was the address and telephone number on the card Uncle Benny gave me. I assumed the man was Chinese from his name, of course, and even more from his association with 14K. Chinese triads didn’t have associations with non-Chinese. Wang Chou Lee might well have a Thai passport but, even if he did, I had no doubt he was ethnic Chinese.

  Wang Chou Lee’s card said his office address was only a half-mile or so up Sukhumvit Road from where I was staying. It was an easily walkable distance in any other city, but nobody walked anywhere in Bangkok. The sultry heat, the broken-up sidewalks, and the jams of street vendors, beggars, and motorcycle taxi boys that were everywhere made trying to get around the city on foot unthinkable. Except to foreigners. We walked a lot, but of course we’re crazy. Just ask any Thai.

  I punched the number on the accountant’s card into my iPhone and hit the SEND button. Almost immediately, a woman answered with something in Thai, but she said it too rapidly for me to catch what it was.

  My Thai is better than the average westerner and my English is better than the average Thai, so I generally communicate well enough in Thailand. On the other hand, I had discovered there is often an advantage in not admitting I speak Thai fairly decently. Most Thais automatically assume westerners don’t speak their language and they frequently make all sorts of indiscreet comments to each other right in front of us since they don’t think we know what they’re saying. Sometimes I find that useful in a business context, but more often it just gives me a chuckle to politely ask people to translate what they said for me and listen to them turn sneering ethnic insults into bland commentaries about the weather.

  “I am calling Wang Chou Lee,” I said to the woman. I spoke loudly and enunciated each word in that exaggerated way Americans do when speaking to someone whom they aren’t certain speaks English well.

  There was a short silence. Just when I began wondering if I might have to blow my cover and speak Thai after all, the woman switched smoothly into English that had a hint of a New Zealand accent in it.

  “Mr. Wang is in a meeting. May I know who is calling?”

  Everybody in Washington was apparently in a meeting. Was everybody in Bangkok going to be in a meeting, too?

  “This is…” I started, and then abruptly I shut up and thought for a second.

  I hadn’t told Uncle Benny about Jello’s John Smith scam, so of course Benny would have told his 14K contact that Jack Shepherd was coming to meet the IT guy. I should have thought about who I was supposed to be before I made the call. Perhaps I wasn’t yet quite as good at this cloak and dagger stuff as I thought.

  “Are you there?” the woman called, her voice rising slightly. “Hello?”

  “Yes, sorry. I guess we lost the connection there for a moment.”

  “Yes. We must have.”

  Perhaps it was only my imagination, but I was pretty sure I heard something like a smile in the woman’s voice. Perhaps she was accustomed to fielding calls from people who weren’t entirely certain who they were supposed to be.

  “I was saying that my name is Jack Shepherd.”

  “Ah yes, Mr. Shepherd. Mr. Wang has been expecting your call.”

  “Can you tell me when—”

  “He would like to meet with you as soon as possible,” she interrupted, “but he’s not available until tomorrow.”

  “That’s fine. What time would he like me to be there?”

  “No, not here. He will meet you at noon at the Pacific City Club.”

  So Mr. Wang didn’t want me to come to his office, huh? Was that for my benefit, I wondered, or for his?

  “Do you know where the
Pacific City Club is?” the woman continued.

  As it happens, I did.

  The Pacific City Club is a luncheon club on top of a building called Two Pacific Place that is much favored by Chinese businessmen. I’d had more than a few lunches there back when I taught international business at Chula and did a little international legal consulting on the side. Chinese guys might love having white guys for lawyers, but they loved even more showing us off to their friends. You didn’t even have to do much actual legal work for them. Just wear a good suit, sit up straight, and look really white. I made out like a bandit.

  “Is it still at the top of Two Pacific Place?” I asked.

  “That’s it. In the lounge then. Tomorrow at noon.”

  “Fine.”

  “And one other thing, Mr. Shepherd. Please bring identification.”

  Now it was my turn to smile. I needed to provide identification to talk to an accountant? This was getting better and better.

  EIGHTEEN

  IT WAS TOO early for dinner, but I had nothing else I needed to do before I met with Mr. Wang tomorrow. I thought about calling Jello to see if he wanted to have a beer, but then I remembered he told me not to call unless I really needed to and I didn’t. It was thinking of Jello that reminded me then of the weird instructions he gave me back in Hong Kong at the Clipper Lounge.

  “Go to the bar of Le Bouchon in Patpong and introduce yourself to the bartender,” he said. “Arrangements are being made for you to meet discreetly with Kate, and the bartender will tell you what they are.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was just after six. Maybe I’d grab a cab and go over there. I knew Patpong pretty well, although I hadn’t been there in a while. It might be fun to walk around a little, see how the place had changed, and later if I felt like it I could drop in at Le Bouchon and see what these mysterious arrangements Jello claimed to have made were really all about.