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

by Jake Needham

  The only other possibility that left was Jello. He could have found my hotel easily enough, of course, but why in the world would Jello put me under surveillance either? He knew why I was in Bangkok. He didn’t have to get someone to follow me around to find out what I was up to.

  No, the most rational explanation was still the most obvious one. No one was actually following me.

  So why was I having such a difficult time convincing myself of that?

  Walking west along Sukhumvit, I continued looking around for the guy I had seen before. Naturally, before long the inevitable happened.

  I saw him. I saw him everywhere. I saw him over and over. Every Thai male on the street seemed to be of average height and average weight and wearing blue jeans.

  All of a sudden, among all those people who might have been the same guy I saw before, I saw someone I was certain really was the same guy I saw before. Well, maybe I wasn’t certain, but I was at least pretty sure. Okay, I was reasonably sure.

  No tan windbreaker this time, of course. He was wearing a white polo shirt with the tail hanging out over his jeans and ambling along about a hundred feet behind me. He was paying no obvious attention to me, but he was giving what seemed to me to be a ridiculous amount of attention to the front windows of the shops we walked past.

  It is a conceit among foreigners in Asian countries that we are invisible. The locals pay so little attention to us that we feel like no one notices us or sees what we do. When I spotted the familiar looking guy wearing the white polo shirt and jeans, my sense of invisibility instantly evaporated. I couldn’t have felt any more conspicuous if I had been driving a Rose Parade float down the middle of Sukhumvit Road.

  If I had paused to consider the matter logically, I would probably have decided it didn’t matter in the slightest if this guy really was following me. I was only going to dinner by myself. Why did I care if he watched me do that?

  But I didn’t consider the matter logically. I was pissed off.

  Who did this bastard think he was, tailing me down Sukhumvit Road? I felt an overwhelming need to ditch this guy, if only to show him he couldn’t take me for just another white jerk too dumb to realize he was being followed through an Asian city.

  I knew how much trouble I had distinguishing Thai faces in crowds of other Thais, and I’d bet money white guys mostly looked alike to this clown, too. What I needed now was a place where there were a lot of white guys and not many Thai males of average height and weight wearing white polo shirts and blue jeans.

  Fortunately, I knew exactly where that place was, and it was less than a five-minute walk away.

  NANA PLAZA IS a three-story, U-shaped structure of mottled concrete built around an open courtyard. Both the courtyard and all the space in the structure above it are crammed with bars brimming over with Eurotrash disco music and good-looking Thai girls. There was no better place in Bangkok to find a crowd of white guys in which to lose myself.

  If Nana Plaza were in L.A., it would be called a strip mall. But if Nana Plaza were in L.A., it would be just another crummy collection of falafel stands, tanning salons, and discount luggage shops. There was no chance at all it would be what it is in Bangkok. Nothing less than the world’s largest cathouse.

  I worked my way up Soi Nana through the sidewalk food vendors, stepped around a tangle of parked motorcycles, and entered Nana Plaza between the pair of open-air bars that flank its narrow entranceway. Brushing past a crowd of determined bar touts, I walked through the central courtyard all the way to the back to a place that had always been my favorite spot in the plaza, a rectangular bar out in front of one of the go-go joints that offers both a comprehensive view of the action and some of the very best espresso in town. Seriously. It really does.

  When I got to the back of the plaza I stopped, momentarily confused, and looked around. The punters were still the same crowd I remembered — a bunch of middle-aged, overwhelmingly Caucasian males — almost nothing else seemed familiar. The comfortable, ramshackle sleaziness of the Nana Plaza I knew from before had been displaced with the overwrought, gaudy sleaziness of something completely different. Instead of the old wooden bar where they used to serve that great espresso, there were new Formica and Plexiglas counters of purple and white lit from within and glowing like flying saucers. It was tacky, tawdry, and kitschy. The place looked like a Florida motel. It was like finding your favorite dive bar had been replaced by a Hooters.

  After a few moments of grief for the passing of an era I knew would never return, I picked out a bar stool that wasn’t too conspicuous yet faced outward toward the center of the plaza. Although my comfortable old hangout might be gone, the schlocky mess that replaced it still offered a fine vantage point from which to enjoy a panorama of budding debauchery unmatched almost anywhere else on earth.

  A dumpy girl with greasy hair and a bad case of acne shuffled over to where I was sitting and stared at me without speaking.

  “Gafair yen,” I said. Iced coffee.

  The girl nodded vaguely and shuffled away. I leaned back and looked around.

  The neon signs blinking over curtained doorways on the floors of Nana Plaza above me looked much the same as I remembered them, and I was sure behind each of those doorways there were still throngs of smooth-skinned, young Thai girls swinging from polished chrome poles to the never-ending thump of disco music. The girls might not be as small and lithe as they once were — after all, McDonald’s and Krispy Kreme were now all over Thailand, too — but I would bet they still teetered along the same narrow runways wearing the same kind of towering high-heeled shoes. When they weren’t on stage, the girls sometimes came down and wandered through the plaza buying food from the local vendors, and the punters tossed back their beers, shifted their weight on their bar stools, and followed the girls with their eyes.

  The dumpy woman returned with my iced coffee in a beer glass. She held up an aluminum sugar bowl and raised her eyebrows in a question. I shook my head, and she took the chit for my coffee and tucked it into a round plastic cup that she left on the bar in front of me.

  I took a sip of the coffee and that was when I realized the guy on the next stool was looking sideways at me. He was a westerner in his mid-forties who looked like he had been on his way home from the office until a more interesting destination occurred to him. His briefcase was at his feet with his suit coat draped over it, and he had the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up and the knot of his tie pulled down. He looked harmless enough so I nodded and bobbed my glass at him before I put it back down on the bar.

  “Coffee?” he asked. He took another swig of his Singha beer straight from the bottle. “Honest to God?”

  “Honest to God,” I nodded.

  “Jesus wept.” The man’s broad Australian accent cut sharply through the babble of voices around us.

  Suddenly he grinned at me and swept an arm around to encompass the whole of our surroundings.

  “This place is just too damned fucked to face with nothing in your gut but coffee, mate.”

  I nodded my head noncommittally.

  “I used to love it here,” he continued, “but now… well, I don’t know.”

  “You think it’s changed?” I asked.

  “Changed? Changed? Bloody hell, you see this?”

  He reached out and pushed a plastic holder that was sitting on the bar toward me. It had a printed card mounted in it, and I picked it up and looked at it. It was a short menu of bar snacks.

  “Look at that shit,” the man grumbled. “Brie on a French baguette? Chicken hotdogs? Give me a fucking break, man. I don’t know what the hell is happening to this place.”

  My neighbor shook his head, went back to drinking his beer, and said nothing else.

  I returned the menu to the bar and sipped at my coffee. I started scanning the crowd for the man who appeared to be following me.

  TWENTY-SIX

  LOOKING AROUND NANA Plaza from my bar stool in the back, I could see no Thai males of average h
eight and weight wearing white polo shirts over blue jeans. Even if the guy had followed me into Nana Plaza, what was I worried about?

  No one likes to be followed, of course, and being followed, if I was being followed, naturally gives rise to a certain level of anxiety. But what real danger could I be in right now? What did I think the guy was going to do? Kidnap me? Shoot me? I was sitting in one of the most public places in Bangkok with at least three hundred Caucasian males all around me. Even if some Thai wanted to make a move on me, there was no way he would do it in the middle of Nana Plaza.

  All of a sudden I was embarrassed to realize I was even thinking about anything like that. My imagination was certainly getting the better of me.

  I shoved a couple of bills into the cup on the bar with my chit, drank the last of my iced coffee, and nodded to the Aussie next to me. He nodded back.

  It was time for me to get back to the Sheraton, but instead of walking perhaps I would take a taxi. Just this once. Just out of an abundance of caution.

  I had walked only a few steps across the plaza when I heard a man’s voice calling.

  “Jack! Jack, is that you?”

  Automatically I glanced toward the sound of the voice and I realized my mistake right away. I wasn’t Jack Shepherd. I was John Smith. How long was it going to take for me to get that through my head?

  A man was walking toward me, one hand half raised in greeting. He was a Caucasian like almost everyone in Nana Plaza, short and thickly built, but I was reasonably sure I didn’t recognize him. That didn’t really matter, of course. What mattered was that he recognized me.

  The man had a five-beer grin plastered across his face and thrust out his hand for a shake. I did my best to look clueless. It was remarkably easy.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t place you,” I said.

  “I’m Frank Russell, Jack. You reviewed some company documents for me when I was running a media group here and you were teaching at Chula.”

  “You’ve got me confused with someone else,” I said. “I’ve never taught anywhere.”

  The fellow looked genuinely perplexed. “You’re not Jack Shepherd?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “But you responded when I called to you.”

  “My name is John. Sometimes people call me Jack, so I thought…”

  I shrugged and left it at that. Close enough for government work.

  The guy kept staring at me. He didn’t appear to be buying my denial.

  “It’s just the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” he finally said. “You look exactly like him. You even sound like him. You’re American, aren’t you?”

  “No,” I shook my head, “Canadian.”

  “I don’t know what to say. It’s like you’re his twin brother or something.”

  I figured I ought to show a little curiosity. Isn’t that what someone genuinely mistaken for someone else would do?

  “Who is this guy you’re talking about?” I asked.

  “He’s a lawyer, an American. Used to be involved in all sorts of financial and political things here and then suddenly he just disappeared. He knew almost every key player in Thailand, I think, and they all knew him. As a matter of fact, I was talking to somebody high up in government just the other day who was asking about him.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  “You work for the government?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “At the America Embassy?”

  “No, I meant I work for the Thai government.”

  “The Thai government employs Americans?”

  “Well… it’s a special deal. There are several of us who work in an advisory capacity in the prime minister’s office.”

  Uh-oh.

  “The prime minister’s office?” I asked carefully.

  The fellow nodded.

  “You mean General Prasert, the guy who took over after the military coup?”

  The fellow nodded again.

  “The prime minister has Americans advising him?” I cleared my throat. “That’s a real surprise to me.”

  And it was.

  “Well… we keep it pretty quiet,” the guy said. “We’re really political consultants, to be honest with you. General Prasert knows he’ll have to allow elections again eventually and he intends to run himself. He seems to think Americans know how to win elections.”

  I probably should have let it go at that, but I figured it might be worth the risk to push my luck a little.

  “And it was someone in the prime minister’s office asking about this guy who looks like me?”

  I tried to make the question sound as casual as possible, but the man had enough beer in him that I doubted he would have become suspicious no matter what I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, and then he hesitated. “Well, to tell you the truth, it was General Prasert himself who was asking about Jack Shepherd.”

  Oh, crap.

  “Since I’m an American, too,” the man went on, “General Prasert asked me if I’d run across Shepherd in Bangkok recently. I guess he thinks we all know each other.”

  The fellow’s eyes narrowed, and he squinted at me again.

  “Wow,” he said. “I just can’t believe you’re not him.”

  I figured it was time to get out of there before my story fell apart.

  “Sorry, but I’ve got to run.” I offered my hand to shake, and the man took it automatically. “That was a great story you told me. I’m going to dine out on it for a long time. If I ever meet General Prasert, maybe I’ll tell him my name is Jack Shepherd.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” the fellow said, looking genuinely alarmed. “I really wouldn’t do that.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “No, man. That could get you into all kinds of trouble.”

  When we finished shaking hands, I walked away as fast as I could without actually breaking into a run. And I didn’t look back.

  What were the odds? An American advising General Prasert? An American who knew me and apparently talked to the general almost every day, and I had to run into him right in the middle of Nana Plaza?

  And what was all that stuff about General Prasert asking him if he had seen me in Bangkok? General Prasert wouldn’t have been asking that just as a matter of conversation. Not unless he had some reason to think I actually was in Bangkok right now and might be involved in something that might embarrass him.

  Like getting Kate out of the country before he could put her on trial.

  What were the odds? What were the fucking odds?

  AS SOON AS I was out of Nana Plaza, I headed straight for the first unoccupied taxi I saw and jumped in the back seat.

  The driver twisted around and peered at me. “Hello, boss, where you go?”

  “The Grand Hyatt,” I said.

  “Oh, very hard,” the driver said. “One way streets make go all the way—”

  “Just drive wherever you have to. I don’t care what it costs.”

  The driver gave me a huge smile and quickly pulled away before I could change my mind. He obviously thought he had landed a live one.

  The Grand Hyatt is a big hotel on Ratchadamri Road not far from the American Embassy, but I certainly wasn’t planning on moving over there from the Sheraton. I was going to the Hyatt because there was something about it I liked a lot. A back entrance on the ground floor of the hotel leads out to Ploenchit Road where there’s a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s and a lot of taxis. I could get dropped off at the lobby doors of the Hyatt, go down the stairs, and straight out the back again. Five minutes later I would be in a different taxi going to the Sheraton. If there wasn’t a whole surveillance team of skilled professionals on me, that would put me in the clear.

  I was beginning to feel like half of Bangkok knew I was in town and was keeping an eye on me. My little taxi trick wasn’t much, but I figured I should at least try to do something clever. And right then that was the best I could come up with.

  The taxi driver took full advantag
e of my generosity and selected a route that amounted to a complete tour of downtown Bangkok. I didn’t really mind. I needed time to think and a safe place to do it, and the backseat of a taxi wasn’t a bad option.

  I was a little worried about the guy who fingered me at Nana Plaza. Had he bought my protestations that I wasn’t Jack Shepherd, but some wandering Canadian named John instead?

  Maybe.

  Maybe not.

  And who the hell was that guy anyway, really? Foreigners in Bangkok are seldom who or what they seem to be. People come to Thailand, try on new identities, and dump those identities at the airport like abandoned luggage when they leave. This guy could have been anybody, even somebody who saw a personal advantage in making trouble for me. Perhaps he could hardly wait to tell General Prasert he had run into a guy he thought was Jack Shepherd but insisted he wasn’t.

  The Thai press generally uses the phrase the foreign community as a collective reference to Bangkok’s non-Thai residents, but the truth is there is neither anything particularly collective nor community-like about foreigners in Bangkok. On the contrary, most foreigners in Bangkok dislike most other foreigners in Bangkok, and many of them go out of their way to inflict whatever harm they can on each other.

  My own residency was only a couple of weeks along when I started noticing the phenomenon. I began calling it the Jungle Jim syndrome since the whole business rekindled childhood memories of a television series I used to watch every Saturday morning when I was about ten years old.

  The series was the tale of a suitably strong and naturally quite handsome white guy whose name was Jungle Jim. He lived in some nameless country in Africa, and he spent his weekend mornings having adventures in the jungle and rescuing people in distress, frequently damsels with quite amazing hooters straining against their tight blouses. The natives Jungle Jim encountered when he was having all these adventures respected him because he was a decent and honorable guy and he treated the natives he met with respect.

  But that was not to say that Jungle Jim had no enemies.

  A recurring plot line was Jungle Jim’s arrival in some isolated village where he always found a couple of old European traders already living happily among the locals. The traders were usually Dutch for some reason, perhaps because then they could have funny accents. Regardless, these traders were inevitably grizzled old drunks who were working on all kinds of evil schemes for swindling the natives, but they were still living among them like kings and pulling all the babes since the locals didn’t know what pathetic losers they really were.