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

by Jake Needham

  “Do you know what Kate’s schedule is for the next few weeks?” I asked Alisa.

  “Why? What are you thinking?”

  “Only that I ought to know what Kate’s schedule is for the next few weeks.”

  I suppose that sounded a little testy, but I was getting a little tired of everyone sitting around waiting for me to fix things.

  “I know about some commitments she has this week, but I’m not sure they’re her whole schedule. She’s meeting some people for lunch tomorrow and speaking at the International School of Bangkok in the afternoon the following day. A friend of hers is opening a restaurant on Friday and I know she promised to cut the ribbon. After that, I’m not sure because of the holiday.”

  “Holiday? What holiday?”

  “You’ve been away too long, Jack. Songkran is next week.”

  And just like that I felt an idea begin to stir.

  I hadn’t exactly forgotten about Songkran. Since I had lived in Thailand for a few years that wasn’t possible. More likely, I had simply blocked out all thought of it.

  It’s a time of year in Thailand I really hate. The holiday is called Songkran or Thai New Year or sometimes the Water Festival. You can call it whatever you want, but it still adds up to a week in which the entire country collapses into not much more than rampant street thuggery and public drunkenness.

  Once Songkran had been quite different. The holiday falls during the hottest weather of the year, which in Thailand is really saying something, and back in the day it was an occasion on which the young showed respect to their elders by pouring cooling water over their hands from a silver pitcher as they knelt before them. The gesture was intended to be symbolic of all that we all owe to our parents and grandparents and those other people who lighted our way. Songkran was a time of remembrance, a time of gentleness, deference, and civility.

  No longer.

  Silver pitchers have been replaced by high-pressure hoses and barrels of water carried in the back of pickup trucks. Mobs of young Thais, many of them drunk for a week, cruise the streets looking for victims to soak with dirty water. Stories of bags of urine, rotten eggs, and motor oil being flung at people instead of water are common.

  Songkran used to last for a day; then it became two days; and now it stretches over a full week in some parts of the country. Even if you have business to attend to and you don’t wish to participate in the merriment, you can’t venture outside your apartment during Songkran without encountering a whole parade of little shits anxious to douse you with filthy water.

  Bangkok is trashed over Songkran. Literally. Thousands of tons of street garbage are generated every year by the festivities. Outside of Bangkok, outright carnage occurs on Thailand’s highways. Five thousand people injured in road accidents during the week and five hundred more killed outright is a pretty average tabulation. And well over half those accidents are attributed to people driving drunk.

  I’ve said many times that Thailand is a very strange place, but it is never stranger than it is in the middle of April. The thuggery happens everywhere from tiny rural hamlets to the streets of Bangkok’s financial district. There’s no avoiding it, so many people have developed a simple strategy. They leave the country entirely every April.

  The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. For nearly a week, a third of the country would be away, another third would be cowering in their apartments, and the remaining third would be drunk. If you wanted to pull off some shit you shouldn’t have a hope in hell of getting away with, there was no better time to try it.

  “Songkran is next week?” I asked.

  “Officially, it’s Monday through Wednesday,” Alisa said, “but you know how it goes. The country will be more or less shut down all week.”

  Jello smiled. “I should have thought of that myself,” he said.

  Alisa looked puzzled. “Thought of what?”

  “Chaos is our friend,” I said, “and there is no chaos like Songkran chaos. There will never be a better time to try to get Kate out of the country than right in the middle of Songkran.”

  “Then you don’t have long to figure out how to do it, Jack,” Jello said. “Songkran is only a week away.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Piece of cake.”

  I grinned at Jello and Alisa. They didn’t grin back. I thought that was probably a bad sign.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I WAS RAVENOUS for some reason when I woke up the next morning. Within twenty minutes, I had dressed and was downstairs filling my plate from the breakfast buffet. Two servings of eggs and bacon and about a quart of coffee later, I was beginning to feel pretty decent again. I waved down a waiter for fresh coffee, spread marmalade on my last slice of toast, and settled back to think.

  The upheavals of Songkran would be beginning in a few days and in less than a week they would be in full swing. I still felt like using the chaos to cover Kate’s escape was the best shot we had but, if I was going to take advantage of it, I had to get this show on the road. It wasn’t as if I could just pick Kate up one morning, drive out to the airport, and buy us a couple of first-class tickets to London. I needed some way of separating Kate from her military minders without starting a small war. I needed one or more places to hide her while we were on the move. I needed travel documents for Kate that wouldn’t set off alarms if we had to produce them for inspection. I needed some form of transport out of the country that wasn’t public.

  I wasn’t exactly the CIA. I was only a guy. How in the world could I get all that done in a few days?

  There was another unexpected problem, too. I had become a bit more conspicuous than I expected to be and that was going to make it harder for me to do anything that had a connection to Kate.

  Entering the country on a Canadian passport had been meant to keep me under the radar. Maybe I had been unlucky, or perhaps Thailand’s radar was better than Jello and I thought it was, but a lot of people had noticed Jack Shepherd was around, and that list included General Prasert himself. Once Kate disappeared, I had to disappear, too. Hanging around Thailand after that looked to me like a very bad idea.

  As if that weren’t all enough, I had an even bigger problem to solve. I might still have to persuade Kate to leave. She certainly hadn’t shown the slightest inclination to do that when we talked about it the first time, but I wondered if the sudden revoking of her bail and the threat of being jailed anytime might have her rethinking her point of view. If I couldn’t move her pretty quickly toward an understanding that leaving Thailand was the right thing for her to do, I didn’t see how I could pull this off at all.

  Alisa promised Kate’s driver would get the phone into her hands by noon today and we could talk shortly after that. It was going to be an important conversation. Everything would turn on it.

  I finished the rest of the coffee, signed the bill, and headed back upstairs to my room.

  The moment I opened the door, a telephone started ringing inside. It was a ring tone I’d never heard before so it took me a moment to work out that the sound was coming from the phone number I had put in the phone I sent to Kate.

  I glanced at my watch. It was only a little after nine-thirty. That was way too early for Kate to be calling. Was it a wrong number, or had the SIM already been compromised?

  “Hello?” I answered cautiously.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice.

  I listened, saying nothing.

  “Is that you, Jack?”

  “Kate?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “I wasn’t expecting you this early. Alisa said you wouldn’t get the phone until you went to lunch.”

  “When Alisa told me she had a safe phone for me to call you, I didn’t want to wait.”

  Men are such simple creatures. What could make us happier than a beautiful woman saying they couldn’t wait to talk to us?

  “I understand they revoked your bail,” I said, “but what does that mean? Are you under house arrest?”

  “No, at least not yet
. I’ve been told I must request permission to leave the house for more than two hours and that I will have a military escort everywhere I go.”

  “Do you have an escort now?”

  “There are four uniformed soldiers in a car right behind me. I don’t recognize any of them.”

  “Did you have to tell them where you’re going?”

  “My driver told them he was taking me to the Paragon Mall to do some shopping before lunch.”

  “The Paragon Mall? Are you close to there now?”

  Kate chuckled. “For some reason, my driver chose an absolutely terrible route. The traffic is awful. It might take us an hour to get there. Maybe longer if he makes more bad route choices, which I’m sure he will.”

  I liked dealing with people who attacked their problems and found creative ways to solve them. It made a nice change from most of my clients.

  “Kate, when we talked before about getting you out of Thailand—”

  “You don’t have to argue with me any longer, Jack. When they revoked my bail that changed everything. I still don’t want to leave, but I understand now I have to.”

  “I guess the immediate prospect of being thrown into prison—”

  “That’s not the reason. Arresting me will tear the country apart. I thought General Prasert was smart enough to know that. Apparently he isn’t.”

  I sensed there was more, so I waited and said nothing.

  “If he sends me to prison, the army will face thousands of protestors in the streets, and I know what General Prasert will do then. He can’t back down or he will lose face so he will order his troops to disperse the protestors. It will be the beginning of a civil war and I can’t let that happen.”

  I waited some more. I didn’t want to sound like I was trying to persuade Kate what she ought to do. I wanted Kate to be the one to take all this to its obvious conclusion.

  “Can you really get me out of the country?” she asked.

  There it was. The money shot.

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  “Work faster. Right now I still have a little freedom, but that might change any moment. I don’t know how much time I have left.”

  No pressure, huh?

  “Alisa said you were going to a restaurant opening at the end of the week. Is that true?”

  “Yes, but what—”

  “Tell me more about it.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Humor me here. I’m working on an idea. I need to know where the restaurant is and when you’re going to be there.”

  “I’m only going because the restaurant is owned by an old friend and he asked me to open it for him. It’s called the Brainwake Café, and—”

  “It’s called what?”

  “The Brainwake Café.”

  “Seriously?”

  Kate laughed. “Seriously.”

  “That is without a doubt the weirdest name for a restaurant I’ve ever heard.”

  “Well, it’s an all-day breakfast place so I guess that’s where the name comes from. Khun Poom has three Brainwakes now and the new one will be his fourth.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s in the EmQuartier.”

  EmQuartier is the newest and most spectacular of Bangkok’s massive shopping palaces. It offers six stories of dining terraces, nine movie theaters, open-air gardens, pedestrian streets, and a five-story waterfall, not to mention well over a hundred of Bangkok’s most expensive and exclusive shops. It also has dozens of entrances and exits, several stories of underground parking, and a direct connection to the city’s mass transit system that everybody calls the Skytrain.

  That was perfect. That was absolutely perfect. I couldn’t imagine a better place to stage a vanishing act for Kate.

  “Are you supposed to give a speech?”

  “Political speeches have been forbidden by the army, Jack, so nobody asks me to talk anymore.” Kate laughed again. “I guess it never occurs to anyone that I can talk about anything else.”

  “So all you’re going to do is show up and stand around?”

  “I think they want me to cut a ribbon or something, but otherwise… yes, show up and stand around probably about covers it.”

  “When are you supposed to be there?”

  “Friday morning. Around eleven, I think.”

  “How long will this last?”

  “I’m not sure. I’d guess not very long. How long does it take to cut a ribbon?”

  A brief silence followed. I was thinking, and Kate was politely waiting for me to finish.

  “I need to get over to EmQuartier and look around,” I said after a minute or so.

  “The opening is only two days away, Jack. Surely you’re not—”

  “You just told me you don’t know how much longer you have. We need to move as fast as we can.”

  “Where will we go, Jack?”

  Where will we go? Not, where will I go.

  It was easy to read too much into Kate’s choice of words, and I really didn’t want to tell myself later how stupid I had been to do that, but I liked the question even so. I liked it a lot.

  “I’m working on that, too,” I said, “but I want to get over to EmQuartier right now and look around. The first thing I have to decide is whether we can use that restaurant opening to get you away from your minders. If we can, we’ll work everything else out from there.”

  “Brainwake is on the first floor, right next to the grocery store. You can’t miss it. Just go into any entrance and all the way to the back and it’s right there.”

  “Call me tomorrow when you’re in the car.”

  “You mean you’ll have everything worked out that soon?”

  “Excuse me, ma’am, but in some circles I’m noted for my speed.”

  “And in other circles,” Kate said, “you’re noted for your charm, your intelligence, and your good looks.”

  Well, shucks.

  “Jack, there’s one more thing I want to say right now.”

  I waited, telling myself not to try to guess what was coming.

  “Thank you for everything. You’ve put yourself at great risk for me, and I know that. I am very grateful for what you’re doing.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet.”

  “Oh, but you will, Jack. I know you’ll find a way to make this work. You always do.”

  No pressure, huh?

  THIRTY-THREE

  I CALLED THE concierge and asked for a bellman to flag a taxi and bring it to the garage level entrance. That was something I really liked about the Sheraton. You could come and go without passing through the main lobby. Unless you were plain unlucky, you stayed completely under the radar.

  The taxi was waiting when I came out of the elevator. It was no more than a dozen steps away through a pair of glass doors. When I walked to it, I saw no one paying any attention to me, but to be on the safe side, I did the thing with the Grand Hyatt again. I had the cab take me to the Hyatt, walked straight through it and out the back, and found another cab to take me to EmQuartier.

  When I got to EmQuartier, the first thing I saw was a metal detector at the main entrance watched over by a guard in a crisp khaki uniform. I tried a couple of other entrances and found metal detectors and guards in crisp uniforms at all of them as well.

  Uh-oh.

  That was an unwelcome complication, and entirely unexpected since security most everywhere in Bangkok is largely nonexistent.

  I walked back to the main entrance and stood there looking for some weakness in the set up. While I watched, a girl who appeared to be Japanese walked past me. Draped over her shoulders was a medium-sized black backpack with the Chanel logo outlined in glittering rhinestones. Did Chanel really sell backpacks with its logo in rhinestones or was that just some piece of crap she picked up in a Bangkok street market?

  The automatic door opened and the girl went in and passed straight through the metal detector. Naturally, it went off with a loud buzzing sound.
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br />   I kept watching and almost laughed out loud. The guard didn’t make the slightest effort to stop the girl or to look in her backpack. He never moved a muscle except to slowly lift his right hand and salute as she disappeared into the crowd of shoppers beyond the entrance.

  The Japanese girl was followed closely by several more people with backpacks and then by three Chinese tourists, each of them pushing a brightly colored wheeled suitcase large enough to hide a body.

  And every time exactly the same thing happened. The metal detector buzzed, the guard saluted, and the person entered the building unchallenged.

  I should have guessed the moment I saw the whole set up. EmQuartier was protected by Thai-style security. All appearance, and absolutely no substance.

  When I walked through the metal detector, it buzzed because of the telephone in my pocket and I acknowledged the guard’s salute with one of my own. The poor guy looked startled since the Asians flowing by had been paying about as much attention to him as they might have to a dead tree.

  I WALKED THE ground level of the mall all the way to the front where there was a large drop off area for private vehicles and a taxi stand. Then I went up an escalator and walked the second floor. Right above the drop off area the mall opened onto a vast plaza built over Sukhumvit Road. It even had its own Skytrain station. Trains running east and west moved through the station one after another and on one of those trains Kate and I could be almost anywhere in Bangkok in fifteen minutes.

  I had no difficulty finding the Brainwake Café. It was right where Kate said it would be, at the back of the mall on the ground floor next to a large gourmet supermarket and across from a local spinoff of New York’s Dean & DeLuca. Behind the big windows I saw a whole troop of young Thais dressed in black pants and white shirts working energetically to get the place ready for its opening on Friday.

  There were two exits from EmQuartier within a hundred feet, one leading to a courtyard and one used primarily by the supermarket as a pickup area for its customers. Not more than fifty feet beyond both exits was a side street that could take us either up to Sukhumvit Road or away from it into a residential area.