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

by Jake Needham

  “But I need to ask you one question before we go any further, and I really must insist you do not equivocate. I need you to tell me the truth.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Are you part of the resistance?”

  “You are well informed.”

  “Please answer the question, Mr. Shepherd.”

  “No, sir. I’m not here because of the group that calls itself the resistance. I’m here because I’m Kate’s friend. I think she is in a great deal of danger. What I’m doing isn’t political. It’s personal.”

  Mr. Wang looked at me for a long time without saying anything. He gave me what I was coming to think of as his lie detector stare. The first time he used it on me I had apparently passed so I stuck to the same technique I had employed then. I looked back at him, kept a neutral expression on my face, and tried not to blink.

  “I believe you, Mr. Shepherd,” Mr. Wang said just when the silence was threatening to become uncomfortable. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re planning and what you need from me?”

  I TOLD MR. Wang what I knew, and what I thought I knew, and I told him what I planned to do. He nodded pleasantly while I talked, never once interrupting, and when I finished he pursed his lips and let his eyes drift to the window. I sat silently and waited to hear the verdict.

  “I congratulate you, Mr. Shepherd. That seems to me to be a sound plan.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And all you need from me are some men to create this disturbance you require?”

  I nodded.

  “What kind of disturbance do you have in mind?”

  “Well… perhaps a broken shop window? Certainly something that would make a lot of noise.”

  “How about an explosion?”

  I struggled to keep my expression neutral. After all, someone casually offering to blow up Bangkok’s most stylish shopping mall as a favor probably isn’t somebody you should piss off.

  “I wouldn’t want anyone to be hurt, sir. That sounds like it might be dangerous.”

  Mr. Wang suddenly clapped his hands together and shifted his gaze back to me.

  “I have it! How about a robbery?”

  I was pleased Mr. Wang had embraced my plan with such abandon, of course, but it didn’t escape my notice that all of his suggestions seem to involve considerable violence.

  “Have you ever seen that big watch shop on the ground floor?” he asked. “The one right at the main entrance?”

  I nodded.

  “I think I should send two men to rob it. Or perhaps three. They can use shotguns with slug loads to blow out the window and then throw a couple of flashbang grenades. Those things make a hell of a noise and a bloody great flash of light. Just what you need.”

  This was getting a little out of hand. All I wanted was a couple of guys to smash a window with a steel rod or something like that and Mr. Wang was gleefully proposing blasting away in a crowded shopping mall with shotguns and lobbing hand grenades around.

  “You appear apprehensive, Mr. Shepherd. Too much, you think?”

  “I wasn’t asking you to commit a serious crime like an armed robbery, Mr. Wang. Maybe just a little friendly vandalism.”

  “Oh, I see why you’re worried, Mr. Shepherd, but you needn’t be. This really wouldn’t be a crime at all.”

  “Robbing a watch shop after blowing out the window with shotguns and then throwing grenades around wouldn’t be a crime?”

  “No, not at all. You see we own the watch shop. You’re the lawyer here, of course, not me, but I don’t see how it could be a crime if we only break our own window and rob ourselves. Am I wrong about that?”

  Mr. Wang grinned hugely, and I had to laugh in spite of myself.

  “To reduce this to a cliché, Mr. Wang, I think this may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  “One of my favorite movies, Mr. Shepherd. May I order you a coffee or perhaps a dessert? And then we can talk this through in somewhat more detail. I would like that.”

  THREE CUPS OF coffee and a bowl of remarkably good bread pudding later, I left the Pacific City Club with the deal all done.

  Mr. Wang would have a man watching the ribbon cutting for the Brainwake Café on Friday. When Kate cut the ribbon or did whatever it was they asked her to do to open the place, the lookout would give the word to the three men standing by to stage the robbery. They would let loose on the window of the watch shop with slug loads from shotguns and drop a few flashbang grenades and some smoke grenades in front of the shop. Then they would grab up a few watches for show, stuff them in a bag, and flee into the traffic on Sukhumvit Road. A couple of policemen with whom Mr. Wang maintained a business relationship would be conveniently on the scene and they would pursue the robbers for a short distance until tragically losing sight of them completely.

  Meanwhile, at least in the version of the narrative with which I was entertaining myself, Kate and I would dash through the supermarket, leave the mall through the loading dock, and head in the opposite direction into the tangle of residential streets behind EmQuartier.

  It was an absolutely superb plan, if I did say so myself.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  THIRTY-FIVE

  IT NEVER RAINS in Thailand in April. That’s the hot season and the country is always perfectly dry during the hot season. So, naturally, the next morning a tropical storm burst over the city.

  The sky darkened like someone had pulled a curtain across it. The rain was blinding, and the wind thrashed the trees. Lightning etched luminescent streaks in the sky, and explosions of thunder pounded the city like barrages of artillery fire. The drains in the roadways were mostly plugged with trash and in only minutes the water filled the streets, rose over the curbs, and began lapping at doorways.

  I had stayed in my room all morning running the half-developed plan to spring Kate at the Brainwake opening back and forth through my mind looking for flaws. I found plenty, but not enough to walk away from it.

  My burner phone rang just as I was washing my hands to go downstairs for some lunch. It had to be Kate.

  “That was good timing,” I said when I answered. “Hang on a second.”

  I put down the phone and dried my hands, and then I flopped down in the chair in front of the windows and put my telephone back up to my ear.

  “Still there, Kate?”

  “Right here.”

  “You’re in the car?”

  “Yes, I’m in the damned car. Now are you going to stop stalling and tell me what you’ve found out?”

  “Okay,” I chuckled. “I’ve found out that I think we can do this.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll go Friday. At the opening of the Brainwake Café in EmQuartier.”

  “Go where?”

  “Let’s take this one step at a time. I’m pulling a plan together to slip you away from the opening. Then we’ll go to ground for a few days and use the cover of the Songkran festivities to get you out of the country.”

  “Do you really think you can do that?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then I guess I—”

  “Hold on, Kate. There’s something I’ve got to ask you first and you need to be absolutely sure of your answer.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you certain you want me to do this?”

  “I already told you. I know it’s what I have to do.”

  “You need to think carefully, Kate. You’re leaving your home in the country where you were born, and there’s no way to know when you’ll be able to come back again. If the army remains in control of Thailand, you may never be able to come back again. Are you sure you’re prepared for that?”

  “I’m not sure anyone can really be prepared for that.”

  “Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t matter. Once I set this in motion, there will be no going back. You need to tell me right now whether you are mentally and physically ready to take that leap on Friday. If you’re not absolutely certain you are, we n
eed to end this now before anybody gets hurt.”

  “I have no choice, Jack.”

  “That doesn’t really sound like a commitment to me. It sounds more like submission.”

  “If I permit General Prasert to arrest me, this country will come apart. I can’t be that selfish. Sometimes I do what I want to, and sometimes I do what I have to. This is what I have to do. I’m ready to go.”

  “On Friday?”

  “I’m ready to go when you tell me to go, Jack. I’m completely in your hands.”

  I had to admit I liked the sound of that.

  “Tell me how this is going to work,” Kate continued while I was still busy basking in her trust.

  “No one else can know about this. Absolutely no one.”

  “I understand.”

  “That means you’re going to have to get rid of Mutt and Jeff.”

  “You know they go everywhere with me.”

  “I do know that. But you’re going to have to find a way to get rid of them this time. We’re certainly not taking them with us.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now. Tell me how this is going to work, Jack.”

  I told a deep breath and plunged in.

  “Right after you cut the ribbon to open the restaurant, there will be a disturbance toward the entrance to EmQuartier. For at least a few minutes, it will pull away whatever guards they send with you.”

  “What kind of a disturbance?”

  “We need to get this straight right now, Kate. The only thing I’m going to tell you is that we will slip away when your guards go to check out the disturbance. And that will give us enough of a head start that they won’t find you again. I’m not going to negotiate with you over the details. Now, do you trust me enough to follow my instructions here?”

  “Of course I trust you, Jack, but—”

  “There can’t be any but to it.”

  Kate hesitated, but for only a moment. “Tell me what to do,” she said.

  “Turn up on Friday morning at EmQuartier exactly as you’ve planned. Don’t do anything out of the ordinary. Don’t bring anything with you. Be especially careful not to do or say anything that might cause someone to guess you’re not coming back.”

  I paused in case Kate had anything to say about that, but she didn’t.

  “When you get to EmQuartier,” I went on after a moment, “just do whatever you would normally do. Don’t look around for me. I’ll be there, but I don’t want to attract any attention by getting near you until we’re ready to go. Exactly one minute after you cut the ribbon, there will be several loud noises from the direction of the main entrance. Right after you hear them, you’ll find me next to you and I’ll lead you away. I have an exit route all set up. All you have to do is stick with me.”

  “You’re not willing to tell me how we’re getting out or where we’re going?”

  Back when I practiced law in Washington, I’d had to put the fear of God into a client more than once with a tough-sounding speech. Shut up, do what I tell you do, follow me wherever I go, or I’ll walk away and quit you. I’d learned the speech from a crusty old criminal lawyer who put control of his client right at the top of the list of conditions for a successful defense. After all, the middle of a trial is no time to have a client decide they want to make a few suggestions about your strategy.

  When you have someone’s life in your hands, you don’t negotiate your strategy with them. Nobody expects to sit up in the middle of an operation and give the surgeon a couple of pointers. Nobody ought to expect to tell their lawyer what to do when crunch time comes either, but a remarkable number of people do.

  I wasn’t Kate’s lawyer in a criminal trial, of course, but the circumstances here weren’t all that different either. I was expected to walk her out of Thailand without getting her locked up or killed, so it came down to pretty much the same thing. Kate’s life was in my hands. I had to have a solid plan, and I had to execute it perfectly. If I made a bad call while doing that, we were screwed. General Prasert would make us both disappear without a trace. To demand that someone follow you blindly and unquestioningly sounds egotistical, I understand that, but in circumstances like these it has nothing to do with ego. It’s simply the only way it will work.

  “One person at a time flies a plane, Kate. I’m flying this one. You have to tell me right now that you’re good with that, or we’re not going to take off.”

  It was only a moment or two before Kate responded, but it felt longer than that to me.

  “Okay,” she said. “No more questions. I’ll cut the ribbon and wait for you to sweep me up in your arms and rescue me, and we’ll both live happily ever after.”

  I liked the sound of that, too, God help me I did, but I knew I had to avoid reading large meanings into Kate’s small jokes. And the way to do that was to stick to business.

  “Rest easy, Kate. I’ve got this.”

  AFTER I ENDED the call with Kate, I sat for a while looking out the window at the rain and running our conversation back and forth through my mind.

  Had I heard hesitation and uncertainty in Kate’s voice? No, I was pretty sure I hadn’t.

  Kate was accustomed to being in charge of things. When you were accustomed to being in charge of things, turning control over to someone else was difficult. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became she both understood why I insisted on complete control and knew it was the only way this would work.

  I picked up my burner phone and pushed the plan a little further forward.

  “Hey, partner,” I said when Jello answered. “You still running in the afternoons?”

  Jello hesitated before responding as well he might have.

  “Sometimes,” he eventually allowed. “Why are you asking me?”

  “I thought you might want to run this afternoon with me.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “We’ve got all kinds of stuff to talk about, and we can do it while we’re both feeling healthy and virtuous.”

  “I never feel healthy and virtuous.”

  “You can start today. How about it?”

  “What do we have to talk about?”

  “Well…” I hesitated.

  I didn’t want to say too much on a telephone, even a burner. Good practice when you’re planning on kidnapping a deposed prime minister right out from under the nose of the Thai army and slipping her out of the country is not to talk about it any more than you have to, and particularly not to talk about it on a telephone. Loose lips sink ships. Like that.

  “You sure you want to hear about that now?” I asked.

  “Probably not, but give me a hint.”

  “I need some stuff to pull this off.”

  Jello snorted. “I should have guessed. You only call me when you want something.”

  “You sound like my ex-wife.”

  “I sound like everybody’s ex-wife.”

  I chuckled in spite of myself.

  “As much as I’m enjoying this richly comic banter, are you going to run with me this afternoon or not?”

  Jello sighed. “When?”

  “Five o’clock?”

  “Works for me. Where?”

  “Same place we ran the last few times we went out together.”

  THE WORST THING about running in Bangkok is the God-forsaken, never-ending heat. The second worst thing is that there is almost no decent place to do it. Unless you have a particular affection for climbing in and out of potholes while playing tag with thirty-year-old Chinese buses driven by guys zonked out of their mind on uppers, you don’t run on the streets. And all that leaves is the parks, such as they are.

  Benjasiri Park isn’t very big, but it’s still one of the better places in Bangkok to run. It’s centrally located, and it’s quiet and pleasant if you judge it by the standard of the few other public parks in Bangkok, which admittedly isn’t a particularly high bar to clear. The park is a small square of open land next to the Emp
orium, one of the city’s ritziest shopping complexes, and it’s just across the street from EmQuartier, the other of the city’s ritziest shopping complexes. Somehow they managed to sandwich some trees, a little grass, a small lake, and a few fountains into just a couple of acres. In spite of its diminutive size, the place actually feels pretty much like a real park if you don’t think about it too much.

  There are two things I like a lot about Benjasiri Park. It’s seldom very crowded, and the walkway that circles it is mostly shaded by big trees. It’s a good place for a private conversation in the heat of a late Bangkok afternoon.

  “You still as slow as you used to be?” Jello asked.

  “Hey, fat man,” I responded. “You just worry about dragging your big ass around the park and we’ll get along nicely.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Jello said.

  Then he hung up.

  THIRTY-SIX

  I GOT OUT of a taxi and walked into Benjasiri Park from the Sukhumvit Road side. Across the small lake I could see Jello bouncing impatiently on the balls of his feet while he watched some kids playing an energetic if not particularly skillful game of basketball.

  I knew perfectly well that some kind of warm-up routine before running was important now that I wasn’t a young hotshot anymore, but most of the time I didn’t bother. I just ran slowly for the first half a mile or so and hoped everything would take care of itself. Sometimes it did. More and more often it didn’t.

  “You’re late,” Jello said when I walked round the lake to where he was waiting.

  “Of course, I’m late. This is Thailand. Everybody is late.”

  “Except me. I’m not late. I’m not ever late.”

  “Only one of the many reasons everybody thinks you’re an asshole.”

  A pebbled concrete walkway circled the park and we jogged slowly through our first circuit on it without any conversation. Jello was a man of few words, which to my way of thinking made him the perfect companion for a run, perhaps the perfect companion for every occasion.

  On the other hand, there were things we had to talk about today. When we were into our second circuit and moving pretty well, I broke the silence.