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

by Jake Needham

  “It’s one of them. I’m a man of affairs now. So many phones and numbers I can barely keep up with them.”

  She laughed, and it was a very nice laugh indeed.

  “I’ll bet you’re up to something,” she said.

  “That’s not a very risky bet. I’m always up to something.”

  She laughed again.

  “Laura, I need to borrow your house for a few days.”

  “Anytime, Jack. I’ve always told you it’s yours anytime you want it.”

  Laura used to run an art gallery in Bangkok. It was joined to a beautiful contemporary townhouse located in a quiet soi that runs parallel to a small canal right behind the American Embassy. A couple of years back she married an investment banker from New York whose name I could never quite remember and moved to Manhattan, but she couldn’t bring herself to sell either the gallery or the house. Both of them just sat there now, occupied by no one but the maid who looked after them. I doubted Laura had been back more than a couple of times after she got married since her husband hated Bangkok. I’d never met him, but on that basis alone I’d always figured I would like him.

  “How about right away? Say, starting Friday for three or four days?”

  There was a pause and I pictured Laura consulting a mental calendar.

  “Next week is Songkran, Jack. Have you forgotten?”

  “No, I remember. That’s why I’m calling. I’m in Bangkok now and I need to stay for a few more days, but I don’t want to be in a hotel over Songkran. That would be way too depressing.”

  “Gosh,” Laura giggled, “I thought you hated Songkran.”

  “I’m growing younger every year, Laura. Now I love water fights. Can’t stand the thought of missing out on one. Is there a problem with the house then?”

  “No, no problem, but the maid will be off for the week. You know how Thais are about going upcountry over Songkran. You’ll be there completely on your own.”

  That was exactly what I had hoped to hear.

  “I’m a big boy, Laura. I’ve been taking care of myself for weeks now. When does your maid leave?”

  Laura hesitated for a moment. “What time is it there?” she asked. “I’m hopeless at trying to work out the time change.”

  “It’s Wednesday night a little after nine.”

  “Then you’re in luck. She’s leaving about noon on Thursday. I’ll give her a call and you can pick up a key from her tomorrow morning.”

  I was indeed in luck, and picking up a key tomorrow morning wasn’t the half of it.

  “Her name is Gao,” Laura continued. “I’ll call her now. Go over tomorrow morning and she’ll be expecting you. Do you want her to do some shopping for you before you get there?”

  “Thank you, Laura, but no. I’ll be fine. I’ll only be there until Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest. Do you want me just to leave the key when I go?”

  “Sure. That’s fine. Gao will be back at the end of the week, but stay as long as you like.”

  I wound up the conversation as rapidly as I could after that since now I figured I pretty much had this thing licked.

  I had a way to separate Kate from her guards at EmQuartier. I had a way to get her through the city’s traffic before they could come after us. I had a place to hide Kate where no one would have any idea to look for us. And I even had a way to get her out of the country when the heat died down.

  Yeah, the whole plan was coming together quite nicely.

  And that was the exact moment something popped into my head that Mike Tyson is supposed to have said once.

  Everybody has a plan, Iron Mike sagely observed, until they get punched in the mouth.

  Shit.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  LAURA’S HOUSE AND her closed-up gallery space are in a part of Bangkok with which I have a lot of history, not all of it good.

  Back in what now feels like the life of someone I have only heard stories about, I lived not far away from there with the woman to whom I was then married and thought I always would be. I loved the neighborhood around Laura’s house. It was a sedate retreat from the upheavals of the city, and its roadways were largely empty of traffic because they didn’t really go anywhere. A narrow klong, a canal, ran straight through the center of the neighborhood and years ago someone had planted a long row of Monkey Pod trees alongside it. They had grown tall and spread their branches until both the klong and Soi Tonson, the narrow roadway parallel to it, were cast for most of the day in cooling shade. In those places where the sun penetrated the thick foliage, its harsh light was magically spun into soft, dappled droplets. Most of the time that left Soi Tonson looking like a Monet painting.

  The last few years had not been kind to the neighborhood. High-rise apartment buildings, hotels, and office buildings had sprung up on Soi Langsuan, which runs parallel to Soi Tonson and a hundred yards or so to the west. It was only a matter of time before Laura’s neighborhood, too, like the rest of Bangkok, succumbed to the relentless tide of development touted as progress.

  When I lived nearby, my morning jog often took me along the bank of the old klong and right in front of Laura’s house. I ran the streets and alleyways of the area so often that I could probably still do it in my sleep. After I got Kate into Laura’s place, I would at least have the advantage of understanding the terrain I had to defend. It might not be much, but knowing that did make me feel a little better.

  Thursday morning I needed to get to Laura’s house before noon to pick up a key from the maid, and after that I had to gather some basic supplies, food and drink mostly, so that Kate and I wouldn’t have to go out again after we got there. At least not until the madness of the Songkran water fights gave us some cover.

  Getting from the Sheraton to Laura’s place worried me a little. General Prasert knew I was at the Sheraton. If he had people watching me and connected me to the place I intended to take Kate after getting her away from her guards, this would all be over before it started. I only wanted to take that risk once, so I packed a small duffel bag with most of my gear including my laptop, my extra burner phone, and as many clothes as I could stuff into it.

  Ever since I had been summoned by General Prasert and quickly dismissed again, I had been watching for army surveillance. Nothing I saw made me suspicious, but I was certainly no expert in surveillance and wasn’t sure I would have seen it even if it were right in front of me. That was why I was worried. It just seemed too good to be true that the general had simply taken my word that I wasn’t in Bangkok because of any connection with Kate and lost interest in me.

  If he wanted to keep me under surveillance, it would have been easy to do without me being any the wiser. A blind man could follow a white guy through the streets of Bangkok. On the other hand, for the white guy to pick out surveillance from the hundreds if not thousands of Thai faces he encountered on the streets would require more cultural awareness than I possessed. All I really had going for me was that internal alarm most of us have that buzzes when someone is looking at us. My own alarm hadn’t given out a peep, but maybe it wasn’t any better at distinguishing one Thai from another than I was.

  All I could do was take precautions, and I took them all, even a few that made me feel silly. I bought a baseball cap in the hotel gift shop, one of those hats with an embroidered elephant on the front that are so beloved by tourists. At least the hat was black and kept the level of my conspicuousness acceptably low. Paired with dark sunglasses, a baseball cap was a remarkably good disguise in most places, although in Bangkok maybe it really wasn’t all that great. No Thai would ever wear a getup like that so it was almost like hanging a sign around my neck that said I am an American! Still, the baseball hat and sunglasses was the only disguise I could come up with, so I went with it.

  As I had done before, I called the concierge to have a taxi sent down to the lower level. At the very least, the lower level was quiet and empty enough that I would surely spot anyone watching for me to leave that way. I might not be able to shake my watcher
s, but at least I would know they were there and avoid leading them to Laura’s house.

  I grabbed my duffel bag, took the elevator down to the lower lobby, and had a bit of good luck. The taxi pulled up exactly at the moment I stepped outside. I was carrying my hat and sunglasses rather than wearing them since I didn’t want to attract any special attention from the driver. One hand on the door handle, I glanced around and saw absolutely no one, not even out on Sukhumvit. If the lower level of the Sheraton was under surveillance by the army, they were using a technique far too sophisticated for me to have any chance to evade it, and that didn’t sound like the Thai army. Those guys weren’t stupid, but they weren’t exactly geniuses either. Maybe General Prasert really had lost interest in me.

  “Grand Hyatt,” I said to the driver. I tossed my duffel into the back seat and closed the door behind me. He nodded and took off without even glancing back.

  As he circled the building and turned up the driveway that led back out to Sukhumvit Road, I pretended to drop my hat and sunglasses onto the floor. I bent down to retrieve them and kept fumbling around until I felt the taxi turn into Sukhumvit and begin to speed up. I sat up, slipped on the glasses, and pulled the hat down low. If anyone had been watching the end of the hotel’s driveway, all they would have seen was a taxi with no one visible in the rear seat coming out and turning west on Sukhumvit. And if anyone was watching from the sidewalk along Sukhumvit Road, all they would see was a taxi with someone unrecognizable in the back.

  At least, that’s what I hoped they would see. Maybe what they would actually see was a taxi carrying some asshole making utterly pathetic attempts to avoid being recognized.

  When we got to the Hyatt, I directed the driver around to the back where a short passageway connects the hotel to Amarin Plaza, a slightly moldy shopping plaza right next door. I jumped out dragging my bag behind me and walked quickly through the plaza to the Renaissance Hotel. I walked around behind it, followed an alleyway, and came out on Soi Langsuan.

  It wasn’t even ten in the morning, but it was already so hot I could feel the concrete through the bottoms of my shoes. Suddenly I was glad to have both the sunglasses and the hat, not as a disguise, but as Bangkok survival gear.

  I kept my eyes moving, but I didn’t see anyone paying the slightest attention to me. If anyone were following me, they were doing a hell of a job of it, and if they were that good I figured I might as well throw up my hands and surrender on the spot.

  On the other side of Soi Langsuan, I trotted down another alleyway that ran next to the homey little building that housed one of the first Starbucks to open in Bangkok, crossed behind the Hotel Muse, and came out on Soi Tonson about fifty yards north of Laura’s house. A few minutes later I was through Laura’s gate, out of sight from the street, and ringing the doorbell at her front door.

  I wasn’t followed there from the Sheraton. I was as sure of that as I had ever been of anything.

  I only hoped that was sure enough.

  THE MAID DIDN’T speak any English and I went into my usual routine of pretending I knew only a few words of Thai. I knew it seldom mattered much one way or another, but I had always imagined not giving away my facility with the language offered me some modest advantage in dealing with Thais.

  Not many foreigners I know have any real fluency at all in Thai, and absolutely none I know can read and write its wacky Sanskrit-like characters. Thais wield their language like a weapon to keep foreigners at a distance, exactly the way someone might use a long stick to fend off a muddy dog. Even when it doesn’t really matter, and I guess it almost never does, I simply like knowing I’m faking the little bastards out.

  The maid let me in, showed me around the house, and gave me a key. It was a nice house, of course, but I wasn’t looking to buy it so I just kept an appreciative look on my face while I followed her around. I was glad to see that most rooms had good exterior sight lines. If Kate and I did attract any attention, I wanted to be sure I saw it coming.

  The building that had been an art gallery was on the other side of a vaguely Japanese looking courtyard. A pathway of finely ground, dark-gray gravel led to it from a gate out on Soi Tonson and another matching pathway led there from a side door of the house. When it looked as if the maid was going to omit it from our tour, I formed my face into an appropriately quizzical expression, pointed to the gallery entrance, and pantomimed using my key to open it.

  The maid looked puzzled, but nodded. “Ka,” she said.

  When she opened the door, I understood why she had looked puzzled. The gallery space was completely empty. The high-ceilinged main room had half a dozen smaller rooms opening off it and a narrow mezzanine about twenty feet up, but all of those spaces appeared to have been stripped of their contents as well.

  The maid looked at me and shrugged. I shrugged back.

  I checked out the kitchen and found a supply of canned soft drinks, a little beer, and a nice wine collection, but no food. While the maid was getting ready to leave, I walked up to the food hall at Central Department Store which was just on the other side of Ploenchit Road and picked up enough stuff to last us a few days. I was certainly no cook, and putting together a series of well-planned menus on the fly was far beyond my abilities, so I just bought the obvious stuff: bread, eggs, bacon, cheese, pasta, and a selection of prepared foods including a couple of sauces for the pasta.

  I was back at Laura’s house putting the food away when the maid came in carrying a small suitcase.

  “I go now,” she said. “Next week I come again.”

  I took out the key she had given me and pantomimed laying it on the kitchen counter.

  “I’ll be gone by then,” I said. “I’ll leave the key here. Understand?”

  She nodded and gave a little wave with her hand. “Bye-bye, mister.”

  A few seconds later I heard the front door close.

  And that was that. I had a safe house ready for me to hide Kate away until the city was in the grip of Songkran fever and we were able to disappear into the madness.

  So far, all this had been a piece of cake, but I knew all too well that we hadn’t yet come to the hard part.

  WHEN I GOT back to the Sheraton, I sat for a long while at the window looking out across the city.

  Off in the distance, I could just pick out the lighted spire on top of the old Dusit Thani hotel and I thought about Patpong right up the road from it. For just a moment, I could almost see Bangkok as it had once been but would never be again and that made me think of Tony Poe and the other old CIA guys who hung out at the Madrid. I wondered what they would have thought about my amateurish plan to rescue Kate.

  Don’t get caught, kid, Tony would probably have advised me. Just don’t fucking get caught.

  From below the window in my room Sukhumvit Road slashed across the city like a fault line, pointing west until it disappeared behind the building where the vaulted glass windows of the Pacific City Club lined the top floors. Sukhumvit was clogged with traffic, of course. It was always clogged with traffic and that just made everything look normal to me. But after tomorrow, there would be no normal for Bangkok. After tomorrow, the army would be turning the city upside down searching for Kate.

  What would someone sitting and looking down on Bangkok see after tomorrow? Tanks blocking Sukhumvit Road? Army patrols in battledress occupying the street corners? Armored personnel carriers rushing back and forth? Whatever it would be, it would not be normal.

  And it certainly would not be me sitting here looking at it. Kate and I would be at Laura’s house on Soi Tonson hiding out from the entire goddamned Thai army. Just the two of us using our wits against a hundred thousand heavily armed Thai soldiers.

  To tell you the truth, I liked the odds.

  THIRTY-NINE

  IT WAS RAINING again on Friday morning. Not one of those driving monsoons when the wind whips the raindrops at you so hard you feel as if you’re being pummeled with gravel, but a melancholy gray mist that hung over the city like a
shroud. It was a lousy way to start what was likely to be the most nerve-racking day of my life.

  I couldn’t think of any impact the weather would have on what I had to do, but I still didn’t like the look of it. Bangkok was gloomy and bleak when it drizzled like this. Gray buildings lined gray streets filled with gray cars and gray people. Considered objectively, it might even be an advantage for us, but somehow I didn’t feel particularly objective. What I felt was antsy and on edge. There wouldn’t be any dry runs. I had just one shot at this.

  It was a simple enough plan, of course. Kate was opening the new Brainwake Café at EmQuartier at eleven o’clock. Right after she cut the ribbon or unlocked the door or whatever it was they had her do, Mr. Wang’s triad soldiers would raise a ruckus at the front of the mall which ought to pull Kate’s minders away long enough for us to slip into the supermarket, go through the stock area, and leave through the back. I would have Jello’s motorbike stashed at the loading dock where the employees parked their bikes so it would be inconspicuous. Once we were on the bike, it would take only a couple of minutes for us to lose ourselves in the warren of small streets to the north.

  After that, we would head for Laura’s house on Soi Tonson. It wouldn’t take us more than a half hour to get there from EmQuartier and then we would lie low until the Songkran madness was at its peak on Tuesday. Using the cover of the water-throwing revelers filling the streets, we would ride an hour or so east of Bangkok to the little airfield where Ike was and fly away to Cambodia.

  At least, that was the plan. But I knew perfectly well plans seldom work out exactly the way you intend for them to work out.

  Shit happens.

  Shit always happens.

  AT FIVE MINUTES after nine my burner phone rang. I answered and a woman’s voice said, “I’m here.” Then she hung up.

  It had to be Alisa with the stuff from Jello, although I couldn’t say for sure I’d recognized her voice from just those two words. Still, Kate was the only other woman who had the number for the burner and I knew it wasn’t her. Had someone else gotten the number and was now using it to set me up? I was overthinking this. I understood I was. But if you aren’t allowed to feel a little anxious and overthink things a bit when you’re going up against a repressive military dictatorship, when could you feel anxious?