WHAT THE PRESS SAYS ABOUT JAKE NEEDHAM
“In his raw power to bring the street-level flavor of contemporary Asian cities to life, Jake Needham is Michael Connelly with steamed rice.” – The Bangkok Post
“Jake Needham is Asia’s most stylish and atmospheric writer of crime fiction.” – The Singapore Straits Times
“Needham certainly knows where a few bodies are buried.” –Asia Inc.
“Jake Needham has a knack for bringing intricate plots to life. His stories blur the line between fact and fiction and have a ‘ripped from the headlines’ feel…Buckle up and enjoy the ride.” – CNNgo
“What you will not get is pseudo-intellectual new-wave Asian literature, sappy relationship writing, or Bangkok bargirl sensationalism. This is top class fiction that happens to be set in an Asian context. As you turn the pages and follow Jack Shepherd in his quest for the truth, you can smell the roadside food stalls and hear the long tail boats roar up and down the Chao Praya River.” – Singapore Airline SilverKris Magazine
“For Mr. Needham, fiction is not just a good story, but an insight into a country’s soul.” –The New Paper (Singapore)
A WORLD OF TROUBLE
A novel
by
Jake Needham
Smashwords edition published by
Half Penny Ltd.
Hong Kong
A WORLD OF TROUBLE, copyright © 2012 by Jake Raymond Needham
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it or it was not purchased specifically for your use, please purchase a copy for yourself. Thank you for respecting the work of the author and the publisher.
Excerpt from LAUNDRY MAN, © 2011 by Jake Raymond Needham
Cover Design by the Stuart Bache Company, London
Cover © 2013 Jake Raymond Needham
Smashwords edition ISBN 978-616-7611-13-6
English-language print publication history
First edition: Marshall Cavendish Editions, Marshall Cavendish International, Singapore, 2012, ISBN 978-981-4361-51-4
All e-book editions published by Half Penny Ltd, Hong Kong
Smashword Edition: October 2012
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
PART TWO
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
PART THREE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
PART FOUR
FORTY-SIX
FORTY-SEVEN
FORTY-EIGHT
FORTY-NINE
FIFTY
FIFTY-ONE
FIFTY-TWO
FIFTY-THREE
FIFTY-FOUR
FIFTY-FIVE
FIFTY-SIX
FIFTY-SEVEN
FIFTY-EIGHT
FIFTY-NINE
SIXTY
EPILOGUE
Bonus Preview of LAUNDRY MAN
The Jake Needham Library
Meet Jake Needham
In memory of John Lewis
CNN’s first correspondent in Asia
and my last best friend
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THIS IS A NOVEL. It’s not journalism. That’s why I got into the fiction business in the first place, folks. I make this stuff up.
Yes, I hear you say, but you’ve been around Asia a long time. You’ve seen a lot of things. You know a lot of people. Isn’t this book, at least to some degree, based on people who are real and events that are true?
This is what Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, had to say on the subject of whether his novels were true:
“Novels lie—they can’t help doing so—but that’s only one part of the story. The other is that, through lying, they express a curious truth, which can only be expressed in a veiled and concealed fashion, masquerading as what it is not.”
I think he’s right about that. But I’ll leave it to you to decide how it applies to this book. If it applies at all.
One other thing.
I have a friend who was a senior intelligence officer in Asia for most of his career. On a night not long ago in Macau, we were smoking a couple of good cigars and talking about my books. He asked me how I had found out the truth about an event around which I had built the plot of one of them. I didn’t find out about anything, I told him. I just made it up.
“That’s the thing about Asia,” he chuckled. “You really can’t make anything up. No matter how outrageous what you have written might seem, one day somebody will come up to you and tell you it really happened, or that it is about to happen.”
Let me repeat this: I made up the events, the characters, and most of the politics in this novel.
But more than once while writing it, I remembered what my friend said that night in Macau.
He usually turns out to be right when he makes an observation like that about Asia.
Just this once, however, I really do hope he’s wrong.
PROLOGUE
I HAVE THE right to remain silent and mostly I have exercised that right. Anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of law. I have the right to an attorney. If I cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for me.
That’s what they told me.
Of course, I figure it’s mostly crap. If I don’t start talking pretty soon, telling them what they want to hear, they’ll haul me out to a little room somewhere in the back and beat the shit out of me.
So let’s get one thing straight right now. Before they come back.
I am not who they say I am. I am not a criminal, not a spy, certainly not an assassin. I am not any of those things.
Maybe I cut a few corners here and there. I would admit to that. But at every turn I tried to do what seemed to me to be right. When you come down to it, that is my only real defense. I did what seemed to me to be right.
There is a pathetic air to that claim. I understand that. And it is something that embarrasses me. But nevertheless it is the truth, so I say it whenever they ask why I did what I did. At least, I think it is the truth. I am not absolutely certain I know what the truth actually is anymore.
Five years ago I was a high-flying lawyer in Washington, D.C., well enough connected to the masters of the universe to occasionally lunch at the White House mess. Three years ago, for reasons I will skip over now, I left the United States to become a professor of international business at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. It was not long before I had a beautiful Italian-born girlfriend, a woman who
would later become my wife, and together Anita and I moved into one of Bangkok’s toniest apartment buildings.
That was when I really hit my stride. Half the companies in Asia seemed to want an American academic on their board of directors. Particularly one with connections in Washington who had been publicly hailed as an expert in international finance and money laundering. There was money and there was prestige. There were private jets and there were suites at famous hotels. There was, let’s face it, ego stroking on an international scale. It was like a blow job that never stopped. It was a great time. The best.
Today, on the other hand, is not a great time. Not the best.
I am no longer a professor of anything. I am no longer on anyone’s board of directors or taking meetings with those good corporate citizens who were lined up outside my office door just a few months ago. I was a reluctant player in a little drama with an international fugitive just slightly less notorious than O.J. Simpson, one who thought I was his ticket to a White House pardon, and I attracted a lot of attention. All of it bad.
And that, as they say, was that.
Goodbye Chulalongkorn University. Goodbye corporate directorships. Goodbye private jets. Goodbye suites in famous hotels. Goodbye blow job.
I earn my living these days practicing law again. Or at least that is what I say when someone asks me what I am doing since I have no better answer. I work by myself in a one-room office in Hong Kong that is above a noodle shop. I live alone in a borrowed apartment. And I have absolutely no idea where, or with who, Anita may be anymore. There’s a pattern there, but it’s one I try not to dwell on.
In order to convince myself I was really a lawyer again, I had to have at least one client, of course. I had known Charlie for a while and he offered to become my first client and I took him on gratefully, without a second thought. It was just that simple. It never once occurred to me back then that having Charlie for a client would lead me straight to where I am today, sitting here in this chair, waiting for the FBI goons to come back and say what is to become of me.
Perhaps if I can explain to you what really happened, if I can convince you this is all just a terrible mistake, I can convince them, too. Perhaps I can even convince myself.
The problem is where to start. This is a story with a lot of beginnings. Sadly, it still has only one ending. All the same, I must begin somewhere, so I will do so here.
On a gloomy day in January in, of all places, Dubai, a tiny city-state in the United Arab Emirates perched on the edge of the Persian Gulf.
Just before dawn that morning a brief but furious storm had rolled in from the desert and left the whole city smelling like a roll of aluminum foil.
Oh wait, I almost forgot.
My name is Jack Shepherd.
But that may be the last thing I tell you of which I am completely and absolutely certain.
PART ONE
DUBAI
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.
In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
— Graham Greene
The Third Man
ONE
THE BLACK MERCEDES S500 pulled to the curb and stopped. Shepherd opened his eyes. He didn’t much like what he saw when he did.
“I thought we were going to your office,” he said.
“We are,” the man in the backseat with him replied.
“This isn’t your office.”
“I need to stop here first.”
“What for?”
General Chalerm ‘Charlie’ Kitnarok didn’t answer. He just opened the rear door and got out, and his driver and security man jumped out right behind him. Charlie bent back down and beckoned. Shepherd was the only person left in the car, so he sighed and got out, too.
Shepherd stretched and yawned and he damn well took his time doing it. It was only mid-morning in Dubai but he hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours on the overnight flight from Hong Kong and he was dog-tired and grumpy. He rolled his shoulders and looked around. They weren’t anywhere near Charlie’s office. They were parked on Baniyas Road a little west of the St. George Hotel, just outside the souk.
“CNN wants some local color for their piece,” Charlie said as if he could see exactly what Shepherd was thinking. “You and I are going to take a walk through the souk and let them shoot a little film for background.”
Shepherd glanced at the white Jeep Cherokee that had stopped right behind them. A cameraman and a soundman were unloading their gear while they ignored a young female producer who was barking instructions. The two men looked like world-weary old hands who had earned their chops covering the Vietnam War. The producer looked like she had graduated from Bryn Mawr the day before and didn’t have any idea what the Vietnam War was.
“You think this is a bad idea, don’t you?” Charlie asked.
“What?”
Charlie jerked his thumb at the CNN crew.
“It’s none of my business,” Shepherd said. “I’m a lawyer, not a media consultant. I don’t give public relations advice, I give legal advice.”
“Then give me legal advice.”
“Sure. My legal advice is that there’s nothing illegal about letting CNN hang around with you to do a story about an unimaginably wealthy former prime minister of Thailand now living in splendid exile in Dubai and devoting his life to helping the poor and wretched of this earth.”
“That’s what I thought,” Charlie said. “So let’s take a little walk and get this over with.”
Charlie pressed his hand lightly against Shepherd’s back, ushering him toward a murky passageway that led into the souk.
***
DUBAI SHOWS THE world a face that is gaudy and futuristic, but the souk is what Dubai is really about. Dark and primeval, its twisting maze of alleyways is clogged with so many burlap bags, cardboard boxes, and wooden crates that there is seldom room enough for more than two people to walk abreast. The pervasive gloom drains everything of color and renders the world in murky shades of gray. Only the souk’s smells give it the illusion of depth and dimension. The cloying sweetness of the air, the spicy scents of cayenne and red pepper, the heady musk of wet burlap bags, the sour odor of garbage baking on hot concrete, the rich waft of bitter coffee, and the acrid aroma of strong tobacco smoked by men you cannot see.
Shepherd hated the souk. Every time he entered its cramped tangle of tiny passageways, some so narrow they were more like cracks between buildings than places to walk, he felt like a guy in a horror movie, the one who never figures out the axe murderer is standing right behind him until it’s too late. Shepherd was certain that a malevolent beast lived somewhere deep inside the souk. The place made his skin crawl.
Charlie didn’t seem to feel any of that. He strolled the souk as if he owned it, and maybe he did. He certainly could afford it. According to Forbes, Charlie Kitnarok was the world’s ninety-eighth richest man. And that was just counting the stuff they knew about.
Shepherd was Charlie’s lawyer. He knew about the other stuff.
At least he knew about a lot of the other stuff. Maybe even he didn’t know about everything. Charlie was a man who took pleasure in secrets and he had a great many of them. Shepherd doubted there was anybody alive who knew all of the things Charlie was involved in.
Possibly not even Charlie.
***
CHARLIE LED THE way with Shepherd walking next to him. The CNN camera crew took up a position about thirty feet behind them and the driver and the security man brought up the rear. They entered the souk and the gloom closed in. Split and pitted concrete walls rose up on both sides of them. Iron pipes and black rubber electrical cables snaked haphazardly back and forth over their heads and air conditioners buzzed and dripped from somewhere above. Metal handcarts piled with bulging burlap sacks and heavily taped br
own cartons rattled past them in both directions.
Fifty feet inside the souk the alleyway made a sharp turn to the left and they passed a narrow shop with mounds of car batteries piled head-high behind a stained and dusty window. In front of the shop two men dressed in dishdashas, the long white shirt-dress that is the preferred attire of locals in Dubai, sat on upturned wooded boxes smoking cigarettes. Their dark eyes tracked Charlie and Shepherd as the little procession passed.
“Where are we going, Charlie?”
“Nowhere. Just walking.”
It didn’t feel to Shepherd like they were just walking. It felt more like they were going somewhere, but he had no idea where. Still, Charlie was his client, his only client if he were being completely honest, and no matter how tired he was that was a boat Shepherd had absolutely no intention of rocking. So he nodded and said nothing.
Charlie took a heavy-framed pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses from his jacket pocket and slipped them on. The lenses were so dark they were almost black. Shepherd wondered why Charlie was putting on sunglasses when the light around them was already so dim he felt like he was walking under water.
A few minutes later they rounded a sharp bend, slipped past a tall stack of odd smelling burlap bags, and emerged into a rectangular courtyard. The courtyard didn’t have much to recommend it as a destination, but something about it made Shepherd wonder if it was the place they had been heading all along.
It was about eighty feet long and twenty-five feet wide with narrow shophouses walling off all four sides. There was some kind of merchandise stacked in front of most of them. Brightly colored spices sealed in clear plastic cylinders the size of barrels; concrete packed in heavy red-and-blue striped paper bags; hundreds of pairs of slippers arranged by color on aluminum racks; wooden cases the size of refrigerators lettered in red Korean characters; and tan cardboard cartoons tightly bound with white plastic straps. The only exit was another narrow passageway at the opposite end.
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