World of Trouble (9786167611136)

by Needham, Jake

  This did not look like the place where a political assassination attempt had occurred only twenty-four hours earlier, a place where two men and a woman had died.

  And yet, it was.

  Shepherd walked over to the building through which he and Charlie had escaped. A metal shutter was pulled down over the front window and the door was locked. He ran his eyes slowly over the pitted concrete surface of the building’s facade, but saw no signs of bullet marks. The shots the gunman fired in their direction must have gone into the bales, and someone had taken the bales away.

  He turned and walked slowly toward the old man sitting in the stenographer’s chair. The surface of the courtyard was paved with concrete stones mortared into neat rows, and his eyes scanned back and forth over them as he walked. He saw no shell casings, but no doubt those would have all been picked up by now anyway. He saw no bloodstains either, and yet three people had bled to death right here.

  When he reached the place where the old man was, he rolled out one of the stenographer’s chairs and sat down. The man remained silent, not even turning his head. If he cared one way or another that Shepherd was there, he gave no sign. Looking up the courtyard, Shepherd saw he was viewing the area at roughly the same angle from which the CNN cameraman had been filming. The perspective was right. The facades of the buildings were right. Only the goods stored in front of the buildings were different.

  Still, there was no sign at all this was a crime scene or that an investigation had been conducted here. No tape, no chalk marks, no litter. Something else felt wrong, too, but it took him a few minutes before it finally occurred to him what it was. The whole courtyard was unnaturally clean, certainly far cleaner than any other part of the souk he had seen. Were the Dubai police that efficient? Had they swept down in force, measured and photographed everything, and then scrubbed and cleaned the whole scene, all in less than twenty-four hours? He supposed it was possible. Obviously more than possible since that was exactly what had happened.

  What am I really looking at here?

  It was the scene of a political assassination attempt, every trace of which had been erased in less than twenty-four hours. Could it be that the Dubai authorities, embarrassed that something like this could happen in their country, were trying to wrap it up quickly? Or was somebody else altogether behind the clean up, somebody connected somehow to Charlie?

  But how did that make any sense?

  Shepherd had no idea. No idea at all.

  After ten minutes of thinking about it, he gave up. He stood up, wished his still silent companion a good afternoon, and walked off in search of a road big enough for him to find a taxi.

  ***

  SHEPHERD HAD DINNER alone at the Manhattan Grill at the Grand Hyatt. For what a steak cost there he could have bought a small car in some countries, but he figured Charlie could afford it. It was certainly one hell of a lot cheaper than flying him to Bangkok in a G-4.

  After dinner, he went back to his hotel and sat on the balcony just staring out into the blackness of the Persian Gulf. Shepherd hadn’t smoked a cigar in a week or two, but all at once a cigar was exactly what he wanted. He went back inside, got a Montecristo out of his briefcase, cut it, and lit it. He was in a non-smoking room and there weren’t any ashtrays so he went into the bathroom and drafted a drinking glass to play the role. It didn’t seem to mind. Back out onto the balcony, he put his makeshift ashtray on the table, then leaned against the railing on his forearms and smoked quietly for a while. The air was moist and thick and there was an odor of ocean salt on the hot night wind.

  Those guys had been trying to kill somebody, Shepherd reminded himself. Whether it was Charlie or it was him, it was sure as hell one of them, and they were both still alive. The gunmen might be dead, but they were only hired hands. Whoever hired them wasn’t dead, at least not as far as he knew, so it seemed possible, even likely, that there would be another attempt. And if necessary, another one after that. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that the attempts would probably continue until somebody tracked down whoever was behind this, or until they eventually succeeded.

  If he was right, if that was the way it was, then Shepherd figured there wasn’t much he could do about it. He sure as hell wasn’t equipped to track down the plotters, whoever they were. And, other than ducking at every possible opportunity, he had no control that he could think of over whether or not they were successful.

  Then there was the matter of Agent Keur. Clearly Keur wasn’t just going to disappear any more than the shooters were. That wasn’t the way the Feds worked when they wanted something, which caused Shepherd to ask himself just what it was that Keur really did want. Asking him to keep tabs on who Charlie saw was ridiculous. If that was all Keur wanted to know, there were better and less risky ways to find out. No, there had to be more to Keur’s approach than that, even if Shepherd didn’t have the slightest idea what it might be.

  Whatever Keur was really after, Shepherd figured Keur would keep cranking up the pressure until Shepherd either did it or Keur didn’t want it anymore. If that was what he was going to do, Shepherd decided there wasn’t much he could do about that either.

  Perhaps it was Shepherd’s growing sense that he was losing control over nearly everything that was the source of it, but suddenly he thought about Anita. It had been a while since he had last thought about Anita, several days perhaps, but he thought about her now, and with the thought came the old terror of wondering where she was, who she was with, and what she was doing right at that moment.

  Like an alcoholic pushing away a glass of whiskey, Shepherd took a deep breath, expelled all such thoughts from his consciousness, and chalked up another entry on the ever-expanding list of things he couldn’t do anything about.

  PART TWO

  BANGKOK

  “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice responded.

  “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

  “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

  “You must be,” said the Cat. “Or you wouldn’t have come here.”

  — Lewis Carroll,

  Alice in Wonderland

  TWELVE

  THAILAND IS THE Italy of Asia. Great food, beautiful women, joyously corrupt, and totally dysfunctional. Sometimes Shepherd wondered if maybe it might not be the right place for him after all. He liked food. He liked women. He was a true connoisseur of corruption. And for the last six months he had been even more dysfunctional than Thailand.

  It had been raining on and off ever since Shepherd got in from Dubai. He had checked into the hotel, made a couple of calls, and gone for a quick run in Lumpini Park to shake off the funk of the long flight. Now he was doing very little but sitting by himself at a window table at a pub in Bangkok’s financial district called the Duke of Wellington. He was drinking coffee, watching the rain, and pretending to read the International Herald Tribune. Outside the window the wind kicked up a notch and the rain swirled like smoke through the hard neon light of the big multicolored signs along the street.

  He had gotten used to the rain in Bangkok. It rains a lot in the evenings. It rains a lot in the mornings, too, and the afternoons and at night. It just didn’t matter very much to anyone that it did. Bangkok is a twenty-four hour town and a little rain does nothing to hold it back. Ten million people, more or less; a city no worse than a lot of others, but no better either.

  Some people say that Bangkok attracts a miserable bunch of foreigners: drifters, losers, loners, people on the run from broken lives. They claim the place is a magnet for the lost, the lonely, and the misbegotten. Shepherd knew some people even thought that was why he had once taken up residence there. It wasn’t true, of course. At least not altogether.

  Shepherd wasn’t bothered much over what people said about him. He figured that what people said about anything depended mostly on where they sat. As for him, he was sitting at a table at the Duke of Wellingto
n drinking coffee. And he didn’t really care what anyone thought about why he had moved to Bangkok once upon a time, because he didn’t live in Bangkok anymore.

  Shepherd finished his coffee, pushed back from the table, and went to look for the toilet.

  ***

  WHEN HE CAME out, Pete Logan was sitting at the bar drinking something brown. Shepherd walked over and took the stool next to him.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said.

  Pete examined Shepherd with curiosity.

  “What?” Shepherd asked.

  “I don’t hear from you for three months, you don’t call, you don’t write, then suddenly you ring up and ask me to come out on a rainy night to meet you here and I do. Right about now I’m asking myself: why am I doing this?”

  “Because you think I’m a really cool guy and you’ve missed me?”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  Pete had been the FBI’s resident agent in Bangkok for a little over three years. Back when Shepherd lived there, too, they had discovered that they were two guys from similar backgrounds stranded in a culture that didn’t much care for either one of them. They occasionally had meals together and even ran together in Lumpini Park a few times. What Shepherd always remembered most clearly, however, was that when Anita left him, Pete had been a pal. He bought drinks and told some stories, but he never offered a word of advice. Shepherd thought that was a pretty good definition of a real friend: somebody who’s there when you need him and understands how to help without being told. Shepherd didn’t have all that many real friends, but from that time on Pete Logan was one of them.

  The bartender brought Shepherd another cup of coffee and Pete stared at it in disbelief.

  Shepherd shrugged. “Jet lag.”

  “When did you get in?”

  “A few hours ago.”

  “Where from?”

  “Dubai.”

  “Don’t tell me you were in Dubai to see—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Were you there when those guys—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did it really go down the way CNN said it did?” Peter asked.

  Shepherd bobbed his head around in a gesture that could have meant practically anything. Then he took another sip of coffee and changed the subject.

  “I need a favor, Pete.”

  “Of course you do. When have you ever called me that you didn’t need a favor?”

  Shepherd told Pete about Agent Keur and his tale about the investigation of Robert Darling and Blossom Trading. Then he told Pete that Keur had asked him to feed the Bureau information about what was happening around Charlie.

  “Did you agree to that?” Pete asked.

  “Of course not.”

  Pete nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

  “So what about Robert Darling and Blossom Trading?” Shepherd prompted.

  “Got me,” Pete said. “I never heard of either one.”

  “What do you know about Keur?”

  “Nothing. I never heard of him either.”

  “That’s funny. I asked Keur if he knew you and he described you perfectly.”

  Pete spread his hands slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

  “He even said you spoke highly of me,” Shepherd added.

  “So there you are. Right off the bat we’ve established that the man is a pathological liar.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “About Keur?”

  “No, about the Bureau’s investigation of Darling and Blossom Trading.”

  Pete pushed back slightly from the bar and cleared his throat.

  “Information like that would be pretty closely restricted, Jack.”

  “I don’t want anything heavy duty. Just when the investigation started, what it’s about, who else has been targeted. Stuff like that.”

  “Right. Nothing heavy duty. Just pretty much everything the Bureau knows.”

  “Well… whatever you feel comfortable telling me, at least.”

  Pete swirled the whiskey in his glass and then threw back the rest of it. Shepherd signaled to the bartender to bring him another and they sat quietly until Pete had it in front of him.

  “I suppose now you think I’ll give it up just because you’ve bought me a drink.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Pete shrugged and gave his glass a couple of turns.

  “I’ll make some calls,” he said. “But no promises. Let me see what turns up and I’ll decide then what I can tell you.”

  They talked for a little longer about this and that. Then Pete finished his whiskey and left. Shepherd walked to the door with him to see if it was still raining. Of course it was still raining. He went back to the bar, picked up the Herald Tribune again, and ordered another cup of coffee.

  Up on one of the flat screen televisions hanging above the bar a satellite channel was broadcasting a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants. Shepherd glanced at his watch and did the math. The game couldn’t have been coming in live, but he supposed it could have been a rebroadcast of a game played earlier in the day. On the other hand, for all he knew it was a re-broadcast of a game played several seasons back. He had pretty much lost track of American sports during the last few years. Occasionally he wished he hadn’t, but not all that often.

  The picture shifted to the Cowboys cheerleaders and that naturally got Shepherd’s full attention. He sat for a minute with his arms folded over his chest and just watched. The star-spangled silver-and-blue uniforms, the tiny white shorts molded to perfect bottoms, the bubbling energy, and the face-splitting smiles all mesmerized him in equal measure. America was the only culture in the history of mankind to have spawned cheerleaders. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but he was absolutely certain it couldn’t be anything good.

  ***

  WHEN THE RAIN eventually stopped, Shepherd paid his tab and headed back to his hotel. It was a nice night for walking and Bangkok didn’t give up many of those. The air, cleansed by the rain, had turned almost cool, at least cool for a place where the locals hauled out parkas and mukluks anytime the temperature dropped below eighty degrees.

  Shepherd liked walking in Bangkok. That was a good thing, since walking was the most practical way to get around. Cars, motorcycles, buses, bicycles, vans, and even tuk-tuks, little three-wheeled vehicles that roared like pissed-off lawnmowers, choked the city’s narrow streets day and night with traffic so snarled it had become a tourist attraction.

  A lot of the city’s life was lived right out there on its streets. People ate their meals on the streets, got their hair cut on the streets, had their shoes repaired on the streets, and did their shopping on the streets. On every walk through the city, he passed through an endless succession of vignettes of people living their lives. They all somehow fused together into an exotic brew of adventure and romance that still held a lot of attraction for him, whatever else he might think about Bangkok now.

  He walked west on Silom Road, then turned left at the old Christian cemetery and followed its concrete wall south. Up ahead he could see the radio masts rising from behind the high, ocher wall topped with razor wire that surround the Russian Embassy. Just in front of that wall was the Grand Hotel.

  The Grand Hotel wasn’t really all that grand. To be absolutely truthful, it was slightly shabby. Some of the great hotels of the world were in Bangkok: hotels like the Mandarin Oriental, the Four Seasons, and the Peninsula. Charlie was paying the bill so naturally Shepherd could have stayed anywhere he wanted, but he stayed at the Grand regardless. It was clean, it was comfortable, it was a ten minute walk from the business district, and it had soul.

  There was something else, too, of course. He had lived at the Grand for nearly six months after Anita left, so there was also an element of loyalty involved in returning there. The Grand had been his sanctuary when he needed one, his safe house while he was trying to decide what was to become of him. The small suite where he lived back then had been agreeable. He ate most of his meals a
t the Duke of Wellington, and he didn’t do any entertaining. What else had he needed but a bedroom, a bathroom, and a little sitting room where he could lie on the sofa and watch television? The Grand had been a steadfast friend when he needed one. He felt now like he owed it the same allegiance and fidelity in return.

  The atmosphere of the place was just right for him as well. The Grand was almost a private club, one dedicated to the preservation of a particular species of foreigner: the slightly off-kilter refugees from reality who usually washed up on the great dirty beach of Bangkok. That was Shepherd back then all right. Off-kilter and washed up. He had fit right in at the Grand.

  ***

  IT WAS LATE when he got to the Grand and no one was in the lobby but a dozing security guard. He was an elderly man in a wrinkled khaki uniform and he sat on a stool next to the front desk, his head pitched forward on his folded arms. He snored gently as Shepherd walked by. Since he had dropped his bag off before going to the Duke, he bypassed the elevator and took the stairs. He was on the third floor, which wasn’t much of a climb, and the elevator was so slow that he had long ago developed the habit of walking whenever it was practical.

  In his room Shepherd quickly shed his clothes, depositing them on the nearest available piece of floor, climbed into the shower, and turned the hot water up all the way. After a pleasant enough few minutes soaking in the scalding spray, the water began to go cold, so he shut off the shower, toweled himself dry, and climbed into bed.

  Lying under the sheet, his hands clasped across his chest, he listened to the humming of the air-conditioner and thought about the last time he had been in Bangkok. Anita had come back to him from everywhere then. Perhaps this time would be different.

  It wasn’t different.

  Soon enough the memories came padding quietly on little cat feet through the grey half-darkness of his room. He surrendered without a struggle and drifted with Anita for a long while in the borderlands of consciousness, visiting and being visited by images he thought he had long forgotten. It was far too long before sleep took him, but eventually it did. The Technicolor memories faded away, folding seamlessly into black and white dreams.