Later, each time he thought back over everything that happened afterward, the same feeling would return to him over and over with a clarity verging on the telepathic. And each time it did, he would shake his head in pure amazement at it all, at the memory of how much he already understood that early morning in Hong Kong Park.
Even though, at the time, he was sure he understood nothing at all.
TWENTY-FIVE
KEUR WATCHED SHEPHERD until he crossed Cotton Tree Drive and disappeared behind the ugly white building that housed the American Consulate. Then he stood up and stretched, collected the crumpled bag with the two empty Starbucks cups in it, and walked slowly in the direction of the Bank of China Tower.
Keur had never liked Hong Kong very much. It was the nosiest, rudest, most overcrowded city he had ever been in, and it had been a hell of a long way to come for a ten minute conversation that didn’t appear to amount to all that much. Still, he was convinced it had been worth it. He was beginning to get inside Shepherd’s guard. He was sure of that now.
At first, using Jack Shepherd to get to Charlie Kitnarok hadn’t seemed like much of a plan. Unless a target’s lawyer was stupid or corrupt, preferably both, the lawyer was never likely to be the road in, and Jack Shepherd was clearly neither of those things. He had detailed intel on Shepherd and got updates almost every day. He had studied Shepherd’s movements. He had read transcripts of his telephone conversations. He was beginning to understand him.
At first, he just hadn’t seen it. He hadn’t thought this was going to work. He had to admit that. But now he did. He could see that it was going to work.
Keur had always viewed recruitments like this as similar to martial arts matches. You won, not by attacking your opponent’s weaknesses, but by turning his strengths against him. Jack Shepherd was a rational guy. He thought like a lawyer. He took in information, examined that information from first one perspective then another, compared it to other information, and reached a measured conclusion as to what it meant. The conclusions he reached were inevitably both intelligent and reasoned. They were never emotional. That was his strength. And that was his weakness.
Control the flow of information to Shepherd and you control Shepherd. Make common cause with him. Build his reliance on you. Make him trust you. And become the one who feeds him information. How was he going to do that? It was the punch line to a very old joke. All you need is sincerity. And once you learn to fake that, you’ve really got it made.
Keur chuckled to himself and walked a little faster. The more he thought about it, the more pumped up he felt. He was like the magician who distracted the audience with his left hand while he picked their pockets with his right. He would keep Shepherd focused on Robert Darling. Then, in another week or two, he would reach out with his other hand and pry Charlie Kitnarok open like a tin can. This was going to work. He could feel it now.
***
SHEPHERD TOOK A quick shower when he got back to Freddy’s apartment, then he dressed and rode the Mid-levels escalator down to his office. And the whole time he rode he kept thinking about that hot cup of coffee Keur had waiting for him in Hong Kong Park. Could he really be under surveillance, or was there was a more mundane explanation for it?
All around him the escalator was jammed with other people who looked like they were going to work, too. Or was it possible that some of those people were there just to watch him? How the hell was he supposed to tell? Other than what he had read in spy novels, Shepherd knew nothing about surveillance and he doubted he would be able to spot it unless somebody jumped out in front of him and waved.
Of course, if there actually were people watching him, it meant the story Keur had told him about being on a one-man crusade was complete horseshit. It took serious manpower and local cooperation to keep someone under surveillance in places like Hong Kong and Dubai. It wasn’t a job one guy could do on his own. Not by a long shot.
And that brought Shepherd face to face with a scary question. Where would Keur get manpower like that? Was the FBI really that interested in him, or was Keur somebody altogether different from who he claimed to be?
The more Shepherd mulled the matter over, the more he decided he was letting Keur get to him. He was making way too much out of a single hot cup of coffee. Keur could easily have known he ran in the mornings and he could just as easily have found out where he lived. Putting those two things together would almost certainly have pointed him to Hong Kong Park. There really wasn’t any other place in central Hong Kong where a runner could be. Yeah, Shepherd thought to himself as he stepped off the escalator just below Hollywood Road, that was probably all there was to it. What other sensible explanation could there be? Surely he wasn’t important enough to command intensive surveillance in two countries nearly half a world away from each other? Not from the FBI, and not from anybody else.
That was another thing that bothered Shepherd about Keur’s sudden appearance that morning, however, something that was probably more important than how Keur came to be in Hong Kong Park in the first place. Keur’s whole pitch to him to spy on Charlie for the FBI, or for Keur personally if his story about being on medical leave was actually true, just didn’t ring right. Unless Keur was a complete idiot, and Shepherd didn’t for a moment think he was, he had to know that wasn’t going to happen. No lawyer who wasn’t corrupt was going to turn informant on his own client. So why had Keur allowed himself to appear stupid by asking in the first place? He had even done it twice now, not just once. That just didn’t make any sense.
Shepherd ducked into the Pacific Coffee Company and grabbed a large coffee and a cinnamon roll. There was a long counter across from the window that looked out into Hollywood Road and he stood leaning on it, watching the traffic while he ate the roll. There was at least one thing about Keur’s story that did add up, even if Shepherd didn’t much like the look of the total he was getting.
Had somebody been trying to kill Charlie in Dubai, or were they really gunning for him as Keur had claimed? As outlandish as that possibility had sounded when Keur first laid it out, the picture Shepherd had on his cell phone of Adnan’s severed head with the eyeballs chewed out had given the whole proposition a degree of credence it hadn’t had before. Somebody had gone after one of the people who was closest to Charlie. Could that mean that Keur was right after all? Could that mean that he might be next on the list?
Of course, Shepherd told himself, the attack in Dubai and Adnan’s murder in Bangkok might not be connected. It might just be a simple coincidence that a headless Adnan had turned up hanging under the Taksin Bridge a couple of days after those two idiots jumped them in Dubai. Shepherd knew if he could convince himself of that, he would feel a hell of a lot better.
But he couldn’t.
Shepherd finished his cinnamon roll and dumped the wrapper in the trash. Then he took the rest of his coffee with him and crossed the street to the little shophouse where he had his office.
***
THE CONCRETE STAIRWELL was musty and dim and it smelled faintly of cat urine. Shepherd climbed the two flights up to his office. He booted up both computers and sipped at his half-cold coffee until they were ready to use. He opened the browser on one and connected to Bloomberg, where he set up a half dozen windows to monitor that morning’s financial data. Then he switched to the other computer and downloaded and printed copies of all the new wire transfer notices that had arrived overnight and checked the balances in the investment accounts.
He added the new wires to his running total and saw immediately that all the incoming transfers in the last few days added up to a little less than the full amount he had wired out of Thailand, but he couldn’t immediately see how that could be. He counted the wires from Bangkok Bank and the total number was right, so he went back and compared the amounts of the wires one by one with the amounts he had ordered transferred. Every wire was a little short, shorter than they should have been just to cover the payments he had authorized Woody Allen to make to get the transfers
approved by the Bank of Thailand.
For a couple of hours Shepherd ran trial balances and checked and double-checked his figures, but no matter how he worked the numbers he kept getting the same result. About seven million dollars of the nearly six hundred million dollars he had wired out of Thailand, give or take, hadn’t shown up in any of the investment accounts. About one million of that was accounted for by what he had agreed to pay the deputy governor of the Bank of Thailand, but what happened to the other six million? Had Charlie’s pet banker gotten sticky fingers?
When you’re dealing with over six hundred million dollars, not being able to account for less than one per cent of it wasn’t exactly a show-stopper, so Shepherd decided to set the matter aside to sort out later, and he spent the rest of the morning on the more pressing task of laying out a detailed investment plan for the new funds. He wanted to talk to Charlie before making any final commitments, but it was still a little early to call him. Dubai was four hours behind Hong Kong, so calling just after lunch would catch Charlie near the beginning of his day. That was assuming Charlie was still in Dubai, of course. If he was somewhere else, the hour might be less convenient, but Shepherd figured that was Charlie’s problem, not his.
In addition to talking to Charlie about the way he had decided to bed down his funds, Shepherd also want to ask him what he knew about Adnan’s dramatic demise. Maybe he could even find out what Adnan had been doing in Bangkok without having to ask Charlie flat out. He knew it was really none of his business what Adnan had been doing there, but under the circumstances, he told himself, his interest was far more than idle curiosity.
A little after 1:00 P.M., he went down to Archie’s New York Deli in SoHo and had a quick corned beef on rye with a couple of kosher dill pickles and a Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda. That was one thing Shepherd really loved about Hong Kong, the exotic Asian food. Then he went back to the office and settled in behind his desk to call Charlie.
As a rule, Shepherd generally called one of Charlie’s office numbers when he needed to talk to him. He didn’t much like calling people’s cell phones. He had seen too many men answering phones with their mouths full or, worse, while standing at a urinal, and he didn’t much care for the picture of Charlie holding his phone with one hand and his penis with the other. But it was early in Dubai, far too early to expect anyone to answer the office lines, so Shepherd set his policy aside and dialed Charlie’s private cell number.
The first time he called, the call went straight to voice mail and he hung up without leaving a message. Charlie never listened to his messages anyway so there was no point in leaving one. Shepherd waited about ten minutes and called again. This time Charlie answered almost immediately.
TWENTY-SIX
THE SMALL TALK lasted no more than a few seconds. Small talk was something neither Charlie nor Shepherd did particularly well.
“I need to tell you how I intend to invest the funds I got out of Thailand,” Shepherd said, getting right to the point.
Charlie didn’t say anything for a moment, and Shepherd wondered if the six hundred million dollars he had bribed a deputy governor of the Bangkok of Thailand to get out of the country for Charlie had temporarily slipped his mind.
“Whatever you want to do is okay with me,” Charlie finally said.
“Let me run over—”
“You’re not listening to me, Jack. Handle the funds however you like. I don’t want the details.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely sure. Anything else?”
So Shepherd asked Charlie what he thought about Adnan.
“The best assistant I ever had,” Charlie answered. “Why are you asking me?”
“No, I meant what do you think about the reason he was killed.”
There was a silence over the telephone so complete that for moment Shepherd wondered if the connection had been broken. Then all at once it occurred to him. Charlie had no idea that Adnan was dead.
“I’m sorry,” Shepherd said. “That was stupid of me. I just assumed you knew.”
“Tell me,” Charlie said.
Shepherd told Charlie what he knew and the silence came again. Shepherd waited for Charlie to break it. It seemed the right thing to do.
“You should get back here, Jack,” he said when he finally he did.
Shepherd didn’t know what he had been expecting Charlie to say, but it certainly wasn’t that.
“What do you mean?”
“Come back to Dubai until I find out what’s going on. You may be in danger, too. You’ll be safe here.”
“I was just in Dubai, Charlie, and I clearly remember two guys shooting at us one morning while we were walking through the souk. That’s what you call safe?”
“Never mind about that. That wasn’t serious. This may be.”
Shepherd could have told Charlie that hiding behind a pile of bags while two guys pumped bullets at them seemed pretty damned serious to him, but he didn’t bother.
“I’ve got work to do here,” he said instead. “And nobody has tried to kill me in Hong Kong recently. I think I’ll stay where I am.”
“That’s not a good idea, Jack. It would make me feel a lot better for you to be in Dubai.”
“There’s some money missing from the wires, Charlie. I need to find it before I even think about going anywhere.”
“What wires?”
“The ones from Bangkok Bank.”
“How much is missing?” he asked.
“Somewhere around six million dollars, I think. Net of gratuities.”
“Net of what?”
Shepherd tried it another way, without the cleverness this time, which he figured was the way he probably should have tried it in the first place.
“The wires were short by a total of about seven million dollars in all. We paid a million or so to get the money out of Thailand, so that leaves around six million dollars unaccounted for.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m thinking your banker may have gotten greedy and helped himself.”
“No, that didn’t happen.”
“Look, Charlie, whether you think it happened or not, there’s still six million dollars—”
“Would you forget about the lousy six million dollars, Jack, and get your ass back here to Dubai right now? Will you just shut the fuck up and do that for me?”
Charlie wasn’t in Dubai for the food. Shepherd understood that. He was there for the discretion, the no-questions-asked anonymity, and the personal security for which Dubai was well known. Money was money and business was business, and they both mattered more in Dubai than politics. If there was a better place on the planet for a billionaire politician on the lam to go to ground, Shepherd didn’t know where it was. He just wasn’t certain that the same reasoning applied to Mr. Billionaire-Politician-On-The-Lam’s lawyer.
If somebody really was trying to pick off the people around Charlie, Shepherd didn’t see how he would be better off in Dubai than he was in Hong Kong. But Charlie was the client so he pretty much went where Charlie asked him to go, regardless of how good or bad the reasons for making the trip might be. That was the way it worked. Lawyers kept their clients happy. Not the other way around.
They wrangled on for a while after that, although Shepherd’s heart really wasn’t in it. He didn’t want to go back to Dubai, of course, but Charlie was absolutely insistent. Shepherd knew it would be easier just to do it than try to talk him out of the idea. After a bit of ritual back and forth, Shepherd gave in and they agreed he would finish bedding down the new funds and leave Hong Kong the next day. The matter of the missing six million dollars was left to deal with some other time.
Buying and selling hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds and currencies might sound romantic to a lot of people, but mostly Shepherd suspected it sounded that way to people who had never done it. The truth was that it was tedious and boring work. He sent dozens of emails to banks and brokerage houses, confirmed them all with faxes, and sort
ed out the mistakes that were inevitably made. Then he did it all again. And again. He always imagined people who worked in banks felt the same way about what they did. After a while, all that money they handled stopped being money and turned into nothing but piles of paper they had to haul around. It wasn’t wealth, it was just another load of stuff they had to hump.
The whole time Shepherd was busy humping his load of stuff, he was turning everything that had happened over and over in his mind. Tedium was very productive for some people he knew, including himself. There were people who cut the grass while they thought. Others who did the ironing. He even knew one guy who claimed to get all his best ideas while vacuuming his swimming pool. As for Shepherd, the tedium that really cut the mustard was shuffling wire transfers and revising investment accounts.
Somewhere between checking the long euro positions at Deutsche Bank and adding to the short-dated T-bills in the HSBC accounts, an idea abruptly popped into Shepherd’s head. Once it did, as was generally the case with almost all of his best ideas, he was dumbfounded he hadn’t thought of it sooner.
***
SHEPHERD HADN’T TALKED to Tommy for nearly a year and he didn’t really want to talk to Tommy now, but he knew that was exactly what he had to do. Shepherd had known Tommy almost from the day he had taken up residence in Bangkok to teach at Chulalongkorn University. Tommy had made it his business to get to know Shepherd back then because getting to know people like Shepherd was what Tommy did for a living.
Tommy’s real name was Tommerat something-or-another, but everyone Shepherd knew just called him Tommy. In the face of all provocation, Tommy stuck doggedly to the story that he was deputy spokesman for the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but if there was anyone in Bangkok who didn’t know that Tommy actually worked for the National Intelligence Agency, Shepherd had never met them. The first time he had introduced Tommy to Anita, she had been terribly amused at the idea that there was such a thing as a Thai spy and she had tossed out a couple of pretty snappy one-liners on the subject. Shepherd tried to explain to her later that there was absolutely nothing amusing about Tommy, and certainly nothing to laugh about, but he didn’t think Anita really believed him.
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