“Is that possible?”
“Oh, I hope so. I really do hope so.”
Far off in the distance, Shepherd heard a siren start up. It was a European siren, one of those with the kind of whoop-whoop-whoop sound that always made him think of late night black-and-white movies about Nazis searching for Anne Frank. He listened until it stopped as abruptly as it had started. That was when a question occurred to him that he should have already asked Kate.
“You said Trippler Aviation operates Harvey under a charter deal and that it’s registered in the UAE. Do you know who actually owns the plane?”
“Yes, I do. It took a while to find out, but eventually we traced the charter payments Trippler is making. For nearly three years, the CIA has been paying about a million dollars a month through Trippler to charter it.”
“That sounds like way too much to me.”
“It’s maybe ten times what the plane is really worth on the charter market.”
Shepherd thought about that while he looked at Harvey sitting next to the black-mirrored building on the empty airfield. “Then I gather what you’re really telling me is that the CIA is using the charter arrangement to funnel money to somebody.”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
“Who?”
“Harvey’s legal owner.”
“Who is that?”
“A shell company in the Cayman Islands.”
“That’s a dead end then.”
“No, it’s not a dead end.”
That surprised Shepherd. Obscuring the actual ownership of Cayman shell companies wasn’t particularly hard. He had done it a few times himself. Either somebody got careless, or they just didn’t care enough to try very hard.
“Some friends of ours used their sources in the Caymans. We know who really owns the shell company. So we also know who owns Harvey and who’s getting the CIA’s money.”
Shepherd was curious about who those friends might be, of course. It could have been anybody but, if he had to bet on it, he would go with the Chinese. Still, he didn’t bother to ask Kate who had cracked the ownership for her. It didn’t really matter and she wouldn’t have told him anyway. Instead, he asked her about Harvey, which was apparently something she did want to talk about.
“Okay, I give up,” he said, spreading his hands. “Who’s getting the sweet deal from the spooks? Who owns Harvey?”
“You own Harvey, Jack.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The Kitnarok Foundation owns Harvey’s and you’re a trustee of the foundation. The CIA’s been funneling money to an organization you’re presumably supervising.”
THIRTY-TWO
KATE DROVE SHEPHERD from Don Mueang to Suvarnabhumi Airport to catch his flight to Dubai. Neither one of them said much during the drive. When they got there, she pulled to the curb at the Emirates Airways entrance.
“Tommy’s going to bring your stuff out. He’ll see that it gets on the plane.”
“After what you’ve told me, I’ve got more important things to worry about than my luggage.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let me think about it.”
Shepherd opened the door and got out of the car. To his surprise, Kate got out as well. He didn’t know what he was expecting. He supposed he thought Kate would just drive away when he closed the door, but she didn’t. Instead she walked around the car, put her arms around him, and gave him a hug. Maybe it was a sisterly hug, and maybe it was something else. Standing there in the harsh metallic wash of the airport lights and breathing the carbon monoxide from the idling vehicles all around them, Shepherd couldn’t decide.
“Watch yourself,” Kate said. “I’m not asking you to do anything about this. I just wanted you to know. It’s not your responsibility to fix it. It’s mine.”
Shepherd said nothing.
Kate broke off the hug, took half a step back, and gave him a look.
“The truth is I told you what I did to convince you not to get involved. Not to entice you into it.”
Shepherd said nothing.
“They’re not going to let you get in their way, Jack. There’s too much at stake. You wouldn’t have a chance.”
“I’m not going to get in their way. I just don’t like being lied to. If I was.”
Kate hesitated at that. She seemed to think about saying something else, but she didn’t. She just nodded, walked back to the driver’s side of the BMW, and got in. She bent down and smiled at Shepherd through the window, then straightened up and drove away. Shepherd thought about that hug for a moment, maybe two, and then he turned around and walked into the airport.
***
THE FLIGHT TO Dubai didn’t leave for another couple of hours so after Shepherd checked in he went to the Emirates lounge, got himself a large whiskey, and found a seat by himself off in a half-darkened corner. Airports are bleak places in the middle of the night. They are not great places anytime, of course, but in the hours after midnight airports are particularly desolate. Shepherd didn’t know if there was a waiting lounge to catch the ferry over the River Styx, but if there was, he had no doubt it would feel and smell exactly like an airport at one o’clock in the morning. The scotch helped, a little, so he swung his feet up onto a low table, stared out the window into the darkness, and thought about what Kate had told him.
Was Blossom Trading really in the arms business? Keur was clearly a man with contacts and he had claimed Blossom Trading was running guns to Iran. Kate, someone who was probably even better informed than Keur, had added that Blossom Trading was supplying arms to both the Muslim rebels in the south of Thailand and to the red shirts in Bangkok. Two people like that, with information like that, were pretty hard to ignore.
Okay, so maybe Blossom Trading was selling arms. And the company was presumably owned in equal shares by Charlie and Robert Darling. So what? It isn’t necessarily illegal to sell arms. Arms are legally sold every day, both by private companies and governments. Just because a company sells weapons, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s involved in criminal activity any more than a pharmaceutical company is automatically involved in criminal activity because it sells drugs.
The question was whether Blossom Trading was breaking any laws with regard to how they did their selling and to whom they did it. But whose laws? Was there any law in Thailand against selling arms to Muslims in the south? And, even if there was, did that law necessarily apply to a company in Dubai that had no office or other place of business in Thailand? And what about the red shirts? Maybe there was no law in Thailand saying ordinary people couldn’t buy guns. Surely the issue was what the red shirts did with those arms after they bought them, and how could the seller be responsible for that?
Shepherd took a long pull on his whiskey and thought about the many benefits of a legal education. He could turn pretty much anything upside down, couldn’t he? He remembered Charlie had once said he could make chicken salad out of chicken shit. Maybe it was a natural talent. Maybe he hadn’t even needed the three years at Georgetown Law to learn how to do it. But he was pretty certain they had helped a whole lot.
Thoroughly disgusted with himself, Shepherd knocked off the rest of his whiskey and went to find his airplane.
***
THANKS TO THE drink, he slept all the way through the six-hour flight. But it was 5:30 A.M. local time when he arrived in Dubai, and sleep or no sleep, he felt like shit.
Airports aren’t any more attractive at 5:30 A.M. than they are at 2:30 A.M. If dawn brings hope and rebirth in most places, airports aren’t most places. In airports, dawn brings mobs of dirty people in rumpled clothing dragging various kinds of wheeled containers behind them. It’s like being caught up in an army of the homeless suddenly on the move. Which, in a manner of speaking, is exactly what it actually is.
A very large bearded man in round silver-framed glasses was working the immigration counter where Shepherd lined up. He was
wearing a dishdasha and ghutra so white they hurt Shepherd’s eyes to look at them. The man peered at Shepherd doubtfully and took his time about examining his passport and immigration card. Eventually he stamped the passport and returned it to him. Shepherd followed the crowds through to the baggage hall. To his complete astonishment, his bag was there waiting for him. He wondered briefly if Tommy had examined it before passing it over to Emirates Airways. Of course he had. Shepherd hoped his dirty laundry had smelled awful.
He hauled his bag outside to the taxi line and for a few moments he just stood quietly in the softness of the dawn light letting the warm desert air wash over him. It was dry and pungent, filled with fragrances he could not identify and brimming with hints of enigmatic events occurring somewhere just out of sight. When he made it to the front of the line, he got into the cab while the driver stowed his bag in the trunk. It wasn’t until the man got back behind the wheel and asked where he was going that it occurred to Shepherd he didn’t have a clue.
He hadn’t made a hotel reservation. He was there only because Charlie had demanded he come. He glanced at his watch. Barely 6:00 A.M. To hell with it, he thought, and he told the driver how to get to Charlie’s villa.
***
THERE WAS VERY little traffic at that hour so they made it to Palm Jumeirah in less than thirty minutes. The cab stopped at the security gate in front of Charlie’s compound and Shepherd paid off the driver and collected his bag from the trunk. It surprised Shepherd that no one emerged to check him out. Maybe Charlie’s security guys weren’t very alert that early in the morning.
The taxi drove away and still no one came out. Shepherd walked over to the gate and slapped on it a couple of times with his open hand. The sound of his hand against the metal echoed in the morning quiet. The first thing Shepherd noticed was that the gate was green-painted aluminum rather than iron as he had always assumed. The second thing he noticed was that the gate was unlocked. It drifted open a few inches from the impact of the slaps.
“Hello!” he shouted through the opening.
He got no reply.
Pushing at the gate, he swung it back far enough to stick his head through. He did so very cautiously. He was not wild about the idea of surprising guys who carried guns.
“Hello!” he shouted again.
Still no answer. Where were Charlie’s security guys? Shepherd dragged his bag through the narrow opening and glanced around. Everything about the compound looked normal enough, but both the main house and the house that Charlie had converted into an office gave off that particular air that deserted buildings do.
What the hell is going on here?
Even if Charlie had suddenly decamped for somewhere without telling him, there would still have been people in the office. Shepherd walked all the way around the villa where the offices were. Then for good measure he made a circuit of the main house, too. Both were empty and locked up tight. There was no one there. No one at all. He made his way back to the courtyard and stood for a while just opposite the security gate. It was still early morning, but the desert sun was already pitiless. The compound looked small and flat and exposed. It lay there as if stunned by the hard morning light.
“You want a ride somewhere?”
Startled, Shepherd whirled around.
Special Agent Leonard Keur was standing just inside the security gate with a half smile on his face. He was wearing a light blue seersucker suit with a white shirt and a dark tie.
“They cleared out last night,” Keur said. “All of them.”
Shepherd was too nonplussed to respond. Where the hell had Keur come from?
“You look as if you could use some coffee,” Keur said. “Come on. I’ve got a rental car. There’s a Starbucks not far away.”
THIRTY-THREE
SHEPHERD PEELED THE top off his coffee and looked around the room. They were on the ground floor of a black glass building facing another almost identical black glass building on the other side of a huge but otherwise unremarkable concrete plaza. The plaza was broken here and there with a few palm trees and stone arches of varying sizes that were apparently supposed to make it look warmer and more human-scale, but they didn’t. They just made it look bleaker and more desolate.
The Starbucks was exactly the same as every other Starbucks Shepherd had ever been in. The colors were the same; the signs were the same; the wall decorations were the same; the displays were the same; the bags of coffee and overpriced mugs were the same; the furniture was the same. Even the view through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows was pretty much the same. He could have been anywhere in the world.
But he wasn’t just anywhere in the world. He was somewhere called Dubai Internet City, a complex of buildings that like most buildings in Dubai were bland, monotonous, and new. About two miles away, out on Palm Jumeirah on the other side of Sheikh Zayed Road, Charlie’s compound sat quiet and abandoned. And he was at a table in Starbucks calmly drinking coffee with an FBI agent who was trying to recruit him as an informant. It was one of those moments that would cause almost anybody to look around and ask himself the same question: How in the hell did I get here?
“Where’s Charlie?” Shepherd asked.
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“No idea.”
Over Keur’s shoulder something about two men just settling themselves down at another table caught Shepherd’s eye. Both were middle-aged Caucasians wearing wrinkled shirts and baggy khakis, but their short haircuts and solid-looking builds screamed either military or ex-military private contractors. Shepherd didn’t much like the way they kept looking in his direction, but he sipped at his coffee and turned his eyes back to Keur.
“You sure you don’t know where the general has gone, Jack?”
Shepherd said nothing. The two men were staring openly toward him now and he shifted his eyes just enough to keep them in his peripheral vision.
“Why don’t I believe you, Jack?”
“Because you’re an unhappy and deeply suspicious person?”
One of the two men pushed back his chair and started toward Shepherd.
Maybe Kate was wrong, Shepherd thought. Maybe somebody whose motives weren’t yet entirely clear actually was targeting Charlie’s advisers. With all the secret facilities, anonymous airplanes, and clandestine arms dealing swirling around, how could he have just accepted at face value Kate’s assurances that nobody had any interest in him?
The man was only a half dozen steps away now, and he was picking up speed.
But surely, even if he was being targeted by somebody, they wouldn’t send people after him right here in the middle of a Starbucks on a sunny morning in Dubai, would they? And, even if they were willing to do that, how the hell did they know where he was? Even he didn’t know where Keur was taking him until they got there.
And then all at once it hit him.
How in God’s name could he have been so stupid? First Keur turns up out of nowhere, and then he takes him here. Of course! It was Keur! Keur had been setting him up from the beginning!
The man was almost on him. Shepherd half rose from his chair and lifted his hands by reflex, although he had no idea what he was going to do with them. This was obviously a trained military man, someone who knew how to kill, and about the only thing Shepherd could do with his hands was operate a laptop. Somehow he doubted he would be able to email this guy to death.
He was still trying desperately to come up with some kind of plan when the man gave him a peculiar look and passed by. He approached two women sitting at a table a short distance away and launched into what looked like a well practiced chat-up routine. Shepherd sat back down feeling very foolish. He glanced at Keur. Keur was watching him with a puzzled expression.
“I thought I knew that guy,” Shepherd said.
Keur looked skeptical, but he nodded slowly.
“Okay,” Keur said after a moment or two of silence, “If you don’t have any idea where the general went, you don’t.”
Shepherd j
ust nodded.
“I guess I really can’t blame him for going to ground. It’s way too hot around here for him right now.”
“I thought you said those guys were really gunning for me. So why would Charlie start worrying about the attack now? Doesn’t he know I was the target?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Keur asked.
“You said that those two gunmen who attacked us in the souk—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Keur waved a hand in dismissal. “Nobody gives a shit about that anymore, not after what happened this morning.”
“What are you talking about? What happened this morning?”
“The prime minister was shot. Haven’t you heard?”
“The prime minister of Dubai was shot?”
Keur looked at Shepherd carefully trying to decide whether or not he was kidding. “You really haven’t heard?”
“Haven’t heard what, for Christ’s sake?”
“Not the prime minster of Dubai,” Keur said, “The prime minister of Thailand. Some guy with a long name.”
“Somchai Woramaneewongse?” Shepherd asked. “Somebody shot Somchai Woramaneewongse?”
“Yeah, right,” Keur said. “Him.”
“Is he okay?”
“Not really. He’s dead.”
Shepherd just stared at Keur, trying to process what he was hearing.
“There were two gunmen on motorcycles. They ambushed his motorcade with automatic weapons early this morning. On some road with a funny name. Suck-something.”
“Sukhumvit Road.”
“That’s it.” Keur nodded. “They used a hijacked bus to block off the security car trailing the prime minister. Then they shot up the car he was riding in. They killed him, two security guys, and the driver.”
“Have the shooters been caught?”
“Both of them made a clean getaway.”
Shepherd was still struggling to get in front of what Keur was telling him. “Are you saying you think Charlie was responsible? That Charlie had the prime minister killed so he could move back in and take power in Thailand?”
World of Trouble (9786167611136) Page 19
