World of Trouble (9786167611136)

by Needham, Jake

WHEN KEUR WALKED back into the apartment a half hour later, he handed Shepherd two paper bags. One of them contained a Big Mac, a large fries, and an apple pie. The other contained five identical Nokia cell phones, the cheap ones without any of the bells and whistles, and five chargers.

  “All prepaid and untraceable,” Keur said. “Bought them down the street and loaded each one with five hours of air time. One’s for you, one’s for me. The batteries are pre-charged so we should be good to go.”

  “Who are the other three for?”

  “For whoever you want to talk to. When you use prepaid numbers for both ends of a conversation, you stay anonymous. At least you do for a while.”

  “You seem to know quite a lot about this kind of thing, Keur.”

  Keur didn’t say anything. He just handed Shepherd a card on which the shop had written the numbers for the five phones.

  Shepherd took the card and turned on three of the phones. After the numbers came up on their screens, he wrote his name by one of the numbers on the card and dropped the phone into his pocket. Then he wrote Keur’s name next to another number and handed that phone to him.

  Shepherd held up the third phone.

  “I need to get this to Liz,” he said.

  “Do you know where her office is?”

  “Yes. Not far.”

  “Give me the address and I’ll go downstairs and hire a motorcycle taxi to deliver it.”

  Shepherd rummaged in a desk drawer until he found a large envelope. He wrote Liz’s address on it, sealed the telephone inside, and gave it to Keur. While Keur took the envelope downstairs, Shepherd turned the television on to pass the time. CNN was running World Sport again. Did they ever broadcast anything else? He muted the sound and sat staring at interminable and interchangeable images of people playing soccer until Keur came back.

  “Ten minutes,” Keur said. He glanced at the television set. “I didn’t know you liked soccer.”

  “I don’t. I loath soccer.”

  “Me, too,” Keur said. Then he sat down on the couch across from Shepherd and focused his attention on the television set.

  Fifteen minutes later, World Sport was still broadcasting excerpts from European soccer games and Shepherd and Keur were still staring at the muted television set in silence. How many soccer games could be played on the planet every day? Shepherd wondered to himself. But he quickly decided any number greater than one was way too many and lost all interest in trying to work it out.

  Shepherd picked up the new Nokia, consulted his list of numbers, and dialed the one for the phone Keur had sent to Liz’s office by motorcycle taxi. No answer.

  Five more minutes of silent soccer and he tried again. Still no answer.

  “Maybe your delivery guy hasn’t made it yet,” he said to Keur.

  “Maybe your pet reporter’s not in her office.”

  Shepherd shrugged and put the Nokia down on the coffee table. Almost immediately it began to play some kind of irritating jingle. He jerked it back up again and answered.

  “Who the fuck is this?” a woman’s voice bawled in his ear. “And what the fuck is going on?”

  “It’s Liz,” he said to Keur.

  “Jack?” Liz’s voice dropped to a stage whisper on the telephone. “Is that you, Jack?”

  “Yes. It’s me.”

  “Did you send me this phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you just called me on it? Twice?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is this number you called me from?”

  “It’s my temporary phone. Just like the phone you’re talking on now is your temporary phone.”

  There was a little silence while Liz took that in.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Close.”

  “Close? You mean you’re in Bangkok?”

  “Never mind about that now, Liz. I heard your report. Why are they looking for me?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I wouldn’t be asking you if I knew.”

  “The government thinks you’re General Kitnarok’s man and that he’s about to start a civil war here. They figure you’ve got something to do with that. Maybe you’re even pulling some of the strings.”

  “I don’t do politics, Liz. I thought you knew that.”

  “This government isn’t going to let General Kitnarok take them down. They’re going to fight. They think you’re involved, Jack, and they’re coming after you.”

  “You mean coming after me the way somebody came after Adnan?”

  “What are you talking about? Who the fuck is Adnan?”

  It suddenly occurred to Shepherd that Liz didn’t know anything about Adnan’s headless corpse dangling under the Taksin Bridge. The military must have hushed it up pretty effectively if the press hadn’t sniffed out anything about it. That was interesting. If the military had been involved in killing Adnan to scare Charlie’s supporters, why would they keep it quiet?

  “Why did you send this phone to me?” Liz interrupted Shepherd’s reverie before he could decide what to make of that.

  “Because it’s untraceable.”

  There was another silence and this time he could almost hear Liz thinking.

  “Are you telling me my calls are being monitored?”

  “Maybe. We think it’s possible.”

  “We?”

  “Later,” Shepherd said, glancing at Keur. “What the hell is going on, Liz? That’s what matters right now. Who’s looking for me?”

  “I’m not actually quite sure. The police, I guess.”

  “I talked to Jello not more than an hour ago. He didn’t know anything about it.”

  “If you say so.”

  “It was your story, Liz. You even had a photo of me. Where did you get it?”

  “We got the picture off the internet. We went to the site for—”

  “Not the goddamned picture, Liz. I meant the story that the Thai authorities are looking for me. Where did you get the story from?”

  “You know I can’t tell you what my source—”

  “Bullshit, lady. Somebody is after me and I want to know who it is. Don’t give me some academic horseshit about protecting your sources.”

  Liz said nothing at all for at least half a minute. Shepherd knew he was about to find out how friendly they really were.

  “The story came from a guy at NIA,” she eventually said. “But that’s all I’m going to tell you”

  “You got this story about me from the National Intelligence Agency?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was it? Who gave you the story?”

  “Jack, I’d like to help you, I really would, but—”

  “Who the fuck was it, Liz?”

  In the silence, Shepherd could hear Liz breathing on the other end of the phone. Maybe he had gone too far. Maybe begging would have been a better tactic. Sometimes Shepherd despaired at his lousy judgment about how to get women to do what he wanted. He had no problem with men. With men he could be very persuasive. But women? He thought he knew less about dealing with them now than he had when he was about five and the only women in his life were his mother and his kindergarten teacher. And he hadn’t known shit about how to deal with them either.

  But this time, for once, the cylinders clicked down and the lock popped open.

  “His name is Tammarat,” Liz said, “Tammarat something-or-another.”

  “Tommy? Tommy is the one who told you that the cops are looking for me?”

  “That’s right. You know Tommy?”

  Oh yeah, Shepherd thought to himself. I know Tommy all right.

  “Did Tommy tell you why the NIA was looking for me?”

  “He said you were running things here for General Kitnarok.”

  “And you believed that?”

  “I know you work for Kitnarok, Jack. Everybody knows that. We just don’t know for sure what you do for him.”

  “So you figured that fomenting revolution might be as good a job description
as any? Sort of like a Che Guevara on an hourly rate?”

  “If it’s not true, come on over here and I’ll do an interview, Jack. I’ll give you a chance to tell your side of the story.”

  “Right. And have your buddies from NIA waiting for me? Fat chance.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Jack.”

  Shepherd knew Liz probably wouldn’t, but how could he be sure about something like that anymore? There was a time not very long ago when Shepherd would have said that he and Tommy were friends, too. Or if not friends, at least acquaintances who wouldn’t stab each other in the back. But the last time Shepherd had seen Tommy, the little shit was in Dubai slinking off Harvey right behind Robert Darling. And now he was apparently back in Bangkok and planting stories with the press that Shepherd was stirring up a civil war in Thailand.

  “Keep that phone handy, Liz. I’ll think about it.”

  But Shepherd wasn’t going to think about it very hard. It was time for him to figure out who his friends really were.

  And he wasn’t about to bet his butt that The New York Times was one of them.

  FORTY-NINE

  “YOU GET MOST of that?” Shepherd asked Keur when he hung up.

  “I think so. What are going to do now?”

  “Can you find out if Harvey is still on the ground in Dubai?”

  Keur glanced at his watch. He nodded. “I can do that.”

  Shepherd held out his hand. “Give me the other two phones.”

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “There’s not a lot of time left and I’ve got to get back in the game. The place to start is with Kate. If I can get a phone to her, I can tell her about Tommy and put an end to this horseshit.”

  “How are you going to do that, Jack? Everybody is jumpy as hell right now. You can’t get close to her.”

  “Want to bet?”

  ***

  SHEPHERD WAS SITTING at a table in the Marriott hotel drinking a cup of coffee when Jello walked past the big front windows. Jello was on his way to Bully’s Pub for lunch just as Shepherd figured he would be. Jello ate at Bully’s Pub almost every day. He parked at the Marriott, then walked next door to the pub and had a Bully’s Burger and a Diet Coke while he read the paper. Jello was a man of habit.

  Shepherd was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap he had bought in the hotel shop. The cap was black and had a large red and yellow beaded elephant on the front, and he had tilted the brim down as far as he could without being obvious about it. In other words, he looked pretty much like most of the other dopy Western tourists in Thailand. Just another middle-aged white guy trying to shake off last night’s hangover. No one gave him a second look.

  The prepaid Nokia rang and the number of the phone Keur was using showed on the screen. Shepherd answered.

  “The plane is still in Dubai,” Keur said. “But Rachel says an application to lift the impoundment order has been filed.”

  “How long do I have?”

  “You might get another twenty-four hours. But that’s probably the most you can hope for. After that, the plane will be able to take off.”

  “Thanks,” Shepherd said and broke the connection.

  He dropped some money on the table and walked out onto Sukhumvit Road. A hundred feet to the east, he pushed through the doors into Bully’s.

  The place was mostly empty. Jello was sitting in a booth by himself all the way in the back. The seats were red Naugahyde doing a lousy job of trying to look like leather and the table was black plastic laminate with aluminum trim. Shepherd walked over and slid into the booth opposite Jello. He took off his sunglasses and hat and put them on the table.

  “I got bored waiting for you to call me back,” he said.

  “What’s with the get up?”

  “It’s a disguise.”

  “No shit? Pretty lame if you ask me.”

  “Good enough to fool you,” Shepherd said. “I was sitting right in the window of the Marriott when you walked by. You never even glanced at me.”

  “Should have crossed your legs.”

  Shepherd mimed a laugh.

  “You going to tell me why you need a disguise?” Jello asked.

  “It appears that I’m a wanted man.”

  A half smile appeared on Jello’s face. “Not by me,” he said.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Then Shepherd told Jello about the CNN report and what Liz had told him about getting the story from Tommy.

  “Huh,” Jello grunted. “I haven’t heard anything about it.”

  “You haven’t?”

  Jello shook his head slowly.

  “Doesn’t that strike you as funny?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It does.”

  “So it’s probably not true that the police are looking for me?”

  “Probably not.”

  Then Shepherd told Jello about seeing Tommy in Dubai coming off Harvey.

  “So you think Tommy may be playing for the other team?” Jello asked.

  “I don’t know,” Shepherd said. “I’m not even sure I know what the other team is anymore.”

  Jello nodded and they both sat in silence watching a basketball game flickering silently on a big flat-screen TV above the bar.

  “I need to talk to Kate,” Shepherd said after the silence had stretched on for a while. “Now you know why.”

  Jello didn’t say anything.

  “She needs to know about Tommy. Then I’ve also got to tell her…”

  Shepherd trailed off.

  “Yeah?” Jello asked.

  “Forget it.”

  Shepherd didn’t want to tell Jello that he suspected a shipment of arms would be coming in on Harvey when it was finally permitted to leave Dubai, arms that would be going to Charlie’s red shirts. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Jello, but he needed to tell Kate first. When Kate knew about the arms shipment, she could decide how to deal with it. Shepherd didn’t want to preempt any of her options by starting to spread the word himself in advance.

  He took one of the Nokias out of his pocket. He laid it on the table, put one finger on it, and pushed it across to Jello.

  “This is a clean phone. Can you get it to Kate?”

  Jello looked at Shepherd for a long moment, but then he took the phone and dropped it into his shirt pocket.

  “When can you get it to her?” Shepherd asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Today?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Tell her to call me as soon as she has the phone. I have a clean phone as well. The number is already programmed. It’s the only number in the directory.”

  “You going to give me the rest?”

  “I can’t. Not now. But I will. Or somebody will.”

  Jello just nodded. He didn’t argue.

  “It’s a real shame,” he said, “that you don’t have another of those—”

  Shepherd pulled out a second Nokia and put it on the table. Jello picked it up and smiled.

  “You’re still pretty sharp, aren’t you, old man,” he said.

  “Anything else you want to say?”

  “Yeah. One thing. I saw you right away when I walked by the Marriott. You looked fucking ridiculous in that hat.”

  ***

  KEUR WENT OUT and bought some chicken and rice and a half dozen bottles of Heineken from a street vendor and they ate in the apartment that night and drank the beers while watching a Celtics game on television. Shepherd didn’t have much of an appetite and he didn’t much like watching basketball on television, but he ate and watched anyway. It was something to do.

  It was hard for Shepherd just to sit there and wait for a phone to ring. Harvey would soon be in the air and on its way back to Thailand. He had little doubt of that now. And that would be the match to light the fuse that would blow this shaky little country apart. Somehow he had to find Charlie before that happened. And he didn’t have a damned clue where to start. Worse, before he could even begin looking for Charlie,
he had to get that little shit Tommy off his back.

  It was the third quarter the Nokia rang. He looked at the screen, saw the number of the phone he had given Jello, and answered.

  “She has the phone.”

  “When is she going to call?”

  “I’ve got no idea if she will call you. That’s up to her. She’s the prime minister. I’m just the delivery boy.”

  “Thanks, Jello. I owe you.”

  “No, you don’t. If you can stop this, I’ll owe you. We all will.”

  Then he broke the connection without another word.

  The fourth quarter came. Somebody scored a lot of points, but Shepherd didn’t care enough to register who it was. There was less than a minute left in the game when the Nokia rang again.

  What could be more fitting? Shepherd thought.

  “Jack?”

  “It’s me, Kate. How are you?”

  “What is this all about?”

  No time for small talk. Yes, she was right about that.

  “Are the police looking for me?” Shepherd asked.

  “Not that I know of. Why would they be?”

  “Then I need to see you. Alone. There are people around you who are betraying you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  More than anything, he wanted to trust Kate. But he knew that might be naive and that was why he didn’t want to tell her about Tommy over a telephone. He had to tell her in person. He had to see her eyes at the moment he told her. That was the only way he would know for sure. Was Tommy really acting on his own, or was he just playing a role in a bigger game, one that Shepherd couldn’t even begin to imagine? One in which he might be as expendable as Tommy, or Adnan.

  “I need to see you,” he repeated. “You need to see me.”

  “Can you find the apartment where we met three days ago?” Kate asked.

  Three days ago? Was that really only three days ago?

  “Yes,” he said. “I can find it.”

  “There will be two men downstairs in the lobby. Tell them your name is Cary Grant.”

  “When?”

  “An hour,” Kate said. And then she hung up.

  Shepherd hit the disconnect button on the Nokia and put it back in his pocket.

  “You want me to go with you?” Keur asked.

  Shepherd shook his head.