“Because Blossom Trading is running guns to Iran as well as Thailand. Darling is an American citizen. When an American citizen is involved in illegal arms dealing, it gets the FBI’s attention.”
“Come off it, Jack. Blossom Trading is just a crappy little company that sells washing machines and automobile tires. It’s not an arms dealer, for God’s sake. If there were any guns around there, somebody would just end up shooting themselves in the ass.”
“Charlie, we’re getting nowhere here. Keur knows all about Blossom Trading. He knows all about Darling. He even knows that the CIA has been running a delivery service for you. For God’s sake, I saw the plane myself. First in Bangkok, then in Dubai. I even saw Darling and Tommy walk off it.”
“Who’s Tommy?”
“Tommerat something-or-another. He works—”
“That guy at NIA?”
Shepherd nodded. “He and Darling are both Agency.”
“Robert doesn’t have anything to do with the CIA,” Charlie said. “That’s stupid.”
“Talk to Keur yourself if you don’t believe me. He’s right downstairs.”
Charlie sat looking out the window for a long time after that, smoking his cigar, saying nothing. Eventually he took a last puff and dumped the remains in the ashtray.
“Okay, get him up here,” he said.
“Don’t you think it would be better to talk to Kate first about—”
“I want to talk to this FBI guy. What’s his name?”
“Keur.”
“Yeah, okay. Keur. Get him up here.”
So Shepherd nodded and went downstairs to get Special Agent Leonard Keur of the FBI.
***
HE WAS DISAPPOINTED he hadn’t been able to convince Charlie that the jig was up. He really thought he could do it. He had hoped Charlie thought enough of him to come clean when he laid out what they already knew. Apparently Charlie didn’t.
Shepherd was happy to hand the ball to Keur and let him take a crack at convincing Charlie it was all over. Maybe his bad cop would get the job done where Shepherd’s good cop had fallen flat on its face.
And, if Keur could convince Charlie that the jig was up, maybe they would still have a chance to stop this thing.
FIFTY-SEVEN
WHEN SHEPHERD RETURNED to the study, Keur was with him. Charlie had moved to a big table at the opposite end of the room and was sitting behind it with his arms folded over his chest. The table was long and narrow and made of rough, dark-stained planks. It looked like an expensive French country antique and probably was.
Shepherd and Keur sat opposite each other on two cream-colored leather love seats positioned perpendicular to Charlie’s table. They had to twist to the side in order to make eye contact with Charlie while Charlie lounged in a high-backed chair looking straight ahead at both of them. It was an uncomfortable way for a visitor to have to sit, but Shepherd gathered that was probably the whole idea.
“This is Special Agent Leonard Keur of the FBI,” Shepherd said. “If you don’t want to listen to me, listen to him.”
Charlie studied Keur expressionlessly. Keur looked right back at him and said nothing.
“So, Mr. FBI man,” Charlie said when he had lost interest in sizing Keur up, “what’s all this shit you’ve been telling Jack?”
“That doesn’t matter anymore,” Keur said.
“It sure as hell matters to me.”
“I’m here with a message for you, General. That’s the only thing that’s important now.”
Charlie obviously had no idea what Keur was talking about. Shepherd knew how he felt.
“Look, Keur,” Shepherd said, “I don’t know what this—”
“A message from who?” Charlie interrupted.
“It’s time for a word from your sponsor, General.”
Charlie’s head rocked back as if Keur had slapped him. Shepherd looked from Charlie to Keur and then back again, but he still couldn’t work out what was going on.
“Who the fuck are you?” Charlie snapped.
“I’m with the Central Intelligence Agency,” Keur said.
Oh shit, Shepherd thought. Shit, shit, shit.
“I had no idea, Charlie,” Shepherd said. “He said he was FBI and I confirmed it with the Bureau guy in Bangkok. He checked out. He really did.”
Charlie just grunted.
“Ah crap,” Shepherd muttered. “Maybe I should have—”
“Don’t blame yourself, Jack,” Keur interrupted. “My ID is fully backstopped. No matter who you called, they’d just confirm what I told you.”
“I don’t get it,” Shepherd said. “Why did you go to so much trouble to—”
“Forget it, Jack,” Charlie interrupted.
Shepherd glanced over at Charlie. He was leaning forward on his forearms, watching Keur intently.
“Whoever the fuck you really are, CIA errand boy, what’s this message you say you have for me?”
“The message is this, General. The party’s over. I’m here to pack up the tents and tell the band to go home.”
“What party?” Shepherd asked, looking back and forth from Keur to Charlie.
“Your pal here hasn’t exactly told you the whole story, Jack,” Keur said. “You see, General Kitnarok is our man in these parts.”
Shepherd looked at Charlie. “You’re working for the CIA?”
Charlie didn’t meet his eyes.
“I asked you a question, Charlie, and I think I’m entitled to an answer.”
Charlie cleared his throat and stared down at his hands. “We’re more like partners.”
“Burma, Laos, and Cambodia are basket cases, so Thailand’s all we’ve got to block China’s expansion through Southeast Asia,” Keur said. “We needed a friendly, reliable government in Thailand and the general here seemed to be the right horse to ride. So we backed him.”
Shepherd was still looking at Charlie. “Then you knew all along that Darling and Tommy were Agency,” he said.
Charlie said nothing, but his chair squeaked as he shifted his weight.
“No,” Keur answered for him, “he didn’t know. We used people we already had in place to make sure everything played the way we wanted it to. We thought a civil war in Thailand would burn China’s supporters here for quite some time, so Darling and Tommy were supposed to see that both the red shirts and the Muslims got what they needed to turn up the heat.”
“You mean guns.”
“Light arms, ammunition, explosives,” Keur shrugged. “Just enough to stir things up. We weren’t exactly going to share nuclear technology with a bunch of fucking farmers, Jack.”
“And what was Charlie’s part in that?”
“None. He had no part. He just didn’t have the stomach for it. Which, I have to tell you, worried us a bit. That’s why I cozied up to you, Jack. We were starting to think our boy here didn’t have the balls he needed and we had to make sure he didn’t go completely tits up on us. I figured sticking close to you was a good way to stick close to him.”
Shepherd shifted his eyes back to Charlie. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“I was thinking you take you friends where you can find them, Jack. That’s what I was thinking.”
“We figured that when Somchai was out of the way—” Keur began.
“The CIA killed Somchai?” Shepherd interrupted.
“Of course not, Jack,” Keur chuckled. “Haven’t you heard? The Agency doesn’t go in for that sort of thing anymore.”
“But I’ll bet you still do stunts,” Shepherd said. “Fake assassinations? Stuff like that?”
Keur’s mouth stretched into something that may or may not have been a smile.
“Charlie told me Adnan arranged the Dubai thing.”
Keur said nothing.
“But it wasn’t Adnan, was it? It was the Agency.”
“Charlie thought that a bit of a show in Dubai would make him look good. We figured it was a dumb idea, but what the hell? It was no big deal.”
> “Maybe not for you. But it was a pretty big deal for the two dead shooters and the CNN producer who took a bullet in the chest.”
“Accidents happen,” Keur shrugged.
“The producer may have been an accident, but my guess is you killed the two shooters to keep them from telling anybody that the assassination was a fake staged by the CIA to get publicity for Charlie.”
“You don’t really think those guys had any idea the Agency was involved, do you?” Keur smiled again and shook his head. “Sometimes we just fuck up, Jack. I hate to admit it, but that’s the truth of it.”
“I’ve come too far to walk away,” Charlie said, pushing himself to his feet. “Why are you doing this?”
“Jack and his girlfriend have gotten too close. They’ve figured out too much. It looks like our little project is going to turn to shit and we don’t want to be embarrassed by all this.”
“I’d think you’d be used to being embarrassed by now,” Charlie snapped. “You’ve sure as hell had plenty of practice.”
“We’ve decided it’s better to cut our losses and move on,” Keur said, speaking to Shepherd as if Charlie wasn’t even in the room. “We’re washing our hands of the general.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’re cutting off the general’s support. This is the end of the money, the intelligence, the influence, the arms supplies, everything.”
“I didn’t ask you for any money,” Charlie said. “And I damn well didn’t ask you for any weapons.”
“No, that’s right, you didn’t. That part was our idea. We thought this might work better if we stirred the pot a little more vigorously than you had the balls to.”
Charlie pushed himself away from the table and walked over to the windows. He stared silently out into the compound while Shepherd stayed where he was and tried to get his mind around what he was hearing. Keur sat quietly and said nothing at all.
“Then I guess I’m on my own now,” Charlie said after a while.
Keur shook his head. “You’re not hearing me, General. It’s all over. We’ve changed our mind. It’s as simple as that. We’re willing to take our chances with the government Thailand has now. It’s time for you to go back to Dubai and play golf.”
“I don’t answer to you,” Charlie snapped.
“Actually,” Keur smiled, “you do. We say this is over. So it’s over.”
“You don’t want me for an enemy,” Charlie said. “I can do a lot of damage. I know a lot. Don’t treat me like some Third World yokel you can send back to the farm when you’re tired of him.”
“Look, General,” Keur said, “you’re right about one thing. We don’t want you for an enemy. We just want you to walk away. Tell me what you need from us to do that and I’ll make it happen.”
“I’m not walking away,” Charlie snapped. “I intend to lead Thailand again. I’ll do it with or without your help.”
Keur shook his head again and sighed heavily. He pushed himself up and walked over to the windows where Charlie was staring down into the compound. He laid one hand gently on Charlie’s shoulder.
“Is there anything I can do to make this right?” he asked. “Anything I can say to convince you not to fight us on this?”
“You can fulfill your commitment and support me until I’m Prime Minister of Thailand again.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Then I guess there isn’t anything you can do. We will be enemies, Mr. CIA errand boy. And there is nothing you can do about it.”
“I can think of one thing,” Keur said.
***
LATER, EVERY TIME Shepherd thought back on what happened after that, he felt as if he were watching a movie from which big chunks had been snipped out. There was so much he couldn’t remember at all.
For instance, he couldn’t remember seeing Keur draw the gun.
One minute Keur was standing at the windows next to Charlie, one hand resting familiarly on Charlie’s shoulder. The next minute he had a tiny silver revolver in his left hand.
And the muzzle was pressed against Charlie’s temple.
FIFTY-EIGHT
“WHOA, WHOA, WHOA!” Shepherd shouted.
He jumped to his feet, his hands palms out in the universal gesture of placation.
“What the fuck are you doing, Keur?”
Charlie didn’t look frightened to Shepherd. He didn’t even look all that surprised.
Keur slid his right hand under his shirt and produced the black SIG-Sauer Shepherd had seen back at the apartment in Bangkok. That was when he remembered he had also seen the short-barreled silver revolver in Keur’s bag then, too. Keur leveled the SIG at Shepherd without taking the revolver away from Charlie’s head.
“Stay where you are, Jack. I’m not your enemy. I’m just a working stiff doing his job.”
“You’ll never get away with killing me,” Charlie said in a voice far calmer than Shepherd thought he could have mustered under the circumstances.
“I’m not going to kill you, General. Jack is. At least that’s the way it’s going to look.”
“That’s stupid, Keur. All I have to do is tell them—”
“What makes you think I’m going to leave you around to tell anyone anything, Jack?”
Shepherd was getting angry now and Keur’s threat rolled off him without making any impact. This man had used him to get to Charlie and now he was pointing guns at both of them. He had such a self-satisfied look on his face that Shepherd would have taken a bullet or two just to get close enough to smash the bastard right in the nose.
“You’d kill two people just to cover all this up?” Shepherd asked.
“Heck, we’d be willing to go a lot higher than two,” Keur said. “I figure two is a bargain.”
“And then you think you’re just going to walk out of here?”
“I know I am. I’m a federal agent engaged in the performance of his duty. I have it on good authority that both the Thai police and the FBI will clear me of any wrongdoing in shooting you after you kill Charlie.”
“None of this will stand up.”
“It probably wouldn’t if anybody looked at it too closely, but nobody is. You can count on that.”
Keur’s attention was entirely focused on Shepherd now. He was enjoying explaining everything to him, telling him exactly how he had brought them all to this moment and what was going to happen next.
Charlie saw his chance. And he didn’t hesitate.
Instead of trying to push away the gun Keur had at his temple, Charlie did something much smarter. He dropped straight down and drove the top of his head into Keur’s midsection. Keur didn’t fire the revolver, realizing he had reacted too slowly to get off an accurate shot. Instead, he swung the SIG that was in his other hand like a hammer. It looped through a half circle and the barrel slammed up into Charlie’s head. Shepherd heard the crunch of bones breaking and saw blood spray.
He was no hero, but Shepherd knew their only chance was for him to move right then and he did. Lunging forward before Keur could lift the SIG again, Shepherd grabbed Keur’s left wrist with one hand and his right wrist with the other. He pushed Keur’s arms up and apart and tried to drive his knee into Keur’s groin. But Charlie was in the way. He was on his hands and knees between them, dripping blood from where Keur had clubbed him in the face with the SIG.
They stayed exactly that way for several seconds. Charlie on the floor at Keur’s feet; Shepherd holding Keur’s wrists and trying to push them upward; Keur trying to pull his arms down. They must have looked like three guys doing a Polish folk dance.
But Shepherd knew the dance was almost over. Keur was stronger than he was, and he could feel Keur slowly gaining the upper hand. So instead of continuing to push against Keur’s superior strength, Shepherd suddenly stepped back and pulled.
Keur’s arms came down, his knees caught Charlie’s back, and he lost his balance. Keur tumbled forward and instinctively reached out with his right hand to
break his fall. His fingers opened and the SIG fell from his grasp.
Shepherd snatched the SIG up by the barrel and swung the butt at Keur’s face. Keur jerked his head toward it instead of away and Shepherd’s wrist hit his ear. The butt of the gun caught nothing but the air.
Charlie was trying to get out of the way, but he was pinned to the ground beneath Keur’s lower body. Shepherd shuffled forward and tried to get his knees into Keur’s back.
And that was when everything really went bad.
Shepherd was pushing Keur toward the floor with his knees, but he slipped in Charlie’s blood and lost his balance. That was the opening Keur needed. He rolled to one side and jerked on Shepherd’s legs. Now all three of them were on the floor.
Keur pounded Shepherd in the face with his right fist. At the same time he extended his left arm, the one in which he still held the little silver revolver, until the muzzle was six inches away from Charlie’s head. He pulled the trigger twice in quick succession, the double tap of the professional hitman. The shots from the little gun were no louder than the sound of a couple of books hitting the floor.
Charlie made a soft grunting sound, coughed, and died.
Still holding the SIG by the barrel, Shepherd clubbed with the butt toward Keur’s face. He heard the satisfying crunch of bone and figured he had gotten lucky, but it didn’t seem to faze Keur.
Shepherd could feel Keur’s weight coming off him and he knew that Keur was rising up to turn the revolver on him. He fumbled to reverse the SIG in his hand, but he almost dropped it.
He didn’t drop it.
Somehow he got the SIG pointed in Keur’s direction, curled his finger around the trigger, and tried to fire. But the trigger pull took more force than he expected and his finger, wet with Charlie’s blood, slipped off.
Shepherd heard two more sounds like books dropping, but he felt nothing so he gathered that Keur had fired again and missed. Somehow he got his finger back on the SIG’s trigger and jerked desperately at it in exactly the way every gun instructor tells people never to do.
The SIG was right next to Shepherd’s ear when he started firing and the sound of the shots were thunderous. He kept jerking the trigger until the slide locked open and he felt, rather than heard, the dry click of the hammer hitting the firing pin. He didn’t know how many shots he fired, but it must have been enough. Keur fell back on top of him and Shepherd felt Keur’s body jerking as the life poured out of it.
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