Shepherd dropped the empty SIG and pushed Keur off him. The little silver revolver slipped from Keur’s fingers and he grabbed it up.
***
IT WAS PROBABLY no more than a few seconds after that before Mutt and Jeff crashed through the door with their guns thrust out in front of them screaming at Shepherd in Thai. But to Shepherd it felt like a couple of weeks.
He had pushed himself up to his knees by then, and he was kneeling there, looking into Charlie’s face. He would have checked his pulse, but there was no need. He had no doubt Charlie was dead. No doubt at all.
“Put the gun down, Jack.”
It was a woman’s voice and it sounded very far away. Shepherd could barely hear it at all over the roar of the SIG still echoing in his ears. But the voice sounded familiar so he twisted his head around to see who it was. Kate was standing in the doorway. Shepherd just stared dumbly at her.
“Put the gun on the floor, Jack.”
He was tired, so tired he couldn’t keep his eyes from closing. He opened his hand and the silver revolver slid out of his fingers. Then he let his body go, too, and he settled onto his stomach on Charlie’s Persian carpet. He thought right after that he heard Kate’s voice saying something else, but he couldn’t make out what it was.
Shepherd’s nose filled with the sugary, cloying odor of blood and he felt consciousness slipping away. The last thing he remembered was looking at Charlie’s magnificent Persian carpet. He wondered why he had never noticed before what a vivid shade of red it was.
FIFTY-NINE
“I’M SORRY, JACK,” Pete Logan said. “Really, I am. But I have to place you under arrest.”
Pete had shown up in Shepherd’s hospital room accompanied by an entire troop of elaborately uniformed Thais, some of them police and some of them military. Shepherd’s room looked like the backstage holding area for a rehearsal of the Metropolitan Opera.
“Who are all these guys?” he asked.
“Fucked if I know,” Pete shrugged. “I think they’re just here to get into the photographs.”
“There’re going to be photographs?”
“Nope, none.” Pete smiled, but only slightly. “That’ll fix the little pricks.”
Shepherd had only woken a couple of hours before and some guy he assumed was a doctor had told him that he had two bullet wounds. A through-and-through in the lower abdomen and a graze on his right shoulder. Keur had apparently placed the two shots he got off more effectively than Shepherd had realized at the time. He had heard that stress could so load people up with adrenalin that they didn’t notice they’d been hit by a bullet unless it did some kind of major damage. He had never really believed that before, but he did now.
It was the second time Shepherd had been shot, and the first time hadn’t been any fun either. Come to think of it, the other time he had taken a bullet had been in Phuket, too, hadn’t it?
Fucking Phuket.
Shepherd made a mental note to kick the crap out of the next person who even mentioned Phuket to him again.
“The FBI is taking jurisdiction over you,” Pete said. “We’re going to fly you up to Bangkok tomorrow. You’ll be held at the embassy while we sort all this out. That’s something.”
It was indeed something, Shepherd thought. It was a lot.
He didn’t even want to think what might happen to him in a Thai jail after being found next to Charlie’s body holding the gun that killed him. Charlie had quite a few friends and admirers, and not a few of them were in jail.
“How did you manage that?” Shepherd asked.
“I didn’t do much. To tell you the truth, I just answered the telephone. The Ministry of Justice called and told me that they were turning you over to us.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I hear you’re pretty well connected. That probably has something to do with it.”
Shepherd just nodded. Kate would have fixed it, of course.
Pete began shooing the troop of Thais out of the room. Since there weren’t any photographers around, they left without a fuss. He closed the door behind them and then he pulled a chair over next to Shepherd’s bed and sat down.
“Look, Jack, I’m really sorry, but I have to play this straight. I’m going to have to put a couple of guys outside your room tonight and you’ll be cuffed for the flight up to Bangkok tomorrow.”
“Oh, come on, Pete. You don’t really think I had anything—”
“You shot an FBI agent, Jack.”
“Keur’s dead?”
Pete nodded.
Shepherd didn’t ask about Charlie. He didn’t have to. He would never forget looking into Charlie’s eyes just before he lost consciousness. He already knew Charlie was dead, too.
“Keur wasn’t an FBI agent,” Shepherd said. “He was CIA.”
“That’s not true. You asked me to check out Leonard Keur and I did, remember? Keur was an FBI agent attached to the Washington field office. There’s no doubt about that.”
“Keur was CIA, Pete. The FBI stuff was just a cover.”
“That sounds pretty wild to me, Jack. What kind of meds are they feeding you in here?”
“Keur was a clean-up guy for the CIA. He used me to keep him close to Charlie so he could kill him if he had to.”
“Why would the CIA want to kill General Kitnarok?”
“Charlie was their front man. The Agency was running an operation to put him in control of Thailand, which would put them in control of Thailand. The whole thing was coming apart and they saw themselves going down with the ship. Getting rid of Charlie was the best way to clean up everything. He had become inconvenient.”
Pete looked away and rubbed at his eyes, but he didn’t say anything.
“What happened to Harvey?” Shepherd asked him.
“Who’s Harvey?”
“The plane.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Jack?”
“The 737 loaded with weapons that was landing in Phuket. Kate called it Harvey. It was an Agency aircraft and we think it was bringing a cargo of guns into Phuket to arm the red shirts.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Robert Darling was on it.”
“Robert Darling is in Paris. I have a surveillance report on my desk. He’s been there for a while.”
“That’s impossible. I saw him a few days ago in Dubai. He admitted to me Blossom Trading was a CIA front and that they were flying a load of arms into Thailand for Charlie’s people. Tommy was with him.”
“Tommy who?”
“Tommerat something-or-another. You know him, don’t you? He tells everyone that he’s just a deputy spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but he really works for NIA. He’s somehow connected with the CIA, too.”
Pete looked at Shepherd and cleared his throat. “I’m kind of tired, Jack,” he said. “Can we save all this for later?”
“You don’t even care what’s really going on here, do you, Pete?”
“My instructions are to place you under arrest, then bring you back to Bangkok and secure you at the embassy. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
“Instructions from who?”
Pete didn’t answer him, of course, but Shepherd hadn’t really expected him to.
“Charlie died,” Shepherd said instead. “He died because I didn’t do anything to save him.”
“Some people think you may have been the one who shot him.”
“Do you?”
“I’m just following my instructions here, Jack.”
“To arrest me for shooting Charlie?”
“No, to arrest you for shooting an FBI agent.”
“So if I didn’t shoot Charlie, who did?”
“I’m just following my instructions,” Pete said again.
“I should have saved him, Pete. I was there and I should have saved him.”
“What could you have done?”
“I don’t know. Something. What good are people if they can’t do
something for their friends at a time like that?”
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
“Neither do I.”
Charlie was murdered, Shepherd thought, and I didn’t do a damn thing to save him.
Now Peter was giving him the bureaucratic runaround and it didn’t look like he could do a damn thing about that either.
“Fuck you, Pete. Keur was CIA. He’d been told to kill Charlie if Charlie didn’t take a dive for them. I tried to stop him and so he tried to kill me, too. I shot him in self defense with his own gun.”
“Then it sounds to me like you have nothing to worry about.”
“But you’re going to arrest me anyway.”
“Yeah, I am. Those are my instructions and that’s my job.”
Shepherd gave up arguing with Pete. He knew he was wasting his breath.
SIXTY
SHEPHERD WAS A little surprised that the facilities at the embassy were so good. It made him wonder how often they did this kind of thing. Somebody had even gotten a few clothes and toiletries together for him.
His room reminded him of a small-town motel somewhere in the Midwest, right down to the orange and brown plaid bedspread and the plastic drinking gasses wrapped up in little cellophane bags. Then there were the two young marines standing guard outside the door with sidearms on their hips who told him he was not to leave the room. That part did not remind him of a small-town motel in the Midwest.
At least he had cable TV so he watched an NBA game on the American Forces Network while he waited for somebody to tell him what was going to happen next. He didn’t really mind all that much lying around for a while watching sports on TV. He wasn’t all that used to getting shot and he needed the rest.
It was the middle of the second quarter and the Knicks were already down by eighteen when one of the marines opened the door and gave Shepherd a stack of newspapers, a couple of Diet Cokes, and a cardboard bucket of ice. Shepherd told the marine he was kind of hungry, too, and asked him to send up the room service menu, but the kid acted as if he hadn’t heard.
The papers were the two English-language Bangkok dailies as well as the International Herald Tribune and the Asian Wall Street Journal. Shepherd went through all of them carefully but he didn’t find a word about Charlie being killed. He wondered if the story had already come and gone while he was in the hospital. He hadn’t been in the hospital that long, had he?
He had no trouble coming up with great questions. He just didn’t have many great answers. None at all, to tell the truth.
For instance, who the devil was Leonard Keur? Was he really a CIA agent? He had told Shepherd and Charlie he was CIA, but then he had also told Shepherd and a lot of other people that he was FBI. Were either of those things true? Maybe Leonard Keur was really somebody else altogether.
And where did Robert Darling and Tommy fit into everything? Were they Agency, too, or was there somebody else pulling the strings? Somebody else he had never seen a trace of?
Shepherd was absolutely sure of at least one thing. Somebody wanted Charlie dead for refusing to stick to the script. And Keur had used him to set-up Charlie.
He had set out to save his friend from a life of notoriety as the man who had started a civil war in Thailand. Instead, he had gotten him killed.
However else he might look at everything, he kept coming back to that.
***
THE KNICKS WERE down by more than thirty in the fourth quarter when someone knocked politely on the door. Shepherd opened it and an average-looking middle-aged man he had never seen before was standing there. The man identified himself as an FBI agent and handed Shepherd a plastic badge on a chain and told him to wear it around his neck. The badge was a laminated card with a red ‘V’ on both sides, which Shepherd knew stood for visitor. He took that as a good sign. He supposed it could have been a ‘P’ for prisoner.
The man escorted Shepherd to the end of the corridor. They made a right and went all the way to the end of another corridor, through a grey steel door, and up two flights of stairs to the second floor. Right at the top there was an unmarked brown laminate door that looked just like most of the other doors in the building. The man opened it without knocking and gestured Shepherd inside. Then he closed the door behind him.
Pete Logan was sitting by himself at a grey metal desk that had nothing on top of it. The room was windowless and the walls were bare other than for a slightly yellowed travel poster bearing a large picture of the Statue of Liberty overprinted with the command, VISIT NEW YORK! Right then, that sounded to Shepherd like a really terrific idea.
The only furniture other than the desk and the chair on which Peter Logan sat was a single straight chair, also grey metal, with a black plastic seat. Shepherd gathered that was for him so he sat down on it.
“You hungry?” Pete asked.
“Not really.”
“Anything else I can get you?”
“How about a Hendricks martini? Very dry. Shaken, not stirred.”
Pete just looked at him.
“You asked if there was anything you could get me,” Shepherd shrugged.
“The doctors say no alcohol for forty-eight hours. Not until the pain killers wear off.”
“The pain killers are going to wear off? Oh, shit.”
Pete looked away and studied the travel poster with more care than Shepherd thought it merited. After a minute or so of silence, Peter cleared his throat and shifted his eyes back to Shepherd.
“What the hell is this really all about, Jack?”
So Shepherd told him.
All of it.
Right from the beginning.
Shepherd thought he was a reasonably engaging storyteller, and he figured he had a pretty good story to tell, but he couldn’t help but notice that Pete didn’t seem all that interested. He just sat there with his arms folded and nodded every now and then, possibly to show he hadn’t fallen asleep. It was easy to tell Pete was just going through the motions. It was a lot harder to figure out why.
“That it?” Peter asked when Shepherd finished.
Shepherd nodded.
“Nothing else you want to add?”
He shook his head.
“Okay,” Pete said. “Sit tight. I’ll be back in a minute.”
***
PETE WAS GONE for no more than five minutes. When he came back into the room, he resumed his seat behind the metal desk and folded his arms.
“I’m sorry to have to do this,” he said, “but I’ve got to read you your rights. Then I’ll get somebody to take you back to your room.”
“Wait just a goddamned minute, Pete. You ask me to tell you what happened, but you clearly don’t give a shit. There’s nothing in the papers about Charlie. There’s nothing on TV. What the fuck is going on here?”
Pete said nothing.
“Charlie was executed in cold blood. And now you’re telling me nothing is going to be done about it?”
“We’re doing something. We’re arresting you.”
“Very fucking funny.”
“There were three guys in that room and the other two are now dead. So what do you think I ought to do? Arrest the dead guys?”
“So that’s it, is it? I’m the only survivor and somebody’s got to take the fall.”
“No, Jack. That’s not it.”
Pete made a face like he was smelling week-old fish. But he didn’t say anything else.
“Who sent Keur to kill Charlie?” Shepherd asked. “You know who sent him, don’t you?”
“I’m not going to talk to you about this, Jack.”
“You talk to me all the time about things you’re not supposed to talk to me about.”
“Not things this big.”
“So how big is thing?”
“The size of a motherfucker.”
“You’re telling me somebody in the United States government ordered a federal agent to kill a foreign national who had suddenly become inconvenient?”
“I didn’t sa
y that.”
“The United States government murdered my client because they were afraid he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut and we’re all supposed to shrug and just forget it?”
“Maybe not everybody, Jack, but you are. That’s sure as hell what you’re supposed to do.”
“And you think I’m going to do that?”
“I don’t know. But I hope so. For my sake, for your sake, I hope so.”
There was a silence in which they each studied opposite corners of the room for a while.
“What happens now?” Shepherd asked.
“I wish I could tell you.”
“So tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t.”
“Can’t. I really don’t know what happens now.”
“Still waiting for your bosses to tell you, huh?”
Pete said nothing.
“Good dog,” Shepherd said. “Roll over. Can you play dead, too?”
Pete cleared his throat. “Like I said before, I’ve got to read you your rights. You ready?”
Shepherd started to say something else, but he knew he would be wasting his breath. So he just nodded and Pete Logan started reading him his rights.
They sounded to Shepherd exactly the way they do on television.
EPILOGUE
FOR THE FIRST couple of days, my detention followed the same unvarying routine. I read the papers. I watched television. And I waited for somebody to come in and tell me what was going to happen to me.
The only breaks in the monotony were my meals in the embassy cafeteria. The evening after my session with Pete, the same FBI agent who had escorted me to Pete’s office came back and took me to the cafeteria for dinner. We sat off to one side by ourselves at a big round table that could have accommodated eight people. I tried engaging the man in conversation, but he ignored me. He didn’t even eat. He just sat there. Eventually I gave up trying to make conversation and finished my meal in silence while watching CNN on one of the television monitors mounted high up on the wall.
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