Killing Plato js-2

by Jake Needham

  “Let me ask you something,” I finally said, breaking the silence. “Who around here has the capacity to do something as sophisticated as this?”

  “We do,” Jello said, referring to ECID. “But it’s not us.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “And the National Intelligence Agency could do it, of course.”

  Jello paused, apparently considering the other possibilities, and while he did I pictured my ride with Tommy earlier than evening and wondered if his NIA buddies might have been responsible for doing the deed while he kept me out of the apartment.

  “Then there are all the foreign embassy intelligence operations. There are twenty or so that we know about and a lot of them are pretty good. Could be almost any of them.”

  Suddenly an image jumped into my mind of CW sitting on a bar stool in Phuket. Was it possible that the US Marshals could be bugging the apartment of a US citizen in Thailand?

  “The equipment isn’t really all that hard to get,” Jello continued before I decided. “You can buy stuff pretty much like that over the internet these days. Quite a few local police and military guys freelance and pick up a few baht on the side, although generally those people only work for wives who are setting their husbands up for a ride into the sunset. You haven’t pissed Anita off recently, have you, Jack?”

  “Very funny.”

  My butt was going to sleep sitting on the hard lid of the toilet, so I stood up. I pulled the stall door open and stepped outside. Ipeduo; leaned back against the sink.

  “Don’t be so quick to shrug off that possibility, Jack. You know what they say. The husband is always the last to know.”

  “Cut it out, Jello. That’s not funny.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

  I let that hang there a moment, then changed tack.

  “So you’re telling me there are a lot of people around here who could have done this,” I said.

  “Yep. Hundreds. Maybe more.”

  Jello had a note of cheerfulness in his voice I found annoying.

  “Unless, of course, you can narrow it down for me, Jack. Maybe by giving me a hint about who you’ve been fucking around with lately.”

  I had just about decided to float Jello a heavily edited version of my recent tete-a-tete with Plato Karsarkis when the door opened and a woman walked into the toilet. She was probably in her late twenties, tall, wasp-waisted, and wearing a white shirt with tight jeans that had lines of silver studs running down both legs. She didn’t seem in the least embarrassed to be in the men’s room and gave me a smile that could have blown out light bulbs. Then she went into the stall I had just vacated and closed the door.

  “So what’s it going to be, Jack?” he pressed, not knowing of course that I was now sharing the men’s room with a startlingly beautiful woman.

  “Ah…” My eyes flicked to the stall door, but I heard nothing from the other side. “That’s a little hard for me to say right now.”

  Jello caught the change in my voice.

  “Has some guy just come in?”

  “You’re half right.”

  Jello considered that in silence, trying to read between the lines.

  “I don’t understand,” he finally said.

  There was still no sound or movement behind the stall door, but my discomfort had increased to the point where I thought it might be better just to get the hell out of there and take my chances with the lasers and shotgun mikes. At least that seemed preferable to standing in the men’s room trying to carry on a telephone conversation while a beautiful young woman relieved herself.

  “Never mind,” I told him. “I’ve had it for tonight. I’m going home.”

  “You want me to get somebody to sweep your apartment tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, that would be good.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll work something out,” he said, “but Jack…” Jello took a deep breath and let it out again. “Until I get that taken care of, be careful what you say.”

  “Oh, golly,” I said. “That never crossed my mind.”

  “Good night, Professor.”

  “Night, Jello.”

  I punched off my phone and stuck it back in my pocket. Then I pushed out through the door and shot a quick glance back over my shoulder just to make certain the woman wasn’t following me. When I did, something caught my eye, and it caused me to stop walking and turn around very slowly.

  That was the first time I clearly registered the black scrollwork painted on the door to t thg ahe toilet I had just come out of. It read…LADIES.

  I HAD BEEN back in the apartment for a nearly an hour sitting at my desk with my feet up and trying unsuccessfully to make some sense out of the evening’s festivities when I heard the front door open and close. A few seconds later Anita walked into the study.

  All at once it occurred to me I had no idea at all what to say to Anita about any of this. If I started pointing at the walls with one finger while holding another over my lips, she wouldn’t know what to think. On the other hand, blurting out something like, Darling, it appears our apartment has been bugged by a sophisticated intelligence operation that wants to know everything we are saying, didn’t seem quite the way to go either.

  Anita stopped in the doorway instead of coming over to the desk to give me a little peck as she usually did.

  “Hello, Jack.”

  There was a brittle edge to her voice and I was left with no doubt Anita was unhappy with me for some reason. That was just great. Here I was under surveillance by persons unknown for reasons unknown and now my wife was apparently mad at me and I didn’t know what the reason for that was either.

  “What’s wrong, Anita?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Why would you ask?”

  Uh-oh.

  Whatever it was, it had to be serious. When a woman says something like, Nothing’s wrong and why would you ask, my own personal rule of thumb is that you’re pretty well fucked right there.

  “We have to talk, Jack.”

  Stee-rike one!

  “But not now. I’m very tired and I’m going straight to bed.”

  Stee-rike two!

  “Good night, Jack.” And with that Anita turned her back on me and walked toward the bedroom.

  Stee-rike three and you’re outta there!

  So far I was having a heck of an evening, wasn’t I? And hell, it was barely ten-thirty. The night was young. There was still plenty of time for a few more tons of shit to fall on me before the day officially ended.

  TWENTY SIX

  Anita must have taken a sleeping pill because when I woke the next morning she hardly seemed to have moved all night. I showered and dressed, trying to do it quietly, and she never stirred.

  I went into the study to pick up my briefcase and then, remembering I hadn’t brought it home with me, all at once I also remembered everything else from the night before as well. Since I hadn’t yet had even a drop of coffee, that wasn’t too swell.

  The maid didn’t come in until eight and I briefly considered making some breakfast for myself, but with the apartment wired for sound and Anita apparently ready to rip into me about something as soon as she woke up, getting out of there as quickly as possible was far more appealing. I left by the front door, got into the car, and drove to the Starbucks in Amarin Plaza. Forty-five minutes later, thoroughly buzzed on the caffeine from a double-shot latte and riding a sugar high from ingesting a couple of blueberry muffins, I parked in the garage on campus, collected my notes from my office, and made it to my nine-o’clock class more or less on time.

  I had plannedpus to give a lecture that morning on the development of international tax avoidance legislation, but I knew under the circumstances I’d never make it through something that tedious. Instead I fell back on the traditional refuge of every distracted academic who didn’t feel like lecturing and who’d had at least some practical experience in the subject at hand. I soft-shoed through a hastily improvised routine composed of my greatest and wit
tiest war stories.

  I imagine former surgeons tell their students about patients whose lives they saved through their quick thinking, and no doubt every trial lawyer has a fund of anecdotes about criminals he freed with his clever tactics. But if you’ve been is a corporate deal guy like me, what you talk about when all else fails is money. Largely how you scored unholy piles of it for some client by being really sneaky. In Asia at least, those kinds of stories are always guaranteed to keep the kids absolutely riveted. Forget about life and liberty, you can almost hear the little bastards chanting, let’s get right down to all that pursuit-of-happiness stuff.

  I ended the day’s entertainment with a flourish-always leave them laughing, somebody said-and speed-walked back to my office before a student could ambush me either with a genuine question or, more likely, a transparent attempt to suck up a little. My secretary wasn’t at her desk, but then Bun was seldom at her desk so I grabbed myself some coffee from the kitchen down at the end of the hall and then went straight into my office. After hanging out a Do Not Disturb sign I kept at the ready, I locked the door.

  I flopped down into my desk chair and made myself comfortable. Then I propped my feet up on the side of a half-open drawer and sipped at my coffee. The time had clearly come to do some serious pondering.

  But where to start? The last completely normal moment I could remember for weeks was when Anita and I had decided to go to the Boathouse for dinner. It had been a placid, soft-toned evening on the western beaches of Phuket and we were looking for nothing anymore exciting than a romantic dinner for two, which can be exciting enough all by itself if you get it right.

  But where had that led?

  The world’s most wanted fugitive was trying to become my new best friend and at the same time an undercover team of US Marshals was trying to recruit me to spy on him. Two powerful groups were tugging me in exactly opposite directions, and that was just if I was lucky. Maybe there were more than two groups who had me in their sights. If neither Karsarkis nor the US marshals were responsible for wiring my apartment, then I had somebody else on my tail, too, somebody who hadn’t yet shown himself.

  I felt like a man who had started out skiing down a gentle slope only to discover he was really on Mount Everest. And he wasn’t wearing skis.

  Everything was becoming clearer and fuzzier all at the same time. Perhaps if I told Jello the truth about what was going on, particularly the part about Karsarkis offering me a huge sum of money to try and get him a presidential pardon, maybe he would at least point me in the right direction. There were some pretty strict limitations as to how much Jello could tell me, of course, even if he did know something I probably ought to, but at worst he would probably tell me there was nothing he could say and I was on my own. I was already on my own, so what did I have to lose by asking?

  I had just about talked myself into telling Jello the whole story and when my cell phone rang. I scooped it up and glanced at the number on the screen. I thought I recognized it as Jello’s so I answered.

  “Hey, man, I was just thinking of you.”

  “Ah, Jack, that’s so sweet. I didn’t know you cared.”

  I looked at the telephone. It wasn’t Jello.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “I thought you said you were just thinking of me. Now you ask who this is? You’re a fickle motherfucker, Big Jack. Just when I was feeling all warm and loved, you jerk the rug right out from under me.”

  “Tommy?”

  “At your service, my friend. At your fucking service.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was expecting someone else.”

  “So I gather.”

  There was an awkward silence after that. I was waiting for Tommy to tell me why he was calling, but he apparently was waiting for me to ask, so eventually I obliged him.

  “What do you want, Tommy?”

  “You asked to see some files, didn’t you, Jack?”

  In all the upheaval since last night I had completely forgotten the conversation Tommy and I had about the NIA’s intelligence files on Karsarkis.

  “So your boss said you could give them to me?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly? What does that mean?”

  “It means my boss is going to give them to you.”

  “Fine.”

  “Okay. Here’s what you do, Jack. Go downstairs and-”

  “Whoa, Tommy. I’m not in the mood this morning for a goddamned scavenger hunt. If your boss has got some files for me, tell him just send them on over.”

  “No can do, Big Jack. Here are the ground rules. You talk directly to my boss. Maybe you get some stuff to look at and maybe you don’t. And even if you do, no notes and no copies. That’s it. Take it or leave it.”

  I sighed and studied a point on my office wall that had nothing in particular to recommend it.

  “Okay, Tommy,” I finally said. “Whatever.”

  “Good call.”

  “I’m so glad you approve.”

  “Downstairs then,” he said. “Now.”

  And with that he hung up.

  I closed my phone and sat looking at it for a moment. Tommy worked hard at being obscure. I gathered he thought spies were supposed to be obscure. Generally, the effect was comic, but occasionally it was irritating. I put today down in the irritating column.

  By the time I got downstairs I was wound up enough to give Tommy a boot in the ass for jerking me around, but the building lobby was empty and I found myself deprived of an immediate target. I stood there for a moment looking around, but it was a very small lobby so that was a pretty pointless exercise. Empty was empty.

  Not having any better idea what I was supposed to do I walked outside and stood at the top of the steps. That was when I saw the black Mercedes parked in the circular drive with the engine running. It looked like the same car in which Tommy and I had ridden out to Karsarkis’ hideaway. At least I thought it was the same car because it had the same kind of darkened windows and sliding curtains, bug chad rit it might have been a different one. I couldn’t tell, and when I thought about it for a moment, I also realized I really didn’t give a damn.

  April is the heart of the hot season in Thailand. Although it wasn’t even eleven yet, the sun was already brutal. I could feel the heat in the concrete through the soles of my loafers. As I walked toward the Mercedes, it was like taking a stroll on a warming tray.

  When I was still fifty feet from the car both front doors opened in near perfect synchronization and two men I’d never seen before got out. They were athletic-looking locals wearing nearly identical white shirts, black pants, and dark neckties, and they were both expressionless behind their opaque sunglasses. I recognized government security when I saw it no matter what country I was in and either that’s what these guys were or they had seen Men in Black way too many times. The driver stepped away from the car and moved back a few strides, his head swiveling slowly back and forth. Then the man who had emerged from the other side went to the rear passenger door and held it open without taking his eyes off me. It was a silent yet unmistakable command for me to get into the car.

  Taking my own sweet time about it, I sauntered over and got in. When I did I discovered the car was already pretty crowded. There were two people in the back seat, and neither one of them was Tommy. The two passengers were a man and a woman. I recognized both of their faces immediately, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen them before.

  The woman in the middle of the back seat appeared to be in her late thirties, although I could never really tell with Thai women. She was stylishly dressed in a cream silk suit with matching heels. Sitting straight, her bare legs crossed at the knee, she dangled a shoe off the toes of one foot which caused her straight skirt to ride up well above her knees and leave her smooth brown thighs very agreeably displayed. When the white-shirt-and-tie muscle outside closed the door behind me, he shoved me up tightly against the woman, which I had to admit I didn’t really mind at all.

>   The man, on the other hand, was short and sallow and middle-aged. He wore a dark suit that appeared expensive, although it also looked like it hadn’t been pressed since the day he had bought it. I assumed he had to be an Englishman, mostly because of his bad teeth and worse complexion and the puckered look on his face that suggested a terminal case of constipation.

  “Good morning, Mr. Shepherd,” he said without looking directly at me. “Thank you very much for coming.”

  His voice sounded familiar, too, but I still couldn’t place him. Regardless, the accent was unquestionably English public school, so I gathered my first impression had been right.

  “Well, gee,” I said, not offering to shake hands. “How could I refuse?”

  The Englishman said nothing in response, but with my arm still pressed against the woman’s side I thought I felt a little ripple of amusement roll through her body. Then perhaps I was mistaken about that. Around beautiful women all men tend to be irrationally hopeful that they are being regarded as witty and charming. It’s pure genetic programming.

  The driver and the guy who was riding shotgun had resumed their places in the front of the car. The Englishman leaned forward slightly and spoke to the driver.

  “Okay, pai gun teu,” he said. “Bork duay ta mee krai tam ma.”

  The man spoke Thai so colloquially I almost missed what he was saying, but his accent left me wcenkraith little doubt he was completely fluent.

  Let’s go, he had said, and let me know if you pick up anybody tailing us.

  The driver put the car into gear and we rolled slowly around the driveway and out into one of the many small streets that ran through the campus. I assumed the driver would turn right toward busy Phayathai Road, the main artery that bisected the campus north to south, but he didn’t. Instead he turned left, drove behind the National Stadium, and then turned left again on a quiet residential street that led in the general direction of the Chao Phraya River.

  Neither the man nor the woman said anything else and I certainly had no intention of giving them the satisfaction of asking what the hell was going on. I concentrated instead on trying to figure out where I knew these two from. I had seen them both recently, I was reasonably sure, but where? And had I seen them together or had I seen them separately?