[Jack Shepherd 01.0] Laundry Man

by Jake Needham

  “It doesn’t matter why you were doing it,” Beth went on before I could ask her any of the questions piling up rapidly in my mind. “I wanted you to know that you’re safe.”

  “Safe?”

  “We’ve had a loose net on you ever since your meeting with Mr. Gale.”

  That was the second time in a week someone had used the phrase “loose net” in connection with me. I didn’t like the sound of it now any more than I had the first time.

  “That was you following me in Hong Kong?”

  “We weren’t following you. Some colleagues of mine were running counter-surveillance procedures. Mr. Gale asked me to keep an eye out for a few days to see if anyone followed you after your meeting.”

  “You’re scaring me, Beth.”

  “I don’t mean to. You were clean in Hong Kong. You should know that.”

  “I can’t tell you how happy it makes me.” Then the obvious question occurred to me. “Did Barry send you here to tell me all this?”

  Beth shook her head. Droplets of sweat dislodged from her hair rolled down her forehead, and into her eyes. She wiped them away with her hand.

  “I just thought you ought to know I have you covered,” she said. “I didn’t want you to worry.”

  I studied Beth and wondered about what she was really saying, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “I guess I don’t get any of this,” I finally said.

  “It’s not very complicated. Barry is afraid somebody may try to get to the missing money through you. He asked me to keep an eye out to make sure that doesn’t happen. That’s what I’m doing and I wanted to tell you that.”

  Something behind me caught Beth’s attention and she looked away over my shoulder. I turned to follow her eyes and saw two men were walking toward us across the grass, the same two men who had disappeared earlier after I ran past them. Both of them were sweating and suffering badly in the morning heat and humidity and they looked even less like real runners now than they had when I passed them by the lake. I glanced at Beth and saw she obviously knew who they were so we sat and waited in silence until they got to the table.

  Beth said something to the men in a language I didn’t recognize and I realized then they weren’t locals after all. The language sounded vaguely like a Chinese dialect, but I didn’t know a single word of any Chinese dialect so I couldn’t be sure. Beth had a question in her voice when she spoke—I was pretty sure of at least that much—and one of the men nodded quickly in response, giving a single crisp snap of his head. After that both men waited patiently while Beth looked off into space for a few moments.

  “Okay,” she finally said.

  Then she added something else in whatever language it was she was speaking and both men immediately turned and walked away without another word.

  Beth took a deep breath and wiped both hands over her face.

  “It looks like somebody may be interested in you after all,” she said.

  “You mean somebody is following me?”

  “There does appear to be surveillance of some kind operating.”

  I blinked at that. “You have got to be kidding.”

  Beth shook her head.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you saying that Jimmy Kicks—”

  Beth interrupted, waving my question away.

  “I don’t know. We’ll keep you covered with a counter-surveillance team until I’m sure what’s going on. Just keep on doing whatever you normally do and don’t worry about it.”

  “Counter-surveillance team? Look, Beth, what the hell is really going on here?”

  “I already told you—”

  “All of a sudden you sound more like a spook than a bodyguard to me, Beth. Is that it? Are you really a spook?”

  “I am exactly who I told you I am, Mr. Shepherd. I am not associated with any intelligence agency.”

  Beth’s response had a oddly wooden quality to it and I wondered for a moment if there was a message for me somewhere in there between the lines.

  “It’s no concern of mine whether you believe me or not,” Beth went on before I could decide. “Mr. Gale pays me to provide security for him and I answer only to him. He asked me to monitor you for surveillance. Now it seems you may be tagged and I’ve got to tell you that I’m not real thrilled.”

  “Well, that makes two of us, Beth.”

  “The reason I’m not real thrilled,” she continued, her tone neutral, “is that now I’m going to have to pull some people off Mr. Gale to cover you and that leaves me weak if anything goes down with him. I don’t like to be weak.”

  She paused and looked at me to make sure I appreciated the point.

  “You must not tell anyone about any of this, Mr. Shepherd. You would be putting yourself in danger, and possibly others as well. If you are under surveillance, this changes everything.”

  “Like what exactly?”

  “It will be difficult for you to see Mr. Gale again.”

  “That’s not a problem. I don’t want to see Mr. Gale again.”

  “Don’t make jokes, Mr. Shepherd. This isn’t a game. I don’t think you understand what you’re up against here.”

  “Oh, I think I do, Beth. I’m not up against anything because I’m not involved with Barry Gale and I don’t intend to get involved with Barry Gale.”

  “Then why were you—”

  “I had some time to kill in Hong Kong and I was curious.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat.”

  “Gee, I wish I’d said that.”

  The corners of Beth’s lips lifted in a smile, but her eyes didn’t join in. “You’re not taking me seriously, are you?”

  “Well… no.”

  “These are serious people. It’s risky to underestimate people you don’t know and don’t understand. I doubt they have underestimated you and that gives them the advantage.”

  “Hold on, Beth.” I tried to put just the right tone of appeal into my voice without coming off like a wimp. “Can you just lay it out for me? What the hell is going on here?”

  “I’m only the hired help, Mr. Shepherd.”

  “But you could tell me, couldn’t you?”

  Beth hesitated, and for a moment I thought she was about to say something, but then she looked away.

  “It’s up to Mr. Gale. My job is just to make sure no one bothers you. We’ll be around. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

  She smiled and there was something like an apology in her eyes, but I knew that was all I was going to get out of her.

  “You really have nothing to worry about, Mr. Shepherd. In spite of what you may have assumed, I’m not just some bimbo. I did eight years with Special Branch Counterintelligence in Hong Kong. I’m very good at my job. I have expert ratings with a dozen kinds of firearms.”

  “Are you saying that you may have to shoot somebody to protect me?”

  Beth chuckled slightly, but she didn’t reply. She just slipped off the picnic table, nodded at me, and broke into a jog toward the park’s main gate on Ratchadamri Road. I watched her until she reached the gate, passed through it, and disappeared.

  I pushed myself off the table, too, and started walking back to where I had parked the Volvo.

  It was utterly inconceivable to me that there could be people watching me at that very moment. I was just an unimportant lecturer at an insignificant business school in an inconsequential country in an unimportant part of the world. I couldn’t believe that anyone—other than perhaps Anita—gave even the most minuscule of damns about where I was going or what I was doing.

  The more I thought about it, the more certain I became there was only one sensible explanation for all this: Barry was trying to scare me. He must have concocted this whole ridiculous story and then sent this woman and the two guys around to make it look real. Barry probably figured if he could frighten me badly enough, I would jump into his arms in sheer terror and then he would have me right where he wanted me. />
  I had thought for a moment there that Beth might be about to tell me what was really going on. Could I really believe she had come to meet me without Barry knowing about it? There had been something, I thought, an instant in which she seemed to want to tell me everything—and I had almost been ready then to believe that she really was there on her own—but I was probably mistaken. Men in general tended to become unreasonably hopeful and stupidly optimistic in the company of beautiful women, and I was no different. That was probably all there had been to that.

  When I got back to the Volvo, I glanced up the street and immediately spotted a man sitting behind the wheel of a blue Toyota van parked a short distance along Soi Sarasin and on the opposite side. He looked like a Thai, but he was wearing a green baseball cap and dark glasses, and it was hard to tell for sure.

  The man was probably just waiting for someone, I told myself. He really didn’t appear to be paying any attention to me and there was nothing unusual about him or about what he was doing. Nevertheless, I found myself keeping a wary eye cocked in his direction while I started the Volvo, made a U-turn, and headed back toward my apartment.

  When I turned the corner onto Wireless Road, I glanced up at my mirror and saw the man was still there. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t even looked at me as far as I could tell. Then both he and his blue van slipped out of sight and all I could do was wonder.

  TWENTY THREE

  ANITA WAS STILL sleeping when I got back so I showered and shaved as quietly as I could. I left a note reminding her of my meeting with Dollar and then went back downstairs to the garage and got back into the Volvo again. I had nothing in particular to do before eleven o’clock, but I thought it might be pleasant to head on down to the United Center, treat myself to a peaceful breakfast somewhere, and then just hang around the office and shuffle papers until Dollar showed up.

  I drove south on Soi Chidlom and caught a red light next to the Central Department Store. While I sat there waiting for it to change, I watched the army of sales clerks arriving for work streaming into the huge store through the employees’ entrance. They were overwhelmingly young and mostly female. Although I had the Volvo’s top down and was quite comfortable in a blue cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, most of the salesgirls wore coats over the white blouses and black skirts of their uniforms. Bulky nylon parkas in bright shades of red and yellow seemed to be the favored choice. One tiny girl even sported a purple ski hat pulled all the way down over her ears.

  The Thais hated cool weather. At the first sign of sliding temperatures, they hauled out parkas fit for winter in Alaska and swapped their flip-flops for fur-lined mukluks. The city’s foreign residents usually reacted to the onset of winter in a somewhat more measured fashion. At most, we rolled down our sleeves.

  When I got to Soi Sarasin and made a right in the direction of the financial district, I involuntarily glanced toward the spot where I had parked the Volvo that morning while I was running in Lumpini Park. The blue van was gone and presumably the man in the sunglasses and baseball hat had gone with it. I wondered briefly if I ought to take that as a good omen, maybe even a sign that everything would start getting back to normal and in a few days I would be laughing. No, that was going way too fast. This morning I’d settle for just getting through breakfast without squinting suspiciously at the waitress.

  After parking in the United Center garage I walked downstairs to the Délifrance. I went through the short line and selected a plate of hard rolls and cheese, picked up a café au lait, and then took everything to a table outside on the tiny front terrace. I watched the morning traffic while I carved slivers of cheese onto the crusty bread and sipped at my coffee. When I was done with both, I went back inside, got another coffee, and sat quietly over it for a long time, thinking.

  Jello’s story about Dollar still seemed ridiculous to me; but in an entirely different way, so was Dollar’s tale about being mugged leaving his office with Howard the Roach. I was sitting right where it had supposedly happened. The blue-and-white canvas umbrella under which I was drinking coffee might have been the very one Dollar claimed to have knocked over in the struggle. I could scarcely believe something like that had happened to them at all, let alone right here in the heart of Bangkok’s financial district. But if it hadn’t happened, if Dollar had made up the story, why had he done that?

  As I thought about it all and sloshed the coffee around in my cup, a scene from an old movie suddenly popped into my head. Three Days of the Condor was one of those CIA conspiracy films that had been so popular right after Watergate when a lot of Americans decided they could believe anything about the kind of people who were running the country. In the movie Robert Redford was the honorable man sucked by accident into an intricate government plot to do something that no one really understood, but that in any event required the killing of a bunch of other honorable people to achieve some obscure end for someone—maybe the CIA, and maybe not. Redford was the hero of the movie, of course. He was cool. He was steady. And he projected a steely determination not to let the bad guys get away with it. Whatever it was.

  I had stumbled across the movie on HBO one night a couple of weeks earlier. Watching it again for the first time in more than twenty years, it was my own reaction that surprised me, not the film itself. Redford no longer seemed to me to be the hero of the story. On the contrary, his unyielding determination to do right even if it put him or the other people around him in danger seemed tired and dated.

  The real star of the film for me now was a character actor named John Houseman, a sort of benighted Santa Claus figure wearing a rumpled blue suit and speaking with a British accent. Houseman’s character was a lot older than Redford with a view of the world that was both wearier and less hopeful that wrongs could be righted just by the conviction they should be. He was the director of the CIA, and while you were pretty sure he wasn’t one of the bad guys, you weren’t absolutely sure he was one of the good guys either.

  There was a moment in the movie when Houseman was reminiscing to one of his subordinates, a stiff-necked young bureaucrat played by Cliff Robertson, about the early days of the American intelligence community when he had been one of Alan Dulles’s boys, a crusading young hotshot battling the Nazis in World War Two. Robertson listened politely to Houseman’s recollections, as we all do sometimes to old men who may have told the same stories a few too many times, and when Houseman was finished, Robertson just sat there, not quite certain as to how he was supposed to respond. Finally, Robertson asked Houseman politely, “So, do you miss the action now, sir?”

  Houseman seemed to consider that possibility as if for the first time, and slowly and deliberately he began to formulate a reply.

  “No, I miss…”

  Houseman paused, searching for exactly the right word, and you hung there while the old man rolled the possibilities around in his mouth until he found just the one he was looking for.

  “… the clarity. What I miss is the clarity.”

  He drew the word out…clar-i-tee…and Robertson nodded, but you could tell he didn’t understand what the hell Houseman was talking about. I wasn’t sure that I understood back then either. But I did now.

  No, I didn’t miss the action any more than Houseman did. I didn’t miss the action one damned bit. I missed the clarity.

  Clarity was what had brought me to Bangkok in the first place, and clarity was what I had found. If I let it slip away, one day I would end up just like that: living in the past, reminiscing to some young dunce who didn’t know what I had lost or care much one way or the other how I had lost it. I thought I had managed to creep quietly out of the big ocean and slide undetected into my small pond without anyone really caring I had gone, but all of a sudden I was getting more attention than a Hezbollah float in the Rose Parade.

  Oh Lord, don’t do this to me. Don’t take it all away.

  I LOOKED AT my watch. It was a little before ten-thirty. Since Dollar and I weren’t supposed to meet until eleven, I still had h
alf an hour to kill, maybe a little more if Dollar showed up as late as he usually did.

  If Howard and Dollar really were up to something, there would almost certainly be some hint of it in Howard’s case files. I could probably find it if I looked carefully, at least I could now that I knew what I was looking for, and there was time to look before Dollar showed up. What could it hurt?

  In the lobby of the United Center a gray half-light illuminated a sleepy-looking security guard flipping through a newspaper behind a wooden desk. I walked to the elevators and pushed the button, but the guard never even glanced at me. Like most Thai security guards he probably wouldn’t have bothered to look up if I had ridden an elephant into the building.

  On the fifteenth floor, I walked to the glass doors at the end of the hall where the big gold letters were dramatically backlit against a stark white wall:

  DUNNE, ANDERSON, LORD & AMPORNPHAKDI

  INTERNATIONAL ATTORNEYS AND COUNSELORS AT LAW

  I did work fairly regularly for Dollar’s firm and I kept a tiny cubbyhole of my own there to avoid dragging client files back and forth to my office at Sasin, so I had a key. I took it out, bent down, and turned it in the floor lock. When I did, for a moment I thought I heard voices coming from somewhere inside.

  It seemed unlikely anyone was there unless Dollar had shown up early after all, and that seemed really unlikely. When the lock snapped over I stood and pushed the door open and waited silently for a moment, listening, but I heard nothing else. I decided I must have been mistaken. I closed the door behind me and relocked it.

  My office was the first door down the hallway to the left, just past the black marble counter manned during the workweek by two receptionists. It was a tiny windowless cell situated in the inside portion of the hallway ring, an area mostly set aside for toilets, storage, and a kitchen. I flipped on the lights and settled into my chair, swiveling around and pulling open the bottom drawer of the big cabinet file behind my desk where I kept my working files.