by Jake Needham
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 with 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?
I was still trying to work that out when the man twisted his body around until he was half facing me and laced his fingers around one knee.
TWENTY SEVEN
“MY NAME IS Smith.”
“Really?” I said. “What an unusual name.”
“I could give you a lot of rubbish, but you probably wouldn’t believe it anyway, so let’s just jump right to it. I am with the British Embassy and I work there in an intelligence capacity.”
That stopped me for a moment.
“You’re Tommy’s boss?” I asked the man. “You’re telling me Tommy works for British intelligence?”
The woman spoke for the first time. “No, Mr. Shepherd,” she said.
Her voice was so soft I had to bend toward her slightly to hear her words. Her rounded tones and deliberate intonation were an even more obvious if less blatant sign of a childhood spent in English public schools than the man’s overly plummy accent had been.
“I’m Tommy’s boss,” she continued. “I am the Director General of the National Intelligence Agency.”
I examined the woman’s face for some sign she was joking. I saw none.
“I’m speechless,” I finally said.
“Somehow I doubt that.”
The woman smiled slightly when she spoke. I noticed it was a very nice smile, particularly for a spook.
“Okay,” I admitted, “maybe not. But I had no idea the head of the NIA was a woman.”
“Really? And now that you know, why are you so surprised?”
“Well…” I tried to think of a diplomatic way to put it. “On the whole Thailand is something of a man’s world, and generally one thinks of Thai women as—”
“Maids and whores, Mr. Shepherd?”
I glanced at the woman. When I saw she was still smiling, I was greatly relieved.
“Seventy-five percent of the university graduates in Thailand are women,” she continued. “We probably run more major companies and are responsible for more meaningful decisions here than in any nation on earth. My personal belief is that in another decade most Thai men will be driving motorcycle taxis and this will be the world’s foremost matriarchal society.”
“That’s a little difficult to imagine,” I muttered, stalling for time while I tried to figure out where this was going.
“Why?” the woman asked.
“Well, for one thing, almost every government minister and the permanent secretary of every department is a man.”
“That is because government counts for very little in Thailand, Mr. Shepherd, at least when it comes to the exercise of real power. We will continue to let the old dinosaurs preen their egos, line their pockets, and run after schoolgirls for so long as they do nothing else. But then you no doubt already know that is all politicians do here anyway. I’m sure you are just too polite to say it.”
I kept my mouth shut. That was something I didn’t do very often, but this seemed to me to be a good time to test out the concept.
“Look, old boy,” Mr. Smith cut in. “This is all absolutely fascinating, I’m sure, but could we get back to the important point here?”
All at once the penny dropped. I placed both of them.
These two had been at Plato Karsarkis’ dinner party in Phuket. And they had been there together. Oh my, oh my. British intelligence and the Director General of the NIA keeping company? The mind boggled as to whom exactly was fucking whom.
“I just realized where we met before,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter,” Smith said. He shook his head and looked away.
“It matters to me.”
“I’m not really concerned with what may or may not matter to you,” Smith continued. “I will say only that the British government does have a certain interest in your friend Plato—”
“Karsarkis isn’t my friend,” I interrupted.
“Whatever you say,” Smith shrugged. “Still, we have an interest in keeping Mr. Karsarkis both alive and reasonably happy, and I’m not so sure your own government shares that interest.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“That’s not for me to say,” Smith shrugged again, a gesture he seemed to have practiced a lot. “I’m just along for the ride. This is Kathleeya’s show.”
It was the first time I could recall hearing the woman’s name. Certainly, she hadn’t introduced herself today and I couldn’t remember how she had been introduced to me at Karsarkis’ dinner party either. I wondered if that was her real name. Regardless, Kathleeya—or whatever her name actually was—spoke up before I could ask.
“How much do you really know about Plato Karsarkis?” she asked me.
“Not much. Mostly what they tell me on CNN.”
“You should watch the BBC,” Smith put in. “CNN is nothing but a load of self-conscious twaddle. Americans trying to pretend they’re c
itizens of the world instead of just Americans. Bloody joke, if you ask me.”
I glanced at him to see if he was smiling. He wasn’t. Nevertheless, when I looked back at Kathleeya she was, and I thought that was nicer anyway.
“You told Tommy you would be willing to help us if we gave you Plato Karsarkis’ files,” she said to me.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Then, Mr. Shepherd, before we go any further perhaps you had better tell me exactly what you did say to Tommy.”
“Karsarkis asked me to try to get him a presidential pardon, and Tommy said the Thai government wanted me to help Karsarkis. I told Tommy I needed to look at whatever the NIA had on Karsarkis before I decided what I was going to do.”
“Yes, I see.”
“By the way, is there any particular direction in which you’d like me to speak so you can get a clear recording of this conversation?”
“Not really. You’re pretty well covered from every direction.”
“Yes, well, your own car is one thing, but bugging my apartment seems to me to extend your coverage area a bit beyond what I would view as fair.”
Kathleeya and the Englishman exchanged a look.
“What makes you think your apartment has been bugged?” she asked.
I realized immediately that I should never have said anything about the bug in my apartment. Men always talk too much in front of beautiful women. It’s an incurable male disease, frequently fatal.
I had jumped too quickly to the conclusion that NIA had something to do with placing the bug, but it looked like I was probably wrong about that. I had given up something that could be important and gotten absolutely nothing in return and, to keep myself from sounding like a paranoid lunatic, I would to have to bring up Jello’s name; but I had absolutely no intention of doing that so I tried a modest finesse.
“Look, I know about the break-in attempt on my laptop and I found your cute little bug in my study. I know there are probably more bugs, too, of course, so some friends at the American Embassy are sweeping my apartment regularly now.”
A clumsy piece of embroidery maybe, but close enough for government work.
“The NIA has nothing to do with whatever you may have found in your apartment, Mr. Shepherd.”
“Of course you don’t.”
Kathleeya turned her head and leaned slightly toward me. She remained silent until I was looking directly into her eyes, which I was more than willing to do.
“It is important that you believe me. I did not know your apartment was under surveillance or your computer had been compromised. I would never have authorized such a thing.”
“My computer wasn’t compromised. I said someone tried to break in. They didn’t succeed. And I think I got the bugs almost immediately after they went in, so I doubt they produced anything of value for anyone either.”
“Well there you are then. If it had been our operation, it would have succeeded.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that so I pushed away the curtain and looked out the car window while I thought about it. The driver had taken Rama IV to the expressway and was heading north. The airport was just off to the east and I followed a departing United 747 with my eyes until it disappeared behind a bank of clouds.
This was probably all just bullshit, I told myself. Of course it was the NIA who had fiddled with my computer and planted the bugs. Who the hell else could it be? Whatever Jello said, I had a little difficulty buying into the idea that all kinds of foreign intelligence services were running amuck in Thailand bugging apartments and breaking into computers.
Still, this woman had looked me right in the eye and denied the NIA had anything to do with it and I wanted to believe her. Would I have tried nearly as hard to believe her if she’d been short, fat, old, and ugly? I knew what the answer to that was, regardless of how embarrassing it might be to admit it.
“What about Karsarkis’ files?” I asked when I turned back from the window. “Do I get them or not?”
The woman opened her dark green leather purse and took out a clear plastic case containing a DVD.
“This is everything we have that is relevant.”
“I asked for the raw files, not what you chose to edit for me,” I said.
“Regardless of what you asked for, this is what you’re getting.”
She held the case toward me. She seemed to assume I would accept it without raising any further objections. She was right, of course.
“I think you’ll find enough there to keep you interested,” she said. “By the way, you should know that when you open the file on the disk, a clock will start.”
“A clock?”
“Exactly one hour from the time you open the file, everything on the disk will be scrambled in such a way as to make it entirely unrecoverable. The same thing will happen immediately if you attempt to print, email, or copy any part of the file. Do I make myself clear?”
“You do indeed. But why all the melodrama?”
“I wouldn’t be very happy to find copies of NIA documents in the New York Times next week.”
“You could have just asked for my word that I wouldn’t give them to anyone.”
Smith snorted audibly, but I thought I saw a flash of something like embarrassment slide across Kathleeya’s face.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Shepherd. We felt this was the appropriate security to impose under the circumstances. Please don’t take it personally.”
“So it’s not personal, it’s just business.”
“You will also find a text file on the disk which contains nothing but a nine-digit number,” she continued without looking at me. “That is my private cell phone number. After you have read the materials on the disk, I would appreciate it if you would call me and tell me whether you have decided to help us.”
“You mean help Plato Karsarkis, don’t you?”
Kathleeya smiled and I allowed myself to enjoy it this time.
“Interests frequently have a way of getting tangled up in odd ways, Mr. Shepherd. You have heard the saying, “The friend of my friend is also my friend.”
“As is the enemy of my enemy,” I said.
“Something like that.” She smiled again.
Smith leaned forward and spoke to the driver and the big Mercedes swung off the Expressway and made a U-turn. No one said much while we were driving back to the city, but as I juggled the DVD case in my fingers I couldn’t help but think about what I might find on that disk.
Her personal cell phone number, huh?
Maybe later when I told Anita about all this I’d skip over that part.
TWENTY EIGHT
AFTER THE BLACK Mercedes dropped me off I went straight upstairs to my office, locked the door, and picked up the telephone. I dialed a number, let it ring once, and hung up. That might not be the usual way to reach someone by telephone, but then I was calling Darcy Rice and there was absolutely nothing usual about her either.
Darcy had retired to Bangkok following a career with the US government doing things about which she was now professionally vague. A lot of people figured Darcy for CIA, certainly back when she was an active government employee and maybe even still, but I doubted that was true. I was pretty sure Darcy had spent her career with the National Security Agency. The NSA monitors and intercepts all sorts of communications, breaks encryption, tasks spy satellites, and engages in a whole range of technology-driven black arts that most people would dismiss as science fiction even if they somehow found out about them, which they wouldn’t anyway. That was exactly the sort of stuff Darcy seemed to know everything about, which was why I had made her for NSA right from our earliest conversations.
These days Darcy was like so many retired government types who had learned their trades in the Cold War. Now that peace had broken out, or at least the game had changed into something nobody understood anymore, she had taken her considerable experience and talents into private enterprise. Darcy ran a small company that operated out of a stylish if aging mansion in the o
ldest part of Bangkok, a place she had remodeled from dilapidated elegance into a high-tech marvel. She described her business as an information gathering and analysis consultancy, which was vague enough to cover most anything. What it actually was, of course, was a private intelligence agency.
At first I had been amazed an operation of such technological sophistication existed in a backwater like Bangkok, but the more Darcy and I had become friends and the more I learned about what she was doing, the more I understood Bangkok was a perfect place for her. Bangkok was where international criminals, law enforcement personnel, intelligence agencies, terrorists, drug runners, arms peddlers, and the inevitable collection of scam artists, hangers-on and wannabes mingled in teeming streets and grimy bars under an unspoken understanding. They could let down their guard in Bangkok. They could just hang around or even party a little without taking all the usual precautions since it was understood they would all leave each other alone while they were here. Even the Thai government didn’t much care what anyone did in Bangkok, as long as it didn’t involve them. The cantina in Star Wars was a run-of-the-mill saloon compared to the bars of Bangkok.
The moment I heard the warnings about the traps the NIA had supposedly built into the disk I had been given, I decided there was no way in hell I was going to touch the thing without talking to Darcy first. I gave her a little help with her projects from time to time and she paid me back by doing me favors when I needed them. I figured I needed one now.
