World of Trouble (9786167611136) (16 page)

Shepherd thought back to Agent Keur’s claim
that he, not Charlie, had been the real target of the attack in
Dubai because somebody was trying to disrupt Charlie’s finances.
Suddenly that claim didn’t sound so ridiculous. Or maybe it still
was. He was getting way ahead of himself.

Shepherd looked around. “What are we doing on
Sathorn Road, Jello? Where are we going?”

“The Taksin Bridge. That’s where the body
is.”

“Somebody dumped a body on the Taksin
Bridge?”

Jello gave him a look, but he didn’t say
anything else.

The Taksin Bridge is a twin-spanned structure
that arches the Chao Phraya River right in the center of Bangkok.
Shepherd knew the bridge was gridlocked with traffic pretty much
day and night, but he still couldn’t believe the snarl of cars and
trucks he saw in the westbound lanes just ahead of them. When they
hit the backup, Jello calmly bumped the Toyota up over the curb,
drove across Sathorn’s broad esplanade, and then bumped back down
into the deserted eastbound lanes. He continued toward the bridge
as if driving on the wrong side of the road was the most natural
thing in the world for him to do. Maybe it was.

“The body’s on the eastbound side of the
bridge,” Jello said as they drove in solitary splendor down the
middle of the empty roadway. “We’ve stopped the traffic at the
other side of the river.”

“Was it just dumped in the roadway?”

“It was hanging under the bridge. Somebody
spotted it from a barge going downriver and we pulled it up.”

That was interesting, Shepherd thought. Had
Tanit been overcome with remorse at his involvement in a bribery
scheme and hung himself? Surely not. The only Thai banker likely to
commit suicide was one who
hadn’t
been offered a bribe.

“Somebody hung himself from the Taksin
Bridge?” Shepherd asked.

“The body was roped around the ankles and the
rope was tied off on the rail almost exactly in the center of the
bridge. Somebody killed this guy and hung him over the side.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Jello glanced at Shepherd, but only for a
moment.

“Okay, so you’re serious. But that sounds
pretty damn weird.”

“You think?” Jello glanced over again. “It
gets weirder.”

“What could be weirder than somebody hanging
a dead body by its ankles from the railing of a bridge right in the
middle of Bangkok?”

“The body was decapitated,” Jello said. “And
we can’t find the head.”

THE BODY WAS on a white sheet somebody had spread out
in the roadway at the very center of the eastbound span of the
Taksin Bridge. A collection of brown-uniformed police, some
civilian hangers-on, and a few of those knuckle-draggers who seemed
to appear everywhere at the first sign of death—even in the middle
of a bridge at five o’clock in the morning—moved back to give
Shepherd and Jello room.

“You know him?” Jello asked Shepherd.

“Not without a head.”

The body was that of a male who was slightly
built and not very tall. He was wearing black cotton slacks and a
black golf shirt with a new-looking pair of Air Jordans and heavy
black athletic socks. Without a head, it was hard to tell much else
about the man with any certainty, but as far as Shepherd was
concerned he could see enough to answer the main question on his
mind right at that moment. Tanit was tall. Even with the head
missing, it was obvious the corpse wasn’t Tanit.

Shepherd had never seen a decapitated body
before and, now that he had, he was surprised to discover the
experience was oddly bloodless. Nothing about the corpse looked
real. The man had bled out, and his skin was now so pale it was
almost translucent. Even the open cavity that used to be his neck
seemed artificial, like plastic that had been melted and then
cooled back into strange-shaped lumps and whorls. Shepherd could
have been looking at a headless mannequin some kid had dumped out
of a car to give the punters a thrill. Only he wasn’t.

His eyes drifted away from the corpse and out
over the bridge’s railing. He traced the twisting course of the
river to the north. Where Shepherd stood everything was in
gray-green dimness, but on the eastern bank of the river Bangkok
sparkled with an astonishing radiance. Most of the city’s towers
were brightly lit, etched into the night sky by lights so
blindingly white that they seemed to drain the color from
everything around them. The rank of luxury hotels standing watch
along the riverfront glistened with jolly red, gold, and blue
lights, shards of which snaked over the surface of the water and
reached out toward them.

A small boat roared by heading downriver. It
was a long tail, one of the narrow, canoe-like vessels powered by
salvaged automobile engines that were the usual form of
transportation on the rivers and canals of Thailand. The little
boat skimmed through the streaks of light like a stone, glancing
lightly off the chop and misting the air with dark fans of
spray.

***

“HAVE YOU EVER seen anything like this before?”
Shepherd asked.

Jello took his time before he answered.

“There are a lot of decapitations in the
south,” he said after a moment of silence. “But this is the first
one I’ve heard of in Bangkok.”

For decades the Thai military had been
fighting a dirty little war in the south of the country. Most of
the world didn’t seem to know anything about it, or maybe it was
just that the rest of the world didn’t care. Thailand is an
overwhelming Buddhist country, but the three provinces in the far
south closest to the Malaysian border are mainly Muslim. Over the
years, the calls from the Muslims for greater autonomy had
increased and the Thai response was mostly brutal repression. For
the last half dozen years in particular, shadowy bands of rebels
had been fighting back against the Thai military and doing it
effectively. Demands were now being heard for the formation of a
new Islamic state entirely separate from Thailand.

Machine gun mounted Humvees scour the
roadsides for bombs. Thai soldiers sweep through villages suspected
of harboring insurgents. And helicopters clatter above an idyllic
tropical landscape over which the Thai military has cast a security
net more dense than the U.S. Army ever did in Iraq. The provincial
towns under siege have names like Pattani, Songkhla, and
Narathiwat, but outside of Thailand almost no one has ever heard of
any of them.

It was just another dirty little war, fought
in places few Westerners could pronounce, between people with funny
names. But the bombings and shootings went on day after day.
Thousands had been killed on both sides, maybe tens of thousands.
And however funny their names might be, the dead left fatherless
and motherless children alone in the half-empty villages fending
for themselves.

The Muslim rebels had recently turned to
terrorizing those who did not wholeheartedly sympathize with them.
Probably not by coincidence, their tactics mirrored those used by
the Iraqi and Afghan fighters against American troops. Taking
captives and beheading them was particularly stylish. Hundreds of
men, women, and even children had been killed that way. Maybe
thousands.

Shepherd glanced back down at the corpse.
Maybe, he thought, Thailand’s homegrown terrorists were tired of
being ignored.

Jello cut into Shepherd’s reverie. “So you
don’t know who this is?”

“I guess you’ll have to be a real detective
and figure it out yourself.”

“It would help me a lot if you had any idea
at all.”

“It would help you even more if you had a
head.”

Jello just nodded and Shepherd didn’t say
anything else.

“So that’s it?” Jello nudged after a
moment.

“That’s it.”

“You don’t have any idea why this guy had
your phone number and travel details in his phone?”

“No idea at all.”

“He didn’t have them because you were
supposed to meet him here in Bangkok?”

Shepherd shook his head.

Jello knew there was something Shepherd
wasn’t telling him, of course. Maybe even a lot he wasn’t telling
him. But he let it pass for the moment. He could see that he wasn’t
going to bully anything out of Shepherd. At least not right
then.

“Do you think this guy was killed by the
decapitation,” Shepherd asked, “or was he decapitated after he was
dead?”

“We don’t know yet.”

Shepherd tried to imagine what death by
decapitation must be like.

“Somebody must have seen something,” he said
after a moment. “There’s traffic up here all the time. You can’t
stop a car, pull out a dead body, and hang it off this bridge
without somebody seeing you.”

“Seeing and coming forward to tell the police
about it are different things. I’m not holding my breath waiting
for volunteers.”

Jello squatted down next to the corpse and
Shepherd heard his knees crack. “The phone was in his right trouser
pocket.”

“Anything else?”

“Some money in a plain gold clip. Not a lot.
Thai baht and US dollars. In the other pocket he had a
handkerchief. White. Unused. Nothing else.”

“No wallet?”

Jello shook his head.

“No ID of any kind?”

Jello even didn’t bother to respond.

“What did you find on the phone’s call
list?”

“Empty.”

“All his calls were deleted?”

“Not deleted. Empty. We checked the SIM. The
phone has never been used. There’s nothing on it but the note you
saw and those listings in the address book.”

“You can trace the numbers, can’t you?”

“They’re all prepaid SIMs. No registered
names. Other than you, of course.” Jello gave Shepherd a look.
“You’re all we’ve got, Jack.”

Shepherd didn’t much like the sound of
that

“My guess,” Jello went on, “is that he loaded
those numbers into a clean phone specifically to use while he was
here. Why would he have loaded your number if he didn’t intend to
call you?”

Shepherd ignored the question and asked one
of his own. “How do you know he was a visitor? Maybe he was
local.”

Jello shook his head. “We’ve traced the
phone. It was part of a batch shipped to Pakistan about a year
ago.”

“And the SIM card?”

“Registered in Dubai.”

Shepherd nodded his head slowly.

It
would
have to be Dubai, wouldn’t
it? Why couldn’t the frigging thing have been registered in
Cleveland?

“If I ask you why you were in Dubai, Jack,
would I get a straight answer?”

Shepherd shrugged, which was pretty much what
Jello expected him to do.

“Were you there when they tried to kill
General Kitnarok?”

“Yeah, I was there.”

“Anywhere close to him?”

“You could say that.”

“Then the guy CNN said was the assistant he
dragged to—”

“Right. That was me.”

Jello thought about that for a moment.

“Did General Kitnarok really save your life?”
he asked.

Shepherd shrugged again. When people asked
him questions about Charlie Kitnarok, that was generally his
gesture of choice.

“I didn’t think so,” Jello said. “I’m glad
you’re okay, but I’m not sure I feel the same way about that guy
you work for.”

Shepherd considered going into his usual song
and dance about the difference between working for someone and
having someone for a client. Under the circumstances it seemed like
a particularly petty distinction, so he just let it go.

Shepherd walked over to the railing and stood
there, looking off toward the horizon. In the rising half-light of
dawn, a long train of teak rice barges slipped silently underneath
the bridge and wallowed slowly downriver toward the Gulf of
Thailand. The air was heavy and breathless, the dim light cold and
mauve colored. He leaned there and looked down at the dark, greasy
surface of the Chao Phraya River trying to imagine a headless
corpse dangling just above it at the end of a rope. It was easier
than he expected.

Jello walked over and leaned on the railing
next to him.

“What’s going on here, Jack?”

“I’ve got no idea,” Shepherd said.
“None.”

“What would be your guess?”

“That it’s some kind of a message.”

“Got to be,” Jello said. “Why else would
anyone do something like this? Killing a guy is one thing. But
killing him
this
way? Then hanging his corpse off a bridge
in the middle of the city? Couldn’t be anything
but
a
message.”

“So who do you think the message is for?’

Jello said nothing. But he turned his head
and looked at Shepherd, his face completely empty.

“Yeah,” Shepherd nodded, “I was afraid that
was what you thought.”

“There’s one other thing, too.”

“Is this the part of the conversation when
you tell me ‘Don’t leave town’? Because unless you lock me up,
that’s exactly what I’m about to do. I’m going home today.”

“You have a home?”

“Yeah. In Hong Kong.”

“That’s home now?”

“I guess,” Shepherd shrugged. “At least for a
while.”

They stood quietly together there at the rail
for a while just watching the river.

“What time does your plane leave?” Jello
asked after a while.

“About ten,” Shepherd said. “This
morning.”

Jello nodded.

“Be on it,” he said.

In the east, out beyond the city, the day
began to break in earnest and a washed-out moon slipped into hiding
back behind the Oriental Hotel. A cold, white spot of light
appeared just on the eastern horizon and then spread slowly until
it became a broad grey band stretching from one side of the city to
the other. It looked thick and metallic, like the blunt edge of a
sword.