World of Trouble (9786167611136) (18 page)

It felt a little cool to Shepherd there at
the bar, but he couldn’t decide if it really was cool or if he just
felt that way because he was waiting for a picture of a severed
head to show up in his email. Hong Kong was probably the most
over-air-conditioned city on earth so the sensation of being cold
on a sticky tropical night was anything but unusual.
Air-conditioning not having been invented until 1902, every saloon
in Hong Kong had been laboring single-mindedly ever since to make
up for lost time.

Shepherd laid his phone on the bar and
glanced around. At a table across the room, a middle-aged Chinese
couple sitting opposite each other were both talking on cell
phones, their drinks left untouched in front of them. Shepherd
doubted they were talking to each other, but maybe they were. In
Hong Kong, anything is possible.

The bartender placed a coaster in front of
Shepherd and carefully positioned a large martini glass on it. Even
in the dim light of the bar, he could see the rim of the glass
sparkling with a necklace of tiny ice crystals. The bartender
lifted a silver shaker in both hands and with a half dozen
economical snaps of his wrists blended the martini and strained it
into Shepherd’s glass.

Before Shepherd could take even a single sip,
a low-pitched buzz sounded from his phone and it vibrated against
the polished bar top. He glanced down and saw the numeral one
superimposed over the email icon. Had the picture from Jello
arrived, or was this just another junk mail promising to improve
his sex life? He reached for his martini first, just in case. He
took a long sip, paused a moment to savor it, then he picked up the
phone and opened the email. The message contained no text, only an
attachment, but it was from Jello so he had no doubt what it
was.

Shepherd put the phone down on the bar and
went back to his martini. It wasn’t just the prospect of looking at
a picture of a severed head that had spent several days on the
bottom of the Chao Phraya River that gave him pause, although under
most circumstances that would have been quite enough. What really
bothered him was that the head was quite probably going to belong
to someone he knew. Why would anyone have been carrying a cell
phone with his number programmed into it and notes about his travel
schedule if they weren’t planning to get in touch with him in
Bangkok? And what were the chances someone would have been planning
to contact him in Bangkok if he had no idea who they were?

Shepherd took his time finishing the martini,
but eventually he did. That was when he took a deep breath, picked
up his telephone, and tapped on the icon attached to Jello’s email.
There was a pause as the phone located whatever it needed to
display the file. Then the picture expanded quickly until it filled
the little screen.

The horror of the image was tempered somewhat
by the small size of the cell phone’s display, but there was still
more than enough horror to spare. The head was hardly recognizable
as something that had once sat on the shoulders of a living human
being. Both eyes had been torn out of their sockets, both cheeks
had been eaten away to the bone, and all of the flesh of the nose
was gone. Shepherd had no doubt he would see that picture in his
mind for the rest of his life. Then and there he vowed never again
to eat in another restaurant that served crab.

In spite of the mutilation, Shepherd
recognized the man immediately.

Oh crap.

What in God’s name had Adnan, Charlie’s
Lebanese assistant, been doing in Bangkok? And, probably more to
the immediate point, why had somebody cut off his head and hung the
rest of him under the Taksin Bridge?

***

SHEPHERD ORDERED ANOTHER martini, but he had pretty
much lost his appetite, so that was all he ordered. When he
finished the second martini, he left Jimmy’s and just aimlessly
wandered the streets for a while. More by accident than design, he
walked through Lan Kwai Fong, past the Central District Police
Station, and ended up on Hollywood Road at the foot of Ladder
Street just in front of the Man Mo Temple. There was a small park
across the road from the temple, not much more than some pieces of
brightly colored children’s playground equipment scattered over a
few dozen square yards of concrete with a few wooden benches here
and there. A night breeze had come up and the din of traffic from
Hollywood Road had faded away, so Shepherd took a seat on one of
the benches.

An elderly Chinese woman caught his eye as
she pushed through a crowd of Western tourists and entered the
temple across the road. She was stooped nearly in half and gripped
a bundle of incense sticks as though they were cylinders of gold.
He watched through the open doors as she lit the sticks and
distributed them methodically among the brass pots filled with sand
that were scattered throughout the building. When she was done, she
stood for a long time before the main alter, her hands pressed
together in front of her chest. She could have been praying for
health, or long life, or even world peace, Shepherd supposed, but
then this was Hong Kong. That made it far more likely she was
asking the gods for a couple of winners at Happy Valley.

Maybe he ought to go over and join her,
Shepherd thought. A little intervention from the gods wouldn’t do
him any harm right then either. Perhaps somebody really
was
stalking the people around Charlie. Perhaps he really
was
on
somebody’s target list.

Shepherd took out his cell phone and called
Jello in Bangkok. He told him whose head it was in the picture.

“What was this guy doing in Bangkok?” Jello
asked.

“I don’t know. I had no idea he was
there.”

“He wasn’t in Bangkok to see you?”

“No.”

“Then why was your number in his phone?”

“Charlie has my number. It’s no big secret.
Maybe he gave it to Adnan. How would I know?”

“You didn’t give it to him?”

“No, I didn’t give it to him.”

Jello weighed that up in silence for a moment
or two.

“If he wasn’t in Bangkok to see you, who else
could he have been meeting?”

“I don’t know. It could have been
anybody.”

“It wasn’t just anybody. It was somebody who
wanted to murder him.”

There was a short silence.

“I can’t help you,” Shepherd said. “I wish I
could, but I can’t.”

“Watch yourself,” Jello said. And then he
hung up.

Man Mo Temple at night is an intoxicating and
otherworldly spectacle. The intense reds and golds of the
building’s lacquer work glitter in the low light and the eyes of
the deities residing within it seem to examine those who come to
pay them tribute. Dozens of huge red coils of incense hang
suspended from its ceiling and, burning slowly, turning from solid
to gas, they author a mystical transubstantiation of everything
around them. Bright lights transform into little more than
shimmering colors drifting in the haze, and solid objects turn to
whirling smoke that disappears into the darkness.

Across the road, Shepherd sat silently for a
long time and watched the clouds of smoke and incense drift away
into the night sky. It looked to him as if the whole world were on
fire.

***

AT SIX O’CLOCK the next morning the Mid-levels were
as close to pleasant as they were ever likely to be. The narrow
sidewalks weren’t yet choked with pedestrians and the streets were
almost empty of vehicles. Using a lamp post for balance, Shepherd
did a few quick heel cord stretches. Then he touched his toes a
half dozen times to extend his hamstrings, wheeled his arms
impatiently, and began a slow jog west along the sidewalk.

Running isn’t a popular sport in Hong Kong.
The weather is lousy most of the time, the streets are unfriendly
all of the time, and the Chinese think the whole idea of
unnecessary physical exertion is absolutely laughable. About the
only people who run regularly in Hong Kong are Americans, and even
then only those Americans who don’t mind the Chinese thinking they
are completely mad. When Shepherd was in Hong Kong, he ran
regularly.

Shepherd wasn’t a big fan of running. He
often thought that if he could find a better way to avoid turning
into a living replica of a bowling ball he would be on it in a
flash, but starvation as a lifestyle was even less appealing to him
than running. What Shepherd did like about running was that it is
uncomplicated. He didn’t need anyone’s permission to do it. He
didn’t have to sit in traffic before he could do it. And he didn’t
have to make any advance arrangements to do it. When the mood took
him, he just pulled on shorts and a T-shirt, laced up his shoes,
and headed out the door. What he hated about running was everything
else.

It was not quite sunrise yet, but it was
already warm and the city was suffused with the deep grey
half-light of a heavy, humid dawn. The sky was indistinct, the
division between earth and sky uncertain, and the air was so thick
he could almost hear the moisture draining out of it.

Shepherd jogged along Caine Road, angled off
behind the abandoned hulk of Victoria Prison into Chancery Lane,
and emerged on Upper Albert Road in front of the Foreign
Correspondents Club. Then, turning south across the Botanical
Gardens, he made his way toward Hong Kong Park. Parks don’t make
any money, which is probably why Hong Kong doesn’t have many of
them. Hong Kong Park is the biggest public space in the central
business district, but it is only a single square kilometer that
was carved out of the site of the old Victoria Barracks when the
British abandoned it a half century or so back. Entering the park
from the north, he began circling it on the broad, smooth walkway
that marked its boundary.

Shepherd took it easy for the first loop, but
he gradually stepped up his pace and the sweat began to flow. A
handful of other runners shared the path with him, all Caucasians
of course, but he saw no one he recognized and was spared the
ritual of exchanging insincere good mornings with people who, like
him, were there precisely because they wanted to be alone with
their own thoughts for a while. He felt good that morning, although
he didn’t really see why he should. He had slept badly, the image
of Adnan’s mutilated head hovering all night in the darkness just
in front of his eyes, but by his second loop around the lake his
feet were flying, the perspiration was pouring off him in rivulets,
and his mind was as placid as a millpond.

The peaceful feeling lasted until he started
his third loop. That was when he spotted the man watching him. He
was seated on a green bench near a clump of banana trees and making
no effort to conceal himself.

Shepherd, of course, recognized him
immediately.

SPECIAL AGENT LEONARD Keur was alone. He was wearing
a dark blue golf shirt and khakis and sat with his legs casually
crossed. He was sipping from a large Starbucks cup. Shepherd tried
to remember if Keur had been sitting on that bench the first couple
of times he had run past the grove of banana trees. He didn’t think
so, but he wasn’t completely certain.

They made eye contact and Keur pointed with
his free hand to a brown paper bag on the bench next to him.
Shepherd slowed to a jog, turned off the path, and walked over.
Keur obviously wasn’t in Hong Kong Park at 6:30
A.M.
by coincidence.

“What are you doing here?”

“Have some coffee,” Keur said, picking up the
brown bag and holding it out to Shepherd. “Take a rest. Sit with me
for a while. Let’s talk.”

“I asked what you’re doing here.”

“It’s a nice morning. I’m enjoying this
lovely park. Go ahead and have some coffee. What can it hurt?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Sure, Jack. Everybody’s got choices. The
trick is to make good ones, don’t you think?”

Shepherd looked at Keur for a moment. Then he
pulled up his shirt, wiped the sweat off his face, and sat down.
Keur was still holding the bag out toward him, so he took it.
Inside was a large Starbucks cup with a white plastic lid on
it.

“How do you know how I like my coffee?” he
asked.

“I don’t. That’s a latte. You like lattes?
There ought to be some sugar in there somewhere if you want
it.”

Shepherd lifted the cup out and dropped the
bag on the bench. The cup was hot, which meant that Keur had bought
the coffee within the last few minutes.

Keur must have known he was running there in
the park when he bought the coffee, but how could that be? Did the
FBI have him under surveillance? That was awfully hard to believe.
Maybe Keur had only seen him in the park by coincidence and
then
had gone and bought the coffee. Who was he kidding?
That was even
harder
to believe.

Peeling the plastic lid off the Starbucks
cup, Shepherd took a sip. He had to admit it was pretty good
coffee, but it didn’t make him feel any better about finding Keur
waiting in the park for him.

“Okay, Keur, what are you doing in Hong
Kong?”

“I’m just doing my job, Jack.”

Shepherd sipped at the coffee and waited, but
Keur didn’t say anything else.

“There is no investigation,” Shepherd said
when he got tired of waiting.

Keur didn’t say anything. He just sat there,
expressionless, and waited for Shepherd to go on.

“There is no FBI investigation underway
involving either Robert Darling or Blossom Trading. I checked.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I asked Pete Logan. He says the FBI has no
interest in either Darling or Blossom Trading. You lied to me.”

Keur chuckled. “You think?”

“I just don’t understand why.”

Keur stifled a yawn and leaned back on the
bench, folding his arms in front of him. “Too bad about old Adnan,
huh?” he said. “Man, that’s got to be rough way to go. You figure
he was dead before they cut off his head, Jack? Or you think maybe
he saw it coming all the way?”