World of Trouble (9786167611136) (2 page)

“What for?”

General Chalerm ‘Charlie’ Kitnarok didn’t
answer. He just opened the rear door and got out, and his driver
and security man jumped out right behind him. Charlie bent back
down and beckoned. Shepherd was the only person left in the car, so
he sighed and got out, too.

Shepherd stretched and yawned and he damn
well took his time doing it. It was only mid-morning in Dubai but
he hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours on the overnight flight
from Hong Kong and he was dog-tired and grumpy. He rolled his
shoulders and looked around. They weren’t anywhere near Charlie’s
office. They were parked on Baniyas Road a little west of the St.
George Hotel, just outside the souk.

“CNN wants some local color for their piece,”
Charlie said as if he could see exactly what Shepherd was thinking.
“You and I are going to take a walk through the souk and let them
shoot a little film for background.”

Shepherd glanced at the white Jeep Cherokee
that had stopped right behind them. A cameraman and a soundman were
unloading their gear while they ignored a young female producer who
was barking instructions. The two men looked like world-weary old
hands who had earned their chops covering the Vietnam War. The
producer looked like she had graduated from Bryn Mawr the day
before and didn’t have any idea what the Vietnam War
was
.

“You think this is a bad idea, don’t you?”
Charlie asked.

“What?”

Charlie jerked his thumb at the CNN crew.

“It’s none of my business,” Shepherd said.
“I’m a lawyer, not a media consultant. I don’t give public
relations advice, I give legal advice.”

“Then give me legal advice.”

“Sure. My legal advice is that there’s
nothing illegal about letting CNN hang around with you to do a
story about an unimaginably wealthy former prime minister of
Thailand now living in splendid exile in Dubai and devoting his
life to helping the poor and wretched of this earth.”

“That’s what I thought,” Charlie said. “So
let’s take a little walk and get this over with.”

Charlie pressed his hand lightly against
Shepherd’s back, ushering him toward a murky passageway that led
into the souk.

***

DUBAI SHOWS THE world a face that is gaudy and
futuristic, but the souk is what Dubai is really about. Dark and
primeval, its twisting maze of alleyways is clogged with so many
burlap bags, cardboard boxes, and wooden crates that there is
seldom room enough for more than two people to walk abreast. The
pervasive gloom drains everything of color and renders the world in
murky shades of gray. Only the souk’s smells give it the illusion
of depth and dimension. The cloying sweetness of the air, the spicy
scents of cayenne and red pepper, the heady musk of wet burlap
bags, the sour odor of garbage baking on hot concrete, the rich
waft of bitter coffee, and the acrid aroma of strong tobacco smoked
by men you cannot see.

Shepherd hated the souk. Every time he
entered its cramped tangle of tiny passageways, some so narrow they
were more like cracks between buildings than places to walk, he
felt like a guy in a horror movie, the one who never figures out
the axe murderer is standing right behind him until it’s too late.
Shepherd was certain that a malevolent beast lived somewhere deep
inside the souk. The place made his skin crawl.

Charlie didn’t seem to feel any of that. He
strolled the souk as if he owned it, and maybe he did. He certainly
could afford it. According to Forbes, Charlie Kitnarok was the
world’s ninety-eighth richest man. And that was just counting the
stuff they knew about.

Shepherd was Charlie’s lawyer. He knew about
the other stuff.

At least he knew about a lot of the other
stuff. Maybe even
he
didn’t know about everything. Charlie
was a man who took pleasure in secrets and he had a great many of
them. Shepherd doubted there was anybody alive who knew all of the
things Charlie was involved in.

Possibly not even Charlie.

***

CHARLIE LED THE way with Shepherd walking next to
him. The CNN camera crew took up a position about thirty feet
behind them and the driver and the security man brought up the
rear. They entered the souk and the gloom closed in. Split and
pitted concrete walls rose up on both sides of them. Iron pipes and
black rubber electrical cables snaked haphazardly back and forth
over their heads and air conditioners buzzed and dripped from
somewhere above. Metal handcarts piled with bulging burlap sacks
and heavily taped brown cartons rattled past them in both
directions.

Fifty feet inside the souk the alleyway made
a sharp turn to the left and they passed a narrow shop with mounds
of car batteries piled head-high behind a stained and dusty window.
In front of the shop two men dressed in
dishdashas
, the long
white shirt-dress that is the preferred attire of locals in Dubai,
sat on upturned wooded boxes smoking cigarettes. Their dark eyes
tracked Charlie and Shepherd as the little procession passed.

“Where are we going, Charlie?”

“Nowhere. Just walking.”

It didn’t feel to Shepherd like they were
just walking. It felt more like they were going somewhere, but he
had no idea where. Still, Charlie was his client, his only client
if he were being completely honest, and no matter how tired he was
that was a boat Shepherd had absolutely no intention of rocking. So
he nodded and said nothing.

Charlie took a heavy-framed pair of
tortoiseshell sunglasses from his jacket pocket and slipped them
on. The lenses were so dark they were almost black. Shepherd
wondered why Charlie was putting on sunglasses when the light
around them was already so dim he felt like he was walking under
water.

A few minutes later they rounded a sharp
bend, slipped past a tall stack of odd smelling burlap bags, and
emerged into a rectangular courtyard. The courtyard didn’t have
much to recommend it as a destination, but something about it made
Shepherd wonder if it was the place they had been heading all
along.

It was about eighty feet long and twenty-five
feet wide with narrow shophouses walling off all four sides. There
was some kind of merchandise stacked in front of most of them.
Brightly colored spices sealed in clear plastic cylinders the size
of barrels; concrete packed in heavy red-and-blue striped paper
bags; hundreds of pairs of slippers arranged by color on aluminum
racks; wooden cases the size of refrigerators lettered in red
Korean characters; and tan cardboard cartoons tightly bound with
white plastic straps. The only exit was another narrow passageway
at the opposite end.

Two men brushed by them walking in the
direction from which they had just come. The first man was
Iranian-looking, clean-shaven and wearing a dark suit with a white
shirt buttoned at the neck. The other man wore a
dishdasha
and a blue Yankees baseball cap. Both men were talking on mobile
telephones and Shepherd wondered briefly if they were talking to
each other.

Charlie was a half step ahead of Shepherd,
walking just in front of his right shoulder. They were almost
exactly in the center of the rectangular space when Charlie turned
his head as if he was about to say something. Whatever he was going
to say, he never got the chance.

The shots came from behind them.

In the confined space of the courtyard, they
sounded like mortar fire.

SHEPHERD REACTED BY instinct. He pushed Charlie
behind two pallets piled high with burlap-wrapped bales and dived
on top of him. The bales were stacked about four feet high and
looked pretty solid. Shepherd had no idea what was in them, but he
hoped to hell whatever it was would stop bullets.

Shepherd scrambled to his knees and took a
quick glance over the bales.

The Iranian-looking man who had brushed past
them was standing in front of an open-fronted shop with a sign in
English over the door: SALEM ALI BAKERY. He was holding a .45 in
his left hand with his right hand wrapped over the bottom of the
grip. His feet were planted a shoulder-width apart, his knees bent,
and his shoulders back. He looked like a model demonstrating the
Weaver stance for a handgunner’s manual.

“What the fuck you doing, Jack?” Charlie
bellowed.

The gunman shifted the muzzle toward the
sound of Charlie’s voice and fired twice. Shepherd ducked back
unharmed, but he didn’t hear the shots thumping into the bags or
ricocheting off the concrete behind them and he wondered about that
for a moment.

That guy must be the world’s worst
shot,
he thought. But even lousy shots get lucky, so Shepherd
stayed as low as he could.

“Any more questions, Charlie?”

“Yeah. Why would anyone want to kill
you
, Jack?”

“Very fucking funny.”

Shepherd glanced over his shoulder. They were
near the center of the courtyard and there was very little behind
them but a narrow walkway disappearing into the gloom between a
mobile phone dealer and a warehouse.

“What’s going on here, Charlie?”

“How should I know?”

“Somebody’s trying to kill you and you have
no idea
why
? What are you into that I don’t know about?”

“Nothing, Jack. Nothing at all.”

Bullshit
, Shepherd thought.

Charlie may have once been a military man,
but the Thai army didn’t do much fighting so Shepherd doubted
Charlie was any more comfortable under fire than he was. Still,
Charlie looked calm enough to him. More annoyed than frightened
really.

What the hell is happening here?
Shepherd asked himself.
And why isn’t Charlie more disturbed
about it?

Shepherd took another glance over the bales
and this time he didn’t draw fire. The Iranian-looking gunman’s
full attention had shifted to the opposite end of the courtyard
where Charlie’s driver and security man had suddenly appeared with
the CNN crew right behind them. It looked to Shepherd like they
were all about to be famous, although whether their fame would be
posthumous was still an open question.

The security man didn’t hesitate. His weapon
was out in front of him in a two-handed grip and he charged
straight at the shooter, firing as he ran. The driver pulled a
handgun, too, and slid to his left, blasting away. The gunman took
two steps back, firing at first one man then the other as he
retreated. Then all at once he dropped straight down like a puppet
whose strings had been cut.

The security man took a few more strides,
kicked the gunman’s gun out of his hand, and dived behind a pile of
cardboard cartons. Across the courtyard, the driver flattened
himself against the wooden crates with the Korean writing.

For a moment, everything stopped.

No more than twenty feet beyond where the
gunman sprawled in the courtyard, the CNN cameraman had his camera
up and his eye pressed to the viewfinder. All Shepherd could see of
the man behind the camera was a blue baseball cap with CNN in red
letters above the bill, a denim jacket, wrinkled blue jeans, and a
pair of blue-and-white athletic shoes. The soundman was just to the
cameraman’s right, arms straight out in front of him, a black
microphone dangling from a short aluminum pole gripped in both
hands. Slightly behind the cameraman and to his left, hovered the
producer. She was wearing a khaki safari jacket and khaki pants
tucked into the tops of brown work boots. She had short blond hair,
a rosy complexion, and eyes the color of jade.

As Shepherd watched, the woman sank slowly to
her knees and pressed her hands together in front of her face. She
looked as if she was so emotionally overcome by the sight of a man
shot to death right in front of her that she had been moved to
prayer. Then Shepherd spotted the dark stain on the woman’s safari
jacket, right in the center of her chest.

She tilted her head down and examined the
stain. Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.
Gradually she slumped forward, twisted slightly to her right, and
laid her cheek gently against the dirty concrete of the courtyard.
A bubble of red formed on her lips, popped, and slid onto the
ground. She didn’t move again.

SHEPHERD GOT HIS feet underneath him and grabbed
Charlie by the arm.

“What are you doing?” Charlie asked.

“We’re getting the hell out of here!”

“Just stay put, Jack.”

“We don’t know how many gunmen there are,
Charlie. They may be others, and they may have automatic weapons or
even grenades. Your guys don’t have anything but handguns.”

“You think too much.” Charlie got his own
feet under him and started to stand up. “Just stay where you are
and—”

A fresh volley of shots cut Charlie off.
Shepherd grabbed him and jerked him back down, but Charlie’s feet
slid out from under him and he went head first into the bales.
Shepherd heard the hollow sound of Charlie’s head bouncing off the
wooden pallet. His sunglasses flew off and caromed away across the
courtyard. Charlie sat up grunting in pain and lifted both hands to
his face. A thick line of blood appeared across his forehead.

It was the blood that made up Shepherd’s
mind.

Dragging Charlie behind him, he duck-walked
behind the bales until they made it to the nearest shophouse.
Inside was a single, large room filled almost to the ceiling with
more burlap-wrapped bales just like the ones outside. Shepherd
pulled Charlie toward the back.

There was a door. He grabbed the handle.

Locked, damn it.

Shepherd pushed hard on the door with his
free hand. It gave slightly but didn’t open. He stepped back,
lifted his foot, and slammed it into the wood beside the lock. The
door popped open as smoothly as if he had opened it with a key.
Shepherd gave Charlie a quick glance. He seemed dazed and the
bleeding had gotten worse. Keeping a tight grip on his arm,
Shepherd pulled him into the alley behind the shophouse. He had no
idea where they were going, but he had to keep them moving.