World of Trouble (9786167611136) (20 page)

That was another thing that bothered Shepherd
about Keur’s sudden appearance that morning, however, something
that was probably more important than how Keur came to be in Hong
Kong Park in the first place. Keur’s whole pitch to him to spy on
Charlie for the FBI, or for Keur personally if his story about
being on medical leave was actually true, just didn’t ring right.
Unless Keur was a complete idiot, and Shepherd didn’t for a moment
think he was, he had to know that wasn’t going to happen. No lawyer
who wasn’t corrupt was going to turn informant on his own client.
So why had Keur allowed himself to appear stupid by asking in the
first place? He had even done it twice now, not just once. That
just didn’t make any sense.

Shepherd ducked into the Pacific Coffee
Company and grabbed a large coffee and a cinnamon roll. There was a
long counter across from the window that looked out into Hollywood
Road and he stood leaning on it, watching the traffic while he ate
the roll. There was at least one thing about Keur’s story that
did
add up, even if Shepherd didn’t much like the look of
the total he was getting.

Had somebody been trying to kill Charlie in
Dubai, or were they really gunning for him as Keur had claimed? As
outlandish as that possibility had sounded when Keur first laid it
out, the picture Shepherd had on his cell phone of Adnan’s severed
head with the eyeballs chewed out had given the whole proposition a
degree of credence it hadn’t had before. Somebody had gone after
one of the people who was closest to Charlie. Could that mean that
Keur was right after all? Could that mean that he might be next on
the list?

Of course, Shepherd told himself, the attack
in Dubai and Adnan’s murder in Bangkok might not be connected. It
might just be a simple coincidence that a headless Adnan had turned
up hanging under the Taksin Bridge a couple of days after those two
idiots jumped them in Dubai. Shepherd knew if he could convince
himself of that, he would feel a hell of a lot better.

But he couldn’t.

Shepherd finished his cinnamon roll and
dumped the wrapper in the trash. Then he took the rest of his
coffee with him and crossed the street to the little shophouse
where he had his office.

***

THE CONCRETE STAIRWELL was musty and dim and it
smelled faintly of cat urine. Shepherd climbed the two flights up
to his office. He booted up both computers and sipped at his
half-cold coffee until they were ready to use. He opened the
browser on one and connected to Bloomberg, where he set up a half
dozen windows to monitor that morning’s financial data. Then he
switched to the other computer and downloaded and printed copies of
all the new wire transfer notices that had arrived overnight and
checked the balances in the investment accounts.

He added the new wires to his running total
and saw immediately that all the incoming transfers in the last few
days added up to a little less than the full amount he had wired
out of Thailand, but he couldn’t immediately see how that could be.
He counted the wires from Bangkok Bank and the total number was
right, so he went back and compared the amounts of the wires one by
one with the amounts he had ordered transferred. Every wire was a
little short, shorter than they should have been just to cover the
payments he had authorized Woody Allen to make to get the transfers
approved by the Bank of Thailand.

For a couple of hours Shepherd ran trial
balances and checked and double-checked his figures, but no matter
how he worked the numbers he kept getting the same result. About
seven million dollars of the nearly six hundred million dollars he
had wired out of Thailand, give or take, hadn’t shown up in any of
the investment accounts. About one million of that was accounted
for by what he had agreed to pay the deputy governor of the Bank of
Thailand, but what happened to the other six million? Had Charlie’s
pet banker gotten sticky fingers?

When you’re dealing with over six hundred
million dollars, not being able to account for less than one per
cent of it wasn’t exactly a show-stopper, so Shepherd decided to
set the matter aside to sort out later, and he spent the rest of
the morning on the more pressing task of laying out a detailed
investment plan for the new funds. He wanted to talk to Charlie
before making any final commitments, but it was still a little
early to call him. Dubai was four hours behind Hong Kong, so
calling just after lunch would catch Charlie near the beginning of
his day. That was assuming Charlie was still in Dubai, of course.
If he was somewhere else, the hour might be less convenient, but
Shepherd figured that was Charlie’s problem, not his.

In addition to talking to Charlie about the
way he had decided to bed down his funds, Shepherd also want to ask
him what he knew about Adnan’s dramatic demise. Maybe he could even
find out what Adnan had been doing in Bangkok without having to ask
Charlie flat out. He knew it was really none of his business what
Adnan had been doing there, but under the circumstances, he told
himself, his interest was far more than idle curiosity.

A little after 1:00
P.M.
, he went down to Archie’s New York Deli in SoHo
and had a quick corned beef on rye with a couple of kosher dill
pickles and a Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda. That was one thing Shepherd
really loved about Hong Kong, the exotic Asian food. Then he went
back to the office and settled in behind his desk to call
Charlie.

As a rule, Shepherd generally called one of
Charlie’s office numbers when he needed to talk to him. He didn’t
much like calling people’s cell phones. He had seen too many men
answering phones with their mouths full or, worse, while standing
at a urinal, and he didn’t much care for the picture of Charlie
holding his phone with one hand and his penis with the other. But
it was early in Dubai, far too early to expect anyone to answer the
office lines, so Shepherd set his policy aside and dialed Charlie’s
private cell number.

The first time he called, the call went
straight to voice mail and he hung up without leaving a message.
Charlie never listened to his messages anyway so there was no point
in leaving one. Shepherd waited about ten minutes and called again.
This time Charlie answered almost immediately.

THE SMALL TALK lasted no more than a few seconds.
Small talk was something neither Charlie nor Shepherd did
particularly well.

“I need to tell you how I intend to invest
the funds I got out of Thailand,” Shepherd said, getting right to
the point.

Charlie didn’t say anything for a moment, and
Shepherd wondered if the six hundred million dollars he had bribed
a deputy governor of the Bangkok of Thailand to get out of the
country for Charlie had temporarily slipped his mind.

“Whatever you want to do is okay with me,”
Charlie finally said.

“Let me run over—”

“You’re not listening to me, Jack. Handle the
funds however you like. I don’t want the details.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely sure. Anything else?”

So Shepherd asked Charlie what he thought
about Adnan.

“The best assistant I ever had,” Charlie
answered. “Why are you asking me?”

“No, I meant what do you think about the
reason he was killed.”

There was a silence over the telephone so
complete that for moment Shepherd wondered if the connection had
been broken. Then all at once it occurred to him. Charlie had no
idea that Adnan was dead.

“I’m sorry,” Shepherd said. “That was stupid
of me. I just assumed you knew.”

“Tell me,” Charlie said.

Shepherd told Charlie what he knew and the
silence came again. Shepherd waited for Charlie to break it. It
seemed the right thing to do.

“You should get back here, Jack,” he said
when he finally he did.

Shepherd didn’t know what he had been
expecting Charlie to say, but it certainly wasn’t that.

“What do you mean?”

“Come back to Dubai until I find out what’s
going on. You may be in danger, too. You’ll be safe here.”

“I was just in Dubai, Charlie, and I clearly
remember two guys shooting at us one morning while we were walking
through the souk. That’s what you call safe?”

“Never mind about that. That wasn’t serious.
This may be.”

Shepherd could have told Charlie that hiding
behind a pile of bags while two guys pumped bullets at them seemed
pretty damned serious to him, but he didn’t bother.

“I’ve got work to do here,” he said instead.
“And nobody has tried to kill me in Hong Kong recently. I think
I’ll stay where I am.”

“That’s not a good idea, Jack. It would make
me feel a lot better for you to be in Dubai.”

“There’s some money missing from the wires,
Charlie. I need to find it before I even think about going
anywhere.”

“What wires?”

“The ones from Bangkok Bank.”

“How much is missing?” he asked.

“Somewhere around six million dollars, I
think. Net of gratuities.”

“Net of what?”

Shepherd tried it another way, without the
cleverness this time, which he figured was the way he probably
should have tried it in the first place.

“The wires were short by a total of about
seven million dollars in all. We paid a million or so to get the
money out of Thailand, so that leaves around six million dollars
unaccounted for.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m thinking your banker may have gotten
greedy and helped himself.”

“No, that didn’t happen.”

“Look, Charlie, whether you think it happened
or not, there’s still six million dollars—”

“Would you forget about the lousy six million
dollars, Jack, and get your ass back here to Dubai right now? Will
you just shut the fuck up and do that for me?”

Charlie wasn’t in Dubai for the food.
Shepherd understood that. He was there for the discretion, the
no-questions-asked anonymity, and the personal security for which
Dubai was well known. Money was money and business was business,
and they both mattered more in Dubai than politics. If there was a
better place on the planet for a billionaire politician on the lam
to go to ground, Shepherd didn’t know where it was. He just wasn’t
certain that the same reasoning applied to Mr.
Billionaire-Politician-On-The-Lam’s lawyer.

If somebody really
was
trying to pick
off the people around Charlie, Shepherd didn’t see how he would be
better off in Dubai than he was in Hong Kong. But Charlie was the
client so he pretty much went where Charlie asked him to go,
regardless of how good or bad the reasons for making the trip might
be. That was the way it worked. Lawyers kept their clients happy.
Not the other way around.

They wrangled on for a while after that,
although Shepherd’s heart really wasn’t in it. He didn’t want to go
back to Dubai, of course, but Charlie was absolutely insistent.
Shepherd knew it would be easier just to do it than try to talk him
out of the idea. After a bit of ritual back and forth, Shepherd
gave in and they agreed he would finish bedding down the new funds
and leave Hong Kong the next day. The matter of the missing six
million dollars was left to deal with some other time.

Buying and selling hundreds of millions of
dollars in bonds and currencies might sound romantic to a lot of
people, but mostly Shepherd suspected it sounded that way to people
who had never done it. The truth was that it was tedious and boring
work. He sent dozens of emails to banks and brokerage houses,
confirmed them all with faxes, and sorted out the mistakes that
were inevitably made. Then he did it all again. And again. He
always imagined people who worked in banks felt the same way about
what they did. After a while, all that money they handled stopped
being money and turned into nothing but piles of paper they had to
haul around. It wasn’t wealth, it was just another load of stuff
they had to hump.

The whole time Shepherd was busy humping his
load of stuff, he was turning everything that had happened over and
over in his mind. Tedium was very productive for some people he
knew, including himself. There were people who cut the grass while
they thought. Others who did the ironing. He even knew one guy who
claimed to get all his best ideas while vacuuming his swimming
pool. As for Shepherd, the tedium that really cut the mustard was
shuffling wire transfers and revising investment accounts.

Somewhere between checking the long euro
positions at Deutsche Bank and adding to the short-dated T-bills in
the HSBC accounts, an idea abruptly popped into Shepherd’s head.
Once it did, as was generally the case with almost all of his best
ideas, he was dumbfounded he hadn’t thought of it sooner.

***

SHEPHERD HADN’T TALKED to Tommy for nearly a year and
he didn’t really want to talk to Tommy now, but he knew that was
exactly what he had to do. Shepherd had known Tommy almost from the
day he had taken up residence in Bangkok to teach at Chulalongkorn
University. Tommy had made it his business to get to know Shepherd
back then because getting to know people like Shepherd was what
Tommy did for a living.

Tommy’s real name was Tommerat
something-or-another, but everyone Shepherd knew just called him
Tommy. In the face of all provocation, Tommy stuck doggedly to the
story that he was deputy spokesman for the Thai Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, but if there was anyone in Bangkok who didn’t know that
Tommy actually worked for the National Intelligence Agency,
Shepherd had never met them. The first time he had introduced Tommy
to Anita, she had been terribly amused at the idea that there was
such a thing as a Thai spy and she had tossed out a couple of
pretty snappy one-liners on the subject. Shepherd tried to explain
to her later that there was absolutely nothing amusing about Tommy,
and certainly nothing to laugh about, but he didn’t think Anita
really believed him.