World of Trouble (9786167611136) (26 page)

One of the two men pushed back his chair and
started toward Shepherd.

Maybe Kate was wrong
,
Shepherd
thought. Maybe somebody whose motives weren’t yet entirely clear
actually
was
targeting Charlie’s advisers. With all the
secret facilities, anonymous airplanes, and clandestine arms
dealing swirling around, how could he have just accepted at face
value Kate’s assurances that nobody had any interest in him?

The man was only a half dozen steps away now,
and he was picking up speed.

But surely, even if he
was
being
targeted by somebody, they wouldn’t send people after him right
here in the middle of a Starbucks on a sunny morning in Dubai,
would they? And, even if they were willing to do that, how the hell
did they know where he was? Even
he
didn’t know where Keur
was taking him until they got there.

And then all at once it hit him.

How in God’s name could he have been so
stupid?
First Keur turns up out of nowhere, and then he takes
him here. Of course! It was Keur! Keur had been setting him up from
the beginning!

The man was almost on him. Shepherd half rose
from his chair and lifted his hands by reflex, although he had no
idea what he was going to do with them. This was obviously a
trained military man, someone who knew how to kill, and about the
only thing Shepherd could do with his hands was operate a laptop.
Somehow he doubted he would be able to email this guy to death.

He was still trying desperately to come up
with some kind of plan when the man gave him a peculiar look and
passed by. He approached two women sitting at a table a short
distance away and launched into what looked like a well practiced
chat-up routine. Shepherd sat back down feeling very foolish. He
glanced at Keur. Keur was watching him with a puzzled
expression.

“I thought I knew that guy,” Shepherd
said.

Keur looked skeptical, but he nodded
slowly.

“Okay,” Keur said after a moment or two of
silence, “If you don’t have any idea where the general went, you
don’t.”

Shepherd just nodded.

“I guess I really can’t blame him for going
to ground. It’s way too hot around here for him right now.”

“I thought you said those guys were really
gunning for me. So why would Charlie start worrying about the
attack now? Doesn’t he know I was the target?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Keur
asked.

“You said that those two gunmen who attacked
us in the souk—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Keur
waved a hand in dismissal. “Nobody gives a shit about that anymore,
not after what happened this morning.”

“What are you talking about? What happened
this morning?”

“The prime minister was shot. Haven’t you
heard?”

“The prime minister of Dubai was shot?”

Keur looked at Shepherd carefully trying to
decide whether or not he was kidding. “You really haven’t
heard?”

“Haven’t heard
what
, for Christ’s
sake?”

“Not the prime minster of Dubai,” Keur said,
“The prime minister of Thailand. Some guy with a long name.”

“Somchai Woramaneewongse?” Shepherd asked.
“Somebody shot Somchai Woramaneewongse?”

“Yeah, right,” Keur said. “Him.”

“Is he okay?”

“Not really. He’s dead.”

Shepherd just stared at Keur, trying to
process what he was hearing.

“There were two gunmen on motorcycles. They
ambushed his motorcade with automatic weapons early this morning.
On some road with a funny name. Suck-something.”

“Sukhumvit Road.”

“That’s it.” Keur nodded. “They used a
hijacked bus to block off the security car trailing the prime
minister. Then they shot up the car he was riding in. They killed
him, two security guys, and the driver.”

“Have the shooters been caught?”

“Both of them made a clean getaway.”

Shepherd was still struggling to get in front
of what Keur was telling him. “Are you saying you think Charlie was
responsible? That Charlie had the prime minister killed so he could
move back in and take power in Thailand?”

“No, I doubt that. But an awful lot of other
people are going to blame him. If I were General Kitnarok, I
wouldn’t be hanging around here like a sitting duck either, just in
case some of the folks on the other team get it into their heads to
deal out a little revenge. I’m sure that’s why he took off.”

If that was what happened, Charlie would have
called, or at least left a message about what was going on,
wouldn’t he? Shepherd took out his cell phone and checked for
messages, but the screen was dark. He must have forgotten to turn
the damned thing back on after getting off the airplane. Maybe that
was why he hadn’t heard from Charlie. Shepherd pushed the power
button and waited for the little beep that would tell him the phone
had logged onto a local network.

“Don’t bother,” Keur said. “I tried both his
cell numbers. The telephones are turned off.”

Shepherd’s phone beeped and he looked at the
screen again. Sure enough, no messages. He took a quick glance at
his email. Nothing from Charlie there either.

“How did you get Charlie’s private cell
numbers?” he asked Keur.

“Come on, Jack. Get real. I’m the fucking
FBI, remember?”

Shepherd put his phone down on the table and
wrapped his hands around his coffee cup. Six hours on an airplane
and he had stepped off it into a world entirely different from the
one he left. It was like science fiction.

“Thailand is going to fall apart,” Shepherd
said. “You can’t build a real country out of nothing but colored
t-shirts.”

Then he thought about it some more. Maybe he
was looking at everything backward.

“On the other hand, maybe this will work out
okay,” he said. “With Somchai dead, there’s nobody left now but
Charlie. Maybe the Thai people will carry Charlie back into office
on their shoulders and that will be that.”

“I don’t think so,” Keur said. “I hear the
government has already picked a new prime minister. They’re digging
in for a fight.”

Shepherd was bit surprised by that, he had to
admit. He didn’t think the existing government had anyone with
enough stature to take Somchai’s place. It seemed unlikely to him
that they would be able to come to an agreement on a new prime
minister without months of wrangling, not to mention hundreds of
palms being crossed with considerable sums of money.

“Are you serious? A new PM? Already?”

Keur nodded.

“Who is he?” Shepherd asked.

“It’s not a he,” Keur said. “It’s a
woman.”

If Shepherd had been surprised before, now he
was downright dumbfounded. The yellow team had chosen a
woman
as prime minister? No woman had
ever
been prime
minister of Thailand. In a nearly feudal society like Thailand,
women had little or no political power. In fact, the only woman he
had ever heard of who held a genuinely significant government
position in Thailand was—

Keur interrupted Shepherd’s reverie. “The new
prime minister used to be the director of the National Intelligence
Agency. Her name is—”

“Kate,” Shepherd said. “Her name is
Kate.”

“WHERE DO YOU want me to drop you off?” Keur asked
when they got back to the car.

Shepherd didn’t really know what to tell him.
He had come to Dubai to lay low with Charlie only because Charlie
had insisted on it. Charlie’s abrupt and mysterious departure had
not only rendered that idea quaintly naive, it had left Shepherd
homeless again. He could always check into a hotel, of course, but
what would be the point of that? With Charlie in the wind, there
was really no reason at all for him to be in Dubai.

So maybe he ought to just fly back home to
Hong Kong.
Okay,
he thought,
and do what after he got
there?
Shuffle papers while his client was on the run, perhaps
even somewhere plotting to start a civil war? Sit around drumming
his fingers while he waited for Charlie to call and tell him what
the hell was going on? Watch CNN wondering if Kate would be the
next Thai prime minister to be murdered?

Shepherd made a snap decision that didn’t
really commit him to anything, which he thought under the
circumstances was the best kind of snap decision to make.

“The airport, please,” he told Keur.

He could decide where he was going after they
got there.

***

SHEPHERD LOOKED IDLY through the window as Keur drove
out of Internet City and wound his way among dozens of medium-rise
office buildings that all looked more or less the same. The grass
was impossibly green and the artificial lakes were impossibly blue.
Everything looked as if it had been colored with food dye. And for
all Shepherd knew, it had. Eventually they emerged from the office
park onto a busy road and followed it until it joined a yet even
busier road. Then they followed that one too until they came to the
massive Sheikh Zayed Road. SZ Road was a concrete arrow that ran
dead straight through the desert for thirty miles all the way from
the middle of Dubai to the neighboring emirate of Abu Dhabi. Keur
eased into the heavy traffic and turned east toward the
airport.

Shepherd watched the utterly flat and
featureless landscape slide by. In less than a generation this
desolate wasteland of sand and scrub had sprouted hundreds of
soaring towers filled with offices and apartments, all connected
together by massive coils of freeways and a glittering monorail
system. At what must have been a staggering cost, vast stretches of
desert had been laced with water pipes and carpeted with thousands
of acres of deep, rich grass interspersed with full-grown trees
flown in and arranged into complete forests.

In spite of all that, there was an
unmistakable feeling of fragility to Dubai. Men could bring water
to the desert, pave it with concrete, and set down spires of glass
and steel that reached hundreds of stories into the heavens, but
they still had not figured out how to put down roots in a place
like this. Out beyond wherever they stopped building, there was
always the sand. The sand simply waited and bided its time. There
was too much of it, and it had been there too long. It would never
be defeated.

They sped on down SZ Road, the car’s tires
whirring hypnotically on the smooth concrete. Occasionally,
stretches of the roadway dipped below ground level and the wide
excavations through which it ran were lined on both sides with blue
and white tiles that had been formed into the shape of huge waves.
The whole effect was very much like driving at high speed through a
giant men’s room.

After a half an hour they crested the Al
Maktoum Bridge high over Dubai Creek and Shepherd saw the airport
off in the distance. By then, he had decided exactly what he was
going to do.

***

KEUR PULLED THE car to the curb outside the Emirates
Airways terminal.

“Where can I reach you?” Shepherd asked.

“Does that mean that you’re going to help
me?”

“It means that I might want to call you one
of these days.”

Keur looked at Shepherd, unsure of what that
meant, but he took only a moment to give up trying to decide. He
pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and scribbled
something on the back.

“Use this number,” he said.

Shepherd took the card, glanced at the number
written on it, and turned it over. A blue-and-gold seal was
embossed in the upper left-hand corner. Department of Justice,
Federal Bureau of Investigation, it said around the shield. Below
it was an address in Washington and a telephone number.

“What if I call this number in Washington
instead?”

“They’ll tell you I’m not there. They may
even tell you I’m on medical leave, but maybe not. I’m not really
sure what they’ll say. When I call myself I generally use the cell
number I gave you. You probably ought to do the same thing.”

Keur got out and opened the trunk. Shepherd
followed him around and retrieved his bag.

“Thanks for the ride.”

Keur nodded and tossed off a little
salute.

“Don’t be a stranger,” he said.

***

INSIDE THE TERMINAL, Shepherd strode straight to the
Emirates first class check-in desk… and then walked right past
it.

He found a staircase that led to the arrival
level of the airport, trotted down the steps, and went back
outside. In five minutes he was in a taxi on his way to the Dusit
Thani Hotel. If Keur or anyone else who had been following them had
parked and come inside to see where he was going, they would be out
of luck. And even if they eventually worked out that he hadn’t
gotten on an airplane at all, a Thai-owned hotel was probably the
last place in Dubai anyone would think to look for him.

The Dusit Thani had an executive suite
available. Shepherd took it for one night and paid cash. The girl
at the check in desk never batted an eye. If he had tried to pay
nine hundred dollars in cash for a hotel room in New York, Shepherd
figured the cops would probably have rushed in before he got his
wallet back in his pocket, slapped the cuffs on him, and charged
him with felony failure to use an American Express card. In Dubai,
tossing out a big pile of cash was about as sinister as wearing a
Rolex.

After the bellboy left, Shepherd went into
the bedroom, got undressed, and took a very long, very hot shower.
There were few conditions in life that couldn’t be improved with
either a hot shower or a drink and, since it wasn’t even 10:30
A.M.
yet, he chose the shower. Drying off
and dressing in a fresh shirt and jeans, he opened the drapes and
picked up his cell phone. He settled into a big upholstered chair
in front of the windows, swung his feet up on the coffee table, and
started dialing for dollars.