World of Trouble (9786167611136) (33 page)

“Neither do I, but judging on how you’ve
handled yourself so far, I’ll bet it’s going to be something that
kicks ass. I want to be there for that.”

“Then thanks,” Shepherd said. “I accept.”

“I’m your man, Jack. You can count on
me.”

Keur stuck out his hand and they shook.

***

KEUR DROPPED SHEPHERD at the Dusit Thani Hotel where
he showered and packed while Keur went off presumably to do the
same thing. An hour later, Shepherd took a cab to the airport and
just before nine he and Keur met again in front of the Thai Airways
check-in counter. Shepherd had already booked first class tickets
for both of them on the 10:40
P.M.
nonstop
to Bangkok, and he brushed off Keur’s offer to pay for his own
ticket. He had charged the tickets to the Kitnarok Foundation, so
what did he care?

Shepherd felt lousy to be back in an airport
again. As they walked to the first class lounge, he started
thinking about the amount of time he had spent in airports just in
the last week. Maybe he ought find a new way to earn a living.

Shepherd and Keur sat in the lounge until the
Bangkok flight was called. They were hungry and tired, too tired to
look for real food. They made do with some bags of pretzels and a
couple of Diet Cokes they scrounged out of the self-service bar. So
much for the glamour of international air travel.

Finally, boarding was announced and Shepherd
and Keur walked to the gate. They were calling for first class
passengers when they got there, so mercifully they walked straight
onto the airplane without having to hang around in the gate lounge.
Later, Shepherd worked out that the flight had probably taken off
right on schedule, but at the time he didn’t have a clue it had
taken off at all, let alone when. He was fast asleep before the
cabin door even closed.

WAKING UP ON an airplane was always a disorienting
experience for Shepherd. His muscles ached in strange and novel
ways, and the sounds, the smells, and the light all seemed
completely alien. He didn’t know how it would feel to suddenly
realize he was dead, of course, but his best guess was that it
would feel exactly like waking up on an airplane.

Shepherd brought his seat upright,
reconnected his brain to his lips, and glanced across the aisle at
Keur.

“How long before we land?”

Keur looked up from the book he was reading
and consulted his watch. “About an hour.”

“Don’t you sleep?”

“I drink, I eat, I read. But I stay awake
just in case the pilot needs my help.”

“Nervous flyer, huh?”

“Don’t we have anything more important to
talk about?”

Shepherd held up his hands, palms toward
Keur.

“Coffee first,” he said. “Lots and lots of
coffee. No conversation without coffee.”

Keur nodded and went back to reading his
book.

Shepherd searched around for the call button
and gave it a push without having much conviction it was actually
connected to anything. Much to his surprise, a lovely Thai woman
wearing a green and yellow silk sarong materialized almost
immediately in the aisle next to him. She had smooth brown skin, a
dazzling smile, and didn’t look a day over twenty, but with Thai
women he had long ago learned you could never really tell for sure.
He asked for water and black coffee, and she hit him again with
that smile and went off to get them.

He stumbled out of his seat to the bathroom
where he emptied his badly overloaded bladder, washed his hands,
threw some water in his face, and combed his hair. There was a
straw basket of toothbrushes on one side of the washbasin, so he
unwrapped one and gave his teeth a few quick swipes as well. Much
against the odds, he found he was feeling vaguely human again.

When Shepherd got back to his seat, he found
coffee and a glass of ice water waiting for him. The smiling vision
in the silk sarong had also covered his table with a starched white
cloth and set out a plate of exotic-looking fruit and a basket of
muffins. Suddenly he remembered how hungry he was and dug in. Three
cups of coffee, a half dozen glasses of ice water, two muffins, and
a plate of completely unidentifiable fruit later, he was finally
capable of coherent conversation.

“Why are you doing this, Keur?”

Keur put a bookmark at his place and closed
the book on his lap. “What do you mean?”

“It’s not your fight.”

“It’s not your fight either.”

“I know,” Shepherd nodded. “But I’ve got
nothing better to do.”

“So there’s your answer,” Keur shrugged.

“If Darling is working for the Agency, trying
to arrest him will be a waste of time for you. What would you
charge him with?”

“Maybe… being an asshole? That would be easy
enough to prove.”

“If we can get proof that Darling is directly
connected to these arms shipments, I think Pete Logan would move on
it. He’s one of the good guys.”

Keur bobbed his head, but he didn’t say
anything.

They sat in silence for a long while after
that. Shepherd still didn’t understand exactly why Keur cared so
much about taking Darling off the board. He knew what Keur had told
him, of course, but that hardly seemed enough to account for his
single-mindedness. Still, Shepherd could see that Keur didn’t
really understand what was driving him either. And he could hardly
blame Keur for that. He wasn’t absolutely sure either.

He had no dog in this fight and yet here he
was, about to jump directly between the two biggest dogs in
Thailand. On one side was a man he liked, even admired. A friend
who was tangled up in ways Shepherd didn’t yet understand with the
CIA and a cast of characters no one would want to invite to dinner.
On the other side was a woman who he probably should have fallen in
love with. But he had hesitated, and that had been that.

So what did he hope to accomplish now by
getting between Charlie and Kate? To become their mutual hero and
earn their eternal gratitude and respect?

That wasn’t likely to be the outcome, and he
knew it. The man who tries to stop a fight usually becomes the
enemy of both combatants. More often than not, he ended up being
blamed by both sides, and by everyone else, for the whole uproar.
Shepherd knew that full well. And yet here he was, his course still
set, no doubts in his mind.

So what the hell was he thinking?

He wanted to believe it was his sense of
righteousness, his dedication to justice that was driving him. But
maybe he was just kidding himself. Maybe all he was doing was
trying to prove he was still a big-time guy, that he still
mattered. Maybe he was just showing off for Charlie and Kate. Maybe
he was just trying to be one of them again.

Through the window Shepherd looked down at
Bangkok. Out there in the grey half-light of dawn, millions of
people were facing another day. They were hoping for the best,
fearing the worst, and doing what they could to survive and look
after the people they loved. Most of them deserved better than they
were getting. Certainly they deserved better than they would get if
Robert Darling and his pals had their way and pulled the whole
country down around them in a misguided effort to keep it from
falling under Chinese influence.

The golden spires of what seemed to be a
hundred temples gleamed as they reflected the first rays of the
rising sun.

———

Now I’m hiding in Honduras
I’m a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan.

—Warren Zevon
‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’

IN THE EARLY 1970s, the Thai government announced it
was building a new, technically advanced international airport for
Bangkok. They began purchasing land in the middle of what was
locally known as Cobra Swamp, an unpromising area of marshy terrain
about twenty miles southeast of the city, and said that
construction would begin shortly. However, the new Suvarnabhumi
International Airport was not completed for nearly thirty-five
years. It eventually opened in 2006.

During the more than three decades it took to
build the new airport, the Thais were anything but idle. On the
contrary, the project spewed money like a broken fire hydrant and
they exuberantly collected every last drop of it. The new airport
became a seemingly inexhaustible fount of bribery, extortion,
cronyism, nepotism, patronage, graft, and embezzlement. Entire
generations of political figures, government bureaucrats, military
officers, their families, and friends and acquaintances saw the new
airport as little more than a source of jewelry for their wives,
condos for their girlfriends, and Mercedes for themselves. That
Suvarnabhumi Airport ended up as a badly designed, poorly built,
thoroughly screwed up mess came as no surprise to anyone in
Thailand. Nor did anyone in Thailand seem to care all that
much.

As for Shepherd, this was one morning on
which he cared a great deal. It was barely 7:30
A.M.
He was cranky and sore from the six-hour flight
from Dubai, he really needed to pee, and there wasn’t a toilet
anywhere that he could see.

The nearly mile-long crowded walkways through
which he and Keur were forced to elbow their way in order to wedge
themselves into a hot, confused, and overcrowded immigration hall
reminded him why otherwise normal people became mass murders. He
found himself fondly thinking back to his last trip to Thailand
when Tommy had picked him up right next to the airplane in a
chauffeured Mercedes and they had driven directly off the airport
with no stops for any irritating nonsense like clearing immigration
and customs.

They were shuffling slowly forward in one of
the interminable lines snaking toward some immigration counters off
in the far distance when Keur gave Shepherd a nudge.

“How long do you think this is going to
take?” he asked.

“Long enough for me to figure out what we’re
going to do when we get out of this hell hole.”

“That long, huh?” Keur mumbled.

***

SHEPHERD AND KEUR took a taxi to the Grand Hotel.
They didn’t have reservations, but with the country on the verge of
civil war, hotels in Bangkok weren’t exactly overflowing and
Shepherd was sure Mr. Tang would have no trouble finding a couple
of rooms for them. He didn’t.

“I’ve got to get some sleep,” Keur said as
they dragged their luggage into the elevator and bumped slowly up
to the third floor. “I’m dying.”

“I think I’ll go out for a run,” Shepherd
said. “I need to clear my head.”

“You can’t possibly be serious.”

“I always run after a long flight. It gets me
going again.”

Keur just shook his head and they stood in
silence until the elevator doors opened.

“Besides,” Shepherd added as they got out,
“I’ve still got to figure out where we start looking for Charlie.
Running helps me think.”

“Then go by all means. I’ve been waiting to
hear the master plan ever since we left Dubai. You’ve promised one
more often than a politician promises to cut taxes, and produced it
exactly as often.”

Keur found his room, gave a little wave over
his shoulder, and closed the door behind him.

Shepherd’s room was down at the other end of
the corridor. He threw his bag on the bed, pulled out his running
gear, and changed. He glanced around and thought about the way
somebody had tossed his room the last time he had been at the
Grand, but this time there wasn’t anything for them to find other
than his dirty underwear. If they really wanted to look at that, it
was okay with him.

He did a few grudging stretches and quickly
got bored, so he shoved his key and his cell phone into his pockets
and headed out to try his luck on the streets of Bangkok.

***

THE NEIGHBORHOOD AROUND the Grand is made for
running. The streets are quiet and mostly empty of traffic. The
sidewalks are dappled with shade from the rows of big-leafed
eucalyptus trees that overhang them along both sides. The high
walls around crumbling villas capture the warm breezes redolent
with smells of charcoal cooking fires and fresh fish. The rest of
Bangkok is
not
made for running.

It was barely 10:00
A.M.
when Shepherd got to Silom Road, but it was
already choked with traffic. Waves of heat radiated from the
pavement and reflected off the trucks, buses, and taxicabs stalled
in the gridlock. He dodged a street vendor selling counterfeit DVDs
and a tout offering massages from beautiful young girls and settled
into a gentle lope along the sidewalk heading eastward toward
Lumpini Park.

Most of the shops along Silom were closed and
steel gates had been pulled down over their windows. Shepherd saw
no obvious evidence of damage anywhere. Apparently this area had
been spared bombings like those that had laid waste to the Hyatt
and the Four Seasons. Air conditioners hummed and dripped from high
overhead. He passed the Duke of Wellington, the only thing around
that looked like it was open, and took a shortcut through the
parking lot of the Dusit Thani Hotel. Security guards were stopping
every car entering the parking lot and checking identification.

Just as he hit the big intersection on Rama
IV Road, the traffic light went green and he crossed the road
without slowing and jogged through the big iron gates into Lumpini
Park. He turned onto a wide sidewalk and looked around. Everything
about the park seemed normal enough. No colored-shirted rioters, no
sounds of explosions, no tanks grinding into position to fire on
local landmarks. Just vendors here and there selling snacks and
cold drinks, a few people strolling the walkways, and one guy
napping on his back in the grass with a newspaper over his
face.