World of Trouble (9786167611136) (38 page)

“Sure I did. If they cut off your head, I
wanted to be the first to say ‘I told you so’.”

Shepherd didn’t think that was very funny so
he said nothing.

“Did you see her?” Keur asked.

Shepherd nodded.

“And?”

“I’m not the object of any manhunt after all.
Tommy gave Liz a phony story.”

“Figures. He’s trying to take you off the
board.”

“Yeah, but he has to know that won’t work for
very long. I was bound to find out what he was up to in a day or
two and get somebody to fix it.”

“So what? You knew that impound order on
their airplane wouldn’t work for more than a day or two either, but
you did it anyway.”

That was a good point, Shepherd knew. He had
gone after the impound order because buying a little time was
better than buying none at all. And with a little luck, a little
time would sometimes solve your problem. He wondered if Tommy was
thinking the same way. If he was, that meant that whatever Tommy
wanted him out of the way for was going to happen soon.

“Kate didn’t know Charlie was in the wind
either,” Shepherd said. “She thinks he may be here.”

“Here? You mean in Bangkok?”

“Not necessarily, but somewhere in
Thailand.”

“Kitnarok would only be in Thailand now if he
was sure the red shirts were going to win.”

“Maybe he
is
sure they’re going to
win. If Harvey is bringing in a load of weapons, the reds will sure
as hell have the yellows outgunned.”

“So what are you going to do now?” Keur
asked.

It was a hell of a good question.

“Kate’s got somebody watching Harvey, so
she’ll know when it takes off,” Shepherd said after a moment.
“Until it does, there’s no way to guess when it’s going to
land.”

“And there may not ever be a way to guess
where
.”

“Maybe not, but I don’t know what else we can
do. Not unless the US government wants to call in a missile
strike.”

“Unfortunately, Dick Cheney is no longer in
the loop.”

“So there you go,” Shepherd said. “We wait
and we watch.”

“And that’s it. That’s your plan?”

“Not entirely. The plane is going wherever
it’s going, but I figure maybe Charlie is already wherever that
is.”

“Not a bad thought.” Keur mulled over that
possibility. “Not bad at all.”

“So I’m going to keep trying to track him
down. Maybe, if we get lucky, we can roll everything up at once.
Charlie, the plane, the load of weapons. What do you think?”

“Works for me.”

“Okay, then pour me one of whatever you’re
having. I’ve got to make some calls.”

Shepherd took out his own cell phone and
tried Charlie’s two cell numbers again, but they were both still
going straight to voice mail. Then he called all the Dubai numbers
he had. Three numbers at the house, two at the office, and even the
number for the Kitnarok Foundation. No answer anywhere. All in all
he had made eight calls and reached exactly nobody. Not much of a
start.

Keur came back and handed Shepherd a glass
that, like his, was half full of clear liquid. Shepherd sipped
cautiously at it. Cold water. He made a mental note never again to
say to an FBI agent,
I’ll have what you’re having
.

Out of desperation he started thumbing
through the address book on his cell phone, looking for anybody who
might have any idea where Charlie might be. As he watched the names
flick by on the little screen, something began to scratch at the
outer edge of his consciousness. Was one of the names reminding him
of something that might help locate Charlie? The harder he stared
at those names and tried to decide what was hanging there just out
of reach, the more convinced he was there was
something
. He
just couldn’t bring it into focus. Eventually, he gave up thinking
about it and went back to trying to decide who to call.

Since it was almost 1:00
A.M.
in Bangkok, that made the problem a little more
complicated. No commercial number in Europe was likely to answer
since it was well past normal business hours there. He tried a few
numbers anyway. Two bankers, two accountants, and a lawyer, all of
whom did work for Charlie. Three of them were in London, one in
Paris, and one in Zurich. He knew it was ridiculous to hope that
any European might be in his office after 5:00
P.M.
, but he called the numbers anyway. Sure enough,
none of them answered. Shepherd had made thirteen calls and hadn’t
spoken a word to anyone. He was beginning to detect a pattern.

Shepherd went back to his address book and
almost immediately saw a listing he had missed the first time
around: Sally Kitnarok. He couldn’t remember why he had a number
for Charlie’s wife, but he crossed his fingers that it was a
private cell phone and dialed. After two rings somebody picked up,
then immediately cut the connection. When he dialed back, the
number went straight to voice mail. Somebody had shut the phone off
when his call came in. It was the kind of thing most people
automatically did when a cell phone they had forgotten to turn off
rang when they were asleep.

Shepherd looked at his watch again and did
the math. If Sally was in Europe or even the Middle East, it was
unlikely she would be asleep yet. But if she were in Thailand…

He didn’t want to jump to any conclusions.
Maybe Sally wasn’t even with Charlie, wherever he was. Maybe she
just didn’t want to be disturbed by a call right then. But if that
was the case, she would see his cell number when she looked at her
missed calls and call him back in an hour or so. If she didn’t call
back, then that would make it more likely she was in Thailand. And
that she didn’t want to talk to him.

It wasn’t much, Shepherd knew. It might not
be anything. But it was all he had after more than a dozen phone
calls.

His eyes drifted back to the address book and
he found himself looking at another name he had passed over before:
Tanit Chaiya, Charlie’s man at Bangkok Bank.

Then all at once Shepherd realized exactly
what had been scratching at him before. And he realized how he just
might be able to find Charlie after all.

Keur had been sitting silently on the other
couch, watching Shepherd make his phone calls. He stood up, stifled
a yawn, and stretched.

“Okay, now what?” he asked. “Got any other
ideas?”

“Yeah,” Shepherd said. “I sure do.”

***

WHEN CHARLIE INSISTED that Shepherd drop what he was
doing in Hong Kong and come straight back to Dubai, Shepherd had
been trying to find out what had happened to some of the money he
had wired out of Charlie’s Thai bank accounts.

The fact that a little money was missing
wasn’t all that alarming by itself. It wasn’t uncommon for
international wires to be misrouted, and only five or six million
dollars out of a total transfer of nearly six hundred million
dollars was unaccounted for. Five or six million dollars was a lot
of money when it represented a beach-front house in Maui with a
couple of mind-blowing cars in the garage and a steady flow of hot
women, but in the world of international capital flows of the
magnitude that Shepherd routinely dealt with for Charlie, it was
little more than spillage.

Shepherd hadn’t thought any more about that
missing money since he left Hong Kong. But now, sitting there
looking at the name of Tanit Chaiya in his address book, he started
thinking about it again.

Why had Charlie brushed him off when he said
he wanted to follow up and figure out what had happened to that
money? If Charlie wanted to launder some money, he had picked a
hell of an effective way to do it. He had even managed to hide it
from his personal laundry man.

Maybe part of Charlie’s plan all along had
been to make that six million dollars disappear when Shepherd moved
the rest of the Thai funds to safety. Maybe that was why Charlie
hadn’t wanted Shepherd to get too curious about what happened to
it. Maybe Charlie had a use for that money he didn’t want to tell
Shepherd about.

All at once Shepherd felt things starting to
come together. And, as it was when good ideas occurred to most
people, he wondered why it had taken him so long to think of
it.

If he could find out where that money had
gone, he would find Charlie, too. He would bet his last dollar they
were both in exactly the same place.

When Shepherd told Keur what he was thinking,
Keur looked unimpressed.

“Why would General Kitnarok do something like
that? He’d just be stealing from himself.”

“You’re missing the point. The idea was to
make the money untraceable. Charlie was creating a hidden slush
fund that nobody knew he had.”

“What does he need a slush fund for? He has
more money than God.”

Keur scratched at his neck and thought about
it some more.

“Wouldn’t it be easy enough to trace the
wires from General Kitnarok’s accounts, regardless of where they
ended up?” he asked.

“Yeah, it would. But if the missing money was
never wired in the first place, you wouldn’t find it, would
you?”

“I’m not following you.”

“If the six million was drawn in cash instead
of being wired, put in a couple of suitcases and moved to wherever
Charlie wanted it to go, there would be no way to trace it.”

“How would he get suitcases of cash out of
Thailand?”

“That would be difficult, so my guess is he
didn’t try. He must need the money here.”

“Six million dollars in cash? Here in
Thailand? What in God’s name for?”

“You really don’t understand how politics
works in Thailand, do you, Keur?”

“You’re saying Kitnarok needed the money to
bribe someone?”

“No, not for a bribe. Bribes are an ordinary
business expense here. They’re paid by check or wire transfer just
like other business expenses. Nobody even bothers to cover them
up.”

“Then what would he need cash for?”

“For the red shirts, Keur. Think about it.
Five hundred baht a day is the going rate for a demonstrator, a
little over fifteen dollars. Pay the going rate and you can turn
out as many people as you need. A hundred thousand people would
cost Charlie a million and a half dollars a day. With the six
million that went missing, he could fill Bangkok’s streets and shut
the city down for four days.”

“Then what? A few days of people in the
streets wouldn’t do him any good. He needs the whole country to
take a huge hit. That won’t do it.”

“It would if Harvey is full of AK-47s, rocket
launchers, plastic explosives, and grenades. And if those weapons
are distributed to a small group who move into the city under cover
of the demonstrators,” Shepherd said. “They fire at the troops
trying to contain the demonstration; the troops fire back; hundreds
if not thousands are killed on both sides; and there’s your civil
war.”

Keur took that in and chewed it over.

“You think General Kitnarok is really that
cynical?” he asked after a while.

“Maybe Charlie doesn’t know it’s going to
happen,” Shepherd said. “Maybe Charlie really does think he’s just
buying a political demonstration.”

“Then who’s pulling the strings?”

Shepherd said nothing.

“The CIA?”

Shepherd said nothing.

Keur smiled. Then he leaned back on the sofa
and laced his fingers together behind his head.

“Even if you’re right,” he said, “what
difference does it make? You have no way of finding out where that
money went.”

“Maybe I do,” Shepherd said. “But it’s the
middle of the night. No matter how much I might want to, I can’t do
it right now. I’ll tackle it first thing in the morning.”

“What are you going to do in the
morning?”

“Not just me, Keur. You, too. We’re going to
drop in on somebody unannounced.”

“Who?”

Shepherd waved the question aside.

“Be ready to go at eight,” he said. “And have
that cute little FBI badge of yours all polished up. You can be the
bad cop and I’ll be the good cop. That’s typecasting, I know, but
what the hell.”

Shepherd left Keur thinking about that, went
into his bedroom, and closed the door behind him. He barely managed
to get his clothes off before he dropped into bed and slid almost
immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep, the kind some people
call the sleep of the dead.

That was just an expression, of course, one
he had heard a hundred times before. But Shepherd’s last conscious
thought before sleep took him was that he really wished it were
called something else.

SHEPHERD AND KEUR were in a taxi on the way to
Bangkok Bank when Shepherd’s cell phone rang. He took it out and
answered it, but it kept ringing anyway.

“Not that one,” Keur prompted. “It’s the
Nokia.”

“Right,” Shepherd nodded. “I need more
coffee.”

He fished out the Nokia and pressed the
answer button.

“Jack, it’s Kate. Can you talk?”

Shepherd’s eyes flicked involuntarily to
Keur. They were trapped in traffic on Rajadamri Road right in front
of what was left of the Four Seasons Hotel. It would probably take
them another fifteen minutes or more to fight their way through the
gridlock and cover the remaining five hundred yards to the Bangkok
Bank Building. He didn’t see what choice he had.

“Go ahead.”

“Harvey left Dubai about forty minutes ago.
They filed a flight plan for Bangkok. It says they’re landing at
Don Mueang.”

Shepherd thought back to when they had stood
on the top floor of that parking garage and Kate had pointed out
Harvey parked outside what she said was a CIA facility at the old
Don Mueang airport. Would the Agency really ship a planeload of
arms into Bangkok and distribute them right out of their own
facility? That seemed wildly unlikely. Not even the Agency was that
arrogant.