World of Trouble (9786167611136) (43 page)

“
WHOA, WHOA, WHOA!
” Shepherd shouted.

He jumped to his feet, his hands palms out in
the universal gesture of placation.

“What the
fuck
are you doing,
Keur?”

Charlie didn’t look frightened to Shepherd.
He didn’t even look all that surprised.

Keur slid his right hand under his shirt and
produced the black SIG-Sauer Shepherd had seen back at the
apartment in Bangkok. That was when he remembered he had also seen
the short-barreled silver revolver in Keur’s bag then, too. Keur
leveled the SIG at Shepherd without taking the revolver away from
Charlie’s head.

“Stay where you are, Jack. I’m not your
enemy. I’m just a working stiff doing his job.”

“You’ll never get away with killing me,”
Charlie said in a voice far calmer than Shepherd thought he could
have mustered under the circumstances.

“I’m not going to kill you, General. Jack is.
At least that’s the way it’s going to look.”

“That’s stupid, Keur. All I have to do is
tell them—”

“What makes you think I’m going to leave you
around to tell anyone anything, Jack?”

Shepherd was getting angry now and Keur’s
threat rolled off him without making any impact. This man had used
him to get to Charlie and now he was pointing guns at both of them.
He had such a self-satisfied look on his face that Shepherd would
have taken a bullet or two just to get close enough to smash the
bastard right in the nose.

“You’d kill two people just to cover all this
up?” Shepherd asked.

“Heck, we’d be willing to go a lot higher
than two,” Keur said. “I figure two is a bargain.”

“And then you think you’re just going to walk
out of here?”

“I know I am. I’m a federal agent engaged in
the performance of his duty. I have it on good authority that both
the Thai police and the FBI will clear me of any wrongdoing in
shooting you after you kill Charlie.”

“None of this will stand up.”

“It probably wouldn’t if anybody looked at it
too closely, but nobody is. You can count on that.”

Keur’s attention was entirely focused on
Shepherd now. He was enjoying explaining everything to him, telling
him exactly how he had brought them all to this moment and what was
going to happen next.

Charlie saw his chance. And he didn’t
hesitate.

Instead of trying to push away the gun Keur
had at his temple, Charlie did something much smarter. He dropped
straight down and drove the top of his head into Keur’s midsection.
Keur didn’t fire the revolver, realizing he had reacted too slowly
to get off an accurate shot. Instead, he swung the SIG that was in
his other hand like a hammer. It looped through a half circle and
the barrel slammed up into Charlie’s head. Shepherd heard the
crunch of bones breaking and saw blood spray.

He was no hero, but Shepherd knew their only
chance was for him to move right then and he did. Lunging forward
before Keur could lift the SIG again, Shepherd grabbed Keur’s left
wrist with one hand and his right wrist with the other. He pushed
Keur’s arms up and apart and tried to drive his knee into Keur’s
groin. But Charlie was in the way. He was on his hands and knees
between them, dripping blood from where Keur had clubbed him in the
face with the SIG.

They stayed exactly that way for several
seconds. Charlie on the floor at Keur’s feet; Shepherd holding
Keur’s wrists and trying to push them upward; Keur trying to pull
his arms down. They must have looked like three guys doing a Polish
folk dance.

But Shepherd knew the dance was almost over.
Keur was stronger than he was, and he could feel Keur slowly
gaining the upper hand. So instead of continuing to push against
Keur’s superior strength, Shepherd suddenly stepped back and
pulled.

Keur’s arms came down, his knees caught
Charlie’s back, and he lost his balance. Keur tumbled forward and
instinctively reached out with his right hand to break his fall.
His fingers opened and the SIG fell from his grasp.

Shepherd snatched the SIG up by the barrel
and swung the butt at Keur’s face. Keur jerked his head toward it
instead of away and Shepherd’s wrist hit his ear. The butt of the
gun caught nothing but the air.

Charlie was trying to get out of the way, but
he was pinned to the ground beneath Keur’s lower body. Shepherd
shuffled forward and tried to get his knees into Keur’s back.

And that was when everything really went
bad.

Shepherd was pushing Keur toward the floor
with his knees, but he slipped in Charlie’s blood and lost his
balance. That was the opening Keur needed. He rolled to one side
and jerked on Shepherd’s legs. Now all three of them were on the
floor.

Keur pounded Shepherd in the face with his
right fist. At the same time he extended his left arm, the one in
which he still held the little silver revolver, until the muzzle
was six inches away from Charlie’s head. He pulled the trigger
twice in quick succession, the double tap of the professional
hitman. The shots from the little gun were no louder than the sound
of a couple of books hitting the floor.

Charlie made a soft grunting sound, coughed,
and died.

Still holding the SIG by the barrel, Shepherd
clubbed with the butt toward Keur’s face. He heard the satisfying
crunch of bone and figured he had gotten lucky, but it didn’t seem
to faze Keur.

Shepherd could feel Keur’s weight coming off
him and he knew that Keur was rising up to turn the revolver on
him. He fumbled to reverse the SIG in his hand, but he almost
dropped it.

He didn’t drop it.

Somehow he got the SIG pointed in Keur’s
direction, curled his finger around the trigger, and tried to fire.
But the trigger pull took more force than he expected and his
finger, wet with Charlie’s blood, slipped off.

Shepherd heard two more sounds like books
dropping, but he felt nothing so he gathered that Keur had fired
again and missed. Somehow he got his finger back on the SIG’s
trigger and jerked desperately at it in exactly the way every gun
instructor tells people never to do.

The SIG was right next to Shepherd’s ear when
he started firing and the sound of the shots were thunderous. He
kept jerking the trigger until the slide locked open and he felt,
rather than heard, the dry click of the hammer hitting the firing
pin. He didn’t know how many shots he fired, but it must have been
enough. Keur fell back on top of him and Shepherd felt Keur’s body
jerking as the life poured out of it.

Shepherd dropped the empty SIG and pushed
Keur off him. The little silver revolver slipped from Keur’s
fingers and he grabbed it up.

***

IT WAS PROBABLY no more than a few seconds after that
before Mutt and Jeff crashed through the door with their guns
thrust out in front of them screaming at Shepherd in Thai. But to
Shepherd it felt like a couple of weeks.

He had pushed himself up to his knees by
then, and he was kneeling there, looking into Charlie’s face. He
would have checked his pulse, but there was no need. He had no
doubt Charlie was dead. No doubt at all.

“Put the gun down, Jack.”

It was a woman’s voice and it sounded very
far away. Shepherd could barely hear it at all over the roar of the
SIG still echoing in his ears. But the voice sounded familiar so he
twisted his head around to see who it was. Kate was standing in the
doorway. Shepherd just stared dumbly at her.

“Put the gun on the floor, Jack.”

He was tired, so tired he couldn’t keep his
eyes from closing. He opened his hand and the silver revolver slid
out of his fingers. Then he let his body go, too, and he settled
onto his stomach on Charlie’s Persian carpet. He thought right
after that he heard Kate’s voice saying something else, but he
couldn’t make out what it was.

Shepherd’s nose filled with the sugary,
cloying odor of blood and he felt consciousness slipping away. The
last thing he remembered was looking at Charlie’s magnificent
Persian carpet. He wondered why he had never noticed before what a
vivid shade of red it was.

“I’M SORRY, JACK,” Pete Logan said. “Really, I am.
But I have to place you under arrest.”

Pete had shown up in Shepherd’s hospital room
accompanied by an entire troop of elaborately uniformed Thais, some
of them police and some of them military. Shepherd’s room looked
like the backstage holding area for a rehearsal of the Metropolitan
Opera.

“Who are all these guys?” he asked.

“Fucked if I know,” Pete shrugged. “I think
they’re just here to get into the photographs.”

“There’re going to be photographs?”

“Nope, none.” Pete smiled, but only slightly.
“That’ll fix the little pricks.”

Shepherd had only woken a couple of hours
before and some guy he assumed was a doctor had told him that he
had two bullet wounds. A through-and-through in the lower abdomen
and a graze on his right shoulder. Keur had apparently placed the
two shots he got off more effectively than Shepherd had realized at
the time. He had heard that stress could so load people up with
adrenalin that they didn’t notice they’d been hit by a bullet
unless it did some kind of major damage. He had never really
believed that before, but he did now.

It was the second time Shepherd had been
shot, and the first time hadn’t been any fun either. Come to think
of it, the other time he had taken a bullet had been in Phuket,
too, hadn’t it?

Fucking Phuket.

Shepherd made a mental note to kick the crap
out of the next person who even mentioned Phuket to him again.

“The FBI is taking jurisdiction over you,”
Pete said. “We’re going to fly you up to Bangkok tomorrow. You’ll
be held at the embassy while we sort all this out. That’s
something.”

It was indeed something,
Shepherd
thought.
It was a lot.

He didn’t even want to think what might
happen to him in a Thai jail after being found next to Charlie’s
body holding the gun that killed him. Charlie had quite a few
friends and admirers, and not a few of them were in jail.

“How did you manage that?” Shepherd
asked.

“I didn’t do much. To tell you the truth, I
just answered the telephone. The Ministry of Justice called and
told me that they were turning you over to us.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I hear you’re pretty well connected. That
probably has something to do with it.”

Shepherd just nodded. Kate would have fixed
it, of course.

Pete began shooing the troop of Thais out of
the room. Since there weren’t any photographers around, they left
without a fuss. He closed the door behind them and then he pulled a
chair over next to Shepherd’s bed and sat down.

“Look, Jack, I’m really sorry, but I have to
play this straight. I’m going to have to put a couple of guys
outside your room tonight and you’ll be cuffed for the flight up to
Bangkok tomorrow.”

“Oh, come on, Pete. You don’t really think I
had anything—”

“You shot an FBI agent, Jack.”

“Keur’s dead?”

Pete nodded.

Shepherd didn’t ask about Charlie. He didn’t
have to. He would never forget looking into Charlie’s eyes just
before he lost consciousness. He already knew Charlie was dead,
too.

“Keur wasn’t an FBI agent,” Shepherd said.
“He was CIA.”

“That’s not true. You asked me to check out
Leonard Keur and I did, remember? Keur was an FBI agent attached to
the Washington field office. There’s no doubt about that.”

“Keur was CIA, Pete. The FBI stuff was just a
cover.”

“That sounds pretty wild to me, Jack. What
kind of meds are they feeding you in here?”

“Keur was a clean-up guy for the CIA. He used
me to keep him close to Charlie so he could kill him if he had
to.”

“Why would the CIA want to kill General
Kitnarok?”

“Charlie was their front man. The Agency was
running an operation to put him in control of Thailand, which would
put
them
in control of Thailand. The whole thing was coming
apart and they saw themselves going down with the ship. Getting rid
of Charlie was the best way to clean up everything. He had become
inconvenient.”

Pete looked away and rubbed at his eyes, but
he didn’t say anything.

“What happened to Harvey?” Shepherd asked
him.

“Who’s Harvey?”

“The plane.”

“What the fuck are you talking about,
Jack?”

“The 737 loaded with weapons that was landing
in Phuket. Kate called it Harvey. It was an Agency aircraft and we
think it was bringing a cargo of guns into Phuket to arm the red
shirts.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“Robert Darling was on it.”

“Robert Darling is in Paris. I have a
surveillance report on my desk. He’s been there for a while.”

“That’s impossible. I saw him a few days ago
in Dubai. He admitted to me Blossom Trading was a CIA front and
that they were flying a load of arms into Thailand for Charlie’s
people. Tommy was with him.”

“Tommy who?”

“Tommerat something-or-another. You know him,
don’t you? He tells everyone that he’s just a deputy spokesman for
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but he really works for NIA. He’s
somehow connected with the CIA, too.”

Pete looked at Shepherd and cleared his
throat. “I’m kind of tired, Jack,” he said. “Can we save all this
for later?”

“You don’t even care what’s really going on
here, do you, Pete?”

“My instructions are to place you under
arrest, then bring you back to Bangkok and secure you at the
embassy. And that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Instructions from who?”

Pete didn’t answer him, of course, but
Shepherd hadn’t really expected him to.

“Charlie died,” Shepherd said instead. “He
died because I didn’t do anything to save him.”