World of Trouble (9786167611136) (7 page)

He entered the mall through an entrance
called the Waterfall, which actually
was
a waterfall, and
rode an escalator that rose hundreds of feet behind the tumbling
water. He strolled past Bloomingdales, Banana Republic, Armani,
Fendi, Ralph Lauren, Jimmy Choo, and even a Dean & Deluca
market. Anyone who doubts the power of globalization has never been
to a shopping mall in Dubai.

***

THE MAN PICKED Shepherd when the hotel car turned
onto the main road at Palm Jumeirah. He stayed well back as
Shepherd’s car headed north on Sheikh Zayed Road, but easily kept
it in sight.

The man didn’t think Shepherd would be
expecting surveillance. He was certain the possibility of it had
never even crossed Shepherd’s mind, but he didn’t want to take any
chances. It was almost time to move, he might even move today, but
if Shepherd suspected he was being watched he would have to back
off. And he didn’t want to back off.

It surprised the man when the car dropped
Shepherd at the Dubai Mall, and he was not a man who liked
surprises. He had assumed Shepherd was going back to his hotel. So
what the hell was he doing at a shopping mall? Was he meeting
someone there? That might prove to be a problem. Fortunately, there
was a valet parking station at the entrance where Shepherd got out
of the hotel car, so the man dumped his own car with the valet and
followed Shepherd inside.

***

SHEPHERD TOOK AN escalator to the mall’s next level
and walked until he spotted the familiar red and yellow sign.

FAT BURGER
The Last Great Hamburger Stand

When Shepherd had stumbled upon the place for
the first time he could hardly believe it. A Fat Burger in Dubai?
He hadn’t had a Fat Burger since the last time he was in L.A. That
was several years back, but he had never waivered in his conviction
that Fat Burgers were the greatest hamburgers ever sold anywhere.
The name was pretty unappetizing, of course—downright disgusting if
he were to be completely honest about it—but he could live with
almost anything they wanted to call themselves since the burgers
tasted so good.

Shepherd went in and looked around. The place
was absolutely identical to the Fat Burgers in LA and was about
half filled with a mix of locals and tourists. He was damn near
starving to death by then, so he ordered a double Fat Burger,
fries, and a Coke from the cheerful Filipino girl behind the
counter and sat down to wait for it.

***

THE MAN WAS a Caucasian dressed in khaki trousers and
a plain white, short-sleeved shirt. Neither tall nor short, neither
heavy nor skinny, neither young nor old, he looked ordinary in
every respect. His appearance was completely forgettable, which was
why he was so good at surveillance.

At first he was afraid he might have been
spotted and Shepherd was about to launch himself on a cleaning
route. A shopping mall was a textbook location for it. But soon it
became obvious that Shepherd wasn’t doing anything of the sort. He
had no idea anyone was on him. The man could have been driving a
float from the Rose Parade and Shepherd wouldn’t have spotted
him.

The crowds were thinner in the part of the
mall where Shepherd was walking now and the man started thinking
about making his move. Somewhere public was good, of course, but
not
too
public. He was just wondering if this might not be
the best chance he was likely to get when Shepherd suddenly started
walking very fast and darted into a storefront about thirty yards
ahead.

For a moment the man panicked. Shepherd must
have spotted him after all and had just been lulling him into a
sense of false confidence. Now Shepherd was moving and he had been
caught flat-footed. Walking as fast as he dared without calling
attention to himself, he headed for the same storefront into which
Shepherd had vanished. He glanced at the sign as he got closer.
Fat Burger.
What the hell was
that
?

When the man walked in, he almost fell over
Shepherd. He was sitting on a molded yellow plastic chair at a
small black Formica table. His back was to the door and he was
watching the opposite end of the room where half a dozen
red-and-yellow uniformed girls worked behind a counter.

The man suddenly understood he hadn’t been
spotted at all. This was some kind of fast food place and Shepherd
had just gone in to eat. He kept walking toward the counter and
ordered a Coke. He paid for it, turned around as if he were looking
for something, and glanced in Shepherd’s direction. One of the
red-and-yellow uniformed girls had just delivered his order to him
on a red plastic tray and Shepherd was so involved in digging into
it that he wasn’t paying the slightest attention to anything
else.

The man went to a table by the wall and took
a chair that faced in Shepherd’s direction. He sipped at his Coke
and watched for a while. There was no one else seated in the area
around Shepherd and he appeared totally absorbed in his food. After
watching for five minutes, the man decided this was the best chance
he was going to get. He knocked back the rest of his Coke, stood
up, and walked toward Shepherd.

***

SHEPHERD FELT RATHER than saw the man approaching. He
didn’t look up. He still had a few bites of his Fat Burger left and
they were far more interesting to him than some guy walking by his
table. But the man didn’t walk by his table. He stopped, stood
right next to it, and cleared his throat.

“How did a guy like you end up working for
somebody like General Kitnarok?” the man asked.

Now Shepherd looked up. He wasn’t sure he had
heard right.

“A man like you, Mr. Shepherd? With your
background and reputation? How did you get mixed up with General
Kitnarok?”

The guy was a middle-aged Caucasian with a
completely forgettable face. Shepherd was certain he had never seen
him before.

“No, Mr. Shepherd,” the man said as if he
were reading his mind. “We’ve never met.”

Shepherd picked up a paper napkin, folded it
over once, and wiped his mouth. Then he just sat and looked at the
guy and waited to see what was coming next.

“I’m Special Agent Leonard Keur of the
FBI.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Do I look like somebody who’s kidding?”

“Can I see some ID?”

The man took a dark brown leather folder out
of his right rear trouser pocket. The folder looked beaten up, like
it had a lot of mileage on it. Without being invited, he sat down
in the plastic chair across from Shepherd and laid the folder on
the table between them. He slid his forefinger inside and flipped
it open.

Clipped to one side of the folder was a gold
badge that said Department of Justice at the top and Federal Bureau
of Investigation at the bottom. On the other side was an
identification card with the FBI seal and FBI printed in big blue
letters. Shepherd bent forward and looked at the card. He popped
the last bite of his Fat Burger in his mouth and chewed
thoughtfully while he examined it.

The card said the bearer’s name was Leonard
Keur. Shepherd looked up and compared the face sitting across from
him with the color photograph laminated to the card. It was the
same guy. No doubt about it. The ID looked genuine enough, too, but
since Shepherd had no idea what genuine FBI identification looked
like, his opinion in the matter was probably of limited value.

“What is this about?” he asked.

“How long has General Kitnarok been your
client?”

“I don’t talk about my clients.”

“Clients? Should that be
client
? Isn’t
General Kitnarok your only client, Jack?”

In Shepherd’s experience, when cops went from
calling him Mr. Shepherd to calling him Jack, it never meant
anything good. So he wiped his mouth again, pushed his tray away,
and awaited developments.

“What is your personal relationship with
General Kitnarok?”

“Good.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what
did
you mean?”

“Is the general just a client or do you
consider him a friend?”

“Who are you really?”

Keur was starting to look annoyed, which
Shepherd rather liked.

“I showed you my identification,” he
snapped.

“Maybe you bought that badge on the
internet.”

“Call Washington if you have any doubts. Call
the field office there. Or call the Director for all I care.” The
man pulled a Blackberry out of a front trouser pocket and laid it
on the table. “There you go. Knock yourself out.”

Shepherd didn’t pick it up.

“Who is Pete Logan and what does he look
like?” he asked instead.

“Pete is the legat in Bangkok,” Keur replied
without hesitation. “He’s about five foot nine, forty-five years
old, has a clean-shaved head, and drinks more scotch than he
should. By the way, he speaks very highly of you.”

Legat is State Department slang for the
resident FBI agent in an American embassy abroad. It’s a
contraction of the title Legal Attaché, abbreviations and acronyms
being much beloved by government types. Pete Logan was the agent
posted at the American embassy in Bangkok and Shepherd had hung
around with him a little during his ill-fated tour there teaching
business at Chulalongkorn University. If this guy knew Logan well
to describe him that way, he was probably for real.

“Okay, let’s say for the sake of argument I’m
convinced you’re actually an FBI agent named Leonard Keur. What do
you want?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“About what?”

Keur stood up. “Let’s take a walk.”

“I don’t want to take a walk.”

“Yes, you do, Jack. You want to take a walk,
and you want to take a walk with me.”

Shepherd sat looking at Keur and thought
about how to play this. His first instinct was to be a hard ass,
but then that was
always
his first instinct and he knew that
sometimes it really wasn’t the best way to go.

“Just one thing,” Keur said.

“Yeah? What’s that?”

Keur reached down, plucked an unused napkin
off Shepherd’s tray, and handed to him.

“Wipe your mouth. You’ve got mustard on your
top lip.”

THEY RODE THE escalator up two levels in silence and
strolled down a wide corridor lined with women’s clothing stores.
They passed Guess, Shanghai Tang, Miss Selfridge, and something
with the unlikely and, Shepherd thought, remarkably unattractive
name of S*uce. They got all the way to Bloomingdales before Keur
spoke again.

“You going to answer my question, Jack?”

“I didn’t hear a question.”

“The one I asked you back in the burger
place. Why is a man like you working for General Kitnarok?”

“I don’t work for him. He’s my client.”

“You have a client or you work for the guy.
It’s a distinction without a difference.”

“A distinction without a difference? That’s a
familiar phrase. Where did you go to law school, Agent Keur?”

“I went to Fordham.”

“Why? Couldn’t you get into Yale?”

It was a snide thing to say and Shepherd felt
lousy almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He was
letting Keur get under his skin.

They passed through an enormous round atrium
that rose in gold-trimmed tiers to a glass dome. Through it
Shepherd could see a cloudless, cobalt-blue sky.

“What do you want from me, Keur?”

“Look, Jack, we need your help. There’s an
investigation underway on which we want your advice.”

“Are you serious? The Bureau wants to hire
me?”

“Not exactly hire. We can’t pay you.”

“That doesn’t make you a very attractive
client.”

“We thought you might be willing to help us
anyway. Money’s not everything. There could be other rewards.”

“Such as what?”

“Having the FBI owe you a favor is pretty
valuable, don’t you think?”

Shepherd wasn’t so sure about that, but he
was curious where this was going so he tried to look impressed
anyway. It wasn’t easy.

“What are you investigating?” he asked.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“So you want my help investigating something,
you don’t want to pay me for my help, and you won’t tell me what
you’re investigating. Do you guys ever stop and think how stupid
you sound sometimes?”

“Look, Jack, we need to know what’s going on
in General Kitnarok’s inner circle. We need to understand who the
players are and how they relate to each other. We thought you might
be in a good position to give us some guidance on that kind of
thing.”

“Why do you need to know that?”

“I’ve already told you too much.”

“You told me exactly nothing.”

“I’ve gone as far as I can go. Can you help
me?”

“Look, Agent Keur, in my line of work you
don’t talk to people about your clients, not unless the subpoena is
nicely typed and has your name spelled right. And most of the time
not even then.”

“We’re not asking you for anything
confidential, Counselor, just some general observations about how
General Kitnarok’s inner circle works.”

“I don’t know how Charlie’s inner circle
works. I couldn’t help you even if I wanted to. I live in Hong
Kong. I mostly deal with Charlie by telephone and email. I hardly
ever see him. I don’t know who he talks to or about what.”

“Then how about this? From now on, find a way
to watch the comings and going of the people around General
Kitnarok for me. Just keep me in the picture as to who’s got his
ear, that sort of thing.”

They walked on in silence until Shepherd
realized they had reached the colossal aquarium that was the
centerpiece of the mall. It held, so the mall claimed, five hundred
sharks. They stopped and watched a huge school of fish swim by
right at eye level. There looked to be hundreds of them, their red
and gold bands shimmering as if they were wrapped in Christmas
foil. Immediately behind the school of fish came three big sharks,
swimming very slowly with such economy of motion that tiny motors
might have been propelling them. The sharks’ swam with their mouths
half open as they shadowed the red and gold fish and the
sharp-pointed triangular teeth lining their jagged jaws were
clearly visible. The message was so clear that Shepherd wondered if
Keur had been leading him there all along.