World of Trouble (9786167611136) (9 page)

Near the place where the CNN cameraman must
have stood, several dozen long bolts of dark-colored cloth were
propped on end against the wall and six or eight small metal chairs
with black vinyl seats were pushed into a tight clump. They were
the kind of chairs people used to call stenographers’ chairs back
when there were still such things as stenographers. A man dressed
in a white
dishdasha
and wearing a red and white checked
ghutra
wrapped around his head was sitting quietly in one of
the chairs at the front of the clump. Shepherd couldn’t see the
man’s face clearly at that distance, but he was old and weathered
and his jaw was working as if he were chewing something.

This did not look like the place where a
political assassination attempt had occurred only twenty-four hours
earlier, a place where two men and a woman had died.

And yet, it was.

Shepherd walked over to the building through
which he and Charlie had escaped. A metal shutter was pulled down
over the front window and the door was locked. He ran his eyes
slowly over the pitted concrete surface of the building’s facade,
but saw no signs of bullet marks. The shots the gunman fired in
their direction must have gone into the bales, and someone had
taken the bales away.

He turned and walked slowly toward the old
man sitting in the stenographer’s chair. The surface of the
courtyard was paved with concrete stones mortared into neat rows,
and his eyes scanned back and forth over them as he walked. He saw
no shell casings, but no doubt those would have all been picked up
by now anyway. He saw no bloodstains either, and yet three people
had bled to death right here.

When he reached the place where the old man
was, he rolled out one of the stenographer’s chairs and sat down.
The man remained silent, not even turning his head. If he cared one
way or another that Shepherd was there, he gave no sign. Looking up
the courtyard, Shepherd saw he was viewing the area at roughly the
same angle from which the CNN cameraman had been filming. The
perspective was right. The facades of the buildings were right.
Only the goods stored in front of the buildings were different.

Still, there was no sign at all this was a
crime scene or that an investigation had been conducted here. No
tape, no chalk marks, no litter. Something else felt wrong, too,
but it took him a few minutes before it finally occurred to him
what it was. The whole courtyard was unnaturally clean, certainly
far cleaner than any other part of the souk he had seen. Were the
Dubai police that efficient? Had they swept down in force, measured
and photographed everything, and then scrubbed and cleaned the
whole scene, all in less than twenty-four hours? He supposed it was
possible. Obviously more than possible since that was exactly what
had happened.

What am I really looking at here?

It was the scene of a political assassination
attempt, every trace of which had been erased in less than
twenty-four hours. Could it be that the Dubai authorities,
embarrassed that something like this could happen in their country,
were trying to wrap it up quickly? Or was somebody else altogether
behind the clean up, somebody connected somehow to Charlie?

But how did that make any sense?

Shepherd had no idea. No idea at all.

After ten minutes of thinking about it, he
gave up. He stood up, wished his still silent companion a good
afternoon, and walked off in search of a road big enough for him to
find a taxi.

***

SHEPHERD HAD DINNER alone at the Manhattan Grill at
the Grand Hyatt. For what a steak cost there he could have bought a
small car in some countries, but he figured Charlie could afford
it. It was certainly one hell of a lot cheaper than flying him to
Bangkok in a G-4.

After dinner, he went back to his hotel and
sat on the balcony just staring out into the blackness of the
Persian Gulf. Shepherd hadn’t smoked a cigar in a week or two, but
all at once a cigar was exactly what he wanted. He went back
inside, got a Montecristo out of his briefcase, cut it, and lit it.
He was in a non-smoking room and there weren’t any ashtrays so he
went into the bathroom and drafted a drinking glass to play the
role. It didn’t seem to mind. Back out onto the balcony, he put his
makeshift ashtray on the table, then leaned against the railing on
his forearms and smoked quietly for a while. The air was moist and
thick and there was an odor of ocean salt on the hot night
wind.

Those guys had been trying to kill
somebody
, Shepherd reminded himself. Whether it was Charlie
or it was him, it was sure as hell
one
of them
,
and
they were both still alive. The gunmen might be dead, but they were
only hired hands. Whoever hired them wasn’t dead, at least not as
far as he knew, so it seemed possible, even likely, that there
would be another attempt. And if necessary, another one after that.
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him that the
attempts would probably continue until somebody tracked down
whoever was behind this, or until they eventually succeeded.

If he was right, if that was the way it was,
then Shepherd figured there wasn’t much he could do about it. He
sure as hell wasn’t equipped to track down the plotters, whoever
they were. And, other than ducking at every possible opportunity,
he had no control that he could think of over whether or not they
were successful.

Then there was the matter of Agent Keur.
Clearly Keur wasn’t just going to disappear any more than the
shooters were. That wasn’t the way the Feds worked when they wanted
something, which caused Shepherd to ask himself just what it was
that Keur really
did
want. Asking him to keep tabs on who
Charlie saw was ridiculous. If that was all Keur wanted to know,
there were better and less risky ways to find out. No, there had to
be more to Keur’s approach than that, even if Shepherd didn’t have
the slightest idea what it might be.

Whatever Keur was really after, Shepherd
figured Keur would keep cranking up the pressure until Shepherd
either did it or Keur didn’t want it anymore. If that was what he
was going to do, Shepherd decided there wasn’t much he could do
about that either.

Perhaps it was Shepherd’s growing sense that
he was losing control over nearly everything that was the source of
it, but suddenly he thought about Anita. It had been a while since
he had last thought about Anita, several days perhaps, but he
thought about her now, and with the thought came the old terror of
wondering where she was, who she was with, and what she was doing
right at that moment.

Like an alcoholic pushing away a glass of
whiskey, Shepherd took a deep breath, expelled all such thoughts
from his consciousness, and chalked up another entry on the
ever-expanding list of things he couldn’t do anything about.

“
But I don’t want to go among mad people,”
Alice responded.

“
Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat.
“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“
How do you know I’m mad?” said
Alice.

“
You must be,” said the Cat. “Or you
wouldn’t have come here.”

— Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland

THAILAND IS THE Italy of Asia. Great food, beautiful
women, joyously corrupt, and totally dysfunctional. Sometimes
Shepherd wondered if maybe it might not be the right place for him
after all. He liked food. He liked women. He was a true connoisseur
of corruption. And for the last six months he had been even more
dysfunctional than Thailand.

It had been raining on and off ever since
Shepherd got in from Dubai. He had checked into the hotel, made a
couple of calls, and gone for a quick run in Lumpini Park to shake
off the funk of the long flight. Now he was doing very little but
sitting by himself at a window table at a pub in Bangkok’s
financial district called the Duke of Wellington. He was drinking
coffee, watching the rain, and pretending to read the
International Herald Tribune
. Outside the window the wind
kicked up a notch and the rain swirled like smoke through the hard
neon light of the big multicolored signs along the street.

He had gotten used to the rain in Bangkok. It
rains a lot in the evenings. It rains a lot in the mornings, too,
and the afternoons and at night. It just didn’t matter very much to
anyone that it did. Bangkok is a twenty-four hour town and a little
rain does nothing to hold it back. Ten million people, more or
less; a city no worse than a lot of others, but no better
either.

Some people say that Bangkok attracts a
miserable bunch of foreigners: drifters, losers, loners, people on
the run from broken lives. They claim the place is a magnet for the
lost, the lonely, and the misbegotten. Shepherd knew some people
even thought that was why he had once taken up residence there. It
wasn’t true, of course. At least not altogether.

Shepherd wasn’t bothered much over what
people said about him. He figured that what people said about
anything depended mostly on where they sat. As for him, he was
sitting at a table at the Duke of Wellington drinking coffee. And
he didn’t really care what anyone thought about why he had moved to
Bangkok once upon a time, because he didn’t live in Bangkok
anymore.

Shepherd finished his coffee, pushed back
from the table, and went to look for the toilet.

***

WHEN HE CAME out, Pete Logan was sitting at the bar
drinking something brown. Shepherd walked over and took the stool
next to him.

“Thanks for coming,” he said.

Pete examined Shepherd with curiosity.

“What?” Shepherd asked.

“I don’t hear from you for three months, you
don’t call, you don’t write, then suddenly you ring up and ask me
to come out on a rainy night to meet you here and I do. Right about
now I’m asking myself: why am I doing this?”

“Because you think I’m a really cool guy and
you’ve missed me?”

“No, that’s not it.”

Pete had been the FBI’s resident agent in
Bangkok for a little over three years. Back when Shepherd lived
there, too, they had discovered that they were two guys from
similar backgrounds stranded in a culture that didn’t much care for
either one of them. They occasionally had meals together and even
ran together in Lumpini Park a few times. What Shepherd always
remembered most clearly, however, was that when Anita left him,
Pete had been a pal. He bought drinks and told some stories, but he
never offered a word of advice. Shepherd thought that was a pretty
good definition of a real friend: somebody who’s there when you
need him and understands how to help without being told. Shepherd
didn’t have all that many real friends, but from that time on Pete
Logan was one of them.

The bartender brought Shepherd another cup of
coffee and Pete stared at it in disbelief.

Shepherd shrugged. “Jet lag.”

“When did you get in?”

“A few hours ago.”

“Where from?”

“Dubai.”

“Don’t tell me you were in Dubai to see—”

“Yeah.”

“Were you there when those guys—”

“Yeah.”

“Did it really go down the way CNN said it
did?” Peter asked.

Shepherd bobbed his head around in a gesture
that could have meant practically anything. Then he took another
sip of coffee and changed the subject.

“I need a favor, Pete.”

“Of course you do. When have you ever called
me that you didn’t need a favor?”

Shepherd told Pete about Agent Keur and his
tale about the investigation of Robert Darling and Blossom Trading.
Then he told Pete that Keur had asked him to feed the Bureau
information about what was happening around Charlie.

“Did you agree to that?” Pete asked.

“Of course not.”

Pete nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

“So what about Robert Darling and Blossom
Trading?” Shepherd prompted.

“Got me,” Pete said. “I never heard of either
one.”

“What do you know about Keur?”

“Nothing. I never heard of him either.”

“That’s funny. I asked Keur if he knew you
and he described you perfectly.”

Pete spread his hands slightly, but he didn’t
say anything.

“He even said you spoke highly of me,”
Shepherd added.

“So there you are. Right off the bat we’ve
established that the man is a pathological liar.”

“Can you find out?”

“About Keur?”

“No, about the Bureau’s investigation of
Darling and Blossom Trading.”

Pete pushed back slightly from the bar and
cleared his throat.

“Information like that would be pretty
closely restricted, Jack.”

“I don’t want anything heavy duty. Just when
the investigation started, what it’s about, who else has been
targeted. Stuff like that.”

“Right. Nothing heavy duty. Just pretty much
everything the Bureau knows.”

“Well… whatever you feel comfortable telling
me, at least.”

Pete swirled the whiskey in his glass and
then threw back the rest of it. Shepherd signaled to the bartender
to bring him another and they sat quietly until Pete had it in
front of him.

“I suppose now you think I’ll give it up just
because you’ve bought me a drink.”

“Yeah, I do.”

Pete shrugged and gave his glass a couple of
turns.

“I’ll make some calls,” he said. “But no
promises. Let me see what turns up and I’ll decide then what I can
tell you.”

They talked for a little longer about this
and that. Then Pete finished his whiskey and left. Shepherd walked
to the door with him to see if it was still raining. Of course it
was still raining. He went back to the bar, picked up the
Herald
Tribune
again, and ordered another cup of coffee.