World of Trouble (9786167611136) (32 page)

Shepherd nodded some more and tried to look
like he agreed with Darling. It wasn’t all that difficult. Darling
wasn’t completely wrong, and Shepherd knew it.

“The political upheaval in Thailand has
already tilted it toward China,” he finished. “It’s the Chinese who
are really behind the yellow shirts. All this people-power,
love-and-peace stuff you hear from them is a bunch of shit. Those
are China’s people, Shepherd, and that’s why they’re taking control
of Thailand, to hand effective control to China. We need Charlie
back in Thailand. He’s ours. He belongs to America. He’s bought and
paid for.”

Darling stubbed out his cigarette. Almost
immediately he pulled the box of Gitanes back out of his pocket and
lit another one.

Maybe that’s the way to solve all
this,
Shepherd thought to himself.
Just keep Darling talking
long enough and he’ll die of lung cancer.

“DO YOU WORK for CIA, Robert?”

Darling inhaled and blew the smoke out very
slowly.

“Everybody in my business either works for
the CIA or with the CIA, Shepherd. The little dogs follow the big
dogs. If you don’t, you get eaten.”

That wasn’t exactly an answer to his
question, of course, but Darling looked like he was still trying to
decide how much more to say. Shepherd gave him a little nudge.

“Then let me ask the question this way. What
is Robert Darling’s involvement in all this?”

“I’m just helping Charlie. I’m his
friend.”

“Come on, Robert, don’t treat me like a dick.
There’s a lot more to it than that.”

“Charlie and I are partners in Blossom
Trading. Blossom Trading sells armaments.”

“Who do you and Charlie sell arms
to
?”

Darling said nothing. He looked as if he
hadn’t even heard Shepherd.

“Are you arming the Thais?”

“Not
all
the Thais. We’re selling to
Charlie’s people. And we’ve sold some stuff to the Muslim
separatists. We’re not amoral, Shepherd. We only sell to the guys
who have the same aims we do.”

“And what aims are those exactly.”

Darling smiled. “To restore good government
to Thailand.”

“Is that what Adnan was doing for you in
Thailand that got him killed? Restoring good government?”

“I don’t answer to you, Shepherd.”

“But you answer to
somebody
. And my
guess is that you answered to somebody about Adnan. Did Adnan’s
head and his body end up in separate places because you fucked up,
Robert? Did you fuck up and get Adnan killed?”

“Adnan is—”

“Was.”

“Adnan was,” Darling corrected himself, “a
man who sometimes overplayed his hand.”

“With who?”

“Look, the demands from the Muslims were
getting out of hand. Adnan seemed to be the right man to explain to
the little pricks that there are limits as to how much support we
can give them.”

Darling took a long pull on his cigarette and
exhaled slowly.

“In retrospect… maybe that wasn’t the case,”
he finished.

“So Adnan was decapitated by Muslim
separatists?”

“They’re melodramatic motherfuckers, aren’t
they?”

“So you’re saying you sent Adnan to tell the
Muslim separatists to toe the party line and they killed him?”

Darling shrugged. “Maybe they have a problem
with authority figures.”

“And who’s the authority figure here?
You?”

Darling shrugged again. Shepherd was getting
really tired of watching him do that no matter how good at it he
was.

“Let’s just be absolutely clear here,”
Shepherd said. “What you’re telling me is that the CIA is
controlling and coordinating the opposition in Thailand to the
present government. Both the Muslim separatists and Charlie’s red
shirts.”

Darling held up both hands, palms out. “Hang
on, Shepherd. I never said anything like that.”

“Yes, you did.”

Shepherd pointed over Darling’s shoulder to
the hanger with the green roof.

“There’s an airplane in there that’s been
carrying your arms shipments into Thailand. You’ve flying into a
strip in the south that’s under the control of the Muslim rebels,
leaving some of the weapons there, and taking the rest of them
north to Bangkok by road.”

Darling looked down, took a final puff on his
cigarette, and flicked it away. He didn’t say anything.

“Your airplane is on charter to a company
called Trippler Aviation. Trippler Aviation is well known as a CIA
front company.”

It might have been a bit of a stretch to say
that it was well known. But what the hell, Shepherd thought. He was
rolling.

“The registered owner of the airplane is the
Kitnarok Foundation. You are a foundation trustee just like I am,
Robert, so you should know that. Do you? Do you know that?”

“Where are you getting all this shit,
Shepherd?”

“That’s really not the important question, is
it? The important question is what Charlie knows. Does Charlie know
his foundation owns an airplane that’s been chartered by the CIA to
smuggle arms into Thailand, arms that are being used to start a
civil war and overthrow the Thai government?”

Darling stood up so abruptly that Shepherd
involuntarily leaned back. Darling reached across the picnic table
and poked him in the chest with his index finger.

“You self-righteous, insignificant little
piece of shit,” he screamed. “Who the
fuck
do you think you
are?”

Darling poked harder and Shepherd leaned
further back.

“There are rules to this game and there are
lines you don’t cross, Shepherd. You’re nothing. We can crush you
like a bug.”

Shepherd said nothing. It was hard to sound
tough sitting at a picnic table while Darling was standing over him
pushing a finger into his chest.

“Get out of our way, Shepherd. If you don’t,
I’ll end your inconsequential little life without a second thought.
Do you read me, mister?”

Shepherd slapped Darlings finger aside and
slid off the bench. But by the time he had gotten to his feet,
Darling had turned his back and was striding angrily toward the
hanger.

“Don’t go away mad, Robert,” Shepherd called
after him.

Darling didn’t answer or even look back. He
just raised his right hand above his shoulder, extended his middle
finger, and kept walking.

***

AFTER DARLING DISAPPEARED into the hanger, Shepherd
stood there for a moment and thought about his options. Or he would
have thought about them if he’d had any options to think about. As
far as he could tell, he was fresh out. The book of matches that
Darling had tossed away was on the table right in front of him. He
sat back down, picked it up, and twisted it back and forth through
his fingers while he replayed in his mind everything Darling had
said.

He had rattled Darling’s cage. He had no
doubt he had at least done that much. But otherwise it looked to
Shepherd like he had pretty much blown it. He had heard Darling’s
justification for what he was doing, but he didn’t know anymore
about
how
Darling was doing it than he had before. What was
Tommy’s role? And where the hell was Charlie?

The impound order on Harvey wouldn’t hold up
for long. Shepherd’s guess was that it wouldn’t take Darling more
than a day or two to get the Agency to come down on the UAE
government and have it lifted. That meant in not much over
forty-eight hours Harvey would be back on the ground in Thailand
and the guns would be flowing.

Thailand was already coming apart. Reds and
yellows were in the streets bashing each other with bats and iron
bars, and random bombings targeting foreigners were holding Bangkok
hostage to terror. Putting automatic weapons into the hands of the
red shirts’ street fighters would trigger a full-scale slaughter.
But what could he do about that in forty-eight hours? Shepherd had
absolutely no idea.

He stopped twisting the matchbook in his hand
and glanced down at it. Registering the crest on the cover, he
raised his eyebrows in surprise. The matchbook was from the Duke of
Wellington in Bangkok. Shepherd thought back to his meeting at the
Duke with Pete Logan, the FBI’s man in Thailand. It was shortly
after that Logan had told him the FBI had no interest in either
Robert Darling or Blossom Trading.

So what was Darling doing now with a book of
matches from the Duke of Wellington? Probably that was no more than
a coincidence. Hundreds of people drank and smoked in the Duke
every week. Having a book of matches from there only meant that
Darling had been in Bangkok at some point, which was hardly
surprising.

But what if it
wasn’t
a coincidence?
Thailand was a very small place and people sometimes turned out to
be connected to each other in surprising ways. He needed to keep
that in mind.

Shepherd stood up from the picnic table,
shoved the book of matches into his pocket, and trudged back to the
Land Cruiser.

KEUR AND RACHEL just looked at Shepherd when he told
them what Darling had said. He got the impression that the artistry
of his interrogation was lost on them both.

“He look pretty angry when he stomped away,”
Rachel said. “That’s something, I guess.”

“At least I’m sure now the Agency is behind
everything. I got that much.”

“I don’t believe him,” Keur said. “Darling’s
the bad guy here, not the US government.”

“Come on, Keur. The Agency’s been pulling
this shit as long as it’s been in business. Subverting governments
they don’t like, installing new ones they do. Of course, they
almost always make a mess out of it, but they keep trying. Cuba,
Chile, Iran, Greece, Vietnam, even Italy. You want me to go
on?”

Keur shook his head, but he said nothing.

“We know the plane delivering the arms
shipments is chartered to a CIA front that’s paying ten times what
the charter is worth,” Shepherd continued. “It’s obvious Agency
money is being laundered through the inflated charter fees to pay
Blossom Trading for the weapons they’re flying into Thailand.”

“Then you’ve decided that General Kitnarok
is
fronting for the CIA?” Keur asked. “You think this is
really a CIA operation to install a military government in Thailand
with General Kitnarok at its head?”

“Yeah,” Shepherd said. “That’s exactly what I
think.”

“Then he sure had you fooled up until
now.”

Shepherd said nothing. He knew he deserved
that. He didn’t like it, but he deserved it.

Shepherd didn’t want to believe that Charlie
was working with the CIA to overthrow the elected government in
Thailand, but the evidence was piling up. Charlie had a lot of
faults, and Shepherd didn’t always see the world the same way he
did, but he would have bet the old bastard loved his country enough
that he wouldn’t have been a party to anything like that. It made
Shepherd feel a little foolish now to think that Charlie might have
been running a game on him the whole time they had been working
together. Just stringing him along, day after day.

“What do you want to do now?” Rachel asked
after a moment. “I can’t keep that gate closed much longer.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Shepherd said. “I’ve got
all I’m going to get out of Darling, and Tommy is probably so shit
scared now that he wouldn’t leave the hanger if you burned it down.
Go ahead and do whatever you need to.”

Rachel picked up a microphone clipped to the
dashboard of the Land Cruiser. She keyed it and told somebody to
re-enter the gate’s original code and notify the man who complained
that it was working again.

Keur folded his arms and looked at Shepherd.
“So what’s next, Lone Ranger?”

Shepherd just sat and shook his head.

“I’m damned if I know, Tonto.”

***

RACHEL DROVE THEM back and they retrieved Keur’s car.
The sun was low in the west and the air had taken on that peculiar
luminescence that announces sunset in the desert. All around them,
Dubai glowed softly with an otherworldly, golden light. It was an
altogether different place from the brassy, hard-edged megalopolis
that lived its days in the harsh white glare of the desert sun.

Before they left the garage, Shepherd took
out his cell phone again and tried both of the numbers he had for
Kate. He needed to warn her that Harvey would be flying back to
Thailand with a load of weapons soon. At least he was reasonably
certain it would. It would probably be a day or two before the
paper barrier he had erected in Dubai would be knocked down, but
inevitably it would be. A day or two wasn’t much, but it was
something. Maybe it would give Kate the time she needed.

Both of Kate’s numbers went directly to voice
mail and Shepherd hung up without leaving a message. Normally at
that point he would have called Tommy and asked to be put in touch
with Kate. But with Tommy and Darling holed up together in the
hanger where Harvey was parked, that no longer seemed like a
particularly good idea.

“They’re about to light the fuse, Keur, and I
can’t even reach Kate to warn her.”

Keur just nodded, but he didn’t say
anything.

“I’ve got to find Charlie,” Shepherd said.
“I’ve got to get to him before everything turns to shit. He can
stop it. Maybe he’s the
only
person who can stop it.”

“I thought you’d say something like
that.”

“Charlie is either in Thailand now or he’s
going to be soon. Either way, there’s no point in hanging around
Dubai any longer. All roads lead back to Thailand. That’s where I
need to start looking.”

“I think you’re right.”

Shepherd fell silent. He was fresh out of
things to say.

“You want some help?”

“Help with what? I have no idea what I’m
going to do.”