KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (27 page)

“Do you have any personal reason for caring whether or not Karsarkis gets a pardon?”

I had to know if Kate was acting solely out of conviction or if there was another reason. Karsarkis obviously owned a lot of powerful politicians and other public figures in Thailand and there were many ways to own people. The crude way was to buy them, but there were other subtler ways and even the possibility of webs of personal loyalties that I could never hope to understand.

Kate looked at me for a long time in complete silence. I just looked back. I didn’t bat an eye. I had been in Asia far too long to be ashamed of asking that kind of question.

“First, Jack, please understand this: I have never taken anything from Karsarkis or from anyone else. There are still a few honest people in government here and I’m one of them. Second, I’m not sleeping with Plato now and I’m not going to be in the future. Whether you help Karsarkis or not, I want you to know both of those things are true.”

I nodded. I wanted to believe Kate and I did. I saw no reason not to.

“There is a lot at stake here,” she continued. “Karsarkis may know a great deal about terrorist operations in Asia that threaten all of us. If your people get him back in one piece and he gives them what he has, that would be a good thing for all of us. We need to know what he knows.”

“I guess they could always make it a condition of the pardon that he come clean.”

“You already know they can’t. Under your Constitution a presidential pardon is unconditional. Karsarkis can promise them anything he wants in order to get it, but if he doesn’t deliver, they can’t take it back. His help has got to come from genuine good will. If he promises to tell you what he knows just to get his pardon and then you give him one and he laughs at you and says he’s changed his mind, what are you going to do about it?”

“Have the marshals kill him?” I suggested.

Kate didn’t smile at that. Perhaps she didn’t think it was all that funny.

“Giving Plato Karsarkis a pardon would be difficult for your president politically,” she said. “That’s why Karsarkis needs you. The White House owes you, Jack. You delivered big for them not very long ago. You even made you friend Mr. Redwine quite the hero. He’s the White House counsel. Pardon applications are filed with his office. And he owes you now.”

“You’re assuming an awful lot.”

“I don’t think so.”

I took a dÀy">I tooeep breath and looked away. The thunderclouds were coming closer and I heard the first rumbling in the distance. After a minute or two, my eyes drifted back to Kate.

“If I’m going to represent Karsarkis,” I said, “I need to know everything.”

“All you need to know is what I’ve just told you.”

“That’s not enough.”

“It ought to be. Mike O’Connell probably knew everything and look what happened to him.”

“No, there’s something else,” I said. “Something specific.”

“What is it?”

“Did Karsarkis kill that girl? Did he cut Cynthia Kim’s throat in that hotel room in Washington?”

Kate sat back and folded her arms. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I really don’t know. He may have.”

We sat for a while in silence after that, both of us watching the storm build. There was still food on my plate, but I had pretty much lost my appetite.

Kate’s story about Karsarkis’ shadowy connections and his knowledge of terrorist operations in Asia might well have been nothing but a lot of horseshit, something she had concocted to make me feel okay about helping a traitor and a murderer. Still, I had no doubt she really did want me to help Karsarkis get his presidential pardon and the reasons she was giving me for that were no doubt at least partially true.

I took my time about finishing my beer and tried to appear thoughtful, although looking back, I’m not sure why I even bothered. I had known what I would eventually say almost from the moment Kate had started spinning her tales
of spies and terrorists and secret money trails leading to Asia. I had always been a complete sucker for stuff like that.

“Look,” I finally told Kate, “let me talk to Karsarkis again. If I’m satisfied he deserves a pardon, maybe I’ll take him on.”

Men are, on the whole, foolish and predictable creatures. I’d had no problem at all looking Karsarkis right in the eye and t
elling him to shove off when he asked me to get the president to pardon him. Then Kate had asked me to do exactly the same thing and I had gone all goo-goo and said, ‘Oh, sure, whatever you want.’

Kate flashed me one of those smiles Thai women keep in reserve, but she didn’t say another word. She knew she didn’t have to.

Smart woman, I thought to myself. Quitting when she was ahead.

Was I ever going to learn to do that?

Probably not.

Phuket

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled
was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

—Verbal Kint
The Usual Suspects

THE MORNING AFTER
my lunch with Kate I woke up early. Way too early.

After making some coffee I stood at the window and watched the air glowing purple with a false dawn. When the sun finally appeared at the horizon, it turned the whole world the color of freshly spun ƀ

I hadn’t bothered to call for a reservation. There were flights from Bangkok to Phuket almost every hour and getting a seat was never much of a problem. Sure enough, the nine-o’clock flight had plenty of room and I was in Phuket just after ten. By ten-thirty I was pulling onto the highway for the drive to Patong Beach in a black Jeep Cherokee I had rented from Avis.

When CW and I met at the Paradise Bar—back in a time that now felt at least a century ago although it had really been just a couple of weeks—he told me he was staying at the Holiday Inn. If CW was in Phuket now, and I had no doubt he was, I would bet my last dollar he was still there. Besides, the Holiday Inn was always the first place you looked for Americans in Phuket.

I had barely driven up the hotel’s circular driveway and climbed out of the Cherokee when I heard his voice.

“Goddamn, Slick,” he bellowed. “What the fuck you doing here?”

I followed the sound across the open-air lobby and found CW nursing what looked like a cup of coffee in an otherwise empty bar. When I walked over and sat down across from him I saw he was puffy and drawn. He looked like he had aged ten years since I had seen him last.

“What’s wrong, CW? You look like somebody shot your dog.”

“I ain’t got a dog.”

I nodded at that, waiting, but CW didn’t say anything else.

“No progress on Karsarkis?” I prompted.

“Ah, son of a bitch,” he muttered. “I am so damned tired of that little pissant I’d like to go in and just string him up on a palm tree. Then at least I could get home to Dallas.”

I raised my eyebrows at the implication, but CW was staring into his coffee cup and didn’t notice. Besides, I doubted irony was a big part of his conversational repertoire.

“Forget about Karsarkis for a couple of hours then,” I said. “You like barbeque?”

CW looked at me as if I had just begun speaking in tongues.

“What are you talking about, boy?”

“Don’t call me boy, you redneck motherfucker. Now do you want to eat barbeque with me or don’t you?”

CW grinned and spread his palms. “Shoot,” he said. “Why not?”

The Cherokee was still in the hotel driveway exactly where I had left it. CW and I got in and I drove back to the main highway and headed south.

DON’S BARBEQUE WAS
at the far south end of the island, almost all the way down to the yacht harbor at Chalong Bay. The building itself looked as if it might once have been a gas station and it sat in solitary splendor alongside the potholed asphalt of an uninspiring rural highway. Its nearest neighbor was a mosque. I seriously doubted very many barbeque joints in the entire world could make a similar claim.

A tile-roofed pavilion open on three sides fronted the building. It was furnished with poured-concrete picnic tables with matching concrete benches. In a modest nod to graciousness, blue plastic tablecloths covered at least parts of some of the concrete tables. Several electric fans hung from the ceiling struggling valiantly against the heat and humidity, but about all they succeeӀl they sded in doing was pushing the heavy air around a little.

“Well, goddamn it all to hell,” CW said as we sat down. “Looks just like home.”

I wasn’t absolutely sure whether CW was joking or not.

A young girl came over to the table carrying two thick plastic folders. CW ordered a beer and I asked for an iced tea. When the girl went off to get our drinks, we leafed through the folders.

“They really got all this shit?” CW asked.

“They do,” I assured him.

“Enchiladas, tacos, tamales, barbequed chicken, rack of ribs. Man, oh man, Slick. This is better than getting laid.”

The girl brought our drinks and I ordered. Then I looked around while CW made up his mind. The place was fairly crowded. Although there were a couple of women who appeared to be local girlfriends or maybe even wives, most of the customers were middle-aged Caucasian males. At one table were four men I had no doubt were Americans. They were big men: big arms, big legs, big shoulders, and big wristwatches. They had sunny, open faces with deep tan lines, and wore faded golf shirts with jeans or khakis and scuffed boots. All of their arms seemed unnaturally hairy and, deeply bleached by the sun, the hair enveloped their forearms like loosely woven blankets. They looked like oil-field workers on R&R, or maybe military or cops. I hoped they were oil-field workers.

When the girl had taken our orders and left, CW folded his arms on the edge of the table and leaned toward me.

“So what have you got to tell me, Slick?”

I looked around Don’s in mock surprise. “You mean I give you all this and you want more?”

“Don’t try my patience, boy.”

“I thought I told you not to call me boy.”

We stared at each other a while after that and I could feel the testosterone levels climbing. Then we both laughed a little and everything settled down.

“You enjoying yourself here in Thailand, CW?”

“Yeah, I like Thais. They’re primitive as hell. They talk to spirits and dead chickens, shit like that, but they’re okay.”

“You ever make it back up to Soi Katoey again?”

I thought I saw a touch of caution in CW’s eyes. “Why would you ask that?”

“Just making conversation.”

“Well then, Slick, you better watch out how you go about doing that, you hear me?”

There was a pause as two motorbikes passed on the highway, both in need of muffler jobs.

“I wasn’t questioning your manhood, CW, I was just asking what you’d been up to since I saw you last.”

CW looked at me for a while, and then he sighed heavily in what seemed to me to be a genuine mixture of disgust and exasperation.

“Ah, I wouldn’t know where to start. I’ve been running around like a two-dicked rooster with a key to the henhouse.”

I laughed in spite of myself, but CW didn’t even smile.

“Nobody seems to know jack shit about what they really want us to do with Karsarkis,” he continued. “They run me one way and then they run me another. I just wished they’d make up their damned minds and we could get on Ӏcould gewith it.”

I let a moment pass, and then because it seemed as good a time as any to do it I laid out the question I had brought CW here to ask in the first place.

“Did your men kill Mike O’Connell?”

CW looked at me without answering. I tried to read his eyes, looking for surprise, but they had gone flat.

“Well, did they?” I asked again.

“Son, you watch your mouth or I’m gonna kick your goddamned ass.”

“Somebody shot him, CW, somebody who knew exactly what they were doing. Local hitters don’t use silenced sniper rifles. A couple of wild shots off the back of a motorcycle with a handgun is the best they can manage.”

“And that’s why you think it was my boys who killed O’Connell?”

“Marcus York was in Bangkok the day O’Connell was shot. Do you want me to believe that was just a coincidence?”

“I don’t give two shits what you believe. You can go fuck yourself right up your sorry ass with a garden rake for all I care.”

The air was so heavy it felt almost solid. I could probably have reached right out with my hand and ripped away a piece of it. Sweat ran in tiny rivulets behind my ears and down my back.

“I know what’s going down here, CW. I have friends at the NIA. They laid it all out for me.”

“What the hell is the NIA?”

“The National Intelligence Agency. The Thai CIA.”

“Well, whoopee do.”

“They showed me transcripts of the intercepts they’ve been running of your email.”

“Intercepts of my
email
?”

“Not your personal email; the communications between your operational headquarters here and Washington.”

“Are you pulling my pecker, son?”

“Nope, they got it all, CW. They know what your instructions are.”

“Well then, son, maybe you better tell me, because I ain’t all that clear what those instructions are myself.”

“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”

“Say whatever you want. Don’t make no difference to me.”

“You’re not here to take Plato Karsarkis back,” I said, “because the Thais aren’t going to extradite him.”

CW’s eyes shifted onto mine and stayed there. He stared at me like a fish gazing out of a tank.

“You’re here to kill him.”

“
What
?” CW reared back away from the table. “We’re here to do
what
?”

“I saw the intercepts, CW.”

“I don’t know what you saw, you sorry motherfucker, but whatever it was, it was a crock of shit.”

CW reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a telephone that looked like an Ericsson. He slammed it down on the table so hard that for a moment I thought he had broken it.

“
That’s
what I use to talk to Washington, dickweed. I don’t even use email.”