KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (32 page)

I examined Marcus York’s bloody face for a moment or two.

Then I passed out.

WHEN I OPENED
my eyes the world looked dim and watery. It was as if I were diving and a long, long way beneath the surface.

I tried to move my head, but my neck muscles ignored me and nothing happened. Before long, I gave up. Using only my eyes, I scouted my surroundings as well as I could.

Everywhere I seemed to be looking through water. Down at the far edge of my vision I could see bits of what appeared to be yellow seaweed streaming upward from the sea bottom, long slender tentacles of plant life waved gracefully in the unseen currents like those Nebraska wheat fields they show on television when they play “America the Beautiful” before a football game. I could hear nothing at all except for a slight rushing in my ears. That seemed more or less consistent with being underwater, too, so cautiously I focused my consciousness on my chest and took stock of how the breathing process was going for me.

My lungs seemed to be working just fine. I could feel my chest rising and falling as they went about their work of pumping the air reliably in and out with what seemed to be their usual efficiency. Still, I thought they might be doing it somewhat more slowly than they had before…

Before
?

Before
what
?

I couldn’t remember.

All of a sudden a face loomed in front of mine, a woman’s face, watery and wavering, but still real and so close I could touch her. I tried to touch her, but my arm muscles were working no better than my neck muscles had been and I couldn’t.

Anita?
I called out to the face.
Is that you, Anita?
But the face didn’t answer.

Of course, it had to be Anita, but…

I fought my hazy memory, skirmishing with it in slow motion, and I felt myself moving toward something. I willed my eyes to focus on the face. I struggled to capture a clear image of it, one that I could lay next to the picture of Anita’s face that I carried always in my mind.

I could not do it. The face started to move away.

Wait!
I shouted.
Come back!

But the face slid beyond the edge of my vision and disappeared.

I thought about it for a moment and then I realized that I should hardly be surprised.

She couldn’t hear you,
I told myself.
You can’t shout underwater.

Underwater
?

There it was again. The only idea I seemed to be able to grasp clearly. The only thought I could hold onto. I was underwater and yet I was still breathing just as if I were on dry land.

Abruptly there was a flash of motion off in the corner of my vision and I had a sensation of a brilliant golden light being born. Emergent and intensifying, it seemed to be pushing straight toward me. Frantically, I twisted my eyes as far as I could, searching desperately for the source. I found it and focused on it, and saw a fish coming directly toward me. A giant goldfish.

A fish? A goldfish?

Ah, shit,
I thought,
you’re not underwater.

You’re dead, man.

You’re dead and you’ve gone to the place where people go when they die, and this is it.

But I was so tired, I could only hold a single thought clearly. And it was this.

If that were true, if I
was
dead, then there was nothing I could do about it anyway.

So I closed my eyes and waited for whatever came next.

THE NEXT TIME
I woke up and opened my eyes, the world looked different. A lot different.

I was in a darkened hospital room and in the gray dimness a faint glow of artificial light came from somewhere. This time when I tried to move, I found my neck muscles worked pretty well. I rolled my head in the direction of the light, then waited for my eyes to focus.

When they did I found myself looking into a softly lighted aquarium with tiny plantings of yellow sea grass lining its sandy bottom. I could hear the aquarium’s air pump humming in the background and a goldfish that seemed to me to be the size of a housecat was bumping against the glass side of the tank.

“Are you awake, Jack?” The woman’s voice came from the other side of my bed, the one opposite the aquarium. “Can you hear me?”

Slowly I rolled my head back. The woman had a nice face, but it was not Anita’s face. An Asian face instead. Dark hair, dark eyes, and skin that made me think of looking into a cup of
café au lait.

At first I couldn’t put a name to the face, although I was sure I knew it. I swam upward through memory, groping for it.

Then I could put a name to it.

Kate.

It was Kate’s face.

“Where am I?” I asked her.

“The hospital,” she said. “You’ve been shot, but you’ll be fine.”

I kept gazing at Kate’s face.

“What are you staring at?” she eventually asked.

“You look so Thai, but you sound…so English.”

Kate laughed and it was a lovely laugh, throaty and warm. “Does that bother you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I was only thinking that…well, thank God it’s not the other way around.”

Kate thought about that for a second and then started laughing again, this time sticking her tongue into the corner of her mouth in mock disapproval. “I gather your sense of humor has survived pretty much intact,” she said.

I started to say something smooth and witty, then all at once everything that had happened to me came back. In a single fast-forwarding rush, it all came back.

“How long have I been out?” I asked.

“A little over twelve hours,” Kate said. “We were worried about you there for a while.”

“It was just a scratch on the cheek,”
I said.

“Hardly,” Kate said. “You werelign=" shot twice. Once in the left side just below your heart and once in the left arm. The arm was only a flesh wound, but the other shot did some damage. You lost a lot of blood. You might have bled to death if we hadn’t found you when we did.”

I tried to take all that in, but I couldn’t get my arms around it. It didn’t really make any sense to me.

“It was just a scratch,” I repeated doggedly.

“As soon as you came in, they got the bleeding stopped and the bullet out of your abdomen. I know the surgeon. He’s a good man and he says there is no major damage to any organs.”

“I don’t remember anything like that.”

“When you feel like it, I’d very much like to hear what you
do
remember.”

I took a deep breath, pushed hard against the bottom, and rose all the way up until I broke through the surface.

“Now is okay,” I said.

I THOUGHT FOR
a moment and did my best to clear my head. Then I told Kate about the motorcycle pulling in front of us and the other bike coming up from behind. I told her about the Jaguar jerking forward and smashing over the first gunman, and I told her about killing the second shooter with the .45 before I passed out. Something told me not to mention pulling off the man’s helmet and recognizing Marcus York’s face, at least not quite yet, so I left that part out.

“Where did you learn to shoot like that?” Kate asked.

“I used to play tennis with some DEA agents in Washington. They took me to ranges sometimes. Just screwing around. They said I had a knack for it.”

A short silence fell after that. I was pretty badly muddled, but I was lucid enough to probe Kate gently, just to see where it might go.

“Who were those guys anyway?” I asked her.

“We don’t know yet. No ID on either of them, of course. They might have been local hitters, but probably not. More than likely imported. Malaysian, would be my guess.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Well…they looked more Malaysian than Thai to me, but I’m just guessing.”

That stopped me.

“You saw the bodies?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And they were both Asians?”

“That’s right. So if you’re wondering whether the marshals had anything to do with this, I think the answer is no. I doubt they would have trusted a couple of local hired guns.”

There was no way in hell Kate could have mistaken Marcus York for a Malaysian. If she was telling me the truth, somebody removed York’s body and substituted another one before she got there. On the other hand, maybe Kate was lying to me. Maybe she
had
seen York’s corpse and she thought I hadn’t, so she didn’t want me to know.

I tried to work out where each of those possibilities left me, but I couldn’t. Before I could even decide whether or not to tell Kate the truth, to tell her I already knew who was behind the attack, she changed the subject

“Is there anybody you’d like me to call for you, Jack? To tell them you’rtace going to be all right?’

“Yes,” I said automatically, “Anita will be worried if she hears…”

But then all that came back to me, too, and I trailed off.

“No,” I said. “No one.”

The finality of it caused me to groan audibly. I turned my head away and Kate leaned closer.

“Shall I get a nurse?’

“No,” I said, “just give me a minute.”

I felt myself plunge into a cavern of coldness and my ears filled with sound that had no source. Kate moved slightly. The gray light in the room shifted and I caught a glimpse of the green luminous numerals of a clock face. My hands trembled against the bedsheets. Then, as abruptly as I had entered it, I was through the cavern and rising again into warmth. My hands stopped trembling and the sound in my ears faded away.

“What about the others?” I asked Kate.

“Dead,” she said. “All of them.”

I had known that already, of course.

“Has anyone told Karsarkis?” I asked. “About Mia, I mean.”

“I sent people out there as soon as we found the wreck. The estate appeared to be secure, but the guards wouldn’t let us in. There’s been no reply to the message we left.”

My eyes searched the room for the clock face I had glimpsed before. I found it on a table.

Just after one o’clock, it said. Was that afternoon? Or night? I struggled to work it out.

Night, I decided. It had to be night. It must be after one a.m.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Kate. “Where did you come from?”

“When Mia didn’t arrive, I called her cell phone and there was no answer. We followed the road back to see if there had been an accident and we found you”

“Didn’t arrive? What do you mean?”

“We were having lunch together at Amanpuri. You didn’t know?”

“She told me she was having lunch with someone. She didn’t say who.”

Kate showed a half smile. “It was me,” she said.

I lay quietly and turned my new discovery over in my mind. It didn’t fit with anything else and I didn’t know how to try to make it fit, so after a while I let it go.

“Who would want to kill Mia?” I asked.

Kate looked at me for a long time.

“What?” I asked.

“Why do you think they were after Mia?”

“Are you trying to tell me it was another mistake? Like Mike O’Connell. Another botched attempt on Karsarkis?”

“That’s possible, I guess. Karsarkis’ car. Mia on one side. A man on the other. Maybe they thought you were Karsarkis.”

“Except I don’t look anything like Karsarkis.”

“Then maybe there’s another explanation, Jack.”

I looked sideways for a moment and then shifted my eyes back to Kate. Her face was professionally empty, but I had no doubt what she meant.

“You&rsnd quo;re shitting me,” I said.

Kate shook her head.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Why in God’s name would they have been trying to kill
me
?”

“If you’re working with Plato, there are people who assume you know what he knows.”

“But I’m not working with Karsarkis.”

“There’re people who probably assume you are.”

“And he hasn’t told me anything.”

“They would probably assume he had.”

“And you think whoever is doing all of this goddamn assuming would send two goddamned gunmen to ambush Mia’s car and kill everybody in it just to get me? Just in case I actually
do
know whatever it is I’m supposed to know?”

“You can put it together that way.”

I stared at Kate. “Oh, man,” I sighed, “You have
got
to be kidding me.”

“I feel like I got you into this, Jack,” Kate said.

I noticed Kate’s voice had turned businesslike. So much, apparently, for the personal warmth part of our program.

“Until I figure out how to get you out of it, a team of my best people will be with you around the clock. You can trust them absolutely.”

“With my life?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Gee, then I guess my worries are over.”

“They can’t get set up until morning, but I’ve got local police all around this hospital until then. Don’t worry. We’re not going to give them a second chance.”

“Give
who
a second chance?”

Kate glanced briefly out the window, which there was very little point in doing since it was pitch black out there. Then she put her hand on my shoulder and gave it a little squeeze.

“I don’t know. The truth is I just don’t know for sure.”

But of course
I
did. I knew. For sure.

“And you think the marshals had nothing to do with this?” I probed again.

“No.”

This time I was watching Kate’s eyes when she answered and I decided she believed what she was saying. She didn’t know about Marcus York, I was certain of that now, but something still kept me from telling her.

“What about the email intercepts?” I asked, trying to make up my mind how to play it from there. “They had to mean something.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jack.”

“Kate, I’m talking about the email intercepts, those transcripts you gave me…”

“I never gave you anything.”

I was a little slow-witted right then, I realized, but not
that
slow-witted.

“Okay,” I said. “I see.”

“I’m glad.”

Kate may not have known specifically about Marcus York trying to kill me, but she knew there was something out there. She also knew it was something ugly and something neither of uspec understood. She wanted to get as far away from it as she possibly could. I could hardly say I blamed her.