KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (36 page)

Kate pulled the car to the side of the road. The blue pickup truck and the clutch of motorcycles parked there looked as if they had been abandoned in haste. We all got out without saying a word.

There was a scar through the trees about five hundred yards long and at least thirty or forty yards across. It ran away from the road and between two low hills, bisecting a narrow gully that still had a shallow layer of water in the bottom from the morning rain. On the other side of the gully the trees were more severely hacked and the concentration of debris was greater.

All along the scar a gruesome mixture of wreckage and human remains coated the landscape. Apart from the plane’s engines that were indestructible masses of hardened steel, there were few pieces of wreckage of any size at all. But worse by far was what I could plainly see entangled in the orange life jackets, fragments of metal, and endless loops of colored wire. Half-buried here and there in the sandy ground, even hanging from the limbs of trees, were what had unmistakably once been parts of human beings.

There were a half-dozen brown-uniformed police down near the main body of debris, but they seemed to be in shock and were hardly moving at all. Two other men in short-sleeved white shirts and nondescript dark pants appeared from somewhere and Kate walked over to meet them. The three of them stood in a tight little knot, just out of earshot, and they murmured in low voices. Otherwise, the whole panorama was oddly silent.

When I could bear looking at the wreckage no more, I glanced away and looked down at my feet. A red toothbrush lay in the dirt just in front of my left foot. I hesitated a moment, then bent down and picked it up. It was an Oral B, the same brand I used.

“Goddamn, Slick,” CW breathed out. “I ain’t never seen nothing like this before in my whole fucking life.”

I turned the red toothbrush over and over in my hands and nodded to CW. But I said nothing at all.

“It was Plato’s Gulfstream,” Kate said when she returned from talking to the two men. “No doubt about it. The explosion occurred while the aircraft was climbing away from the airport. It wasn’t a big enough explosion to destroy the plane. Just big enough to cripple and crash it.”

“Could it have been an accident?” I asked, knowing of course that it wasn’t.

Kate glanced at me. “You don’t think so and neither do I.”

“I don’t get it,” CW said. “If somebody wanted to kill Karsarkis, why a small explosion? Why not just blast him right out of the sky?”

“My guess is they were trying to do just enough damage to make certain the plane went down more or less intact,” Kate said. “Normally planes take off from Phuket out over the sea. That’s deep water out there. If the plane went down there, and it went down intact, we would have never found any wreckage.”

“But it didn’t go down at sea,” I said. “Because the pilot took off in the opposite direction.”

Kate nodded.

“Why would anyone…” I started to ask, but then I trailed off.

I realized the answer was pretty obvious. The only rea&ldquson somebody would want the wreckage intact and at the bottom of the sea was because they didn’t want the wreckage found, and the reason they wouldn’t want the wreckage found was they expected something to be
in
the wreckage that they didn’t want found.

Kate had obviously figured it out, too. “What was Plato carrying, Jack?” she asked me right on cue. “What did he have with him that somebody wanted lost forever?”

“Got me,” I shrugged.

Kate watched me, her face as flat as a dinner plate. “From the moment I walked into your hospital room and told you what happened,” she said, “you never expressed the slightest surprise Plato was leaving Phuket today.”

I thought about it, eyes half closed. “Okay,” I said after a moment, “so I knew Karsarkis was leaving. He came to the hospital this morning and told me.”

“Why did he do that?” Kate asked.

“He said he wanted me to know he was sorry he had gotten me into all this.”

“Where was he going?”

“I don’t know.”

“You weren’t curious enough to ask?”

“I wasn’t.”

Kate didn’t even try to be polite about it. “I don’t believe you, Jack.”

“Hey, I understand,” I said, spreading my hands in the universal gesture of innocence. “Sometimes I have a little trouble believing me, too.”

Kate shook her head and looked away. We all fell silent.

“The American ambassador called the prime minister about the time the first reports of the crash came in,” Kate said after a few moments. “How do you suppose he found out about it so fast?”

“Beats me,” I said.

“He demanded the crash site be completely locked down until American personnel could get here. I figure in about another hour the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the DEA, the military spooks, and God only knows who else will be crawling all over this place and carting away everything you see. After they’re done, we probably won’t even have to clean up.”

“Probably not,” I agreed.

“Jack, if there might be anything out there…” Kate waved her arms vaguely over the devastation, “anything at all that it might be better for us—or you—your fellow countrymen don’t find when they take over the site, this is the only chance you’re going to have to tell me about it.”

“If I knew of anything like that, I would tell you, Kate, but I don’t.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

“Because you’re a deeply cynical woman with a suspicious nature who is professionally paranoid about nearly everything?”

Kate said nothing. She just walked away, picking a cautious path forward through the field of wreckage. Not really knowing what else to do, CW and I followed.

After about twenty yards, Kate stopped and pointed at the mangled rubber trees lining both sides of the swath the dying aircraft had dug through the landscape. “When there is a crash right after take-off,” she said, “there’s generally a large fire because the plane is fully loaded with fuel.”

I could see most of the rubber trees were scorched and blackened although not really burned. A number of them were still damp from the morning rain and looked to be wholly untouched.

“There was no fire here,” Kate said. “Plato’s Gulfstream would have had thirty thousand pounds of jet fuel in its tanks when it hit, but there was no fire.”

She looked at me to see if I understood the significance of that.

“You’re saying the impact was so great the fuel vaporized before it could catch fire,” I said.

She nodded.

“Then the explosion was probably just large enough to shear off the tail section and cut the control cables,” I said. “Most of the plane would have been left intact. Those poor bastards rode it all the way down, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” Kate said. “I think they did.”

“Son of a bitch,” CW muttered to himself.

The three of us continued to walk slowly south, picking our way through things I did not want to examine too closely. After another fifty or sixty yards, we reached what appeared to be the center of the horror.

“Do you know exactly who was on the plane?” I asked Kate.

“Just Plato,” she said, “and two pilots and two cabin attendants. No one else we know of.”

“But you are absolutely sure Plato Karsarkis was on this airplane?”

“Yes,” Kate said. “We had the airport under surveillance. We watched him board, and we watched the plane take off.”

“Some people aren’t going to believe he’s dead, you know.”

“Maybe not, but he is.”

“There’s no doubt in your mind?”

“None at all. Whoever it was, they finally got him.”

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

One of the two men in short-sleeved white shirts caught up with Kate again. He began to murmur into Kate’s ear and she turned away from us, listening.

“What do you think, Slick?” CW asked me under his breath.

“I don’t know.”

“You figure it was foreign terrorists?”

“No.”

“Than who the fuck was it?”

I took a deep breath. “I think it was you, C.W, or somebody a lot like you.”

“Ah, shit, Slick, you couldn’t really think…” CW trailed off. He took a couple of steps away from me and half turned his back. Then he just stood there, his hands jammed in his pockets, shaking his head.

The sightseers were already starting to gather. Men, women, and children had materialized through the trees from nearly every direction and the noise level was rising with each new group of arrivals. Some people picked through the debris looking for things of value, while others shoved and jostled to get a better look at the devastation.

I noticed a whole family pushing eagerly forward. There was a mother, a father, and two little children who couldn’t have been more than four or five. The mother had one child, the father had the other, and they held both of them high above the cr/p filepos-id="filepos673029">owd so the children could see as much of the horror as possible.

A few uniformed police moved around the debris making ineffectual efforts to keep sightseers away, but they were overwhelmed and disoriented men and they accomplished nothing. I watched one policeman climb into the lower branches of a badly mangled rubber tree about twenty yards away. He reached up above his head and began pushing with his hands, trying to dislodge something tangled there. Although it took me a few moments, I eventuall
y realized the policeman was heaving at a headless human torso.

The torso had been wedged so tightly into the tree’s branches that the policeman couldn’t move it regardless of how hard he pushed. Shifting his weight slightly and holding the trunk with one hand, he reached up again and tried tugging at it instead.

Almost immediately the torso disintegrated. A flood of yellow fluid poured down over the policeman’s head, followed by strips of gray flesh and coils of pinkish intestines.

The man slid backwards out of the tree, fell to his knees on the ground, and vomited down the front of his shirt.

New York City
Washington, D.C.

“America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets…It’s time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time. Here’s to them.”

—James Ellroy
      
American Tabloid

THE FALL TERM
at the university began in September, but it began without me. That was an arrangement agreeable all around. I didn’t feel a great deal like teaching and the university didn’t feel a great deal like employing a professor whose face had been in half the newspapers in the world after shooting a man to death during the murder of Plato Karsarkis’ wife and her security guards.

As one might expect in Thailand the separation was accomplished with massive amounts of face-saving on all sides. I asked the university for a leave of absence based on a detailed account of the injuries I suffered in the attack in Phuket, and the university granted me a leave of absence based on its deeply sympathetic feelings for me and its sincere hope I would return to my post at an early date.

Both statements were, of course, utter crap. After the kind of publicity I’d had, a Thai university wouldn’t have touched me with a rubber-insulated cattle prod. And for my part, the bullet wounds had healed completely within a few weeks following my return to Bangkok. It was the invisible wounds that caused all the pain after that.

I thought of Anita constantly: where she was now, and what she was doing. Over and over I summoned up a picture of her and each time it opened in my mind like an image projected on a screen. I would lean toward it, studying the detail, tracing its edges, looking for whatever it was I had not seen there before; but I could not find it. There was nothing that I had not seen there before. That was the part that really frightened me, of course. Even now, even knowing the truth of it now, I still could not see anything I had not seen there before.

It was not until after the school term had actually begun that I started to think about what I was going to do with myself. I had no claem"sses to teach and perhaps I never would again, but at the very least I had none for a while. I had resigned all of my corporate directorships as well and the consulting work I sometimes did had dried up of its own accord. When people hire a lawyer for a matter that they need handled discreetly, on the whole they prefer to hire someone whose public profile is discreet as well. That pretty much ruled me out now.

For what was probably the first time in my entire adult life I had no obligations at all. That was when I discovered something that a whole lot of other people no doubt already knew. When you find yourself at loose ends, you spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about lunch. I ended up reading a lot, which I didn’t mind, but with Anita gone the apartment was still and depressing and I started spending more and more time every day trying to think of some place to go just to get out of it.

One night in early November, I was at home eating a tuna sandwich and watching CNN when I heard a report that Plato Karsarkis’ daughter Zoe had died of leukemia in New York. On impulse, I had thrown a few things into a bag that very night, taken a cab to the airport the next morning, and flown to New York for her funeral.

Even now, I’m not sure exactly why I did that. Maybe it just seemed like a convenient excuse to spend some time under what might be a kinder sky. I could hardly claim I was doing it for Zoe. I had never even met her. And I sure as hell wasn’t doing it for Plato Karsarkis.

The plain fact was that I had thought about Karsarkis as little as possible since his plane had smashed into that grove of rubber trees in Phuket, and I had not thought at all about what he had told me in my hospital room that morning before it happened. I hadn’t listened to the tapes he had given me. Never even considered it. I had tucked all three of them away in a bottom drawer of my desk together with the transcripts of the email intercepts Kate had given me, and I had not taken them out or even thought about them since I had put them in there. I’m sure a psychiatrist could have come up with a term for how I had managed to bury the whole subject so completely, maybe even why, but I didn’t much want to know what it was. I already knew far more than I wanted to know about far too many things.