World of Trouble (9786167611136)
Read World of Trouble (9786167611136) Online
Authors: Jake Needham
Tags: #hong kong, #thailand, #political thriller, #dubai, #bangkok, #legal thriller, #international crime, #asian crime
“In his raw power to bring the street-level
flavor of contemporary Asian cities to life, Jake Needham is
Michael Connelly with steamed rice.”
– The Bangkok Post
“Jake Needham is Asia’s most stylish and
atmospheric writer of crime fiction.”
–
The Singapore
Straits Times
“Needham certainly knows where a few bodies
are buried.” –
Asia Inc.
“Jake Needham has a knack for bringing
intricate plots to life. His stories blur the line between fact and
fiction and have a ‘ripped from the headlines’ feel…Buckle up and
enjoy the ride.”
– CNNgo
“What you will not get is pseudo-intellectual
new-wave Asian literature, sappy relationship writing, or Bangkok
bargirl sensationalism. This is top class fiction that happens to
be set in an Asian context. As you turn the pages and follow Jack
Shepherd in his quest for the truth, you can smell the roadside
food stalls and hear the long tail boats roar up and down the Chao
Praya River.”
– Singapore Airline SilverKris Magazine
“For Mr. Needham, fiction is not just a good
story, but an insight into a country’s soul.”
–The New Paper
(Singapore)
TROUBLE
A novel
by
Smashwords edition published by
Half Penny Ltd.
Hong Kong
A WORLD OF TROUBLE, copyright © 2012 by Jake
Raymond Needham
This e-book is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other
people. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it or it
was not purchased specifically for your use, please purchase a copy
for yourself. Thank you for respecting the work of the author and
the publisher.
Excerpt from LAUNDRY MAN, © 2011 by Jake
Raymond Needham
Cover Design by the Stuart Bache Company,
London
Cover © 2013 Jake Raymond Needham
Smashwords edition ISBN 978-616-7611-13-6
English-language print publication
history
First edition: Marshall Cavendish Editions,
Marshall Cavendish International, Singapore, 2012, ISBN
978-981-4361-51-4
All e-book editions published by Half Penny
Ltd, Hong Kong
Smashword Edition: October 2012
memory of John Lewis
CNN’s first correspondent in Asia
and my last best friend
NOTE
THIS IS A NOVEL. It’s not journalism. That’s why I
got into the fiction business in the first place, folks. I make
this stuff up.
Yes, I hear you say, but you’ve been around
Asia a long time. You’ve seen a lot of things. You know a lot of
people. Isn’t this book, at least to some degree, based on people
who are real and events that are true?
This is what Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian
writer who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, had to say on
the subject of whether his novels were true:
“
Novels lie—they can’t help doing so—but that’s
only one part of the story. The other is that, through lying, they
express a curious truth, which can only be expressed in a veiled
and concealed fashion, masquerading as what it is not.”
I think he’s right about that. But I’ll leave
it to you to decide how it applies to this book. If it applies at
all.
One other thing.
I have a friend who was a senior intelligence
officer in Asia for most of his career. On a night not long ago in
Macau, we were smoking a couple of good cigars and talking about my
books. He asked me how I had found out the truth about an event
around which I had built the plot of one of them. I didn’t find out
about anything, I told him. I just made it up.
“That’s the thing about Asia,” he chuckled.
“You really
can’t
make anything up. No matter how outrageous
what you have written might seem, one day somebody will come up to
you and tell you it really happened, or that it is about to
happen.”
Let me repeat this: I made up the events, the
characters, and most of the politics in this novel.
But more than once while writing it, I
remembered what my friend said that night in Macau.
He usually turns out to be right when he
makes an observation like that about Asia.
Just this once, however, I really do hope
he’s wrong.
I HAVE THE right to remain silent and mostly I have
exercised that right. Anything I say can and will be used against
me in a court of law. I have the right to an attorney. If I cannot
afford an attorney, one will be appointed for me.
That’s what they told me.
Of course, I figure it’s mostly crap. If I
don’t start talking pretty soon, telling them what they want to
hear, they’ll haul me out to a little room somewhere in the back
and beat the shit out of me.
So let’s get one thing straight right now.
Before they come back.
I am not who they say I am. I am not a
criminal, not a spy, certainly not an assassin. I am not any of
those things.
Maybe I cut a few corners here and there. I
would admit to that. But at every turn I tried to do what seemed to
me to be right. When you come down to it, that is my only real
defense. I did what seemed to me to be right.
There is a pathetic air to that claim. I
understand that. And it is something that embarrasses me. But
nevertheless it is the truth, so I say it whenever they ask why I
did what I did. At least, I think it is the truth. I am not
absolutely certain I know what the truth actually is anymore.
Five years ago I was a high-flying lawyer in
Washington, D.C., well enough connected to the masters of the
universe to occasionally lunch at the White House mess. Three years
ago, for reasons I will skip over now, I left the United States to
become a professor of international business at Bangkok’s
Chulalongkorn University. It was not long before I had a beautiful
Italian-born girlfriend, a woman who would later become my wife,
and together Anita and I moved into one of Bangkok’s toniest
apartment buildings.
That was when I really hit my stride. Half
the companies in Asia seemed to want an American academic on their
board of directors. Particularly one with connections in Washington
who had been publicly hailed as an expert in international finance
and money laundering. There was money and there was prestige. There
were private jets and there were suites at famous hotels. There
was, let’s face it, ego stroking on an international scale. It was
like a blow job that never stopped. It was a great time. The
best.
Today, on the other hand, is not a great
time. Not the best.
I am no longer a professor of anything. I am
no longer on anyone’s board of directors or taking meetings with
those good corporate citizens who were lined up outside my office
door just a few months ago. I was a reluctant player in a little
drama with an international fugitive just slightly less notorious
than O.J. Simpson, one who thought I was his ticket to a White
House pardon, and I attracted a lot of attention. All of it
bad.
And that, as they say, was that.
Goodbye Chulalongkorn University. Goodbye
corporate directorships. Goodbye private jets. Goodbye suites in
famous hotels. Goodbye blow job.
I earn my living these days practicing law
again. Or at least that is what I say when someone asks me what I
am doing since I have no better answer. I work by myself in a
one-room office in Hong Kong that is above a noodle shop. I live
alone in a borrowed apartment. And I have absolutely no idea where,
or with who, Anita may be anymore. There’s a pattern there, but
it’s one I try not to dwell on.
In order to convince myself I was really a
lawyer again, I had to have at least one client, of course. I had
known Charlie for a while and he offered to become my first client
and I took him on gratefully, without a second thought. It was just
that simple. It never once occurred to me back then that having
Charlie for a client would lead me straight to where I am today,
sitting here in this chair, waiting for the FBI goons to come back
and say what is to become of me.
Perhaps if I can explain to you what really
happened, if I can convince you this is all just a terrible
mistake, I can convince them, too. Perhaps I can even convince
myself.
The problem is where to start. This is a
story with a lot of beginnings. Sadly, it still has only one
ending. All the same, I must begin somewhere, so I will do so
here.
On a gloomy day in January in, of all
places, Dubai, a tiny city-state in the United Arab Emirates
perched on the edge of the Persian Gulf.
Just before dawn that morning a brief but
furious storm had rolled in from the desert and left the whole city
smelling like a roll of aluminum foil.
Oh wait, I almost forgot.
My name is Jack Shepherd.
But that may be the last thing I tell you of
which I am completely and absolutely certain.
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they
had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.
In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had
five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that
produce? The cuckoo clock.
— Graham Greene
The Third Man
THE BLACK MERCEDES S500 pulled to the curb and
stopped. Shepherd opened his eyes. He didn’t much like what he saw
when he did.
“I thought we were going to your office,” he
said.
“We are,” the man in the backseat with him
replied.
“This isn’t your office.”
“I need to stop here first.”