SHEPHERD’S FIRST CALLS were to the numbers where he usually reached Charlie: his cell numbers and the private number at the Palm Jumeirah compound. None of those numbers answered or were even redirected to voice mail. They just rang until Shepherd got bored listening to them and hung up.
Then he called the Kitnarok Foundation, identified himself, and asked if Charlie was in the office. Shepherd knew he wouldn’t be, of course, but he wanted to see what they said. They didn’t say much. The woman fielding calls was someone whose voice he didn’t recognize and she just said Charlie wasn’t there and they didn’t expect him. Although Shepherd had assumed the foundation would be a dead end, he was still disappointed it was quite as dead an end as it turned out to be.
Shifting tacks, he tried Kate’s private cell number in Bangkok. Not surprisingly under the circumstances, his call was diverted directly to voice mail. He hung up without leaving a message. Then he tried calling Tommy. The result was the same: voice mail. He hung up again without leaving a message.
Shepherd really wasn’t doing any worse than he expected to do, but he was still a little frustrated. He had been hoping to catch some kind of a lucky break.
Then with his next call, he did. Jello picked up on the first ring.
“It sounds like you were sitting there just waiting for me to call,” Shepherd said.
“When shit hits the fan, I’m always waiting for you to call,” Jello said. “Where are you?”
“Dubai.”
“Figures.”
“I need a favor,” Shepherd said, getting straight to the point.
“This is not a good time to ask for favors, Jack. You may have heard we’re a little busy. Having a prime minister murdered tends to make a real mess out of my day.”
“Yeah, well, imagine what it did to his.”
“What do you want, Jack?”
“This is a favor for you, too, man. But you’re going to have to trust me on that. I can’t tell you why right now, but this is connected with the matter that has your full attention today.”
Jello didn’t say anything.
So Shepherd told him about white 737 with the UAE tail number parked at Don Mueang. He didn’t tell him how he knew about it, and he certainly didn’t tell him that Kate called the plane Harvey. Bringing Kate’s name into the conversation would have spun it off in directions he really didn’t want to go, and telling Jello the airplane had been named after a six-foot rabbit from a fifty-year-old movie would probably have caused him to hang up.
“I need to know if that airplane is still there,” Shepherd said. “And if it isn’t, I need to know when it left and what kind of a flight plan they filed.”
Jello still didn’t say anything, but he didn’t hang up either.
Shepherd could tell he was thinking it over. “Yes or no?” he prodded. “I promise you that by tomorrow you’ll be happy you did this for me.”
Jello made a sound on the other end of the phone that Shepherd didn’t much like.
“Come on, man,” he pleaded, “trust me here.”
There was a pause and then Jello sighed heavily. Shepherd knew then that he had him.
“Where do you want me to call you?” Jello asked.
“On my cell.”
“Give me fifteen minutes,” Jello said.
Then he hung up.
***
JELLO CALLED BACK in ten minutes.
“Your plane left this morning. It took off at 9:27 A.M.”
“Exactly when was Somchai murdered?”
Jello was quiet for a moment as he thought about why Jack was asking him that.
“A little after eight this morning,” he answered slowly.
“Your shooters were on that plane.”
“Listen, Jack, whatever you know about this—”
“What about the flight plan?”
“They filed for Dubai with a stop in Phuket.”
“Dubai,” Shepherd muttered. “Fuck me dead. When did you say they took off?”
“9:27 A.M.”
Shepherd did the math in his head. An hour and a quarter to Phuket, maybe a half hour to make a quick landing and take off again, then a little over six hours to Dubai, give or take. That would put the plane on the ground in Dubai around 5:30 P.M. Bangkok time, which was 2:30 P.M. Dubai time. He glanced at his watch. It was 11:40 A.M. The plane was still three hours out.
Of course, flight plans got changed for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes pilots even filed flight plans to one destination and then re-filed them to another destination after they were out of the departure airport’s control zone. Maybe the plane wasn’t coming to Dubai at all.
Who was he kidding?
The CIA didn’t use Harvey for weekend jaunts to Las Vegas, did they? Of course the plane was coming to Dubai. Blossom Trading was in Dubai and everything that was happening was somehow tied into Blossom Trading. Even if he wasn’t yet sure exactly how.
“Did you check when the plane actually left Phuket?”
“Yeah,” Jello said. “It didn’t.”
“You mean it’s still there?”
“No, I mean it never left because it never arrived.”
“Then where did it go?”
“Beats me.”
Maybe Somchai’s killers had been onboard the plane when it left Bangkok and maybe they hadn’t been. But they most certainly wouldn’t be on it when it got to Dubai. The plane had landed somewhere, probably at a private strip in the deep south of Thailand. Filing a flight plan to Phuket would have taken it in exactly the right direction for that. That would have been where the shooters got off, but it didn’t really matter to Shepherd where the shooters got off. They were just hired guns and he didn’t really give a damn about them.
What he did give a damn about was what the plane was going to do after it offloaded the shooters, and his guess was that the plane was coming to Dubai for another cargo of weapons Those weapons would then be loaded onto it and it would fly right back to Thailand. Maybe Charlie was even waiting at the airport to get onboard himself and slip quietly back into Thailand without anyone knowing about it. Unlikely, Shepherd thought, but not impossible.
The ground in Thailand would never be more fertile for Charlie to stage his triumphant return. All his followers needed was some leadership and a little muscle, and the whole country would be theirs for the taking. Charlie was the leadership, of course, and the arms from Blossom Trading were the muscle. He didn’t even want to think about where that left Kate and a whole bunch of other decent and honorable people who thought Thailand deserved better than another military dictatorship sponsored by the CIA.
That 737 coming into Dubai was the key. It was the key whether it was there to transport weapons, or Charlie, or both. Shepherd hadn’t the slightest doubt about that.
Okay, so what the hell was he going to do about it?
He had plenty of time to get to the airport before the plane turned up since the airport was only about a half hour’s drive from the Dusit Thani. But Dubai had an awfully big airport and he had no idea where the 737 would be parked. Then, even if he could find it, what was he going to do after that? Turn himself into Bruce Willis, round up some wisecracking cops, seize control of the airplane, and take it away from the CIA? Not freaking likely. He was going to have to come up with a hell of a lot better plan than that. Fortunately, he had an idea.
“I owe you, big guy,” he said to Jello.
“Goddamn it all, Jack, if you—”
Shepherd didn’t hear the rest of whatever Jello was trying to say. He had already cut him off and was dialing the number Keur had written on the back of his business card.