JUST UNDER AN hour later, Shepherd and Keur were in an apartment high up in a large building on Soi Thonglor, a pleasant thoroughfare on the far eastern side of Bangkok. The apartment was large and expensively decorated. If this was a Bureau safe house, Shepherd figured the Bureau’s safe house budget ought to be investigated by somebody.
The living room was at least forty feet long. It was anchored by a grand piano at one end and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves at the other. Both the east and west walls were broken by a succession of big windows through which Shepherd could see the office towers of the city in one direction and the distant glimmer of the Chao Phraya River in the other.
They sat facing each other on two sofas upholstered in rich damask patterned linen. Between them was a six-foot long square coffee table that was dotted with stacks of art books.
“Nice apartment,” Shepherd said. “When does the butler come in?”
Keur said nothing.
“As much as I appreciate the hospitality, I’m not going to accomplish anything hiding out here,” Shepherd went on.
“You’re not going to accomplish anything by getting yourself arrested either.”
“My guess is somebody doesn’t want me find Charlie and that’s why the arrest order was issued. They’re trying to keep me pinned down. I’ve got to get that order lifted.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“The first step is to find out where the arrest order came. So I’m going to call Liz and ask her.”
Shepherd swung his feet up onto the coffee table and pulled out his phone. But before he could dial, Keur leaped off the other sofa like he had been stabbed in the ass and wrapped his hand around it.
“What the fuck you doing?” he snapped.
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m calling Liz to ask her where she got that story. We’re old friends. I’m sure she’ll tell me.”
Actually, Shepherd wasn’t at all sure she would tell him. But he had always believed that sounding confident was more than half the battle, particularly when he actually didn’t have a clue what the hell was coming next.
Keur just stared at Shepherd for a moment, then put the phone on the table sat back down.
“Oh, give me a break,” Shepherd said. “You’re not saying somebody’s listening to my cell phone, are you?”
“Probably not. Cell phone signals are hard to isolate unless they already know roughly where you are.”
“And nobody but you knows where I am right now.”
“Right,” Keur nodded. “On the other hand, I’ll bet a lot of people know where the Times chick is right now.”
Shepherd hadn’t thought of that, but he wasn’t about to admit it to Keur. Instead, he arranged his features in a look of bored disinterest and waited.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Keur said. “You want something to eat?”
“Where are you going?”
“McDonald’s. There’s one next door.”
McDonald’s didn’t do much for Shepherd, but he hadn’t had eaten anything since he got up and all of a sudden he realized how hungry he was.
“Bring me some of whatever you’re having,” he said.
He had always held the view that it didn’t matter what you ordered at McDonald’s. Everything they sold tasted more or less the same anyway.
***
WHEN KEUR WALKED back into the apartment a half hour later, he handed Shepherd two paper bags. One of them contained a Big Mac, a large fries, and an apple pie. The other contained five identical Nokia cell phones, the cheap ones without any of the bells and whistles, and five chargers.
“All prepaid and untraceable,” Keur said. “Bought them down the street and loaded each one with five hours of air time. One’s for you, one’s for me. The batteries are pre-charged so we should be good to go.”
“Who are the other three for?”
“For whoever you want to talk to. When you use prepaid numbers for both ends of a conversation, you stay anonymous. At least you do for a while.”
“You seem to know quite a lot about this kind of thing, Keur.”
Keur didn’t say anything. He just handed Shepherd a card on which the shop had written the numbers for the five phones.
Shepherd took the card and turned on three of the phones. After the numbers came up on their screens, he wrote his name by one of the numbers on the card and dropped the phone into his pocket. Then he wrote Keur’s name next to another number and handed that phone to him.
Shepherd held up the third phone.
“I need to get this to Liz,” he said.
“Do you know where her office is?”
“Yes. Not far.”
“Give me the address and I’ll go downstairs and hire a motorcycle taxi to deliver it.”
Shepherd rummaged in a desk drawer until he found a large envelope. He wrote Liz’s address on it, sealed the telephone inside, and gave it to Keur. While Keur took the envelope downstairs, Shepherd turned the television on to pass the time. CNN was running World Sport again. Did they ever broadcast anything else? He muted the sound and sat staring at interminable and interchangeable images of people playing soccer until Keur came back.
“Ten minutes,” Keur said. He glanced at the television set. “I didn’t know you liked soccer.”
“I don’t. I loath soccer.”
“Me, too,” Keur said. Then he sat down on the couch across from Shepherd and focused his attention on the television set.
Fifteen minutes later, World Sport was still broadcasting excerpts from European soccer games and Shepherd and Keur were still staring at the muted television set in silence. How many soccer games could be played on the planet every day? Shepherd wondered to himself. But he quickly decided any number greater than one was way too many and lost all interest in trying to work it out.
Shepherd picked up the new Nokia, consulted his list of numbers, and dialed the one for the phone Keur had sent to Liz’s office by motorcycle taxi. No answer.
Five more minutes of silent soccer and he tried again. Still no answer.
“Maybe your delivery guy hasn’t made it yet,” he said to Keur.
“Maybe your pet reporter’s not in her office.”
Shepherd shrugged and put the Nokia down on the coffee table. Almost immediately it began to play some kind of irritating jingle. He jerked it back up again and answered.
“Who the fuck is this?” a woman’s voice bawled in his ear. “And what the fuck is going on?”
“It’s Liz,” he said to Keur.
“Jack?” Liz’s voice dropped to a stage whisper on the telephone. “Is that you, Jack?”
“Yes. It’s me.”
“Did you send me this phone?”
“Yes.”
“And you just called me on it? Twice?”
“Yes.”
“What is this number you called me from?”
“It’s my temporary phone. Just like the phone you’re talking on now is your temporary phone.”
There was a little silence while Liz took that in.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Close.”
“Close? You mean you’re in Bangkok?”
“Never mind about that now, Liz. I heard your report. Why are they looking for me?”
“You don’t know?”
“I wouldn’t be asking you if I knew.”
“The government thinks you’re General Kitnarok’s man and that he’s about to start a civil war here. They figure you’ve got something to do with that. Maybe you’re even pulling some of the strings.”
“I don’t do politics, Liz. I thought you knew that.”
“This government isn’t going to let General Kitnarok take them down. They’re going to fight. They think you’re involved, Jack, and they’re coming after you.”
“You mean coming after me the way somebody came after Adnan?”
“What are you talking about? Who the fuck is Adnan?”
It suddenly occurred to Shepherd that Liz didn’t know anything about Adnan’s headless corpse dangling under the Taksin Bridge. The military must have hushed it up pretty effectively if the press hadn’t sniffed out anything about it. That was interesting. If the military had been involved in killing Adnan to scare Charlie’s supporters, why would they keep it quiet?
“Why did you send this phone to me?” Liz interrupted Shepherd’s reverie before he could decide what to make of that.
“Because it’s untraceable.”
There was another silence and this time he could almost hear Liz thinking.
“Are you telling me my calls are being monitored?”
“Maybe. We think it’s possible.”
“We?”
“Later,” Shepherd said, glancing at Keur. “What the hell is going on, Liz? That’s what matters right now. Who’s looking for me?”
“I’m not actually quite sure. The police, I guess.”
“I talked to Jello not more than an hour ago. He didn’t know anything about it.”
“If you say so.”
“It was your story, Liz. You even had a photo of me. Where did you get it?”
“We got the picture off the internet. We went to the site for—”
“Not the goddamned picture, Liz. I meant the story that the Thai authorities are looking for me. Where did you get the story from?”
“You know I can’t tell you what my source—”
“Bullshit, lady. Somebody is after me and I want to know who it is. Don’t give me some academic horseshit about protecting your sources.”
Liz said nothing at all for at least half a minute. Shepherd knew he was about to find out how friendly they really were.
“The story came from a guy at NIA,” she eventually said. “But that’s all I’m going to tell you”
“You got this story about me from the National Intelligence Agency?”
“Yes.”
“Who was it? Who gave you the story?”
“Jack, I’d like to help you, I really would, but—”
“Who the fuck was it, Liz?”
In the silence, Shepherd could hear Liz breathing on the other end of the phone. Maybe he had gone too far. Maybe begging would have been a better tactic. Sometimes Shepherd despaired at his lousy judgment about how to get women to do what he wanted. He had no problem with men. With men he could be very persuasive. But women? He thought he knew less about dealing with them now than he had when he was about five and the only women in his life were his mother and his kindergarten teacher. And he hadn’t known shit about how to deal with them either.
But this time, for once, the cylinders clicked down and the lock popped open.
“His name is Tammarat,” Liz said, “Tammarat something-or-another.”
“Tommy? Tommy is the one who told you that the cops are looking for me?”
“That’s right. You know Tommy?”
Oh yeah, Shepherd thought to himself. I know Tommy all right.
“Did Tommy tell you why the NIA was looking for me?”
“He said you were running things here for General Kitnarok.”
“And you believed that?”
“I know you work for Kitnarok, Jack. Everybody knows that. We just don’t know for sure what you do for him.”
“So you figured that fomenting revolution might be as good a job description as any? Sort of like a Che Guevara on an hourly rate?”
“If it’s not true, come on over here and I’ll do an interview, Jack. I’ll give you a chance to tell your side of the story.”
“Right. And have your buddies from NIA waiting for me? Fat chance.”
“I wouldn’t do that, Jack.”
Shepherd knew Liz probably wouldn’t, but how could he be sure about something like that anymore? There was a time not very long ago when Shepherd would have said that he and Tommy were friends, too. Or if not friends, at least acquaintances who wouldn’t stab each other in the back. But the last time Shepherd had seen Tommy, the little shit was in Dubai slinking off Harvey right behind Robert Darling. And now he was apparently back in Bangkok and planting stories with the press that Shepherd was stirring up a civil war in Thailand.
“Keep that phone handy, Liz. I’ll think about it.”
But Shepherd wasn’t going to think about it very hard. It was time for him to figure out who his friends really were.
And he wasn’t about to bet his butt that The New York Times was one of them.