KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (26 page)

“I guess I’m not following you. Why does the Thai National Intelligence Agency have any interest in a Panamanian oil trading company even if it actually did have some kind of link to Iraqi intelligence at one time? That’s old news. There
is
no Iraqi intelligence service anymore.”

“Back then Iraqi Intelligence also had a lot of operations here, Jack.”

“Where?” Now I was sure I had lost her. “Surely you don’
t mean in Thailand?”

“Yes, here in Thailand. Also in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The same countries where Karsarkis sold most of the embargoed oil.”

A mobile telephone began to ring and Kate retrieved her purse from beneath her feet and took out her phone.

“I’m sorry,” she said, glancing at its screen. “I have to take this.” She stood up and moved off until she was out of earshot, then lifted the phone and turned her back.

I noticed her driver and security man both stand at the same time and spread apart slightly. They kept a professional distance while she talked, but they stayed directly bed directtween Kate and the restaurant’s entrance. They looked as if they thought a terrorist hit squad might charge into the restaurant at any moment.

I could only hope they were wrong about that.

THE WOMAN IN
the rumpled sarong returned and refilled Kate’s wine glass.

“One more beer?” she asked, pointing to my empty Heineken bottle.

I nodded. Why not
?

I didn’t really have anything important to do for the rest of the afternoon so getting a little sleepy from the beer wouldn’t be a complete disaster. Besides, I figured having a beautiful master spy whispering exotic tales of shadowy international intelligence operations into my ear justified at least a modicum of flexibility.

Out over the Gulf of Thailand thunderheads were building and the afternoon light had turned thin and watery. I watched as lightning danced among towers of gunmetal-colored cloud somewhere very far away. The breeze kicked up a notch and brought with it distant smells of dead and dying fish. It rippled the plastic palm trees lining the railings and they made a sound like tape being ripped from a box.

A young boy brought me a fresh Heineken. At almost the same moment, Kate returned to the table.

“Does the name Ramzi Yousef mean anything to you?” she asked, sitting down and watching the boy until he had gone.

“Didn’t he have something to do with the first World Trade Center attack? The one back in…” I hesitated, searching my memory for the right year. “Was it 1993?”

“That’s right. In 1992, Yousef entered the United States on a fake passport supplied by Iraqi intelligence and made contact with a group of Iraqi immigrants who had grandiose plans for attacking Americans on their own soil. Yousef organized those people into the operation that eventually became the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.”

“Okay,” I nodded.

I had absolutely no idea where Kate was going with any of this, but it was a nice afternoon and I was on my second Heineken so I was willing to listen to her pretty much as long as she wanted to talk.

“The Americans didn’t get Yousef until 1995,” she continued. “During the two years following the first World Trade Center attack, Yousef spent most of his time here in Southeast Asia mounting elaborate operations to kill westerners.”

I scooped up a spoonful of rice with a spiral of garlic calamari in it and chewed unhurriedly, waiting for Kate to get to whatever point she wanted to make.

“Do you remember a couple of months after the attack on the World Trade Center there was an attempt to assassinate George Bush with a car bomb in Kuwait?”

“Vaguely.”

“Two hundred pounds of Portuguese PE-4A was packed into the door panels of a Toyota Landcruiser, but the Kuwaitis got wind of the plot and grabbed the Landcruiser before it made it anywhere near Bush. They also arrested seventeen people who were connected in one way or another with the plan. The two ringleaders eventually admitted to your FBI that they were acting under the instructions of the Iraqi intelligence and they named Yousef as their contact. The batch of plastic explosives they used was identified as having come from Malaysia.”

“That doesn’t mean much,” I said as I sipped at my Heineken. “The stuff could have passed through dozens of hands before it ended up in that Landcruiser.”

“It could have, but it didn’t. Do you remember the attempted bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok?”

“No.”

“That was in 1994. A stolen water truck packed with explosives was in a traffic accident very close to the Israeli Embassy and the Arab-looking man who was driving it abandoned the truck in the street and ran away. The police towed it off and never bothered to look inside, at least they didn’t until it began to smell. When they finally opened the back, they found the decomposing body of the truck’s owner and enough explosives to take a square kilometer out of the middle of Bangkok. We can put Yousef in the room in the Nana Hotel where the detonator was built and the bomb assembled.”

All of a sudden Kate was hitting a little close to home. The Nana Hotel is a third-rate tourist dump immediately across the street from a complex of go-go bars and burger joints where every western male in Bangkok has gone at least a few times, although most refuse to admit to it.

“Then after that came Project Bojinka,” Kate said while I was still trying to calculate the exact distance between the Nana Hotel and my apartment in Chidlom Place.

“I don’t know anything about that either.”

“You don’t know much about what’s been going on in Asia, do you?” Kate gave me a sharp look. “Where in the world have you been, Jack?”

“In Washington,” I answered reflexively, then laughed in spite of myself at what I had just said.

“Yousef built up a terrorist cell in Manila,” Kate went on without smiling. “They rented an apartment there in late 1994 and planned to assassinate the Pope when he came to Manila in early 1995. When Yousef was preparing the explosives, he made a mistake and started a fire. He and the others fled the apartment, leaving behind a laptop computer containing his plans to hijack eleven American commercial aircraft flying over the Pacific on a single day.”

“It’s a lousy excuse, I know, Kate, but no one in Washington pays much attention to what happens in Southeast Asia these days. After China and maybe Japan, the rest of Asia just isn’t on anyone’s radar anymore.”

Kate just sat and shook her head slowly for a moment. When she continued, her voice was tinged with exasperation.

“The files on the laptop made it clear that Yousef was planning to crash the planes into high-profile targets in the United States, including CIA headquarters in Washington.”

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

“Ramzi Yousef was an Iraqi intelligence agent,” Kate said, watching my eyes as she spoke. “We know it and so does your CIA. They just won’t admit it publicly.”

“Are you trying to tell me the Iraqis were responsible for September 11? That Dick Chaney was right?”

“I don’t know that. Anyway, that’s not the point I’m making now.”

“Then I guess you’re going to have to spell it out for me, Kate. What
is
your point?”

“Look, Jack, all those big Iraqi operations during the nineties had their roots in Southeast Asia. The reason for that was the Iraqis were developing a deeply eÀng a deentrenched, anti-western terrorist network in Asia that would survive no matter what happened anywhere else. They may have succeeded at precious little otherwise, but they succeeded at that.”

“That’s pretty hard for me to believe.”

“Is it? Think about this. Yousef’s operation to hijack the eleven American planes was financed by a Malaysian company called Konsojaya that was fronted by a shareholder list drawn from the highest levels of Malaysian business and government. If Yousef was an Iraqi intelligence officer, then almost certainly Konsojaya was actually a cover for Iraqi intelligence and it was deeply tied into the political and military power structures in Malaysia.”

“Even if that’s true, so what? That was a long time ago.”

“Was it?” Kate asked. “In January 2000, Malaysian intelligence monitored a meeting in Kuala Lumpur between two of the directors of Konsojaya and two of the men who flew the planes into your World Trade Center on September 11 of the following year.”

“Then you
are
saying the Iraqis were behind the attack on the World Trade Center. That this company in Malaysia had something to do with it.”

“It might well be true, but that’s not what I’m telling you.”

“Then for Christ’s sakes, what
are
you telling me, Kate?” Now I was the one with the exasperation in my voice. “What had all this cloak-and-dagger Iraqi terrorist stuff got to do with Plato Karsarkis? The Iraqi intelligence service is dead and buried now. Nobody cares anymore even if once upon a time they might have had some connection with the September 11 hijackers.”

“Plato Karsarkis sold smuggled oil for the Iraqis. Sedco, the Panamanian company brokering the sales, sold oil to Konsojaya. Then Konsojaya resold the oil to the Malaysian National Oil Company at a handsome profit and accumulated a lot of cash. Think about that carefully, Jack. Directors of the same company that was buying Iraqi oil from Plato Karsarkis and reselling it at a huge profit were meeting with the terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center on September 11. Do you think that was just a coincidence?”

Suddenly it seemed very quiet. I could hear the waters of the gulf scrapping the pilings twenty feet below and I listened to a seagull calling from somewhere very far away.

“What we don’t know,” Kate went on, “is exactly
why
that oil went through Konsojaya. Karsarkis claims he was working under instructions from the White House, but if he was, why would he have been arranging for a company linked to Iraqi intelligence to accumulate cash in Malaysia?”

“Because his story is bullshit?”

“Maybe, but then it might also be true. We know anti-western terrorists now have significant financial and banking operations in this region, so who knows what was really going on?”

“Perhaps—” I began, but Kate cut me off.

“Along the way Karsarkis could well have acquired an intimate knowledge of at least the financial aspects of terrorist operations in this region, possibly even some indications of what future operation plans may exist.”

Then I saw where this was all going.

“You think those are the people who are after Karsarkis, don’t you?” I said. “Not the marshals. You think someone killed Mike O’Connell because he knew what Karsarkis knows abÀrkis knoout terrorist operations in Asia, and now these same people are going after Karsarkis himself.”

Kate said nothing. She didn’t have to.

“But what about those email intercepts you gave me?” I asked. “Those weren’t intercepts of some terrorist cell. They were emails originating from the United States marshals and they seemed clear enough to me. Somebody was talking about killing Karsarkis, even if they were being very subtle about it.”

“Yes,” Kate admitted, “I don’t understand that either.”

“So what are you telling me here? That the poor bastard has both a band of Asian terrorists and the US marshals gunning for him at the same time?”

“That could be.”

“Is Karsarkis aware of any of this?” I asked.

Kate gave a little shrug, but she didn’t say anything.

“Does he at least know what the marshals might be up to?”

“I don’t think so,” she said

“I don’t see how he could be. He’d hardly be so keen on going back to Washington if he knew the friendly feds were out to punch his ticket.”

“Maybe they aren’t,” Kate said. “At least not all of them. I think the protection of the United States government is the only chance Plato Karsarkis has to survive. If you don’t take him in, if you can’t find a safe haven for him in the US, he’s lost.”

I started to object to the
you
thing, but I decided it wasn’t worth the effort and let it go.

“You said you would consider helping Plato after you read our files, Jack. I’ve let you read them, and now I’ve told you more than I should about some things that aren’t in them. I need to know what you’re going to do. I need to know now.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“The same thing Plato wants you to do.”

I noticed that Kate had begun calling the man Plato, just like Anita had begun doing on very short acquaintance. The old bastard was a real babe magnet. No doubt about that.

“Plato has asked you to file an application for a presidential pardon on his behalf, Jack, and he wants you to use your White House contacts to push it through. He’s not going back to the United States any other way.”

“Except dead.”

“There’s that.”

“And you want him alive.”

“We want him in safe hands. We want him willing to tell what he knows. We want to hear from him exactly how much danger we are in here in Asia, and we think he knows.”

“Then why not just ask him?”

“He’s not going to give up whatever he knows for nothing, Jack. You know better than that.”

“Then arrest him and send him back. Problem solved. Right?”

Kate tried to keep her face expressionless and mostly she succeeded, but for just an instant I could see the embarrassment as it passed behind her eyes.

“That’s not an option,” she said. “You of all people ought to understand that.”

I did understand that. I didn’t like Àrsquo;t it, but I understood it.

Corruption ran deep in Thailand and there were too many people eating off Karsarkis’ table for an arrest to be in the cards. I rubbed my hands over my face and thought about what Kate was asking me to do.

“This is all a hell of a mess,” I said after a while.

“Yes,” she agreed. “It is.”

“Even if I was inclined to try and get the White House to pardon Karsarkis, I don’t think I could pull it off. Nobody has that many favors to call in.”

“Plato thinks you do. So do I.”

I let that pass without comment. There was something else I needed to ask Kate about. I didn’t really want to ask, but I knew eventually I was going to have to, so I took a deep breath and just plunged it.