LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (32 page)

I contemplated the route while I ate my sandwich. There weren’t very many landmarks and it occurred to me that some basic reconnaissance might help me to make up my mind exactly what to do. If I drove the route that Tom had marked and took a closer look at the house, maybe something brilliant would occur to me. Bolting the last crusts of my sandwich, I signed the bill—ripping off Benny Glup’s signature with a flourish—refolded the map, and walked out to the jeep.

I found the place where the red line on Tom’s map began without a great deal of trouble. It was little more than a bumpy track that intersected the asphalt from the left and disappeared inland between two dilapidated wooden buildings, but I turned into it without hesitation. I drove for a long while through pineapple fields while the terrain rose steadily toward some rugged-looking hills to the west. When Captain Tom had stopped the jeep and pointed out the compound where Barry was supposed to be holed up
,
it seemed to me that we were on the ocean side of those hills, the opposite side to the one I was now approaching.

Beyond the pineapple field was a dense forest of rubber trees, all of them apparently planted about the same time, and the utter uniformity of their size and the geometrical perfection of the long rows gave the entire grove the unreal feeling of a cartoon. The track entered the rubber forest slipping between parallel ranks of spindly, white-streaked trees set barely ten feet apart and the afternoon light slowly went gray and spongy. Then abruptly I was out of the grove again and climbing once more in the harsh glare of the afternoon sun.

About ten minutes later I came upon a ramshackle one-story wooden building with the roof caved in and I wondered if it was the abandoned tin mine Tom had mentioned. I saw no other obvious evidence of a mine, but then again I really had no idea at all what a tin mine might look like, abandoned or otherwise, so I couldn’t be sure. Just beyond the mine, if that’s what it was, the road twisted sharply and I saw how far I had climbed.

Out along the horizon was the Andaman Sea. It was slate gray now rather than blue, and it looked to be turning rough in a rising wind. From somewhere, perhaps one of the craggy, shrub-clad islands just offshore where I had heard sea gypsies still lived, the steady breeze carried the pungent smell of salted fish drying in the open air. Up here the rain forest was thick and luxuriant. Fed relentlessly by the southwestern monsoons, groves of frangipani trees with their cloying fragrance were intermingled with deep stands of coconut palms, figs, and mangos. The jungle was damp and lush. You could hear the solitude.

The jeep pitched and bounced over the ground as the track became steeper. When I topped a little ridgeline, the ruts swung sharply right and paralleled it for a short run before cutting left again then surging over the top. On the opposite side of the ridge, the deep lushness of the rain-forest vanished, metamorphosing abruptly into a vast and ominous pan of bare limestone interrupted only intermittently by lonely clumps of scrubby trees bent and twisted into angry shapes by the winds that swirled up from the Andaman. The twin ruts became an almost invisible track over the rock and the jeep struggled for traction. About a half-mile further on, the track swung around a sharp outcropping of limestone and I saw just below me the compound that Captain Tom had called Berghof
.

The track gradually descended for another four or five hundred yards on the other side of the outcropping until it dead ended at the compound. An asphalt highway emerged from behind a rise to the right and led directly to the main gates. I gathered that was what Tom had described as the main road.

I stopped and backed up until the jeep was out of sight down behind the ridge, then I got the binoculars out of the duffle and walked up the road again. When I found a place where I wouldn’t be too conspicuous, I settled myself in and braced my arms against the rock to steady the glasses. From my elevated vantage point, I could see almost every part of the compound clearly.

Two massive gates gleamed in the afternoon sun like teak polished to a high gloss. They were flanked with two equally massive brass torches, each of them sticking a good six feet over the top of the wall. Inside the wall was what appeared to be a main house with three smaller buildings grouped around it. I studied each of the structures through the glasses, taking care to angle the lenses so that the afternoon sun wouldn’t flash off them and give me away. There was no obvious security paraphernalia visible, but of course there wouldn’t be, would there?

One of the smaller buildings looked like a large garage with room for several vehicles. It had a huge tank next to it that might have been for gasoline storage. The other two small buildings looked like guesthouses, except that one had four satellite dishes on its roof: three small ones and one very large one. Either there was a sophisticated communications facility in there or somebody watched a whole lot of television.

The main house sprawled across most of the rest of the compound. It was built of black rock with shiny brass trim and oversized windows and doors. Overall, the whole effect was something like Wayne Newton does Phuket.

As I studied one of the smaller houses more carefully, the one without the electronic apparatus on the roof, a man came out. I was too far away to pick out his features with any clarity, but I watched him as he walked toward the inside of the front gate. I lost sight of him when my angle of vision was blocked by the compound’s wall, but I kept scanning with the glasses and in a moment he reappeared. It looked to me as if the man was walking the compound’s perimeter like a watchman making his rounds, and the automatic rifle he carried in the crook of his left arm pretty much sealed the deal.

I continued to follow the man as he paced the inside of the wall. Then something behind him attracted his attention and I saw him half turn, apparently talking to someone. I swung the glasses in the direction the man was looking and braced my arms to steady them.

A woman with her hands on her hips was visible in the half-open front door to the main house and she looked as if she was giving instructions to the man with the rifle. I didn’t need to see her face to know who she was.

Beth Staley was a hard woman to miss.

MY CELL PHONE
began to ring and in the silence it sounded as loud as a siren. I trotted quickly back to the jeep, dug the phone out of the duffle bag, and flipped it open. Since I was on what looked like the dark side of the moon, I couldn’t believe it would work very well, but then a man’s voice sounded in my ear so clearly that it startled me.

“Professeur?”

“Tom?”

“Oui, Professeur.
It is me.”

Captain Tom sounded happier after we had identified each other with certainty, but I thought there was still some kind of an odd note in his voice.

“Find out who owns the house?” I asked.

“That was another joke, right,
Professeur?
Like the shit about the bazooka?”

“Look, Tom, just tell me what you found out. All right?”

“Yes, all right.”

Tom paused a beat before he went on. There was something in the silence, but I couldn’t decide what it was.

“The land title is held in the name of a Thai company, but that company is controlled by another one registered in Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong company is jointly owned by two companies, both of them registered in the British Virgin Islands as nonresident trusts.”

“Figures,” I said. “Let me guess. The trustees for the companies are both lawyers who are somewhere else.”

“Both companies have the same trustee. And, yes, you are right. He’s a lawyer who is somewhere else.”

There was that odd note in Tom’s voice again.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Why are you fucking me around like this,
Professeur?”

“I’m not fucking you around, Tom. I just want to know who the trustee is.”

“You really don’t know?”

“No, I really don’t know.”

“That’s strange,
Professeur.
I believe you, but that’s pretty fucking strange.”

“Why, Tom?”

“Because the fellow we use to run down this kind of stuff never gets it wrong. He says the name of the trustee for both companies is Jonathan William Shepherd. That’s you,
n’est-ce pas?”

There was a long silence. I knew Tom was waiting for me to tell him exactly what was going on. Since I didn’t have any better idea than he did, I said nothing.

“You still there,
Professeur?”

“Yeah, Tom, I’m here. Look, let that go. I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

And even if I did, I had no goddamned clue what I could say.

Captain Tom must have been accustomed to people who didn’t want to talk about things because he changed the subject smoothly.

“Where are you now,
Professeur?”

“I followed the route you marked on the map. I’m in a spot just above the compound and I can see it pretty well. Do you know how many people are in there?”

“Why? What are you going to do? Rush the place with that faggot .45 of yours?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, shit,
Professeur.”

There was a short silence before Captain Tom went on.

“I don’t know who’s in there. The place isn’t that big, is it?”

“Looks pretty big from here. You don’t know for sure?”

“Jesus Christ,
Professeur,
I know fuck all for sure.”

I didn’t say anything else. Captain Tom obviously hoped I would tell him what I was going to do, but he wasn’t sure he should press the point.

“Hey, I was only making a joke about rushing the house,” he eventually said.

“Uh-huh.”

“I mean… you wouldn’t really do that, would you,
Professeur?”

“Nope.”

“Hey, okay. You had me worried there for a minute.”

Then Captain Tom must have played back the last bit of our conversation and noticed that I had left his original question conspicuously unanswered.

“So what
are
you going to do?”

“You got a phone number for the compound, Tom?”

“Ah… no.”

“Didn’t think you would. Then I guess I’ll have to go down and ring the doorbell like you suggested.”

“Hey,
Professeur,
now wait a minute. If I were you, I’d think about it for a long time before—”

I cut Tom off before he could get wound up.

“Ground control to Captain Tom. Over and out.”

I hit the red power button and my cell phone went dead. I shoved it into the duffle and walked back to the rock outcropping that had become my observation post; then I raised the field glasses again. The compound looked quiet and sleepy in the late afternoon sun and the guard was no longer anywhere to be seen.

So I’m the trustee for the property, huh?

Of course Barry Gale was down there. He had flown to Phuket under my name and now here he was, surrounded by armed guards and in an elaborate compound owned by companies I appeared to control. Barry couldn’t have made it any clearer if he had installed a red neon sign on the roof.

Barry Gale
wanted
me to find him.

And now I had.

So why wait any longer to ask Barry what the hell this was all about? I certainly wasn’t just going to drive back down to the Phuket Yacht Club now and think about it some more over a Heineken. In my experience, life generally worked out best if you just kept moving in a reasonably straight line most of the time, even if a lot of people tried to make it seem more complicated than that. For example, if you wanted to ask someone a question, usually the best approach was to walk right up to them and ask it. That way, you got your answer without a lot of unnecessary screwing around. Of course, the answer was frequently a lie; but hey, it was a start, wasn’t it?

I lowered the glasses and looked around. Barry had picked a hell of a good bolt-hole. Other than using the main road or coming cross-country like I had, the compound was unapproachable. Nobody could get within five hundred yards of the place without being spotted, and even if somebody
could
get up to it the walls made it a fortress that would have given General Patton pause. With the gasoline storage and the communications equipment, Barry could probably hold out in there long enough to make anyone stalking him throw up their hands in exasperation and just go away.

Waiting until dark to approach the compound probably wouldn’t make any difference, but then again, it might. The element of surprise was always supposed to be a good thing, wasn’t it?

Okay, let’s just say that I managed to get down there without being seen. Then what?

I could check the place out, of course, see if there might be a way to get past the wall and slip by the guards. Maybe I could give Barry Gale a bit of a shock that way and that would help me get the truth out of him. Okay, so it wasn’t much—in fact, it probably wasn’t anything—but it was the cleverest plan I could come up with on short notice.

On the other hand, it occurred to me that armed guards aren’t particularly relevant unless whoever is being guarded expects someone to show up, so it was possible that the primary effect of me suddenly appearing out of the darkness might be to get my ass shot off. That insight caused me to recalculate the value of the element of surprise a few times, but I couldn’t make up my mind which way the balance fell so I decided not to worry about it.

It was just after five. I walked back to the jeep and settled into the passenger seat, waiting either for darkness to fall or rational thought processes to return, whichever occurred first.

It seemed unlikely there would be any other traffic the way I had just come—I hadn’t seen another vehicle the entire time I’d been driving—but just in case, I reversed the jeep along the track until I found a good spot to swing it around. I parked it facing out toward the ocean like I was up there to watch the sunset. If anyone did come up the road, I would probably look like just another loony tourist in a tropical daze.

I unzipped the duffle and pushed the glasses inside. When I did, I saw the .45 and lifted it out. I used to shoot some at a range in the Maryland suburbs just outside of Washington, but I hadn’t touched a handgun since I had been in Thailand and I had certainly never pointed one at a human being. What the hell did I think I was going to do with this one? Use it to threaten Barry?