LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (39 page)

Eventually it was my visitor who broke the silence.

“What made you so sure I didn’t know about all this already, Jack?”

“I wasn’t sure.” I thought about it some more. “You just don’t seem to me to be a guy who would be part of this kind of thing.”

“Too honorable?”

“Not really. Just too smart.”

We let our half-smiles hang in the air for a moment.

“How long have we known each other, Jack?” the man finally asked.

“Oh God, I don’t know. We were roommates our last year at Georgetown, so I guess that makes it… what? Twenty-odd years now?”

The man nodded. “Yeah, about that.”

The sun hid behind a cloud for a moment and the terrace slipped into a gray half-light.

“When I was first appointed White House counsel, I heard from everybody I’d ever met. I had a million best friends. You were probably the only guy I’d ever known who didn’t call me.”

“I was probably the only guy you’d ever known who didn’t want anything from you then.”

“But you do now.”

“Yeah.”

“Then lay it out for me, Jack. Tell me exactly what it is that you
do
want.”

I put it as plainly as I could.

“I want to be absolutely certain the president knows about this. If he does, and it’s what he wants, then there’s not a damned thing I can do about it no matter what I believe. But if he doesn’t know, he ought to, then he can do whatever he thinks he should.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

The bottom rim of the sun touched the ocean at last and we watched silently as the huge red ball slid through the horizon.

“I can tell you right now, Jack, nothing like this came out of the White House. I don’t know who these guys are, but they’re not ours. It sounds to me like somebody at the Pentagon or CIA has gone way over the edge.”

The man shook his head in disgust.

“I really hate goddamned fucking cowboys like that. There are so many good people who care so much, but sometimes…”

He trailed off with a rueful smile.

Just as the sun’s topmost edge plopped out of sight, there was a sudden bright flare. An arc of brilliant emerald green exploded out of the ocean and expanded like a shock wave until it was swallowed up by the darkening sky.

Damn. So there really
is
a green flash. How about that?

I turned to say something about it and saw that my visitor was holding out his hand.

“I’ve got to leave, Jack, but I can promise you one thing. I will tell the president the whole story tomorrow. You have my word on that.”

We shook and I walked him back inside. We crossed the room through the gathering gloom.

“Oh, hey, I almost forgot,” my visitor suddenly said.

The man picked up his briefcase from where he had left it by the door. He swung it onto the desk and snapped open the catches. Reaching inside he produced a box of cigars and handed it to me.

“Montecristos. Cubans, no less,” I said turning the box over in my hands. “Isn’t this a breach of national security or something?”

“Working in the White House has got to have some perks, doesn’t it?”

We both smiled, but I suspected at different things.

“It’s a real shame you had to give them those bank records,” the man said as he closed his briefcase. “Now that they’ve got their hands on the slush fund again, shutting down these guys will be a bitch.”

I scratched at the back of my neck with one hand and made a show of thoughtful deliberation.

“You have to understand that I needed to see your reaction before I gave you the last little bit of it,” I said after a pause. “I had to see if you already knew.”

My visitor eyed me a moment, a half-smile creeping over his face, and then he leaned against the wall, waiting.

“I have no idea where the money is,” I said. “Neither do they.”

I paused to let that sink in.

“And now that they’ve killed Barry Gale, they’ll never find it.”

There was a look of puzzlement in my visitor’s nod. “But what about the bank records you gave them?” he asked.

“The network I got them into was the university network at Chula, not the Asian Bank of Commerce. What Phony Frank got was a list of transactions I’d made up for the final exam in my international banking class. I don’t think they’ll be of much use to someone who’s trying to overthrow the Chinese government.”

My visitor stuck his tongue into the corner of his cheek.

“You’re shittin’ me,” he laughed.

“I shit you not, partner.”

The man laughed some more and clapped me on the shoulder.

“You sure you don’t want a job at the White House, Jack? You’re just the kind of sneaky, deceitful bastard who would fit right in.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the red and yellow plumes of the setting sun coloring the sky above the Andaman Sea. They were bombarding the heavens like rockets, bursting against the clouds and sprinkling a dusting of pink and gold over the gunmetal surface of the sea.

“No thanks,” I said after a moment. “I’m fine right here.”

AFTER MY VISITOR
left I took one of the Montecristos out of the box and went back out on the terrace. I dragged a chair around until I could slump back into it and prop my feet up on the railing, then I lit the cigar, cupping my hand around its tip to block off the ocean winds until a red coal was burning deep inside. Taking my time, I nursed a tiny cone of ash into life at its tip.

I sat there smoking quietly and soon I was enveloped by a night deeper than any I could remember. I stole away into it and thought back over what my visitor had said.

Did the White House really know nothing about any of this?

Had no one there ever heard of Just John or Phony Frank, or about the murders of Dollar Dunne or Howard the Roach or Barry Gale?

Maybe he had told me the truth. Maybe nobody there knew anything.

But then again, maybe somebody there knew everything.

What else would he have said if they had?

Tilting my head back, I looked up at a canopy of stars that was so radiant, so lustrously deep and rich that all at once I felt a sensation of being released from the world. It was as if at any moment I was about to be lifted gently away from the earth and drawn straight up into the sky.

I took a deep draw on my cigar. The wet ocean air collected the gray wisps of smoke and tugged them away into the night.

THE END

Jack Shepherd #2
Enjoy a preview of another
Jack Shepherd international crime thriller

You can buy the full version of KILLING PLATO here

Kindle US & International

Kindle UK

KILLING PLATO

IT STARTED THE
way a spy story should start.

On a misty night in Phuket.

In a little bar.

I recognized him the moment I walked in. He was standing by himself holding a tiny stainless steel telephone to his ear. His body was turned slightly away from me, his elbows resting on the polished teakwood of the bar top, and he was gazing out toward the ocean, nodding his head occasionally, listening more than he was talking.

Plato Karsarkis could not be here of all places, casually leaning on a bar in Phuket, a resort island off the eastern coast of Thailand. There was plainly no way in the world that could be.

Yet, just as plainly, there he was.

Anita and I had spent the day exploring. A warm drizzle began to fall late in the afternoon and we decided to call it a day and have an early dinner at a place called the Boathouse that is right on the sand at Kata Beach. I parked the jeep and Anita stopped at the ladies room while I went in to get us a table. The girl at the hostess stand said she would have one free in fifteen or twenty minutes, so I left my name and went into the bar to wait.

The bar was laid out in the shape of a large C. Plato Karsarkis was leaning on the side nearest the ocean and so I took a stool on the opposite side that offered both a striking panorama of the Andaman Sea and the opportunity to stare at Karsarkis without being too obvious about it. I ordered a Heineken and wondered what Anita’s face would look like when she came out of the ladies’ room and saw him.

Anita had designated this trip to Phuket as our official honeymoon and she had been obsessive about making every detail of it perfect. We were both well into our forties—I somewhat more so than she—and we had been living together for almost two years before we got married so I really couldn’t understand why she was making such a big deal out of having a honeymoon now. Still, Anita had her own ways, and I had absolutely no intention of risking a quarrel by volunteering my thoughts on the subject.

Anita was an artist, a painter whom European art circles had clasped to their bosom as a harbinger of what the critics were calling a new wave of post-feminist revisionism, whatever that meant. Even when her behavior didn’t make complete sense to me, I always tried to remember Anita had an ability to see the world in ways that I could not, ways that were continually surprising and frequently illuminating.

I shifted my weight on the stool to cover the turn of my body and glanced back toward Karsarkis.

He seemed taller in person than he had on television, although I had always heard it was supposed to be the other way around. His forehead was quite high, his nose rounded in that way that some people call Roman, and his curly gray hair trimmed closely against his skull. He wore a tight black T-shirt tucked into black chinos cinched with a narrow belt, also black, and although he must have been in his fifties, maybe even older, he looked pretty able-bodied. The whole effect was something like a cross between Giorgio Armani and Richard Nixon.

What he did
not
look like, leaning nonchalantly there on the bar and talking into his shiny little telephone, was the world’s most famous fugitive. Which was funny, because that was exactly what he was.

“That was a Heineken,” the bartender said, breaking into my reverie. “Right?”

I pulled my eyes away from Karsarkis. “Right,” I said.

The bartender placed a tall glass still frosty from the cooler on a blue and white striped square of cotton and poured my beer from the familiar green bottle. When he was done, he rapped the empty bottle smartly on the bar top, nodded, and walked away.

As soon as he did, my eyes flicked right back to Plato Karsarkis.

Karsarkis had put away his mobile phone and now he was just leaning against the bar on his forearms, doing nothing in particular. Oddly, it almost seemed as if he was looking at
me
. So unlikely was that it took several seconds for me to register that he really
was
looking at me. Worse, when Karsarkis saw the realization of it in my eyes, he raised his right index finger and shook it at me in an exaggerated gesture of mock irritation.

I flashed a hasty and very self-conscious smile and, thoroughly embarrassed, looked down at the bar. I was reaching for my glass again just to have something to do when Karsarkis called out to me.

“Are you Jack Shepherd?”

My first thought of course was that I had misunderstood him. Plato Karsarkis could not have been speaking to me or have the slightest idea who I was. So I kept my eyes forward and said nothing.

“Pardon me,” Karsarkis called out again. “You’re Jack Shepherd, aren’t you?”

Christ, I
had
heard him right. Karsarkis
was
speaking to me, and he
did
know who I was. With what I’m certain was a look of utter bafflement, I lifted my eyes back to Karsarkis. He shook his finger at me again, and then he stood up and started around the bar.

Holy shit
.

The world’s most famous fugitive was not only alive and well and having a drink at the Boathouse in Phuket, he was walking straight toward me, his hand thrust out to shake mine.

KILLING PLATO

I TOOK KARSARKIS’
hand. What else was I going to do? We shook.

“I’m Plato Karsarkis.”

“I know.”

Karsarkis nodded quickly and lowered his eyes. The man’s brief acknowledgement of his notoriety seemed to me to contain an element of genuine embarrassment and, for a moment, I almost felt sorry for him.

“May I?” Karsarkis pointed to the stool to my right, the one at the end of the bar right up against the wall.

“Of course.”

He pulled the stool out and sat down, pushing himself around until his back was to the wall and his face turned toward mine. The bartender had returned when he saw Karsarkis reach for the stool and stood waiting quietly.

“Campari and soda,” Karsarkis said without looking at him. “And Mr. Shepherd will have another…”

His eyebrows lifted into a question.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”

Karsarkis nodded slightly at that, but made no comment. After a moment his eyes slid off mine and we sat there together in what was for me an uneasy silence until the bartender returned with his drink. After that, Karsarkis took a deep breath and let it out again and I thanked heaven that it looked like he was finally going to say
something
.