Free World of Trouble (9786167611136) by Jake Needham Page B

that was the source of
it, but suddenly he thought about Anita. It had been a while since
he had last thought about Anita, several days perhaps, but he
thought about her now, and with the thought came the old terror of
wondering where she was, who she was with, and what she was doing
right at that moment.
    Like an alcoholic pushing away a glass of
whiskey, Shepherd took a deep breath, expelled all such thoughts
from his consciousness, and chalked up another entry on the
ever-expanding list of things he couldn’t do anything about.

 
     
     
PART
TWO
     
BANGKOK
     
     
     
    “ But I don’t want to go among mad people,”
Alice responded.
    “ Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat.
“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
    “ How do you know I’m mad?” said
Alice.
    “ You must be,” said the Cat. “Or you
wouldn’t have come here.”
     
    — Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland

 
     
     
TWELVE
     
    THAILAND IS THE Italy of Asia. Great food, beautiful
women, joyously corrupt, and totally dysfunctional. Sometimes
Shepherd wondered if maybe it might not be the right place for him
after all. He liked food. He liked women. He was a true connoisseur
of corruption. And for the last six months he had been even more
dysfunctional than Thailand.
    It had been raining on and off ever since
Shepherd got in from Dubai. He had checked into the hotel, made a
couple of calls, and gone for a quick run in Lumpini Park to shake
off the funk of the long flight. Now he was doing very little but
sitting by himself at a window table at a pub in Bangkok’s
financial district called the Duke of Wellington. He was drinking
coffee, watching the rain, and pretending to read the International Herald Tribune . Outside the window the wind
kicked up a notch and the rain swirled like smoke through the hard
neon light of the big multicolored signs along the street.
    He had gotten used to the rain in Bangkok. It
rains a lot in the evenings. It rains a lot in the mornings, too,
and the afternoons and at night. It just didn’t matter very much to
anyone that it did. Bangkok is a twenty-four hour town and a little
rain does nothing to hold it back. Ten million people, more or
less; a city no worse than a lot of others, but no better
either.
    Some people say that Bangkok attracts a
miserable bunch of foreigners: drifters, losers, loners, people on
the run from broken lives. They claim the place is a magnet for the
lost, the lonely, and the misbegotten. Shepherd knew some people
even thought that was why he had once taken up residence there. It
wasn’t true, of course. At least not altogether.
    Shepherd wasn’t bothered much over what
people said about him. He figured that what people said about
anything depended mostly on where they sat. As for him, he was
sitting at a table at the Duke of Wellington drinking coffee. And
he didn’t really care what anyone thought about why he had moved to
Bangkok once upon a time, because he didn’t live in Bangkok
anymore.
    Shepherd finished his coffee, pushed back
from the table, and went to look for the toilet.
    ***
    WHEN HE CAME out, Pete Logan was sitting at the bar
drinking something brown. Shepherd walked over and took the stool
next to him.
    “Thanks for coming,” he said.
    Pete examined Shepherd with curiosity.
    “What?” Shepherd asked.
    “I don’t hear from you for three months, you
don’t call, you don’t write, then suddenly you ring up and ask me
to come out on a rainy night to meet you here and I do. Right about
now I’m asking myself: why am I doing this?”
    “Because you think I’m a really cool guy and
you’ve missed me?”
    “No, that’s not it.”
    Pete had been the FBI’s resident agent in
Bangkok for a little over three years. Back when Shepherd lived
there, too, they had discovered that they were two guys from
similar backgrounds stranded in a culture that didn’t much care for
either one of them. They occasionally had meals together and even
ran together