KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (31 page)

“Okay, thanks,” I said. “I’ll take you up on that.”

I saw Plaid Shirt and the other man exchange a quick glance, but neither said anything. Plaid Shirt walked over to the silver Jaguar and opened one of the rear passenger doors. Mia got in. Then Plaid Shirt took the front passenger seat and the other man got behind the wheel. Nobody seemed inclined to hold a door for me so I opened the other rear passenger door by myself and got in next to Mia.

All the way down the driveway I wondered about the marshals who were outside blocking the roads with their gray minivans and whether they would try to prevent Mia from passing, but when we drove out through the gate, the minivans were gone. The road was as still and empty as if they had never been there at all.

“You look as if you’re about to say something, Mr. Shepherd.”

Mia spoke as we passed the place York and Parker had pulled me over on my way in. She was no doubt wondering why I was swiveling my head around like an idiot right then.

“Not really,” I said. Then I added lamely, “It’s been a bad day.”

“Oh, my,” Mia laughed, “and it’s not even lunchtime yet.”

No one spoke again until we had turned onto the main highway and the Jag had settled into a high-speed cruise. The driver seemed skilled and Plaid Shirt sat forward scanning the roadway attentively. Whether these two guys were really IRA I had no earthly idea, but watching them now I had no doubt at all that they were a couple of pros wherever they came from.

“I want to thank you for coming to see Plato today, Mr. Shepherd.” Mia spoke suddenly, without looking at me. “Plato needs…he’s been a little depressed. Having someone he respects to talk to for a while was probably a great blessing for him.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant and I said nothing.

“Can you help him?” Mia asked, turning away from the window and examining me, her lips compressed to mask any expression.

“Help him?”

“With a pardon. He says the White House listens to you, that if you will represent him they might grant it.”

“If that what he says, Mrs. Karsarkis, I’m afraid your husband has far too high an opinion of me.”

Mia nodded absently, letting me off the hook without a fuss, for which I was grateful.

The highway was almost empty and we made good time. The silver Jag’s tires sang a steady, high-pitched whine over the asphalt as we passed little houses here and there, mostly simple structures of concrete blocks with a carport occasionally tacked onto one side like an afterthought. For most of the way there was little sign of habitation. The highway ran through thick groves of banana trees, ferns, and elephant ears, their leaves shiny with moisture from the air and flattening slightly in a feeble breeze.

We passed the entrance to the Sheraton Grande and a well-manicured golf course appeared on our right. A conga line of middle-aged Japanese in funny clothes was making its way down a gently rolling fairway with a crowd of young Thai women trailing behind them. Some of the women carried the golfers’ heavy bags, while oth
ers carried brightly striped umbrellas to shade the Japanese from the sun.

“He misses her more than he would ever admit to you.” Mia spoke to the window rather than to me. “Zoe, I mean. His daughter.”

I said nothing.

“He wants to go home, Mr. Shepherd.” Mia turned from the window and fixed me with a stare so desolate I could not return it. “All he wants to do is to go home.”

There were many things I could ings I chave said, but none of them seemed worth the hurt they would no doubt inflict on this woman. So I tried to come up with something innocuous.

“Your husband has asked me to lodge a pardon application on his behalf, Mrs. Karsarkis, and I am considering it. But please understand I have not yet made any commitment to him.”

That sounded ridiculously tight-assed, and almost as soon as I had spoken I wished I had said nothing at all. Regardless, Mia just nodded as if that was what she had expected me to say, and then she went back to staring out the window.

WE LEFT THE
main highway, turned directly into the full glare of the midday sun, and followed a narrow, humpbacked road toward the rocky promontory where Amanpuri perched. I watched a column of smoke from a trash fire rise up in ripples so perfectly formed that they looked as if they had been painted on the blue background of the sky. A few hundred feet above the ground unseen air currents bent the smoke and spread it across the highway in front of us, a beige-colored cloud stuck to the earth on an otherwise cloudless day.

A motorcycle roared by. It was a big bike and noisy, although not knowing one kind of motorcycle from another the model didn’t register on me. All I could remember later was that it had been purple with a lot of chrome and that it had a steeply swept-back windshield with two huge rear-view mirrors sticking out from its sides.

The rider, like most motorcycle riders in Thailand, wore a helmet with an opaque visor that entirely obscured his features. He also wore jeans and a dark, nondescript jacket zipped up in front. It was one of those free jackets that companies gave to motorcycle taxi drivers for the advertising. Later, thinking back, I realized I had seen yellow lettering on the back of the jacket that said
The Wall Street Journal Asia
.

After passing us the bike pulled into the lane directly in front of the Jag and almost immediately started slowing down. Our driver tapped his brake and I saw Plaid Shirt’s shoulders stiffen as he sat up straighter, his eyes on the motorcycle. I glanced at Mia, but she was still staring out the side window. She was either entirely unaware of the motorcycle or perhaps just disinterested in it.

I bent forward and looked through the gap between Plaid Shirt and the driver. The motorcycle slowed down some more and our driver blipped his horn. The cyclist turned his head back toward us pointing to the bike’s engine, and for a moment I saw the leaping chrome Jaguar at the tip of the car’s hood reflected in the black mirror of his visor. Our driver lifted both hands from the steering wheel, wheeling them impatiently, a gesture that struck me for some reason as more Italian than Irish.

The motorcycle coughed and choked, then all of a sudden caught again with a loud growl and the cyclist roared away. Barely fifty yards later, it stalled again and the rider turned sharply as if he were trying to get clear of us and off the road to the shoulder. But when he was squarely in front of us, the big bike came to an abrupt halt.

The rider kicked at the starter as we rolled toward him, his helmeted head rotating back and forth between his bike and our Jaguar. Our driver cursed and braked sharply, and he banged the horn again. I saw Plaid Shirt and the driver exchange a look. I couldn’t see what kind of a look it was, but I could guess.

I leaned further forward, lowering my head and keeping my voice down in order not to alarm Mia.

“Don’t stop,” I said.

“Huh?” The driver glanced back at me.

“They use motorcycles here,” I said.

“Who does?” Plaid Shirt asked.

“Hired gunmen. Hitters. They do business from bikes. They…”

But my words were lost in the roar of another powerful motorcycle closing on the Jaguar from behind.

At the same instant we heard it coming, the motorcyclist in front of us started his bike and in one smooth movement turned it directly toward us. He jerked a weapon from inside his jacket— I think it was a MAC-10, but I couldn’t be sure — and pointed it directly into the windshield. The other bike slid to a stop next to the rear window where Mia sat.

Realizing now what was happening, both Plaid Shirt and the driver produced handguns from somewhere. Before they could bring them into play, the motorcyclist in front of us fired two brief bursts from his rifle. The first blew out the Jaguar’s windscreen. The second caught both Plaid Shirt and the driver in the faces, shattering their skulls like two eggshells. A fine mist of blood and tissue filled the car, swirling through it as if a tiny storm of pink rain had just passed over us.

In his death convulsions, the driver must have pushed the Jaguar’s accelerator to the floor because the car leaped forward, smashing straight into the surprised motorcyclist in front of us. The heavy car plowed over the man and his bike, grinding them both into the road. In a shower of sparks, the gunman, his motorcycle, and the heavy Jaguar grated along the asphalt until the whole mass crashed off the road and down into a narrow drainage ditch, pinning the gunman and his wildly roaring bike underneath the weight of the engine block. The impact dislodged the driver’s foot from the accelerator and the pile of wreckage stopped there, tilting nose-down into the ditch.

The force of smashing into the shooter and then toppling down into the drainage ditch threw me forward and to the left, leaving me more in the front seat than the back. I could feel a sting as if a knife had slashed my cheek and the unmistakable warm wetness of blood. I knew I hadn’t been hit. I must have caught a ricochet from somewhere.

The front passenger door hung open and instinctively I hauled myself further forward to get to it. Twisting around to pull my legs under me, I looked back at Mia who was strangely silent. Then I saw why. The second motorcyclist must have fired, too, although I didn’t remember hearing any gunfire other than from the front.

Mia sat almost straight upright in spite of the list of the car, but there was a neat crescent of entry wounds stitched high into her chest. Her mouth hung open and her eyes stared through the empty space where the car’s side window had been not so very long before.

Struggling for purchase in the blood soaking Plaid Shirt’s body, I grunted as something dug into my stomach. Pushing my hand under me, I felt a heavy automatic, a .45 that either Plaid Shirt or the driver had dropped. I wrapped my hand around its grip.

I slid downward and toward the open door, skidding through the blood as if I were belly down on ice. My elbow hit the ground first, then my shoulder, but I held onto the .45 and rolled, pulling my legs free of the car and curling them under me.

The Jaguar’s sudden lurch forward had caught the second motorcyclist by surprise, but now he roared up on the side of the car opposite me and raked it efficiently with short bursts. Glass shattered and popped and bullets pinged into the metal skin of the car with a sound like bells gone mad.lls gone When the shooter’s magazine was empty, a silence fell that was more terrible than the noise of the crash, worse even than the glass and metal of the Jaguar ripping open in a storm of bullets.

And in that silence I knew with absolute certainty the other shooter would be coming. He was in no hurry. He would not leave until he had examined each body to make certain we were all dead.

From near the rear of the car I heard the characteristic
clack-clack
of a magazine being replaced and I went prone as silently as I could, my arms extended out in front of me.

Twisting my hand to examine the pistol in it, I saw the safety was off and it was cocked. I said a silent thank you to whichever of the security men had been quick enough to get me at least that far before he died. The rest was up to me.

I took a deep breath, willed my fingers of my right hand to relax on the grip, and nestled the butt into the palm of my left hand for stability.

There was a sudden movement just in front of me followed by a crash. I almost fired, but I didn’t. The shooter had thrown a hubcap out from behind the car and it had caught the rear tire and ricocheted off some rocks before rolling into the drainage ditch. Whoever he was, he was a professional and he was cautiously probing for any sign of survivors before he ventured closer to the wreckage.

A few moments later there was another sudden explosion of noise and a dozen jets of dirt shot into the air from the bank of the ditch behind me. The gunman was firing over the top of the car, still probing around for survivors.

I held my fire. I didn’t move.

Move? I could barely breathe. I was damned near petrified with terror. I probably couldn’t have moved if I had wanted to.

Then, all at once, there was a sudden flash of black right in front of me, like a dark curtain closing across the landscape.

It was the gunman, diving out from behind the car, tumbling toward the cover of the ditch.

Time seemed to slow for me. I always thought time slowing was just something that happened in the movies; but it isn’t, and it did.

Somewhere inside my head I heard my old instructor speaking to me in calm, clear voice and I followed his directions. With the front sight of the .45, I tracked just ahead of the black mass. I raised the back sight until the blade nestled perfectly into the notch in the front sight. I squeezed the trigger, twice, in rapid succession.

The noise of the big .45 exploded all around me. I had no idea it would be so loud. The sound reached right down deep into my chest, grabbed me by the heart, and squeezed until I thought it would stop beating.

The gunman hit the ground with a thud that vibrated through the earth all the way to where I lay a dozen feet away. For several long minutes after that he did not move. Nor did I.

When finally I started to crawl cautiously toward him, his
black helmet lifted all at once and he twisted toward me.

I fired twice more.

The man’s body shuddered with the impacts. The helmet bent unnaturally to one side and then fell back against the ground. He did not move again.

Keeping the .45 centered on the man’s helmet, I reached out slowly with my free hand. When my fingers touched the curving magazine of his rifle, I wrapped them around it and jerked the gun away. His limp hand gave it up without a struggle and flopped against the ground.

Pulling myself around until I was huntil I alf sitting and half leaning on my left hand, I put down the .45 and unsnapped the strap of the man’s helmet. Then I slipped my hand underneath the visor and wrenched it off his head.

Blood was coming from the man’s nose and one of his ears, but his eyes were frozen and open. The hard black pupils stared at me in death with the same emptiness they had stared at me in life.