KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (18 page)

I led him into the study and he paused next to the straight chair in front of my desk, examining it as if he wasn’t quite sure what it was. I had to admit it looked a little dainty next to him. A lot of people doubted Jello was a Thai since he was so big. Rather than possessing the wiry, whippet-like physique usually associated with Thais, Jello was build more like a sumo wrestler. A
big
sumo wrestler.

“You got something I won’t break?” he asked, pointing at the chair.

I sat back down behind my desk and waved him into the chair without saying anything. He settled gingerly onto it. Remarkably, it held.

“You get some bad sushi for dinner or something, Professor?” Jello studied my face as he laid the red accordion file he was carrying in his ample lap. “You don’t look too good.”

I tapped my fingers on the desk and avoided Jello’s eyes. How much should I tell him?

The last conversation I had with Jello had ended with ominous warnings from him not to have anything to do with Plato Karsarkis. If I told him I had just been hanging out with Karsarkis while somebody was breaking into my apartment and checking out my laptop, he would have looked at me pretty strangely. I could hardly blame him. Shoot,
I
was looking at me pretty strangely.

“Well…” I paused, but Jello didn’t say anything to help me out, so I made a snap decision to stick strictly to the mystery of the moment and leave Plato Karsarkis out of it. “It looks like somebody’s been messing with my laptop, but there’s nobody here who could have.”

“Anita?”

“No, she’s out and it happened just a couple of hours ago.”

Jello leaned forward and tossed the file he’d brought me onto the desk, then he folded his arms and looked at me.

“Go on,” he said.

I told him what I knew about what had happened, which wasn’t much, so it didn’t take long.

“Is there anything on the laptop anybody might want?” he asked when I was done.

“Not really. My class preparation stuff, a little personal financial data. Like that.”

“No client files?”

“No…well, nothing important. Certainly nothing anybody would want to break into my apartment for.”

“You think this was a break-in?”

“I don’t know what I think. Maybe the damned software is all fucked up. You asked me why I looked a little strange and I told you. Now lay off. Don’t grill me about it.”

I looked at Jello for ten or fifteen seconds and he looked back, but he never said a word. Then abruptly he stood up and began to wander around the sn="jtudy, apparently aimlessly, examining the framed memorabilia hung on the walls.

“Any signs of forced entry?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Anything missing?”

“I don’t think so. Somebody just tried to get into my laptop, that’s all.”

“So you’ve checked everything?”

“No,” I admitted. “ I’ve looked around in here. Not in the other rooms.”

Jello nodded very slowly as if I had somehow just confirmed all his deepest suspicions.

“You piss anybody off recently, Professor?”

“Not that I know of.”

“How about the stuff you’re working on now. You involved in any flaky shit I ought to know about?”

I apparently took a beat too long to respond because Jello shot me a dead-eyed look over his shoulder and then went back to examining the hangings on my walls with considerably more care than I thought they merited.

“Look, could we just drop this?” I asked as Jello scrutinized the elaborately engraved certificate attesting to my good standing with the United States Supreme Court. “It’s probably nothing. You’re making me wish I hadn’t told you.”

Jello worked his way around the wall to the low filing cabinet. All of a sudden he hopped on top of it with such astonishing agility for a big man that I just sat and stared, too dumbstruck to do much else.

Jello reached up and ran the fingertips of his left hand lightly back and forth over the wide molding that joined the wall and the ceiling. Then a small penknife materialized in his right hand and, after feeling around a bit more with his left, he pressed the point into the soft wood and twisted it into the molding with a corkscrewing motion.

“Jello, what in Christ’s name—”

He waved me into silence without turning around. Digging something out of the molding with the blade, he closed the knife and cradled whatever it was in his palm, examining it, but his body blocked my view and I couldn’t tell what it was. Jello’s body was so big he could have been holding a small automobile and I wouldn’t have been able to tell what it was.

“Look, man, what the hell are you doing?” I asked. “What’s that?”

Jello turned around and hopped off the filing cabinet, then walked over and gently placed what looked like a nail on my desk blotter. I stared at it for a moment and then looked up.

“Okay, it’s a nail,” I said. “So what?”

“Not a nail.”

Jello picked up the thing that still looked to me like a nail and held it right in front of my face, rotating it between his thumb and forefinger. Then he cupped it in his hand and closed his fingers around it, burying the head in his palm.

“It’s a wireless transmitter,” he said. “Short range, maybe three hundred yards, but pretty reliable over that distance. The main drawback to this model is its internal power only lasts for about seventy-two hours. After that you have to replace it.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“I shit you not, Professor. I shit you not one little bit.”

I stared at Jello’s closed fist and tried to envision the device he had cupped inside it.

“Oh, come on,” I shook my head at him again. “Surely it’s not really…”

“Very sophisticated stuff, too. Almost looks like one of ours, although it isn’t.”

“You mean somebody’s listening to us right now?” I asked.

“Not as long as I’ve got the business end blocked like this.” Jello wiggled his fist at me. “But somebody
has
been listening to everything that’s been said in this room.”

“For how long? Three days?”

I began frantically trying to remember what might have been said in this room during the last three days.

Jello shook his head. “Not necessarily.”

He carefully reseated himself on the fragile looking chair in front of my desk, keeping the listening device closed up inside his big hand.

“I said this thing was good for about three days,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it’s been here three days. Maybe whoever was looking at your laptop put it in. Maybe it wasn’t here until tonight. On the other hand, maybe they were replacing one they had put in before and its battery was gone. No way to tell.”

“Why would anyone want to stick a bug in my study?”

Jello shrugged. “Why would anyone want to look at whatever you have on your laptop?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Jello looked unconvinced.

“Look, Jack, you’re going to have to tell me what you’re into here. Otherwise, I don’t see what help I can be.”

I was still trying to make up my mind whether to tell Jello about Tommy and the meeting at Karsarkis’ apartment when he leaned forward, used his free hand to pick a pen out of the cup on my desk, and began to write on a legal pad lying next to it.

“Anyway,” he said as he continued to write, “your bug is dead now.”

Then abruptly he rotated the yellow pad and pushed it toward me.

On it Jello had scrawled
it may not be the only one
.

I held Jello’s eyes across the desk until I was sure he wasn’t joking around.

Then I took the pen and wrote
what do I do?

“Look, Jack, you can tell me what you’ve got yourself into here or not.” The whole time Jello was talking, he was writing again. “I don’t really give much of a damn either way.”

Walk across the street to McDonalds
, he wrote, then he looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

I nodded.

Take your phone into the upstairs toilet.

I would have laughed right out loud, but it hardly seemed the thing to do under the circumstances.

“Look, Jello,” I said instead, over-enunciating like a bad actor, “I don’t really know what to tell you here.”

Then call me
, he finished writing. He popped the pen back into the cup and pushed the pad over to me.

“Okay, Jack, suit yourself. I just came to drop off these incorporation papers.” Jello stoodo; cup and p up and pocketed the bug. “But I can see this isn’t a good time. If you change your mind about telling me what’s going on, let me know. I’ll try to help.”

I picked my phone up off my desk and pushed it into my pocket.

“Okay, Jello. I understand. I’ll do that.”

We walked to the front door together in silence.

“Maybe I’ll go downstairs with you,” I said as I opened it for him. “I might go out and get something to eat.”

“Suit yourself,” he shrugged.

Neither of us spoke again until the elevator had come and we were inside.

“Look, Jello—” I started to say, but he shook his head before I got any further than that.

“Not yet.”

We stepped into the lobby and walked outside. Jello turned toward the visitors parking area without the slightest indication that he even remembered the notes we had traded upstairs.

“Night, Jack,” he said, and gave a little wave over his shoulder.

“Night, man.”

I turned the other way and walked through the building’s main gate and out to Soi C
hidlom. There was a huge two-story McDonalds on the other side of the street, and its red, yellow, and green neon outlines looked incongruously cheerful among the other buildings in the neighborhood that were mostly dark at that hour.

A nearly unbroken river of cars, trucks, buses, and motorbikes still flowed south along Soi Chidlom toward Ploenchit Road about half a mile away. While I stood there waiting for enough of an opening to dart across without ending up as a hood ornament on a Mercedes Benz, Jello’s nondescript white Toyota pulled out of Chidlom Place and turned right into traffic.

He drove right past me. If he even noticed me standing there on the curb, he didn’t let on.

“WHY EXACTLY AM
I sitting on a toilet in McDonalds talking to you on my cell phone, Jello?”

I looked around. The inside of a bathroom stall didn’t have a great deal to recommend it as a place to carry on a telephone conversation, but then I could probably have guessed that if I had ever thought about it before, which I hadn’t.

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” he said. “What have you gotten yourself into this time?”

“I’m not into anything, man.”

“Oh, I see. Then I guess that little bug I found in your apartment must have been put there by mistake. You figure?”

“Why didn’t we just have this conversation outside the apartment?” I asked.

“Shotgun mikes are pretty effective. Your friends could have had one on us from a hundred different places and we’d never know it.”

“So why don’t you come on back here and I’ll buy you a Big Mac. Then we can sit at one of those nice red plastic tables downstairs and talk this whole thing through. If there are any people in here tonight with shotgun mikes, I’m sure we’ll spot them right away.”

“Not a good idea. A laser anywhere outside could pick up the conversation right off the windows. We’d never even know it was there.&rustifdquo

“You’re scaring me, Jello.”

“Good. That’s my intention.”

“But then why the hell are we talking on a telephone? Isn’t there a risk in that, too?”

“You’re using a GSM phone, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Those things are real bastards to intercept here even if you’ve got the right cap code and can tell which signal you’re looking for. Once the transmission gets to the first tower the whole signal stream goes digital and a mess of different conversations are scrambled together. GSM phones are secure enough we don’t even bother to send encrypted radios with our guys when they’re out on an operation anymore. They just use their phones to talk to each other.”

I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel better or not.

“Anyway,” Jello continued while I tried to make up my mind. “Now you’re in an enclosed space where no one could possibly have expected you to be and talking on a GSM cell phone. That’s about as secure as you’re going to get.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “So what do we do now?”

“Either you tell me what’s happening here or you don’t. Right now I don’t know jack shit.”

“Well, I don’t know jack shit either, pal.”

“Horse manure. Somebody pretty sophisticated has got you in their sights and my guess is you know exactly who it is.”

“Then your guess would be wrong,” I snapped.

A long silence fell after that. I wouldn’t have blamed Jello if he had just hung up, but he didn’t.

“Let me ask you something,” I finally said, breaking the silence. “Who around here has the capacity to do something as sophisticated as this?”

“We do,” Jello said, referring to ECID. “But it’s not us.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“And the National Intelligence Agency could do it, of course.”

Jello paused, apparently considering the other possibilities, and while he did I pictured my ride with Tommy earlier than evening and wondered if his NIA buddies might have been responsible for doing the deed while he kept me out of the apartment.

“Then there are all the foreign embassy intelligence operations. There are twenty or so that we know about and a lot of them are pretty good. Could be almost any of them.”

Suddenly an image jumped into my mind of CW sitting on a bar stool in Phuket. Was it possible that the US Marshals could be bugging the apartment of a US citizen in Thailand?

“The equipment isn’t really all that hard to get,” Jello continued before I decided. “You can buy stuff pretty much like that over the internet these days. Quite a few local police and military guys freelance and pick up a few baht on the side, although generally those people only work for wives who are setting their husbands up for a ride into the sunset. You haven’t pissed Anita off recently, have you, Jack?”