LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (36 page)

Barry laughed loudly, too loudly for it to sound particularly convincing. Then he turned away and walked quickly up the gallery. Beth stayed close behind him.

I SAT THERE
quietly for a while watching the fire burn, which felt awfully odd. Here I was on a tropical island on the edge of the Indian Ocean, so for God’s sake what was I doing staring into a roaring fire?

Come to think of it, what am I doing here at all?

When I had set out to storm the Black Prince’s castle I figured I was right on the verge of getting everything under control. Of course, I
always
figured I was right on the verge of getting everything under control, but this time it wasn’t quite working out that way.

Maybe Barry was right. Maybe either the Agency really
was
responsible for killing Howard and Dollar, either because they were trying to get the Chinese slush fund back or because they were trying to cover up the embarrassing fact that it had existed in the first place. But why did that necessarily make me the next guy on their list? Even if I could bring myself to believe that agents of the United States government really went around murdering other Americans to keep them quiet, what in God’s name would these guys accomplish by killing me?

I didn’t know
shit
about whatever they were up to. That was precisely my problem.

I sat there for a while on the sofa with my hands laced behind my head trying to decide what I ought to do now. Surely after Barry came back I could finesse my way past him somehow and work something out. After all, finesse was my best punch, wasn’t it? A sharply focused argument here, a glib phrase there, baffle them with bullshit then run for the door. It had always worked before. Why not now?

Eventually I got bored with thinking about my predicament and started examining my surroundings. Although right at that moment it wasn’t the décor that had my attention, it was more a question of where the exits were.

I could see two sets of double doors at the opposite end of the room and of course I knew the gallery behind me that led to the front door. Then along the right-hand wall flanking the fireplace there were a half-dozen windows covered with shades of red-and-green tartan fabric.

I walked over and pulled one of the window shades aside. Outside I could see only a small section of the compound, but it looked like I was somewhere at the back. The area was deserted and the moon was just strong enough to illuminate everything with a soft, sourceless glow that under different circumstances might have been romantic. Floodlights, maybe even a pack of snarling German Shepherds, would have seemed more fitting to me, but I didn’t see any sign of either.

I walked to the end of the room and tried the left hand pair of double doors. Locked. Then I went to the right hand pair, placed my palm against the upper panel of one of the doors, and pressed gently. It swung open without a sound and I stepped through half expecting to trip some kind of alarm. But nothing happened.

In front of me was a windowless corridor that ran straight for about twenty feet and then ended at an ordinary single door that was standing half open. From just beyond it, I could hear the crackle of a radio. I walked quickly down the corridor and through the door. There was no one in the room.

My eyes swept over the small space. On the left-hand wall there was a rack with a dozen or more guns I had no trouble recognizing. They were AK-47s with folding stocks, nasty-looking pieces of hardware that provided serious firepower. I had played tennis with a couple of SWAT guys back in Washington and one day they had taken me out to their training range and let me mess around with some stuff they had taken off a street gang which included a Chinese-made version of the AK. Barry must have been scared shitless if he had stockpiled heavy-duty weapons like that.

In front of me there was a sagging leather couch and on the opposite side of the room there was a desk pushed up against the wall with a line of five television monitors mounted above it. The first, second, and third monitors showed gray-toned pictures that were apparently coming from various parts of the compound. The fourth monitor showed the area just inside the main gates. The gates stood open a few feet and I could see several of the guards hovering together in a little knot and watching something outside. Oddly, none of the guards seemed to be carrying weapons now.

But it was the fifth monitor that drew my full attention.

That one was displaying what had to be the picture from the camera I had spotted above the gate. In the glare of the lights shining down from the top of the wall, I could see two white Toyotas and a jeep right outside the gate and a group of men who had apparently just arrived in them. There were seven or eight in all, each wearing the chocolate-brown uniform of a Thai policeman. All but one were also wearing dark green combat helmets with red stripes running around them. The only man without a helmet appeared to be the officer in charge. The left side of his chest was emblazoned with a clipboard-sized pad of ribbons and he stood apart and just in front of the others.

I slid into the black swivel chair in front of the desk and leaned toward the monitor, studying it carefully.

Barry Gale had gone outside to meet the police and the scene on the monitor looked like a tableau that had been arranged around him. Beth was standing to his left, and to his right one of the guards appeared to be talking to the senior police officer and translating for Barry. The half-dozen or more uniforms behind the officer looked ready to move into action at a moment’s notice. In the foreground I saw three of Barry’s guards backing him up, but like the guards still inside they appeared to have discarded their weapons. Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it? It would have hardly been smart to carry AK-47s out to meet the cops.

On the monitor I could see Barry shaking his head. His body language made him appear more exasperated than concerned, but I still wondered what was going on. There was something about the whole scene that didn’t look quite right to me, although I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.

As I watched, Beth turned her head away from the conversation and lifted a handheld radio to her lips. When she spoke I could hear her voice coming through a loudspeaker that was mounted above the monitor rack.

“Activity in any other sector?” she asked.

“Negative,” a male voice with a Thai accent replied immediately. I gathered it was a guard posted somewhere else around the compound.

“Negative.”

“No.”

Two more voices. Okay, so there were a
lot
of guards around the compound.

What
was
it about the scene on the security monitor that looked so strange to me? Something was wrong, but whatever it was dangled just out of reach.

The senior police officer was talking to the translator again and pointing his finger at Barry. After whatever he had said was repeated in English, I saw Beth step forward and hold up both her hands, palms out, shaking her head vigorously. The man immediately raised a radio of his own, turned and spoke a few quick words into it.

As soon as he did, Barry turned around and started toward the gates, but several of the cops drew handguns and moved quickly to outflank him, and he stopped. I was still trying to work out what that was all about when two of the other uniforms produced folding submachine guns from somewhere and spread out expertly, covering Beth and her people through widely separated angles of fire.

Now I saw exactly what was wrong with the whole picture.

Thai street cops didn’t move like combat soldiers. Thai police generally moved more like the last customers in a pub emptying out at closing time. Regardless of their uniforms, these guys obviously weren’t police. They were military.

And they were there for Barry. I had no doubt about it.

Barry had stockpiled all this firepower and secured himself behind these walls. Then some guys showed up and he told his the guards to open the gates and put away their AKs and just because the men were wearing police uniforms the guards did it.

In Thailand, the army did all the really high-class hits. Cops were a lot cheaper to rent, of course, but they were not nearly as reliable.

What a schmuck Barry is,
I thought.
Stupid to the end.

“WAIT A MINUTE.”

It was one of the guard’s voices coming through the speaker.

I watched on the monitor as Beth raised her radio again. “What have you got?” she asked.

“More vehicles,” the same voice said. “Three. Coming up road.”

“What are they?”

“Four-wheel drives. Black ones.”

“How close?” Beth’s voice had an undertone of dread.

“Two minutes,” the guard replied.

On the monitor I saw Beth lower the radio and put her lips close to Barry’s ear. She spoke for a moment and Barry appeared to ask her a question, and when she nodded her head he suddenly broke into a run toward the half-open gates.

The senior uniform started after him, drawing his sidearm as he did, and the other uniforms spread out and covered the area with their guns. It didn’t look to me like anybody was actually firing yet, but I figured that was just a matter of time.

Beth moved to cut off the man in the officer’s uniform, which looked like it might give Barry time to make the gates. She reached for the man’s gun arm. The officer hardly glanced at her. He cleared the heavy-looking black automatic from his belt holster and kept coming. His gun swung up and out in a smooth arc.

I saw the barrel slam Beth on the side of the head, and I saw her go down.

Automatically, I pushed myself out of my chair.

So what are you going to do about it?
You’re a college professor, not a tin-pot action hero.

I glanced over my shoulder at the rack of automatic rifles, but I felt a blanket of helplessness settling over me. There were six or eight heavily-armed and obviously well-trained men rushing the gates of Barry’s compound and my sole experience with combat weapons had been a half-hour at a SWAT range in Washington DC.

I glanced back at the monitor just in time to see the man in the police officer’s uniform level the muzzle of his handgun directly at me, pointing it straight into the lens of the camera. Reflexively, I ducked, and when I looked back up again the monitor’s picture had turned to static. If they were knocking out the surveillance systems, I knew what that meant. Barry was going down and they didn’t want any witnesses.

I had absolutely no intention of going down with him. I looked around the little room and for the first time noticed another door. Leaping up and grabbing the handle I twisted it.

Locked.

Then I saw the throw bolt just above the handle. It had been secured into a receiver on the doorjamb and I jerked it open and tried again.

This time the door swung open. A wave of heavy night air flooded in and the room’s lights jumped into the darkness. I banged the switch off with the heel of my hand before I attracted any unwanted attention. I started outside, but then I jumped back and grabbed one of the AKs out of the rack. I fumbled with the magazine in the glow of the security monitors until I remembered how to get it out. From the weight, I could tell it was full before I even looked.

I slapped the magazine back in and racked the cocking handle. If any of those bastards in the phony police uniforms came at me, I wanted something in my hands. I would decide later what to do with it.

I eased the door closed behind me and stood quietly, letting my eyes adjust to the faint blush of the moonlight. The compound’s wall was at least twenty yards away across open and exposed ground. From where I crouched, there appeared no more hope of climbing it from this side than there had been from the other.

Okay, they came up the main road and I had left the jeep behind a rise well away from it so they almost certainly hadn’t seen it and didn’t know Barry had a visitor. Maybe they wouldn’t even bother to search the compound after they finished rounding up Barry and his guards.

If they didn’t, I had one idea that might actually work.

One of the guesthouses was near a corner of the main house.
If
they didn’t know I was there, and
if
they’d already searched the guesthouse, and
if
I could get to it without being seen,
maybe
I could hide out there until this was all over.

A shit load of ifs and maybes, but it was all I had going for me.

Keeping low and pressing myself against the house I began to work my way toward the corner that I guessed was closest to the guesthouse. None of the windows I passed were lighted, but I stayed in a half crouch anyway and kept my body tight against the wall. When I reached the corner, I stopped and dropped flat to the ground. Wedging myself as close to the wall as I could and holding the AK against my chest, I turned my head to one side and inched forward in slow motion. I could feel grit against my cheek as my ear dredged up loose soil like a little backhoe.

When my left eye cleared the corner of the house, my heart sank. I could see four men standing twenty or thirty yards away, exactly halfway between the guesthouse and the main gate. Their backs were toward me, but it seemed hopeless to try and cross the open space without attracting their attention. Then I noticed a dozen or so people were lying facedown on the ground in a straight line just in front of the four men, their hands all cuffed behind them.

I was still trying to make sense of that when something else registered. None of the four men were wearing police uniforms. Instead they all wore loose-fitting blue windbreakers with big yellow letters across the back. The big yellow letters said FBI.

I was just wondering if these guys had gotten their jackets the same place I had gotten mine when a powerful beam of light hit me directly in the face. Momentarily blinded, I felt rather than saw a boot dig under my stomach. Before I could react, the boot flipped me over, then came down in the center of my chest and pinned me to the ground.