Killing Plato

I had plannedpus to give a lecture that morning on the development of international tax avoidance legislation, but I knew under the circumstances I’d never make it through something that tedious. Instead I fell back on the traditional refuge of every distracted academic who didn’t feel like lecturing and who’d had at least some practical experience in the subject at hand. I soft-shoed through a hastily improvised routine composed of my greatest and wittiest war stories.

I imagine former surgeons tell their students about patients whose lives they saved through their quick thinking, and no doubt every trial lawyer has a fund of anecdotes about criminals he freed with his clever tactics. But if you’ve been is a corporate deal guy like me, what you talk about when all else fails is money. Largely how you scored unholy piles of it for some client by being really sneaky. In Asia at least, those kinds of stories are always guaranteed to keep the kids absolutely riveted. Forget about life and liberty, you can almost hear the little bastards chanting, let’s get right down to all that pursuit-of-happiness stuff.

I ended the day’s entertainment with a flourish-always leave them laughing, somebody said-and speed- walked back to my office before a student could ambush me either with a genuine question or, more likely, a transparent attempt to suck up a little. My secretary wasn’t at her desk, but then Bun was seldom at her desk so I grabbed myself some coffee from the kitchen down at the end of the hall and then went straight into my office. After hanging out a Do Not Disturb sign I kept at the ready, I locked the door.

I flopped down into my desk chair and made myself comfortable. Then I propped my feet up on the side of a half-open drawer and sipped at my coffee. The time had clearly come to do some serious pondering.

But where to start? The last completely normal moment I could remember for weeks was when Anita and I had decided to go to the Boathouse for dinner. It had been a placid, soft-toned evening on the western beaches of Phuket and we were looking for nothing anymore exciting than a romantic dinner for two, which can be exciting enough all by itself if you get it right.

But where had that led?

The world’s most wanted fugitive was trying to become my new best friend and at the same time an undercover team of US Marshals was trying to recruit me to spy on him. Two powerful groups were tugging me in exactly opposite directions, and that was just if I was lucky. Maybe there were more than two groups who had me in their sights. If neither Karsarkis nor the US marshals were responsible for wiring my apartment, then I had somebody else on my tail, too, somebody who hadn’t yet shown himself.

I felt like a man who had started out skiing down a gentle slope only to discover he was really on Mount Everest. And he wasn’t wearing skis.

Everything was becoming clearer and fuzzier all at the same time. Perhaps if I told Jello the truth about what was going on, particularly the part about Karsarkis offering me a huge sum of money to try and get him a presidential pardon, maybe he would at least point me in the right direction. There were some pretty strict limitations as to how much Jello could tell me, of course, even if he did know something I probably ought to, but at worst he would probably tell me there was nothing he could say and I was on my own. I was already on my own, so what did I have to lose by asking?

I had just about talked myself into telling Jello the whole story and when my cell phone rang. I scooped it up and glanced at the number on the screen. I thought I recognized it as Jello’s so I answered.

“Hey, man, I was just thinking of you.”

“Ah, Jack, that’s so sweet. I didn’t know you cared.”

I looked at the telephone. It wasn’t Jello.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“I thought you said you were just thinking of me. Now you ask who this is? You’re a fickle motherfucker, Big Jack. Just when I was feeling all warm and loved, you jerk the rug right out from under me.”

“Tommy?”

“At your service, my friend. At your fucking service.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was expecting someone else.”

“So I gather.”

There was an awkward silence after that. I was waiting for Tommy to tell me why he was calling, but he apparently was waiting for me to ask, so eventually I obliged him.

“What do you want, Tommy?”

“You asked to see some files, didn’t you, Jack?”

In all the upheaval since last night I had completely forgotten the conversation Tommy and I had about the NIA’s intelligence files on Karsarkis.

“So your boss said you could give them to me?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? What does that mean?”

“It means my boss is going to give them to you.”

“Fine.”

“Okay. Here’s what you do, Jack. Go downstairs and-”

“Whoa, Tommy. I’m not in the mood this morning for a goddamned scavenger hunt. If your boss has got some files for me, tell him just send them on over.”

“No can do, Big Jack. Here are the ground rules. You talk directly to my boss. Maybe you get some stuff to look at and maybe you don’t. And even if you do, no notes and no copies. That’s it. Take it or leave it.”

I sighed and studied a point on my office wall that had nothing in particular to recommend it.

“Okay, Tommy,” I finally said. “Whatever.”

“Good call.”

“I’m so glad you approve.”

“Downstairs then,” he said. “Now.”

And with that he hung up.

I closed my phone and sat looking at it for a moment. Tommy worked hard at being obscure. I gathered he thought spies were supposed to be obscure. Generally, the effect was comic, but occasionally it was irritating. I put today down in the irritating column.

By the time I got downstairs I was wound up enough to give Tommy a boot in the ass for jerking me around, but the building lobby was empty and I found myself deprived of an immediate target. I stood there for a moment looking around, but it was a very small lobby so that was a pretty pointless exercise. Empty was empty.

Not having any better idea what I was supposed to do I walked outside and stood at the top of the steps. That was when I saw the black Mercedes parked in the circular drive with the engine running. It looked like the same car in which Tommy and I had ridden out to Karsarkis’ hideaway. At least I thought it was the same car because it had the same kind of darkened windows and sliding curtains, bug chad rit it might have been a different one. I couldn’t tell, and when I thought about it for a moment, I also realized I really didn’t give a damn.

April is the heart of the hot season in Thailand. Although it wasn’t even eleven yet, the sun was already brutal. I could feel the heat in the concrete through the soles of my loafers. As I walked toward the Mercedes, it was like taking a stroll on a warming tray.

When I was still fifty feet from the car both front doors opened in near perfect synchronization and two men I’d never seen before got out. They were athletic-looking locals wearing nearly identical white shirts, black pants, and dark neckties, and they were both expressionless behind their opaque sunglasses. I recognized government security when I saw it no matter what country I was in and either that’s what these guys were or they had seen Men in Black way too many times. The driver stepped away from the car and moved back a few strides, his head swiveling slowly back and forth. Then the man who had emerged from the other side went to the rear passenger door and held it open without taking his eyes off me. It was a silent yet unmistakable command for me to get into the car.

Taking my own sweet time about it, I sauntered over and got in. When I did I discovered the car was already pretty crowded. There were two people in the back seat, and neither one of them was Tommy. The two passengers were a man and a woman. I recognized both of their faces immediately, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen them before.

The woman in the middle of the back seat appeared to be in her late thirties, although I could never really tell with Thai women. She was stylishly dressed in a cream silk suit with matching heels. Sitting straight, her bare legs crossed at the knee, she dangled a shoe off the toes of one foot which caused her straight skirt to ride up well