“You should watch the BBC,” Smith put in. “CNN is nothing but a load of self-conscious twaddle. Americans trying to pretend they’re citizens of the world instead of just Americans. Bloody joke, if you ask me.”
I glanced at him to see if he was smiling. He wasn’t. Nevertheless, when I looked back at Kathleeya
“You told Tommy you would be willing to help us if we gave you Plato Karsarkis’ files,” she said to me.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Then, Mr. Shepherd, before we go any further perhaps you had better tell me exactly what you did say to Tommy.”
“Karsarkis asked me to try to get him a presidential pardon, and Tommy said the Thai government wanted me to help Karsarkis. I told Tommy I needed to look at whatever the NIA had on Karsarkis before I decided what I was going to do.”
“Yes, I see.”
“By the way, is there any particular direction in which you’d like me to speak so you can get a clear recording of this conversation?”
“Not really. You’re pretty well covered from every direction.”
“Yes, well, your own car is one thing, but bugging my apartment seems to me to extend your coverage area a bit beyond what I would view as fair.”
Kathleeya and the Englishman exchanged a look.
“What makes you think your apartment has been bugged?” she asked.
I realized immediately that I should never have said anything about the bug in my apartment. Men always talk too much in front of beautiful women. It’s an incurable male disease, frequently fatal.
I had jumped too quickly to the conclusion that NIA had something to do with placing the bug, but it looked like I was probably wrong about that. I had given up something that could be important and gotten absolutely nothing in return and, to keep myself from sounding like a paranoid lunatic, I would to have to bring up Jello’s name; but I had absolutely no intention of doing that so I tried a modest finesse.
“Look, I know about the break-in attempt on my laptop and I found your cute little bug in my study. I know there are probably more bugs, too, of course, so some friends at the American Embassy are sweeping my apartment regularly now.”
A clumsy piece of embroidery maybe, but close enough for government work.
“The NIA has nothing to do with whatever you may have found in your apartment, Mr. Shepherd.”
“Of course you don’t.”
Kathleeya turned her head and leaned slightly toward me. She remained silent until I was looking directly into her eyes, which I was more than willing to do.
“It is important that you believe me. I did not know your apartment was under surveillance or your computer had been compromised. I would never have authorized such a thing.”
“My computer wasn’t compromised. I said someone
“Well there you are then. If it had been our operation, it would have succeeded.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that so I pushed away the curtain and looked out the car window while I thought about it. The driver had taken Rama IV to the expressway and was heading north. The airport was just off to the east and I followed a departing United 747 with my eyes until it disappeared behind a bank of clouds.
This was probably all just bullshit, I told myself. Of course it was the NIA who had fiddled with my computer and planted the bugs. Who the hell else could it be? Whatever Jello said, I had a little difficulty buying into the idea that all kinds of foreign intelligence services were running amuck in Thailand bugging apartments and breaents andking into computers.
Still, this woman had looked me right in the eye and denied the NIA had anything to do with it and I wanted to believe her. Would I have tried nearly as hard to believe her if she’d been short, fat, old, and ugly? I knew what the answer to that was, regardless of how embarrassing it might be to admit it.
“What about Karsarkis’ files?” I asked when I turned back from the window. “Do I get them or not?”
The woman opened her dark green leather purse and took out a clear plastic case containing a DVD.
“This is everything we have that is relevant.”
“I asked for the raw files, not what you chose to edit for me,” I said.
“Regardless of what you asked for, this is what you’re getting.”
She held the case toward me. She seemed to assume I would accept it without raising any further objections. She was right, of course.
“I think you’ll find enough there to keep you interested,” she said. “By the way, you should know that when you open the file on the disk, a clock will start.”
“A clock?”
“Exactly one hour from the time you open the file, everything on the disk will be scrambled in such a way as to make it entirely unrecoverable. The same thing will happen immediately if you attempt to print, email, or copy any part of the file. Do I make myself clear?”
“You do indeed. But why all the melodrama?”
“I wouldn’t be very happy to find copies of NIA documents in the New York Times next week.”
“You could have just asked for my word that I wouldn’t give them to anyone.”
Smith snorted audibly, but I thought I saw a flash of something like embarrassment slide across Kathleeya’s face.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Shepherd. We felt this was the appropriate security to impose under the circumstances. Please don’t take it personally.”
“So it’s not personal, it’s just business.”
“You will also find a text file on the disk which contains nothing but a nine-digit number,” she continued without looking at me. “That is my private cell phone number. After you have read the materials on the disk, I would appreciate it if you would call me and tell me whether you have decided to help us.”
“You mean help Plato Karsarkis, don’t you?”
Kathleeya smiled and I allowed myself to enjoy it this time.
“Interests frequently have a way of getting tangled up in odd ways, Mr. Shepherd. You have heard the saying, “The friend of my friend is also my friend.”
“As is the enemy of my enemy,” I said.
“Something like that.” She smiled again.
Smith leaned forward and spoke to the driver and the big Mercedes swung off the Expressway and made a U-turn. No one said much while we were driving back to the city, but as I juggled the DVD case in my fingers I couldn’t help but think about what I might find on that disk.
Her personal cell phone number, huh?
Maybe later when I told Anita about all this I’d skip over that part.
TWENTY EIGHT
After the black Mercedes dropped me off I went straight upstairs to my office, locked the door, and picked up the telephone. I dialed a number, let it ring once, and hung up. That might not be the usual way to reach someone by telephone, but then I was calling Darcy Rice and there was absolutely nothing usual about her either.
Darcy had retired to Bangkok following a career with the US government doing things about which she was now professionally vague. A lot of people figured Darcy for CIA, certainly back when she was an active government employee and maybe even still, but I doubted that was true. I was pretty sure Darcy had spent her career with the National Security Agency. The NSA monitors and intercepts all sorts of communications, breaks encryption, tasks spy satellites, and engages in a whole range of technology-driven black arts that most people would dismiss as science fiction even if they somehow found out about them, which they wouldn’t anyway. That was exactly the sort of stuff Darcy seemed to know everything about, which was why I had made her for NSA right from our earliest
