Jake Needham - Killing Plato

She flicked her eyes back to the young man.

“What time tomorrow, Mr. O’Connell?”

“Would eight o’clock be convenient? If you’ll tell me where you’re staying, we’ll send a car for you.”

“And where are we having dinner exactly?”

“At Mr. Karsarkis’ home, Mrs. Shepherd. He is having several people around tomorrow night and thought you and your husband might like to join them.”

Anita nodded slowly. “You’ll appreciate, of course, I’m still having a little trouble with all this.”

“Yes, ma’am. Apparently.”

“I hope you’ll excuse me saying so, Mr. O’Connell, but it is difficult for me to accept that Plato Karsarkis is quietly living in Phuket and giving dinner parties.”

“Yes, ma’am. But that’s where he is and that’s what he’s doing. Where shall I tell the driver to pick you up?”

“Never mind about that,” I cut in.

I tried to strike a tone cool enough to leave no doubt at all as to my view of Karsarkis’ invitation.

“We’re not going,” I said. “We have other plans.”

“We are going, Jack.” Anita’s voice was losarvoice ww, but her tone was just as cool as mine had been. “I’d like to go.”

“Can we talk about this later, Anita?”

“No.” Her faced mimed a smile, but I didn’t see any humor in it. “We can’t.”

I looked at O’Connell. He was expressionless. I felt trapped. I gathered I was.

“Okay,” I finally said. “But no car. We’ll drive ourselves.”

“Then may I fax a map to your hotel, sir? That would probably be best.”

Not only was Plato Karsarkis living in Phuket and giving dinner parties, he was faxing out maps to his house.

“That’s fine,” I said. “We’re staying at a hotel on Cape Panwa called the Panwaburi. I don’t know the fax number, but-”

“You’ll have a map by tomorrow morning, sir.”

O’Connell took a step back from the table and inclined his head politely.

“Enjoy your dinner,” he said. Then he turned and walked away across the dining room.

I looked at Anita without saying anything. She looked back at me with an expression I couldn’t read.

“Well,” she finally murmured, breaking the silence. Then she retrieved her menu from the table and resumed studying it. “Shall we order?”

The next morning I was sitting on the deck of our cabin drinking coffee and picking at a huge platter of unidentifiable fruit Anita had ordered from room service when I noticed an envelope that had apparently been left at our door sometime during the night. I opened it and found it was the map Karsarkis’ emissary had promised, and it made more sense to me than I had really expected it to.

As islands go, Phuket isn’t that large. It only takes a little over an hour to drive the length of it from north to south and about half that to cross it east to west. Karsarkis’ house was on the far northwestern coast of the island, on the headlands above a place called Nai Thon Beach, maybe a forty-five minute drive from our hotel but no more than a modest jog from Phuket’s only airport. I wondered if that was a coincidence. Probably not. Karsarkis no doubt kept a couple of packed bags in the trunk of his car, just in case.

After little more than a quick scan of the map, I saw I wouldn’t have any trouble finding the place where Karsarkis was holed up. That, of course, raised a fairly obvious question in my mind. How in the world could everyone else on the planet be having so much trouble finding it?

As curious as I might be about that, I wasn’t curious enough to let Plato Karsarkis spoil my vacation. After all, the man wasn’t my problem, was he?

So for the rest of the day, in between moments of laboring earnestly at an arduous regimen of swimming with Anita and napping on the beach, I carefully focused my attention on the young, sarong-clad girls with impossibly shiny black hair who plied us endlessly with sweating goblets of exotic drinks and plates heaped with cold seafood. Then, when the sun began to slide toward the sea, Anita and I showered and changed-what does one wear to dinner at the home of an internationally wanted fugitive? — and just after dusk we left our cabin and began climbing the steep pathway up to the hotel parking lot.

The night smeat lled of salt water and rotting fish, of neighborhood kitchens and mystifying foods, of diesel fuel and burning charcoal, and of plants and flowers with euphonious but utterly unpronounceable names. I inhaled deeply and wondered what it was about the smell of the night in Thailand that always made me feel so utterly alive.

Anita seemed to me uncharacteristically anxious, perhaps even apprehensive in some way, and that wasn’t really like her at all.

“Are you worried about this?” I asked.

Anita hesitated before she answered. “I don’t know what you mean,” she finally said.

“Yes, you do. Have you changed your mind about going to this dinner, Anita? You know I’d be very happy just to bag it.”

“Look, Jack. Why wouldn’t we go? We’ve been invited to dinner by someone most of the world would kill to have dinner with.”

“An unfortunate choice of words.”

“Don’t be so glib. I want to go. Really. Give me just one reason we shouldn’t.”

“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because the man’s a criminal on the run?”

“Oh, I see. A criminal on the run. You mean like that Japanese guy you play tennis with sometimes, the one the FBI is trying to get its hands on for securities fraud? Or maybe he’s more like that Thai banker whose daughter’s wedding we went to last week. Surasak? Isn’t that his name? They say his bank collapsed because of the hundred million or so he drained out of it and sent to Switzerland, don’t they? Or maybe you mean-”

“Now who’s being glib?”

“I honestly don’t see the difference.”

“Look, Anita, Karsarkis is in a whole different league from guys like that. He made his fortune buying massive amounts of smuggled crude oil from Iraq back during the economic embargo before the war. Then he constructed a daisy chain of paper companies in suitably shady places and transformed the Iraqi crude into apparently perfectly legal oil from perfectly legal sources by whipping up a phony paper trail for it. He funneled money to the Iraqis when he knew they would end up using it to kill Americans.”

“I thought he had a rather interesting explanation for all that,” Anita said.

Interesting was the right word for it, although whether Karsarkis’ tale actually amounted to a defense was another question altogether. Still, after Karsarkis’ lawyers had artfully arranged for his story to leak to the press, it was what had made of the whole case such a public sensation.

Karsarkis’ lawyers were prepared to admit he had done what the government claimed, more or less, but they insisted he had been secretly functioning as an American agent when he did, and acting under the direct instructions of the White House, no less.

“You don’t really believe any of that spy crap, do you, Anita?”

“Then what about that woman? What was her name?”

“Cynthia Kim.”

“Yeah, her,” Anita nodded. “She was going to testify it was true, wasn’t she? That the president himself had told her it was?”

Although Karsarkis’ defense attorneys had always remained properly mute in public, his numerous apologists had been everywhere claiming Cynthia Kim was going to be the defen C beattorse’s star witness. According to the pro-Karsarkis people, who seemed to have more than a passing linkage with the anti-White House people, Miss Kim would testify she knew Karsarkis’ dealings had been authorized by the White House. She knew this, they said, because she herself was secretly placed inside Plato Karsarkis’ business operations by the White House in the first place. She had been put there to monitor Karsarkis’ activities and report back regularly to somebody, although precisely who was a bit unclear.