Jake Needham - Killing Plato

“Then who?” I asked.

“How much do you know about Plato Karsarkis’ business operations, Jack?”

“Not very much.” I thought a moment. “Not anything really, except for what I read in the newspapers.”

“And what is that?”

“That Karsarkis was indicted by a federal grand jury for doing deals with the Iraqis back before the war. He used one of his trading companies to barter embargoed oil or something like that.”

Kate leaned forward, lifted one of the serving spoons, and pushed at a fat prawn on one of the plastic plates.

“What do you know about the structure of his operations?”

“Nothing.”

“That surprises me. I thought the transcript I gave you would be quite enlightening to a man with your background.”

So that’s why the excerpts from Cynthia Kim’s deposition had been on the disk, to illustrate the company structures through which Karsarkis had worked. I had skimmed over all that at the time without appreciating its significance.

“Never mind,” Kate continued. “You want the high points now?”

“Sure.”

Kate put the spoon down and left the prawn where it was.

“Plato Karsarkis controls a web of companies with operations in forty-seven countries. We have identified sixty-one of those companies so far, and we know there are a number of others we haven’t yet traced. A company called Icon Holdings seems to be at the center of everything. It was registered in Luxembourg in 1987, and it has since taken over control of most of Plato’s operating companies.”

“Does Karsarkis personally control Icon?” I asked.

“We think so, but of course it’s not straightforward. Icon’s stock is actually registered to seven different trusts located in the Cayman Islands, Monte Carlo, the British Virgin Islands, and the Netherlands Antilles, and each of those trusts has a different bank as its trustee, most of those banks registered in Hong Kong and Panama. Tracing the real ownership of Icon would be almost impossible, which is of course the whole point of establishing that sort of structure in the first place.”

“What do these companies controlled by Icon actually do?”

“A fairly usual range of things: oil trading, commodity brokerage, real estate, banking, pharmaceuticals, mining, air transportation, shipping. The sort of diversified commercial operations typical of large multinational companies, at least on the surface.”

I said nothing.

“Those are also the sorts of businesses frequently used to conceal a whole range of other activities, Jack. Arms dealing, money laundering, bribery. Sometimes worse.”

“That’s a pretty big stretch, Kate. By that logic General Electric could be the world’s largest terrorist organization.”

“Plato Karsarkis’ companies started dealing smuggled Iraqi oil around the time the United Nations embargo was imposed on Iraq before the first Gulf War. As far as we can tell, Icon controls a Panamanian oil trading company called Sedco that was the primary vehicle for those sales. We also have reason to believe Sedco had close links with Iraqi intelligence. It may even have been a major source of barter funding for the Iraqi weapons procurement program.”

“I guess I’m not following you. Why does the Thai National Intelligence Agency have any interest in a Panamanian oil trading company even if it actually did have some kind of link to Iraqi intelligence at one time? That’s old news. There is no Iraqi intelligence service anymore.”

“Back then Iraqi Intelligence also had a lot of operations here, Jack.”

“Where?” Now I was sure I had lost her. “Surely you don’t mean in Thailand?”

“Yes, here in Thailand. Also in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The same countries where Karsarkis sold most of the embargoed oil.”

A mobile telephone began to ring and Kate retrieved her purse from beneath her feet and took out her phone.

“I’m sorry,” she said, glancing at its screen. “I have to take this.” She stood up and moved off until she was out of earshot, then lifted the phone and turned her back.

I noticed her driver and security man both stand at the same time and spread apart slightly. They kept a professional distance while she talked, but they stayed directly bed directtween Kate and the restaurant’s entrance. They looked as if they thought a terrorist hit squad might charge into the restaurant at any moment.

I could only hope they were wrong about that.

The woman in the rumpled sarong returned and refilled Kate’s wine glass.

“One more beer?” she asked, pointing to my empty Heineken bottle.

I nodded. Why not?

I didn’t really have anything important to do for the rest of the afternoon so getting a little sleepy from the beer wouldn’t be a complete disaster. Besides, I figured having a beautiful master spy whispering exotic tales of shadowy international intelligence operations into my ear justified at least a modicum of flexibility.

Out over the Gulf of Thailand thunderheads were building and the afternoon light had turned thin and watery. I watched as lightning danced among towers of gunmetal-colored cloud somewhere very far away. The breeze kicked up a notch and brought with it distant smells of dead and dying fish. It rippled the plastic palm trees lining the railings and they made a sound like tape being ripped from a box.

A young boy brought me a fresh Heineken. At almost the same moment, Kate returned to the table.

“Does the name Ramzi Yousef mean anything to you?” she asked, sitting down and watching the boy until he had gone.

“Didn’t he have something to do with the first World Trade Center attack? The one back in…” I hesitated, searching my memory for the right year. “Was it 1993?”

“That’s right. In 1992, Yousef entered the United States on a fake passport supplied by Iraqi intelligence and made contact with a group of Iraqi immigrants who had grandiose plans for attacking Americans on their own soil. Yousef organized those people into the operation that eventually became the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.”

“Okay,” I nodded.

I had absolutely no idea where Kate was going with any of this, but it was a nice afternoon and I was on my second Heineken so I was willing to listen to her pretty much as long as she wanted to talk.

“The Americans didn’t get Yousef until 1995,” she continued. “During the two years following the first World Trade Center attack, Yousef spent most of his time here in Southeast Asia mounting elaborate operations to kill westerners.”

I scooped up a spoonful of rice with a spiral of garlic calamari in it and chewed unhurriedly, waiting for Kate to get to whatever point she wanted to make.

“Do you remember a couple of months after the attack on the World Trade Center there was an attempt to assassinate George Bush with a car bomb in Kuwait?”

“Vaguely.”

“Two hundred pounds of Portuguese PE-4A was packed into the door panels of a Toyota Landcruiser, but the Kuwaitis got wind of the plot and grabbed the Landcruiser before it made it anywhere near Bush. They also arrested seventeen people who were connected in one way or another with the plan. The two ringleaders eventually admitted to your FBI that they were acting under the instructions of the Iraqi intelligence and they named Yousef as their contact. The batch of plastic explosives they used was identified as having come from Malaysia.”

“That doesn’t mean much,” I said as I sipped at my Heineken. “The stuff could have passed through dozens of hands before it ended up in that Landcruiser.”

“It could have, but it didn’t. Do you remember the attempted bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok?”