KILLING PLATO (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) Read Online Free PDF Page A

walkie-talkie for his flashlight, snapped it on, and stepped back, playing the beam over our Suzuki.
    “Rod jeep kong khun rue plan, kraap?”
Is this your jeep?
    “Mai chai, kraap, kong Mister Avis.”
No, it belongs to Mr. Avis.
    “Krai Khun Avis, kraap?”
Who is Mr. Avis?
    “Mai pen rai.”
It’s not important.
    The man nodded thoughtfully and made his way methodically ar Ft Art pen rai.ound the jeep, inspecting it with his flashlight. Except for the jerking beam, the darkness was nearly complete. We sat still and said nothing.
    When the man reached Anita’s side of the jeep, he leaned over and played the beam into the tiny back seat and over the floor behind the front seats. When he was done, he lifted it up and scanned forward inside the jeep, the beam of light bouncing through the rear-view mirror and into my eyes.
    At last, apparently satisfied, he clicked off the flashlight and walked to the front of the Suzuki. He waved to someone who must have been standing just out of sight somewhere in the darkness. The gate squeaked loudly on its tracks as it was pushed open from the inside.
    The first man stepped back, came to attention, and snapped us a salute, which I took to mean we could pass. I turned my headlights back on and, when I did, I could see the second man was almost a twin to the man standing next to our jeep, right down to the camouflage fatigues and the sidearm on his belt. I put the jeep in gear and we rolled forward. I felt the gate’s track bump past underneath us.
    When we were inside, I looked across at Anita. “Well, that was interesting.”
    “Yes, it was,” she murmured in a low voice. “I suppose.”
    The driveway beyond the gate was asphalt and it climbed steeply into a dense, very green rain forest with scatterings of cashew and rubber trees among the otherwise impenetrable stands of mangroves and coconut palms. What seemed to be about a mile on, it twisted suddenly to the right and the forest disappeared. Directly in front of us, although still a good distance away, was a small rise and at the top of it we saw the house. Taking my foot off the gas, I let the jeep coast to a stop.
    Bathed in floodlights and so white and colorless it hurt my eyes to stare directly at it, Karsarkis’ house looked like a cross between a movie set and a flying saucer crash. It was composed basically of four towers connected into a rectangle with long glass corridors. From the tops of each of the towers, glass pyramids rose some twenty feet further, each of them emitting a yellow glow suggestive of imminent levitation. At the foot of the rise there was a grass and stone surfaced courtyard with a low rectangular fountain in its center from which three nozzles burped rings of water into the night air. Just past the fountain, wide pebbled-concrete steps led from the courtyard up to a pair of glass doors flanked on both sides by a garden of what looked like lava rocks.
    “You may park up there, sir.”
    The sound of the voice from the shadows startled me, but not nearly as much as did the submachine gun I saw in the blond man’s hands when he stepped into the glow cast by our headlights. Although his voice was firm and commanding, the soft Irish lilt in his tones was impossible to miss.
    “Up there with the others now, sir, please.”
    Never much inclined to engage in dialogue with a man holding a submachine gun, I stepped on the gas and rolled on into the courtyard.
    There was another Suzuki parked next to the fountain, a white one with the top up, and a dark Mercedes sedan just past it. There was also a big four-wheel drive of some kind, although I couldn’t immediately identify the make.
    When we pulled to a stop behind the other Suzuki, I saw two drivers in gray safari suits sitting on the edge of the fountain, waiting and smoking cigarettes, silently watching. I assumed one went with the Mercedes and the other with four-wheel. It was pretty hard to imagine anyone being driven around in the backseat K th