by Brett Baker
Sun wrote as Buster spoke, and every time Buster finished speaking Sun stared at him without responding, as if judging the truthfulness of Buster’s statement. The intervals of silence increased by a second or two each time Buster spoke.
“Before you say anything else,” Sun said, “you should know that we’re here because no one has seen Li in days. He had arranged to meet a friend in New York, and when he didn’t show, that friend called Li’s wife, and she called us.”
“That’s horrible,” Buster said. “I hope you find him.”
“We’re making progress,” Sun said. “Things are starting to come together. That’s why we’re here. We’re hoping that maybe you can shed some light on a few things.”
“I’ll try, but I’m afraid I won’t be much help. I haven’t seen Li, and I didn’t know him well. In fact, I didn’t even know he was married. He never mentioned a wife, and I got the impression that he didn’t do anything but work. The guy isn’t afraid of hard work, I’ll give him that.”
“We found his car in the parking garage,” Sun said. “Just this morning. A total fluke.”
“Which parking garage,” Buster asked, his heart beating out of his chest. Somehow in the days since his encounter with Li he’d failed to consider his car. The thought hadn’t even crossed his mind. He hadn’t checked for it in the parking garage. He hadn’t assumed that Li had someone drive him to Chinchew that night. He hadn’t resolved the question of whether Li had a car at Chinchew, he had failed to even ask himself the question.
“Here. At Chinchew.”
“He parked his car here?” Buster asked because he could think of nothing else to say. Sun nodded. “So it makes sense for you to assume that he might have come to see me. I understand that. But like I said, Li knows everyone. I’m sure that I’m not the only person he knows in this building.” Buster stood up, as if he’d settled the issue. “Let me know if I can do anything else for you, but I’m afraid I have no information about Yuzhan Li.”
“Mr. Dodge, I’m afraid we have a few more questions. Please sit down.”
Buster looked at the two men, glanced down at his watch, and said, “Oh, of course! I’m sorry. I figured since I have nothing helpful to add that we might as well not waste more time with this. I’m sure you’re busy men.”
“Thanks for your consideration,” Gao said, speaking for the first time, “But this is our priority, so we’re in no hurry. We just need to get it right.” Buster nodded.
“Buster, we know what Li did right up until he drove his car here. Now, it could be that he drove here and parked downstairs and walked somewhere else. Parking’s difficult around here, and I’m sure people park here and walk elsewhere all the time. But Li had dinner with his wife that night, and then told her he had some business to take care of. He left his house at eight-thirty. If he arrived here after that, he’d have no reason to park downstairs unless he was coming here. There’s plenty of parking at that time of night. So if he were going somewhere else, he would have parked somewhere else.”
“Well it’s a big building, Mr. Sun. He could have parked here and met someone in one of the other offices.”
“Yes, that’s possible,” Sun said. “And we’ll make our way through the building to talk to others. But according to the security logs you were the only person in the building with whom we’re sure he had a relationship.”
“I don’t know if I’d go so far to say that we had a relationship.”
“You did business together. Maybe not a lot of business. Maybe not for some months. But you did business together, which constitutes a relationship. I’m not saying he was your brother or your best friend. Just that you knew each other.”
Buster shrugged as if conceding the point.
“I haven’t seen Li for quite some time,” Buster said. “He didn’t come see me that night.”
“How long is quite some time?” Sun asked.
“I don’t know. Months. I’m a busy man. I don’t have time for people like Li.”
“What will we find when we go through Li’s car?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Buster asked.
“What are you working on with him?”
“Have you listened to anything I’ve said? I just told you that I don’t have time for Li. I haven’t seen him for months. He helped me with the building, but that’s done and I’ve moved on. I suspect he’s moved on, too. Chances are he had some deal with one of the tenants in the building, and that’s why he was here. Ask around. I’m sure you’ll find someone who’s been working with him. He didn’t come here for nothing.”
“Thanks for the advice, Buster,” Gao said.
“So you haven’t seen Li for months, including in the last week or so?” Sun asked.
“Correct.”
“What do you know about his business dealings?”
“Nothing. That’s his business, not my business. All I know about what he does are the things we’ve worked on together. I’ve got my hands full managing my own business. I can’t worry about someone else’s business.”
“One last thing,” Sun said. “Li’s wife didn’t know he planned to go to New York, yet we found information that showed he planned to board a flight to New York later that evening. What do you make of that?”
“I haven’t the first damn clue,” Buster said. “Maybe he liked to keep things from his wife. Maybe he forgot he had the plane ticket. I don’t know why you think I’d know anything about his relationship with his wife, who I didn’t even know existed until just a few minutes ago.”
“I thought maybe he mentioned it to you when he called you that night,” Sun said.
Buster thought his heart would explode. It raced in his chest and he could feel his blood pressure rising. Every artery seemed ready to burst. He felt waves of heat radiate through his body at the same time a chill washed over him. He knew that he had no hope of hiding his surprise, so he decided to try to portray it as anger.
“With all due respect, Mr. Sun, I resent you coming into my office and calling me a liar. If I had communicated with Li, I’d be more than happy to tell you about it. But I have not. So I think it’s best if you leave right now. I’ve tried to accommodate you, but it’s clear that you’ve come in here with a nonsensical line of reasoning, so I refuse to give you more of my time. I’m sure Li’s wife would be very disappointed to know the tremendous disservice you’re doing her with your misguided investigation.”
“Sit down, Buster,” Sun said. “What did you and Li discuss? What have you been working on?”
“We haven’t been working on anything,” Buster said. “I don’t know how to make that any clearer to you. I don’t recall getting a phone call from him, and I certainly haven’t seen him. I’m afraid you’re going to have to dig elsewhere for the answers you seek. Rough break, boys. Looks like this is going to involve actual police work. I hope you’re up to the task.”
“So you expect us to believe that Li called you and you have no recollection of talking to him?”
Buster closed his eyes, lowered his head, and scratched his cheek as if pondering an important point. Or at least that’s what he hoped Sun would believe. But the truth was that Buster had no idea what to say next. A small detail drove him to try and turn the emphasis of the conversation back on the detectives.
“Why are you just asking me about this now? I mean if Li’s been missing, why didn’t you come to talk to me as soon as someone reported him missing? Didn’t you pull his phone records right away? That seems like a rather elementary first step. You said that no one has seen him in days, but this is the first I’m hearing of it, even though you claim that he called me. Did you not think to look at his phone records until you found his car?”
“Thanks for your advice on how to do our jobs,” Gao said, “but you can rest assured that we’re on top of things.”
“Li’s wife reported him missing three days ago, but since he has a history we waited to act.”
“A history o
f what?” Buster asked.
“Disappearing,” Sun said. “In the past he’s disappeared for a couple of days at a time, so his wife didn’t worry, and when she reported it to us, we didn’t worry. However, he’s never been gone this long, and the discovery of his car confirms that this time is different.”
“I’m not certain it confirms anything,” Buster said. “The guy’s a restless soul. He’s on the move. He likes to disappear.” Buster stood up, and pushed his chair in. “I wish you would have disclosed this piece of information at the beginning of our conversation. I wouldn’t have been so accommodating with my time. I’m a busy man. And I’m sure you’re busy, so let me give you some advice. Don’t waste your time on this. He’ll be back. Maybe he just needs a few extra days. Maybe he’s hiding out in one of these offices. Maybe he just needed a respite from his wife.”
“This is more than that,” Sun said.
“I don’t think it is,” Buster said. “Li likes to do his own thing, so give him some space. He’ll be back in a few days, and you won’t have to look for him. But if you insist on chasing your tail on this, then I suggest you do it elsewhere. There’s nothing here.”
Sun and Gao stood up, and Buster extended his hand to each man. He’d felt the walls closing in on him as Sun continued to question him, and at various times felt like he might crack under the pressure and either confess or drop dead. He hadn’t known Li well enough to know that he sometimes disappeared on his own, but he recognized how useful such information might be for him, both with the police investigating his disappearance, and the men awaiting his arrival in New York.
For the first time in days, Buster felt the noose around his neck ease.
20
Chapter 20
“I don’t know the men who came aboard. Let me get that out of the way from the beginning. I assume they knew Graham, but since we didn’t get a chance to talk about it, I’m just guessing on that. Mia, I think you’ll agree that some familiarity seemed to exist between him and the leader of the pirates. I call them pirates because I guess that’s what they were, but we can’t be sure about that either. And now it doesn’t matter.”
Randy spoke with the relief of a man about to get something off of his chest. After talking with Mia about The Summit, and realizing that everything she divulged was unknown to almost everyone in the world, Randy knew he could remove the shield he’d presented to Mia since he pulled her out of the water. They had a common interest, and working together provided the best chance of success. But just as Mia threatened him before telling him about The Summit, he reserved the right to eliminate Mia and the others if he had to.
“How do we know that you don’t know those men?” Krasner asked.
“You don’t. You’ll have to take my word for it.”
“Let him talk,” Mia said. “Maybe we can piece it together. Who are you?”
“Randy is my real name. United States Secret Service, Financial Crimes Division. Graham and Fitz were Secret Service, too. We’re on the trail of this gold you mentioned. Just over three weeks ago, as part of a counterfeit currency operation, some special agents came across a stockpile of gold in a hangar near LAX. They weren’t looking for gold. They were looking for greenbacks, so they didn’t pursue the gold. But they included it in their report, and Graham and I started investigating. We went back to the warehouse, and all of it had been moved.”
“Golly fuck, why wouldn’t the special agents safeguard that?” Mia asked. “I have no Secret Service training, but it seems rather obvious that a stockpile of gold in an airplane hangar isn’t on the up-and-up. How could they let that go?”
“It wasn’t their purview. They were there for currency. We’re a special unit of the Financial Crimes Division. I guess the best way for you to think about it is that we’re The Summit for the Secret Service. Most agents and officers of the Service don’t even know we exist. When the Service moved from Treasury to Homeland Security after 9/11, they left one unit behind in Treasury. That’s us. The idea is that anyone tracking the resources of the Secret Service misses us. Our dollars come directly from Treasury. We joke that they print the money and give it directly to us, and that’s not too far from the truth. Since we’ve got so many resources we’re given the tough assignments. Mostly cyber warfare cases. High-tech stuff. But we also cover the other end of the spectrum, the most low-tech bullshit you can imagine. Guys printing money, loading it in boxes, and shipping it. Stuff like that. Anyway, these guys can get rather sophisticated in their methods, so it’s important for us to keep our eye on the ball. We’ve got to find a common thread and pull it, and follow it where it goes. On that day, for those agents, the gold was just a distraction.”
“And for you it led to the middle of the Pacific?” Mia asked.
“Eventually. We monitored the warehouse almost twenty-four hours for the next three weeks. Nothing. Not a single visitor during that entire time. Meanwhile, we’re scouring the Port of Los Angeles records and talking to everyone we can find at the warehouse and LAX to see if we can find what happened to all that gold. No one knows anything. Millions of dollars of gold, vanished. Without a trace. Like it didn’t even exist. We concentrated on the Port after that.”
“You assumed it had to be shipped over water because of the weight?” Oglesby asked.
“That’s right. Hard to imagine shipping too many twenty-five pound gold bars through the air. In the report the special agents noted about five-dozen pallets. We assume they’d want to transport it all once, but even if they had a big enough plane it’s risky to send that much through the air, as Mia now knows well. So we guessed they were going to ship it by freighter.”
“To what purpose?” Oglesby asked.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Randy said. “When we came upon Mia we’d been cruising between a couple of common shipping lanes, trying to head off any vessel that seemed suspicious.”
“How did you deem a vessel suspicious?”
“Too small. It’s not cheap to ship across the ocean, and companies that do it don’t use small vessels. They want to load as much cargo as possible. But if I were shipping tons of gold across the ocean illegally, I wouldn’t want to put it on one of those huge freighters. Too many people handling it. Too risky. Plus, shipping by legitimate means creates a paper trail. Granted, there’s a high probability that they’ll get it through without anyone detecting anything, but all it takes is one looky-loo longshoreman and the whole thing comes crashing down. So, assuming they wanted to send it internationally, and that so much gold made air transport unfeasible, we decided to concentrate on small vessels.”
“But why in the middle of the ocean?” Krasner asked. “Why not stick close to shore? A smaller range to cover.”
“We might have missed something. If they got a head start of a day or two then we would have never caught them. So we decided to get out to sea, ahead of any ship that could have left in the past week or so, and cut them off.”
“The ocean’s big,” Oglesby said. “Why would you think you could monitor every ship passing by? You’re bound to miss something.”
“It’s a guessing game,” Randy said. “Educated guesses, but guesses nonetheless. The two biggest gold markets, India and China, are in Asia. The bars of gold disappeared from a warehouse in Los Angeles. Easy to assume that it’s headed to China or India. That shortens the range we have to cover. They’re not going to want to go through Japan or Thailand if that’s not the final destination. Too messy. China’s closer to India, so we concentrated on the route from L.A. to China. Shanghai’s too close to the East China Sea, which is a mess with Japan and China fighting over it, so southern China made more sense. Preferred currents lead to southern China, so if we remained within those currents we had a rather narrow belt of sea to monitor. If they shipped it by small boat, we would have found it. No doubt in my mind. Could be that we were too far ahead. Maybe they’re still on the way.”
“Or they didn’t ship it by sea,” Oglesby sai
d.
“Doesn’t seem like it,” Randy said. “Not if Mia saw the same gold in that airplane that our agents saw in the warehouse.”
“There’s no way to tell,” Mia said. “Agents saw gold in L.A. three weeks ago. We don’t know what happened to that gold. The bars in the plane that went down with me were in Vegas a week ago. Maybe they’re the same bars you saw, maybe not.”
“Couldn’t be all of them,” Randy said. “Our guys saw five-dozen pallets. They wouldn’t all fit in that truck you rode from Vegas to New York.”
“Right. And there’s some significance to my gold going to New York first,” Mia said. “It doesn’t make sense to truck it 2,500 miles to New York, only to fly it back in the same direction.”
“Maybe some of your gold joined up with other gold in New York and they loaded all of it on the plane.”
“Even so, why not just fly the plane to Vegas and add my gold there? It had to go to New York first for some reason. So it’s quite possible that your gold also went to New York.”
“So you think New York is key here?” Randy asked.
“Seems like it.”
“And you don’t know where your plane was headed?”
“Asia, obviously. We took off from New York, and judging by the amount of time we were in the air, and where you pulled me from the sea, I suspect we landed in Honolulu to refuel.”
“What kind of aircraft?”
“767, I think,” Mia said. “I’ve never been great at identifying planes, but I’ve been on enough of those that I think I’m right.”
“I sure wish we could lift that thing from the bottom of the ocean,” Randy said. “It’d be nice if those bars had imprints we could trace, or we could track the ownership of the plane. We can check with the FAA, but I suspect anyone who is transporting billions of dollars worth of gold under questionable circumstances has taken the proper precautions to ensure their mode of transportation remains unknown, as well.”
