by Jake Needham
“Are you sure that’s the only reason you are in Thailand, Professor Shepherd?”
“Yes, sir. Quite sure.”
“You must understand how this looks to me.”
I did, but I said nothing.
General Prasert watched me for a moment. I looked back at him and tried not to blink.
“Can you assure me,” he asked after the longest minute or two of my life, “that you are not here to represent Kathleeya Srisophon at her trial?”
So that was what this was all about.
“Yes, sir, I can. I haven’t been asked to and, if I were asked, I would refuse. I am not qualified to represent a defendant in a Thai court.”
“But perhaps you have been called in as a special consultant of some kind?”
“I haven’t.”
“Have you seen Kathleeya Srisophon since you left Thailand to live in Hong Kong?”
Did this bastard know everything about me? Yes, it sounded like he did. I only hoped he didn’t know I was about to lie to him.
“No, sir.”
“Have you spoken to her?”
I tried not to answer too quickly or hesitate too long.
“No, sir.”
The general stared at me without expression for what felt like a week but was probably only a minute or so.
“When do you plan to leave Thailand, Professor Shepherd?”
“I expect to complete the investigation for the Malaysian government this week, and I will leave Thailand right after that.”
Prasert nodded several times and sat looking at me, apparently weighing what I had just told him.
“If that is true, Professor Shepherd, I think we can overlook the matter of you using a Canadian passport to enter the country. I wouldn’t wish to embarrass our neighbors to the south by washing their dirty laundry in public.”
I nodded.
Quit when you’re ahead had always been my motto. I wasn’t absolutely certain I was ahead here, but I figured quitting was still the thing to do whether I was ahead or not. So I said nothing.
“On the other hand,” he added, “if it turns out you are involved in Kathleeya Srisophon’s trial in some way…”
Prasert trailed off and spread his open hands slightly. I got the message.
“I’m not, sir. I will be leaving Thailand before the end of this week.”
Abruptly Prasert dropped the remote control on the coffee table and got to his feet.
“I hope that is the truth, Professor Shepherd.”
He extended his hand. I rose and shook it.
“For your sake, I hope that really is the truth.”
Prasert sank into his chair, picked up the television remote, and turned the golf tournament back on.
“Someone will take you back to the Sheraton,” he said, raising his voice enough for me to hear him over the television set, but not bothering to look at me. “Goodbye, Professor Shepherd.”
I was dismissed.
When I left the room, a young soldier wearing sergeant’s stripes was waiting for me. The two senior officers had disappeared.
The Mercedes with the dark windows had disappeared, too. The soldier drove me back to the Sheraton in an old Toyota pickup.
Was that a sign General Prasert had lost interest in me?
I certainly hoped so.
TWENTY-NINE
I CONSIDERED CALLING Jello the next morning to tell him about my little chat with General Prasert, but I decided not to. What would be the point? Nothing had been said that meant anything, at least not that I could see. If I told Jello I had been summoned by Prasert, it would no doubt stir things up for no reason at all, and things were already quite well enough stirred up for me.
Since I didn’t call Jello and had no other commitments for the morning, I got to the Pacific City Club early for my meeting with Mr. Wang. He had promised to produce Eddie Lo’s IT guy there at noon and allow me to question him about Eddie’s involvement with the money missing from the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund, but I wasn’t absolutely certain that was really going to happen. This had all been too easy. Why was a Chinese triad being so helpful to a white guy? It still didn’t make sense to me.
When I got to the Pacific City Club, the receptionist told me they did indeed have a private room reserved for Mr. Wang at noon. Even if I didn’t understand why this was happening, it apparently was.
She took me down a short hallway to a teak door with shiny brass fittings and held it open for me. The room wasn’t large, but it was elegantly furnished with a circular mahogany table and six comfortable looking chairs upholstered in green and gold stripes. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, I could see all the way to the Chao Phraya River and the hulking cranes lining Bangkok’s port.
The receptionist brought me coffee in a cream-colored china cup and a plate of unidentifiable cookies. It was good coffee, and I was happy to sit drinking it, eating the cookies, and admiring the view until the door opened again.
Mr. Wang was accompanied by another man. He was young, no more than twenty-five, and obviously Indian. That surprised me although I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that possibility already. A great many of the IT specialists working in private companies in Hong Kong were Indian. Indians had a reputation for being easier to manage than the Chinese, and of course cheaper. I had just assumed that anyone working for the Eddie Lo would be ethnic Chinese, but obviously I was wrong about that.
“This is Nalin Singh,” Mr. Wang said.
We shook hands and I looked the young man over. He had short hair, an open face, dark skin, and slightly uneven teeth. He was dressed in a black polo shirt and rumpled khakis, and he wore rimless glasses with thin, gold-colored temples.
“May I bring anything for anyone?” the receptionist asked.
Nalin Singh gave a single, tight shake of his head. I pointed to my empty coffee cup.
“Perhaps I will have tea,” Mr. Wang said. “I think… Earl Grey. Yes, Earl Grey. That would be very nice.”
Personally, I thought Mr. Wang was pushing this English gentleman thing a little too far, but he was the one doing me the favor here so what business was it of mine what part he wanted to play?
Mr. Wang selected the chair across from me and sat down. Nalin Singh stood uncertainly for a moment shifting from foot to foot, but when neither of us said anything he finally chose the chair between us and sat down, too.
“Nalin, my name is Jack Shepherd. I’d like to talk to you about the work you did for Eddie Lo.”
“Mr. Wang says you’re not police.”
“That’s right. I’m not.”
“Then I don’t have to talk to you, do I?”
“You might help yourself out if you do.”
“How? Would it help me get my money from Eddie?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. What have you got to lose?”
“My ass, man.”
“It looks to me like you already put that on the line when you copied Eddie’s files and took off.” I gestured at Mr. Wang. “Without these guys to look out for you, I’m not sure what would have become of you by now.”
The Indian kid put his elbows on the table and his face in his hands.
“Oh man, I am so fucked,” he whined through his hands.
“Then let’s see what we can do to unfuck you,” I said. “You give me something I can use, and I’ll make things very unpleasant for Eddie. When he sees how much harm you can do him, he’ll pay you off in a minute.”
“Either that or just kill my ass.”
That was always a possibility, of course, and the kid would have known I was full of shit if I tried to say it wasn’t, so I said nothing at all.
He lifted his face out of his hands and looked at me with empty, frightened eyes.
The door opened and a waiter in a white jacket entered with a tea service and a silver coffee pot on a tray. We all stayed quiet while he refilled my cup and fussed around setting out Mr. Wang’s tea. After he poured the tea and returned the str
ainer to its holder, he bowed slightly and let himself out.
Mr. Wang bent forward and examined the tea in his cup like a man making a difficult purchase decision. Apparently satisfied with what he saw, he added a small measure of milk to the tea, stirred it, and took a sip.
“Ah,” he said. “Excellent. Really excellent.”
He returned his cup to its saucer and glanced first at me then at the Indian kid.
“I would suggest you answer Mr. Shepherd’s questions to the best of your ability, Nalin,” he finally said. “It would be very much to your advantage.”
Mr. Wang’s voice was soft, and his face was expressionless, but the threat was right there on the surface.
Nalin eyed Mr. Wang for a moment, and then he sat up a little straighter and shifted his eyes back to me.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“I’ve been hired to find some money that’s missing from a Malaysian investment fund,” I said. “It’s quite a lot of money.”
The kid bobbed his head. “That’s what Mr. Wang told me. What’s that got to do with Eddie Lo?”
“Our information is that Eddie Lo helped the people who took it launder the money through companies he controls. He may have invested it in real estate or in securities, or he may have broken it up into bank deposits.”
“This is money that would have all come at the same time?”
“More or less.”
“Did it all come in one lot, or was it broken up and sent from different sources?”
“I don’t honestly know.”
“Would it have been five or six months ago?”
I nodded.
“How much money are we talking about here?” the kid asked.
I had wanted to avoid that question although I knew it was unlikely I could. After all, I was asking this guy about movements of large sums of money through Eddie’s companies. He couldn’t tell me much unless he knew how much I was looking for and I understood that. On the other hand, when he found out I was looking for a billion dollars, he might well decide his help was worth a lot to me and demand more in return than I would, or could, deliver.
“A lot,” I hedged. “An awful lot.”
The young Indian looked away and scratched his cheek.
“Eddie had me set up a bunch of shell companies about four months before I left,” he said after a moment. “Mostly Cayman Islands companies, but I also used a few in the British Virgin Islands and Singapore. He wanted multiple bank accounts for all of them, which was a real pain in the ass. It took me a few days, but right after I finished I saw money flooding in. Came from all over.”
“Do you remember what the total was?”
“It was a lot, man. In US dollars?”
I nodded.
“Eight or nine hundred million. Could have been more. I never had any reason to add it all up.”
I watched Nalin carefully, but he didn’t seem overly impressed by the amount.
“Did you frequently handle sums like that for Eddie?”
“It was no big deal. You handle a hundred million the same way you handle one million. And you handle eight hundred million the same way you handle a hundred million. You just do more of the same things. Like I said, no big deal.”
“And what are those things?”
Nalin looked confused. “What are you talking about, man?”
“You said you just did the same things regardless of how much money is involved. What are those things?”
“Oh, I see.” Nalin scratched at his cheek and leaned forward. “You probably already know. You sound like you understand all this stuff pretty well.”
“Please answer the question, Nalin,” I prodded. “What are these things you do?”
“I take the money that comes in and route it to different accounts held by the shell companies. Then I write a little software routine that breaks up the deposits and transfers them around among accounts for the other shell companies. Ten, maybe fifteen transfers, all in varying amounts and different currencies. The money goes round and round,” he giggled.
“And after the money stops moving around, what happens to it?”
“Eddie invests most of it in stuff.”
“Do you know what kind of stuff?”
“Oh yeah, man,” Nalin smiled. “Most of the time I know. Eddie doesn’t think I do, but I know.”
Suddenly Mr. Wang, who had been quiet up until then, cleared his throat. Both Nalin and I looked at him.
“I wonder if this might be a good time to take a break?” he asked.
“But I was just getting to the good part,” I said.
“Yes, exactly. And that is why I would like to get a couple of things straight before we go on.”
“Such as what?”
Nalin was looking back and forth between us like a man watching a tennis match. I wondered if he yet understood that he was the ball.
“What do you plan to do with whatever information this young man gives you?” Mr. Wang asked me.
“I will put it together with the other information I have obtained and give it to my clients.”
“And what will they do with it?”
“In all likelihood they’ll ask me to get their money back for them.”
“Will you do that?”
“I’ll certainly try.”
“Can you do that?”
“Probably.”
“Then it is your expectation the information given to you here will lead to Eddie Lo losing this money?”
“Yes.”
“How long do you think that will take?”
“For me to get their money back from Eddie Lo?”
Mr. Wang nodded.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I would just be guessing.”
“Guess.”
I watched Mr. Wang and thought that over, but I could feel Nalin’s eyes on me, too.
“It will happen soon. Perhaps in a matter of weeks. Look at it this way. If you were missing a billion dollars and you hired someone to get it back for you, how long would you want them to take?”
Mr. Wang nodded several times and fell silent.
“Now let me ask you a question,” I said to him after the silence had stretched on for a while.
He looked at me and raised his eyebrows, which I took as an invitation to continue.
“What’s in this for you? What do you expect to get in return for letting Nalin tell me what he knows about where the Malaysian money went?”
“Oh, I think you’ve worked that out by now, Mr. Shepherd. I’ve been told you’re quite a smart man.”
“Want to hear my guess?”
“Please.”
“When my clients go after Eddie to get their money back, you’re going to tell him that Nalin here also knows where he has put all of that bribe money from China he’s been laundering for years. You’re going to threaten to make that public unless he pays you well. He won’t be certain how much you have, of course, but since he just showed my clients what Eddie did with their money, it will make the risk too great. So he will pay you.”
“Very good, Mr. Shepherd. You are every bit as smart as I’ve heard.”
“Does that mean I’m right?”
“You are exactly right. Your clients get their money, the young lad here gets his money, and we get paid a bit for our trouble. As a bonus, Eddie Lo is effectively ruined. It’s a win-win for everyone.”
“Except for Eddie,” I pointed out.
“Yes, well. In every win-win there is still at least one lose-lose somewhere. In this case, that’s Eddie.”
Mr. Wang paused and looked out the windows at something.
“No one really cares about that,” he added after a moment.
“Except for Eddie,” I said once again.
Mr. Wang just smiled.
NO ONE SAID anything for a long while after that. Mr. Wang continued looking out the window. I looked at Mr. Wang and wondered what Eddie Lo had done to piss off an entire triad. Nalin looked at bot
h of us.
“May I continue now?” I asked Mr. Wang after the silence had gone on for much too long.
“Of course, Mr. Shepherd,” he said, shifting his eyes back to me from whatever he had been watching out the windows. “Please do.”
I turned back to the Indian kid.
“You were saying you knew how Eddie had invested the money that came in during this period we’re talking about. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“All of that money?”
“I can’t be sure, but I think so.”
“Then please tell me,” I said to Nalin.
“I can do better than that,” he said.
Nalin Singh fished in the right-hand pocket of his trousers for a moment and came out with a chrome-colored flash drive about the width of a stick of gum and a little shorter. He pushed it across the table to me. When I picked it up and examined it, I saw that on one side it said Kingston, and on the other it said 64Gb.
Mr. Wang leaned forward. “I asked Nalin to prepare a copy of the materials I thought would interest you most, Mr. Shepherd. The material that interests us, of course, is not included.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Is that it?” the Indian kid asked. “Can I go now?”
“Everything about how you laundered the money that came in five months ago and where it went is on here?” I asked holding up the thumb drive he gave me. I watched his eyes for any sign somebody was trying to slip something past me.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Everything.”
I didn’t see anything in his eyes that kept me from believing him.
THIRTY
I LEFT THE Pacific City Club, found a taxi, and told the driver to take me to Pantip Plaza, a featureless office tower on Petchaburi Road that is the mother of all IT shopping malls in Thailand. Without traffic, Pantip would be less than a ten-minute drive from the Pacific City Club, but there is no such thing as Bangkok without traffic and it could just as easily take an hour and a half to get there. Today it took me twenty-five minutes. I felt downright lucky.
