by Jake Needham
Pantip is dingy and rundown and has seen better days, but it still pulls the punters because it offers five floors crammed with small shops selling laptops, desktops, tablets, printers, digital cameras, MP3 players, computer parts, cases, and a good deal of stuff I couldn’t identify with a gun to my head. Counterfeit computer products are sold right alongside genuine, top-of-the-range gear, but most of the shopkeepers aren’t really trying to rip anyone off. They offer both the illegal copy and the genuine article and leave it up to you to decide how honest you are.
The place’s greatest notoriety comes from it being ground zero in Thailand for the sale of counterfeit software and pirated CDs and DVDs. Sometimes you find Hollywood movies there that haven’t even appeared in theaters yet. And of course there are also the touts who hiss at every male foreigner, “You want copy porno? Very sexy!”
The only place in Pantip I’ll buy anything is IT City, which occupies the whole of the fifth floor. It’s the biggest store in Pantip and sells only genuine versions of the latest computer hardware. The store is surprisingly well organized and stands apart from the chaos of the rest of the mall. The staff is even pretty able and speaks reasonable English.
After a half hour of poking around, I picked out a Lenovo IdeaPad with a thirty-day trial version of Microsoft Office already installed on it. I had a perfectly good laptop at home already, of course, but I hadn’t brought it with me to Bangkok since I thought this trip would just involve a few quick conversations and I’d be on my way home. Or maybe that was more of a hope than a thought.
To bring order to my growing collection of SIM cards, I also picked up four cheap telephones that looked like Chinese knock-offs of the old Motorola flip phone and I grabbed a few no-name thumb drives in case I need to make extra copies of anything. Even with all that, I was still out the door for less than six hundred dollars.
Back at the Sheraton, I put the three SIMs I bought at the airport into three of the phones and put the SIM Alisa gave me into the fourth, which let me put my own SIM card from Hong Kong back in my iPhone where it belonged. I found some tape in a little kit of office supplies in the desk drawer so I wrote out the numbers for each of the new SIMs and taped them to the phones. I searched around the room until I located enough power outlets and plugged all four of the phones in to charge.
After that, I sat down at the desk, powered up the Lenovo laptop, and fiddled around until I felt comfortable with it. When I was confident I wouldn’t screw up the contents of the thumb drive the Indian kid had given me, I plugged it into a USB port on the laptop and took a look at what was on it. There were half a dozen spreadsheets set up in Microsoft Excel and a bunch of Word documents, pretty much what I expected to find.
The first thing I did was log onto the hotel’s wi-fi system and copy the contents of the thumb drive to the encrypted cloud storage where I back up all my client files. After that, out of my usual overabundance of lawyerly caution, I put the original thumb drive in an envelope and addressed it to myself in Hong Kong, and I took the envelope downstairs to the front desk and sent it by Express Mail. I found a vending machine on my way back up to my room and bought a Coke Zero. Then I settled down at the desk and started reading through the documents on the drive.
It took me about fifteen minutes to finish my Coke Zero and another half hour after that to go through all the documents. When I was done, I had a pretty good idea where the money from the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund had ended up. It was getting it back that was going to prove a challenge.
Nalin Singh had done a fine job. The routine he wrote converted the incoming funds into euros, pounds sterling, Swiss francs, Japanese yen, Hong Kong dollars, and Singapore dollars, broke the converted sums into deposits of varying sizes, and bounced those deposits around among shell company accounts at twenty banks located in tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Monaco, the Cook Islands, the Bahamas, and Luxembourg. After making ten or fifteen trips through the maze, most of the funds had been converted back into US dollars and injected into five fresh shell companies with accounts at banks in Singapore and Hong Kong. By the time the money had been routed into those accounts, every deposit was clean and fresh and gave off the bracing aroma of new money. That was why it was called money laundering.
I was interested in all that, of course, but my interest was mostly academic. What mattered most were the five shell companies where Nalin had parked the money after all the wash-rinse-dry cycles were done. Who owned those five companies? Other companies owned them, I quickly discovered, other companies that were owned by yet other companies incorporated in countries most people couldn’t find on a map.
One of those five companies was called Red and Blue Limited, and it used the three hundred million or so it had when Nalin Singh’s money-go-round stopped to buy a New York property company. The Manhattan Property Trust owned a collection of office buildings, hotels, and apartment buildings scattered around New York City. They weren’t trophy properties, the kind of buildings that might attract unwanted publicity, but solid, middle-of-the-road commercial properties that wouldn’t attract any notice when their ownership changed.
Of course, like most properties held for commercial investment, the properties in the Manhattan Property Trust’s portfolio were all leveraged, each of them having been acquired in part with mortgage debt, and this was where Eddie’s scheme was so inventive that I almost stood up and applauded. After acquiring the Manhattan Property Trust, Eddie refinanced all its mortgages with debt from new sources and paid off the original mortgages. And where did Red and Blue Limited borrow money to refinance the debt it owed to the creditors of the Manhattan Property Trust, particularly since no one had ever heard of Red and Blue Limited before and it had no credit facilities available to it?
It borrowed the money from the other four shell companies that Nalin Singh’s money-go-round had capitalized. Genius. It was genius because the money had been borrowed in name only. Eddie never intended to pay any of it back, and no one would ever ask for any of it back.
As a practical matter, Red and Blue Limited now owned the Manhattan Property Trust and its entire Manhattan real estate portfolio free and clear, a billion dollars’ worth of solid commercial real estate in the best commercial real estate market in the world. And, since not a cent of the money used to buy or finance the property had any connection with the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the money Red and Blue Limited would receive when it started selling off the properties would be whiter than white. Like I said, genius.
Okay, so now I knew where the money had gone, but how to get it back? That was a much bigger problem.
The American courts would help if the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund could show the properties were bought and financed with money stolen from them, but Nalin Singh had done such a good job of burying the source of the funds under a mountain of funny-money mortgages and multi-currency transfers that I didn’t see how they could do that. Of course, part of what the fund was paying me for was to tell them how to do that, so finding a way to tear down all of the structures Nalin Singh had carefully built up was now my problem. And it was not an easy one to solve. I needed to think about it for a while.
I closed the laptop and locked it in the room safe. Then I put on my running clothes and went down to the Sheraton’s gym.
Some people exercise to burn off excess energy. Some people exercise to reduce stress. Some people exercise to make themselves feel good. I don’t understand any of those people.
Back in Washington I used to play tennis two or three times a week, but living in Bangkok and Hong Kong I got out of the habit. Courts were hard to come by in both places. They were all either too crappy to play on or too far away to get to. If you did find one that was both in good condition and conveniently located, the court time was generally so expensive you had to take out a second mortgage to afford it. That was when I took up running instead.
A lot of people love running. I hate it. The cigars don’t help
, of course, but I struggle along anyway since my only alternative is to develop a passing resemblance to the Pillsbury Dough Boy.
I have managed to get myself to a point where I can do five miles without keeling over dead. That isn’t very much, I know, but I try to do those five miles three times a week, and that’s good enough for me. If running outside isn’t too grim, that’s what I do, but I don’t mind hitting the treadmill in a gym if the outside world isn’t particularly appealing. One side benefit to running for me is that after forty-five minutes or so of pounding along on a treadmill I feel so crappy I no longer have enough energy to worry about whatever problems are bugging me. All I want to do is to lie down and forget about them.
After I made my five miles without triggering a coronary, I staggered out of the gym to the Sheraton’s pool deck, which is far enough above Bangkok’s shitty street-level air to be pleasant. As a bonus, it wasn’t particularly crowded. I spread my sweaty towel on a lounge chair that was sitting off to itself and stretched out. I considered trying to focus my mind on how to get the Malaysia Sovereign Wealth Fund’s money back from Eddie Lo, but five minutes later I was fast asleep. See how the exercise thing works for me?
When I woke up, it was dark. The lights in the pool were on and they threw rippling shadows across the deck. I looked at my watch and wrinkled my brow. I did the calculation, then I did it again as my mind fought the fuzziness that comes with waking suddenly from an unexpected nap. Was it really possible I had slept for more than three hours? How could that be?
I sat up and shook off the cobwebs. So much for working out how to retrieve the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund’s missing money, huh? Time to take a shower and get something to eat. Then I could read for a while, get a decent night’s sleep, and approach the whole problem with a fresh mind tomorrow. I congratulated myself on constructing such a wonderful justification so quickly, went inside, and took the elevator back up to my floor.
When I got to my room, I opened the door with my key card and fumbled for the light switch. There was enough light seeping in from the corridor that I noticed movement across the room out of the corner of my eye. When I looked toward it, I saw a figure rising slowly from the couch. A big figure.
I almost bolted back out into the corridor, but at that moment my hand found the switch and the room was flooded with light.
The figure rising from the couch was Jello. In the chair next to him, Alisa pushed herself upright and rubbed at her eyes with the backs of her hands.
“Where the fuck you been, Jack?” Jello rumbled. “We’ve been trying to call you for hours.”
THIRTY-ONE
“SON OF A bitch!” I snapped. “How did you get in here?”
Then I thought about it for a moment longer.
“And how the hell did you even know where I’m staying?”
Jello just looked at me and slowly shook his head.
“We’ve been trying to call, but you didn’t answer,” Alisa said.
“I went to the gym and out to the pool. I didn’t take a phone.”
It was the truth, of course, but it sounded embarrassingly lame. I went over to the desk and sorted through the telephones until I found the one with the SIM card Alisa had given me. The screen showed eight missed calls.
“Eight calls?” I glanced from Jello to Alisa. “What the hell is going on?”
“Not eight,” Alisa said. “Five, maybe six.”
I opened the telephone’s call log and found five calls from one number and three from another. I read out the number that had made the five calls and looked at Alisa.
“That you?”
She nodded.
Then I read out the number that had made the other three calls.
“Ever heard of that number?”
“Yes,” Alisa said. “That’s one of Kate’s.”
This wasn’t going to be good news, was it? I pulled the chair out from the desk and sat on it turned backwards, my arms folded over the back rest.
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Kate’s bail has been revoked,” Jello said. “We’re out of time.”
“Has the army taken her into custody?” I asked.
“No, not yet.”
“Why would they revoke her bail and not arrest her?”
“You don’t really understand what’s happening here anymore, do you, Jack?”
“I guess I don’t.”
A glanced passed between Jello and Alisa, but I couldn’t tell what it meant.
“General Prasert and the army rule by fear,” Jello said. “People disappear every day. The army says someone was sent to a re-education camp and they’re never seen again. Nobody asks any questions because they know if they attract too much attention they might be sent to a re-education camp, too. The army doesn’t have to censor the news because the people who report the news are so shit scared they censor it themselves.”
“Kate’s too important. She has too much support for them to do something like that to her.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Jello said. “It’s more effective for them to revoke Kate’s bail and not arrest her.”
“If General Prasert arrests Kate and locks her up somewhere,” Alisa said, “that will make a lot of people angry. If they are angry enough to take to the streets, that creates a problem for him. He either orders the army to start shooting people, or he looks weak, perhaps even weak enough to be toppled by an uprising. And General Prasert is not going to let that happen. It’s better for him if people don’t go into the streets and force him to issue an order to shoot them, but he will if he has to.”
“But now Kate and the people around her know General Prasert could order her detained without warning,” Jello added. “The fear of sudden detention is a better tool for him to wield than the fact of detention. It will force her to keep a lower profile. Fear gets him what he wants and has fewer consequences.”
“When I talked to Kate, she didn’t sound frightened to me.”
“Maybe not,” Alisa said, “but she should be. The resistance doesn’t need a martyr, it needs a leader.”
I thought about that for a moment and then nodded. “Okay, I see now. Let me call Kate back and—”
“Wait,” Jello interrupted. “You’re on a burner phone, but she isn’t. They’ll be checking what numbers she calls and who they belong to.”
“Then this will be a dead end for them.” I gestured with the telephone holding the SIM card Alisa had given me. “This SIM came from you. They have no way to connect the number with me.”
“Think about it, Jack. The army captures the numbers Kate calls to see who they belong to and they find this number belongs to an unregistered SIM. So what do you think they’ll do then? Just forget about it? You know what they’ll do. They’ll start monitoring this unknown number, too.”
Jello pointed at the phone.
“That number’s compromised now. You might as well take out the SIM card and throw it away.”
“I already asked him to do that,” Alisa said.
No reason to start an argument here by mentioning that Kate asked me to keep the SIM working, so I just shrugged.
“I don’t want Kate to think I’m ignoring her calls,” I said, changing the subject.
“Send a text to the number Kate called from,” Jello said. “Make it something innocuous, but something she will know came from you. Tell her you know what happened and you’ll be in touch with her.”
I opened the text app on the phone, thought for a second, and picked out a message with my thumbs.
I heard. Be in touch soon. Drive me back to Pattaya again for some more seafood when you have a free day?
“How about this?” I asked, holding out the telephone so that Jello could read the message.
“What’s that stuff about Pattaya?”
“We were going to have lunch in Bangkok one day a year or so ago, but she ended up driving us to Pattaya and we ate seafood at one of those restaurant
s out on a pier. Nobody else knew about it.”
Jello nodded, and I hit SEND.
Then I took the SIM card out of the phone and snapped it between my fingers.
I picked up one of the three phones that held the SIMs I’d bought at the airport and looked at Alisa.
“Can you get this to Kate?”
“Are you sure—”
“It’s completely clean. I bought the SIM at the airport using the John Smith passport, and I bought the phone yesterday at Pantip Plaza. I’ve never used either one.”
“You’re getting better at this stuff all the time,” Jello said.
“I’m not sure whether I like knowing that or not.”
“I’ll give the phone to Kate’s driver,” Alisa said. “You can talk to her when she’s in the car. I don’t want the phone found if Kate is detained or her house searched.”
“Wait a second,” I said. I picked up another phone and entered its number into the phonebook of the telephone I was sending to Kate, labeling the number Pattaya Seafood, and I also entered the number of Kate’s phone into the telephone I was keeping for myself.
“Ask her to call me as soon as she gets it,” I said, handing the phone to Alisa. “Just tell her my burner is the only number in the phonebook.”
“Read me the number of the burner you’re using,” Jello said. I did, and both he and Alisa entered it into their phones as well.
“Okay,” I said, looking back and forth between Jello and Alisa. “In spite of Kate having a clean phone, you do realize there’s still a pretty big problem with me talking to her, don’t you?”
“What that?” Jello asked.
“Only that I don’t have the first fucking idea what to say to her.”
“Just explain to her your plan to slip her out of the country before the army arrests her.”
“I don’t have a plan to slip her out of the country before the army arrests her.”
“Okay,” Jello nodded. “Now I see your problem.”
WE ALL SAT for a while after that waiting for someone else to say something. Eventually I lost the staring contest.
