The Scottish Banker of Surabaya

by Ian Hamilton

  The two ground crew reached for the doors and pulled them closed. They spoke to each other and then left, walking back in the direction of the main terminal.

  Ava glanced sideways at Poirier. His full attention was on the gate. Ava looked down at his hands and saw that they were resting on his knees, palms down and fingers spread. He seemed completely relaxed. He’s done this kind of thing more than a few times, she thought. The marines were just as calm.

  “I’m impressed with the composure of these men,” she said softly to Poirier.

  “These men have fought urban terrorists and jungle guerrillas. Two Italians in a plane hangar don’t faze them.”

  She saw the soldier with the earpiece nod, then raise his right hand in the air with the thumb extended.

  “Here we go,” Poirier said.

  A white panel van appeared at the end of the road and turned in at the guardhouse. It barely came to a full stop before moving through the swinging gate, then drove straight towards the hangars. It stopped short of the first hangar in the row as if the van’s occupants, invisible through tinted glass, were sniffing the air. There wasn’t a person in view. The only other vehicles in the area were parked in front of the freight office.

  For a full minute the van sat in that one spot. “They might be talking to the pilot,” Poirier finally said.

  As if on cue, the front doors of the second hangar slid apart and the pilot and co-pilot stood framed by the opening. Then they stepped back and stood to either side.

  The van turned left and slowly crossed the tarmac. It paused briefly when it got to the doors but then crawled into the hangar, the doors immediately closing behind it.

  The soldiers reached for their balaclavas and pulled them on. Poirier and Ava followed suit. It seemed to Ava that no one in their vehicle was breathing.

  She counted under her breath. At one hundred and twenty, the Daihatsu stuck its nose out beyond the front of the farthest hangar. It turned left and began to inch towards the Italians’ hangar. It stopped parallel to but just short of the front doors.

  “Our turn,” Poirier said.

  The Nissan drove more quickly, but to the left side of the first hangar in line. It went past it and then turned hard to the right and parked at the rear of the second hangar, next to a small door. The soldiers and Poirier left the Nissan and took up positions on either side of the door. Ava saw that the Canadian had a pistol in his hand — she had no idea where it had come from. The back door of the Nissan was still open. Ava slid out, hugging the side of the car. She began to count again.

  At twenty, a gunshot rang out.

  At twenty-one, all hell broke loose.

  ( 48 )

  She had no idea how long it went on or how many shots were fired, but it seemed like an eternity. She felt as if she was listening to a full-scale war.

  Poirier and the soldiers standing next to the door didn’t move until the firing stopped. Even then, the soldier with the earpiece spoke to Poirier before gingerly turning the knob to open the door. When they started to file inside, Ava left the car and got in line.

  The soldiers separated and went to either side of the plane. Ava followed Poirier.

  In the gap between the plane and the van, four of Aries’ soldiers stood with guns nestled in the crooks of their arms. The side of the plane that faced the hangar doors was pockmarked with bullets that had ripped right through the sides of the van, leaving its walls like white lace.

  Poirier walked around the van towards the hangar doors. Then he realized Ava was behind him. “You don’t want to look at this,” he said.

  She moved to one side so he wouldn’t block her view. Captain Aries leaned against a wall, the balaclava pulled up over his forehead. He was looking down at the floor. Standing next to him, one of his troops gripped a pale young man by the arm, his gun pressed into his back. The young man wore a white shirt with a bar on each shoulder. He was shaking, his free hand rubbing the front of the shirt as if he could wipe away the blood that drenched it.

  “Christ,” Poirier said.

  There were three bodies on the ground, blood still oozing from their gunshot wounds. Another man in a white shirt with bars on the shoulders lay by himself near the front of the van. Blood pooled around his entire body like a halo. The Italians — the men who Ava assumed were the Italians — had fallen together, one body partially covering the other, and their blood had formed a puddle that was starting to stream across the uneven floor towards the hangar door. The face of the man on the bottom looked skyward. There was so little of it left that it was barely recognizable.

  “I thought we were going to try to take them alive,” Poirier said to Aries.

  “One of them pulled a gun. He fired a shot at my men.”

  “Did that warrant . . . this?” Poirier said.

  “We defended ourselves. You always knew we would. You also know we don’t do things in half measures,” Aries said, waving his hand at the bodies on the floor. “And what difference does it make to them if we kill them with one bullet or thirty?”

  Poirier shook his head and sighed. “I see only one gun.”

  “I wasn’t prepared to take any chances.”

  “How did he survive?” Poirier asked, pointing to the young man.

  “He fell on the floor, put his hands behind his head, and rolled over to the wall.”

  “Have you ID’d them?”

  “No, we’re just about to do that,” Aries said, and then turned to speak to his men, who were hovering near the bodies.

  “Are you okay?” Poirier said to Ava.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Yes . . . you actually seem to be,” he said, looking closely at her.

  “I’m sorry if you expected me to fall apart,” she said.

  “I just didn’t know how familiar you were with blood.”

  “I didn’t —” she began.

  “Are you ready to see what this plane is carrying?” Aries interrupted.

  “Sure, that’s why we’re here,” Poirier said.

  “Then let’s go.”

  The captain led the way, Poirier behind, Ava trailing him. The plane’s stairs had four steps from the door to the hangar floor. Aries bounded to the top in two and then stopped, blocking the doorway. He peered inside. “Well, well, well,” he said. He looked down at Poirier. “This isn’t exactly what I expected.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Poirier said.

  “I know you were expecting to find millions of dollars or euros or whatever, but even so, I never thought it would be this impressive.”

  “Keep moving,” Poirier said.

  Aries entered the plane and Poirier and Ava squeezed in after him. The passenger cabin had been stripped. Where there should have been seats, Ava found herself looking at a wall of money.

  “Jesus,” Poirier said.

  Ava stepped forward. The bills had been stacked and then banded. Eight stacks were cubed and then overwrapped with plastic. Sixteen cubes were overwrapped again and then strapped around both sides to form large blocks. Ava tried to count how many blocks there were, but she couldn’t see how many rows back they went.

  She looked at the denominations in the stacks closest to her. Five- and ten-euro notes seemed to be predominant. It looked like a lot of money, but if it was mainly fives and tens she wasn’t sure it would amount to thirty million.

  “Will you be able to get this on your plane?” Poirier asked Aries.

  “I’ll find the room.”

  “This isn’t going anywhere until I can count it,” Ava said.

  “How do you propose to do that?” Aries said.

  “I don’t know yet. I need to open up some of these blocks and see how the money is organized.”

  “I’ll have one of my men help you,” Aries said.

  “Komandan,” a voice said.

  Aries went to the doorway and looked out. The voice began to speak, and Ava thought she heard the names Foti and Chorico.

  “The pape
rs and credit cards and government cards on the men who are dead suggest they were all Italian,” Aries said, turning back into the plane.

  “What were their names?” Ava asked.

  “The pilot was Bova, the other two Foti and Chorico.”

  “The one who’s still alive?” Poirier said.

  “We haven’t asked him yet, and there isn’t any rush. There will be plenty of time for questions about that and many other things when we get him back to Jakarta.”

  “He seems to have been the co-pilot,” Poirier said.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “I will be surprised if he knows anything of value beyond what his job required. The other two, Foti and Chorico, those are the ones who we needed to take back with us.”

  Aries shrugged. “It wasn’t meant to be. They chose another fate. Besides, who knows what mischief they might have caused in Jakarta. Men like them would say anything to avoid punishment.”

  Ava was watching Poirier. She saw his top teeth bite into his lower lip, and then he closed his eyes as if he was trying to chase away an unpleasant memory.

  “Now we need to help this young woman count her money,” Aries said.

  ( 49 )

  Aries assigned two men to help her, or, as it turned out, to watch her. They stood by, doing nothing, as she opened two blocks and worked her way into them, her dismay growing as she did. There was an excess of five- and ten-euro notes, and at the bottom of one block, two cubes of pounds sterling. Each stack was all of the same denomination, thankfully, and after counting five of them it was obvious that they were wrapped one hundred to a stack. It was still going to be a time-consuming job.

  She left the plane to look for Aries and Poirier. A police cruiser had arrived and a man with a chest full of medals and an elaborately gold-embellished hat was talking with them. They were standing over the bodies of the Italians, the tips of the policeman’s shoes touching the puddle of blood. They began to laugh and then stepped back from the corpses as an ambulance pulled up at the entrance to the hangar.

  “Can I speak to you, please?” Ava said to Poirier.

  “Sure,” he said, walking towards her.

  “I can’t count the money while it’s on the plane. We need to unload it. I need enough space to be able to sort it by denomination and currency.”

  “When we get the bodies out of here, the van will be leaving. Will that give you enough room to operate?”

  “Is someone going to mop up the blood?”

  “We can do that.”

  “And then I’ll need a large scale. Once we’ve got the money sorted, we’ll weigh it.”

  “Okay, if you think that will work.”

  “It will be accurate enough.”

  “Give us half an hour to get this place cleaned up, and let me see if I can run down a scale for you.”

  “Thank you. In the meantime, would you mind if I went back to the Nissan? I have my notebook and iPhone in my bag. I need to make a record of what we count.”

  “You don’t need my permission.”

  “I also want to make a phone call.”

  “Your client?”

  “My partner.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Ava walked through the back door, past a soldier who was guarding it, and climbed into the car and extracted her phone. She tried Uncle’s Kowloon number first.

  “Wei,” he said before the first ring ended.

  “It’s me,” she said, realizing he must have been waiting by the phone.

  “I have been anxious.”

  “You can begin to relax; the worst is over. The plane arrived full of money and we secured it.”

  “The Italians?”

  “Both dead, and the pilot.”

  “So they resisted?”

  “There seemed to be one gun and one shot. The Indonesians used that as an excuse to put a hundred bullets in each of them.”

  “That bad?”

  “Maybe not quite that many, but there isn’t much left for a mother to recognize.”

  “Once a man is dead, what does it matter how he looks?”

  “Well, there’s no doubt they’re dead, and not much doubt, I think, that they were going to die anyway, whether a shot was fired or not.”

  Uncle hesitated. “It is better that way.”

  “The Canadian doesn’t think so.”

  “Did he react badly?”

  “He showed his displeasure in a subtle way. Otherwise he was very professional. He knows the game.”

  “As do we.”

  “Yes, Uncle, as do we.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “They’re removing the bodies and the van the Italians came in. When that’s done, I’ll count the money, get as many official signatures as I can, and catch an early flight out of here tomorrow morning.”

  “I am glad you made the decision to go.”

  “Me too.”

  “There is always a risk when you are dealing with so many moving parts, but if you had not gone, it would have been very difficult for us to even start to put the Italians behind us.”

  “And we have the money.”

  “I care less about the money. Maybe I did when I first suggested trading our information for it, but as I took more time to think, it was the Italians that weighed on me. That is why I am happy you went. You are too young to have to worry about being pursued by people who never forget that vengeance is owed.”

  “I’m going to count the money anyway, and I’m going to get them to sign off on it.”

  “The Indonesians will keep it for now?”

  “Yes, but they have their agreement with the Canadians and the Canadians have their deal with us, and we have the information the Canadians are waiting for.”

  “A few days, then, before we will see it in Kowloon?”

  “I would hope so.”

  “By the way, I got a small package from Perkasa today.”

  “Stick it in a drawer. It’s a copy of the bank records. I wanted you to have it as backup.”

  “It is nice to know that we should not need it.”

  “I’ll see you sometime tomorrow,” Ava said.

  “What time do you think you will arrive?”

  “If everything goes well, around noon on the CX flight.”

  “Call in the morning to confirm. If you cannot reach me, talk to Sonny. Either way, he will meet you at the airport,” Uncle said. “Now I need to get some rest.”

  Ava looked at her watch. It was still early in the evening. “See you tomorrow,” she said.

  She closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the seat. The van was idling, the air conditioning humming, but she still felt hot. Sweat began to trickle down her face and she felt the onset of panic in her stomach. She sat upright, unstrapped the bulletproof jacket, and threw it behind her. Things had gone well, better than she had any right to expect. Now wasn’t the time to let other issues intrude. I have to get outside myself, she thought.

  Poirier came to the back door of the Nissan and opened it. “The bodies are gone,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s great,” Ava said, pulling herself together.

  “The van is being hooked up for a tow and I’ll have someone get rid of the blood, so you can start emptying the plane anytime you want.”

  “A scale?”

  “They’re looking for one. It will take you a while to get the money organized. By the time you do, we should have what you need.”

  “Thank you very much for being so helpful.”

  Poirier’s hand rested on the door handle. “I am sorry it got so brutal in there.”

  “You didn’t seem very pleased with the way things were conducted.”

  “I wanted to take the Italians alive.”

  “Yes, that was obvious. Your friend the captain didn’t seem to think it was that important.”

  “He is his own man. Or at least he’s the marines’ man, and he knows how to obey an order,” Poirier said.

  “I don
’t see how it matters that much anyway,” Ava said. “We have the money, the bank will be put out of business, and I’ll be sending Ottawa the information that has been promised. What else did you want?”

  He shrugged. “I wanted to know the things the Indonesians don’t want me to know.”

  “That’s all too confusing and conspiratorial for me. I’m an accountant, and all I want to do is count the money and get on a morning flight for Hong Kong.”

  Poirier moved away from the car. “Let’s get started.”

  Ava walked with him back into the hangar, just as the white panel van was leaving it. A soldier had started to hose down the floor, the diluted blood flowing towards the tarmac. Aries was in a corner talking to some of his men. The policeman was gone. So was the co-pilot. The two soldiers who had been in the plane with her stood at the bottom of its steps.

  “We’ll put the money over here,” Ava said, pointing to the wall farthest from the blood.

  Poirier went over to Aries. A minute later, the two of them came up to Ava. “I’ll have my men empty the plane right away,” Aries said with a smile. “You won’t mind if I watch you while you work?”

  “Not at all. I don’t want there to be any confusion when I’m done.”

  He turned to Poirier. “I’m going to send most of the men back to the barracks after we unload. What do you want to do?”

  “I’m staying here.”

  “Naturally.”

  ( 50 )

  Poirier rode with her to the main terminal at Juanda International Airport. It was seven o’clock in the morning, and she was on schedule to catch her eight-thirty flight.

  They had finished counting the money an hour before. The magnitude of the sum involved had done nothing to make it less tedious, and it was with a sense of relief, not any particular pleasure, that Ava wrote the final figure in her notebook and had Aries and Poirier sign off on it. And then, for good measure, she took photos of that page and of the money piled high on the floor and sent it to her Ava Lee email address.

  The night before, it had taken a line of soldiers less than twenty minutes to get the money off the plane. The rest of the time was spent sorting. Her plan had been to bundle and weigh one hundred stacks — ten thousand notes — and then weigh everything else in bulk. This would have eliminated the need to count, and if the block contents had been uniform it would have been a rapid process. But the blocks had been constructed with no rhyme or reason and contained multiple denominations and currencies. They had to be taken apart and then completely reconfigured into bundles of like denominations before she could start weighing.