by Steven Gore
It turned out to be a little of each.
Exhausted when he’d left Bangkok, Gage had missed all of Kai’s cues, ones that had been formed in a society that had a named smile for every occasion, no matter how painful. And like Chinese culture, where face was the currency of life, well-read Thai signals saved face, and Gage had missed them altogether. He hadn’t realized the nature of Kai’s feelings until he returned to Thailand on a money laundering investigation a few months later, one on which the fate of a London private bank’s future rested. He’d called ahead and asked her to introduce him to Li Chung-yun, a heroin trafficker known as Eight Iron—and not because he played golf, but because he’d used the club to beat an informant to death who’d betrayed him to the United Bamboo. Kai knew him well since her construction company had built shopping centers and office buildings for him in northern Thailand.
When Gage had entered the arrivals area of the Suvarnabhumi Airport on this second trip, Kai’s driver intercepted him and took him to an executive suite at the Emerald Hotel, then handed him a key card and walked away. As Gage looked through the darkened room toward the window overlooking the lights of downtown Bangkok, he saw a candlelit dining table. And as he emerged from the hallway into the room, Kai rose from the couch and glided toward his jet-lagged body and pressed up against him before he could form a face-saving sentence that would back her off without humiliating her. Only then did Gage realize that Kai thought she, and not the case he’d been working on, was the real reason he’d returned to Bangkok. He’d pulled away and held her by the shoulders at arm’s length.
“Who will know but us?” Kai had asked.
“Isn’t that enough? Your husband’s collection of wives and mistresses may be a model over here, but it isn’t for me and Faith.”
Kai stepped back toward the couch and drew on a silk robe. She didn’t camouflage her disappointment in either anger or in a juvenile pout.
Instead, she’d asked, “Can we still have dinner?”
“As long as you stay on your side of the table.”
Kai put on a face of disappointment, real, but exaggerated. “Is that where I have to spend the rest of my life?”
Gage nodded.
Kai shrugged. “Then I guess we have an understanding.”
CHAPTER 38
Because Kai’s husband was the minister of interior and in command of the airport security, Kai was able to meet Gage at the gate when he arrived in Bangkok from Hong Kong.
As they walked toward the arrivals hall, she wearing an embroidered Cheongsam silk dress and he in a suit, they knew other travelers were examining them through the lens of stereotype, assuming that he was a farang, a foreigner, there to meet what the Thais called a chick, a sex toy rented for the week or the month, or perhaps an Internet-ordered bride to take home.
Nausea surged through Gage as they stepped into the exhaust-fouled air outside of the airport. He gritted his teeth and tensed his stomach in a failed attempt to fight it off as he climbed into her Mercedes parked at the curb.
“I spoke to Eight Iron,” Kai said, as her driver pulled into traffic. “He’ll meet us tonight. I promised him if he gives you what you want, you’ll give him a way to hurt United Bamboo.”
Gage held his breath for a moment. The nausea lessened. He breathed again.
“Will he object to you translating?”
“He trusts me. And like they say on American TV, he knows where I live.”
“What time?”
“Not till seven o’clock.” Kai smiled and glanced at her watch. “It’s too bad we have an understanding,”
Gage forced a smile back. “I feel safer because we have one.”
As they drove south on Rachadapisek Road toward downtown, Gage saw the residue of the second Asian economic collapse, the first caused by the Thai devaluation of the baht in the 1990s and the more recent by the U.S. mortgage crisis. The recovery had been weak. During his last trip, at the bottom of the collapse, he recalled thinking that the two names for the city, Bangkok, meaning plum orchard, and Krung Thep, meaning City of Angels, had seemed either indictments or satire. Then, the skyline, marked by half-empty office buildings, jagged and towering concrete monsters, had seemed both hopeless and foreboding in the polluted air of Bangkok. Even now, many of the stores that had once drawn up-country teenagers to the city for work were still dusty hulks, the windows plastered with frayed and yellowed signs advertising Versace, Rolex, and Armani, luxuries that remained beyond the reach of those who didn’t work in the resurging underground economy. And the used car lots on either side of the street still overflowed with repossessed or surrendered Mercedes, BMWs, and Volvos, the onetime status symbols of those who’d ridden high.
“How has Siri Construction been surviving?” Gage asked as they passed an abandoned high-rise.
“A few projects were canceled, but having a husband who’s a cabinet minister guarantees that we kept most of our government contracts.”
“The prime minister should’ve put Somchai in charge of finance instead of interior. His ganja dealing did more for the economy than globalization and all the free trade agreements combined.”
“The prime minister offered it, but he wanted interior, and he put two hundred million baht into the prime minister’s campaign to get it. He needed to be in charge of the police so they couldn’t cooperate with the DEA and extradite him to the U.S.” She grinned. “Of course, I wouldn’t mind visiting him there, especially if they kept him near San Francisco.”
Gage gave her a sour look and shook his head.
She winked at him. “A girl’s got to try.”
GAGE LAY DOWN IN BED after Kai dropped him off at his hotel. Night sweats were keeping him awake, but he hadn’t taken the sleeping pills prescribed by Dr. Stern, fearing a chemically induced grogginess when he met Eight Iron.
A ringing sent him reaching for his cell phone on the side table. It was Sylvia.
“Lucy’s disappeared.”
Gage swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up.
“I tried to reach her on her cell and home phones, but she didn’t return my calls.”
“Did you go to her apartment?”
“Her neighbors haven’t seen her for days. I drove right from there to her mother’s house. Linda hasn’t heard from her either. She called her husband. He wanted to fly over, but she convinced him to let us look into it first.” Sylvia paused. “I hate even to say the words, but do you think Ah Ming picked up the drumbeats and grabbed her?”
“A hostage is no good unless you use it. And he’s not using it.”
Gage thought back on Sylvia’s comment about Lucy’s anger and her comment about the shortest distance between two points.
“Have Linda e-mail you photos of her, then send people to scout around East Wind. I’ll bet she’s playing surveillance cop and sitting on a rooftop or at an office window watching with a pair of binoculars and making cell-phone videos, thinking Ah Ming will commit a crime in the middle of his parking lot and all she has to do is call it in to the police. Grab her before his guys spot her.”
CHAPTER 39
As Gage walked down the hallway of the hotel’s small private banquet rooms, he spotted Eight Iron’s lead bodyguard standing in front of a closed door.
Even though Gage had known him for years, Kasa didn’t greet him, just cast dead eyes on his approach. Gage knew Kasa came doubly armed: with a semiautomatic under his loose shirt and with Shan tattoos, a body-length forest of real and mythological creatures, gods and demons, and scripts and sacred mantras to protect him from evil, from sickness, and from harm at the hands of others.
Gage wasn’t convinced that Kasa believed in the efficacy of the colored ink, because the last time he’d stepped up to protect Eight Iron, he led with his gun, not with his chest.
Eight Iron and Kai were standing together when Gage entered the rosewood-paneled banquet room.
“Thanks for meeting me,” Gage said to Eight Iron through Kai, who transla
ted his greeting into Chaozhou Chinese.
Eight Iron looked him over. “You’ve lost a few pounds.”
Gage wasn’t interested in engaging in small talk with Eight Iron. This was a meeting of necessity, not choice. But he knew he had to play along.
“Just been working out a little more than usual.” Gage let his gaze fall from Eight Iron’s round face down to the blue golf shirt stretched tight over his stomach. “Looks like you put on a few.”
Eight Iron patted his belly. “But unlike in the States, over here it’s a sign of wealth and contentment.”
Gage tilted his head toward the door. “I didn’t see any signs like that on Kasa.”
“I should’ve called you last year when I thought I saw him smile. It could’ve just been him passing gas. I was upwind, so I couldn’t tell.”
Kai turned so that only Gage could see her face and her rolling eyes.
Gage directed Eight Iron to sit between Kai and himself at the circular table, then waitresses wearing side-slit dresses served wine followed by a series of Chaozhou and Cantonese dishes. A mix of background nausea and worry over Lucy left Gage without an appetite. He made a pretense of eating, more moving bits of food around his plate than bringing any of them to his mouth. Eight Iron, on the other hand ate with the lack of inhibition of a predator devouring a kill.
It was only after the waitress cleared the last plate and Eight Iron instructed Kasa to block anyone from entering that they turned to business.
Gage wasn’t sure whether Eight Iron was still an enemy of United Bamboo, for alliances shift over time and, where there is profit to be made, enemies become friends, or whether Casey’s intelligence connecting Ah Ming and United Bamboo was correct. He figured he’d try to prompt a reaction from Eight Iron by which he could judge before revealing too much.
“I was hired to investigate a deal involving a man who used to live in Thailand. He’s known as Ah Ming.”
Eight Iron’s eyes widened a fraction. “Has this deal happened already?”
“Let’s talk a little bit more before I answer that.”
Eight Iron smiled. “You want to know if I’ll try to grab something for myself.”
“Basically.”
“The answer is no.”
“Retired?”
Eight shook his head. “A few years ago, one of my people was extradited to the States. He met a Hell’s Angel in jail while he was waiting for his trial. The Hell’s Angel came to visit me after he was released.”
“And now you’re sending methamphetamines to the U.S.”
Eight Iron smiled. “You’re as quick as ever. Yaba pills are much simpler to make and sell than heroin.” He held up a forefinger. “First, there are no seasons to worry about like with poppies. Production is year-round.” He held up another finger. “Second, there are fewer transportation risks in yaba. No more moving opium resin from the fields and then the finished heroin to the port, so there are fewer police and military officers to pay off.” He held up another. “Third, it’s cheap and easy to get ma huang, what you call ephedrine, and the other chemicals from China. That’s the reason the Hell’s Angels wanted to outsource their manufacturing. They’d only have to import one thing, the pills, instead of all the precursors.” He lowered his hand. “And since there’s no smell, we’re undetectable in the city. There’s no reason anymore to fight snakes and malaria in the forests. Any industrial lab will do.”
“Why’d you trust him?”
“Because he went to trial and won. He would’ve pleaded guilty or his case would’ve been dismissed if he’d cooperated with the DEA.”
Kai interjected her own comment in Chinese and then in English: “I guess you could say that the DEA put together a drug deal.”
“They did better than that. Since we started last year we’ve worked up to a hundred kilos a month. It costs us less than eight hundred dollars a kilo to make and we sell it to the Angels for eight thousand a kilo, delivered to the East Coast of the U.S.”
“But not as good as heroin.”
Eight Iron shrugged and said, “The profit in heroin was falling anyway. Afghans flooded the market after your government overthrew the Taliban. Our quality has always been better—even now our China White is ninety-nine percent pure—but we can’t match their quantity.”
“So the answer to my question is that you’re making too much money to complicate your life?”
“Exactly.” Eight Iron looked back and forth between Kai and Gage. “And now that you know something dangerous to me, we can trust each other.”
Gage found nothing dangerous about it. Eight Iron hadn’t admitted anything more than what Cobra could’ve found out at any of the narcotics traffickers’ karaoke bars or mah-jongg clubs. Without names, places, and routes, no one could attack Eight Iron. He was no more at risk now than he had been five minutes earlier.
Gage decided to ignore the lie and push on. “I take it you know Ah Ming.”
“You suspected I did. That’s why you wanted to meet with me.” Eight Iron cast what the Thais called yim mee lessanai, the wicked smile, then looked at Kai. “At least Kai did. I’m sure she told you about my fifty kilos.”
“You ever go after him?”
“About a week later, I spotted him playing mah-jongg with other United Bamboo members at the Krung Thep Palace Hotel, but it wasn’t a good place to go to war. We tracked down some underlings and Kasa used them to send a message, but I never got to Ah Ming himself. Next I heard, he’d left for the States. I have good connections, but I didn’t think it was safe to reach out quite that far.”
Eight Iron paused, and his eyes went vacant for a moment, then he said, “He’s a brilliant man, Ah Ming. An entrepreneur. He came here after he killed a gambler in Taiwan. In less than six months he reorganized the underground lottery and unified it under his control. That’s where he developed his signature, the severed head with a one baht note stuffed in the mouth. He only had to do it a few times before all the competing groups got into line. That moved him up from just a nak laeng to a godfather, and a couple of years later he took control of the United Bamboo heroin operation.”
“I assume he made other enemies besides you.”
“Back then it was mainly Big Circle. Lots of Chinese fugitives gathered in Bangkok in the nineties and the organization grew like a fungus.”
“Is that why he moved to the States?”
Eight Iron shook his head. “United Bamboo won that war and Ah Ming was rewarded for his part with the West Coast of the U.S.” He smiled again. “He decided to experiment with what the financial people call vertical integration. He wanted to control the heroin supply chain all the way from the poppy fields to the sellers in the States just above street level.
“It used to be”—Eight Iron glanced at Kai as though she were the repository of Thai drug trafficking history—“that United Bamboo would buy a kilo over here for five thousand and sell it for fifty when it arrived in the U.S. Ah Ming’s idea was to follow it down one or two more steps and net three or four hundred thousand a kilo with very little additional risk.”
Gage now understood the deeper meaning of the intercepted call that Alex Z had located in which dealers had complained that Ah Ming had flooded the streets with Triple K and 555.
“I don’t know whether he succeeded with that,” Gage said, “but he succeeded in adding a second kind of crime to his enterprise.”
Gage paused to let the implication appear in Eight Iron’s mind, that there may be another way to strike at Ah Ming, and then said, “You still want to get even with him?”
“Of course.” Eight Iron’s eyebrows narrowed as he looked at Gage. “But what’s in it for you?”
“The son of my client was killed in a robbery in California. Ah Ming was behind it.”
“You mean he ripped off someone else’s heroin?”
“No. Something different.”
Eight Iron rocked his head side to side as though sorting through the risks, then asked, “Who do
you have helping you over here?”
“Kai and Cobra.”
Eight Iron nodded, and then said, “The beauty and the beast.”
Kai smiled as she translated the compliment, then asked Gage whether he had an understanding of what Eight Iron said. Gage didn’t smile back for fear that it might be source of distrust since Eight Iron wouldn’t grasp the meaning, and Gage didn’t want to explain.
“I take it you came to see me because Ah Ming’s new enterprise has a connection to Thailand.”
Gage shook his head.
Eight Iron paused, biting his lower lip. His gaze moved from the table to the Chinese paintings on the walls, to the side cart bearing wine bottles and flowers.
“I see what you’re aiming at.” Eight Iron smiled. “You want to tie him to a heroin deal here since you can’t tie him to the robbery over there.”
Gage nodded. “If you can find out whether he’s got a deal working right now, I can put an end to it.”
“And him?”
“And him in the States.”
Eight Iron put on a deliberative expression, even though he and Gage both knew he’d already come to a decision.
“I’ll try to find out, but not for your sake, for mine. I lost money and face, and things between me and Ah Ming need to be rebalanced.”
They stood and walked toward the door. Eight Iron stopped and turned toward Gage.
“You do realize,” Eight Iron said, “that at the end of this, it will be you against him. Man to man. That’s the way he is and the way he’ll want it to be and that’s the only way you’ll take him. That is, which is far more likely, if he doesn’t take you first.”
GAGE RETURNED TO HIS ROOM while Kai escorted Eight Iron to the lobby. She telephoned Gage as she drove away.
“Did you see that?” Kai asked. “He started to drool like one of those big red dogs with the floppy ears . . . I don’t remember the English name.”
“Bloodhound?”
“That’s it. A bloodhound.”
“The problem is that bloodhounds are hard to control,” Gage said. “And I’m not sure we have a leash strong enough to restrain him.”
