White Ghost

by Steven Gore

  “Isaan one, Isaan one. Over.”

  “Isaan one here. Over,” Kai answered.

  “We are still with our friends, over.”

  “Where are you? Over.”

  “North of Pu’er, south of Kunming.”

  “And the weather? Over.”

  “Still good. Over.”

  “Isaan one, out.”

  “Isaan one, out.”

  “WHY DON’T YOU GO DOWN and collect your friend Zhang,” Gage told Kai, as they once again packed up the radio. “We can have breakfast up here.”

  Gage ordered room service and it had been laid out on the dining table in the living room, overlooking the hotel gardens by the time Kai and Zhang arrived.

  Zhang reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out Gage’s list of boat names and numbers. He held it up long enough for them to see that names of ports had been written next to each, then put it away.

  “Do you trust this man Burch?” Zhang asked.

  Gage nodded.

  “What about the people in Hong Kong who’ll handle the company and the bank account?”

  “Jack didn’t tell me who he’s using, but it’ll be a firm he’s done a lot of business with.”

  “And that puzzles me. I checked on Burch. He’s big. Huge. He’s Global 500 not Formosa Strait smuggling. Why would he risk involving himself in something like this?”

  Gage found the question irrelevant. Zhang was using his temporary leverage from Gage, needing his help to mine for information about Burch in order to exploit it, and maybe Burch, later. But Gage wasn’t going to give him the opportunity.

  “He doesn’t know what this is all about.”

  Zhang smiled. “Deniability.”

  Gage shook his head, not returning the smile. “Not even that.”

  Zhang seemed to realize that his move had been blocked and resigned himself to now having to make a decision. Holding his teacup in his hand, he gazed out of the window and down toward the gardens below like a high diver on a windy day.

  And then jumped: “We’ve got a deal.”

  Gage called Burch from the bedroom while Kai and Zhang ate breakfast.

  “The insurance carrier agreed to the escrow idea,” Burch said. “They figure they can recover part of their loss by discounting and reselling the chips. And I bought a company from a friend in Hong Kong. He was with Arthur Andersen before it evaporated. He set up a number of shelf companies about two years ago and has been selling them off over time. An older one is more expensive, but I figured it would draw less attention than a new one. I don’t know if the person you’re dealing with understands any of this, but if he does, he’ll find it reassuring.”

  “He won’t, but I do. This is his first time he’s dealt offshore at this level. And don’t use the phrases shelf company or shell company when you talk to him, he’ll just get confused. Just say ready-made.”

  Gage wrote down the name of the company and the location of the bank and the account number, then disconnected and walked back into the living room.

  “The company is called Calico Limited.”

  Zhang smiled. “I was hoping for K-A-I.”

  Gage shrugged. “Not everything is possible.”

  “It does seem that way, doesn’t it,” Zhang said, then reached again for the list of boats and handed it to Kai.

  From her pocket, Kai pulled out a slip of paper showing the partial hull number of the smuggling boat, then scanned down numbers and looked up at Gage.

  “It’s on its way to Qidong.”

  Gage turned toward Zhang. “Which is where?”

  “North along the Yangtze. Jiangsu Province. Just a few hours’ drive from here.”

  After Zhang left to make arrangements for the trip, Gage brought up a map of the Qidong area on his cell phone and displayed it for Kai.

  Gage then texted Alex Z asking him to search Ah Tien’s address book for names and companies in that area.

  When he looked up from his phone, Kai said, “I’m worried that with Zhang we could have another Eight Iron on our hands. This is his world, not ours, and he could cut us out and steal the chips. He’s a snake. Two PLA officers got executed for being involved in the car smuggling case from when you first met him. He was up to his neck in it, and all he got was promoted.”

  “I don’t think he’ll be that shortsighted about this. He’s getting at least half a million dollars and an offshore company and a bank account. He’s spent his whole career landlocked and we’re giving him the tools to go international. It’s something he’d never be able to do on his own, or at least without having to share with others in the PLA. And the only reason he’s getting any of this is because Burch told his people in Hong Kong that this is a legitimately acquired insurance reward.”

  Kai pulled back and looked at Gage. “Legitimately?” Her voice whined with sarcasm. “Did you say legitimately?”

  “Apparently you didn’t study cultural relativity in college in the States.”

  “I didn’t need to. I practiced it.”

  CHAPTER 51

  When Gage and Kai walked out the hotel exit, they spotted Ferrari dressed in civilian clothes standing at the curb next to a five-year-old Toyota van with tinted windows. He pulled open the sliding door as they approached and took their bags around to the back. They found Zhang sitting on one of two rear bench seats facing a table on which lay maps, note paper, cell phones, and thermoses of tea.

  Soon after leaving the hotel grounds, they passed hundreds of taxis in a line extending from the airport, each driver leaning against his car, waiting his turn to grab a fare for the long ride into the commercial center of Shanghai or to the Nanjing Road shopping district. Gage felt anger rumble inside him when he noticed that most of them were smoking, killing themselves, embracing the cancer that he was fighting, wasting their bodies and their lives.

  He forced himself to look away as Ferrari cut north.

  Ferrari took them along the far western edge of the city of twenty-three million, skirting the center gasping for the ocean air sweeping the gray-brown haze of diesel fumes and coal ash inland. The pollution didn’t bother Gage as much as the cab drivers’ cigarette smoke, for when hundreds of millions live in poverty, pollution can be seen as a sign of progress, even of hope.

  Gage studied Zhang talking on his cell phone, a man he knew to be content in that unpredictable nexus where power and greed conjoined in state-authorized corruption. He then realized that Zhang was so focused on the money he never asked who Gage was working for and what he stood to gain. At the same time, he doubted Zhang would ask what was being exchanged for the chips. He’d likely figure it out on his own and surely keep it to himself.

  As they drove farther north and west, Ferrari slowed next to Anting Automobile City. Zhang looked out of the window and pointed at a billboard displaying a Formula One race car, blurred by its two-hundred-mile-an-hour velocity.

  “The Shanghai Grand Prix,” Zhang said, glancing over his shoulder at Ferrari. “Maybe someday . . .”

  In the rearview mirror Gage could see a smile emerge on Ferrari’s face.

  “But not now.”

  Ferrari hit the accelerator and they merged back into traffic.

  Gage glanced down at Zhang’s cell phone lying on the desk. “You have any leads about when the chips will come to shore?”

  “Not yet, but it won’t make any difference. My people will be watching for it.”

  “Maybe this will help them.”

  Gage handed Zhang a list of the names and decoded numbers they recovered from Ah Tien.

  “My staff located two companies that might be involved. They were listed in an address book belonging to a man named Ah Tien in San Francisco. Tongming Tiger and Efficiency Trading. Both are in a city called Nantong.”

  Zhang nodded. “I know the place. Commercial and agricultural. About a million people. It’s west of the port and next to a Special Economic Zone.”

  “And someone at the local trade bureau may be helping
them.”

  Zhang looked from the sheet to Gage. “What did this Ah Tien have to say about them?”

  “He’s not talking anymore.”

  Zhang drew back, then said, “Oh, I see.” He then scanned the company names and read one aloud: “Chao Yang. That’s Chaozhou for Sunny Glory.” He looked up. “Are all these people Chaozhou?”

  “I think the ones in Thailand and Taiwan are.”

  “Dangerous people,” Zhang said, then smiled at Kai. “Except you, of course.”

  “Thank you, that’s very generous.” Kai pinched Gage’s thigh under the table as punishment for Zhang’s crime.

  Gage knew once Zhang made the Chaozhou connection, he’d assume that the contraband was heroin, for they controlled the major trafficking syndicates and had managed the trade routes for more than three generations. There was no reason now not to specify the origin of the heroin.

  “The contraband I mentioned is being trucked north from Thailand. And there may be a man named Lew Fung-hao on his way from the States to meet it.”

  Gage decided not to tell Zhang about the enforcer traveling from Taiwan that Casey had learned about. He didn’t want Zhang to think U.S. law enforcement was paying attention.

  Zhang punched a number into his cell phone, then passed on Lew’s name and the names and telephone numbers from the list.

  “I need to have what you would call a hypothetical discussion with the commander of the Qidong port,” Zhang said. “We’ll have to come to an agreement about the contraband. We have capital punishment in China, a great deal of it and enforced rather capriciously, so this could be a little tricky.”

  They drove on through the rice, wheat, and cotton fields of Jiangsu Province toward the dock where the ferry crossed the Yangtze River, then waited in a long line of cars and trucks. They were among the last to make it on.

  Gage and Kai left the car and took the stairs to the upper deck. As he looked out over the Yangtze, it seemed more like the East China Sea into which it fed. The opposite bank was not only lost in fog, but was too far away to be seen even on a fogless day, and the river was populated mostly by oceangoing ships. Only the barges reminded Gage that they were on a river.

  After they left the ferry behind on the northern bank, they drove to the crossroads between the Qidong port in the east and Nantong City in the west.

  A car was waiting to take Zhang to meet the commander.

  As Gage and Kai rode with Ferrari toward Nantong, Gage felt just as he often had at homicide scenes so many years ago in San Francisco. He’d walk into a house or an apartment or a basement and see a corpse splayed out. Then he’d smell food cooking next door and overhear the sounds of laughter, of everyday conversation, of people oblivious to a violent death that had been inflicted on the other side of their wall. He’d think of the victim’s relatives a thousand miles away, equally oblivious, laughing at a crude joke at the moment of death—

  Then a call, a knock, a chill, a new world.

  Everyone is oblivious to almost everything, Gage thought to himself as he looked out at the countryside, imagining the tough little farmers far inland carrying their oranges a thousand feet down to the Yangtze, workers hunched over in wheat fields and rice paddies, all of them knowing nothing of microprocessors, or of offshore corporations, or of stolen SUVs. But they didn’t need to know, at least about these microprocessors or this offshore corporation or Zhang’s SUV.

  On the other hand, Gage knew that if he kept his strength and had his way, in the next few days men in Nantong, and even Lew himself, would hear the knock and feel the chill and face a new world because of the death of a confused teenage boy a couple of weeks earlier on a warehouse floor an ocean away.

  CHAPTER 52

  Cobra sat on his motorcycle in the shadow of a tree a hundred yards from a gasoline station in Southern China where the two heroin trucks had stopped to repair a flat tire. They were just a few miles from Kunming. Cobra had starting using the bike to follow them because it reduced his chances of losing them in the chaotic traffic in the city of a million and a half people. But he was tired. He’d stayed awake all night, fearing that if he fell asleep, he’d wake up when his body hit the pavement a second after Moby and Luck tossed him from the truck.

  His mind began to drift as he gazed down the dusty, oil-spotted road. He shook his head and the trucks once again became clear. He needed to concentrate, control himself, if for no other reason than he didn’t want to be seen staring. He knew nothing would give him away more easily than glazed eyes, seen from a distance, fixed toward something no longer in focus.

  He edged forward to stay in the tree’s shadow, moving with the transit of the sun.

  A grease-covered mechanic bent low and rubbed a rag on the side of the tire and squinted at the printing. He then hopped into a battered pickup truck and raced off, leaving a spray of dust and gravel behind.

  Cobra’s mind again began to drift, now back in time to just after he’d resigned from the MJIB and he’d married Malee, trying to find a way to make a living, and to stay alive doing it. He saw himself in Bangkok, standing just inside the door to an underground casino, the eight baccarat tables populated by Thai-Chinese nak laeng tough guys and jao phor godfathers, the walls lined with their bodyguards. He’d felt motion in the threshold and the room went silent. He looked over to see a gwai lo, a white ghost, standing next to him surveying the crowd.

  Cobra shifted his weight and blinked hard at the truck in the distance. He pushed the bike forward again, then took off his cap so the sun edging the tree’s shadow would keep him alert. But his mind wouldn’t stay focused; it had to do something while he waited and his eyes watched. A mind can’t be blank.

  Cobra followed Gage’s gaze and saw the questions forming in the minds behind the gamblers’ faces: Who is this crazy white ghost? Some asking: Is it about me? Guards drew their semiautomatics, but Gage ignored them, scanning the tables until he fixed a stare on a man calling himself Henry Hong, a gangster just arrived from the States who’s bought his way into the game with two hundred thousand dollars. A couple of the casino guards started to advance on Gage, but the owner, Thanom Suanmali, waved them off. He wanted to see what Gage was up to, how tough he was, how Gage would stand up against the hardest men in Bangkok. They all watched Gage walk up to the table at which Hong was gambling. The other players backed away. He pointed at the stacks of cash in front of Hong.

  “Is that yours?” Gage asked.

  Hong stared back, trying to break Gage’s gaze, but then lowered his eyes and said, “It’s all mine.” But his voice was so weak that he forfeited whatever loyalty he might’ve expected from the others.

  Gage picked up the bills and then looked at Thanom, now a referee in a game with higher stakes. “You speak English?”

  “Some.” Thanom smiled. “Michigan State, 1986.” He nodded at the cash in Gage’s hand. “I take it that’s not his money.”

  Gage shook his head. “Stolen from my client in the States. His name is Ho.”

  “That’s odd. He said his name was Hong.” He pointed at a guard who patted Ho down and withdrew a passport and brought it to him. Thanom glanced inside, then tossed it on the floor. “I believe you. As weak as he is, you should just kill him. No one will mind. You’ll be doing us a favor.”

  Ho’s eyes turned wild, jerking side to side, looking from guard to guard, from gun to gun.

  Gage shook his head again. “This is only about money.”

  “Since you’re now our guest, it’s up to you.” Thanom grinned. “How’d you get in here? It costs me a lot of money to keep people out.”

  Gage shrugged. “I think I’ll keep that to myself. I may need to come back.”

  “You won’t need to. I’ll have whatever money he has left by tomorrow.”

  Thanom pointed at Cobra. “Make arrangements to collect it all and deliver it to our friend.” He then looked again at Gage. “What’s your name?”

  “Graham Gage.”

  Thanom nodd
ed and smiled. “I think we’ll call you Santisuk if you come this way again. Thanks for the very interesting evening.”

  Cobra and Gage walked out together.

  “What’s Santisuk?” Gage asked.

  “A nickname. It means peaceful.”

  I still don’t know if he was right, Cobra thought as he watched the heroin trucks. But the name caught on with people in Thailand because it seemed to ring true, but . . . but Gage’s force of will was the nearest substitute for violence Cobra had ever seen.

  Maybe, Cobra now wondered, Thanom had meant the name as irony.

  Cobra’s heart thumped harder as he watched the small pickup truck return, its tail pressed low to the ground by the weight of the tire in the bed.

  In a few more minutes it would be mounted, and it would be time for the truck to move on, and for him to make some decisions.

  CHAPTER 53

  Gage and Kai checked into the Nantong Center Hotel in the financial heart of the city an hour after Zhang separated from them at the crossroads. Gage chose it from those suggested by Zhang because it catered to foreigners and Chinese who came to meet with traders and manufacturers in the Special Economic Zone, an onshore haven with offshore tax benefits. It was also at a low-enough end of the trade that it was unlikely he’d encounter anyone who might know him.

  Gage found that his suite was just clean enough: well-swept concrete floors discolored by ground-in grime, traces of bathroom mildew, a teacup-ringed, child-size cherry wooden desk, and double beds with stiff sheets and hard pillows.

  “Commander Ren is considering our proposition,” Zhang said, when he and Kai arrived in Gage’s room an hour later. “I suggested a private financial arrangement between him and me. His only requirement is that he doesn’t want to be in Qidong if any contraband passes through the port.”

  “Will we need him at that point?”

  Zhang shook his head. “Not once we learn how the deal is structured, and we’ve made progress on that end. Ren says that Efficiency Trading is a China-Taiwan joint venture, set up through the local trade bureau. The domestic shareholder is called Lao Wu, Old Wu.”