White Ghost

by Steven Gore

  “We expect the chips to arrive the day after tomorrow. We’ve received regular communications from the captain since he left Taiwan. Everything is normal.”

  “And the white powder from the south?”

  “That, too, is on its way.”

  Ten minutes later, Wu delivered Lew to the front steps of a small hotel. Lew walked across the worn marble floor to the reception desk, surrendered his passport to the clerk, and filled out the registration form. Key in hand, he walked to the tiny elevator, then found his third-floor room where he lay down. As he drifted his way toward sleep, he thought again of the disheveled man and his rare wood table. Its presence in the house would prompt every visitor to ask where he got the money, and any answer Wu gave would raise suspicions. Wu now struck him as a man who invited scrutiny for the pleasure of deflecting it, and he knew that such a man could neither be trusted nor relied upon.

  CHAPTER 56

  Gage’s cell phone rang with a call from Cobra as he and Kai waited in his room for General Zhang and Commander Ren to wake up from their naps. In the reflection of the mirror above the desk where he sat, Gage could see Kai sitting on the edge of the couch, her attention seemingly turned inward, perhaps occupied by thoughts that had come to her as they walked along the river.

  “It looks like Eight Iron was planning to make a move on the heroin,” Cobra said. “The rider he sent along was ready to put me out, but I got him first.”

  “Dead?”

  Cobra laughed. “Only to the world for a while.”

  “Hold on.” Gage made a scribbling motion with his hand and Kai retrieved a notepad and a pen.

  “How is it traveling?”

  “In two First Auto Works heavy transport trucks. Old-style, snub-nosed cabs. Double wheels in the back. Gray, with painted red lions on the cab doors. The beds are framed by wooden stakes and covered by a green canvas. Yunan Province plates. I’ll send you photos and bring the numbers with me.”

  “When’s that?”

  “Late tonight, maybe early tomorrow morning.”

  “We’re at the Nantong Center Hotel. I’ll book you a room. Let’s meet downstairs for breakfast at eight o’clock.”

  “What about Kasa? Should Kai let him go?”

  Gage thought for a moment, then said, “That’s as good a way as any to clue Eight Iron in that he’s lost his link to the heroin.”

  “I just hope he trusts you to do the damage to Ah Ming you promised and stays out of it.”

  “How about have someone keep an eye on him just in case. Let Kai know when you’ve got it set up and she then can have her people cut him loose.”

  “Has she been honoring your understanding?’

  “I’d say she’s been very well behaved.”

  “Maybe not for long,” Kai said. “Tell him you tried to deflect me to a car thief.”

  “Maybe not so well behaved after all. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  After Gage disconnected, he realized Kai’s last line didn’t have its usual snap, and when he looked up, she was staring at him in the mirror. Then her eyes lost focus like she was looking past him at something in the far beyond. He had the feeling she was near a moment of insight, poised at some kind of threshold. He watched her. A minute passed, then Kai’s eyes came awake again and her face reddened like she’d arrived with great anticipation at a party a day too early or a day too late. It lasted only an instant, then a somber expression replaced it.

  “Silence,” she finally said. “My mind just went silent.” She looked at Gage. “For years it seems my thoughts have raced from one thing to another. Nonstop. Especially around men. Like a gambler or maybe like a prospector, except I never win and never find the gold.” She paused, then took in a long breath and exhaled. “Silence. Who would have thought? Maybe that’s what I’ve been looking for all my life. A silent moment like that with a man, in a room or walking along a river.”

  Kai turned toward the window overlooking the city. “That could be the real reason I came along with you. Until now I thought it was just sex or adventure or something forbidden or out of reach that got me here.” She looked back at Gage. “It was just the opposite. I needed a safe place to feel that unmoving moment, where I could stop trying to justify myself.”

  “If you stay with Somchai, you might not ever have one again.”

  “I know.” She sighed. “Our life has been about money and politics and business, and getting more and more. But I ended up with too much of everything and none of what I really needed.” She sat down in the desk chair and looked at herself in the mirror. Finally, she shook her head and said, “I can’t believe I actually said that out loud.” She glanced up at Gage. “I think the twisted rope that has tied me to him all these years may have just come unwound.”

  CHAPTER 57

  Kasa lay on a cot in the eight-by-eight storage room attached by a chain running from his ankle to an industrial lathe bolted to the warehouse floor. He was watching the third to the last video of the twelve-volume San Kuo, The Three Kingdoms, a tale of the ancient struggle among the Wei, Shu, and Wu warlords for control of China.

  Kai’s bodyguard appeared at the door and pointed a semiautomatic at him.

  “It’s time to leave.”

  “Right now?” Kasa said, without looking over. “I have two episodes left. Maybe you can come back later.”

  The bodyguard stiffened, recognizing that Kasa’s gesture was a feint, but not sure what his next move would be.

  “Kneel down on the floor and put your hands behind your back.”

  The bodyguard had tried to sound casual and businesslike, but he knew that Kasa could hear the strain in his voice.

  Kasa complied and the driver stepped into the room and handcuffed him.

  After taking two steps toward the threshold, Kasa stopped and looked back at the television. He smiled as one of the warlords said, “I will kill him while I live, or die doing it,” then walked out.

  They urged Kasa through the warehouse and out to the car where the driver was waiting. They drove him into central Chiang Rai and released him next to a crowd of Japanese tourists in front of the Monkey Wat. The driver reported in to Kai as they sped to a bar where they bought each other whiskeys to soothe their fears. Once calmed by alcohol, they surveyed the prostitutes sitting together around a table in the corner. They chose two sixteen-year-olds, paid the bar owner his buy-out fee, bought two bottles of cognac, and walked with the girls to their upstairs room.

  The driver first handed the girls a hundred baht each for an hour, then looked at the bodyguard and gave the girls a thousand each for the night.

  Kasa would surely be gone by morning.

  TEN MINUTES AFTER HE WAS DROPPED OFF AT THE TEMPLE, Kasa arrived at Eight Iron’s Chiang Rai office on the bank of the Mae Kok River. He met with the manager, and then called Eight Iron in Bangkok.

  “I need you to go meet our people in Kunming,” Eight Iron said. “There’s a problem. We’ve lost the trucks, and the police found Luck overdosed in an alley with a syringe in his pocket. He’s under guard in the government hospital. Moby is waiting for you.”

  Kasa took a company van from behind the building and drove to a nearby service station, filled the tank, and checked the oil and tires. The manager was waiting with a stack of yuan when Kasa returned. He took the money, collected three mobile phones, a semiautomatic pistol and a box of bullets, then raced north toward Mae Sai, Burma, and China in the far beyond.

  For the entire first hour of the drive, as he pushed through the dust and exhaust and swerved around slow trucks and oncoming traffic, he fingered the tip of the bullet that he hoped would soon blast a hole in the back of Cobra’s head.

  CHAPTER

  58

  Kai and Gage walked down a floor in the Nantong Center Hotel and knocked on the door to Zhang’s room, hoping he and Ren had woken from their alcohol-induced afternoon nap. Zhang opened it on the second knock. They could see Ren in the bathroom combing wet hair away from his puf
fy face. The steam from shower and the scents of soap and shampoo clouded the doorway, then Zhang’s stale cognac and pork breath broke through, and bile rose in Gage’s throat.

  Gage swallowed hard and then said, “The trucks from the south are on their way. They’ll be here in a day or two.”

  Zhang nodded. “We’ll have time to arrange everything.” His tone was crisp, not the rough voice of someone who’d just awakened from an alcohol-induced stupor.

  “We?”

  Zhang glanced at Ren and nodded. He then pointed downward and said, “We’ll meet you in a few minutes. He wants to show you how the people and companies are distributed around the city.”

  Kai and Gage went down to the lobby where Gage made a room reservation for Cobra.

  ZHANG SNAPPED HIS CELL PHONE SHUT as he and Ren left the elevator and moments later Ferrari pulled the mobile office to a stop in front of the hotel. The evening air was still and the streetlights were coming on as they entered the van. Ferrari reached back and handed each of them a map of Nantong in both English and Chinese, with all the businesses marked that had appeared in Ah Tien’s address book.

  Gage felt an uncanniness looking at the annotated map. It somehow reminded him of the CAT scan he’d done, a picture that would reveal a disease or, perhaps, a projection of a diagnosis onto a picture. It made him feel as though the next hour of inspecting the places shown on the map would be like an exercise in pathology, an examination of the social tumors, or at least their outer shape, that had led to the death of Peter Sheridan.

  Ferrari first drove northeast to Lao Wu’s Efficiency Trading, composed of a metal building, part office and part warehouse, the size of an American auto parts store. Its green paint had long faded, and cardboard covered a couple of broken second-floor windows. It had a single loading bay, its roll-up door closed, trash collected along the wall, and used cardboard boxes folded and piled by the rear fence. An old cargo van was parked on the street with the company name painted on the side with two laborers asleep in the front seat.

  The mood of neglect suggested to Gage that Lao Wu was either irresponsible or a man at the end of his career, or both. And as he scanned the street, he noticed that the rest of the businesses were also small and old, suggesting that economic development in the area had started there twenty or thirty years earlier and had moved on.

  Ferrari’s next stop confirmed it.

  Tongming Tiger stood along a four-lane road lined with factories and cold storage facilities on the western edge of town. Most of the businesses had luxury cars and SUVs parked in front.

  A dozen loading docks gaped from the football-field-size Tongming Tiger warehouse, with laborers swarming from truck to truck, loading and unloading, while supervisors stood by marking off deliveries on bills of lading. Semis were lined up at the gate and extended thirty yards down the street, their exhaust seeming to create their own gray microclimate of clouds and fog.

  Kai reached for Zhang’s binoculars and read off the printing on the bags and boxes that workers were moving by hand or forklift: rice, wheat, dried corn, food preservatives, components for traditional Chinese medicines, including dried reptiles and insects and roots, mushrooms, and bark.

  If the key to successful drug trafficking was to conceal it within normal business activities, Gage thought, then Tongming Tiger was ideal. Millions of dollars in chips or hundreds of kilos of heroin could slip in and out unnoticed by the workers who bore it from truck to warehouse, even less by the fluorescent-lit clerks on the second-and third-floor offices.

  Ferrari pointed to a middle-aged balding man walking from the entrance toward a Nissan sedan, then spoke a few words to Zhang in Chinese.

  “That’s Dong,” Zhang said. “The owner. A very modest person. He’s worth millions, but he and his wife live like mice in a little house by the river. His only vice is a little gambling in Macao every few months.”

  “Hold that thought,” Gage said. “In the next few days we’ll find out whether modesty is just the part he plays.”

  As they drove in silence back through Nantong, Ren and Zhang slid down in their seats and closed their eyes.

  Ferrari turned left a few blocks before reaching the Nantong Center Hotel and pulled to the curb.

  “Why are we stopping here?” Kai asked Ferrari.

  “Tian Nan . . . Hotel,” Ferrari said in broken English, pointing at the sign over the entrance.

  “And?” Kai asked.

  Zhang stirred, then stretched over to peer out through the van side window, and said, “Ah yes, the Tian Nan Hotel.” He looked at Kai, then at Gage, and smiled. “A person by the name of Lew Fung-hao checked in here this afternoon.”

  CHAPTER 59

  Wu and Lew sat together at a small table in the Tian Nan Hotel restaurant. Even though the rooms above were small and crowded with single beds, Wu had chosen it because it catered to Chinese, rather than foreign businesspeople, and the menu accommodated tastes from almost anywhere in China.

  One of Ren’s plainclothes soldiers secured a table next to them. She grasped at their words and at the sentence fragments that emerged out of the surrounding chaos of clacking dishes, murmured conversations and bursts of laughter, but the only ones that reached her seemed unrelated to smuggling.

  “I can tell by your accent you’re from the southern coastal area,” Wu said, as the waiter delivered plates of Lucky Fish and steamed vegetables and bowls of rice.

  “I was born near Shantou and lived there until 1971 when I . . .” Lew stiffened and his voice trailed off.

  Wu wasn’t surprised by Lew’s difficulty in speaking of the past. He’d met many like Lew. Diaspora Chinese who’d returned to do business, but who were unable to adjust to the political reality of a modern China that had ripped through the seams of its communist past.

  “You can speak freely,” Wu said, glancing around the restaurant. “Things have changed. There’s no need to worry. Even those who suffered the worst and fled to America and Hong Kong are now coming back to live here.” He pointed up at a television hanging from a bracket in the far corner of the room. “There are no secrets anymore. The state television shows documentaries about Red Guards harassing and beating people and about the famine.”

  “My memories of those days have become a filter against the present,” Lew said. “I’m not sure I can see China very clearly.” He shrugged. “Maybe I never will.”

  Wu slid a piece of fish into Lew’s rice bowl, then said, “In some ways it was easier for those who stayed to adjust to the changes because we could watch them happening.”

  Wu chose not to speak of the dead who hadn’t survived to watch anything: those executed or murdered and the thirty million who starved to death.

  “I was in my late twenties when the Cultural Revolution began,” Wu said. “I was working as a clerk at a collective farm just west of here. I was considered a necessary evil because I could read and write. Then the Red Guards came along. They didn’t see me as necessary, only as evil, and sent me into the fields as a laborer. Two years later, everyone who depended on the farm was starving because there was no one left with management skills.”

  Lew set down his chopsticks. “I was a history professor.” He shook his head as if to say that if he’d understood more, he might have suffered less. “The Party let me come back to the university after six years of hard labor and reeducation, but then everything turned upside down again when the students turned against us.”

  Wu didn’t expect Lew to describe what had happened to him—that generation never did—but the memories returned: intellectuals dressed like clowns and paraded through the streets, to be beat and spit upon.

  “Other professors committed suicide, but somehow I found the strength to resist and then to escape to Hong Kong.”

  “A survivor.”

  Lew nodded. “And you, too.”

  “As it turned out, the communist leaders were right in their analysis of the danger the former capitalist classes held for the revolution.�
� Wu smiled. “Capitalism does seem to be genetic. I saw a chance to open a business and somehow knew how to run it. It grew over time into Efficiency Trading.”

  “Maybe if I’d held out longer . . .”

  Wu shook his head. “It’s better to have left.” He smiled again. “America is a wonderful place. I’ve seen it. My son was a student at Columbia and I stayed with him for a month last year.” His smile turned into a grin. “And Las Vegas? Fantastic.” His excitement pushed him forward in his chair. “Have you been?”

  “No, I’ve lived a quiet life.”

  Lew picked up his chopsticks and poked at the fish, but he didn’t pick up a piece.

  In the silence, Wu inspected Lew’s eyes. They were deadened by what Wu knew had to have been an unquiet life, or maybe a quiet one ruthlessly lived. The big boss in San Francisco never would’ve trusted a weak man with the mission that had brought Lew to Nantong.

  Wu stared down at Lew’s now idle chopsticks.

  Was there blood on those hands? Wu asked himself. Maybe. Maybe not.

  Wu settled on maybe, for the American end of the heroin trade was much more violent than in China where it’s like any other kind of commodity. At the same time, organizations like Ah Ming’s also needed people with fingers clean enough to handle the money without drawing suspicion. In any case, Wu decided, it wasn’t a topic to be raised at this table, for here they were just two old men whose lives by chance had converged.

  “And what about the future?” Wu finally asked.

  “I’m thinking about retiring.”

  “Here?”

  Lew shrugged. “Maybe. Though I find the thought surprising.”

  CHAPTER 60

  Cobra nodded toward Gage and Kai as he entered the Nantong Center Hotel restaurant and then walked to the breakfast buffet table and served himself a bowl of da mi zhou, steaming rice porridge, and sprinkled pao cai, pickled vegetables, on top.

  “What have I missed?” Cobra asked as he sat down.