Freddy was certain the door he could see was locked, but he figured he should at least check. He would feel pretty stupid if he eventually discovered he had been dumped somewhere in a cheap hotel and the door wasn’t even locked.
He slid his body to the edge of the bed and let his feet drop to the floor. Cautiously, he pushed himself up into a standing position. The contents of his stomach stayed where they were supposed to stay, which he viewed as a good start, so he took a step. He was a little dizzy, but not too dizzy to walk, so he took another.
And at exactly that moment the door opened.
“I’M HAPPY TO SEE you up and around,” Harry Pine said, “but you really don’t look so good. You should probably sit down.”
Pine pointed at the blue couch. Freddy just stood there and stared so Pine took Freddy gently by the arms and steered him backward until the backs of his legs hit the couch and he collapsed onto it.
“You were out for a lot longer than we expected,” Pine said. “I was getting worried about you.”
“What time is it?” Freddy asked.
“It’s a little after noon.”
Freddy struggled with the concept. All this had started at the Grand Lapa sometime late in the afternoon or early in the evening, hadn’t it? Was that yesterday? Yes, surely it was, so he had been out through the night and the morning of the next day. No wonder he was so damned thirsty.
“Could I have some water?”
One of Pine’s arms moved and something flew through the air and bounced on the couch right next to Freddy. He looked down at it and recognized the familiar red and blue Evian label on the small plastic bottle. He scooped it up, broke open the cap, and took a long pull of the sweetest, most beautiful water he had ever tasted.
“Don’t drink it too fast,” Pine cautioned.
Freddy ignored him. He tilted the bottle up a second time and drained it. Against all odds, he started feeling better almost as soon as the water had washed the sourness out of his mouth. He dropped the empty bottle back on the couch and looked at Pine.
“Where am I?”
“You don’t recognize it?”
“Why would I?”
“It’s the place we work out of here in Macau. I thought you might have been here.”
Freddy was confused. Did Pine think he was somehow involved in whatever he was doing here in Macau? No, of course he didn’t. He knew better than that.
That was when Freddy noticed Pine was grinning at him in that particularly way men grin at each other sometimes when they think they are saying something slightly sly. He couldn’t imagine what Pine was on about and his eyes swept the room looking for a clue. The couch, the bed, the table, the huge mirror next to the bed…
Suddenly he got it.
“This is a whorehouse, isn’t it?”
Pine made a little clucking sound with his tongue. “That’s such a harsh expression. I rather prefer to call it a men’s spa.”
“You’re running the DPRK’s business out of a whorehouse?”
“You don’t think the irony is rather amusing?”
Freddy did, but he wasn’t about to get into a discussion about the concept of irony right that moment so he said nothing.
“Besides,” Pine continued, “there are so many men’s spas in Macau that I figured no one would pay any attention to one more.”
Freddy could only shake his head.
“I’ll give you a tour later if you like,” Pine said. “You really should see what we’re doing here before you go home.”
That got Freddy’s full attention exactly as he gather Pine intended for it to.
“Home?”
“Yes, it will be a couple or three days before you can leave, but we’ll make you as comfortable as we can until then.”
“Why can’t I go now?”
“Well…” Pine made a show of thinking, “the transportation question is rather complicated.”
Now Freddy was confused again. Transportation? No place in Macau was more than a few minutes from anywhere. How could transportation be complicated?
“We have a shipment going out toward the end of the week,” Pine went on. “I’m trying now to make arrangements for you to accompany it.”
A shipment? What in the world was Pine talking about?
“How long has it been since you were home?” Pine asked.
“I don’t know.” Freddy thought about it. “A week or so. I went out to my house to see my wife but she wasn’t there.”
“Not your house in Coloane,” Pine smiled. “I meant Pyongyang.”
And all of a sudden Freddy understood what was going to happen to him.
“You’re sending me to Pyongyang?”
Pine nodded.
“But why? I haven’t been there in fifteen years.”
“Because you’re planning to defect to the US. Your brother and the wise men can’t have that, can they? You ought to imagine the embarrassment they would suffer. You should have realized they simply won’t allow it to happen.”
“So my brother told you to kidnap me and ship me to Pyongyang?”
“Not exactly. I actually got orders to kill you, but I can’t get confirmation that your brother approves of that order or even knows about it. If I do kill you, and if he doesn’t approve, it’s my ass.”
“So you’re shipping me back instead of killing me.”
Pine snapped his fingers and pointed at Freddy. “I knew you were a smart guy. I send you back to Pyongyang and it’s your brother’s problem what to do with you.”
“So you’re sending me to Pyongyang with…what? Weapons? Missile parts?”
“Don’t be silly. We sell that shit. We don’t buy it.”
Freddy waited. He knew Pine would tell him eventually, and then Pine did.
“Money, my friend. Damn near eight hundred million Hong Kong dollars. All freshly laundered and ready to go out in the world and buy the wise men in Pyongyang whatever things they most fancy in the depths of their black little hearts.”
Freddy did the math in his head. Eight hundred million Hong Kong was something like a hundred million United States dollars. He had no idea what kind of businesses Pine was running out of this whorehouse, but it wasn’t hookers if he was generating that kind of income. Certainly not Korean hookers.
Drugs? Gunrunning? Christ, was it nuclear weapons? Had to be something big to earn that kind of money.
“I DON’T WANT TO go to Pyongyang.”
“Who does?”
“Isn’t there some alternative?”
“Sure, I could shoot you. How does that sound?”
“It might be better than going to Pyongyang.”
“Actually, it doesn’t really matter what you want,” Pine said. “When this shipment is ready to go out, you’re going with it. After you get to Pyongyang you and your brother can have a good old family reunion and he can decide what to do with you. At least you’ll be out of my hair.”
“I don’t want to go to Pyongyang.”
“Yeah, you said that. You want to go to Hawaii. Me, too, but ain’t neither of us going to get our wish.”
“I don’t know anything about what you’re doing here. I can’t possibly tell—”
Pine held up his right hand like a traffic cop.
“Save your breath, man. There’s nothing to discuss. This is how it’s going down. I’ll get food and water brought to you and get you out of here in another day or two, but that’s the best I can do for you.”
Freddy sighed and looked down at his feet.
“After you get there you can work things out with your brother. Just leave me out of it. I’m only a working stiff. I don’t get involved in all this political shit.”
And with that, Pine turned on his heel and disappeared through the door. Freddy heard two solid thunks that had to be two bolts slamming shut outside. He wasn’t going anywhere until Pine decided he was. And then he was going to Pyongyang.
Freddy fell back on the couch, rolled onto his side, and
buried his head in his hands.
THIRTY
I LEFT ARCHIE SITTING in Bar Cristal, crossed the east lobby of the Wynn, and headed out to Avenida 24 de Junho to walk the short distance back to the MGM.
It didn’t occur to me until I was halfway down the driveway that this was the very spot where I had been ducking gunfire a few weeks back. I scanned the street for any sign of shooters on a motorbike and checked around for another handy Rolls Royce to dive behind just in case, but all I saw were a bus, a couple of taxis, and a few people on foot who looked anxious to get into the Wynn’s casino and empty their pockets as quickly as possible.
I walked a block to the back entry to the MGM, cut through the casino to the lobby, and less than ten minutes later was stretched out on the couch in my suite, lighting a Montecristo.
Some people looked upon the act of smoking a cigar as something pugnacious, perhaps even aggressive, but in my experience the only people who thought that were people who didn’t smoke cigars. People who did smoke cigars knew the truth was quite the opposite. The process of cutting, lighting, and puffing a cigar into life kindles along with it a few moments of utter tranquility. Smoking a cigar, if it is a good one, is a contemplative act, even a meditative one. I did some of my best thinking with a Montecristo in my teeth, and that was what I needed right now. Good thinking.
So I took another puff, studied the ceiling, and started putting a few things together…
Maybe I was right in the middle of some huge coincidence. Maybe Kim Jong-Nam suddenly turning up in my life and getting himself kidnapped had absolutely nothing to do with the discovery that a bunch of Koreans touched up by plastic surgery were laundering massive amounts of currency through the MGM casino.
What was the chance of that?
No fucking chance whatsoever.
I would bet my last dollar it was the North Korean government that was behind the money laundering operation at the MGM. And who else but the North Korean government would want to kidnap Kim Jong-Nam?
The two things were connected by something or somebody, even if I couldn’t yet see exactly what, or who, that connection was.
That was when I saw the very first signs of an idea in the tendrils of smoke reaching for the ceiling from my Montecristo.
Maybe I could make this work for me. Maybe I could even find a way to use the connection to find Freddy.
BY THE TIME I had finished my Montecristo and watched the butt burn itself out in the heavy glass ashtray on the coffee table, I was gratified to discover those first signs had very helpfully grown into something not too far from a full fledged plan. But there was a problem with it, and it was a pretty significant problem. The plan required manpower. Not an army exactly, but not a couple of guys either. Ideally, I figured we needed about a dozen people to do it right, but six people and a little luck would probably work, too. Where was I going to get manpower like that?
The only person I could think of who might be able to round up some bodies for me at short notice was Pete Logan. Would he be willing to help? It was Pete who had lured me to Macau in the first place, presumably to help out the FBI, so he could hardly claim to be aggrieved or give me a hard time for asking for his help now, could he? Of course he could…
I pull out my cell phone, found Pete’s number, and hit the call button.
“SHIT, JACKO, THIS BETTER be good.”
I could hear sounds behind Pete. I wasn’t certain what they were, but they sounded familiar somehow. A restaurant? A bar? Something like that. I glanced at my watch. A little before midnight in Macau, but God only knew where Pete was so I had no idea what time it was for him.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“In bed.”
I had meant what country he was in, of course, but I didn’t press the point. “It doesn’t sound like you’re in bed.”
“The TV’s on.”
It wasn’t a TV I was hearing, I was certain of that, but I didn’t argue with Pete. What did I care if he was having a late dinner with some woman or even sitting in a Bangkok go-go bar surrounded by topless dancers? I went ahead and told him why I was calling and what I had in mind.
When I was finished, he said, “Not bad, Jacko. Not bad at all.”
I was so surprised Pete didn’t pee all over me that I didn’t know what to say.
“How many men do you think you’ll need?” he continued before I could think of anything.
“A dozen to do it right.”
“Not possible.”
“Six would probably be the minimum.”
“I can give you one.”
“One?”
“Yeah. Me.”
“You? Can’t you send me a few Bureau guys from the Hong Kong office?”
“Uh-uh.”
I thought about that. After a moment, I understood.
“When you pushed me into working for Pansy Ho it wasn’t an official bureau operation, was it? Whatever this is, it’s strictly your own deal.”
“That depends on what your definition of it is.”
“That sounds even stupider coming from you than it did from Bill Clinton when he was trying to explain away a blow job.”
“Look, Jacko, Pansy needed your help and I thought you helping her might help me, so I leaned on you a little. What’s the big deal?”
“You let me think this was a Bureau operation.”
“It is. I’m Bureau and this is my operation. So it’s a Bureau operation. Comprende, pal?”
This wasn’t getting us anywhere and it was the middle of the night and I was tired. So I let it go. For now.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” Pete said. “We’ll figure something out.”
In the morning? That was less than eight hours away and there weren’t any middle of the night flights from Bangkok to Macau.
Now the familiar background noise I had heard when Pete first answered his phone was starting to make sense. Pete was already here in Macau. Probably hanging around in one of the casinos. Maybe playing a little blackjack. But what the hell was he doing here? Watching me?
“Nine o’clock?” Pete asked before I could ask him about that.
“Better make it a little later. I want to talk to Pansy first.”
“Good idea. Why don’t you come out to the Venetian about noon?”
So Pete was at the Venetian…
“There’s a Fat Burger in the food court on the third floor,” he went on. “I seem to remember you like a Fat Burger every now and then.”
I did. I hadn’t had a Fat Burger since I was in Dubai, and the less I thought about having a Fat Burger in Dubai the happier I was.
“See you there at noon tomorrow,” I said, and hung up.
I WAS IN PANSY’S office by nine the next morning, suitably energized by three cups of coffee and a pretty decent bagel slathered in cream cheese.
“The people who are smurfing your casino have to be operating from somewhere,” I told her. “They’re bringing in piles of US dollars and Euros every day and they’re not keeping all that currency at home under their beds. They’re picking it up somewhere before they go to the casino, then I’m guessing they take the Hong Kong dollars they get from you back to the same place they picked it up. If we can find that place, we’ll know who we’re dealing with, and we can figure out a way to stop them.”
“So you want to put some of these people who’re bringing in this money under surveillance and see where they go when they leave here?”
“I think that’s the best way to nail down who’s really behind the money laundering.”
And of course I figured if I found the place where the Koreans were running their money laundering operations, I might find Freddy, too. I just didn’t see any need to mention that part to Pansy.
“How are you going to do it?” she asked.
That was the question, wasn’t it? I had three guys: Pete, Archie, and me. The MGM casino was huge. The three of us had no chance of covering it. I suppose I could have asked Pansy to give
me some of their security staff, but the truth was that I didn’t trust locals I didn’t know. If the Koreans were tipped off, they would be gone in a moment and with them would go any chance I had of finding the source of the money or where Freddy was. No locals. I couldn’t take the chance.
“All I need is for your cashiers to keep an eye out for people bringing in large numbers of $50 bills or €100 notes, and let me know when they spot somebody. We’ll take it from there.”
“Who’s we?”
I didn’t want Pansy to know that it was just me and two other guys, she would laugh, so I smiled and winked. Let her think I had the whole fucking CIA on call.
“Okay, I see,” she said. “It’s probably better if I don’t know exactly what you’re doing anyway.”
I nodded again. On the other hand, it would be certainly better if I did know, but I didn’t. I was making this up as I went along.
AFTER I LEFT PANSY’S office I spent a couple of hours with Gerald Brady going over plans of the casino floor and working out an arrangement for the cashiers to alert me to any out-of-the-ordinary movement they spotted in $50 bills or €100 notes. I would have been happier not even to involve Brady, but there was no way to make this work without an inside man at the casino, and since Brady was head of security he was the obvious candidate. I had no reason to mistrust Brady since Pansy obviously trusted him, and besides he already knew I was trying to run down the source of the money laundering activity and it was still going on. If Brady was a risk for warning them off, he would have already done it, wouldn’t he? I told myself he would have. That helped. A little.
The plan was pretty simple. When a cashier was asked to exchange a large number of $50 bills or €100 notes, he would tell the customer that his counting machine was out of order, step back into the enclosed counting room that was behind every cashier’s cage, presumably to find a counting machine that was functional, and telephone Brady with a description of the smurf. After that the cashier would return to the cage and give the smurf his chips as if everything were completely in order.
THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) Page 19
