The Second Poison

by Pieter Wilhelm

  “Is he into ladyboys?” asked Bao Shen, “and do you know where he hangs out?” I had to admit that I didn’t have the slightest idea. The guy was living just one floor above me, but I’d only seen him in the lift where we’d exchanged a “Good morning” or a “Good evening” and nothing more. “I need his smartphone for a minute or two,” Bao Shen said. “It doesn’t matter where or when.”

  I phoned Frank Reitz and explained what I needed.

  “What you want is almost impossible,” Frank said. “Sure, I can figure out his daily routine, but who separates themselves from their phones these days? My phone spends more time with me than my wife! People take their phones to the toilet and into the bedroom. To be honest, I can’t think of a situation where someone would separate themselves from their smartphone.”

  “Let’s see what you can come up with,” I said.

  The Gentlemen’s Club was tucked away at the end of a small soi. There was no outside sign to identify it, and no name was displayed on the building. The club had no website and was members only – membership was available only by introduction and for an annual fee of about one million baht. Non-members were admitted only when invited by a full member. The club took up all five floors of the building, and offered a Turkish bath, a sauna and a steam room. The bar, on the top floor, was well-stocked with imported beers and spirits. Beside it was a separate smoking room where Cuban and other high-quality imported cigars were stored in a humidor. Attractive girls who spoke excellent English, a handful of whom could also speak Japanese, were available as companions while members enjoyed a drink or cigar. The girls could be taken to one of the private rooms on the floor below. Evidently Hubert was a regular there, and had been a member for a long time. According to Frank, he normally came to the club every Tuesday and Thursday evening, and would spend some time in the steam room before going to the bar upstairs. Then he would usually take one of the available girls to a private room downstairs. Adjacent to the steam room was a locker room where members could store their car keys, phones and any other electronic equipment that would be vulnerable to the humidity of the steam room. Since it was a members-only club and the members placed a high value on their privacy, there were no security cameras around.

  “Well,” said Frank as he nursed his drink, “your best bet is the locker room. I managed to get an invitation through one of my clients and was able to get inside. The lockers have electronic keypads so someone will need to glance over Hubert’s shoulder as he punches in his code. I’m certain his smartphone will be in there as it can’t be taken into the steam room.”

  “One million baht to buy a membership?” I asked.

  “Yes, and you’d also need to be introduced by a member,” replied Frank.

  15

  Chapter 15

  Uncle Zheng

  My nephew Bao Shen has always been a big nuisance. When my brother was on his deathbed, he made me promise to look after his son. I’ve had trouble with him ever since. I was glad to finally see him beginning to contribute to the family business through his Thai-boxing gambling operation, but now here he was phoning me asking for a million baht to buy a membership to some club.

  I get sick and tired of this boy – there’s no way that the family will agree to fund his perverted ventures. You know, he even had a katoi in his Bangkok condo, and I had to tell him to get rid of her. I’m so glad my brother is not around to see what his son has become. Bao Shen explained to me the details of his financial request, so I phoned a relative in Bangkok who arranged an invitation for a one-off visit to the club. I’m not sure it will do any good though; this boy only spells trouble. He had something good going with this gambling project, but now he’ seems to have let it slip through his fingers.

  Bao Shen

  That was a piece of cake. The gweilo took no notice of me in the locker room and was oblivious to the fact I was reading the access code on his locker using mirrored lenses in my glasses when he opened it. As soon as the gweilo left for the steam room I opened his locker again. I connected Hubert’s smartphone to my own with a cable and it took less than two minutes to upload and install the spyware. Once the installation was complete I took Hubert’s keyless fob for his Mercedes. Using another app, it took about two minutes more for me to record the serial number and the frequency the fob used to communicate with the car’s transponder. I replaced the smartphone and the fob as I’d found them and I closed the locker before joining the gweilo in the steam room. The gweilo was bragging to some other foreigners about the new Mercedes that he’d just bought.

  “They’re the safest cars in the world,” he said.

  We’ll see about that, I thought.

  Tony

  Now I had two mobiles to monitor. I opened two separate windows of the monitoring programme on my laptop and spent days listening to Hubert’s conversations. I also had the microphone switched on most of the time when he wasn’t on a call. He seemed to spend a lot of time in his apartment. I could see when he logged into his Hong Kong bank account, since each time he logged in he was sent an access code by SMS. Every time he logged in he would pound away at his keyboard, and I could only wish that I was able to look over his shoulder. He sent emails to Donald on a daily basis, but these were only office related. Meanwhile, the conversations I eavesdropped on were not incriminating. After a week I became a little disillusioned, since other than listening in to social calls I could only determine when he was doing internet banking or communicating with Donald. I began to doubt whether I’d be able to recover the funds stolen from my father or from Maura’s clients. Meanwhile my bank balance was falling at an alarming pace. I called Bao Shen and said I didn’t think our cooperation was going to bear any fruit.

  “It’s a shame about the money,” Bao Shen replied, “but we can make him suffer all the same. And if we take him out, he can’t continue.”

  Yayee

  After leaving Tukataa in the care of my mamasan friend on Soi 6, I became quite busy as I managed to pick up a few customers. I also went to some boxing matches in Chonburi province only to see my old boxer friend Ma getting the shit kicked out of him. He was clearly having a bad run and it looked like his boxing career wasn’t going to last much longer. I barely had time to think about it though because I received an alarming LINE message from my mamasan friend. A sex tourist had gotten rough with Tukataa and had beaten her. I couldn’t find Tukataa when I arrived at the bar. The mamasan saw me looking around for her and told me that both her eyes were swollen and her face was bruised. She had been taken to the government hospital. On examining her, the medical staff there had apparently discovered that she also had two broken ribs.

  “I had no idea …” the mamasan told me. “Last night an obese farang bar-fined Tukataa to go back to his place.”

  “Where is that man?” I demanded.

  The mamasan tried to dodge the blame, “He bar-fined another girl last night too, but he paid in full and she didn’t have any problems.”

  “Where is she?” I repeated.

  The mamasan called out for another girl to come over to give me the apartment address and unit number. I set off immediately. I felt the same rage pulsating through my veins that I experienced when my sister Nok had been attacked and raped.

  The events that followed came back to me slowly over time. I remember a man at the front desk nodding to me as I entered, no doubt thinking to himself that someone had ordered another girl for the night. The fat farang was evidently already naked when I arrived, and must have been peering through the peephole in the door expecting his next hooker when he saw me, big breasted, long black hair shaping my face – how could he resist?

  He made the decision to open the door to me and as soon as he did that I head-butted him in the chest. It had little effect on him though, his body fat absorbed the impact. He stepped back and as I tried to punch him he grabbed my hair and began pulling violently as he repeatedly punched me with his free fist. I fell onto the floor and he started kicking me. He land
ed the sole of his fake Timberland shoes a few times in my face, which broke my nose and crushed my cheek bones and an eye socket. I was enraged. I kicked upwards, first with little effect, but I finally managed to land a kick that made my long stiletto heel disappear into the fatso’s crotch. He collapsed onto the floor and screamed in pain, but still managed to keep his grip on my hair. I remember biting one of his nipples with all my strength. The farang must have let go of my hair because I hit him with a half-empty beer bottle I had grabbed from a table. Then I was jumping on him in my stilettos. I lost a heel and it was sticking out of his belly. I had to kick my shoes off. The farang tried to crawl to the door so I jumped on his back and tried to insert the bottle into his asshole. I shoved the neck of the bottle in, put on my heelless shoe and stamped on the bottom of the bottle until it disappeared into his anus. I tried to break the bottle inside him by jumping on him but he was a human trampoline. When he made for the door again I kicked it closed, bashing his head and knocking him unconscious. I slowly dragged him back into the room and towards the balcony but I couldn’t lift him over the rail, he was that fat. I was drained by this point. Finally I managed to lift his upper body onto the balcony railing and then haul up one leg. Once I’d lifted his leg high enough, his centre of mass shifted and his torso pulled the rest of him over the rail and down onto the car park below.

  I noticed the group of neighbours had formed in front of the apartment door, wondering what the noise was all about. I walked towards them, blood streaming out of my crushed eye socket and nose, my shirt soaked with blood. The neighbours stepped back in horror. I staggered over to the lift and as the doors closed, I must have fainted. I later learnt that the residents called the emergency services, and they transported me to the Chonburi public hospital where I slipped into a coma. Apparently the police showed up in the hospital to interrogate me, but the doctor informed them I was suffering from severe concussion and it was uncertain I would ever wake up. The police ordered the doctor on duty to report any improvement in my condition and there I stayed.

  Jennifer

  Uncle Zheng told Bao Shen to send him all the files they’d stolen from the gweilo, including all the emails, recordings and any other data they’d collected. Uncle Zheng then had it copied to a memory card and asked for a favour from another family. Their business was harvesting online usernames and passwords, usually from the customers of banks and other financial institutions. They sent over one of their best: me.

  “I’m retired,” I told Uncle Zheng, “but my family has asked me to help you.”

  Uncle Zheng knew my age and my reputation. “How can a twenty-four-year-old be retired?” he inquired.

  I only smiled in response, since I was unwilling to explain to him how I’d made my fortune and many of the crimes I’d participated in remained unsolved. Some foot soldiers may have been arrested, but the masterminds had never even been identified. One of my proudest achievements was the Bangladesh Bank job.

  The Bangladesh Bank cyber heist took place in February 2016, when instructions to fraudulently withdraw $1 billion from the account of the central bank of Bangladesh was issued via the SWIFT network. We made five transactions worth $101 million, which we withdrew from a Bangladesh Bank account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The authorities traced $20 million to Sri Lanka and recovered that and they traced another $81 million to the Philippines but only recovered about $18 million of that. At the request of the Bangladesh Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York blocked the remaining transactions, amounting to $850 million but we came away with a respectable amount.

  Minutes before the heist, I had infected the Bangladesh Bank system with malware, which disabled the SWIFT printer. Bank staff initially assumed it was simply a printer problem, as this was a common occurrence. Because the international SWIFT transactions were not printed, the fraudulent withdrawals from the bank’s Nostro account went unnoticed until it was too late.

  “I’ll work from my hotel room,” I told Uncle Zheng. “I’ll go through the data you gave me and see if I can do something for you. Perhaps you could ask one of your sons to drop me off at my hotel.”

  The old man disappeared into his study. Returning, he apologized. “I’m sorry, all my sons are out at the moment, but I’ve called you a taxi.”

  I called Uncle Zheng at 11 pn that same day. “It’s done,” I told him. “I have access to the system.”

  16

  Chapter 16

  The Arsonist

  This was my second visit to the Mercedes dealership in downtown Shanghai. On my first visit I found out everything I could about one model’s security system, now I needed to know about the car’s air-conditioning unit. I even popped the hood and took photos. I was looking forward to this job. I’m a pragmatic person and will consider any job but I prefer to work under the radar of the authorities. This job ticked all the boxes and was out of China.

  When I’d finished at the dealership, I visited the camping section of a department store and found a gas canister for a portable stove that would suit my needs. I didn’t buy it but I took a few photos of it. After that I went up a few floors to the food court for lunch. I studied the photos as I ate my soup, then deleted them. I texted Bao Shen: “I’m ready.”

  Uncle Zheng

  Jennifer gave me a demonstration of how she’d managed to retrieve the information from the gweilo’s PC in Bangkok. She’d needed to travel to Thailand to complete the final step, she explained, emphasizing that she refused to do any work with amateurs. I said I would accompany her to Bangkok to oversee the operation, and this was the reassurance she wanted. We landed at Suvarnabhumi airport three days later. Unbeknown to us at the time, Bao Shen’s arsonist was on the same plane.

  Tony

  To an outsider it might have appeared like a typical business meeting. Bao Shen sat timidly and kept quiet as Uncle Zheng took charge of the discussions. I liked the old man; he had style and spoke with a British accent. He stood up and leaned on his walking stick as he introduced his companion, a Chinese woman named Jennifer. She looked classy and charming, but I soon learned she had an arrogant attitude.

  “What have you guys been smoking?” she asked. “What good is all this intel if you can’t interpret it?” Her tablet was connected to a smart TV and she opened the files stolen from Hubert. I’d already scrutinized these files several times over the past few weeks. “This is an email Hubert wrote three weeks ago,” she said. “You found it on Donald’s smartphone. The message is of no importance, but look at it. It contains a date and time-stamp so we know exactly when Hubert wrote it.” She opened another folder. “Now look at the files from Hubert’s smartphone. The voice recording spyware was activated the same evening this email was written. We know from the spyware settings that the recording started at 7:13 pm that evening. Now we can run a timer until the moment that Hubert began writing the email sent to Donald.”

  She tapped a button on the tablet screen and I could hear the sound of someone typing on a keyboard. Every keystroke was highlighted on the TV screen over the text of the email. We sat in silence and watched as each keystroke we heard moved a coloured cursor across the text. None of us understood what she was getting at until she removed all the characters from the text except for the “A” key.

  “Listen how the ‘A’ key sounds,” she said. “We’ve finally got it – each key has its own sound like on a piano.” She opened another audio file of Hubert typing away at his keyboard. “We don’t have any corresponding text for this, but have a look at this!” She opened a programme that was able to reconstruct the text solely from the unique sounds that each keystroke produced. “Using this technique I’ve already found Hubert’s account number and password for his Hong Kong bank account. We can get the one-time SMS password from the installed spyware in his smartphone, and then we can easily empty his bank account. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Hubert has transferred most of his funds to a crypto exchange and bought bitcoin, which he always send
s to a crypto wallet on his computer. I know this because he visits a blockchain explorer page on his smartphone to check his bitcoin transactions. I found the wallet address in his logs, and it currently holds a little over sixty million dollars in bitcoin.” We all gasped. “Hubert probably didn’t steal sixty million dollars,” Jennifer continued. “The price of bitcoin went up twentyfold in the last few months.”

  “How can we be certain that these bitcoins are stored in only one wallet on his computer?” asked Bao Shen. “I have some stored in different online wallets.”

  “I doubt whether a criminal would store bitcoin in an online wallet with an exchange that the FBI or another government agency could get a court order for,” Jennifer replied. “Besides, each time he buys bitcoin on an exchange I can hear him typing the same password, probably to check the updated balance of his wallet.”

  “All right,” Bao Shen conceded. “We have the password to unlock his computer and bitcoin wallet, so we just need to break into his apartment and access his computer.”

  “How can we do that?” I asked. “The building’s security is very tight. Visitors need to report to the front desk and are only allowed access after confirmation through a call with the resident who invited them. Even if I clear the visit, the front desk will register the visit to my name. Plus there are cameras in the lifts and landings on every floor. I doubt that even a professional burglar could gain access unnoticed.”