***
They arrived at the Washington just minutes after a team of detectives from the Narcotics Bureau. A SWAT team waited outside as back up. A fifty-year-old transvestite was exposing his silicone implants to a SWAT sergeant who was doing his best to ignore him. The rest of the crazies and winos who usually staked out their morning territory outside the Washington had disappeared.
“Let's do it,” Mayhew said.
The foyer of the Washington was cramped, drab and filthy, with peeling linoleum on the floor. It reeked of mothballs and rising damp. There was a single elevator beside the stairs.
The staff, all Chinese, were in uproar. A Lieutenant from Narcotics, still gripping a search and seizure warrant in his right fist, was trying to make himself heard. Uniformed police hovered around him, ready to intervene.
Mayhew nodded to the Lieutenant. “How's it going?”
“If I can get this guy out of my face, I'll be fine.” The Lieutenant was a big man, a college basketball player, and the top of the manager's head barely reached his shoulder. But the little Cantonese was not intimidated. “Hey, don't poke,” the Lieutenant said, brushing aside the other man's hand aside.
Another detective emerged from a corridor at the back of the foyer. He nodded to the lieutenant. “In the basement,” he said. “In the safe. More than fifty units, I guess.”
The Lieutenant grinned and pointed at the little Chinese. “Arrest this mother's ass,” he said to one of the uniforms.
The little Chinese was still shouting. The Lieutenant shook his head. “Wish I knew what the fuck he was saying.”
Keelan had picked up a few useful expressions during his six months in Hong Kong. “He called you a Mountain of Dung,” Keelan said.
The lieutenant looked at Keelan, startled, then back at the Chinese manager. “Well, I think you're a bag of shit, too, brother,” he shouted, and followed his detective down to the basement to inspect the haul.
Shekhou, China
Tourists were often disappointed when they crossed the border at Lo Wu into China. Some thought they had boarded the wrong train and were back in Kowloon. The countless duck farms of the New Territories gave way to blocks of high rises and another, drabber, Hong Kong rose from the dragon hills.
Shenzhen was politically, if not economically, a part of China, one of the flagship cities of the Special Economic Zone, the People's flirtation with capitalism. The real border to communist China was fifteen kilometers to the north, on other side of the mountains.
The SEZ was not, as some said, completely lawless; money ruled. It was Hong Kong without the sophistication, the prosperity, or the restraint. The triads had found a warm bed to lie there, a place to flourish beyond the reach of Hong Kong's ex-pat policemen or the stern-faced mandarins of Beijing. It was a nightmare vision of the future for those who planned to remain in Hong Kong after '97, and a spur for those who plan to leave.
Across Shenzhen Bay was Shekhou City, a sprawl of electronics factories and their dormitories. Labor costs were low and there was a maximum tax rate of fifteen per cent so many Hong Kong manufacturers had invested there, exporting their products through Hong Kong to the United States.
One of these far-sighted investors was Vincent Tse. Eddie Lau's syndicate now owned three factories in Shekhou City alone.
***
Eddie was shown into Vincent's office by the manager. One of the staff brought them a pot of jasmine tea, and then bowed out of the door, closing it gently behind him.
Eddie sprawled in a chair on the other side of Vincent's desk. He looked at the trays of paperwork, the abacus and electronic calculator and computer terminals, and wondered how Vincent did not go mad with it all. “How is business?” he said.
“Business is okay. We are making almost as much here as we are with our pin un - our illegal businesses - in Hong Kong, and for much less risk.”
“So why do you look so serious?”
“Because we still do not have enough cash. Our little adventure in Thailand cost us over one million US. The short term loans we raised are now due, and we have another shipment from Louis Huu to pay for.”
“Perhaps I can help you balance your books,” Eddie said.
“More white powder?”
He shook his head. “Going to hit the biggest gold shop in Wanchai. It is all arranged.”
Vincent did not try to hide his dismay. “Do not need to do this no more. Soon we can make enough to be legitimate. This is just a little cash flow problem, Eddie. Let me take care of it.”
“Do not want to be legitimate. Do not care about all these numbers in a book! Want respect, Ah Lam! ' He slammed his fist on the desk top.
The tea spilled. Vincent fussed over it, mopping up his papers with a silk handkerchief. They had had this argument before. Why was Eddie so afraid to be rich? “Why, Eddie-ah? Let someone else take the risk.”
“You don't use a muscle, gets soft and flabby. Do not plan to get soft and flabby. Like Gordon Wu. Like the Ox.”
Vincent walked around the desk, put a hand on Eddie's shoulder. “Love you too much, Eddie-ah,” he whispered. “If you die, would rather they break all my bones, one by one. It will not hurt so much.”
Eddie pushed his hand away.
“If not for Ruby Wen, you do not have to do this. She costs us one million to Louis Huu! How does she show her gratitude? She cheat us another forty thousand from our profit! How long you let her do this to us, Eddie-ah?”
“Very tired of you talking about Ruby Wen all the time.”
“Very tired of her taking all our money.”
“Ruby Wen is my problem.”
“When will you make this problem go away?”
Eddie got to his feet and went to the door. “You look after all this ... paper. I look after business.”
Vincent picked up a calculator from the desk and threw it at the wall, narrowly missing Eddie's head. “That is all I am to you! Numbers in a book.”
Eddie did not flinch. “You do not understand about Ruby-ah,” Eddie said, evenly. “I take care of her my own way.”
He went out, closing the door behind him.
Chapter 77
San Francisco
THE office of the United States Assistant District Attorney was on the sixteenth floor of the Federal Building. It was a large office, crammed with government issue furniture and somber grey metal filing cabinets. It looked out over Golden Gate Avenue and a rundown commercial building just across the street.
The assistant DA was a stocky Bostonian and former Notre Dame quarterback by the name of Dave Browne. The top of his desk had been cleared of its usual clutter, leaving just the blotter, a jade pen stand, and a framed color photograph of his wife and children. The wall behind him was covered with framed citations and photographs of Browne with his political masters from across the spectrum.
There were two brown manila files side by side on the green blotter.
Keelan and Mayhew had not expected anyone else to be at the meeting but when they arrived there was another man lounging in a chair on the other side of Browne's desk. He looked to be in his early seventies. He had grey, short-cropped hair, and was wearing a blue Lacoste sports shirt and fawn slacks. He had the sort of tan you only acquired from spending a lot of time under a sun lamp.
“John, Bill, this is Gerry Gates,” Browne said.
Gates rose and shook their hands. “Pleased to know you.” He looked like anyone's pleasant golf-playing grandfather from Fort Lauderdale, Keelan thought. Except for the eyes.
“Gerry's just down from Langley in Virginia,” Browne said, immediately defining the parameters of their discussion.
“Right.”
Browne organized coffees and reviewed the files on the desk in front of him while the two DEA agents toyed with their cups. Gates made no attempt at polite conversation and Keelan felt a tension building in the room. He wondered what interest the CIA could have in this particular case.
Browne leaned back in his leather executive chair, his
hands behind his head. “I don't know,” he said.
“You don't know what, Dave?” Mayhew said, a note of irritation in his voice.
“Let's see what we got here. First of all, our Mister Bertolli.” He picked up one of the files. It was two inches thick. “So far you have what we call a No Dope Historical. You are going to ask a court for a conviction on the basis of an unreliable witness, and you have no powder on the table to impress a jury of twelve good men and true. I cannot recommend a prosecution on this basis.”
Keelan felt as if he'd been punched in the stomach. “Our informant can detail conspiracy to import narcotics into this country going back five years.”
“Oh yeah, ROSE,” Browne said, using the codename the agency had designated for Ruby.
“She's willing to testify in front of a Grand Jury,” Keelan said. Well, maybe. He thought he had managed to change her mind about going back to Hong Kong but who knew?
Browne did not look impressed. “I see from her file that she escaped from Thailand while on bail facing a charge of possession of seven kilograms of heroin. At the time she was not registered as a confidential informant of your agency. A good defense attorney would have a field day here.” He chewed his bottom lip. “You do still have ROSE?”
Keelan took a deep breath. “ROSE has refused protective custody.”
Browne closed the file. “Unless you have some powder on the table or some transcripts for me, forget it. Sorry.”
Keelan closed his eyes. No, he can't get away from me again.
Browne pulled the second file towards him. “Mister Huu. We got a few hundred hours of taped phone conversations acquired by your Bangkok office, all conducted in chiu chao dialect. Even with the aid of your transcripts there is a heavy preponderance of slang and code words, so you would have to submit to a judge for a local agent to make an interpretation of what is being said. There is a precedent for this, in the Howard Marks case, but it could be challenged by a good defense attorney. The real problem here is that the host country's narcotics bureau appears to have lost the masters of the tapes, so the cassette copies we possess could be challenged and ruled inadmissible.”
“Now the good news?” Mayhew said.
“I've not finished with the bad news yet. Mister Louis Huu is a national of a foreign and friendly country and without these tapes we cannot prove he has conspired against the laws of the United States of America.” Browne leaned forward. “I see from your report that you have had a twenty four hour surveillance on Mister Huu since his arrival in the city and this has yielded some results.”
“He's been staying at a house in Daly City,” Mayhew said. “The house was purchased two and a half years ago, in the name of ...” Mayhew consulted his file, ' ...Michael Chin kok-yen. Yesterday one of my men followed a black Mercedes 500 SEL, registered in that name, to a hotel in the Tenderloin called the Washington. This hotel is registered to another Chinese, Alan Ho peng-fei. Our CI has informed us that Michael Chin is Louis Huu's son-in-law, and Alan Ho is his cousin. This led us to suspect that the premises were being used as a warehouse for Huu's narcotic shipments. '
“You executed a search and seizure warrant?”
“We confiscated forty kilos of Double U-O Globe heroin, ninety eight per cent pure, worth seven hundred million dollars on the street. We have questioned several CAAC crews who were staying at the hotel and four of them have admitted bringing parcels into the country hidden in their luggage. These parcels are either delivered to them in Hong Kong or inside China itself. We suspect, but cannot prove, that the heroin is being refined inside Kachin Burma or Yunnan and smuggled across China, along the old silk routes, with the collusion of the People's Liberation Army. We maintain that this trade is organized and financed by the Huu family.”
Gates spoke for the first time. “Mister Huu and his family have not been detained?”
“Not yet.”
Browne cleared his throat. “I was discussing this case with Mister Gates, just before you got here, and it seems we have a problem. He has told me that even with solid evidence against this man it may not be possible to prosecute our case.”
Mayhew shook his head. “Excuse me?”
Keelan stared at Gates. “What’s the problem? This son of a bitch is a major drug dealer.”
Gates put his hands behind his head. “This is a confidential discussion?”
“Of course,” Browne said.
“I understand you both have distinguished service records with the DEA so I know that this must cause you a great deal of consternation. But, you see, there is a bigger picture here.”
“A bigger picture?” Keelan said.
“I admit I am shocked by your revelations, as I happen to know this Mister Huu personally.”
“Personally?” Mayhew said.
“Let me draw a parallel for you. You people use so-called Confidential Informants who are often, let's say, not exactly upright citizens? The Agency works the same way. We have to swim in muddy waters and some of the foreign nationals in our employ are not the sort of people you or I might choose to have for dinner.” When Keelan and Mayhew did not respond, he said: “I take it you both know your history?”
“Which history?” Keelan said.
“You remember the Sicily Landings?”
“Not personally. My father would remember. He was in them.”
“Well, perhaps he - and by logical extension, you - would not be here now if it were not for a fellow called Charles Luciano. Commonly known as Lucky. He was serving a long prison term at the time but because of his connections in Sicily that assault went far smoother than planned, saved considerable loss of life. But as everyone knows, Luciano was also a pimp, a racketeer and a drug smuggler. Sometimes the lines between what is right and what is wrong become a little ... blurred. Such is the case with Mister Huu.”
“He's going to help you invade Sicily?” Keelan said.
“Mister Huu has some well-established contacts inside China, especially with certain gentlemen in the military. Highly placed personnel in the PLA make extraordinary profits by transporting Mister Huu's goods across Yunnan and into Canton province and the SEZ. However, that is not the only way they enrich themselves.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we obtain a great deal of very important intelligence along this same pipeline. Mister Huu uses these same contacts inside China to buy military and political information. In a sense, the narcotics and the intelligence are smuggled out together.”
“Louis Huu buys your protection.”
“That's not the way I would put it.”
“How would you put it?”
“We have to weigh our country's security against an internal social problem. The intelligence that has been coming our way through this pipeline is too important to be compromised. I'm sorry, gentlemen, but you are required to leave him alone.”
“We let him carry on flooding our country with heroin?”
“I understand you have arrested the hotel manager at the Washington and that several Chinese air crew have admitted to importing restricted substances. I would expect you to prosecute these cases to the fullest extent of the law. But that’s all.”
Keelan looked at Mayhew, then back at Gates. “Well, you guys appear to have this all worked out.”
Browne looked stricken. “I don't like this any more than you do. But we're all grownups here and this isn't Camelot.”
“Not even close.”
“I'm sorry, John,” Browne said. “I know how hard you worked on this one.”
“Shove it up your ass,” Keelan said, and walked out.
***
Mayhew and Keelan drove to the Mandarin Oriental. Two of Mayhew's men had been posted in the lobby. They assured them that Ruby Wen had not tried to check out of her room, had not even appeared in the lobby since the previous evening.
The two men took the elevator to her room, and knocked on the door. There was no reply. Finally Keelan went downstairs to find the servic
e manager, who opened the door with a master key. Her cases stood side by side in the middle of the room, but Ruby Wen was not there.
As they were later to discover, the previous afternoon Ruby had left the hotel through a service door and taken a taxi to the airport. She paid cash for a China Airlines flight to Hong Kong using the forged Malaysian passport that Eddie Lau had provided for her.
Keelan went back to his room at the Holiday Inn with Mayhew and the two men got very drunk. They had lost Louis Huu. Now, without Ruby Wen, Frank Bertolli was off the hook as well.
Chapter 78
Mirs Bay
The speedboat had six two hundred and seventy five horsepower Mercuries mounted on the stern, a bullet-proof glass windshield, armor-reinforced bows for ramming and a mounted Browning fifty caliber machine gun. It could travel at speeds over eighty miles per hour and was faster than anything the British Navy or the Hong Kong Marine Police had at their disposal.
Eddie Lau studied his three recruits; Benny Cheong, barely out of his teens, a blue lantern from Shekhou City; Paul Tam, who was even younger than Benny, a good-looking boy with the tattoo of a snake coiled around his left wrist; and Tang kam-chuen, ‘Democracy Tang’, almost as old as Eddie himself, a former PLA corporal who boasted that he had killed five students with a sidearm at Tiananmen. Hence his nickname.
The journey from Mirs Bay to the deserted beach at Ko Tong Hao took just fifteen minutes. There were half a dozen men waiting beside a truck on the dirt road above the beach. They splashed into the shallows with large cardboard boxes balanced on their shoulders, and started loading them into the boat. The packaging identified the contents as new Hitachi fifty four centimeter television sets. Each one would fetch a hundred dollars profit inside China and the speedboat could accommodate two hundred boxes. Within half an hour the boat would be heading back up the channel for the run across Mirs Bay and back to the SEZ.
Eddie led his three mah-jai's off the beach. A Mercedes was waiting for them behind the truck. They climbed in and set off through the New Territories for the city. On the way they checked their weapons. They had brought with them four Chinese-made pistols, a dozen clips of seven-point-six-two ammunition, with twenty-five rounds in each, and an ex-PLA hand grenade.
Chasing the Dragon: a story of love, redemption and the Chinese triads (Opium Book 2) Page 31