Laundry Man js-1

by Jake Needham

  “You know how to use that?”

  “I think I can manage.”

  “It’s running a standard Windows communication package through a satellite hookup. Just put the address into the browser and you’ll be in business. Unless you’re completely full of shit, of course. Then you’ll be just plain fucked.”

  I booted up the ThinkPad, opened the browser, and typed in an address. Phony Frank and John bent into the Cherokee and watched over my shoulder.

  The host computer’s identifiers started rolling across the screen and I brought up the login box. I shifted my head just enough to block their view as I typed an access code, then quickly hit Return. When the main screen opened, I began clicking through menus.

  “What the fuck is all that shit?”

  Phony Frank’s mouth was so close to my ear that I could feel his breath when he spoke.

  I stopped typing and twisted my head toward him. “Do you want me to stop and give you a lesson on the structure of commercial banking databases, or do you want me to get you the information you’re looking for?”

  Frank didn’t bother to answer, so I turned back and resumed typing. After a few more moments a large spreadsheet opened and I pointed to the first column of numbers.

  “There it is. Those are the dates of every transfer out of the ABC that Barry Gale personally ordered and the Fed wire number for each of them.”

  Then I opened another file, this one a plain text document with three long columns.

  “This is a list of the same Fed wire numbers, but viewed from the opposite side of each transaction.”

  I moved the cursor around the screen like a pointer.

  “Here’s each wire number, and when you follow across it matches up with an amount, a receiving bank, and the account name and number in the bank where the transfer went.”

  “What’s this stuff at the bottom?” Just John asked.

  He pointed to another list of names and numbers that appeared as I scrolled down to the bottom of the file.

  “Just some notes somebody made when they were working out all the transactions. They don’t mean anything.”

  “So this is all we need to find our money?” John asked.

  “Look, I’m giving you a list of all the banks and account numbers where Barry stashed everything he transferred out of the ABC. What you do with it is up to you.”

  John still looked as if he thought something wasn’t quite right, but Phony Frank was grinning as he stepped away from the Cherokee and straightened up.

  “Well, I’ve got to hand it to you, Jack.” He spoke in a tone that I thought tried hard to hit a note of respectful admiration, but it came out sounding mostly smug. “You really did our job for us.”

  “I’ll start checking my mail for a letter of gratitude from the president,” I said. “You’ll need these files. I’ll save them to a folder on the desktop.”

  When I had finished I shut the laptop down and closed it.

  “Done,” I said, and got out of the Cherokee.

  Back across the compound, Jello was still faithfully standing guard over Barry Gale.

  “Good dog,” I said when we all trooped back, but Jello ignored me.

  “Can I load this one up now so we can get out of here?” he asked Phony Frank instead.

  “I’ll take care of him,” Phony Frank replied, bending down over Barry.

  When I thought back on it later, I was certain I hadn’t seen the gun until Frank fired.

  FIFTY ONE

  Cops sometimes call the.22 caliber Colt Woodsman the hit man special. The gun is too small to have any real stopping power and it’s useless for self-defense; but load it with hollow points and fire it point-blank into a man’s head and it’s a foolproof killing machine.

  Phony Frank had produced the little gun from somewhere and pressed it against Barry’s temple when he bent down, but the popping noises it made when he pulled the trigger were the first sign I had that something had gone badly wrong.

  “You goddamned bastard!” I screamed uselessly at him.

  Just John was ready when I lunged at Phony Frank, wrapping me in a bear hug and holding me while I futilely thrashed around.

  Jello half pulled his service revolver, but Frank quickly straightened up and laid the muzzle of the Woodsman under Jello’s chin. Jello just stood there with a puzzled expression on his face waiting for his brain to catch up with his eyes.

  “Put it on the ground, Jello.” Just John spoke in a soft and soothing voice. “Put it on the ground and then we’ll all have a nice little talk.”

  “I’m not having any talk with you bastards!” I yelled. “You murdered that man in cold blood!”

  I kicked back hard with my right heel and caught Just John squarely on his shin, but he never even flinched.

  Jello lowered his arm and slowly bent his knees, laying his service revolver flat on the ground. Phony Frank scooped it up and slid it into a pocket of his jacket.

  “I’m just doing what they told me to do, Jello,” he said.

  Phony Frank watched Jello cautiously, but Jello still seemed more puzzled than alarmed by what was happening.

  “My instructions were to locate the missing funds and then eliminate the cause. I guess it’s obvious why I couldn’t tell you that up front. I’m sorry, Jello. Really.”

  “You’re sorry?” I barked at Frank.

  “Not for him,” Phony Frank nodded toward the handcuffed corpse on the ground. “I’m sorry I had to string Jello along without telling him the whole story.”

  “But why kill Barry?” I asked. “I got your goddamned money for you.”

  “Barry Gale compromised a top-secret national security operation. Any way you slice it, Jack, you know we’re not going to leave him running around loose. You can’t imagine how much he knows.”

  “Is that why you killed Howard and Dollar, too? Because of what they knew?”

  “Every operation has losses, Jack.”

  “I know as much as they did, maybe more now. And so does Jello. You going to kill us, too?”

  Phony Frank swung the Woodsman away from Jello and took a lazy step toward me. “Well, you raise an interesting point there, Jack, a real interesting point. If it was up to me…”

  Phony Frank slowly spread his hands in a gesture that left little doubt as to what his preferred choice was.

  “But it’s not up to me. The guys who tell me what to do say you both walk away. Too many bodies in an operation, they figure, and people start snooping around. Besides, we’re sure that when you calm down and think everything through, you’ll both be safe bets.”

  “I’ll tell you what, partner, your lap dog of a local cop over there may be okay, but I’m anything but a safe bet!”

  Phony Frank was smirking now and I would have liked nothing better than to smash that look right down his throat.

  “I don’t think you’ll be any problem, Jack. You’re a player now.”

  “I’m a what?”

  “You’re a player. You’re part of one of the great secrets of history. Look at it this way. If the guys we’re backing succeed in overthrowing the Chinese government and taking over the whole country like we think they will, you’ll probably get a goddamned medal. A secret one, of course.”

  Phony Frank looked down and kicked the toe of his boot through the loose dirt. In the silence, the sound of it was like a wave breaking over stones.

  “Hell, man, even if the little Chink bastards fuck up and the whole plan turns to shit, you’ll be one of the few guys around who knows how close we came to changing the world. That’s what a player is, Jack. That’s you now.”

  Just John had loosened his grip on me and I shook him off and took several steps away.

  “I’ll go to the press and burn you.”

  “You really believe all that the-truth-shall-make-you-free crap, don’t you, Jack?” Phony Frank snorted. “You poor jerk.”

  “You might get a few reporters going for a while,” Just John said. “But no re
spectable publication will ever print a word you tell them. We’ve got that covered. Maybe you’d get your own web page with the other conspiracy nuts, but that’s about the best you can hope for.”

  “It’s all wrapped up, Jack,” Phony Frank said. “Tighter than a gnat’s asshole.”

  He smiled serenely at me. “You got no place to go. Nobody to listen to you.”

  “I’ve got a top-ranking officer in the Thai police as a witness. That’s got to count for something.”

  We all looked at Jello.

  “That true, Jello?” Just John asked. “You see anything here tonight that you might want to talk to somebody about?”

  Jello looked at the ground and said nothing. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “There you go, Jack.” Phony Frank shook his head in mock sympathy. “A good witness is hard to find these days.”

  I stood quietly and looked off across the compound. The wall was too high for me to see the ocean from where we were, but I could smell the salt in the heavy night air. Somewhere not very far away there were lovers cuddling on palm-lined beaches, fishing boats dragging home nets filled with lobsters, children playing tag on scruffy jetties, and seaside shacks filled with tourists drinking at wobbly tables. Somewhere out there, I reminded myself, normal people were still living normal lives.

  But that was beyond the wall, out in the world I had left behind. Or that had left me behind.

  “You’ve really got to face it, Jack.”

  Just John’s voice was gentle now. He sounded like a priest trying to talk somebody out of jumping off a bridge.

  “You’re on the inside now. You’re one of us.”

  All I could do was stand and shake my head. I looked back at Barry Gale’s body lying facedown in the dirt, his arms still handcuffed behind him. The little Colt had left two small, tidy holes in Barry’s left temple. Thin streams of drying blood had run down from each wound and joined together into a single, thicker stream just above Barry’s ear. It was a neat, professional job of extinguishing a man’s life.

  “I’m not one of you,” I said after a while. “I’m nothing like you.”

  FIFTY TWO

  The morning after they shot Barry Gale, I woke well before daybreak and sat out on the balcony at the Phuket Yacht Club watching the ocean turn from black to blue steel as the sky slowly lightened. I ordered a pot of coffee from room service and made a promise to myself that by the time it was all gone I would decide.

  A hard little seed of anger had formed inside me overnight. I cherished it. I nursed it. I willed it to grow.

  It grew.

  And after I finished the last of the coffee, I knew exactly what I was going to do.

  I lifted the telephone and made the call I had been mentally rehearsing on and off as I tossed restlessly through the night, struggling with dark dreams that either made no sense, or worse, did.

  It took me quite a while to reach the man I wanted to reach, but after I did and I told him enough to get his attention, he said he would leave immediately. Still, it would take him at least a full day to get to Phuket, possibly longer.

  After that I walked the beach for an hour wondering if I had done the right thing.

  When I got back to the hotel I wandered around until I found a shop and bought some T-shirts and a bathing suit. Around noon I called Anita, but I didn’t tell her much. I said that I’d had to go out of town for a couple of days and that I would explain when I got back. Surely the whole story sounded unbelievably strange to her, but I guess she must have heard something in my voice because she didn’t question me too closely. She only told me to keep safe and left it at that.

  Later in the afternoon I put on my running shoes and jogged listlessly on Nai Harn Beach for a half-hour. I was pleased and a little surprised to find that the footing was firm and I began stretching myself, pushing harder and harder until I was up to my usual pace. Almost before I realized it, I had covered several miles and with each crunch of my shoes on the hard-packed sand I became still more certain.

  Yes, you’ve done the right thing. You’ve got to try at least.

  The longer I ran the more my conviction hardened and I ran the beach that afternoon until the blood pounding in my ears was all I could hear and the ache of my legs was all I could feel.

  Then I did it all over again the next morning. And I did it once more the next afternoon.

  IT WAS MY third morning in Phuket. I finished my run and came back to my room and found him sitting quietly on the floor outside the door. We talked until early afternoon and I told him everything. Then we ordered some sandwiches and coffee from room service and I went over it all again. This time he took notes.

  When I was done he started asking long and detailed questions and I answered them all as well as I could. It was almost six that evening before we both finally fell silent.

  Tired of talking, we walked out onto the terrace and watched in silence as the sun slid toward the surface of the sea, aiming itself exactly at a gap between two tiny islands that were several miles offshore. Five or ten minutes must have passed without either of us saying another word.

  Eventually it was my visitor who broke the silence.

  “What made you so sure I didn’t know about all this already, Jack?”

  “I wasn’t sure.” I thought about it some more. “You just don’t seem to me to be a guy who would be part of this kind of thing.”

  “Too honorable?”

  “Not really. Just too smart.”

  We let our half-smiles hang in the air for a moment.

  “How long have we known each other, Jack?” the man finally asked.

  “Oh God, I don’t know. We were roommates our last year at Georgetown, so I guess that makes it… what? Twenty-odd years now?”

  The man nodded. “Yeah, about that.”

  The sun hid behind a cloud for a moment and the terrace slipped into a gray half-light.

  “When I was first appointed White House counsel, I heard from everybody I’d ever met. I had a million best friends. You were probably the only guy I’d ever known who didn’t call me.”

  “I was probably the only guy you’d ever known who didn’t want anything from you then.”

  “But you do now.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then lay it out for me, Jack. Tell me exactly what it is that you do want.”

  I put it as plainly as I could.

  “I want to be absolutely certain the president knows about this. If he does, and it’s what he wants, then there’s not a damned thing I can do about it no matter what I believe. But if he doesn’t know, he ought to, then he can do whatever he thinks he should.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  The bottom rim of the sun touched the ocean at last and we watched silently as the huge red ball slid through the horizon.

  “I can tell you right now, Jack, nothing like this came out of the White House. I don’t know who these guys are, but they’re not ours. It sounds to me like somebody at the Pentagon or CIA has gone way over the edge.”

  The man shook his head in disgust.

  “I really hate goddamned fucking cowboys like that. There are so many good people who care so much, but sometimes…”

  He trailed off with a rueful smile.

  Just as the sun’s topmost edge plopped out of sight, there was a sudden bright flare. An arc of brilliant emerald green exploded out of the ocean and expanded like a shock wave until it was swallowed up by the darkening sky.

  Damn. So there really is a green flash. How about that?

  I turned to say something about it and saw that my visitor was holding out his hand.

  “I’ve got to leave, Jack, but I can promise you one thing. I will tell the president the whole story tomorrow. You have my word on that.”

  We shook and I walked him back inside. We crossed the room through the gathering gloom.

  “Oh, hey, I almost forgot,” my visitor suddenly said.

  The ma
n picked up his briefcase from where he had left it by the door. He swung it onto the desk and snapped open the catches. Reaching inside he produced a box of cigars and handed it to me.

  “Montecristos. Cubans, no less,” I said turning the box over in my hands. “Isn’t this a breach of national security or something?”

  “Working in the White House has got to have some perks, doesn’t it?”

  We both smiled, but I suspected at different things.

  “It’s a real shame you had to give them those bank records,” the man said as he closed his briefcase. “Now that they’ve got their hands on the slush fund again, shutting down these guys will be a bitch.”

  I scratched at the back of my neck with one hand and made a show of thoughtful deliberation.

  “You have to understand that I needed to see your reaction before I gave you the last little bit of it,” I said after a pause. “I had to see if you already knew.”

  My visitor eyed me a moment, a half-smile creeping over his face, and then he leaned against the wall, waiting.

  “I have no idea where the money is,” I said. “Neither do they.”

  I paused to let that sink in.

  “And now that they’ve killed Barry Gale, they’ll never find it.”

  There was a look of puzzlement in my visitor’s nod. “But what about the bank records you gave them?” he asked.

  “The network I got them into was the university network at Chula, not the Asian Bank of Commerce. What Phony Frank got was a list of transactions I’d made up for the final exam in my international banking class. I don’t think they’ll be of much use to someone who’s trying to overthrow the Chinese government.”

  My visitor stuck his tongue into the corner of his cheek.

  “You’re shittin’ me,” he laughed.

  “I shit you not, partner.”

  The man laughed some more and clapped me on the shoulder.

  “You sure you don’t want a job at the White House, Jack? You’re just the kind of sneaky, deceitful bastard who would fit right in.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the red and yellow plumes of the setting sun coloring the sky above the Andaman Sea. They were bombarding the heavens like rockets, bursting against the clouds and sprinkling a dusting of pink and gold over the gunmetal surface of the sea.