by Mary Moylum
First, the filing cabinet. No doubt about it, the old man was a pack rat. Jammed in the first drawer were old letters, going back decades, from friends and “those from the old country.” The second and third drawers were filled with assorted loose papers. Some of them were receipts from various charities he had supported regularly, and others he supported sporadically; all seeking charitable donations, or sending him charitable contribution slips or thank you letters for his donations. But no red dragon.
What exactly was it? And where could it be?
She didn’t want to linger in the house longer than necessary. Pushing the bedroom door opened, she walked in.
One step forward. My God.
On the bookshelf in his bedroom sat a pair of bookends. Two red dragons. She grabbed them both. One was heavier than the other. She would examine them later. Stuffing them both in her bag, she raced down the stairs and out of the house.
Sitting at her breakfast table, she looked over the bookends carefully. The irony of the old man’s secret hiding place was not lost on her as she pried open the false bottom of the red dragon bookend. Finding a plate that moved slightly on the bottom of the heavier “red dragon” she pried it open. Inside she found two diskettes. She loaded the first diskette into her Toshiba laptop. It contained files of financial statements broken down by quarter, going back several years. As she stared at the fields and the numbers, the revelation was too fantastic to believe. She was looking at the financial records of illegal immigration operations by the Flying Dragons. The old man was either the bookkeeper or secretary. Either way, his involvement in the triad came as a shock to her.
The zeros on the balance sheet far exceeded mere millions. The money the triad was raking in was a testament to the profitability of the triad, and the exodus of people leaving their homelands. In the case of illegal migration from China, Beijing’s market reforms had cost millions of farmers and industrial workers their jobs. That was what the old man had been trying to tell her. Ironic really. China’s bid to enter the World Trade Organization would further hurt millions of people, driving them to leave the country by whatever means they could. And on this side of the world, the sweatshops were clamouring for cheap labour; one of the ugly side effects of globalization that no one talked about.
The second diskette was a breakdown of expenses. It was more damning than the first. The entries spoke of payoffs and campaign contributions to individuals. It was all here. The campaign contributions crossed political party lines. The old man and Sun had been hedging their bets. Nothing wrong with that. Legitimate companies and honest businesspeople did that all the time. No, the damning evidence was the payoffs made to corruptible border guards and customs officers for entry visas and to look the other way at immigration checkpoints.
If it hadn’t been for the subpoena, Wa Sing would still be alive today. The subpoena had been his death warrant. Sun didn’t want to take chances. The last thing he wanted was to have the old man name the names of those who had been bought off in the human smuggling racket. That would have destroyed the Flying Dragons crime empire. Too many parties would kill to suppress this information. The evidence laid out before her was what the intruder had been looking for in Wa Sing’s house.
Sweat from her palms was dampening the keyboard. There were multiple entries to a numbered account. Huge sums of money paid on a regular basis. Paid to whom? She had an idea. But first she had to prove it.
The old man had died to prevent this information from getting out. What should she do? At first, Grace wanted to shut down the machine, destroy the diskettes, and forget she had ever seen them. She turned her head and eyed the phone. Whose advice should she seek? Who could she trust? If only Nick was here.
She closed her eyes. What if she had been followed from Wa Sing’s house? She stood, and with elaborate casualness, checked the street outside. No one. She went out the front door and observed the comings and goings of her neighbours. Nothing out of the ordinary. She went back inside.
She already knew that illegal immigration was a multinational, billion-dollar business. The old man had allowed himself to act as a front for Sun and his crime gang. Damn! That’s what all of this was about. Money. Making money illegally with murder on the side.
She nodded to herself, her eyes staring into the middle distance as she thought more about it. Organized crime groups like the Flying Dragons offered a one-stop-shopping approach to smuggling. From Nick’s adversarial evidence, she knew that the Dragons not only handled travel and other documents for their migrant clientele, but also rented and bought old cargo ships, and refitted them. She also knew that criminal organizations like the Flying Dragons had corrupted government officials around the world. The whole damn mess was a Pandora’s box. Breach of trust. If any of it ever hit the press … God, she didn’t want to go there right now.
None of this would have surfaced if Walter Martin hadn’t died that night, and if the Mandarin Club’s telephone number hadn’t been found in that snakehead’s shirt pocket. Funny how chickens have a way of coming home to roost.
Knowing what she knew, what should she do? She dialled the telephone number again. In the space of a few hours, the line had been disconnected. What did it mean? Was someone onto her?
Nick was bone tired when his flight crossed the international dateline. He had taken a risk in leaving the country without seeking permission from the director general or the minister of immigration himself. Only his secretary, Rocco, Dubois, and Grace knew of his departure from the country. For all he knew, his career would be over when he returned. That was not something he would lose sleep over in light of the fact that his political masters had committed greater crimes.
Twelve and a half hours after leaving San Francisco, the plane began its descent into Vietnam.
Darkness. How he loved the darkness.
BJ rested his head on the back of the driver’s seat of the gook’s car. It was a much nicer car than the stolen piece of shit he’d been driving around. For starters, it had air conditioning.
He stared at her house. He had been watching the house for days. He knew about the burglar alarm system. All the windows were wired too. Middleclass people could be so stupid. Installing an outside door in glass. Smash the glass and get into the house. Or go through a basement window. But that would trigger the alarm. After casing the house thoroughly, he knew exactly how he would get in without triggering the alarm. The stupidity of never-ending middleclass people.
BJ oiled his gun. He was tired of the game. He had originally planned to kill her tonight but had changed his mind after he saw the boyfriend. He didn’t have an axe to grind with the boyfriend. If it was the Chinaman, it would have been a different story.
Tomorrow night it would be time to finish the job. In his head, he choreographed her death. He would let her watch as he killed her fat furball. The death of a pet drove them crazy. He’d learned that when he’d killed his neighbour’s cat back in the sixth grade.
Should he use a gun on her? No, maybe a knife. With a gun it was over in one shot. But a knife, the possibilities were endless. Pleasure surged through him as he started the car.
“Lady judge, you and me, we got a date tomorrow night. Are you good and scared?”
You should be.
chapter thirty
The plane accelerated down the runway and lifted off. Nick’s twenty-four hour layover in Vietnam had been surreal, as if it had happened to someone else. It was a mixture of the National Geographic and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Looking out of the plane window, he could still make out the pretty water lilies floating in the round ponds. As a student of history, he knew they weren’t just landscaping. They were craters, left by the U.S. bombers.
He leaned back in his seat and accepted a drink from the flight attendant. He nursed it, thinking of the citizens of Vietnam, who lived in a hand-to-mouth cycle of poverty. How to choose between begging, borrowing, and stealing? Or working in brothels? In Ho Chi Minh City, beautiful young girls co
uld be had for less than the price of a beer back home. The story of American foreign policy could still be read on the zombie-like faces of people who had survived one horrific tragedy after another.
He had tracked down Li Mann Vu’s village but no one there knew where he was. In Da Nang, he met a couple of smugglers who bragged about their routes. Phnom Penh and Bangkok were major snakehead staging grounds where officials were easily bribed into providing illegals with fake documents. One of the smugglers who had worked with Li Mann said, often times, illegals were flown to cities like Mexico or Moscow before being rerouted into the United States and Canada. What Nick really wanted was more information about the safe houses and the clearing houses for the illegals. In that regard, he got zippo.
Now, flying above the country, Nick meditated on what he had seen. What a paradox, he thought. In the West, snakeheads were vilified for smuggling hundreds of boatloads of illegal immigrants into countries. Here they were looked upon by the desperate as saviours. Goes to show, nothing is ever black and white. Even though he had never fought in the war, he could understand why the country still loomed large in the consciousness of America. He was leaving a place that had blown through him like a hot desert wind.
He closed his eyes.
Grace spent an almost sleepless night and passed the long hours of the next day at home, her mind only partly occupied by the backlog of files she was working on. By nine o’clock that evening she knew what her next move had to be. Accelerating down the Parkway, she turned music on her car radio up loud to cancel out her thoughts. By the time she parked in front of the IRC, her neck and shoulders were stiff with tension.
The security guard at the console nodded to her before returning to his fourteen-inch black and white.
Grace tried to breeze past him. “I’m in a hurry — is it okay if I don’t bother to sign in? I’ll only be here two minutes. I forgot something in my office yesterday morning.”
“Miss Wang-Weinstein, we got to do it by the book. You gotta sign it, else I could lose my job,” said the security guard.
Sighing impatiently, she entered her name and falsified her destination into the log book. At least she’d tried. At the bank of elevators, instead of hitting the up button, her finger pressed the down indicator. She was nervous. As a non-administrative person, she needed permission to go down to the bowels of the building. The knowledge that she might be challenged by a guard sent a shiver of anxiety through her body, exacerbating the tightness that had settled around her neck and shoulders. But she needed to know. She needed to check the Archives for clues about Cadeux’s duplicity. She needed exact proof of his breach of trust.
Inside the elevator, she slowly exhaled as she hit the button for Level II of the basement, where old cases were archived, going back ten years. She closed her eyes momentarily. Dear God, don’t let me get into trouble over this. Nervously, she swiped her electronic keycard through the slot. The steel door to the archives clicked open. The room was L-shaped, with a low ceiling. Its walls were lined with rows of filing cabinets that went on for about a hundred feet or so. At the other end of the room were computer workstations. In her opinion, the room was laid out wrong. The computer workstations should be reversed. After a search for records was completed, one would then cross the room to retrieve them from the filing cabinets.
She only flicked on half the lights as she moved across the room because she did not want to attract attention of security. The room was still in gloomy darkness as she sat down at one of the workstations. Turning on the computer, she typed in Cadeux’s name and the year he was appointed as head of the IRC. She needed to get a full flavour of the cases that had passed through his hands. He had assigned particular cases to specific adjudicators, and signed off on completed cases and their outcomes. She needed to see if there was a pattern, somewhere. Anywhere.
The databases showed that he had had a hand in more than eight thousand cases over a five-year period. Her task was huge. She’d have to compress years of cases into a couple of hours of search time. For the next two hours, she mined the system, doggedly pulling up statistics, cross-referencing fields, and databases.
Gradually, inevitably, it came together. It was all there. Buried under half a dozen programs and a couple of databases. Cadeux had used his deputy ministerial powers and that loopy signature of his to facilitate visas at various embassies around the world. He had allowed people with possible criminal connections to enter the country under the guise of business investors and foreign students. The microfiche confirmed his signature on the signed applications. God knows how many of those then went on to file refugee applications, or used Canada as a back door entry into the United States.
She could not help murmuring as she re-read the list several times. So much power in the hands of one unprincipled, ambitious little sneak. In the Convention Refugee Database, his fingerprints were easier to identify. He had assigned rookie lawyers on tough cases, and without supervision. In short, he had stacked the deck against the government that employed him. He didn’t always win. That would have looked suspicious. But there was no doubt he delivered what his bosses wanted.
Talk about breach of trust. Thanks to officials like Cadeux, the lucrative flow of human traffic would never slow down.
On a hunch, with several strokes at the keyboard, she went into her own case system. After typing in the names of several claimants she had turned down, she waited for the system to do a search. After a long minute, the screen changed. There it was. Several of the claimants she had turned down had somehow had their decisions reversed. So the little shit did always win, in the end. He had taken advantage of the weakness of the IRC. With a backlog of a thousand or so asylum cases, she had never given much thought to those claimants she had rejected. She and all the other adjudicators had trusted the system. Cadeux had constantly reminded them that they were not administrators. But now she saw that Cadeux sometimes directed the last few administrative links to his own doorstep. With a click of the mouse, he had power to overturn failed asylum claims. Like the fox guarding the hen house.
He had made the country’s generous immigration and refugee system even more generous. God knows how many people he had granted Convention refugee status too. Or the numbers who had obtained citizenship by fraud. Nick and his colleagues were working frantically to stem the tide of illegals pouring into the country. Walter Martin had died in that battle. But had they ever suspected that it was operatives inside their own government that had opened the floodgates?
Still unable to believe what she had just read, she hit the print button for a hard copy. She needed proof.
BJ was outfitted in dark clothing. He had followed her to the office. Nine-thirty in the evening and she was going to work? Then she’d be home late, probably alone. An ideal opportunity.
With her goon out of the way, tonight would be the night. He drove back to her house in a station wagon he had stolen from an underground parking garage. He knew exactly how to get into her house without triggering the burglar alarm system. He owed it to that fat lump of fur. From watching the cat, BJ knew that there were no motion sensors in the kitchen, and no electrical contacts at the trap door. He knew it because the last time he was here, he had tried to kill the furball, but it had gotten away from him, scooting into the house through the animal trap door.
Deliberately stomping through her flowerbed, he made his way around to the back of the house. Sure enough, the cat was sitting on top of the kitchen counter, next to the stove. At the sight of him, it stood up, arched its back and hissed. BJ smiled to himself, there would be plenty of time to kill it when he got inside the house.
Unwrapping the handsaw, he began to enlarge the cat entrance, which was nothing more than a swinging trap door built for a large cat or small dog. Forty-three minutes later, he had cut through vinyl siding, wood, insulation, and drywall. He squeezed his hundred-and-eighty-pound frame through the enlarged mess of a hole. Methodically, he checked out the house. He needed to find a g
ood hiding place and surprise her. Nothing too cramped. He might have to wait a long time for her to come home. His gaze swept the living room and dining room, then he headed upstairs towards her bedroom.
Boy, was she going to be surprised. The thought brought a cruel smile to his lips.
“Such dedication. Eleven at night. In the sub-basement of a downtown office building reading dusty files and staring at a computer screen. It would be admirable, if you had security clearance to be here at all.” Grace shot up in her seat at the sound of Cadeux’s voice behind her. “Curiosity killed the cat, Grace. What exactly are you doing?”
She struggled to speak. “I’m looking at old files.”
“I know that much. Why?”
The hard copies lay on the desk. She shifted her position to stand in front of them, blocking Cadeux’s line of vision. The ruse didn’t work. He walked towards her, pushed her aside, and picked up the documents.
His expression hardened as he flipped through the printouts. “What were you planning on doing with these? Brown bag them to the press?” His voice shook with anger. “Not a very smart idea, Grace. You disappoint me.”
“You’re the bigger disappointment,” she said defiantly. “How could you rubber-stamp thousands of phony asylum seekers into our country? How could you destroy the integrity of our immigration and refugee system? How could you?”
“Oh, don’t pretend to be so pure. In my shoes you would’ve done the same. If I hadn’t let them in somebody else would have. Why shouldn’t I be the one to get the rewards? Besides, I had no choice. I needed the money. Do you know how much I pay my ex-wife in alimony? I was royally fucked. Wa Sing was my lifeline. What was there to think about when someone offers to pick up the tab?” He met her gaze head on.