by C. J. Shane
"Okay. I promise. I'll just tell my pals that everything is top secret. That makes you even cooler." He laughed.
"Remember Jade Lopez?"
"Of course. She's so smoking hot. All that red hair and those melons. Ay yi yi."
Letty laughed. "Don't get any ideas. She's too old for you. She's twenty-eight and you are only seventeen. And she's a married woman."
"Yeah, and her husband disappeared on her and took all that money. Right? She needs a younger man...one with no money. That could be me. I'm just saying." He grinned.
Letty sighed in mock exasperation. "So I guess that's how it is for seventeen-year old-dudes. You just think about one thing. Melons?" She raised one eyebrow.
"Pretty much," Will grinned. "Well, I think about my bike a lot, and I think about Millie, too." He stroked the dog's back.
Letty decided to give him a brief rundown about Jade's intruder and the Chinese cop named Zhou. "And tomorrow morning we're all three going down to the police station."
"Wow. That's totally weird. Mexican criminals I would expect, but Chinese?"
"Yes, I think it’s weird, too. It's not every day that a Chinese cop shows up in your friend's backyard. And he seems to think Jade is in some serious danger. I'm going to keep an eye on her until I know what's up."
“I could keep an eye on Jade, too,” Will said hopefully.
“No! You need to study.”
Letty stood and opened the back screen door. "I think the food is ready now. Let's eat supper. Come on, Millie. It's getting too cold for you out here."
After supper and clean-up, Will went to his room and spent the rest of the evening as he often did, on his laptop reading websites about long-distance racing and doing a little homework. Millie followed him, her tail wagging.
Letty did the same on her laptop, but instead of reading about carb loading for a bike race or time trials for the Tour de France as Will did, Letty looked at the Chinese government's Ministry of Public Security (not much information there), then the Interpol website. Interpol was more forthcoming, but there was nothing about Chinese triad gangs in Arizona. Then she put the words "triad gangs" into Google, and started reading. After an hour of this, her sense of dread had grown considerably.
Triads were a group of secretive criminal gangs shrouded in myth and mystery. The story was that the society had formed originally during the Qing Dynasty as a patriotic effort to resist the rule of invading Manchus from the north and to reinstate the ethnic-Han Ming dynasty. There were different stories about where the term "triad" came from. The most cited was that the 17th-century group, the Three Harmonies Society, led to the name triad. No one could say for sure. Later when Mao and the Chinese Communist Party took over China, the triads had already become heavily involved in crime. Triads fled the mainland to set up business in Hong Kong, that beautiful city on the South China Sea. Hong Kong was still their primary center of operations, although triads had spread across the world to operate in places where there were large Chinese populations. That included North American cities like Vancouver, Toronto, San Francisco and New York.
Over the centuries, the secretive triads had transformed from revolutionaries to hardened criminals similar to the Italian mafia and Japanese yakuza. Triads were involved in everything from smuggling, money laundering and prostitution to the counterfeiting of a long list of goods and money. They were deep into just about every criminal activity known to man. And eventually the triad gangs had returned to mainland China, too. They flourished there, thanks to corrupt officials at every level who took bribes and looked the other way at triad operations.
Letty learned that there were numerous triad groups with names like Sun Yee On and 14K. Each had an elaborate organizational structure with officers carrying poetic names like "Mountain Master," "Incense Master," "White Paper Fan" and "Red Pole." Their initiation ceremonies involved animal sacrifice, and members were often easy to identify because of elaborate and extensive body tattoos.
But it was their brutality that really got Letty's attention. The triad gangsters had a favorite tool. It was a rectangular hatchet – a cleaver really – that was often found in the kitchens of Chinese restaurants. If the triad gangster met with any resistance, the cleaver was a quick and easy way to remove a finger from a hand as a warning, and if that wasn't enough, removing the hand usually did the trick. Swearing to adhere to the Thirty-Six Oaths was part of a triad initiation, and woe be to anyone who took those oaths and then violated them later. That person could count on being chopped into pieces, slowly, by the triad cleaver.
By the time she crawled into bed, Letty was taking the incident at Jade’s home very seriously indeed.
Chapter 5
Before Letty left Jade’s house to go home and eat with her brother, Zhou followed her around the interior to make sure all windows and doors were locked. The house looked moderately secure although they both knew that a determined intruder would have little trouble breaking in, most likely through the back door. Zhou was going to make sure that didn't happen. Zhou knew, too, that Letty Valdez was not entirely sure about him. That pleased him. If she were wary, then she would be alert and watch everything and everybody. And Jade would be safer because of the wariness of Letty Valdez.
Zhou complied with Letty at every point. He knew she was watching him as he went through the back gate, and he heard the lock click behind him. He knew she would be listening for him to start the engine of his rental car and drive away. And so he did exactly that.
He pulled away from Jade’s house and headed to a convenience store on a nearby boulevard named "Speedway." He wondered briefly if motorists were allowed to drive faster there, but judging from the cars passing by, it did not seem that they were driving unusually fast, for Americans, that is. Drivers generally went faster here in the U.S. than in Chinese cities, maybe because there was just more room on the roads than in crowded China. Of course, neither country’s drivers could compete with the Italians. He remembered the thrill of driving on the Italian Autostrada A-4 between Torino and Milano. Thanks to a grateful Interpol associate, Zhou had been lent a Lamborghini for a couple of days. He drove it on this section of the Autostrada with a speed limit of 93 mph. Yet, it seemed that no one was paying any attention at all to the speed limit, least of all Zhou. Fast and dangerous was the Autostrada. Yes, definitely a thrill.
Zhou waited a few minutes to make sure Letty wasn’t following him. Then he left the convenience store and doubled back to a city park quite close to Jade’s house. The park was deserted, and the library was closed for the day. Before traveling to the United States, Zhou had done some research about his destination, Tucson. He found that the city’s public libraries had free wi-fi. He needed wi-fi now so he could contact his boss Yang using WeChat, the Chinese social media app.
Zhou chose the city park and library not only for the wi-fi. He had learned from his travels that Chinese people tended to speak louder to each other in normal conversation than the volume typically used by North Americans or Europeans. He had to find a place to speak at Chinese volume without attracting attention, and the alley behind Jade's house wouldn't do. A deserted park was a better choice. He checked his watch. It was almost 9 p.m. in Tucson. Beijing was fifteen hours ahead, which meant he would catch his supervisor in his office at the Ministry of Public Security in late morning unless Commissioner Yang was in a meeting. Zhou pulled his phone from his pocket and connected to Yang through WeChat.
Yang answered after a brief delay.
"Where the hell have you been?" Yang sounded even more irritated than usual.
Zhou explained briefly about following Bao from the airport to the American woman's house. He did not tell Yang that he was planning on returning to Jade's house to make sure she would be safe overnight. Yang would give him a direct order to abandon Jade and get on with his investigation. Zhou didn't want that.
Yang waited in silence, a subtle message that Zhou interpreted as Yang’s disappointment with him. He let Zhou know
by his silence that he thought by now his star investigator should have come up with something already.
"Tomorrow I'm going to report in to the local police and get some identification from them so that I don't have any problems with local law enforcement," Zhou added.
"All right, then," Yang said sharply. "Report back on a regular basis."
Yang hung up without saying goodbye.
Zhou frowned. Yang had a reputation for being rude and something of an ass, but in their recent interactions, he had been especially curt. Zhou remembered their last face-to-face meeting in Beijing two weeks earlier. It was a bone-chilling winter day in the capital, and thick smog from thousands of coal-burning heating units hung over everything. The streets were full of people, most with white paper masks over their faces in a futile attempt to protect their lungs. Yang's office was filled with cigarette smoke. A burning cigarette hung from his lips, and another waited in an ash tray. Their meeting was brief. Yang made it clear that Zhou had been chosen at the last minute for this assignment and against Yang's will.
Yang had been planning on sending another inspector, one that was a personal friend of his, whose name also was Zhou...in this case Zhou Li. Being sent to the U.S. was something of a treat for Chinese agents. After they finished their assigned tasks, most of them took a detour on the way home and enjoyed the casinos and prostitutes in Las Vegas for a few days. Yang wanted to reward his favorite inspector by assigning the case to Zhou Li. But the Deputy General Commissioner above Yang had intervened at the last minute. He handpicked the young, up-and-coming Zhou Liang Wei to go to America, find a missing girl, and stop the triad gang. Yang was annoyed as hell about being overruled by a superior, and also annoyed at being unable to give out a plum assignment that would increase his personal status among his staff. Yang made no effort to hide his irritation. Zhou was off on assignment when this decision was made, and on his return to Beijing, Yang informed him of his assignment in an American state known as Arizona.
After a brief and tense meeting in Yang's office, Zhou left to prepare for this trip. He hailed a taxi and directed the driver to take him down Chang'An Avenue past the Forbidden City, the Gate of Eternal Peace, and Tiananmen Square. Zhou often went that way before leaving China on assignment. He represented an ancient and advanced culture when he went abroad, and he wanted to remind himself to be the superior man that the Yi Jing described. He always tried to be the best man he could, but most especially when in another country. Despite all its many problems, Zhou believed that China, its people and its culture, would always endure. He wanted to always represent China well even if he often felt out of place in his own homeland.
Twenty minutes later, Zhou left the city park and cruised quietly past the front of Jade Lopez’s house to make sure Letty was gone. There were no cars on the street at all. The neighborhood was quiet. He returned to the alley behind the house and tucked the rental car against the back wall.
Zhou retrieved a windbreaker from his backpack and quickly climbed the adobe wall into Jade's backyard. He had to avoid the nopal cactus that was almost as high as the six-foot wall, but the palo verde tree made it easy to go over the wall into the backyard for the second time that day.
Despite the pool of light around the back door, most of the backyard was in shadows. He silently moved the reclining patio chair into the darkest spot he could find against a side wall under overhanging branches of an olive tree. He put on the windbreaker, zipped it up, and settled onto the reclining chair for what he expected to be a long, cold night. He was surprised at how quickly the temperature dropped once the sun set. It was December after all. Although this region called Arizona had a reputation for wonderful sunny winters that attracted tourists, he knew he would be thoroughly chilled before morning. He thought about the western desert in China...Urumqi and Kashi. It was the same there. Wild landscape, gorgeous sunsets, dry air, cold nights, stars in the sky. He looked up. Yes, a sky just like the Taklimakan Desert. Beautiful. Silent. Peaceful. So wrong to see Bao in this place.
No way was Zhou going to a hotel. He figured that there was at least a 50-percent chance that Bao would show up again. And he might not come alone this time. He was the violent arm of a triad gang that carried out the will of the boss. Zhou believed that the triad boss in this case was Ting. Bao had a well-deserved reputation for being violent. Ting was worse. Ting was the handmaiden of violence. Violence was her middle name. She breathed violence. Zhou knew that many criminals acted out of a desire to improve their financial status. He thought that some of them could be rehabilitated. In Ting's case, she was ambitious and wanted to be wealthy beyond measure. But more than that, she enjoyed hurting people. Jiang Qing. That's who Ting made Zhou think of. Mao's last wife, Jiang Qing. Leader of the Gang of Four. Jiang Qing made recordings of the cries of people being tortured by her henchmen. Then she listened to the recordings again and again for her personal pleasure.
Zhou closed his eyes. He knew he was in a difficult situation. First, he wasn't supposed to be here like this. He was a Detective Inspector in the Ministry of Public Security, People's Republic of China, not a bodyguard. He had moved up quickly through the ranks to bypass Inspector Third Grade and become an Inspector Second Grade at the young age of thirty-two. Rumors floated around the Ministry that he might be in line to become Inspector First Grade after his recent superior performance in Zambia and at Interpol headquarters in France. So here he was in this desert city in the United States with the job of investigating what no-good Ting and her gang were up to. He had told Jade the truth, or at least part of the truth. Interpol had picked up rumors that Ting's gang was opening a new smuggling route into the United States and had passed this information on to the Ministry in Beijing.
Zhou had a second assignment, one that he had not mentioned to Letty or Jade. The teenage daughter of a Hong Kong government official had gone missing. Her dad finally went to the Hong Kong police and then to the Ministry in Beijing to ask for help in finding the girl. The triad gang had approached him, he revealed, and had offered him a huge bribe if he would make sure that the men under him would not obstruct triad illegal operations. The gang wanted assurance that their counterfeit goods and smuggled people could be moved from Shenzhen down the Pearl River to Hong Kong and then shipped off to ports around the world without interference from Hong Kong inspectors. The Hong Kong official had been educated in Britain. He had developed some idealistic views about China's need for "rule of law." He made a point of committing himself to ending corruption in the People's Republic. He turned the triad gangsters down. He refused their bribe. A few days later his daughter disappeared. She had been gone a month now. Her name was Victoria. Zhou wondered if she’d been named after the landmark peak on Hong Kong Island, and Queen Victoria before that.
There was no definitive connection between the girl's disappearance and Ting's gang, and there was no firm information at all about the girl's whereabouts. And yet whispers from informants on the streets of Hong Kong led the Ministry to believe that Ting might have taken her to America. Then they got a break. One informant came close to naming a place, claiming that Ting had the official's daughter and had taken her to an American city close to the Mexican border. San Diego came to mind first, but then a crucial bit of information was added only three days earlier. A triad member definitely identified as Bao had purchased a plane ticket from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, with connecting flights to Phoenix and Tucson. The final destination was Tucson, Arizona. Zhou had to look on the map to find this city because he had never heard of it. He followed in Bao's footsteps and arranged his own flight to Tucson.
Zhou guessed that Ting and her group were probably involved in sex trafficking. Young peasant girls and women from rural Fujian Province answered an ad for a job in Hong Kong, and then found themselves in a brothel somewhere in the world servicing fifteen or twenty men a day, seven days a week, with beatings in between if they complained. Death was the penalty for attempting to escape. It usually took just one dead gi
rl in a brothel to convince the others to stay in line and behave. Zhou had already closed down one of Ting's girl trafficking rings in Australia a couple of years earlier. Ting knew who Zhou was, although the two had never met. Of course, Ting would like nothing better than to eliminate Zhou as an obstacle to her business plans. There was a chance that the Hong Kong official's daughter had been thrown in with the Fujian girls. It was an awful end for the daughter of an important Chinese official or for any young girl at all.....to disappear into the dark world of human sex trafficking...to be whored out to customers until she died from disease or exhaustion, probably before the age of thirty.
Why the triad gang had chosen Arizona and Tucson was a matter of speculation. Zhou knew that U.S. Homeland Security personnel had been much more careful in recent years about inspecting incoming cargo at the American ocean ports of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Homeland Security feared that terrorists would try to smuggle in a nuclear device. Because of this increased vigilance at the ports, smuggling people and goods by sea had become much more difficult.
Mexico's ports and beaches were easier. The beaches south of San Diego along the upper Baja Peninsula or the Sea of Cortez were not so well inspected or patrolled, and bribery was rampant. Once they had their goods in Mexico, Ting's gang would still have to make the trip across the international border from Mexico into the U.S. But that border was like a sieve, regularly breached by the drug cartels and those people-smugglers known as coyotes who charged a fee to take migrant workers north. They guided peasant workers from Mexico, and from Central American countries, too, across the Arizona desert to Phoenix where they were transported to other cities across the U.S. Often the migrant workers were forced by cartel operatives to carry drugs on their desert trek. The goal of the migrants was to find a job, and to send money home to feed the families left behind in Mexico. Too often the coyotes abandoned the migrants in the desert once the coyotes were paid. Over a twenty-year period, thousands of job-seekers had perished in the unforgiving Sonoran Desert.