by Jake Needham
Naturally the connection between the source of the transfers I had uncovered and my friend Archie’s colorful Aussie accent struck me as something less than pure coincidence. By that time it was pretty obvious to me that Archie wasn’t actually employed by HSBC at all. To tell the truth, I had no doubt at all that Archie really worked for ASIS, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, but following accepted etiquette in such matters I pretended not to know. And for his part, Archie pretended not to know that I knew.
Archie had called me a few times after that with some general questions about corporate finance which happily I had been able to answer for him. He always ended our conversations by saying that he owed me one. This seemed to me as good a time as any to collect on the accumulated debt.
I had a couple of other Hong Kong numbers in my diary for Archie, too, so I called those for good measure. One was a mobile that didn’t even ring and had apparently been abandoned, but at the other number a woman’s voice answered with a simple, “Yes?” I smiled at her Australian accent, obvious even from that single word, and told her I was calling for Archie. Before she could protest her ignorance that any such person existed, I gave her my name, said I was at the Mandarin, and asked for Archie to call me there. Naturally, she said she didn’t know what I was talking about. I thanked her and hung up.
One of the numbers must have worked, maybe all of them, because about twenty minutes later the telephone in my room rang.
“You got your cell phone with you?” Archie spoke without preamble.
“I do.”
Before I even had a chance to give him the number he hung up. It was only a few seconds before it rang.
“Hello.”
“Good on ya, mate. She’ll be right now.“
“I won’t even bother to ask you how you got this number, Archie.”
“Shit, mate. I wouldn’t fucking tell you anyway.”
“So…” I hesitated a moment. “What’s new?”
Archie started laughing so hard I thought he might hurt himself.
“What’s new? Jack Shepherd, you are without a doubt the only bloke I’ve ever known who would have the nerve to ring me up and ask, ‘What’s new?’ You Yank ratbags are too much. You really are.”
“Just being friendly.”
“Well, mate, I’m as busy as a one-legged bloke in an arse-kicking contest, so let’s have it. What’s on your mind?”
“It’s all probably just a lot of nothing, Archie, but I need to collect on one of those favors you owe me. Something a little strange has come up and I thought you might be able to give me some background.”
“Reckon I probably can if I want to. What’s the subject?”
“The Asian Bank of Commerce. You ever heard of it?”
There was a short silence.
“Bloody oath,” Archie sighed after a few moments. “What are you doing mixed up with those bodgie mongrels?”
“Well, it’s a little hard to explain, but—”
“Never mind. Can you meet me right now?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Sure. Where are you?”
“Don’t worry about that. Just pay attention, Jacko. Do exactly what I tell you to do.”
I paid attention, then following Archie’s instructions I took the lift downstairs and left the Mandarin by the front entrance. Climbing a short flight of stairs just on the other side of the hotel’s service drive, I joined the rivers of pedestrians flowing through the networks of overhead walkways that knitted Hong Kong together and walked to the Star Ferry terminal.
The Star Ferry had been running back and forth across Victoria Harbour for over a century. The little green-and-white double-decked vessels crossed the harbor from the wharf on Hong Kong Island, docked at Tsim Sha Tsui at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula and then traveled back again, moving almost continuously over the same ten-minute route all day and through a good part of the night.
When each ferry bumped with practiced ease into its berth, a Chinese sailor in a blue uniform swung open an iron gate to allow boarding passengers to stream on even as disembarking passengers were still being funneled off in the opposite direction. After the ferry was filled—and it happened very quickly, like everything else in Hong Kong—a loud bell rang, a large traffic signal hanging over the gate snapped first to yellow and then to red, and a sailor-suited man pushed the iron gate firmly shut, stemming if only for a moment the relentlessly advancing crowds. Of course, there were always a last few stubborn stragglers determined to slip around the gate’s closing edge and leap across to the deck of the ferry as the gangway was being hauled away, all that in spite of the fact that another green-and-white ferry would be slipping into the wharf almost as soon as the first one was clear and the whole process would begin again after only the slightest interruption. This was Hong Kong after all. Wasted time was wasted money.
At a few minutes after five I was standing in front of the Star Ferry terminal waiting for Archie. I glanced at my watch and contemplated my immediate future. The traffic to the airport would be horrible. If I was going to make my flight to Bangkok, I probably had a half-hour at the very most to talk to Archie, get back to the hotel, grab my bag, and check out.
That looked pretty unlikely right then, and I knew that this unscheduled excursion would almost certainly cause me to be stuck in Hong Kong for another night. Anita was going to be less than thrilled about that. Actually, I was less than thrilled about that, too. Things had been a little strained with Anita ever since my Sunday night rendezvous with Barry Gale so I was eager to get home. And yet, here I was standing in front of the Star Ferry waiting for Archie Ward. I began to polish the story I would be telling Anita a little later on the telephone.
The walkways of the ferry building were jammed with commuters on their way to Kowloon and the crowds shouldered past me as I shifted my weight from foot to foot. Finally I saw Archie coming from the direction of the Post Office building. He was easing through the throng in such a practiced way that there was hardly a ripple around him and for a moment I envied the evident deftness he had developed for living in a city as combative as Hong Kong.
Archie grinned as he eased up next to me and gave my shoulder a warm squeeze.
“G’day, mate. How you keeping?”
“I’m good, Archie.”
“Still teaching in Bangkok?”
“Yeah, still teaching. You still with…” I wasn’t sure exactly how to put it, so I said the first thing that popped into my head, “the bank?”
Archie chuckled. “Nah. I’ve changed jobs.”
He produced a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and held them out to me. When I shook my head, he extracted one with his lips, lit it using a red Bic, and exhaled in a long, steady stream.
“Got no perks anymore, Jacko. No more promotions, no insurance, no pension. Just me, my shoeshine, and my smile.”
“When did that happen?”
“A few months ago.”
“Your idea?”
“Too bloody right. I’d been watching all those little ratbags who used to be Mossad or Shin Bet quit and then use their contacts to make heaps in the arms or drug business. Big fucking bickies they were scoring, mate. And there was me without a brass razoo to me name.”
The idea that my friend Archie had coolly set himself up in the business of dealing guns or smuggling drugs startled me, and my face must have shown it.
“No, Jacko, that shit’s not for me. But now a lot of your other blokes, they don’t give a flying fuck. That mob’s cunning as dunny rats and they make a few quid, I’ll tell you. Only problem is that most of them aren’t around long enough to spend any of it.”
“So what are you doing, Archie?”
He pulled at his cigarette, acting like he was thinking, maybe wondering if he ought to be saying what he was saying, but I knew better. Archie Ward liked to play the cheery little Aussie larrikin who didn’t really care about anything other than sinking a few tinnies with his mates down at the pub, but I seriously
doubted he had ever uttered a word in his life that hadn’t been carefully weighed in advance. Whatever he was about to tell me, Archie thought there might be something in it somewhere for him.
“I’m completely independent now, Jacko. Everybody knows that I’ve got the good oil on just about everybody. Now I sell what I know to whoever offers me the best price. Sometimes it gets a little shonky, I got to admit but, bloody hell, the rest of the time it pays off like a busted pokie machine.”
Archie paused and shifted his eyes around, sizing up the crowd. Finally, he looked back at me and pointed to the ferry entrance.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Hanging around out here we stick out like a dog’s balls.”
EIGHTEEN
I FOLLOWED ARCHIE as he dropped some coins in a turnstile and we joined the river of humanity moving up the stairs and then down a ramp toward the ferry. Archie was in the lead, but when a loud bell started clattering and the green light flashed to yellow, the black iron gate at the bottom of the ramp began to close. The crowd surged forward and I lost sight of him.
When the light snapped to red, a few people started to run as well as they could in the tight quarters. Bouncing on my toes to see over the crowd, I could tell that the gate was closing so I edged past an old woman carrying a stack of white food boxes from which drifted some pungent although unidentifiable smell, bounced off a very large and red-faced German tourist and, in the clear for a split second, took two fast side steps, twisted to my left and lunged through the last crack of open space as the gate clanged shut behind me. I trotted down the ramp and crossed the gangway just as the sailor began to haul on the rope that hoisted it away from the dock.
Archie was leaning on the rail, waiting for me, a half-smile on his face.
“Still pretty good moves, leastwise for an old guy,” he said as I pushed in next to him.
“Is this all really necessary?” I asked.
“What?”
“The ferry ride. Where are we going?”
“Nowhere. We’re just mucking around.”
“Couldn’t I have just come to an office somewhere?”
“Nope.”
I wasn’t really as annoyed as I sounded. Riding the Star Ferry had always been one of my favorite things to do in Hong Kong anyway. The ferry’s engines throbbed and white water churned as we pushed away from the wharf with a slight shudder and began moving out into the harbor.
“Friend of yours?” Archie asked.
“Who?”
“Over there, at the gate.”
Archie gestured vaguely past me in the general direction of the wharf. The crowd had drifted back to wait for the next ferry, but there was a tall man who was still standing right up against the gate as if he was watching the ferry leave with considerable regret. He was wearing a dark raincoat and looked to be Chinese.
I shook my head. “No. Don’t know him.”
“Didn’t think you would.”
Archie and I watched the man until the next ferry sliding into the berth blocked our view.
“Are you saying this guy is following me, Archie?”
“Maybe. He was watching us before we got on. Maybe that was just a coincidence; maybe not.”
Before I could ask him what that was supposed to mean, Archie walked up to the glass-enclosed cabin that walled off the fifty or so seats at the front of the ferry. Instead of sitting, Archie stood right in the bow, turned his back to the stunning panorama of Victoria Harbour and looking over the crowd on the ferry. I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I stood next to him and watched the next ferry maneuvering into position at the wharf even while we were still pulling away. My eyes sought out and eventually found the man in the dark raincoat again. He was still standing at the gate, both hands hooked through the bars, and he was still looking unhappy. Surely Archie’s imagination was on overtime, I told myself.
“Look, Archie—”
He waved me into silence. “Let’s give it a minute, huh, mate?”
I leaned back and folded my arms, waiting for Archie to decide he was ready to talk.
“Okay,” he said after we were clear of the wharf and no one had taken any of the seats near us, “I’m listening, Jacko.”
Archie tilted his head toward me while he continued scanning the crowd. I told him most of what I knew about the Asian Bank of Commerce, but I adjusted the story on the fly so that I could talk around the resurrection of Barry Gale rather than bring that up right away. Archie remained expressionless throughout my tale, but the moment I stopped talking, he grinned at me.
“What is it you’re not telling me?”
I sighed. “I thought I was better than that.”
“You’re pretty good. But it’s still London to a brick you wouldn’t tell me the whole thing the first time.”
“Well, it seems better to me if I—”
“Just lay out what you know, Jacko. Give me everything and I’ll let you have a mate’s rate on some good advice.”
I trusted Archie and I really didn’t have anything to lose, so I started again. I told Archie the story one more time and this time I included the part about the second coming of Barry Gale. By the time I had finished, the ferry was bumping against the pier in Kowloon and the passengers were beginning to move toward the gangway. I started to join them, but Archie just shook his head and offered a little downward flutter of his right hand in a gesture that obviously meant we were going to continue our voyage.
“Are we just going ride back and forth on this damned thing all day?” I asked.
Archie gave no sign that he had heard me and stood silently as the ferry filled once again with passengers and shoved off to begin its trip back across the harbor. I looked at the ferry that was approaching the spot on the wharf we had just vacated and wondered if the man in the dark raincoat was vainly trailing in our wake or if he was still somewhere back on the Central side waiting for us.
It wasn’t until we had wallowed out into the harbor again that Archie finally spoke.
“Are you certain this man you met was really Gale?”
“No doubt at all.”
“Well Christ, mate.”
The ferry slid into a trough left by a passing ship and floundered up the other side, forcing us to shift our balance and lean into the roll of the deck.
“And he said he’d taken over the Asian Bank of Commerce using Russian mob money?”
“He did.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I can’t imagine why anyone would lie about a thing like that.”
“Yeah, but did you believe him?”
I tried to look as credible as possible, although I wasn’t entirely certain what constituted a look of credibility while riding a ferry back and forth across Victoria Harbour.
“He was scared to death, Archie.”
“Maybe it wasn’t Russian mobsters he was scared of.”
“Then who?”
“The way I hear it, it wasn’t the Russian mob behind the Asian Bank of Commerce. It was somebody… bigger.”
“Bigger?”
Archie hesitated. He was either going to tell me what he knew or he wasn’t and there wasn’t anything more I could say to convince him one way or the other.
“Russian mobsters make for sexy stories,” he went on after a while, “but the truth is that most of them are just jackasses. When it comes to these huge international conspiracies they always get blamed for, well… they’d be well and truly buggered, Jacko. Reckon they’d have Buckley’s chance of making any of them work.”
I kept my mouth shut and just listened.
Archie looked at me for a long time, then he cleared his throat. “It was Chinese money, Jacko. That’s what funded the takeover.”
“You mean the triads?” I asked.
“No, nothing like that.”
“Then what?”
Archie’s head bobbed around on his shoulders as if it had become momentarily detached.
“Military?” I asked. “Government?”
“Not officially.”
“You mean it was Chinese intelligence.”
Archie nodded.
“The ABC was where they stashed the bribe money?” I asked.
“Yeah, something like that.”
I thought back to my midnight walk and talk in Bangkok with Barry Gale.
“If that’s true, Archie, Barry Gale doesn’t know it.”
“So what?”
“But Barry Gale was running the ABC. If he didn’t know it, how could it be true?”
Archie rolled his eyes and looked away.
“I think you’ve been in Asia too long for your own good, partner,” I said. “Everything that happens out here looks like some huge conspiracy to you.”
“Everything that happens out here is some huge conspiracy, Jacko.”
The wharf in Central was coming up fast. I looked over what I could see of the walkways around it, but there was no sign of our friend in the dark coat. Archie’s imagination had apparently gotten out of hand there. Maybe his tale of Chinese money being behind the ABC fell into the same category.
“Who was this bribe money supposed to belong to?”
“The usual suspects. A bunch of generals, a couple of ministers. It even went as high as the Politburo, I hear.”
“Who was paying? And what for?”
Archie didn’t seem to notice I had asked him anything. He pulled out his pack of Marlboros, then changed his mind and pushed them back into his shirt pocket.
The ferry’s engines churned into reverse as the pilot edged toward to the wharf. A sailor stood by the gangway with the rope to lower it wrapped around both hands and a few people in the crowd rose and began to shuffle toward the exit.
“This is the end of the trip, Jacko.” Archie’s voice was flat. “That’s all I’m saying. We’re square now.”
“Just one more thing, Archie.”
He shifted his eyes to mine.
“Did these Chinese generals and politicians get their money before the ABC collapsed?”
The ferry bumped the pilings and we stumbled slightly. Almost immediately I heard the sound of winches squealing followed by the crash of the metal gangway as it hit the concrete pier. The crowd surged forward and Archie turned away and began moving along everyone else, but I stuck to him as if we were handcuffed together. When he finally spoke his voice was so low I could barely pick out the words through the rumble of shuffling feet and the bursts of Cantonese crashing around us like mortar shells.