White Ghost

by Steven Gore

  Kai and Gage arrived back at her room just after the room service waiter set bowls of noodles on the table. Ferrari followed him back into the hallway and closed the door.

  Lew laid his chopsticks across the bowl and looked up.

  “What does Ah Ming think you’re doing now?” Gage asked.

  “We agreed—or at least I thought we had agreed—before I left that since I worked so closely with him, I had better stay away for a while. I wouldn’t even contact him again at least until after the heroin had been distributed.”

  “When will that be?”

  “The same day the container arrives.”

  “At Sunny Glory?”

  “Sunny Glory?” Lew’s voice rose. “You know about Chau?”

  “I know a lot of things.”

  Uncertainty crossed Lew’s face. Now he wasn’t sure exactly what Gage knew.

  “Chau has no idea what’s really going on,” Lew said. “He’s willing to believe all of this is about avoiding trade restrictions going into China and customs duties in the U.S.”

  “You mean that’s what he wanted to believe.”

  Lew shrugged. “We didn’t care what he believed. He was convenient because he has branches both in the States and in Taiwan.”

  “And he’s greedy.”

  Lew nodded.

  “Isn’t Chau in United Bamboo?”

  Lew shook his head. “But I think his partner in Taiwan is. Chau isn’t tough enough for that kind of life.”

  “Does Ah Ming deal with Chau directly?”

  “Only Ah Tien and I dealt with him. Ah Ming would terrify him.”

  “You mean he wouldn’t be able to believe what he wanted to believe.”

  “Yes, I guess you could say that.”

  “What about his customs broker, InterOcean?”

  “Only me and Ah Tien. We picked them for the same reason we picked Sunny Glory. They have branches in both San Francisco and Taiwan.”

  “These people are all Chaozhou and involved in smuggling,” Kai said. “Surely everyone must at least suspect the possibility that it’s heroin they’re moving.”

  “They have no idea the shipments coming out of China originate in Thailand. They’re chiselers at heart. They don’t think about things they don’t want to think about.”

  “What about the Thai end?” Gage asked. “Who does Ah Ming deal with?”

  Lew shook his head. “I can’t answer that. It’ll get you no closer to Ah Ming and it’ll hurt others unnecessarily. If you want to widen your net, you’ll have to cast it elsewhere.”

  Gage decided not to fight him. His more immediate need was local.

  “What about ChinaCom?”

  Lew nodded. He’d answer that question. “ChinaCom wanted some separation between themselves and the chips, so they brought in Huang Medical. If you know about ChinaCom, you must know it was a ChinaCom executive who brought the cash to pay for the chips. I’ve been thinking that he secretly owns Huang himself.”

  “And you used the money in the briefcase to pay for the heroin?”

  “Yes.”

  “What currency?”

  “Dollars. The supplier insisted on dollars.”

  “What route will the heroin follow to the States?”

  “The reverse of the one the chips followed. Through Sunny Glory in Taiwan and back onto a container. Unless there are delays, it will go out on the Hanjin Beijing to the Port of Oakland and will be trucked to Sunny Glory in San Francisco.”

  Lew smiled. Gage saw in his eyes that he was drawing back to stab Ah Ming.

  “East Wind makes pickups at Sunny Glory almost hourly. That’s Ah Ming’s secret. His heroin operation is invisible. After the heroin arrives, the trucks will collect boxes of processed garlic, like on any other day, but the ones with special numbering will contain the heroin. A dash and two ones after the product number. The drivers continue on their routes and make their deliveries. It’s for much younger men than me to know who receives the heroin, cuts it, and delivers it to the distributors. Ah Tien knew and managed everything, but he’s gone.”

  Gage looked at Kai; she shook her head. There was no reason to pressure him about who pulled the trigger that killed Ah Tien. Lew wasn’t about to confess to participation in a conspiracy to commit murder.

  KAI AND GAGE LEFT THE HOTEL for a walk along the river. Gage needed to think and needed distance and evening air. He felt his body starting to let him down, a kind of fatigue that seemed to radiate outward from his heart to his limbs.

  Within a block they came upon an outdoor food market. Flames shot up from woks resting on gas burners, and the smell of garlic, ginger, and smoking peppers infused the breeze flowing in from the Yangtze. Workers were buying dinner on their way home, and after-school children with their heavy backpacks and little uniforms were chattering as they walked hand in hand.

  It was a mundane place to make a tough decision.

  They paused and leaned against a railing and stared down at the water. Rippling streaks of light reached toward them from the shops and office buildings on the opposite bank.

  “If we let the heroin go to Sunny Glory and track it from there,” Gage said, “we’ll have a very complicated job of connecting it to Ah Ming. Chau will claim Ah Tien used Sunny Glory without Chau’s knowledge, and Ah Tien’s dead. And even if the U.S. attorney accepts our theory about what happened, Ah Ming will claim he knows nothing. He’ll say East Wind was used by disloyal employees, Lew, in particular, who’ll have appeared to have run away.”

  “What about sending Lew back to the States? Force him to testify about Ah Ming?”

  “He’d tell the prosecutor about the connection between the heroin and the chips. That would expose Zhang and his cut, and us.”

  Gage noticed an old man sitting on a bench next to a food cart. He dug snuff out of a container etched with a drawing of a eucalyptus leaf and snorted it into each nostril.

  “I know what I’ll do.” Gage straightened up, then looked over at Kai. The fatigue lifted for a moment. “I’m going to give Ah Ming a billion-dollar overdose.”

  CHAPTER 67

  Find out whether the FBI brass will allow Joe Casey to come to Shanghai to recover the chips for the United States,” Gage told Sylvia over the phone when he and Kai arrived in his room. “The Chinese will want some political mileage out of the recovery. It would help if an FBI supervisor from Silicon Valley showed up. If he’ll do it, I’ll have the PLA general who made the seizure contact him either directly or through diplomatic channels.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Zhang. General Zhang Xianzi.”

  Gage caught Burch while he was driving in to work.

  “I was hoping to hear from you,” Burch said. “Faith said the good blood test results mean the doctor is still giving you a long leash, assuming there aren’t any new holes in that aging skin of yours.”

  “Not mine, but a couple of other people weren’t so lucky.”

  “I hope that doesn’t include the people who were helping you.”

  “One got a through-and-through and—”

  “A what?”

  “A slug went in one side and out the other.”

  Burch gasped. “Damn.”

  “That’s kind of what he said, but in Fukienese.”

  “How about the chips? The insurance company has been filling up my voice mail.”

  “We’ve got them and we’re ready to move to step two.”

  “Just say the word and Zhang’s new company will jump down off the shelf.”

  “Tell the insurance company to send the reward to your trust account and book a flight for an Intel technician to arrive in Shanghai in the next couple of days. Zhang will let him examine the chips, but he won’t relinquish control until he has verification that the money is in his company account.”

  “What kind of verification will he accept?”

  “He’s a suspicious and old-fashioned guy. He’ll want actual hard-copy proof of everything. I’ll
get a secure fax number here, and we’ll have your bank fax the confirmation that the funds have been sent from your trust account to Zhang’s. We can then have his bank fax him the wire transfer receipt so he knows the money has arrived.”

  “What if he doesn’t accept that?”

  “Then he can fly to Hong Kong and go to the bank himself. But he won’t. He doesn’t want to be seen running off to Hong Kong right after a big seizure in his territory. It would look too much like somebody paid him off. You and I know that would never happen, but suspicious minds might draw other conclusions.”

  “And everything you’ve told me suggests he’s not the sort of person who’d accept a private reward for fulfilling his official duties.”

  “That’s why we can sleep at night.”

  KAI AND GAGE RETURNED TO KAI’S ROOM and sat down with Lew at the table. His noodles were untouched. An oily glaze had risen to the surface of the soup in which they sat.

  “General Zhang will take you into protective custody. You won’t be allowed to make any calls except those I direct. Understood?”

  Lew nodded.

  “That includes to your new friend, Mr. Wu.”

  “But he’s expecting to see me tomorrow.”

  “That’s been taken care of. The hotel will call Wu with your regrets. He’ll believe you’re on your way to Shanghai.”

  “I understand.”

  “You also better understand that if Ah Ming finds out what’s going on, he’ll come after you again.”

  “I understand that all too well.”

  Gage leaned forward, laying his forearms on the table and interweaving his fingers.

  “I’ll need you to do a few things in the next couple of weeks.”

  “What will I get out of it?”

  “One, you’ll stay alive, and two, you’ll get a chance to disappear.”

  “That’s not much for an old man.”

  “That’s all there is. And if I find out you’re trying to reach out to Ah Ming, you won’t even get that. You’re on thin ice already and if I could prove what you and I both know, I’d haul you back to the States and get you and Ah Ming tried for murder, so you better hope the ice doesn’t melt before I leave here.”

  Gage waited until Lew nodded, then said, “You’ll be making some calls. Kai will work out the scripts and Zhang will tell you when to make them.” Gage pointed a forefinger between Lew’s eyes. “And don’t play any games.”

  Gage grabbed Lew’s chopsticks, and jammed them into his noodles, leaving them propped up in the bowl like two incense sticks at a funeral.

  Lew’s eyes widened when he caught the meaning, and then he lowered his head. After a few moments, he looked up at Gage and said, “There will be no games.”

  CHAPTER 68

  When Kai and Gage went to check on Cobra, they found Zhang had sent a nurse to sit with him. It didn’t seem to Gage to be a Zhang-like thing to do. Gage wondered whether he had a bighearted moment after collecting his chips or whether he just wanted to make sure Cobra didn’t die at a place and time that would require an explanation he couldn’t provide without risking a bullet in the back of his head.

  Gage closed Cobra’s door, then invited Kai for a drink.

  “How are you doing?” Gage asked after they sat down in the hotel bar. “It was a big day.”

  “I’m fine now, but I was terrified when I drove up to where you were stopped. I saw Cobra lying on the pavement. I knew he was hurt.” Her eyes became moist. “I couldn’t see you at first. I thought . . .”

  “I’m sorry. I should’ve made sure you could see me.”

  Kai wiped her eyes as the waitress set down their drinks. She then looked at Gage.

  “It was a terrifying moment. Death so close to us. It made me realize that half my life is over and I don’t have a clue what I’ve been doing all these years. You don’t have that problem. You’ve never had any doubts.”

  But she was wrong. It had been doubt and the need to think about what he had been doing with his life that had taken him away from police work and into graduate school. It was something that Faith had understood from the start. And he knew, and was grateful, it was something Faith understood now.

  “And I want to feel alive all the time, not just when I’m on some adventure, not just when I’m on the edge.” She looked down and shook her head. “My adventures have just been escapes from thinking about what’s really important, what I really want out of life.” Kai was half smiling when she looked up again. “All these Westerners come to Thailand to learn about Buddhism and about mindfulness and never seem to grasp that we’re no better at any of this than anyone else.” She blew out a breath. “It’s time for me to start over.”

  “What does that mean, starting over?”

  “I need to leave Somchai. Money and reflected glory from a politician aren’t enough. I never needed him for the money anyway. I think I really only needed him because I was a dutiful daughter, and dutiful Chinese daughters get married and put up with anything. I won’t deny Somchai was my choice, and my mistake. My father let me make it. He could’ve forced me to marry someone of his choosing, but he didn’t, and I’ll always be grateful for that.”

  Kai paused and her eyes went vacant as they stared into the past.

  “When I was first in the States, I was offended and then amazed by American girls. By the end I thought I was becoming one. I couldn’t imagine that I would spend my marriage as a minor wife. Even now there are times when I still can’t believe it. That alone had a lot to do with the unthinking way I’ve chosen to go through life.”

  “Somchai will fight back if you try to divorce him.”

  Kai blinked and refocused on Gage. “I know. Hard. The first thing he’ll do is call his accountant to see what properties he can take from me. After that, he’ll try to figure out how to prevent me from keeping anything at all. But I don’t care. I’ve always had my own money. While he gambled away most of his, I invested mine. I have land in the names of male relatives he can’t touch. And I have Siri Construction. He had nothing to do with that.”

  Kai thumped the table between them with her forefinger.

  “And I’ll tell you this—”

  Gage raised his palm toward her and glanced around the bar. “Not so loud.”

  She lowered her voice and leaned toward him. “I’m going to keep half of what we made from ganja. That was hard work and I did at least half of it. No, I did more than half of it. I’m the one who hiked to those plantations in Laos and Cambodia, slogging through the jungle, attacked by bandits. I was the toughest twenty-year-old any of those people ever dealt with. I’m the one who went to the warehouses, argued over prices, not him. I’m the one who smuggled in the cash to pay off the police and the military. He was too busy drinking with the American buyers and playing baccarat and mah-jongg. He would’ve been nothing without ganja, and without me.”

  Gage inspected her face with its intensity, its anger, its pride. He took a sip of his drink to delay having to respond. He felt Kai gazing at him. When he looked up, Kai’s eyes had lost focus again. Then her head fell and her body slumped.

  “I just did it again,” she said. “Defined my life with respect to him.”

  “And with respect to money.”

  Kai looked up. “What’s wrong with me?”

  CHAPTER 69

  When Gage woke up in the early morning, and even with the drapes still closed, he knew the storm had moved past them and up the Yangtze, maybe even to where the orange trees once grew before the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. He rose and looked outside. The wincing light revealed a partly cloudy sky and a translucent curtain of rain to the west and a mass of buildings. Huge blocks of concrete and stucco in shades of gray studded the land. And in that moment he discovered the trick of relevance his mind had been playing on him since his arrival: the city wasn’t composed only of two houses and two hotels, a couple of offices and warehouses, a few roads and a rice paddy. It was a city of hundreds of thousan
ds of people whose economy had risen by a multimillion-dollar flood tide of chips and heroin that had ebbed, then flowed, with the moon and the sea.

  And he wondered whether he’d been as invisible to the city as it had been to him.

  After showering and dressing, he walked down the hall to Cobra’s room. The nurse assigned by Zhang came to the door and eased it open. Cobra was sleeping, oblivious to the slug that had gouged his flesh.

  Gage left him in the womb of his sleep and rode the elevator downstairs to the dining room for breakfast. Kai joined him a few minutes later.

  “Make sure Lew doesn’t try to do anything in code or trick you with some double meaning. Remind him about Zhang if he needs it.”

  “I know Zhang will be pleased to have been remembered.”

  “I’ll give him a call to find out what story he’s decided Huang will use.”

  But Gage didn’t need to phone. Zhang invited himself to breakfast. He helped himself to da mi zhou and pao cai from the buffet, then signaled the waiter to deliver tea as he walked toward them.

  “A beautiful day.” Zhang said, sitting down at their table. “We recovered eleven thousand six hundred and eighty-nine chips, exactly. I had a clerk check the Internet for wholesale prices in the United States, and they ranged from two hundred to four hundred dollars each.”

  “I’m glad it worked out,” Gage said. “And I’m sorry about that incident with Cobra.”

  “It’s all right,” Zhang said, smirking. “I could’ve taken him anytime.”

  Kai snorted.

  “I’m sure you could have,” Gage said, bumping Kai with his knee under the table. They weren’t done with Zhang yet.

  Zhang poured himself tea, then said, “Lew was right. The little fellow who came with the giant to pick up the chips from Tongming Tiger is a director of ChinaCom. He’s also the owner of Huang Medical. I have him sitting in a small room wondering whether I’m going to tell ChinaCom he was working his own side deals or whether we’ll have him harvested for body parts.” Zhang took a sip. “Of course, I’ll do neither. He’s much more useful to me alive and in place.”