THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels)

by Needham, Jake

  Finally I told him that Raymond had admitted to me, under a certain amount of duress, that Freddy was really Kim Jong-Nam and the older brother of North Korea’s Little Leader.

  “Huh,” Archie said. “No shit.”

  His tone of voice held about as much interest as if I had just announced that today was my cat’s birthday. But I don’t have a cat, so I might be wrong about that.

  “You don’t sound very surprised,” I said. “Did you already know Kim Jong-Nam was living here in Macau?”

  “Sure. Didn’t you?”

  “Up until recently, I wouldn’t have cared much if he was living in Cleveland.”

  “But I didn’t know that KJN wanted to defect,” he said. “I’m buggered if I’d heard about that.”

  “He wants to live in Hawaii.”

  “Crikey! If little brother finds out about that, KJN has about as much chance of getting out of Macau alive as he does of pushing shit uphill with a rubber fork. No wonder he’s done a runner.”

  “If he’s still in Macau, can you find him?”

  In the dim half light I couldn’t quite read the expression on Archie’s face, but it looked a bit like a smile.

  “Reckon I could if I wanted to.”

  “Then I want you to want to.”

  WE EMERGED FROM THE cobblestone alleyway into what could have been a small residential square in the heart of Lisbon. A green and white tiled fountain that looked like a giant birdbath dribbled sheets of water into a tiny pool in the center, and four story Mediterranean style buildings with heavy wooden shutters and iron balconies lined all four sides. Here and there trees poked up through the paving stones and under most of them were benches made of green wooden slats and black wrought iron legs.

  “What does this guy look like?” Archie asked.

  I described Freddy as well as I could.

  Archie pointed to a bench on the far side of the square. “Take a load off over there for a few minutes, mate. I’ll make a couple of calls. See what I can do.”

  Archie paced around the fountain punching out numbers on his cell phone, talking a bit, and then punching out more numbers. It was less than ten minutes before he broke off from his circling of the fountain, punched the phone off, and pocketed it. He walked toward me with a big smile on his face.

  “We’re apples, mate!” Archie said when he got back to where I was waiting. “Cost some bickies, it did, but I got the drum.”

  “What the hell does all that mean?”

  “Means it cost you a few dollars, but I know where he is.”

  “Where?”

  “He’s at the Grand Lapa. Checked in under another name, but it’s KJN. No doubt about it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Bloody hell, mate, you know better than to ask me shit like that.”

  “You mean you paid somebody off, and—”

  Archie tossed out a crooked grin.

  “This is Macau, mate. What else did you expect?”

  THERE WAS NO TRAFFIC in the quiet little square, so there were no taxis around either, but I could see a busy road in the distance that held out the promise of available transportation. I led Archie toward it at a brisk pace.

  “What’s your hurry?” he asked.

  “I want to get to Freddy before anything happens to him or he decides something is about to happen and he disappears again.”

  “Why do you think something’s going to happen to him?”

  “If you found him in ten minutes, the bad guys can find him, too.”

  “For Christ’s sake, slow down. Two minutes one way or the other isn’t going to make any difference.”

  “What’s the matter, old man? Can’t keep up?”

  “Nah, it’s this new shave I got. Don’t want to ruin it.”

  I laughed, but I slowed down a bit anyway. Archie was right. A couple of minutes one way or the other wasn’t going to matter.

  We walked on at a more measured pace toward the roadway where I could now clearly see the occasional passing taxi.

  “You going to help this guy?” Archie asked.

  The truth was that I wasn’t sure yet, so I didn’t answer Archie’s question.

  The first thing I had to do was find Freddy. There would be plenty of time after that to decide what to do.

  TWENTY FIVE

  THE GRAND LAPA PUT him in a suite on the top floor that looked down over the Macau Sands. As soon as he was upstairs, Freddy took a shower and ordered a club sandwich from room service. It had been a long, rotten day and he was dirty and hungry and tired.

  The bag he kept in the back of the Toyota with his emergency supplies had a few extra clothes in it for those nights he didn’t make it back to wherever he might be sleeping right then. Fishing around in it, he came up with a fresh black polo shirt and a pair of black cotton pants. He wore black a lot. Someone once told him black made people look thinner and, since he really didn’t care that much what color he was wearing anyway, he wore mostly black, on the off chance it really did make him look thinner.

  The shower made him feel good and the club sandwich and the two beers made him feel even better. He pushed the room service trolley into a corner, picked up what was left of his second beer, and walked over the big floor-to-ceiling windows that formed one wall of the suite’s living room.

  While he sipped at the beer he watched the garish display of neon that danced silently back and forth over the Macau Sands. Sometimes he wondered why casinos bothered with light displays and dancing fountains and outrageous architecture. Did they really attract more gamblers with their cheesy displays? Perhaps they did in America where gambling was mostly about having fun, but that had nothing to do with why the Chinese gambled in Macau. The Chinese gambled to make money. No other reason. It was another form of work that, like all work, had the purpose of increasing one’s wealth. Fun had nothing to do with it.

  The Sands had been the first of the foreign casinos to open in Macau, but now it was looking a little old and tired. There were rumors that it was going to be torn down and something vastly larger and more elaborate built in its place, but Freddy wasn’t so sure about that. There were rumors in Macau that almost everything was going to be torn down and something vastly larger and more elaborate built in its place. Generally the rumors were true, but not always. He hoped the rumors about the Sands weren’t true. The building had aged a little now, that was true, and the Venetian and the Wynn and the MGM were much more lavish, but he liked the Sands anyway. It seemed…well, real. He hoped it survived.

  FREDDY FINISHED HIS BEER thinking about survival. First, the survival of the Sands, and then, inevitably, his own survival. He might be safe and dry in the Grand Lapa tonight, but he couldn’t stay here forever. What was he going to do?

  Macau was a lousy place to hide out. It was small and didn’t offer many places to lay low, of course, but there was an even worse problem than that. When you weren’t Chinese, you felt anonymous in Macau, a cork drifting in a disinterested sea of indifferent people. But the truth was you were anything other than anonymous. Everywhere you went, somebody saw you, and everybody who saw you knew people they could tell. The place was a maze of local networks and ethnic connections no outsider would ever see, or understand.

  How many hotels were there in Macau? Maybe fifty? Probably seventy-five, if you included the whorehouses. Anyone who was looking for him wouldn’t find his name on a registration list anywhere, of course, but that wouldn’t stop them for long. All they had to do was tap into one of the local networks and put his description out there. How many people could have checked into a hotel in Macau today? A couple thousand at most? And how many of them were single men staying alone? A couple of hundred? And how many of them matched his general description? Two or three? If the bastards wanted him, they would be at his door in twenty-four hours, perhaps less.

  Freddy knew the obvious answer was to get out of Macau, but that wasn’t easy either. The airport was small, and trying to slip out inconspicuously
that way was out of the question. Otherwise, once you ruled out flying, from Macau you could go to China or you could go to Hong Kong. That was pretty much it. The Hong Kong International Airport would be a much better bet since it was huge and sprawling and from there he could find a flight to almost anyplace on earth. The problem was he wasn’t sure his passport was good enough to get him into another country. It might get him onto an airplane, but eventually he was going to have to walk up to an immigration counter somewhere and he didn’t think the odds of making it past one were all that great. He hadn’t even been able to get into Japan to go to Disneyland, and that was more than ten years ago. Who knew how many more ways there were these days of detecting phony passports?

  No, neither hiding out in Macau nor running to another country would work. He needed someone with the right connections to talk to the right people for him, someone to smooth the way for him to get to a safe place.

  The solution was obvious enough. He needed Jack Shepherd to get him asylum in the United States.

  FREDDY WENT INTO THE bedroom where he had dumped his stuff. He dug out up the throwaway phone on which Shepherd had called him and checked the number the call had come from. It had a Macau dialing code that almost certainly meant it wasn’t Shepherd’s personal cell phone. Regardless, it was all he had so he punched CALL BACK and listened for a moment. When the operator at the MGM answered, he quickly hung up, but almost immediately he began wondering why he had.

  Obviously Shepherd was staying at the MGM. What was wrong with calling him there? Had he gotten so paranoid that he really believed all the lines at a huge resort like the MGM Macau could be monitored? Besides, there was nothing to connect the cell phone on which he was making the call to him. Even if somehow somebody were watching the calls coming into Shepherd’s room, his number would mean nothing to anyone. Better yet, he could call from his room phone, couldn’t he? What would be more innocuous than a call coming into the MGM telephone system from out of the Grand Lapa telephone system? Somebody at one big hotel calling somebody at another big hotel. Had to happen a thousand times a day.

  Picking up the room phone he dialed the MGM again and asked for Jack Shepherd. When he did, he pitched his voice lower than usual and tried to put on a British accent. He felt completely ridiculous doing it, but he did it anyway. There was a brief pause and he heard the phone ringing in Shepherd’s room. It rang steadily for about a minute before a voice mail announcement began to play. As he listened to the instructions for leaving a message he decided all over again that might not be a very good idea after all, so after the announcement was done he hung up.

  Shepherd wasn’t there. He could either leave a message or keep calling until he answered. And leaving a message that said where he was or how to reach him was probably idiotic.

  FREDDY SAT THERE FOR a minute holding the room phone trying to decide what to do now. He couldn’t think of anything so he decided to go to bed. It had been a bad enough day already. No point in making it even worse by working himself up into a lather trying to solve all his problems at once. Maybe Shepherd would answer his phone tomorrow morning. Maybe, at the very least, everything would look different in the light of a new day.

  Before Freddy put down the phone he pushed the speed dial button for room service and told them to pick up the cart on which his dinner had been delivered, which is why he wasn’t particularly startled when there was a knock on the door of his suite a few minutes later.

  TWENTY SIX

  WHEN THEY GOT INTO the taxi, Archie asked the driver to take them to the Sands.

  “I thought you told me Freddy was at the Grand Lapa,” I said.

  Archie cut his eyes toward the back of the driver’s head and shook his head slightly.

  “My mistake,” I muttered and turned to look out the window.

  We rode in silence along Avenida do Coronel Mesquita in the general direction of the harbor and circled around the north side of Guia Hill, the highest point in Macau, which isn’t really very high.

  The Portuguese built a fortress on Guia Hill in the 1600’s to defend their hold on their little colony, and in the 1800’s they had also built the first western-style lighthouse on the China coast up there. The fortress is now a largely ignored tourist attraction, but the lighthouse still sends out its beam every night exactly as it has for a hundred and fifty years.

  As I watched the light etch lazy circles into the thin winter fog lying over the city, I thought about the generations of sailors on the South China Sea who had seen that light in the last century and a half and looked upon it as a signal light beckoning them toward safety. I wanted very much to feel the same way right then myself, but these days safety was a far more complicated concept than it had been for some eighteenth century sailors. I allowed myself a moment of pure envy, and the feeling passed.

  On the other side of Guia Hill we turned south on Estrada do Reservadrio and the Macau Ferry Terminal was right in front of us. The ferry terminal had been Macau’s sole connection with the outside world until the airport opened in 1995. It was still its most important connection. Every few minutes a giant hydrofoil slipped its moorings and set out on a rapid passage to some part of Hong Kong or up the Pearl River Delta to Shenzhen and Guangzhou. There was even a regular helicopter service from the roof of the ferry building that ran back and forth to Hong Kong every half hour. Someone once told me that the one way fare for the fifteen minute flight was more than $500. That sounded crazy to me when a first class ticket for the one hour trip on the hydrofoil was about $40, but I suppose Chinese high rollers who push $10,000 or $100,000 onto the baccarat table every time the cards are dealt don’t really care what it costs to get to Macau as long as it gets them there fast and gives them more time at the tables.

  I looked up at the roof as we passed and saw a blue and white helicopter with its rotor blades idling lazily. It sat in a pool of white light so blinding that the landing pad looked as if were suspended weightlessly in the blackness of the night sky. I cranked down the window and listened to the noise of the blades. Archie looked at me strangely, but he said nothing.

  That was probably a good thing. I didn’t really want to admit to Archie I was thinking that all I would have to do was tell the taxi driver to stop, climb up to the roof of the ferry building, get into that helicopter. Then I could fly away from Macau and leave behind the MGM and the triads and the bales of laundered money and Freddy and whoever was trying to kill him. Just like that, I could be done with them all.

  But of course I didn’t tell the taxi driver to stop. I just rolled the window back up and sat quietly as the taxi continued on to the Sands.

  AT THE MAIN ENTRANCE to the Sands, Archie paid off the driver and we stood together in silence watching him drive away. After the taillights disappeared into the traffic on Avenida da Amizade, I turned to Archie and asked what seemed to me to be the obvious question.

  “Why are we are the Sands instead of the Grand Lapa?”

  “What did you expect to do, Jacko? Walk into the lobby of the Grand Lapa, ask for Freddy’s room number, then go up and tap politely on his door?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “We have no idea what we’re walking into. Don’t you think we ought to do a reconnaissance before we blunder in there?”

  “How about reconnaissance by fire?”

  “What’s that?”

  “We shoot at him. If he shoots back, we know he’s there.”

  “Very funny.”

  Archie may have said that was very funny, but I noticed he didn’t laugh. Too bad. I thought it really was funny.

  “ARE WE AT LEAST somewhere close to the Grand Lapa?” I asked.

  Archie pointed at a white building right next door to the Sands. It was about eighteen stories high and looked as if it had been built in the sixties. I tilted my head back and saw on the top a gold neon sign that said THE GRAND LAPA.

  Between the Sands and the Grand Lapa there was a sort of lonely looking plaza with a
few concrete benches scattered around in it. It was shadowy and empty in the darkness, and tentacles of fog twisted through its grey half light like smoke from unseen fires. We walked to the nearest bench, sat down, and looked up at the lights that were on in about half the rooms of the Grand Lapa.

  “You sure he’s there?” I asked.

  “I know a guy who has access to most of the hotel reservations systems in Macau.”

  “You hacked the Grand Lapa’s computer system?”

  Archie gave me a long look. I shrugged and gestured for him to continue.

  “Between noon and six today only nine single males traveling alone checked into Macau hotels. We talked to the front desk managers in each of the hotels involved and the single male who checked into the Grand Lapa more or less matches the description you gave me of Freddy. The others don’t.” Archie shrugged again. “That’s as close to sure as I can get you.”

  “What name is he registered under?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I guess not. As long as you have the room number.”

  “1801.” Archie lifted his arm and pointed. “It’s on the top floor. Left hand corner of the building.”

  I looked where he was pointing. The lights in that room were on.

  “How do you think we ought to do this?” I asked.

  “It seems to me there are two distinct possibilities here. Either he’ll be happy as hell to see you since you could be his protector from whoever is after him. Or he thinks you set him up in the first place and will put a bullet in you the moment you knock at his door.”

  “I don’t think he’s armed.”

  “Look, Jack, you don’t know a damned thing about this guy except that he’s the older brother of the kid who runs North Korea and periodically threatens to blow up a couple of million people. Maybe he has a private security team. Maybe he’s surrounded by a squad of crack North Korean commandos.”

  “He was alone both times I met him.”

  “How do you know?”