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

by Needham, Jake

  Right.

  There was a broad walkway to the right that ran through a small flotilla of at least thirty Caribbean stud poker tables, and off in the distance at the end of it I could see an exit from the casino. I thought it was the exit that was opposite the entrance to the Wynn Macau, but I wasn’t absolutely certain. If it was, and if the lady in yellow went out through there and back into the casino at the Wynn, I’d never find her.

  Making straight for the exit, I kept my eyes moving back but I got no joy. No flashes of yellow. I knew I could be going in the wrong direction altogether so I pulled out my phone and called Archie.

  “I’m walking toward an exit, but I don’t see her. She may be outside already.”

  “My girl’s still playing her slot, but the guy who was hustling her has hit the road.”

  “Is Pete with you?”

  “I see him coming now.”

  “Okay, tell Pete to sit on her and you head for the exit that’s on the other side of the Bentley sign. I’m going to…wait, I got her!”

  The lady in yellow was walking crisply toward the exit from the left. I was pretty sure there was another cashier’s cage off in the direction she was coming from, and that could only mean…

  “She’s cashed out, Archie, and she’s heading outside! This has to be the right one!”

  “I’m on my way.”

  The closer I got to the exit the thinner the crowds became so I found myself covering ground faster. It looked like I was going to hit the exit about a hundred feet behind her. But what the hell was I going to do after that?

  If she crossed the street and went into the Wynn after she got outside, I was toast. Even if she didn’t go into the Wynn, I didn’t much like my chances of keeping up with her on the street without being made. Following people looked easy in the movies, but I had tried it a couple of times in real life and for some reason it never worked out quite the same way for me that it did for Matt Damon.

  The lady in yellow reached the exit and pushed out through the big brass doors. About ten seconds later, so did I, and a moment later I was standing out on the curb of Praceta 24 de Junho looking toward the entrance to the Wynn on the other side.

  I quickly spotted the woman walking away from me a little less than a hundred feet off to my left. Suddenly she veered off the sidewalk and climbed the steps into a bus that was parked at the curb.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  What was I going to now? Hail a cab and shout Follow that bus? And, by the way, how exactly did I say Follow that bus in Mandarin?

  I was still trying to decide what to do when Archie walked up beside me. I pointed at the bus.

  “So now we know she wasn’t the right one,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The bus. Look at the sign on the front of it.”

  There was indeed a large sign taped in the front window of the bus, but it was written entirely in Chinese characters and meant less than nothing to me.

  “You can read Chinese?” I asked Archie.

  Archie gave me a look. ”That’s a junket bus,” he said. “It shuttles Chinese gamblers back and forth from Zhuhai right across the border in China. Tens of thousands of Chinese day-trippers come in every day and go right back after they give all their money to the casinos. There’s no one on that bus that isn’t a mainland Chinese. I promise you that.”

  I pulled out my phone and called Pete. He answered and I quickly asked him, “Is the girl you’re watching still at the table?”

  There was a short silence and I knew what Pete was going to say before he said it, but he said it anyway.

  “I never found her. Archie told me where she was when he lit out after you, but she wasn’t where I thought he told me to look. Either I misunderstood him or she left before I got here. What happened to the one you were following?”

  I told him.

  “Well…shit,” Pete said, and I thought that summed up where we were pretty well.

  I told Pete to meet us in the Lion Bar, and Archie and I turned around and headed back inside.

  THE LION BAR AT THE MGM is usually a pretty good place to hang out. It’s comfortable, cool, and sophisticated, and they have a great selection of malt whiskys. Even better, it has a reputation for attracting an enticing crowd of young Filipina women.

  The problem right at that moment was that I didn’t feel particularly comfortable, cool, or sophisticated, and I was drinking a Diet Coke. And I was so pissed off I didn’t even notice if there were any women in the place, Filipino or otherwise.

  “We’ll get another shot, Jack.”

  Pete sounded like he meant it and so I nodded. Yes, we would get another shot, but now I had real doubts this was going to work when we did. Certainly not without far more luck than I had any right to hope for.

  Archie and Pete had tried to tell me how tough it would be to pick up one of the smurfs in a crowded casino and stay on them until they got to wherever they were going. Between the vast size of the casino, the multitude of exits, and the huge number of forms of transportation available once the target was outside, I now understood what they had been saying. It seemed like an impossible task to pull off with only three guys. I had let my optimism rule my good sense and now my good sense had pushed its way to the front of the line and was having a good laugh at my expense.

  “What do you want to do, Jack?” Archie asked.

  “I have to have a pee. Let me think about it until I get back.”

  I walked across the Lion Bar and went out into the casino looking for a men’s room. I passed the stage where the bands worked later in the evening and turned up a walkway that according to the overhead signs led to the hotel’s main lobby. I hadn’t gone more than fifty feet when I saw a woman walking straight toward me.

  She wasn’t wearing blue jeans or a yellow t-shirt, or carrying a black purse. She was in a black pants suit and her purse was red. And she wasn’t middle-aged and slim. She was young, probably in her mid-twenties, wearing glasses too big for her face, and a bit on the chunky side.

  But I recognized her. She was one of the faces in the security photos. She was one of the smurfs. I had not the slightest doubt about it.

  There no plan better than pure dumb luck, is there?

  We were back in business.

  THIRTY THREE

  FREDDY HAD NO IDEA what time it was when Pine came for him. He never wore a watch. Knowing what time it was in a place like Macau had never really seemed all that important. Judging by the delivery of his meals, he thought he had been there about two days, but he wasn’t even certain of that.

  “We’re moving you,” Pine said.

  “To Pyongyang?”

  “No, we’re cleaning up.”

  Freddy’s head snapped up. Did that mean…?

  “Don’t worry,” Pine said when he realized what Freddy was thinking. “I only meant we’re taking you someplace else for a day or two, not killing you. We’ll ship you to Pyongyang when the load is ready to go.”

  “Load?”

  “Never mind. I talk too much. I know I talk too much and yet I still do it. Funny, isn’t it?”

  Freddy was glad to hear Pine hadn’t decided to shoot him after all at least, and he was happy too to know that he still had a day or two before he was being sent to Pyongyang. Every day he was somewhere other than Pyongyang was a day that something might happen to keep him from being sent there. Maybe he would find some way to get in touch with Shepherd and be rescued. Maybe Pine would die. Maybe he would die. Well…not that, of course.

  Pine had left the door open. Freddy couldn’t see anything outside except a dim hallway, but he eyed it nevertheless. It wasn’t much of an escape chance, he knew, but it was something. Then two of Pine’s goons came through the door and it was nothing.

  The man tossed a piece of dark cloth to Pine. Pine caught it and held it out to Freddy.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to wear a hood,” he said. “It’s for your own protection really. T
he less you know about our operations here, the better it will be for you.”

  “I don’t know anything at all.”

  “And take it from me, you want to keep it that way.”

  Pine held out the hood and Freddy took it. What else was he going to do? He pulled it over his head. It wasn’t uncomfortable and he could breathe fine, but the inside of it smelled funny. Like steamed broccoli. It made no sense that the inside of the hood would smell like steamed broccoli, but it did.

  Pine or someone pulled the drawstrings on the sides of the hood. They tightened around his neck and he was in darkness.

  SOMEONE TOOK HIS ARM and led him forward a few steps, turned him to the right, and tugged him gently forward. Freddy walked with a shuffling gait like his feet had been chained together, although they hadn’t been. It was simply a disconcerting feeling to have to walk without being able to see anything and it made you walk funny.

  “We’re coming to the stairs.”

  He was surprised to hear Pine’s voice close to his ear. He had assumed it was one of the heavies who was gripping his left arm and pulling him along, but apparently it was Pine.

  “There are two flights. Walk slowly. I won’t let you fall.”

  DOWN THE STAIRS, another fifteen or twenty steps straight ahead, and they stopped. Freddy heard the sound of a door opening and he felt cool, moist air on his skin and heard that low murmur that every city gives off no matter how quiet the streets might be. They started walking again and he felt the surface change under his feet from indoors to outdoors.

  “I’m going to put you in a van. You’ll be in the back. There’s a mattress on the floor and I want you to lie down on it. Do not take off the hood. One of my men will be watching you and it will go very badly for you if you try to remove it.”

  Freddy had no intention of removing his hood. He didn’t want to see a damned thing. But when he heard the muffled sound of his own voice coming back at him from inside the hood he nodded instead of trying to talk.

  Somewhere in front of them Freddy heard a metallic creaking sound that he assumed was the doors of the van being opened. With Pine tugging on his left arm he continued to shuffle slowly forward until he bumped gently into something solid about at waist level.

  “Okay, you’re there,” Pine said. “Let me help you up.”

  Pine tugged at his elbow and turned him around. With surprising gentleness, he tried to lift Freddy up into the van, but Freddy hardly budged.

  “Man, you got to lose some weight,” Pine laughed.

  Freddy shrugged. Even if he could have made himself understood through the goddamned hood he wouldn’t have been much interested in discussing his weight problem with Pine. He supposed that was the upside to being sent to Pyongyang. At least he would lose a little weight. Probably quite a bit of weight…

  Pine took his hands away and a moment later Freddy was lifted from both sides, so he gathered Pine’s two thugs had taken over. He felt the metal floor of the van under his butt and his legs and, when he reached out with his hands to steady himself, he felt the mattress, too. He pulled himself further into the van and rolled onto the mattress. It was actually pretty comfortable. Better than the one he had been sleeping on for the last two days.

  The back doors of the van slammed, followed a few moments later by both of the front doors. The engine started and Freddy felt the van begin to move.

  FREDDY WONDERED IF HE shouldn’t start counting or something so later he would be able to say how far they had driven. Since he had no idea where they were starting from, however, it wouldn’t mean much to know how long it took them to get to wherever they were going, would it?

  He knew he wouldn’t be long. You couldn’t drive much more than twenty minutes in any direction in Macau, even if the traffic was heavy. The whole place was surrounded by water except for the narrow neck of land crossed by the Chinese border, and he seriously doubted that Pine would be driving across the Chinese border with a guy lying in the back of his van wearing a black hood. Besides, why would Pine want to take him into China anyway? Could the Chinese government somehow be involved with helping North Korea run their operations in Macau? No, there wasn’t a chance in the world of that. Whatever the DPRK was up to in Macau, they were doing it on their own. He had no doubt whatsoever about that.

  Freddy tried to work out from the sounds he could hear where they were going. There was really no point in doing that either, he knew. When he got to where they were taking him, that’s where he would be. What earthly difference would it make whether he had figured it out in advance? Still, he listened and tried to guess since he didn’t have anything better to do.

  For the first ten minutes or so he heard nothing he was able to identify, only the normal sounds of traffic all around them. The van did seem to be moving at a good clip though, which narrowed down the possibilities quite a bit. There weren’t many roads in Macau where you could drive steadily at speed rather than bumping along from one traffic light to the next. He felt the road surface change and heard the hollow sound tires make when they are crossing a bridge and suddenly he knew exactly where they were. They were crossing one of the long bridges that tied the Macau peninsula to the islands of Taipa and Coloane. But were they going north toward the Chinese border or south toward where his house was at the edge of the South China Sea?

  Freddy’s guess was they were heading south. He had heard traffic around them when they first started out and there wasn’t any traffic to the south on Coloane. It was more likely they had begun the journey on the crowded peninsula and were now moving toward the less crowded part of Macau, not the other way around. The more Freddy thought about it, the more certain he was that he was right, but he also had to admit that his insight was of no value at all in getting his ass out of this before it got shipped to Pyongyang.

  THERE WERE ONLY TWO ways out of Macau if you didn’t count the land crossing into China, and Freddy had already written that possibility off. One was by air, and one was by sea. If he were being sent to Pyongyang, it would be one or the other.

  Macau’s port was fairly small since no passenger vessels called there at all and most of the cargo for the area went through the huge container port in Hong Kong. There wasn’t much use in trying to duplicate Hong Kong’s extensive facilities in Macau. Hong Kong was too close and it was far cheaper to barge cargo back and forth to the port there. Still, there was a tiny container port in Macau and it was out on the north edge of Taipa close to the airport.

  Freddy had never actually been to it, but he knew where it was, and he knew that occasionally North Korean ships called there. He had always wondered why they did, since surely the amount of commercial trade between Macau and North Korea was negligible. Maybe they were the line of communications between the DPRK and Pine’s operations in Macau. Maybe the DPRK moved their people in and out of Macau on the freighters making those occasional port calls here. Maybe now he was going to be one of those people.

  Flying him out was the other possibility. The airport in Macau was small, too, and taking him out through the commercial side certainly wasn’t going to happen. They could hardly go out on a regular flight. There were no direct flights to Pyongyang and you couldn’t exactly sit in an airport lounge somewhere sipping a beer and waiting for your connection when you were traveling with someone you had kidnapped who was wearing a black hood over his head. If they took him out by air, it would have to be a private flight of some kind. Perhaps a cargo flight. That could be how the DPRK moved their people in and out of Macau. Not on ships, but on cargo flights.

  THE VAN STOPPED AND Freddy heard muffled conversation followed by a creaking noise. The van started rolling again right after that, but more slowly now. It sounded to him like they had probably passed through a gate.

  After three or four minutes, the van stopped for a second time and Freddy heard more creaking and finally a bang. Had they pulled into some kind of parking area, a garage perhaps, and slammed a door behind them?

  The more
Freddy thought about it, the less it seemed to matter one way or another. Here he was lying in the back of a van with a hood tied over his head and Pine and his muscle boys were sitting in the front of the van. He closed his eyes and sighed. Pine was going to do whatever he wanted with him. The idea that he might find a way to escape or that Jack Shepherd might rescue him was a ridiculous fantasy.

  His life in Macau was over. His dream of going to Hawaii was dead. All he had left now was to hope that he wasn’t dead, too.

  On the other hand, if the alternative was to be shipped to Pyongyang…

  THIRTY FOUR

  COMPARED TO THE LADY in yellow, the lady in black was a piece of cake.

  I made a quick left off the walkway, wandered around among a bunch of blackjack tables until she passed, then turned and fell in behind her. I called Archie while I walked and told him to take Pete and get outside the exit across from the Wynn since she seemed to be moving in that direction. As long as she was inside the casino I could cover her, but this time I wanted to be ready if she went outside.

  And that was exactly what she did. She left through the same exit the woman in the yellow t-shirt had taken, crossed over Praceta 24 de Junho, and went into the casino at the Wynn. She walked straight through the casino and, with the three of us rambling after her, she went right back out again through the front door. I didn’t think she was making an effort to shake off surveillance, just taking a short cut to…well, that was the question, wasn’t it?

  The lady in black followed the Wynn’s driveway down to the double boulevard on which the hotel sits. She crossed under it using a pedestrian tunnel, rode an escalator back to street level in front of the old Hotel Lisboa, and walked north along Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro which everyone calls San Ma Lo. It is crowded, dirty, and noisy. Its sidewalks are jammed day and night with locals trying to make their way somewhere and tourists not going anywhere in particular.