When Brady answered, he sounded awake so I didn’t waste time apologizing for calling so late. I asked him if he could impound all the $50 bills and the €100 notes that had been exchanged in the casino in the last twelve hours before they got shipped out to a bank and commingled with currency from other casinos. Brady asked me what I was looking for, of course, and I mumbled some gibberish about serial numbers that I thought didn’t make much sense, but it seemed to satisfy him anyway.
Brady told me that there should have been a currency pickup around five o’clock, but that all the currency that had come in after that would still be in the casino cages. He promised to have security people round up the $50 bills and the €100 notes at the end of the shift and isolate them from the next pick-up.
We had spotted our smurf about seven, so whatever bills she had brought into the casino tonight ought to be included. It didn’t seem likely to me she had exchanged her currency early enough for it to have been counted and packed and included in a five o’clock pick up. Not likely, but not completely impossible either.
It probably didn’t matter. I was pretty sure I was wrong anyway.
At least, I hoped I was.
THIRTY SIX
WHEN I WOKE UP the next morning I found a text message waiting for me from Brady. It said that all the $50 bills and €100 notes from the last shift had been separated out and were being held for me in the casino’s main vault.
I called Pete and Archie and I told them to meet me at the vault in an hour. After that I called room service and ordered a large pot of coffee. I figured I was going to need it.
BRADY HAD MADE ALL the necessary arrangements and we were quickly ushered into one of the counting rooms near the vault, where the three of us took seats around a smooth, blond wood table in the middle of the room. After a short wait, a small Filipino man with a big head and a sallow complexion wheeled in an aluminum cart with two shelves. The top shelf was stacked with straps of $50 bills and the bottom shelf with straps of €100 notes.
“I don’t understand what you’re looking for,” Pete said after the man had left and closed the door to the counting room. “What are the serial numbers going to tell you?”
I walked over to the cart, scooped up a pile of the $50 straps, and dumped them in the middle of the table.
“How much do you know about US currency, Pete?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, can you spot counterfeits?”
Archie and Pete looked at each other, but neither of them said anything.
“It would explain a lot,” I said. “For instance, it would explain why the only notes the smurfs were bringing into the casino were $50 and €100. If what you’re doing is laundering dirty cash, it’s not going to be in only two denominations.”
Pete looked skeptical. “Do you have any other reason—”
“It would also explain why the smurfs were bringing in these two currencies and carrying out Hong Kong dollars without making any effort to convert the Hong Kong dollars into bank deposits. After all, if you have a shitload of cash, what’s the point of setting up a huge operation like this and ending up with another shitload of cash, only in a different currency? That accomplishes nothing.”
“Maybe the money they were exchanging was stolen and you’re afraid the serial numbers are on a hot list somewhere.”
“Too much money involved,” I said. “Nobody has stolen tens of millions in $50 bills and €100 notes. If they had, you’d know about it. I’d probably even know about it.”
For a minute, nobody said anything.
“That leaves only one possibility that I can see,” I finished. “They’re exchanging counterfeit currency.”
“Even assuming you’re right, what are they doing with the Hong Kong dollars?” Archie asked.
“If they’re not depositing it in a bank here, they have to be shipping it out of the country.”
“So how do you think—”
“I have no fucking clue.”
PETE PICKED UP ONE of the straps of $50 bills and turned it over in his hands, examining both sides of the bills.
“I don’t see it,” he said. “North Korea is a backwater. They couldn’t be making currency this good.”
“They could be,” Archie said, “because they already have.”
Archie was talking, of course, about what the Secret Service had dubbed the ‘supernote’. Supernotes were American currency made with the same kind of Swiss-manufactured intaglio presses and optically variable ink that the United States Treasury uses to print genuine bank notes. They started turning up in various parts of the world during the early 1990’s, and as the US Secret Service tracked the examples they seized they saw the quality getting better and better. In 2005, the Secret Service fingered Banco Delta Asia in Macau as a primary source of the supernotes and accused the bank of importing them in quantity and placing them into international circulation through the bank’s facilities.
“Those were $100 bills, not $50’s,” Pete said, “and there was no other currency being counterfeited. Besides, didn’t the crackdown on that bank here in Macau shut down the whole operation?”
“What if they only got better after that? What if they diversified into other denominations and other currencies, and we stopped finding the forgeries in circulation because they got so good they couldn’t be detected?”
“So if they’re too good to be detected, how are you going to detect them? How would you ever prove that any of this currency is counterfeit?”
“We need to start going through all these bills—”
“Oh, horseshit, Jack. I know next to nothing about detecting counterfeit currency and you probably know less than I do. Besides, it would take a week to examine the front and back of every one of these bills even if we did know what we’re doing, which we don’t.”
“So you’re saying we should ignore the possibility?”
“If you go around telling people that there might be huge amounts of counterfeit dollars and euros in circulation without giving them any way to distinguish real currency from the counterfeit, you’re going to undermine confidence in all both currencies.”
“So what do you want me to do, Pete? You want me to pretend that’s not a possible explanation for what’s going on at the MGM and ignore all the signs that some of this could be funny money?”
“I’m only saying it would be reckless for you to make a claim like that without proof, and without a way to separate the bad money from the good.”
Pete was right, of course, but so was I, and a silence fell as we both contemplated the pile of currency lying in front of us and considered the possibilities.
After a few moments, Archie broke the silence.
“Are you guys through?” he asked.
Archie was sitting on the other side of the table with his hands folded in front of him. He looked like a priest patiently listening to a parishioner’s sins before prescribing the appropriate number of Hail Marys.
“Because, if you are, I have an idea.”
I LEFT A MESSAGE for Pansy Ho as soon as I got up to my suite and she called me back almost immediately.
“We need to talk,” I said. “It’s important.”
“You’ve found out something about the money?”
“Possibly.”
“Do I want to hear it?”
“Probably not.”
I listen to Pansy’s tired sigh and wondered if I was doing the right thing by telling her this.
“I’m in Hong Kong,” she said. “Can you come over here this afternoon?”
“Yes, but I want you to do something first.”
I explained to Pansy that I needed her to call Brady and authorize him to release to me all the $50 bills and €100 notes they had isolated from the last shift.
“I want to copy all the bills and run a computer analysis of them, which requires special scanning software. Archie has a contact at Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. They have the software and they’re
going to help us.”
“Are you saying you think there’s something wrong with the currency these people have been running through us? That it’s counterfeit?”
I could hear the alarm in Pansy’s voice so I chose my words carefully. I didn’t want to flat out lie to her, but I didn’t want to explain my suspicions quite yet either. Particularly if it turned out I was full of shit. Nobody wants to look like a fool to a beautiful woman.
“I want to do an analysis of the serial numbers. I think that might point us to the source.”
It was the same line of bullshit I had given Brady, and Pansy didn’t question it either. Maybe they had both realized I had a reason to avoid giving them a direct answer, or maybe they had both simply decided I was an idiot.
“I’ll arrange a helicopter for you from the ferry terminal,” she said. “And I’ll have a car meet you when you get here and take you straight to HSBC. What time shall I tell the pilots to expect you?”
I glanced at my watch. It was coming up on eleven and I added everything up. Fifteen minutes to make arrangements to take the currency, a half hour or so to pack it and get ready to leave, and ten minutes to the heliport at the ferry terminal.
“Say twelve noon exactly? Does that work for you?”
“They’ll be ready when you are, Jack. Call me on this number when you know enough to tell me what’s really going on here.”
“I will.”
I only hoped that a time like that would eventually arrive.
THIRTY SEVEN
I ROUNDED UP ARCHIE and Pete, and hurried down to the casino vault. When we got there, Brady was personally packing the straps of $50 bills and €100 notes into two leather suitcases that looked sturdy but well worn and appropriately inconspicuous. I got the feeling he might have done something like this before, but never mind that…
When Brady was finished, he called for a hotel car and personally drove us with both of the suitcases to the ferry terminal. At the heliport on the roof an AgustaWestland twin turbo helicopter was on the pad with its rotors turning.
Barely fifteen minutes later, Pete, Archie, and I were getting out of the helicopter in Hong Kong at the heliport on top of the Sheung Wan MTR station. Two of Pansy’s security men were waiting there for us. They carried the cases downstairs and stashed them in the trunk of a black Mercedes S series with heavily tinted windows that was waiting at the curb along Connaught Road. They got in the front and we got in the back.
The drive from Sheung Wan to the HSBC building through Hong Kong’s perpetually snarled traffic took twice as long as the helicopter flight from Macau, but by one o’clock we were in a seventeenth floor conference room and Archie was explaining in Mandarin to a man he didn’t introduce exactly what we needed him to do. The man was Chinese and bore what seemed to me to be a remarkable resemblance to a young Mao Zedong. He had a square face, a large head, a high forehead, and his thick jet-black hair was swept straight back. When Mao had taken the two cases of money and left, Archie flopped down in a chair and swung his feet up on the conference table.
“The currency reader will scan high-res images of both the fronts and backs of every note into a software program that will compare all of them with a database of comparison points and flag any anomalies,” he said. “It will also trace the serial numbers and try to determine if any of them are duplications.”
“How long is this going to take?” I asked.
Archie shrugged. “A couple of hours?”
I TOOK OUT MY cell phone and walked over to the windows. The sun was sparkling off Hong Kong harbor and I watched for a moment as a flock of tugboats scurried around nudging a white cruise ship into a berth at the Ocean Terminal. When I was done stalling, I located Pansy’s number on my call list and hit the call button. I expected to leave another message and wait for a call back, but Pansy answered right away.
“What did you find out?”
“Nothing yet. HSBC is scanning all the serial numbers and comparing them to a data base.”
“Are you looking for duplicates?”
“That’s one possibility, I guess.” I still didn’t want to lay out my suspicions completely. “There are others.”
“I can hardly wait to hear what those other possibilities are,” Pansy laughed. “You really are trying to break something to me gently, aren’t you, Jack? And I do love you for it.”
I had no idea what to say to that so I said nothing at all. In my personal experience, getting in trouble about things I didn’t say was much less likely than getting into trouble about things I did say.
“How about meeting me around four?” she asked when the silence had stretched on to the point of embarrassment.
“Sure,” I said, happy to be off the hook. “We ought to have something solid by four. At your office?”
“No.”
Pansy said it so quickly that I wondered what was wrong with meeting at her office.
“I’ll pick you up. I’ll be at the Queen’s Road side of the HSBC Building at exactly four.”
“Another black Mercedes S series with blacked out windows?”
“We got a fleet price,” Pansy said.
ARCHIE’S ESTIMATE THAT IT would take about two hours for HSBC to process the currency we had brought to them was a pretty good one, if it had been a guess at all, and I wasn’t entirely sure about that. At almost exactly three-thirty, Mao returned with both cases and a manila envelope that he handed to Archie.
Archie opened the envelope and quickly scanned the four sheets inside.
“What do you want to do with the money?” he asked me.
“Can we put the cases into the vault here until we go back to Macau?”
Archie said something in Mandarin to Mao, and Mao nodded. Archie nodded to me and I nodded back at him. Here we all were nodding like crazy and I still didn’t know shit.
As soon as the door closed behind Mao, I pointed to the sheets of paper Archie had taken out of the envelope Mao had given him. “Do I have to read that, or are you going to tell me what it says?”
“It says that about five percent of the $50 bills and four percent of the €100 notes have anomalies.”
“What kind of anomalies?”
“Design issues, mostly.”
“So you’re saying that a small percentage of our currency doesn’t meet the design standards of real currency?”
“Not exactly,” Archie smiled. “The problem with some of these bills is that the micro-engraving is too sharp. It’s actually of higher quality than the micro-engraving on a genuine bill.”
“You’re telling me the counterfeits are better than real currency?”
Archie smiled again and nodded, and I nodded, but this time Pete jumped in before all the nodding could get out of hand.
“What about the serial numbers?” he asked.
“Some appear to be duplicates,” Archie said, “but it will take a day or two to nail that down for sure.”
“But you’re saying there’s no doubt about the design anomalies?”
“Well, the software says there are design anomalies, but personally I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting my name to a finding of counterfeiting until some actual human beings who know about this stuff examine the notes the software flagged.”
“I’ve got to tell Pansy now,” I said. “I can’t stall any longer. She deserves to know what we know.”
“It’s pretty much London to a brick the software nailed it,” Archie shrugged. “I think you’re safe telling her she’s looking at a big whack of funny money there, mate.”
THE BLACK MERCEDES WAS idling at the curb along Queen’s road when I came out of the HSBC building. I crossed the narrow plaza and got in. The first thing I saw was the grim look on Pansy’s face.
“Tell me,” she said. “Yes or no?”
“It’s a little bit of both.”
“Oh God, I hate lawyers,” she sighed.
“I thought you said you loved me.”
“I lied,” Pansy laughed. �
��Or at least I exaggerated a whole lot.”
The driver put the Mercedes in gear and pulled into traffic.
WE MADE SMALL TALK while the driver worked his way through the traffic in Central and into Sheung Wan. When we passed the University of Hong Kong, the car turned inland and I saw we were heading in the direction Pok Fu Lam, one of Hong Kong’s most beautiful areas tucked away on a sandy bay on the island’s southern shore.
“Do you want me to tell you what we’ve found?” I asked.
Pansy caught my eye and looked at the back of the driver’s head. I got the message, nodded, and fell silent.
The car turned off Pok Fu Lam Road and passed through Kennedy Town, the far western reach of the forest of featureless high rise towers that jostled for space throughout most of Hong Kong. We tracked the coast on a road that ran along a narrow ledge between the South China Sea and Mount Davis. On the right steep cliffs fell sharply away into the ocean and on the left the dense vegetation of the mountainside reached down to the edge of the pavement. It was a wild and untamed sight, a stupefying counterpoint to the human density and structural congestion that was Hong Kong’s very soul. I lowered my window and breathed in the fresh, cool ocean air. I could almost feel my pulse slowing and my blood pressure dropping.
“I like to come out here when I need to think,” Pansy said, as if she were reading my thoughts.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
We drove another ten minutes or so until Victoria Road abruptly swung inland. Up on our right, between the road and the ocean, I spotted what looked like athletic fields, the dark green of their carefully tended grass contrasting sharply with the gunmetal grey of the sea beyond them. The driver slowed the car when we came to a utilitarian looking concrete structure about four stories high. He turned in and I saw it was a parking garage. Then I saw the black lettering above the entrance:
THE STANLEY HO SPORTS CENTRE
Of course it was.
PANSY AND I WALKED slowly around a track made of crushed red clay that was divided into running lanes with precisely etched white lines. The sun was sinking into the ocean somewhere behind the mountains and the last light of the day was making its final stand in the sea. There was a breeze from the west which carried the heady odors of salt and dead fish, and in the distance I watched a Chinese junk moving under sail through the Lamma Channel, its sails sparkling red in the dying light. The junk looked like a child’s toy trapped forever in a sea of pewter.
THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) Page 23