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

by Needham, Jake

  Parking on the gravel of the circular driveway, I got out and made my way up the short brick walk between rows of tropical plants so carefully tended and perfectly formed that they might have been shot out of plastic injection molds. Darcy opened the door and stepped onto the house’s wide front porch. She was a smallish woman, a few years past sixty, trim with a pleasant but forgettable face, and she wore her silver hair in a tightly fitted, masculine crop. As always when she was at home, she was dressed in a white silk blouse and an ankle-length sarong, today’s selection being in the brightest shade of saffron I had ever seen.

  “It’s been a long time, doll.” She pecked me on the cheek and held my arm in a kind of embrace as we entered the living room of the house. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Out chasing women. What else is there to do in Bangkok?”

  Darcy laughed and gestured me toward a couch in the elegantly proportioned living area. She sat on the one opposite and folded a leg up under her. A maid appeared almost immediately and placed sweating glasses of cold water in front of each of us, positioning them carefully on tiny squares of coarse, white cotton.

  Darcy smiled at me and waited until the maid had glided silently out of the room before she said anything else.

  “Nata is out in the cottage running some stuff. She ought to be in any minute.”

  Nata had been Darcy’s companion for almost fifteen years and, not surprisingly, she was one of the primary reasons why Darcy had chosen Bangkok for her retirement. The daughter of a Thai general who had ended up on the wrong side of some long-forgotten military coup, Nata was a stunningly beautiful woman who must have been in her late forties. She was very slight with wispy, wide-set eyes, and she seldom wore make-up. Her skin was smooth and milky-looking, so white that you could go snow-blind just looking at it.

  I was the pretty much the only foreigner I knew who hadn’t ended up in Thailand because of the women.

  “So tell me, doll, what’s on your mind? I get the feeling you didn’t come all the way out here looking for a free lunch.”

  “I guess I did in a manner of speaking. I need something.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “I’ve got to meet somebody tonight, and I don’t want to sound completely stupid when I do.”

  “Uh-huh.” Darcy’s face was professionally empty, waiting.

  “I just need a little background. Nothing heavy duty.”

  “Tell me the story. Let me decide that.”

  I told Darcy about the telephone call and about my summons to Foodland that night. I also told her what I remembered about Barry Gale’s so-called suicide and the stories linking the Texas State Bank with money laundering by Russian mobsters. But I didn’t know much so that didn’t take very long.

  “What I need is a digest of the press coverage around the time Barry Gale is supposed to have died,” I finished. “Can you manage that?”

  “Exactly what are you looking for?”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure. Anything that would prepare me for however this conversation tonight ends up going, I guess. Whatever that means.”

  “I don’t see how any of the public stuff is going to help you figure out whether this really is your guy, if that’s what you’re trying to do.”

  “Well…”

  “Yeah, I know,” Darcy laughed. “You’d also like to see if I could come up with anything that might not have made the papers.”

  “Something like that.”

  “For you, Jack, anything.”

  Darcy stood up and held out her hand.

  “Let’s take a walk out to the cottage, doll.”

  LAUNDRY MAN

  SIX

  THE BUILDING THAT DARCY called a cottage was actually the size of a whole house even if it didn’t look much like one. Had it not been for a door on the first level and two small windows on the second, it would have resembled a solid cube of stucco.

  The first floor was a single brightly lit room with at least a dozen computer workstations positioned around its walls. Three matronly-looking Thai women, all apparently well into their sixties if not older, moved silently from station to station checking the screens and occasionally tapping a few characters on one of the keyboards. In the center of the room, on a low platform, there was a far more elaborate workstation equipped with four huge thin-panel displays supported by sleek, black pedestals.

  Nata perched at the center of the platform in an orthopedic chair and rested her folded forearms on the table in front of a keyboard. She was looking from one display to the other, twisting her brows in concentration. A thin microphone on a chrome boom curved in front of her mouth and I had the impression she had been murmuring into it when we came in, but when she saw us she pushed herself back from the table and flicked the boom up over her head like a surfer chick flipping up sunglasses.

  “Hey, Jack boy! Long time.”

  “I was in the neighborhood, so—”

  “Yeah, yeah. What is it this time? You never come to see me except when you want something.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” I said, but it pretty much was.

  Darcy stepped in and in a few clipped phrases related to Nata the high points of the story I had just told her about my call from the man claiming to be Barry Gale.

  “This guy wants to meet you where?”

  Nata’s question was addressed to me, but she was looking at Darcy when she asked it.

  “Took Lae Dee.” I said. “It’s in Foodland.”

  “The one on Sukhumvit Road? Down by the Ambassador Hotel?”

  I nodded. I didn’t much blame Nata for wondering about that part of my story. I was wondering a little about it, too.

  During daylight hours Sukhumvit Road was one of Bangkok’s principal arteries, four lanes jammed with vehicles and the Sky Train running on massive concrete pillars down its center. It slashed like a fault line across the part of the city where almost every foreigner in town lived. For miles it was lined with luxurious shopping malls, expensive restaurants, and many-starred hotels. It was generally thronged with people: well-heeled tourists, foreign residents, and those adventurous Thais who didn’t mind so much mixing with either.

  In the hours after dark, however, a different breed took over Sukhumvit Road. Even at its most benign, Bangkok was part Miami and part Beirut, and there was nothing benign about midnight on the fault line. In the late, late hours, Sukhumvit Road became Blade Runner country.

  I had always thought there had to be some kind of international network devoted to coaxing social rejects and dropout cases worldwide into coming to Bangkok, because come they did by the thousands. They walked away from third-shift jobs in places like Los Angeles, London, Sydney, Berlin, and Toronto, packed what they had, bought a cheap airline ticket, and made their way to the Land of Smiles. Some were looking for a cheap tropical paradise; others thought they’d found Sodom and Gomorrah; but almost every one of them was hoping in some way to make a fresh start on a life that up until then probably had little to recommend it. Many of these refugees from reality probably couldn’t have located the city on a map before they decided it was the place for them, maybe they still couldn’t, but now Bangkok had become their last, maybe their only hope.

  In the empty hours it was this army of the dispossessed that took control of Sukhumvit Road. Tuk-tuks, little three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, flew up and down the street most of the night ferrying carousers between the two clumps of go-go bars that anchored the neighborhood: Nana Plaza on the west and Soi Cowboy about a mile to the east. They were all there: the lonely, the frightened, the guilty, the depressed, and the psychotic. Soaked with sweat, they rushed back and forth from one bar to another, reeking of that peculiarly sour, metallic odor habitually given off by the emotionally overmatched and underachieving. It was this floodtide of the lost and abandoned that owned Sukhumvit Road after midnight.

  “So what do you want from me, Big Jack?” Nata asked.

  “Whatever you can find out for me a
bout Barry Gale. If I’m going into Indian country tonight, I want to go well-armed.”

  Nata raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Metaphorically speaking,” I added quickly.

  Nata thought about that for a moment, her face a blank, then turned back to her keyboard and pushed a few keys. Boxes began appearing on one of the big screens in front of her. I watched her type Texas State Bank into a space in one of them and after ten or fifteen seconds a list rolled up on the other screen. She typed Barry Gale into another box and waited until a second list replaced the first. Then she typed something that appeared on the screen as nothing but a row of asterisks, hit the Enter key twice, and waited.

  After a few seconds an index of news stories appeared back on the first screen, each entry providing a headline, a newspaper’s name, a date, and the first few sentences from the story. Nata started working her way methodically through every item, calling up the full text of some of the accounts. By the time she had been at it for ten or fifteen minutes, we knew pretty much everything the press had reported about the death of Barry Gale.

  Barry had been at the bank’s North Dallas guesthouse for several weeks while preparing the Texas State directors for their formal meetings with the federal banking examiners. The examiners were awfully curious as to exactly how millions of dollars of the bank’s deposits managed to wander away without anyone noticing, and they were ready to ask the directors a lot of tough questions.

  It was a Thursday afternoon when Barry told everyone he was exhausted and was going to knock off and go to Acapulco for a few days, so no one really wondered very much why they hadn’t heard from him until he failed to turn up for a conference with some Treasury Department people the following Wednesday. Then on Thursday, exactly a week after Barry had last been seen, a maintenance man found the body in a lap pool behind the guesthouse off Preston Road.

  “Your ghost was right on the money,” Nata pointed out. “No useable fingerprints and the corpse’s face was too badly smashed up to get an ID except with dental records.”

  “Was there an autopsy?” Darcy asked Nata. I had apparently been relegated to the roll of a silent observer.

  “If there was,” Nata said consulting her screens again. “there’s nothing about it here.”

  “That manhole cover looks like a pretty big loose end,” Darcy mused. “What do those suckers weigh? They’d have to go at least seventy-five, maybe a hundred pounds, wouldn’t they?”

  Nata nodded absentmindedly, still studying one of the screens.

  “Staggering around with a cast-iron manhole cover, using barbed wire to tie it around your neck, and then leaping into a swimming pool sounds looks to me like a pretty hard way to commit suicide,” Darcy said. “At least, it is if you’re doing the committing entirely on your own.”

  “It sounds like the Russians,” Nata nodded. “Those guys love stuff like that.”

  Darcy bent forward, reading a Dallas Morning News story over Nata’s shoulder. It concerned the unexplained disappearance of another director of the Texas State Bank about the same time Barry took the big swim, a guy named Harold Wilkins. The stories about Wilkins were pretty sketchy since Barry Gale’s drowning was so much sexier, but there was enough to work out the gist of what had happened. Darcy pointed to the monitor.

  “Wilkins had been buying currency futures for a year or more before he disappeared. He was running all the positions himself using an account in the name of Westmoreland Oil and Gas, which was apparently a real oil trader in Dallas.”

  “How could he do that?” Nata asked. “Wouldn’t somebody have started asking questions?”

  “Not necessarily,” I offered.

  Darcy and Nata both looked at me as if they had just remembered that I was there.

  “If Westmoreland had been reasonably active in the foreign exchange markets hedging their exposure on future deliveries like most oil traders do, it would have looked normal enough. And I’m sure Wilkins would have been smart enough to route all the dummy accounts to himself. If he was, Westmoreland would never have noticed anything and there would have been nobody else to blow the whistle.”

  Darcy and Nata took that in, glancing at each other, then all three of us went back to reading silently through the rest of the story. As we read, the rest fell into place. Wilkins had been using accounts he had set up in Westmoreland’s name to conduct his trading operations all right. He was buying and selling futures contracts in a half-dozen different currencies for what on the surface appeared to be routine hedging of exposure on crude oil deliveries that provided for payments in Japanese yen and Singapore dollars. When the market turned on Wilkins, however, his losses quickly began to pyramid.

  He kept ahead of them for a while—mostly by running hard, shuffling papers fast, and doubling up his losses—but when the magnitude of the debacle became so large that he couldn’t hide it any longer, the entire mess collapsed in a heap. That was when Wilkins disappeared without a trace. He left his house to drive to the bank one morning and stepped right off into the twilight zone.

  Two weeks later, Barry Gale—or someone—was found at the bottom of the swimming pool at the guest house. His suicide was quickly attributed to the working relationship between Gale and Wilkins. There was even some speculation that Barry Gale could have been the real mastermind behind the whole currency futures scam and that he might have been using the less experienced Wilkins as a front man; but with one man dead and the other missing, following up the speculation would have been difficult.

  In the end, apparently no one even bothered to try.

  LAUNDRY MAN

  SEVEN

  WHEN NATA FINISHED READING the story, she looked at Darcy. “Maybe this guy Gale really is still around,” she said.

  “Then who was the stiff in the pool?” Darcy asked.

  No one said anything since the answer was pretty obvious. If Barry Gale was still alive, Wilkins was the prime candidate for the Esther Williams role. Moreover, that opened the possibility that Barry might have had something to do with arranging the casting.

  “You think this guy might be indexed somewhere with EDGAR?” Darcy asked Nata.

  “Who’s—” I started to ask.

  “Never mind,” Darcy interrupted, and obediently I fell silent.

  Nata typed briefly and then slid her hand over a trackball sitting next to the keyboard. As she rolled the cursor around one of the screens and clicked here and there, both she and Darcy leaned in closer. After a moment I saw them exchange a look and then Darcy leaned over Nata’s shoulder and typed a few keystrokes. After that they both watched the other screen in silence.

  “That’s pretty amazing,” Nata finally said, more to herself than to Darcy or me.

  She clicked the left mouse button on the trackball twice, looked at the screen for a long time in silence, and finally rotated her chair until she was facing me.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Jack.”

  Up until then I thought we had been doing just fine.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I found the name Barry Gale in a keyword search of EDGAR’s primary data index,” Nata explained. “But when I went to the locations referenced in the search, there was nothing there. All the references came up as invalid entries.”

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  Darcy glanced at Nata for a moment and then shook her head. “Never.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked, looking from one to the other.

  “There are a couple of possibilities, I guess,” Nata took over again. “Three, really. Mistakes in data paths can occur. Maybe this is just the result of a simple input error.”

  “But you don’t think so.” I was sure, at least, of that much. Nata’s face made it plain. “What else?” I asked.

  “The references may have been there once, then deleted for some reason and the index entries were overlooked.”

  “I didn’t think database entries were ever deleted, just updated.”

/>   “Right. Usually they’re not.”

  “So then what’s the third reason?” I asked.

  Nata hesitated, glancing at Darcy, who nodded once.

  “The entries may be encrypted with a unique key that we don’t have,” she said. “That’s never happened before either, but theoretically I suppose it’s possible.”

  “And what would that mean?”

  “There’s generally a turf battle of some kind going on in Washington, Jack. It might just be that one agency has something going and it’s taking particular care to make sure that another agency can’t find out about it. It could be that sort of thing.”

  “Could be?”

  “Look, Jack, we’re good, but we’re not perfect. Some of the really big hitters can bury stuff so deep we can’t get to it. To tell you the absolute truth, it hasn’t happened before, but it is possible.”

  “Really big hitters? What are you telling me? What kind of database is this anyway?”

  Nata felt silent, then glanced toward Darcy again. Darcy sighed and folded her arms.

  “Don’t put me in a bad spot here, Jack. Let’s just say that it is a comprehensive summary of…” Darcy paused, weighing her words, “nonpublic U.S. intelligence data concerning foreign organized crime activity. If there was any real connection between your man, the Texas State Bank, and the Russian mob, it would be in here.”

  “In other words,” I said, “you’ve hacked the FBI.”

  “If we had, you wouldn’t want us to tell you, would you?”

  I had always thought the expression about someone’s eyes twinkling was pure poetic exaggeration, but right at that moment Darcy’s actually did.

  “So what can you tell me that won’t get me twenty to life?”

  “My gut says you’re about to step into it here, Jack,” Darcy said. “I’d back off and let it go if I were you.”

  That wasn’t exactly what I had been expecting to hear.

  “Don’t you think that’s sensationalizing this thing a little, Darcy? How can it hurt just to meet a guy at Foodland and talk to him?”