THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) (17 page)

Freddy realized almost at once that he hadn’t actually heard the shots, only the ricochets. The men were using silencers. They weren’t there to scare somebody. They were there to kill somebody.

The hillside where he and Shepherd lay was steep and rocky, and there was no place to hide. About fifty feet directly below them was the back wall of The First Palace of the Holy Mountain. Freddy knew that right below it was the entry gate and Barra Square.

Even while he was still lying there on the ground thinking that they might be safe if they could get that far, Shepherd was already moving. He rose into a half crouch and gave Freddy another shove. Freddy began to slide on the loose dirt, bounced off a rock, rolled over more times than he could count, and finally bumped into the back wall of The First Palace of the Holy Mountain.

Freddy lifted his head and shook the dirt out of his eyes. The two men were about a hundred feet above him now, aiming their guns down, and he scrambled around the corner as more shots zinged off the wall of the temple. He looked around and saw that somehow Shepherd had gotten there before him.

“What the fuck is going on?” Shepherd bellowed.

Freddy didn’t know what to say so he shook his head and said nothing.

Shepherd looked exasperated, but he grabbed Freddy by the arm, turned him downhill, and snapped, “Stay with me!”

Thirty feet more and they stumbled out from behind The First Palace of the Holy Mountain right into the middle of a huge mass of Chinese tourists. They were grouped obediently around a pretty young girl wearing a red uniform and holding a red pennant over her head. Freddy had never thought he would be glad to see a huge mass of Chinese tourists anywhere, but right here and right now they seemed to him to have been sent by whatever god it was that ruled over the Ah-Ma Temple.

Shepherd was already pushing his way through the crowd and Freddy fell in right behind him. The Chinese muttered in irritation at the rude westerner and his chubby companion who were suddenly in their midst, and Freddy risked a quick glance over his shoulder to see if the two shooters were coming down the steps to intercept them. He couldn’t see anything. The mob of Chinese jammed the walkway so completely that he couldn’t see anything past them. If the two men were coming after them, at least it would take them a while to get through.

“For Christ’s sake, keep up!” Shepherd snapped, glancing back over his shoulder.

A moment later they were down the steps, through the gate, and out into Barra Square. Shepherd turned left and plunged through the crowds, but Freddy turned right. He ran past the kiosk in the middle of the square and made straight for where he had left the Toyota.

His hand shook as he shoved the key into the ignition. He said a little prayer as he turned it and it must have been answered because the old car started immediately. His eyes were on the square as he lurched away from the curb and he barely missed an old man riding a battered motorbike. But he couldn’t see either of the two men coming after him.

Thirty feet and a hard left, fifty feet more and a hard right, and he was in the
Rua do Almirante Sergio
, losing himself in the heavy traffic moving north along the harbor toward the Chinese border.

Freddy knew he couldn’t go home, but he almost never stayed there anyway. He usually slept in some hotel. He liked to move around, and Macau was the perfect place to do that. It had a lot of hotels and most of them were very big.

It would take them a while to find him even if they came looking, but he wasn’t sure they would. He was thinking the men were there to disrupt his meeting with Shepherd, and they had done that. Hunting him down now might not serve any purpose, and it could cause whoever was behind it all sorts of problems.

No, the more Freddy thought about it the surer he became that he was safe, at least for a while. He wondered what had happened to Shepherd? If he was safe, too?

He hoped so. He didn’t want any more on his conscience than there already was.

“WHO THE FUCK IS
he, Raymond?”

The lunch rush was on at Henri’s, the place was packed, and everyone there stopped eating and stared. A dirty, disheveled American nose to nose with Raymond and screaming into his face was something they didn’t see every day. At least, not as far as I knew…

Raymond made little shushing gestures with his open hands and tried to back away, but I wasn’t having any of it.

“
I said, who the fuck is he?”

It had taken me less than fifteen minutes to jog to Henri’s from the Ah-Ma Temple, but it was uphill and down and I had been looking over my shoulder most of the way so I was breathing pretty hard when I got there. I had no idea what had happened to Freddy. I lost track of him somewhere in Barra Square. Had the gunmen gotten him? I hoped not, but…

“One more chance, Raymond, and then I’m going to lose it!”

Raymond’s face showed pure amazement. “You mean for you
this
isn’t losing it?”

I tried not to laugh and spoil my outrage, but I couldn’t help it. Raymond jumped in quickly before I had time to work up a fresh mad on.

“Come back to the office,” he said, “and you can explain to me what you’re talking about.”

Raymond swept me in front of him through a door into the kitchen, then through another door next to the walk-in freezer. Behind it was a small office, and I let myself be nudged inside. A passing waiter had four bottles of Macau Beer on his tray and Raymond grabbed two of them, followed me into the office, and kicked the door shut behind him. I sucked down half of my beer in one pull while Raymond settled into a chair behind the desk.

“Now what is this all about?” he asked.

I collapsed on a beaten up wooden chair in front of the desk and took another pull on my beer.

And I told him.

“SO THAT’S WHY YOU
look like shit,” Raymond said.

“Rolling down a hill trying to get away from two triad shooters is a dirty business.”

“How do you know the shooters were triad?”

“You have some other kind of gangsters in Macau, Raymond? Who do you think they were, the UCLA trap shooting team?” I held up both hands, palms out like a traffic cop. “And please don’t tell me this happens all the time here. I’ve already heard that one. These guys weren’t plinking for the fun of it. They were there to kill somebody.”

“Perhaps you misinterpreted what happened.”

“If that’s the kind of shit I’m going to get from you, pal, you better find me another beer real quick.”

“Well, isn’t it possible—”

“Horse shit, Raymond. These two triad goons were shooting at us. And they sure as hell intended to kill at least one of us.”

“Okay, let’s assume for a moment that’s true. How do you know they were after Freddy? You could have been the target.”

I had thought long and hard about that possibility the whole time I was jogging toward Henri’s and looking back over my shoulder half expecting to see these guys coming after me on motorcycles. When you’ve had to duck bullets twice in the same week, it certainly does raise the possibility that you’re wearing a target on your chest.

It raised that possibility, but I didn’t think it was true.

I honestly couldn’t think of a single reason anyone would want to take the risk of shooting me, certainly not in public. The story about me being hired by MGM to track down the source of the money flowing through their casino hadn’t become public knowledge yet, and I wasn’t involved in anything else in Macau that was even slightly controversial.

Besides, if someone did want me dead, they didn’t have to engage in theatrics like spraying the outside of the Wynn with gunfire or staging a shoot out in the middle of the Ah-Ma Temple. I was visible and accessible and didn’t have any security. There were a hundred times every day when anyone could walk up behind me or knock on my door and make me quietly dead.

No, I might have been uncomfortably close to the business end of some bullets recently, but it didn’t make any sense to conclude they were meant for me. I didn’t know who the target outside the Wynn might have been, if there was a target at all, but I didn’t have the slightest doubt who the target was today. It was Freddy.

“Who the fuck is he, Raymond?”

Raymond looked so uncomfortable that I almost felt sorry for him.

“I can’t tell you, Jack. I’m sorry, but I can’t. I gave him my word that I wouldn’t.”

I stopped feeling sorry for him.

“That’s bullshit.”

“Confucius say, ‘There are things a man will do and things he will not’.”

“Oh crap. Don’t try to pull that Asia wisdom horseshit on me, pal. Confucius didn’t say any such thing.”

Raymond shrugged and fell silent.

“You got me into this, Raymond. You set me up, whether you intended to or not.”

“Jack, I never thought for a minute—”

I rose up out of the chair, leaned across Raymond’s desk, and planted one open hand on each side of him. “You fucking owe me a straight answer, pal, and I’m going to get it out of you one way or another.”

“You don’t have to threaten me, Jack.”

“It looks to me like I do.”

Raymond sighed and leaned as far away from me as he could without actually moving his chair back. “Sit down,” he said after a moment. “Just sit down.”

I sat back down, folded my arms, and waited.

“You’re probably not going to like it when I tell you.”

“You haven’t told me yet, and already I don’t like it.”

Raymond nodded and went back to studying that spot above my head.

“Okay, here it is,” he finally said. “He’s Kim Jong-Nam.”

AT FIRST I DIDN’T
know what to say, and then I did.

“You’re shitting me, man.”

Raymond shook his head, but he didn’t say anything else.

“You mean Freddy is the dictator who runs North Korea?” I asked.

“No, Jack, that’s Kim Jong-Un. This is Kim Jong-Nam. He’s the older brother.”

It took me a minute to process that. Actually, it took a lot longer than a minute and Raymond started talking again before I could say anything.

“Kim Il-Sung was called the Great Leader. He ran Korea from the end of World War Two until he died in 1994. Then his son, Kim Jong-Il, took over and ran Korea until he died too in 2011. They called him the Dear Leader. After that, his youngest son Kim Jong-Un took over. He’s a kid, only about thirty.”

“What do they call him? The Little Leader?”

Raymond didn’t laugh. “He’s called the Great Successor.”

“Snappy.”

“Kim Jong-Nam is the oldest son. He would have been his father’s successor but they had a falling out when he tried to enter Japan on a false passport in about 2001.”

“Why did he do that?”

“He wanted to go to Disneyland.”

I had said it before a moment earlier, but it still seemed the only thing to say.

“You’re shitting me.”

“I shit you not, brother. The Japanese busted Freddy trying to sneak into the country to go to Disneyland. After that, his father pretty much banished him. The next son in line was Kim Jong-Chul, but his father thought he was too effeminate and the succession passed to Kim Jong-Un, who was the youngest.”

“Let me get this absolutely clear, Raymond. Are you telling me the older brother of the guy who runs North Korea is living right here in Macau?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. He’s lived here quietly for years. For what it’s worth, he has two wives, at least two mistresses, and several children. One wife lives here with some of the children and a mistress lives here, too. I think the other wife and mistress live in Beijing.”

“And now he’s trying to defect to the United States?”

Raymond nodded. “He wants to live in Hawaii.”

“Don’t we all.”

“Look, Jack, Freddy doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on in North Korea. He was just a kid who wanted to go to Disneyland. Now he’s just a chubby middle-aged guy who wants to live a quiet life. He’s like that fat kid we all went to school with. Nice enough, a little shy, and a bit self-conscious. He’s an ordinary, simple guy.”

“He’s the brother of the guy who threatened a nuclear attack on the United States.”

Yeah, well,” Raymond shrugged, “we can’t choose our relatives.”

I SAT THERE IN
silence, trying to get my mind around what Raymond was telling me.

“Do you think Freddy got away from those guys?” he eventually asked when he got tired of waiting for me to say something.

“I don’t know. I never saw him after we got down to the square. It was too crowded and he headed off in a different direction.”

“The North Koreans must have been trying to keep Freddy from defecting.”

“Does he know something they don’t want him telling us?”

“He hasn’t been in North Korea in ten years so I don’t know what it would be. He didn’t even go back for his father’s funeral. He was afraid they wouldn’t let him out again.”

“It doesn’t matter. Having the older brother of King Jong-Un defect to the US and move to Hawaii would be a huge embarrassment for them. That’s probably a good enough reason to kill him right there, regardless of what he might actually know.”

Raymond thought about that for a moment. “Okay, Jack, so what are you going to do?”

“What am I going to do? I’m going to go back to my comfortable hotel suite and take a long, hot shower. What do you think I’m going to do?”

“You got to find Freddy, Jack. He’s just an ordinary guy who must be scared out of his wits now.”

“When you’re the older brother of a guy who goes around screaming about launching a nuclear first strike on the United States, I think that probably goes with the territory.”

“Freddy’s my friend, Jack. I promised him you’d help him and now his own people are trying to kill him.”

“You had no business promising him anything.”

“Whether I did or didn’t, you can’t walk away now and leave him caught in the middle like this.”

“What do you expect me to do, Raymond?”

“Find him. Find Freddy and help him get to Hawaii.”

“And how do you think I’m going to do that? I’m not the fucking CIA. I’m just a guy.”