THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) (18 page)

“Yeah, but you’re a guy who knows people. You fix things. Fix this.”

“Raymond, think about what you’re saying. You asking me to hunt down the older brother of Kim Jong-Un before the North Koreans get to him, rescue him from the North Korean secret police or whatever these guys with guns are, then sneak him out of Macau and smuggle him into Hawaii, where he can apply for political amnesty.”

“Yes.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“You want another beer, Jack?”

“No, I don’t want another beer! How did I ever let you talk me into getting involved in this?”

“Doesn’t matter. You are involved. You started talking to Freddy and somehow the North Koreans found out so now they’re trying to kill him. You got him into this, and now you’ve got to get him out of it.”

“I got him into this?
I got him into this?”

Raymond shrugged. “You know you can’t walk away, Jack.”

“I can’t, huh? Watch me!”

But I didn’t move, of course. I didn’t even stand up. Raymond had me and he knew it.

There was no way I was going to walk away from something this outlandish. Outlandish was what I did, and I would never come across anything more outlandish than the older brother of Kim Jong-Un asking me to help him defect to the United States. Raymond was right. This was just too good to miss out on.

AFTER I FIGURED A
decent enough interval had passed to demonstrate how well and truly pissed off at Raymond I actually was, I cleared my throat.

“Do you know how to reach him?” I asked.

“I have a phone number.”

I fished around in my pants pockets until I came up with the white card Freddy had given me and I slapped it on the desk in front of Raymond.

“Is this the number?”

Raymond’s eyes flicked down, but he didn’t move his head.

“No,” he said.

I pointed to the cell phone lying on Raymond’s desk. “Call the number you have.”

Raymond picked up his phone, thumbed quickly through the directory, and pushed the call button. He listened for a few seconds, then he took the phone away from his ear and said…

“Voicemail.”

I pointed to the white card.

“Try that number.”

Raymond glanced at the card and punched out the number on his phone.

A pause.

“Voicemail again.”

I was hardly surprised.

“Do you know where Freddy lives?” I asked.

“He has a house on Coloane, but I don’t think he actually lives there.”

“What does that mean?”

“The way I hear it, one of his wives lives there with some of his children.”

“So where does Freddy live?”

“He moves around. Stays in hotels mostly. He uses one for a while and then moves on to another. You can’t blame him for being a little paranoid.”

“Assuming he got away, he had to go somewhere. Where do you think he might be now?”

Raymond shook his head and I gave him a hard stare.

“No, really,” Raymond protested. “I have absolutely no idea. But I’ll make some calls. It’s a small town. People talk.”

“You make those calls. And if I were you, I’d make them quick. Whoever sent those shooters is probably making the same calls.”

“He’s a good guy, Jack. I want to help him if I possibly can. I want you to help him.”

“I can’t believe you got me into this. Didn’t you think, man? Didn’t it ever occur to you that this could all blow up like this?”

Raymond grinned and threw up his hands.

“Hey, Jack, shit happens, huh?” he said. “You really don’t want another beer?”

AFTER HE FLED THE
temple, Freddy drove north for a while. He felt safe in the Toyota. It was wonderful camouflage. He would have liked to keep driving until he was somewhere else altogether, but that was a luxury that Macau couldn’t offer him. Even in the heaviest traffic, the border crossing into China was no more than twenty minutes north of the big casinos, and that was it. No other roads that went anywhere at all. Nothing on every other side of the place but water. Macau was too small for him sometimes.

The house Freddy owned was on the south coast of Coloane all the way across Macau in the opposite direction from the Chinese border. Eighteen largely identical houses were arrayed in a tidy crescent around a cove across from the Westin Resort. He had bought the first three houses along the crescent several years ago, and these days his second wife and their children lived in the one closest to the sea. The other two houses were empty. His security people had lived in the second one for a while, but he did not have security people anymore.

The houses were all three stories high and built of white tile and concrete that had been turned grey and dirty by decades of exposure to salt air. There was a sort of fortress quality to them since heavy black wrought iron gates guarded all the entrances, and the windows were small and narrow. With the gates and high walls and roof decks instead of outdoor spaces, living in one of them was about as isolated as you could be in a teeming anthill like Macau.

His wife thought the houses were lonely looking, and he supposed they were. Particularly the way they sat around the empty cove with the windswept brown waters of the South China Sea in front and a low hill behind. But he didn’t mind. He could manage lonely as long as he had privacy.

Actually, none of that really mattered now, Freddy knew. He certainly couldn’t go back there now.

There was privacy in isolation, but there was also privacy in crowds as long as they were suitably anonymous crowds, and there was no crowd as anonymous as people staying in a hotel in a gambling town like Macau. So he spent most of his time in hotels now. He liked hotels. He liked their disposable nature in particular. You lived in them, you walked away whenever you felt like it, and you came back and found everything exactly the way it had been before. Few things in life required less personal commitment than staying in a hotel.

ABOUT A MILE SOUTH
of the border Freddy passed Mong Ha Hill Park and on a whim he stopped and walked into the park. He followed a path at random as it wound up the low hill, and when he came upon a bench that faced out over the inner harbor he sat down. He liked the winter in Macau. It was never particularly cold and the light fogs that generally cloaked the city brought a softness to Macau that he thought suited it. Freddy could almost feel the tension draining out of his body and after about a half hour he began methodically to think through what had happened and where that left him now.

Was someone trying to kill him? And if so, who was it?

Well, he knew the answer to the second question at least. If someone was trying to kill him, the source of the malice could only be in one place: his nearly forgotten homeland of North Korea.

The first part of the question was harder. Would his brother really issue an order to kill him? He had heard that his brother had two of his old girlfriends shot for some transgression or another, real or imagined, but blood was blood. You didn’t kill your own family. At least you didn’t if they were no threat to you, and how could he be a threat to Kim Jong-Un by living here in Macau and minding his own business?

Of course, if his brother knew he was seeking political asylum in the United States that would be something else again. That could well make him enough of a threat to turn him into a target. But his brother didn’t know. He couldn’t. Freddy had told nobody but Raymond and Shepherd, and he didn’t see how they could have told anyone who knew his brother. That didn’t make sense.

Suddenly he had a thought. Was it possible the gunmen had been targeting Shepherd? He hadn’t really considered that. Would that be ironic? The brother of the leader of North Korea contacts a lawyer to seek political asylum in the United States and two Korean gunmen attempt to kill the lawyer for some reason. It seemed terribly unlikely, but he supposed it was at least possible. Perhaps he should call Raymond and ask him what he thought.

And when Raymond’s name came to mind, so did another idea.

He needed to go to ground for a while and sitting on this bench wasn’t going to get it done. Perhaps he ought to ask Raymond to get a suite for him in some hotel where he had never stayed before and to book it in Raymond’s name so that it couldn’t be traced back to him. Freddy was sure he would do that for him if he asked.

Raymond was a real friend and, as nearly as Freddy could tell, he didn’t want anything in return for his friendship. Freddy could tell that other people he knew, and who knew who he was, did want something. They assumed he was powerful or rich or probably both. He was neither, of course, not really, but they didn’t know that. When they found out, he was pretty sure that he wouldn’t have many friends left. But he was also pretty sure that Raymond would be one of them.

Now where should he ask Raymond to book him a suite?

Someplace quiet that wasn’t part of a huge casino complex would be best, but most of the hotels that didn’t have casinos weren’t particularly nice and he wasn’t going to stay in a dump. Perhaps the Grand Lapa. That was an idea. It had been called the Mandarin Oriental Macau until they built a bigger, fancier Mandarin Oriental over near the MGM, but the old place had to still be a pretty good hotel. It did have a small casino, but he had never been in it and no one there knew him. Best of all, the Grand Lapa was near the ferry terminal where the helicopter shuttle to Hong Kong operated. If worst came to worst, he could be on a helicopter in ten minutes and in Hong Kong in twenty-five.

The more Freddy thought about it, the better the idea sounded, but he was having second thoughts about getting Raymond involved. He would ask Raymond not to tell Shepherd or anyone else where he was, of course, but how could he be certain that Raymond would respect his confidence? He trusted Raymond, he really did, but it was always possible that Raymond had loyalties to Shepherd that were even greater than the loyalties Raymond had to him. Raymond might feel he had to tell Shepherd where he was, in spite of promising not to.

Why did he need Raymond anyway? He had a couple of fake passports in the little suitcase he always carried in the back of the Toyota that would work for the hotel, even if using them to leave Macau might be risky. They were good, but not that good. Surely the Grand Lapa would have a room available and he could be at there in half an hour. He could check himself in with one of his false passports, take a shower, and order up room service. That ought to buy him at least a couple of days in the clear to think things through and come up with a long range plan. Yes, the more he thought about, the more that sounded like just the ticket.

Freddy took out his phone to call the Grand Lapa and was surprised to see that it was after three o’clock. Was it really possible that he had been sitting there all that time without seeing another soul? That was something he loved about Macau, the yin and yang of it. The city was all noise and crowds and upheaval, and yet here he had sat under a thick clump of banana trees since noon watching wisps of fog curling over the harbor without encountering another living human.

It had been a good day not to encounter another living human being. Not until he figured out what was going on, and what he was going to do next.

“YOU LOOK LIKE YOU’VE
had a rough morning, my friend.”

I was crossing the lobby of the MGM on the way to the elevators when I heard the voice behind me. I was dirty and disheveled from sliding down the hillside at the Ah-Ma Temple and still a little slack-jawed from Raymond’s confession that Freddy was really Kim Jong-Nam. I didn’t much feel like a chat with anyone.

I turned around and I recognized the guy walking toward me, but I couldn’t immediately place him. He was wearing jeans and a black polo shirt and looked like half the westerners I had ever seen in Asia. He could have been anybody.

“I’ll bet you’ve forgotten me already, Jack.” The guy held out his hand. “I’m Harry Pine. Remember? I bumped into you at Starbucks over in the Wynn?”

We shook hands and then I remembered. This was that strange guy who had plopped himself down at the table with me in Starbucks and claimed to recognize me from somewhere. I had a feeling back then something was off about the guy, and finding him hanging around the lobby of the MGM now of all times reminded me of that.

“What happened to you, Jack? Fall off a hill somewhere?”

My pants were a little dirty and my shirt was a little wrinkled and my hair was probably mussed, but fell down a hill? That was an odd thing to say to someone who was a little rumpled and sweaty. Unless, of course, Pine already knew exactly why I was rumpled and dirty, although I didn’t really see how he could.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I told you before. I live here.”

“You live here at the MGM Hotel?”

“No, of course not. I mean I live in Macau. I had lunch over at the Wynn and I was walking through the MGM to get a cab back to my office.”

“You couldn’t get a cab at the Wynn?”

“I probably could, but it’s easier here. Why the third degree, man? I saw you walking across the lobby and thought I’d say hello. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered.”

No, he also said I looked like I fell down a hill, which was so close to the truth that it was hard to shrug it off as nothing more than a coincidence. Still, how could he know?

I was probably being paranoid and I knew it. Almost certainly Pine was nothing but who he seemed to be: an ordinary joe who thought every fellow American he met in Macau wanted to be his pal for life just because they had been born in the same country. Who else could he be?

“Sorry,” I said, “it’s been a lousy day, but I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”

“What happened?”

There was no way on earth I was going to tell a stranger the truth so I shrugged and said, “I fell down. It was a little embarrassing.”

“I’ll bet,” Pine chuckled, “and at this time of day you’ve got to take full responsibility. You can’t even pin the blame on a couple of extra martinis, can you?”

I dutifully shook my head and chuckled right back, but there wasn’t any actual humor in it.