THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) (31 page)

“It’s not personal. My father has many enemies. There is always security around him.”

Pansy stepped closer to me and lowered her voice until it was not much more than a whisper.

“Dr. Ho is an old man, Jack. He relies on routine and this is his routine. Do this for me, please.”

Are all men utterly helpless to say no to a beautiful woman?

Yes.

Do all beautiful women know that and work it for everything they can get out of it?

Uh-huh.

I lifted my arms and one of Ho’s goons stepped around and gave me a thorough frisking from behind. He spent so much time checking out my crotch that I wondered if he might be considering proposing marriage, but he didn’t. He stepped back when he was done and the second heavy waved me forward.

Pansy and I crossed the room toward Ho. I saw him studying me as I approached and I studied him right back.

Stanley Ho had to be at least ninety and he looked it. He was wearing some kind of high collared black jacket, grey slacks, and a black flat cap with a short bill. I had heard that Ho was proud of once being famed for his skill as a ballroom dancer and that he had been particularly adept at the tango. I figured that had to have been a century or two back. Now he looked like a retired cab driver.

His wheelchair was another matter altogether. It was a conveyance designed for an emperor, not a cab driver. It was motorized, of course, and the seat, back, and headrest were all thick leather cushions the color of United States currency. It looked like a first class seat on some expensive airline unaccountably detached from the plane and equipped with wheels.

Stanley watched me carefully as Pansy and I walked toward him, but he never moved. His hands were folded together in his lap as if he were preparing to say grace. His face was waxen and puffy and there were red blotches on his cheeks, but his eyes were locked onto me and he never blinked. I could only imagine the fear those eyes must have conjured up in all sorts of people over the course of Stanley’s long and active lifetime. Now they looked like two black buttons sewn onto his face.

“Please sit down, Jack.”

Pansy pointed to the chair where she had been sitting when I came in. I wondered if I should offer Stanley my hand first, but he was sitting there impassively so I settled for simply nodding to him. He didn’t bother to nod back.

“Jack, please,” Pansy repeated, nodding toward the chair again.

I sat.

“DR. HO WOULD LIKE
to hear what you have discovered about the money passing through the MGM casino.”

“Haven’t you already told him all that?”

“He would like to hear it from you.”

So I took a deep breath and summarized what I knew as succinctly as I could. I told Stanley about my discovery that the excess funds moving through the MGM could be accounted for by a large number of $50 bills and €100 notes that had been exchanged for chips, and those chips promptly cashed back out for Hong Kong dollars. I told him about our identification of the smurfs and tracing one of them to the building that had been emptied out. I told him about our discovery of the money strap in one of the banker’s boxes that had been left behind, and I told him about isolating some of the $50 bills and €100 notes collected by the casino and taking them to Hong Kong to be scanned by the HSBC’s computers. Finally, I told him that the computers had identified a number of the bills as possessing anomalies, which meant they were almost certainly counterfeit.

Stanley looked at me the whole time I was talking, but no expression crossed his face. I briefly wondered if he had died of boredom.

“Dr. Ho would also like to know who you think is responsible.”

Was Stanley mute, or was there some other reason Pansy was leading me through this dog and pony show like it was being recorded for later playback? I supposed it didn’t really matter, so I didn’t ask. I just explained to Stanley about the security pictures we had collected of the smurfs and our conclusion that they were all Koreans who had probably had a bit of surgery done to make them look less Korean.

“So you are telling Dr. Ho—”

“I’m not telling him anything. Not for sure. It’s all circumstantial,” I finished, “but I think North Korea is using the MGM and probably other casinos in Macau to exchange very high quality counterfeit US dollars and euros for Hong Kong dollars. Then they’re smuggling the Hong Kong dollars out of the country.”

I wasn’t sure why I bothered, but in the interest of full disclosure I also told Stanley about Freddy, about Freddy’s promise to trade important information about what North Korea was doing in Macau for political asylum in the United States, and finally about Freddy’s kidnapping.

“I think they will either kill Freddy or try to take him out of Macau the same way they are sending out the currency,” I finished.

Ho just sat there and looked at me. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t even blink.

“HOW ARE YOU GOING
to stop them?” Pansy asked.

I was so completely flabbergasted by her question that for a moment I didn’t know what to say.

“I asked if you know how you’re going to stop them, Jack.”

“Look, Pansy,” I said very quietly as soon as I regained the power of speech, “I’m not the cops. You hired me to find out where this money was coming from and who was moving it through your casino. I’ve done that and I’ve told you what I found. I’m all done here.”

“So you’re going to walk away now? What do you think the press will do to me when they find out that the MGM has laundered millions of dollars of counterfeit money for North Korea? Don’t you think all the old stories about Dr. Ho’s presumed criminal connections will be dredged up and they will be used to imply that I am involved somehow? They’ll ruin me, Jack!”

“Look, Pansy, I don’t see what—”

“And what about Freddy? You’re just going to let them kill him?”

“What the hell do you expect me to do?”

“I expect you to stop them. I expect you to keep that money from leaving Macau. I expect you to prevent them from killing Freddy because he’s the only one who can say that I had nothing to do with it and be believed.”

“Stop them? I don’t even know how to find them!”

Pansy leaned back in her chair, crossed her legs, and offered a very small smile. I shot a quick glance at Stanley and saw his eyes moving back and forth between us. At least the old man was still alive…

“Finding them is not a problem. Dr. Ho has friends everywhere. He will ask his friends to find them and his friends will do so. After that, we will tell you where they are and you can stop them.”

“Why can’t he do that?” I waved a hand at the old man in his wheelchair and immediately realized how silly my question sounded, so I amended it slightly. “What I mean is why can’t he get some of these same friends of his to stop them?”

“Dr. Ho cannot be seen to be involved in this. If he is, many will assume the triads are involved, too.”

No shit, Sherlock.

“He can arrange to get information to you about their location,” Pansy continued, “but that is all he can do. I’m sure you understand.”

I didn’t understand, actually, but it didn’t feel right demanding that an old man in a wheelchair do something I wasn’t willing to do myself.

“I need you, Jack. Freddy needs you. Both our lives are in your hands. We have no one else to turn to.”

I shot a glance at Stanley. I could swear I saw the sides of the old man’s mouth curl up for a second into something that approximated a grin.

Pansy had me. And Stanley knew she did.

IT TOOK STANLEY HO
less than eight hours to deliver.

When Pansy called, Pete and Archie were with me in the suite and we were watching a replay of a Dallas Cowboys game on ESPN. The Cowboys were ahead, and we all had side bets on how they were going to blow the game this time.

“Are you upstairs?” Pansy asked me.

“I guess that depends on whether you’re downstairs.”

Pansy hung up without saying anything else. I guess she was downstairs.

THE DOORBELL RANG A
few minutes later and I got up and let Pansy in. Everyone seemed to know everyone else already so I didn’t waste any time on introductions, and Pansy didn’t waste any time on small talk.

“They’re not on a ship,” she said. “They’re on an airplane.”

“Does your father know which airplane?”

“Yes. He said that a flight plan has already been filed. It’s departing for Sunan Airport in Pyongyang at eleven o’clock tonight.”

I looked at my watch. A little after eight. That was less than three hours away.

Pete was looking at his watch, too. “That doesn’t give us much time to convince whoever runs the airport to stop that plane from taking off,” he said. “Does anyone know—”

“No!”

Pansy’s interruption was so sharp we all stopped and looked at her.

“If you get someone official involved, all this is going to become public. You’ve got to stop that plane yourselves.”

“Where is Bruce Willis when you really need him?” I shrugged.

Nobody laughed, probably because it wasn’t really very funny.

“IS IT A REGULAR
commercial flight?” I asked Pansy.

“No,” she said. “At least I don’t think it is.”

She handed me the piece of notepaper she had in her hand and I read what was written on it.

“It’s something called Yas Air,” I said, looking at Archie.

“That’s an Iranian freight carrier,” he answered.

“Tail number is EP-GOP. The plane is an Ilyushin Il-76TD.”

“That’s a Russian military transport that’s been converted to civilian use. It’s a big motherfucker. High wings, four engines, probably a hundred and fifty feet long.”

“How are we going to get on the airport?” Pete asked. “I know Macau isn’t exactly New York, but they still have security. We can’t climb over the fence and go looking for the plane.”

“And even if we do get to the plane,” Archie continued, “what are we going to do then? Shoot the crew? They’ll probably be Iranians, and if they are—”

“One thing at a time,” I cut in. “Let’s figure out how we can get to the plane. After that we’ll figure out what to do when we get there.”

Archie and Pete looked at me and waited.

“You up for this?” I asked Pete.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Archie?”

Archie shrugged.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“I CAN GET YOU
onto the airport,” Pansy said, and all three of us stopped looking at each other and looked at her. “MGM has two Falcon 50’s we use for VIPs. I could take you in as high rollers we’re flying home.”

“Wouldn’t work,” Archie said almost immediately. “When was the last time any casino in Macau VIPed white guys? Everyone would smell a rat the minute we got out of the car.”

“It’s still a good idea,” I said, “but we don’t go in as high rolling gamblers.”

Everyone looked at me.

“We go in as pilots,” I said. “Half the pilots in the world are Americans or Aussies. Nobody would look twice at us.”

“We’ve got less than three hours,” Pete said, looking at his watch. “It’s a little late for us to learn to fly.”

“We don’t have to fly anything. We only need to look like we can. Uniforms and IDs ought to do it.”

“We’ve got spare uniforms in our pilots’ lounge downstairs,” Pansy said. “And I can get IDs made up in fifteen minutes.”

“There you go,” I said. “We’re pilots.”

PANSY GRABBED THE ROOM
phone and went to work. Within a few minutes an elderly Chinese woman appeared with a digital camera to take our pictures for the IDs and five minutes after that a selection of uniforms was delivered to the suite. The three of us started trying on jackets, pants, shirts, and hats. Archie and I found pieces pretty close to our size right away, but Peter was having trouble finding a pair of pants large enough. When he caught me watching him with a little grin on my face, he said, “Shut the fuck up.”

By the time we were dressed, the elderly woman was back. She gave each of us an ID in a little plastic sleeve with a clip on it and a black leather flight case like the ones everybody sees pilots lugging through airports. We clipped the IDs to our pockets, picked up the cases, and checked ourselves out in the mirror.

“Pretty damned real looking,” Pansy said. “Let’s go.”

Archie jacked a round into the chamber of the Glock 19 I had seen back at the Grand Lapa and put it into his flight case. Pete put a little 9mm Walther into his. It was so small I hadn’t even realized he was carrying it until we started changing into our uniforms.

I went to the room safe, got the silver Halliburton case I had brought from Hong Kong, and tossed it on the bed. I slid the Ruger LC9 9mm out of its foam rubber mount, loaded the clip with hollow points from the box in the case, and screwed the Osprey sound suppressor onto the barrel. I slipped it into a black nylon holster and put it in my flight case.

“Pretty fancy rig,” Pete said. “For a civilian.”

“Laser sight?” Archie asked.

I nodded.

“Good,” Pete said. “At least you won’t shoot me in the ass.”

“Not by accident at least,” I said.

FIVE MINUTES LATER WE
were downstairs in front of the MGM. Pansy slid behind the wheel of a silver VW van with the MGM lion on both doors, and the three of us got in the back.

We pulled out of the driveway and Pansy turned west on
Avenida Dr. Sun Yat-Sen
, heading for the bridge to Taipa. She pulled out her phone, dialed with her thumb, and began speaking rapid Cantonese in a low voice. I thought of reminding her that it wasn’t safe to drive and talk on a cell phone at the same time, but then I realized that was probably the least of our problems at the moment and kept my mouth shut. For once.

I looked at my watch. Nine-thirty. We would be at the airport in about fifteen minutes. We had done well to get everything together as fast as we had, but we would still have barely an hour before the Ilyushin’s takeoff time. Not much time to think of something. Even less much time to do something.

“Okay,” Pete looked at me and said, “what’s the plan?”