Authors: Steven Gore
G
age got another call from Casey as he was parking his car behind his building. He was surprised he had gotten back to him so soon.
“I need to see you,” Casey said. “I'm at First and Market. I'll swing by and pick you up. Three minutes.”
“What's up?”
“I'll tell you when I get there.”
Gage walked out to the sidewalk. Casey drove up a few minutes later and Gage got in.
Casey gripped the wheel with both hands. He didn't look at Gage. He hit the accelerator, pushing them back hard against the seats. He sped along the bay for two blocks, then stopped in a red zone in front of a pier.
Only then did he turn to face Gage. “What the fuck do you think you're doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“There was something hinky about what happened at Denny's. I just called Faith and told her I was worried about you and made her think I knew what was going on. And she spilled the diagnosis.”
Gage felt his face flush. “You mean you tricked her.”
“It was for your own good.”
“It was not for my own good and it's nothing to worry about.”
“That's not how I hear it.”
“A little chemical dip. Not a big deal.”
“And exactly when is that going to be? You're asking me to help, but all you're doing is making me a coconspirator in your suicide.”
“It's not suicide. It's a risk, but it's not any different than if they found it a month from now.”
“The fact is that they didn't find it a month from now and a month from now it could be a whole lot worse.” Casey threw up his hands. “I've never known you to deceive yourself like this.”
“I'm not deceiving myself. The oncologist will monitor it the whole time.”
“What, from half a world away?
“The world's gotten smaller. She's a text message away.”
“Yeah. Right. How long have you known?”
“Not long.”
“And when were you thinking of telling me? You didn't tell me you had cancer, you didn't tell me how bad it was, you recruited me to help you, and now you're going out of the country despite what the doctors say. Did I miss anything?”
“You said this is going to be the only chance to get this guy and I'm the only one who can do it. That hasn't changed.”
“I said chance and maybe. I never said one hundred percent. And you bet it's changed. Tell me. You're dying, aren't you? Faith wouldn't say it, but I could tell it in her voice.”
“They can fix it, not permanently, but they can stop it for a while.”
“Bullshit. Any stopping of it will be temporary. I called my own doctor and asked him.”
“Temporary will have to do.”
“So then take the dip. Don't go running off. Ah Ming is just a crook. You don't owe anybody anything.” Casey shot out his arguments as if from an automatic weapon. “So he gets away. That's life. What's so important about him?”
“Ling.”
Casey rolled his eyes. “Ling? What does she have to do with it? Are you into some kind of cosmic payback? Like you gotta balance the scales before you check out?”
“There's nothing cosmic about it. Now she calls herself Linda. Peter Sheridan was her son.”
Casey stared at Gage. “But how . . .”
“It's a long story. I owe her. You know I do.”
“But she can't expectâ”
“She doesn't know and she doesn't need to know.”
“What about Faith?”
“There's nothing more important to me than Faith, you know that. But if there hadn't been Ling, there wouldn't have been Faith. I would've bled out on the pavement. And if Faith can handle it, then you can, too.”
“Butâ”
“But what? If you don't want to help, that's up to you. I'm going. If all goes well, I'll be back in a few weeks.” Gage reached for the door handle. “You don't need to drive me back.”
Gage stepped out onto the sidewalk, closed the door, and then walked away. He heard the passenger window lower and glanced back to see Casey rolling up toward him.
“Get in.”
They drove back to Gage's office in silence. As Gage turned to get out, Casey reached over and gripped Gage's shoulder.
Gage looked back.
“You always win these things,” Casey said. “Always. It started the first day we met. Damn you. I lost sleep worrying about you then, and I'm just about to start again.”
“It's just something I have to do.”
“I know.” Casey lowered his gaze and shook his head. “I hope I'd do the same.”
He then reached into his suit pocket and handed Gage an ICE database printout.
Gage read it over.
Sunny Glory had shipped a container from Oakland to the southern Taiwanese port of Kaohsiung twenty-four hours after the robbery.
G
age was finished packing and was on the deck barbecuing salmon and vegetables when Faith arrived home from UC Berkeley. She spread place settings on the table, then shifted the canvas umbrella to block the setting sun. They gazed out over the oaks and through the pines and redwoods toward the San Francisco Bay as they ate. A young red-tailed hawk cruised the currents rising in the canyon below. A container ship sailed in under the Golden Gate Bridge, the wake rocking flocks of returning fishing boats before breaking against both anchorages. Along the near shoreline, Gage spotted the great white cranes lining the Oakland port that lifted a million containers a year and only days before might have lifted the stolen chips that had cost a boy his life.
“What fake e-mail account did you set up for the trip?” Faith asked.
“Doris Day.”
She smiled. “That had to have been Alex Z's idea. He loves those old movies.” She tapped her chin with her forefinger. “The question is, which one?” She thought for a moment, then smiles. “I got it.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
.”
“Exactly.”
Faith joined Gage in laughing, a little too long and a little too hard, which made the following silence all the more painful. They then felt an awkwardness that they'd never experienced together. They both sensed an emptiness in the still air surrounding them as they watched the soundless motion of ships moving on the bay and of traffic crossing the bridges. A breeze rustled oak leaves above them and broke the spell.
“Graham,” Faith said, examining his uneaten salmon, “you need to eat a little more.”
“Actually, I was just going to . . .” He shrugged. “Well, maybe I wasn't.”
Faith looked at him with loving disapproval.
“But I will.”
Gage picked up a mushroom with his fork and shook it free onto his plate.
“You promise to come back right away if Dr. Stern says so?”
Gage held out his left hand, and then tapped on his wedding ring.
“I do.”
F
lying over the South China Sea toward Hong Kong, Gage remembered the old days when landing at Kai Tak Airport turned airline passengers into voyeurs. As the planes touched the runway, travelers gazing out of their windows would find themselves peeping into offices and apartments. They'd see televisions in crowded living rooms flickering with music videos, Chinese opera, or reruns of
Baywatch;
T-shirted men sitting in tiny kitchens, rice bowls poised at their lips, chopsticks digging and scooping.
But that wasn't what Gage saw as his plane swooped down over Lantau Island to land at Chek Lap Kok. The airport, which he knew old-timers and China hands would call new long into its fourth decade, was an architectural phenomenon of which any city in Asia or Europe or the Americas would be proud. In Gage's mind, that was the problem. There was nothing Hong Kong about it.
The plane jolted against the tarmac, and in that moment Gage realized what had prompted that thought. It wasn't Hong Kong that had changed, it was him.
“Y
OU DIDN'T NEED TO COME
all the way out here,” Gage said to Jong Arng as he stepped into the arrivals hall. “I could've met you at the hotel.”
Jong Arng, Thai for “Cobra,” had been waiting for Gage after he passed through Immigration and Customs.
“Mai pen rai.”
The Thai expression meaning “no problem” was Cobra's response to just about everything: monsoons, flat tires, gunshot wounds, or an unexpected request to fly from Bangkok to Hong Kong.
As Cobra drove them toward Kowloon, it struck Gage that throughout the years Cobra had retained the solid build he'd had in the 1980s as a young Taiwanese intelligence officer managing the heroin trade in the Golden Triangle. If Alan Lim had quick eyes that revealed an agile mind, Cobra had slow, steady ones that concealed it.
It sometimes bothered Gage that Cobra played such a huge role in what was even then a dead fantasy: that the Nationalist Chinese Army could overthrow the mainland government. Cobra's youth had made him prone to an unthinking patriotism, not all that different from the CIA agents who transported Golden Triangle heroin to fund its covert actions in Vietnam in the early 1960s before the United States acknowledged its involvement in the war.
By the time Gage met him, Cobra had come to acknowledge to himself that it was all a fantasy. He realized that the Nationalist Third Army was never going back to China and that its heroin traffic had devolved from a political necessity into a matter of guns and money. He resigned his commission in the Taiwan Ministry of Justice Intelligence Bureau, married a Thai-Chinese teacher of English literature, and remained in Thailand.
While Cobra abandoned the ideology and the lost cause, he took with him his connections from the lowest
nak laeng
tough
guys on the streets and in the karaoke bars to the
jao phor
mafia godfathers in their office towers and armed and fortified compounds, from the chemists in the field to the heroin brokers playing mah-jongg at the Krung Thep Palace Hotel, and from the Royal Thai police officers and soldiers who drove the heroin south, to the generals and admirals who provided protection to the poppy fields, the labs, and the ports.
It was that background that led Gage to ask him to fly to Hong Kong. Not only could Cobra help identify Ah Ming's sources for Double UO Globe, 555, and Triple K heroin, but Sunny Glory's link to Ah Ming meant that if the chips were in the container the company had sent out after the robbery, it would pass through the jurisdiction of his former colleagues at the MJIB.
“If I'm right,” Gage told him, as the office towers of Central Hong Kong came into view, “the container carrying the chips is on its way to Kaohsiung.”
“
Mai pen rai.
”
“No problem? Not so fast. Weâyouâwill have to hide a tracking device on it.”
“
Mei kuan hsi
.”
“What's
mei kuan hsi
?”
Cobra glanced over, smiling. “Taiwanese for
mai pen rai
.”
“I should've guessed.”
“You know when the container will arrive?”
“According to the shipping schedule, three days.”
Cobra nodded. “As long as you have the cash, I'll find people to do what we need.”
“I'll see Sheridan this afternoon. His headquarters is in Central. Thirty-ninth floor. Apparently he's a major shareholder in the company that owns the building.”
“So I guess he has the money.”
“More than enough. But I don't know whether he's got the heart.”
Cobra lowered his head a fraction to see the skyline.
“People up in those skyscrapers rarely do.”
“In the meantime, go see Andrew Tang at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. He set aside one of the GPS units the club uses to track members' sailboats during races of the high seas. Once you've placed it on the container, he'll link it to our cell phones and make sure somebody's monitoring it twenty-four hours a day.”
“What if I can't recover the device afterward?”
“I'll cover the loss. Then let's meet for dinner at Jimmy's Kitchen at six o'clock. I want you to meet Sheridan so if something happens to me, he'll know he can trust you.”
Cobra looked over, eyes intent on Gage. “What do you mean, if something happens to you?”
Gage shrugged. “Nothing. Just a precaution.”
A
fter checking in, Gage caught a taxi from the Renaissance Kowloon Hotel overlooking Victoria Harbour to the China Travel Service to fill out a visa application and to drop off an Irish passport he'd begun using when he became too well known in Asia. He then caught another cab toward Sheridan's office, located a block above the commercial Queen's Road in the heart of Central Hong Kong.
Halfway there, he caught a wave of jet lag and decided to take Dr. Stern's advice to get some exercise. He told the driver to pull over near a restaurant on Ice House Street, then hoofed it the rest of the way. And after a moment of dizziness as he hiked up the final hill, the walk cleared his head and he felt steadier when he met with Sheridan.
From the moment they'd shaken hands in the lobby, Sheridan impressed him as one of a type: a Brit of deceptive outer reticence and inner overconfidence who had gained Britain an empire with a velvet glove, but forced them to keep it with an iron fist. And the London School of Economics diploma hanging on the wall of his office told Gage that Sheridan didn't want anyone to forget that he was a foreign financial conqueror.
“I think the chips are on their way to China,” Gage said as he sat down across from Sheridan.
“Nothing new there,” Sheridan said, dismissing the hard-fought particular fact with an easily won general statement. “The business section of the
South China Morning Post
reported yesterday that representatives from Intel and Microsoft are in Beijing right now demanding stronger enforcement.” He glanced at a copy of
The Economist
lying on his glass-topped desk and offered a diplomatic smile. “When one has a business in Hong Kong, one has to keep up, you know.” He looked back at Gage. “Where exactly are these chips going?”
“It's better if you don't know the details. There's nothing you can do to help, and there's a risk you'll do something foolish like running headlong at Ah Ming again.”
Sheridan straightened in his chair and squared his shoulders.
“You seem to have forgotten that I'm the one who discovered Ah Ming was the man my son was allied with and I'm the reason you're sitting here.”
Gage was stunned, not by the silliness of Sheridan's claim to heroism, but by the fact that the man had no idea why Gage was in his office or who his own wife really was. And he now understood why Sheridan had made Linda return to the San Francisco area against her will, forcing her into a seclusion that had abandoned her son to the world. But he also understood it wasn't entirely Sheridan's fault. It was likely she'd lied at the beginning of their relationship about how she was wounded and about her underground life in San Francisco.
Maybe she'd done it for his good, to protect him by wrapping him in ignorance. But as Sheridan rose in the business world, hers became an unacceptable past. And looking across the desk at Sheridan now, the man wearing an expression of oblivious entitlement, Gage wondered whether she ever trusted him at all.
“That's not quite true.” Gage modulated his voice, then in
creased its intensity. “Your son told you about Ah Ming before you went over there. Getting your head cracked open just gave you an additional reason to go after him.”
Gage glanced around at the staged antique Chinese artifacts on the counters and shelves and then pointed at the Lucite-encased integrated circuit sitting on his desk.
“It would be better if you stick with what you are good at.”
“You don't seem to understand. I'm Peter's father and Iâ”
“Never having lost a child I wouldn't presume to understand. And I don't need to. All I need to understand is how to do what needs to be done. Anything that interferes or puts me and others at risk isn't acceptable. If you can live with that, fine. If not, I can still make an evening flight back to San Francisco.”
Sheridan's face reddened and he tried to stare down Gage, but in his inability to speak, they both understood that he'd have to resign himself to the logic of real life. Ah Ming had let him crawl away for the same reason Gage wouldn't let him back in: he wasn't up to whatever would come next.
Sheridan took a deep breath, his cheeks puffing out as he exhaled, displaying the resignation of a businessman forced to cut his losses.
“Okay. You win this one. Jack Burch told me that you're the best and I trust Jack.” Sheridan leaned forward and rested his forearms on his desk as if in surrender. “What do you need?”
“I'm putting together a team in Taiwan. I'll need some money to pay them and to buy the equipment they'll use. I would've brought cash from the States, but didn't want to take a chance of being questioned about it if I got searched going through customs.”
“What are the odds you'll succeed?”
“Fifty-fifty. No better.”
“Fifty-fifty isn't that good in business, particularly when it seems to be all or nothing.”
“It is.”
“And this isn't business. How much do you need?”
“Fifty thousand US. Five thousand of it Hong Kong dollars and the rest in Taiwanese NT.”
Sheridan picked up his phone and directed his secretary to make the arrangements.
“I'll have it this afternoon.”
“Let's make it six
P.M.
at Jimmy's Kitchen. I'm having dinner with someone I need you to meet.”
Sheridan smiled. “Just about every deal I've made in this town has taken place at one of those tables. I think I may start to like you after all.”
As Gage rose to his feet he realized he could both warn Sheridan off and include him at the same time.
“One more thing. Lucy and your wife don't need to know what we're doing. There's no reason to risk them making an offhand comment the wrong person might hear. It's a much smaller world than you might think.”
G
AGE'S CELL PHONE RANG
as his taxi emerged from the Victoria Harbour Tunnel from Hong Kong to Kowloon.
It was Sylvia.
“Casey called with more information about the container. The bill of lading says it's filled with soybeans and it's still headed to the Sunny Glory branch in Taiwan. He has security people at the shipping lines checking every day to see whether they transfer ownership to another company before the ship docks at Kaohsiung.”
“That would be a shrewd maneuver on Ah Ming's part, but he may not have a way to do it now that Ah Tien has been cut out.”
“And I got a call from Lucy. She was grateful you stayed with the case, but sounded frustrated when I couldn't tell her what you're up to.”
“I think it's more than just frustration, it's anger. Ah Ming is close byâshe can feel his presence like he's radiating heatâand I'm thousands of miles away, seemingly too far away to damp out the fire. And she's young and naïve enough to believe a straight line is always the shortest distance between two points. Sometimes it's an arc.”