White Ghost (20 page)

C
obra sat on his motorcycle in the shadow of a tree a hundred yards from a gasoline station in Southern China where the two heroin trucks had stopped to repair a flat tire. They were just a few miles from Kunming. Cobra had starting using the bike to follow them because it reduced his chances of losing them in the chaotic traffic in the city of a million and a half people. But he was tired. He'd stayed awake all night, fearing that if he fell asleep, he'd wake up when his body hit the pavement a second after Moby and Luck tossed him from the truck.

His mind began to drift as he gazed down the dusty, oil-spotted road. He shook his head and the trucks once again became clear. He needed to concentrate, control himself, if for no other reason than he didn't want to be seen staring. He knew nothing would give him away more easily than glazed eyes, seen from a distance, fixed toward something no longer in focus.

He edged forward to stay in the tree's shadow, moving with the transit of the sun.

A grease-covered mechanic bent low and rubbed a rag on the side of the tire and squinted at the printing. He then hopped into
a battered pickup truck and raced off, leaving a spray of dust and gravel behind.

Cobra's mind again began to drift, now back in time to just after he'd resigned from the MJIB and he'd married Malee, trying to find a way to make a living, and to stay alive doing it. He saw himself in Bangkok, standing just inside the door to an underground casino, the eight baccarat tables populated by Thai-Chinese
nak laeng
tough guys and
jao phor
godfathers, the walls lined with their bodyguards. He'd felt motion in the threshold and the room went silent. He looked over to see a
gwai lo,
a white ghost, standing next to him surveying the crowd.

Cobra shifted his weight and blinked hard at the truck in the distance. He pushed the bike forward again, then took off his cap so the sun edging the tree's shadow would keep him alert. But his mind wouldn't stay focused; it had to do something while he waited and his eyes watched. A mind can't be blank.

Cobra followed Gage's gaze and saw the questions forming in the minds behind the gamblers' faces:
Who is this crazy white ghost?
Some asking:
Is it about me?
Guards drew their semiautomatics, but Gage ignored them, scanning the tables until he fixed a stare on a man calling himself Henry Hong, a gangster just arrived from the States who's bought his way into the game with two hundred thousand dollars. A couple of the casino guards started to advance on Gage, but the owner, Thanom Suanmali, waved them off. He wanted to see what Gage was up to, how tough he was, how Gage would stand up against the hardest men in Bangkok. They all watched Gage walk up to the table at which Hong was gambling. The other players backed away. He pointed at the stacks of cash in front of Hong.

“Is that yours?” Gage asked.

Hong stared back, trying to break Gage's gaze, but then lowered his eyes and said, “It's all mine.” But his voice was so weak
that he forfeited whatever loyalty he might've expected from the others.

Gage picked up the bills and then looked at Thanom, now a referee in a game with higher stakes. “You speak English?”

“Some.” Thanom smiled. “Michigan State, 1986.” He nodded at the cash in Gage's hand. “I take it that's not his money.”

Gage shook his head. “Stolen from my client in the States. His name is Ho.”

“That's odd. He said his name was Hong.” He pointed at a guard who patted Ho down and withdrew a passport and brought it to him. Thanom glanced inside, then tossed it on the floor. “I believe you. As weak as he is, you should just kill him. No one will mind. You'll be doing us a favor.”

Ho's eyes turned wild, jerking side to side, looking from guard to guard, from gun to gun.

Gage shook his head again. “This is only about money.”

“Since you're now our guest, it's up to you.” Thanom grinned. “How'd you get in here? It costs me a lot of money to keep people out.”

Gage shrugged. “I think I'll keep that to myself. I may need to come back.”

“You won't need to. I'll have whatever money he has left by tomorrow.”

Thanom pointed at Cobra. “Make arrangements to collect it all and deliver it to our friend.” He then looked again at Gage. “What's your name?”

“Graham Gage.”

Thanom nodded and smiled. “I think we'll call you Santisuk if you come this way again. Thanks for the very interesting evening.”

Cobra and Gage walked out together.

“What's Santisuk?” Gage asked.

“A nickname. It means peaceful.”

I still don't know if he was right,
Cobra thought as he watched the heroin trucks. But the name caught on with people in Thailand because it seemed to ring true, but . . . but Gage's force of will was the nearest substitute for violence Cobra had ever seen.

Maybe, Cobra now wondered, Thanom had meant the name as irony.

Cobra's heart thumped harder as he watched the small pickup truck return, its tail pressed low to the ground by the weight of the tire in the bed.

In a few more minutes it would be mounted, and it would be time for the truck to move on, and for him to make some decisions.

G
age and Kai checked into the Nantong Center Hotel in the financial heart of the city an hour after Zhang separated from them at the crossroads. Gage chose it from those suggested by Zhang because it catered to foreigners and Chinese who came to meet with traders and manufacturers in the Special Economic Zone, an onshore haven with offshore tax benefits. It was also at a low-enough end of the trade that it was unlikely he'd encounter anyone who might know him.

Gage found that his suite was just clean enough: well-swept concrete floors discolored by ground-in grime, traces of bathroom mildew, a teacup-ringed, child-size cherry wooden desk, and double beds with stiff sheets and hard pillows.

“Commander Ren is considering our proposition,” Zhang said, when he and Kai arrived in Gage's room an hour later. “I suggested a private financial arrangement between him and me. His only requirement is that he doesn't want to be in Qidong if any contraband passes through the port.”

“Will we need him at that point?”

Zhang shook his head. “Not once we learn how the deal is structured, and we've made progress on that end. Ren says that Efficiency Trading is a China-Taiwan joint venture, set up
through the local trade bureau. The domestic shareholder is called Lao Wu, Old Wu.”

“How old is old?”

“Early seventies. And the foreign shareholder is a Taiwanese company on Ah Tien's list. Sunny Glory, in Taichung.”

“And in San Francisco.”

Kai looked at Gage. “And that closes the circle.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It could be one that closed around a prior deal, not this one. The killing of the kid during the chip robbery may have reverberated through their operation, forcing them out of their routine.”

But they all knew it was all they had to go on.

“Have Sunny Glory and Efficiency Trading done much business during the last few years?”

Zhang reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his notes. “The port's paperwork shows mushrooms, ginger, and cashews coming in and processed garlic going out.”

“What about the other company Ah Tien had coded, Tongming Tiger. Any shipments between it and Sunny Glory, in either direction?”

“None. Tongming Tiger is a domestic dealer in pharmaceuticals, medicinal herbs, and grains. As far as we can tell, it has no connection either with Sunny Glory or Efficiency Trading.”

Gage had been hoping to find a pattern or something he could imagine on a flowchart, but he hadn't found it. And he didn't want to assume that since all three weren't connected aboveground they must be connected underground.

He looped back through the conversation, arriving at Commander Ren's mention of the trade bureau. “Who at the trade bureau was involved in setting up the Efficiency Trading joint venture?”

“A man whose name was also in Ah Tien's little book. Mao Zhou-li.”

Gage walked to the window overlooking the street. He needed time to think about how to approach the trade bureau, knowing the wrong move might reverberate all the way back to Ah Ming. Day laborers were crowded around a pushcart below him on the sidewalk, flame and steam rising from a wok on top. Next to it a woman was selling dumplings and fish.

“What did you put down for us on the hotel registration form?” Gage asked Zhang, turning back.

“That you're an American businessman and Kai is your translator. I told the clerk you're here to look into setting up a joint venture with a Chinese state enterprise to process ginger for export.”

“And you?”

“I represent the state enterprise.”

“And what do we know about ginger?” Gage asked.

“There can't be that much to it,” Zhang said, answering like a person who knew nothing about farming, who thought money was complicated and nature was simple.

Gage saw Kai clench her jaws at Zhang's arrogance and ignorance. She knew otherwise, for her father had been an agricultural trader in northeastern Thailand.

“My father worked with ginger farmers and processors before he started his own business. I know enough to bluff anyone who might ask.”

W
HEN THEY LEFT THE HOTEL
to walk to the restaurant down the block to meet the port commander, Ren, for lunch, they stopped to watch a group of farmers arguing with a city official. One was waving a heavy cotton bag as if it could speak for him.

“He's saying that he and his family were moved here by the government from an area flooded by the Three Gorges Dam,” Kai told Gage. “Just downstream of Chongqing. He has orange
seeds in his bag. The government promised him land to replace the orchard he was forced to abandon.”

“I take it he didn't get any.”

“No,” Zhang said. “And it's the same all along the lower Yangtze. All these farmers want to live near the river, but there's not enough land. And there hasn't been for a thousand years. It's time they accepted that fact.”

The restaurant owner was also watching the scene. He broke away to invite them inside the heavy, wood-framed building.

Gage had seen many like them in China, nineteenth-century teahouses wrested away at the beginning of the twentieth century from country folk and converted into Shanghai-style social clubs, with bourbon replacing tea, and jazz replacing Chinese
zheng
. They were seized by the Communist Party for communal use in the 1950s and finally privatized in the 1990s after it became glorious for the few to be rich.

The owner led them past chickens and ducks pacing in cages, turtles and frogs resting in plastic tubs of shallow water, and snakes sleeping in glass tanks. Crabs, shrimp, lobsters, and salt and fresh water fish inspected them from aerated commercial aquariums as they walked by.

Gage observed a thief's pride of ownership on the man's face, an expression revealing that the restaurant was his, but that he hadn't earned it. Gage suspected he'd been the manager during communist times and grabbed it for himself during the first, chaotic capitalist years.

Commander Ren was waiting in a private dining room. At first sight, he seemed to Gage to possess the manner of a young Zhang, except that he was taller and darker. As he rose, he displayed more military bearing than Zhang had ever shown, but his eyes, darting from Gage to Kai and back, seemed at least as calculating

Ren's attire, particularly his cheap watch and mass-produced shoes, suggested to Gage that he hadn't gotten to the big money yet, maybe because he was unwilling to take the kinds of risks Zhang had always been willing to take, ones that now might lead to a bullet in the back of the head instead of a Hong Kong bank account.

As Gage walked across the room to shake Ren's hand, he noticed that in business banquet fashion, bottles of beer and cognac were lined up on a side table next to the window. And he knew then what Zhang hoped to accomplish with the meal and how it would end.

By the time they'd moved past the shark fin soup and the sautéed prawns in garlic, Ren and Zhang had gone from beer to cognac. By the time they consumed the steamed freshwater fish, the goose tongues, and the chicken feet, the two were red-faced. By the time they'd finished the roasted snake, the fried scorpion, and the
tungpo
pork fat, the two soldiers had toasted Kai, Gage, each other, the weather, the cook, the Yangtze, and each day of the week.

Neither Zhang nor Ren seemed to have noticed that Kai and Gage had nursed the same beers throughout the meal. She and he understood the dance in which Ren and Zhang were engaged and their participation wasn't required.

Afterward, Gage guided Zhang and Ren to the hotel where he rented them a double room to sleep off their lunch.

Gage and Kai then walked in silence along the river while they waited for Cobra to check in, both understanding that his day wasn't being spent as harmlessly as theirs.

A
fter the tire had been changed, Cobra and Luck had ridden their motorcycles behind the Thai heroin trucks into the commercial center of Kunming. They'd left Moby and their own truck near the shop where the tire had been repaired. He'd remain there until Luck called him. The two traded the lead position, switching when the traffic was thick or when they were stopped at an intersection. The mass of trucks, scooters, bicycles, pedestrians, fruit sellers, and food stalls crowded with customers spilling into the street made for a slow-going pursuit.

They trailed the heroin into an industrial district bordering a residential area of three-story commercial town houses with small groceries, pharmacies, hardware stores, or video rental shops on the first floor and living units above. The two trucks then made a final turn into a large alleyway and swung in behind the loading dock of a warehouse.

As the drivers reviewed the bills of lading with a clerk, Cobra and Luck parked their motorbikes sixty yards away, near a food cart. They bought noodles and took their bowls and sat down in metal chairs at a folding table in the midst of a dozen others
crowded with workers eating, talking, and laughing. From there, Cobra surveyed the dozen laborers seated on the ground at the back of the warehouse. Most wore the traditional Shan, Hakka, or Meo
longyi,
ankle-length shirts knotted at the waist, while others had adapted to the Chinese laborer's uniform of shorts and T-shirts. Cobra guessed they were tribesmen who'd made an after-harvest trek down from their plots in the hills to earn cash in the city.

Ten minutes later, two Chinese trucks drove in from the opposite direction, then backed to the rear of the Thai trucks. Cobra couldn't make out the license plates or the company names, but he could see logos of lions painted in red against the gray background of the doors.

“I'll walk around the block,” Cobra told Luck as he got up from the table, “and come up from the other side so I can get the license plate numbers. You watch from here.”

Cobra slipped around the near corner and headed along a row of first-floor shops. He next walked the length of the block turning left and left again. By the time he'd gotten into a position twenty yards away, laborers had begun transferring the sacks of cassava powder with the heroin concealed inside from the Thai to the Chinese trucks. He stood facing an empty storefront that was advertised for rent and tried to make it appear that he was inspecting it and noting down rental information as he wrote down the license numbers and the company names that were printed on sides of the trucks. As he snapped a photo with his phone, he spotted Luck walking back to the table from the direction of the warehouse.

Cobra retraced his steps, this time stopping at a small grocery store to buy two Cokes, opening them as he walked back. He found Luck sitting again at the table, sweating in the midday sun, acting as though he'd never left. The previously empty
tables around theirs were now filled with workers, talking and laughing and slurping their noodles.

Cobra handed Luck one of the sodas as he sat down. Luck sipped his Coke, never taking his eyes from the trucks in the distance. Finally, Luck caught Cobra's eye, then nodded toward an alley running between the buildings behind them, indicating that they needed to get away from those around them in order to talk. He rose and Cobra led him between the tables and past the cart, then down ten yards to the opening.

“It looks like they're about ten minutes from transferring everything into the Chinese ones,” Luck said. “I think we—”

Luck looked past Cobra and his eyes widened as he drew back.

Cobra crouched and started a turn as if to defend himself, then spun back and drove his fist into Luck's stomach. Luck bucked forward and Cobra dropped him with punch to the fleshy part of his cheek.

When he looked down, Cobra spotted a knife lying on the dirt next Luck's body.

Only then did Cobra glance back at the alley behind him. He'd guessed right. It was empty. The only person who could have set a trap in that spot was Luck, but instead he had trapped himself.

Cobra confirmed that Luck still had a pulse, then dragged him in among the garbage cans and propped him against the wall. He walked back to Luck's motorcycle and searched his knapsack. Inside he found three meters of rope, a syringe, heroin, and a strip of cloth for a blindfold.

Cobra cooked up the heroin in the alley and injected Luck, then ripped out the electrical wires of Luck's motorcycle and broke off the top of the spark plug with a rock. He then sat down at the table and drank his Coke and watched the last of the bags loaded into the Chinese trucks.

He followed the Chinese trucks the rest of the way through Kunming and fifty kilometers up the highway until he was satisfied both that they were continuing north and that he was the only one trailing them. There was no reason to continue following them since there was no way he could stay awake much longer. He turned back south, hoping Gage would find a way to track the heroin from the other end.

Cobra tossed Kai's gun and Luck's cell phone into the Panlong River, rode to the railway station, and abandoned the motorcycle among a collection of others in the employee parking area. He broke off the spark plug in this one also, then caught a taxi to the airport, all the time wishing the flight to Shanghai was six hours, rather than three. He needed the sleep.