Riding the Snake (1998) (19 page)

"Shit," she mumbled. "Anything on the 1414?"

"It's not in any databank we have," he said, "but the Chinese love numerology, so I'm getting somebody on the outside to see if there's a number significance."

After saying good-bye, they both hung up.

On the plane ride to Cleveland, Wheeler had read Willard G. Vickers's testimony before Congress, while a ten-year-old boy kicked the back of his first-class seat. He handed the file back to Tanisha once they were in the taxicab heading to the address she had found for the Pacific Rim Criminal Research Center.

The address turned out to be a clapboard house on a run-down street in a racially mixed area of South Cleveland. They stared apprehensively at the unpainted house and graffiti-tagged neighborhood.

The cab driver glared back at them. He wasn't happy about the neighborhood either. "This is it!" he growled in some Middle Eastern accent.

"This can't be the Pacific Rim Criminal Research Center," she said, looking at the house, then back at the address in her hand.

"Expecting something with a lobby and a revolving door?" Wheeler mused as they got out. Before they could stop him, the cab driver sped off.

"Maybe we should've held the cab," he said after it was gone.

"You're a shade late with that, Chuck," she sighed, and they moved up the weed-strewn path to a rickety wooden front porch.

There was a wood plaque leaning against the side of the house. It had fallen off a metal bracket by the front door. Wheeler picked it up. In faded, hand-painted block letters it said:

P
. R. C. R. C
.

"I don't know about you," Wheeler drawled, "but I just felt a shiver of pure excitement."

She frowned and knocked on the door. Then she rang the bell, which sounded the last five notes from a seventies rock-and
-
roll song.

"Isn't that from Truckin',' by the Grateful Dead?" Wheeler asked.

"Jesus," she muttered, disgusted. They'd come all the way to Cleveland to visit the Pacific Rim Criminal Research Center and it turned out to be a clapboard house in a slum, with a doorbell that played drug music from the seventies. She rang the bell again, and the door was opened by a very pretty Chinese girl, about twenty. She stood at the threshold in a tank top and torn jeans, and looked at them through unfocused eyes. "Yeah," she said. "Do we know you?"

"Is Willard around?" Tanisha asked.

"Willard's flying Mexican Air. Won't land for about an hour."

"Out of town?" Wheeler asked, and the girl shifted her bored look over to him.

"He's laced," Tanisha groaned. "Mexican marijuana. He won't be straight for an hour. Am I right?" she asked. The girl nodded, then Tanisha pulled out her LAPD badge and flashed it, not leaving it out long enough for the girl to see it was no good in Cleveland.

"Shit, you guys're blue dogs?"

"You have a name, precious?" Tanisha glowered.

"Kelly Ching."

"Okay, Kelly ... we need to talk to Willard, so stand aside." She pushed the door open with the palm of her hand, and they moved into a cluttered, totally disheveled house.

Willard G. Vickers, like his doorbell, was a throwback to the seventies, big and barefoot with long, stringy gray hair, a full beard, and too much turquoise-and-silver Indian jewelry. He was dressed in coveralls, and crashed on a sofa, staring glassily at a video game which kept recycling its opening advertisement. A cyber-warrior galloped maniacally around, killing floating objects that looked to Tanisha like Portuguese man-of-wars. Willard Vickers shot them a wide smile.

"S'up, kids?" he said with lidded eyes.

Three hours later, they were sitting in the shabby dining room of the Pacific Rim Criminal Research Center. Willard G. Vickers had landed. He was off his ganja ride but having a bad sugar jones.

"Kelly, see if there's some Hershey bars in the kitchen. Second drawer, left of the sink," he said. Kelly jumped up obediently and went off in search of blood sugar for the boss.

Tanisha handed him a copy of the typed transcript she'd made of the recording from Prescott's Mercedes. She wasn't expecting much from this disheveled pothead and watched skeptically as he placed the page in front of him on the dining-room table, which was obviously not used for eating. It was stacked high with Asian crime research reports. Vickers read the transcript once, carefully.

"Well, obviously the writer of this missive didn't want us to know what he was talking about. But let us do some calculated guessing," he said, looking up at them with bloodshot eyes. "He mentions the White Fan, which is a subleader in a Chinese Triad, like a Consigliere in the Italian mob. Most likely, the man who wrote this is a cutout for the Chin Lo Triad, but you already know that, or you wouldn't be here," he said. Then he picked up the sheet of paper by its edges, rereading it carefully while they waited.

"I like this," he said, then he began reading part of the transcript out loud: " T am listing, under code, the last group of animals who have been fed,' and then we get this list of letters and numbers: d 34-13/66-9/12-5(22), r 78-88/5-3/22-6, and so on."

Tanisha took a moment and explained to him what she'd learned about the key book code.

"Who are the animals?" Wheeler asked. His hands were trembling slightly. He needed a drink. He put them in his lap to hide them as Vickers looked critically at the transcript.

"Just a guess, but back in 1994, when China first identified America as their global enemy, they decided to invest in young political comers in the U
. S
. by donating to their campaigns. China's leadership realized if they could buy influence with hot-shot pols on their way up, once these elected officials became important players in Congress, China's influence would grow, and their agenda would grow with it. It was a long-range plan, so'd' could stand for Democrats, 'r' for Republicans. The animals could be donkeys and elephants. The Chinese love animal symbols . . . snakes and tigers, stuff like that. With respect to the key book code, the numbers could be initials. Hey, Kel, how you doin' with the candy?"

Kelly Ching came back carrying a half-eaten candy bar with the wrapper still on it. He peeled it back and took a bite, then went on.

"Later in the letter, he talks about increasing the flow in three divisions. The divisions could be Triad product lines. Like guns or drugs."

"Shit," Wheeler said softly.

Vickers finished the candy bar and wiped his hands on his pants.

Willard Vickers was hardly what Tanisha had been expecting. She could barely imagine this large, unkempt bear sitting at a polished desk in front of a joint Senate-House committee, sporting his long gray hair, beard, and four pounds of turquoise jewelry. He was bizarre and slightly comic. No wonder they hadn't acted on his alarming statistics. But somehow she sensed that what he'd been telling everybody, without success, was true.

"How did you get so interested in Asian crime?" she finally asked.

"Accident. I was handling radicals during the sixties, before I got disbarred for smoking bud on my lunch break, inside a federal courthouse. Back then, I did a lotta pro bono work, specialized in draft dodgers who got snatched for crimes in Canada and were facing extradition back to the U
. S
. Along the way, I picked up a few Snake Riders who were dissidents being sent back to China. They'da been killed by Mao if they were returned, so they were petitioning our government for diplomatic asylum. I was pretty good at winning those cases. Then the Chin Lo Triad contacted me, wanted to put me on retainer. Something about those Triad criminals really stuck to the roof of my mouth. The more I saw what was happening, what they were doing, the more I realized this country was under attack."

"I thought you were anti-government," she said.

"You cops never get it right!" he said hotly. "I'm a patriot. I love this country. I just hate bullshit. Vietnam was bullshit. Kent State was bullshit. Waco was bullshit. And stealing three hundred billion dollars a year from the tax base of this country--money that could go to feed starving kids in the inner city--is also bullshit.

"I got disbarred right about then, so I formed the Research Center . . . mostly volunteers, like Kelly. The deeper I dug, the smellier it got. We've got us a full-scale, secret war against the United States happening here, and our President is afraid we're gonna piss off the Chinese and close that huge market. He's afraid his buddies like Bill Gates and Steve Spielberg won't be able to get their products into China. So nobody is doing shit." There was a long moment, and then he stood up. "You want my opinion, this letter is about the '98 elections in Hong Kong."

"What elections?" Tanisha asked.

"The first democratic elections ever being held in a Communist province."

They sent out for pizza and were eating it in the living room off TV trays while Willard G. Vickers continued:

"That reference in your transcript to mid-1998 makes me wonder if a lot of what's going on in L
. A
. might be connected to the Hong Kong elections this year. In order to see the nature of all this, you've gotta understand the complex history of Hong Kong.

The way people are behaving today has to do with the way things happened historically."

They ate the greasy pizza and listened while Willard gave a remarkable political lecture:

"The whole thing started in 1839," he began, and they stopped chewing. "I know, I know . . . that's almost a century and a half ago, but to understand China, you've gotta understand two things. They revere history, and they never forget." Willard pushed up the sleeves on his long-sleeved shirt and exposed furry, snow
-
white arms.

"In 1839, China pulled a massive drug bust on the British, who had been trading opium for silver at Canton for years. This started the first Sino-British Opium War, which the Chinese promptly lost. When the treaty of Nanking was signed on August 29, 1842, part of the spoils of war given to Britain was a barren little island with a terrific harbor, just off the southeast coast of China. Only about three thousand people lived on it, mostly fishermen and incense-makers. The incense is why they called the island Xiang Gang, the Fragrant Harbor. The Chinese sign it over to Britain 'in perpetuity,' and it becomes Hong Kong."

"Right," Tanisha said. She had her notebook out and was writing it all down, although Wheeler didn't see how the Opium Wars could have anything to do with the murders of Prescott and Angie Wong.

"Okay, then comes the second Opium War, 1856 to 1858, which breaks out when the Chinese board a British trading ship named The Arrow. Sure enough, the Chinese lose again. This time they have to give up the Kowloon Peninsula, right across the harbor from Hong Kong Island. Then--and this is the important part--the British lease the New Territories, a big chunk of land behind Kowloon, for ninety-nine years. It's this lease, signed in 1898, that ran out at midnight, July first, last year."

"So why did they give everything back?" Wheeler asked. "You just said the Brits got Hong Kong and Kowloon in perpetuity."

"That's right," Vickers replied, "but Hong Kong can't function without the New Territories and the islands and waters around them. Take away the New Territories and you take away the economic base for Hong Kong. There'd be damned little left. So in 1983, when China said they wanted it all back, Britain saw the handwriting on the wall. They said they would turn over the whole deal and get out."

"Okay," she said, scribbling furiously. "Got it."

"The Japanese conquered Hong Kong during World War II, but they ended up surrendering the Colony back to the British on September 16, 1945. This is only important in our context because the Triads came into renewed political prominence during the Japanese occupation. During World War II, the Triads fought the Japanese invaders. They were national heroes because of it, celebrated for their acts of courage and their attempts to free the country from the hated Japanese. It's one of the reasons the Triads still have some measure of respectability today, despite the fact that they've since become total criminal organizations."

He got up and threw the rest of his pizza in a trash can. "Okay, next comes Mao Zedong." Willard was pacing, prowling the small, cluttered room like a predator. "On October 1, 1949, Chairman Mao founded the People's Republic of China, and in 1966 he started the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Lotta people got messed with big-time by that. Everybody has to dress in Mao coats, walk around like zombies, quoting from the Red Book. Even when I was a Socialist in the sixties, I thought that sucked. Lots of Chinese escaped during the 1950s and '60s, and some became wealthy business owners in Hong Kong. They love China, but they fled Mao to escape political persecution. They know the Communist government today ain't much more tolerant than Chairman Mao's gang, so even though they're smiling in public, they're very leery of the Chinese being back in control of Hong Kong."

"Okay, keep going," Tanisha said, her pen flying across the paper to keep up.

"In 1966, the anti-colonial riots break out in Hong Kong over increased fares on the Cross Harbor Star Ferry. Obviously, that head-bashing tournament wasn't about the fares. It was about British rule. The Communist-backed labor unions wanted to run the Colony. That's why these elections coming up are so important. But I digress," he grinned.