THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) (34 page)

Freddy lay curled in the fetal position across the two seats in the back row, his feet hanging out into the aisle. He looked dead.

Halfway up the aisle to where Archie was doing his pilot imitation at the front of the compartment, Harry Pine had stopped walking and was looking back over his shoulder.

I watched the red dot from the laser sight on my Ruger dancing on Pine’s face and stole another glance at Freddy lying across those two seats in the back. He looked like a dead fat kid.
If Freddy was dead,
I told myself,
and if this dirt bag had had anything to do with killing him…

I felt my finger tightening on the Ruger’s trigger and yelled at Pine, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Before Pine could say anything, Archie pulled his Glock out from under his uniform jacket, took two quick steps, and jammed the muzzle into Pine’s belly.

“On your knees!”
he screamed.
“Hands on your head! Do it now!”

Pine was half smiling as he slowly sunk to his knees and laced his fingers together on top of his head. It didn’t look to me like he needed any instruction on assuming the position.

“That’s Freddy on the back seats,” I told Pete. “See if he’s alive.”

Pete slid back past me and put his fingers on Freddy’s neck. He pulled up his eyelids one at a time and checked his pupils. “It looks like he’s been drugged, but he’s certainly alive.”

“What did you do to him, Pine?” I snapped.

Pine ignored the question. “I’ve got to give you credit, Jack,” he chuckled instead. “I have no idea where you came from or how you found us, but I guess you must be as clever as most people say.”

Pete looked at me. “You know this guy?”

“He’s been turning up everywhere I’ve been in Macau. He said his name was Harry Pine and he has something to do with reviewing construction contracts.”

Pine was on his knees now with his hands on top of his head, but he was still twisted around watching me with that silly half-smile on his face. I took a step forward, cocked my arm, and whipped the barrel of the Ruger across this cheek. His head snapped to the side and a thin line of blood appeared where the front sight had dragged across his face.

“I asked you what you did to Freddy.”

Pine shook his head a couple of times and blinked his eyes rapidly. “I just shot him up enough to keep him quiet until we get to Pyongyang.”

“What did you use?”

“Rohypnol. I gave him two milligrams in liquid form. He’ll be fine, but when he wakes up in North Korea he won’t remember much about how he got there.”

I must have looked to Pine like I was going to stroke him with the Ruger again because he quickly added, “If you don’t believe me, look in my backpack. It’s under the seat over there. I’ve got a couple more doses for him if he wakes up too soon.”

“Get the backpack, Pete,” I said without taking my eyes off Pine.

PINE LOOKED AT ME
and I looked at him.

“I still don’t understand what you’re doing on this plane, Pine, if that’s even your real name.”

“Probably not,” he grinned. “Look, Jack, I work for the Koreans, but I’m no big time spy or anything like that. I’m only an errand boy. I do the Koreans’ grunt work. I handle banking and look after some companies. You might say I direct traffic. That’s it really. Nothing very interesting.”

I jerked my head to where Freddy was sleeping peacefully across two seats. ”I thought kidnapping was supposed to be pretty interesting work.”

“That was a one-off for me, man. I didn’t have any choice. They wanted me to kill him, but I’m no killer. So I’m taking him back to them instead. It’s better than being dead, isn’t it?”

“Why were you following me around Macau?”

“I wasn’t really following you, Jack. I only wanted to find out more about you. You’re an interesting man. I wanted to get to know you better. I thought we might even become friends.”

“You wanted to know if I was on to you yet, didn’t you?”

“Well…yeah. That, too.”

“How big is this counterfeiting operation?” I asked. “Do you have more money to move or are you done?”

“Now don’t put me in a bad spot here, man. You have to know I can’t answer that. It would be my ass.”

I cocked my arm back to slam Pine with the Ruger again, but Archie reached over with his free hand and held my elbow.

“That’s not going to help,” he said. “Besides, it doesn’t matter what he says. Your interest is in rescuing your friend and returning the MGM’s money to Pansy. Now you can do both. Leave the rest to other people.”

“What other people?”

“You don’t really want me to tell you that, do you, Jack?”

I shook my head. No, I probably didn’t.

PETE CAME UP BEHIND
me and dropped a dark green backpack on a seat. He pulled a small metal box out of it and held it out so I could see what was inside: a clear glass vial and two hypodermic needles.

I looked at Pine. “This is what you gave Freddy?”

“Yeah.”

“How long before he comes out of it?”

“Four or five hours.”

I examined the vial. The label read Flunitrazepam.

“That’s the generic name for Rohypnol,” Pine explained before I asked. “And that’s really what it is.”

“I can think of a good way to make sure,” I said. “Get his asshole up and put him in a seat.”

Archie kept the Glock leveled at Pine’s midsection while Pete stepped past me, jerked him up, and shoved him into a seat.

I looked at Archie. “You wouldn’t happen to have another pair—”

“I always have another pair of everything,” Archie said, dipping into a pocket with his free hand and producing a pair of FlexiCuffs.

I took them, pulled Pine’s hands together behind his back, and cuffed them to the seatbelt anchor.

“You taking Freddy with you?”

I nodded.

“You going to get me in all sorts of shit, man.”

“I’m counting on that actually.”

“You going to let us fly out after you’ve got Freddy?”

I nodded again.

“To Pyongyang?”

“Yep.”

I took the vial and one hypodermic out of the box Pete was holding, pulled the tip off the needle, and pushed it through the top of the vial.

“You don’t have to use that shit on me to prove it really is Rohypnol,” he said. “I give you my word.”

I lifted the vial up to the light and slowly pulled back the plunger of the hypodermic, but I didn’t say anything.

“Okay,” Pine sighed. “Shit, I guess I can use the sleep anyway.”

He eyed the hypodermic as I continued to fill it.

“Don’t OD me, man. Too much of that stuff can kill you.”

“You say you gave Freddy two milligrams?”

Pine nodded.

“So you get three.”

“Whatever, man.”

ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES
of Flunitrazepam is that it works fast. I pushed up Pine’s sleeve and injected him without making any effort to be gentle about it. Five minutes later his chin was on his chest and he was off to wherever people like him went when they were asleep.

I pulled up the armrest between the seats, lifted up Pine’s feet, and curled his body into a shape across the two seats similar to the shape in which Freddy snoozed on his seats. The FlexiCuffs didn’t stretch far enough for me to make him particularly comfortable, which was fine with me.

“Let’s get Freddy down to the van,” I said. “We need to see how much money is in those containers and figure out some way to get it off by ourselves.”

“What are we going to do with the pilots?” Pete asked.

“We’re going to cut them loose and tell them to go ahead and make their delivery in Pyongyang as scheduled. Only they’ll be one passenger and a little cargo short when they get there.”

“That’s going to go pretty hard on this asshole,” Pete said, patting Pine on the shoulder.

I smiled.

WE GOT FREDDY OFF
the seats where he was sleeping and carried him down the air stairs, although with some difficulty. He was all dead weight, and he was a great deal of dead weight. It was quite a struggle, even for the three of us. When we got to the bottom of the steps Pete looked at me and said, “Remind me of this if you ever see me reaching for another Big Mac.”

Pansy had pulled the silver van to the bottom of the Ilyushin’s steps like I asked her to, so we tucked Freddy up in the back and climbed up the air stairs again. We walked past the passenger compartment to the cargo area where the three containers were sitting strapped down right in the middle of it.

All we had to do was figure out a way to get the money off the Ilyushin, and we could cut Vlad and Mikhail loose and send them on their way to Pyongyang. Taking the money off wasn’t going to be any easier than it had been taking Freddy off. Probably a lot harder.

The containers were the problem. Containers are a highly efficient way of shifting freight when you have access to the specialized equipment required to move them, but they aren’t so efficient when all you have are three guys working with their bare hands and a van sitting at the bottom of a set of air stairs.

“The money wasn’t thrown into the containers,” I said. “It’s packaged up somehow. Let’s get one of these suckers open and see what we’ve got.”

THE THREE SHINY ALUMINUM
containers were each about eight feet wide, five feet high, and five feet deep with two recessed handles on both of their long sides. I fiddled with the handles on one side of the first container and Pete attacked the handles on the other side. I managed to figure out how to work mine first. When I twisted both at the same time, one in a clockwise and the other in a counter-clockwise direction, the two panels forming the side of the container separated. One swung up and the other swung down, giving free access to the interior of the container.

I bent down, peered inside, and saw neat stacks of uniformed cardboard cartons, each about a foot wide, a foot high, and eighteen inches long. I pulled one out and tested the weight. Not too bad. We could do this.

“Okay,” I said, “the freight doors are open and the reloading ramp is still down. That’s a break. Somebody go down and get Pansy to pull the van around to the bottom of the ramp. We’ll take these boxes out of the containers, push them down the ramp one by one, and load them into the van.”

Pete looked skeptical. “You think they’ll all fit?”

“We won’t know until we try. Besides, what choice do we have unless we get somebody else involved and have them pull the containers off?”

“Get the van, Pete,” Archie said. “Let’s go to work.”

BY THE TIME PANSY
brought the van around and Pete directed her with big gestures to line it up perfectly with the bottom of the loading ramp, Archie and I had already stacked a dozen of the cartons at the top.

“I’ll keep the boxes coming,” I said. “You push them down and Pete can load them into the van.”

The first five boxes slid down the ramp exactly like they were supposed to. Pete scooped each one up and loaded it into the back of the van. Then one didn’t slide down like it was supposed to, and everything changed.

THE SIXTH BOX HIT
a rough spot on the ramp, spun over the side, and dropped eight feet straight down to the concrete parking apron. It hit on one corner and broke wide open. Pete hurried over to it to collect the loose money before it attracted anyone’s attention. He started to bend down, but all of a sudden he stopped and just stood there looking at the broken box.

“Jack!” he called up. “Better come down here and take a look at this.”

I stopped pushing boxes and Archie stopped hauling them and we both walked down the ramp and stood next to Pete. We joined him in looking down at the piles of Macao Tourist Office brochures that had spilled out of the broken box. After a moment of stunned silence, I spoke up.

“Pete, you check the boxes you’ve already put in the van. Archie and I’ll check the others up in the plane.”

WE WERE STILL PULLING
boxes out of the containers and tearing them open when I heard Pete trudge up the loading ramp.

“They’re all the same,” he said when he got to the top. “Tourist brochures.”

Archie and I straightened up and looked at each other. All of the boxes we had opened were the same, too. Identical stacks of Macau tourist brochures. No currency of any kind. Not a single note.

“Somebody took the money before it was loaded onto the plane,” I said. “Then they filled the containers with this stuff so their weight would be right.”

“So you figure Pine was pulling a fast one on his bosses?” Pete asked.

“It wasn’t Pine. Pine was flying back to Pyongyang with the containers. If he had switched out the money, he wouldn’t have wanted to be within ten thousand miles of those containers when they were opened.”

Archie cleared his throat, and Pete and I looked at him.

“I’ve heard stories,” he said, “that the triads run the freight business here at the airport. The crews that do the loading and unloading all pretty much belong to them. They also control a lot of the printing business in Macau. It’s possible they even do the printing for the Macau tourist office.”

Archie didn’t say anything else. He just stood there looking at me with a half smile on his face, waiting for me to get it.

It took me a moment, but then I did.

I WALKED BACK TO
the loading ramp and looked down at the van and the boxes of tourist brochures that Pete had opened and dumped out on the concrete. All I could do was laugh and shake my head. Archie came over and stood next to me, and he laughed some, too.

Pete didn’t laugh. He just shook his head and looked mystified.

“I guess I don’t get it, guys,” he said. “Where did the money go?”

“Somebody arranged for it to be switched for these boxes of tourist brochures before the containers were loaded onto the plane,” I said.

“Yeah, but if it wasn’t Pine, who else could have done that? We only found out a few hours ago ourselves that the money was supposed to be on this airplane.”

“That’s right,” I nodded, “and how did we find out it was supposed to be on this airplane?”

“Pansy told us.”