LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) (35 page)

Barry tapped the side of his head with one finger and hoisted his eyebrows. I struggled not to laugh.

“All the ABC had to do was arrange routine trade financing between the Burmese shell companies and a bunch of ordinary businesses the Chinese army controlled. Coal mines and toy companies, shit like that. We accepted the cash being held in the American banks as security for the loans. After that, we could shift the deposits around through our own system without anybody noticing. You following me here, Jack?”

“I think I can grasp the mechanics, Barry.”

“It was even simpler than you might think because here’s the twist I put on the deal. We took the Burmese funds out of the American shell companies as security for the loans to the Chinese, but we never made any loans.”

It took me a moment, but then I saw the brutal simplicity in what Barry was saying.

“You’re telling me that instead of laundering the money that came from the Burmese and passing it through to the Chinese, the Asian Bank of Commerce
stole
it?”

“Not exactly.
I
stole it, not the bank. I personally cleaned the motherfuckers out.”

“Why would you think you could get away with that?”

“Two reasons, Jack.”

Barry held up two fingers as if I might not be familiar with the number.

“First, what we had with the ABC was a sort of No Tell Motel for money. I mean, it’s like this. You’re at a nice little motel way out somewhere on the highway with a lady friend and you see your worst enemy with some big-tittied hooker. What are you going to do? Call his wife and say you saw him there? And then when
your
wife finds out
you
were there and she asks ‘What were you doing at the No Tell Motel?’ what are you going to say to her? Hey, it was foolproof, Jack. The money was never supposed to be there in the first place. So who the hell was going to complain that it was gone?”

“What’s the second reason?” I asked.

“Well, the second reason—and I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Jack—is you.”

“Me? I’ve got nothing to do with your deal, Barry.”

Barry smiled and there was something about the way he did it that I really didn’t like.

“Every business deal I have ever been in eventually works out the same way, Jack. Somebody gets fucked. You know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“So that’s what you’ve got to do with this deal. You’re the guy who’s getting fucked.”

“IT’S THIS WAY,
Jack. Even when you’re messing around with money that’s not supposed to exist, it still belongs to somebody, and they’ll still be plenty pissed when they find out it’s gone.”

“I can imagine.”

“Yeah, that was the problem I had. If the Burmese thought I had their money, they might not come after me publicly, but you can bet your ass that they’d do it privately. Sometimes it’s those private complaints that really end up fucking you in the ass. You know what I mean?”

“Not really. That’s not a problem I’ve ever had.”

“Well, Jack, that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you here. You have it now.”

Barry tapped the side of his head with his index finger for the second time. He apparently liked that gesture a lot.

“Taking the money was easy, Jack, but I knew keeping it was a whole different deal. I needed a patsy, someone who was such a respected expert in international finance that it would be entirely believable that he was the scammer, not me. Someone exactly like you.”

“That’s nuts, Barry. Why would anyone in his right mind think that I had anything to do with all this?”

“Because your fingerprints are all over everything connected with it: the legal work, the fund transfers, even the corporate structures we used. It was all your work, Jack. You put it together.”

That didn’t make any sense. I had never had any thing to do with the Asian Bank of Commerce. The closest I had come to it was fifteen minutes in a corporate services office in Hong Kong trying to have a conversation with a human doorstop.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

He had me there. I shook my head.

“I own Southeast Asian Investments, Jack. Why do you think you got that invitation out of the blue to join their board of directors?” Barry grinned and spread his palms. “Hey, I always remember my buddies, don’t I?”

And just like that the pieces of the puzzle began to slide around in my mind and assemble themselves into a picture that actually made a sort of weird sense.

“The Cambodian shrimp farm deal they ask me to look into was really just a conduit for laundering money into China?” I asked carefully.

“Yep,” Barry nodded. “You’re strapped so tightly to ABC and Southeast Asian Investments that it won’t take even those Burmese idiots very long to work out that you’re the guy in the barrel here.”

“And what did I do with all this money I’m supposed to have taken?”

“Ah, Jack…” Barry spread his hands in front of him in the classic gesture of helplessness. “I only wish I knew. If I did, honest banker that I am, I’d send the information straight to the Chinese who were supposed to get the funds in the first place. You were just too smart for me.”

And that was when I started to laugh.

Barry looked puzzled. He figured I ought to be pissing myself right about then, certainly oozing some heavy sweat at the very least, but I wasn’t. I was sitting there laughing at him.

“Laugh if you want, Jack, but I hear both the Burmese and the Chinese are looking all over for their money. And they’re looking for
you.”

I sat and shook my head. This was too good to be true.

“How much did you get?” I asked him. “How much did
I
get?’

“Nearly $50,000,000.”

I knew I might never get another moment like this again if I lived forever.

“Actually, it wasn’t quite that much, was it, Barry? It was more like $43,600,000. Plus change.”

I stared Barry straight in the eyes and relished every second of the silence that followed. He tried briefly to look unperturbed, but the effort was a dead loss.

“How the hell did you know that?” he snapped.

I could see the fear. Barry had lost control somehow. He didn’t know why or how, and that had scared the hell out of him. Slamming him right then was like slugging a drunk, but I did it anyway. I continued to stare straight into his wide black eyes and I swung from my heels.

“The money you stole was going to China all right, Barry, but it didn’t belong to any Burmese drug producers and it wasn’t meant for building heroin refineries in China. It was a CIA slush fund. It was bribe money the CIA was laundering to keep their Chinese networks going.”

Barry went completely white. I had never seen anyone go white before and I had always thought the expression to be mostly poetic license; but it wasn’t, and he did.

“Bullshit!” he sputtered.

For a moment Barry appeared to be fumbling for some even more forceful way to put his thoughts, but if that’s what he was doing, he was spectacularly unsuccessful.

“Bullshit!” he sputtered again, spittle accumulating at the corners of his mouth.

This time he pointed a finger at me, although I wasn’t quite sure what he thought that added to his point of view.

“Makes no difference to me if you believe it,” I said and tossed out my most ingratiating smile. “My ass isn’t hanging out here.”

“The hell it isn’t!” Barry jutted out his chin and I could hear his breathing accelerate. “It doesn’t matter
whose
money it really was. Whoever it is, they still think you’ve got it. You’re still the patty in this burger, old buddy.”

I shook my head. “How do you think I knew the exact amount of money you had taken, Barry? A guy connected to the Agency gave me the number.” And then I leaned in and added my coldest smile. “And he told me because the Agency already
knew
I didn’t have their money.”

Barry made a disdainful noise, but I could almost hear him thinking.

“Then why are they still on your ass, shithead?” he snapped after a moment.

“Because they want something else from me, Barry.”

“What the fuck could they want that’s worth more to them than $43,000,000?”

And there it was. We had come to the bottom line.

I smiled broadly when I answered.

“You, Barry. They want you.”

Right in front of me I saw Barry Gale deflate. Like an old balloon man slowly losing air, his arms contracted, followed by his legs, then his shoulders pulled back somewhere into his neck and he crumpled slowly into his red leather wing chair.

“That’s why I went through all that nonsense to get here without being followed. I wanted to hear your side of the story before I made up my mind what to do.” I started to laugh again in spite of myself. “Man, oh man. I can’t believe it. You’re even dumber than the spooks.”

Barry watched me as if I was far away and needed magnification. His eyes shifted back and forth and his jaw worked. He leaned forward in his chair like he was about to rise, but then he shifted his weight and sat back again. He crossed and uncrossed his legs.

Then an expression like release appeared on Barry’s face and I felt a shift in the air. All at once he looked like a man who had just made the pleasing discovery that the law of gravity didn’t apply to him.

“Is the money really the CIA’s?” he asked in a voice so soft and controlled that it startled me after his screaming fit.

“That’s what they told me. All $43,600,000 of it.”

“I don’t know. That doesn’t sound right to me.”

“Then what do you think the truth is, Barry?

“Shoot, I don’t know, Jack. The truth is a slippery business sometimes.” Barry took a deep breath and looked away. “What do you figure it’s going to cost me to fix all this, Jack?”

“I don’t know, Barry. I’m not really the guy to ask. You probably ought to talk to the spooks about that when they show up here, but I’ll bet they can be real hard asses when they find out that some tin-pot pimp for a bunch of Russian mobsters scammed them.”

Barry looked no more concerned than if we were negotiating the purchase of a car and I had suggested a price in which he was just slightly disappointed.

“So what do you do now, Jack?” Barry crossed his legs and leaned back, like a man making social chitchat without a care in the world. “You go back to Bangkok and you meet the Agency guys you know, I suppose, and you tell them…”

Barry stopped talking and seemed to search hard for a sensible answer to his own question.

“What do you tell them, Jack?”

Is that a trick question?

“I’ll probably tell them what happened to their money and where they can find you.”

“And then you think they’ll just let you walk away? You think after that you can just go back to teaching and they’ll forget all about you?”

I said nothing and Barry shaped his face into an expression of incredulity.

“Who do you think killed Howard and Dollar, Jack?”

Barry shook his head sadly like I had just missed the last question in the lightning round and he could hardly believe my lousy luck.

“You think they had something to do with setting up this deal and I whacked Dollar and Howard so they wouldn’t tell anyone about it? Is that what you think, Jack?”

“Something like that.”

Barry shook his head some more in mock amazement at my naïveté.

“The CIA killed them both, Jack.”

“Give me a break, Barry. If you really think you can sell me that, you’ve been watching way too much TV.”

“Think about it. Why would anybody have been after Dollar and Howard?
To find out where the money really went.
I already
knew
where the money really went, Jack. It was the CIA that didn’t know. They were the ones after Dollar and Howard. Not me.”

“I can’t see that, Barry,” I said.

But I could.

Barry was right. He didn’t have to look for the money. He already knew where it was.

“So, the way I’m looking at this thing now, Jack, the spooks must have followed the money from Howard to Dollar, and now to…” Barry stopped talking and pointed his right hand at me, using his thumb and forefinger to make it into a little gun. “You see my point.”

I did. Ray Charles could see his point.

“It looks to me like you’re standing in a tricky load of goose shit here, Jack. So, just out of interest, tell me, what do you plan to do now?”

It was a good question, and right off the top of my head, I didn’t have a great answer.

Everything was going too fast. I was usually pretty good at thinking on my feet, but this was ridiculous. A half-hour of talking to Barry and I’d already accumulated an array of faceless adversaries big enough to throw a respectable masked ball. It was all getting so complicated that I probably should have been taking notes.

All at once Barry pushed himself out of the leather wing and strode past me. Beth had come in again and was waiting quietly for him at the end of the gallery. As he had before, Barry stood too close to her for me to hear what they were saying, but I could see Beth’s face and something that looked like disquiet in her expression as her lips moved. Barry folded his arms and glanced quickly back at me; then he said something and Beth frowned. After that, she said something else and Barry shook his head.

“I got to take care of something, Jack,” he called back to me without turning around.

“That’s okay. It’s past my bedtime anyway. I’ll probably just shove off.”

That caused Barry to turn around. It also caused him to jam his hands in his pockets and go back to chuckling.

“Nah, Jack. That’s not a choice for you right now. Make yourself at home. I’ll be back in a few minutes and we’ll get us some drinks, maybe have some sandwiches, and then we’ll cut a deal here. We’re both businessmen. We’ve done tough deals before. I’m sure we can work something out.”

Barry fixed me with a steady eye.

“That’s the truth, don’t you think, Jack?”

I shrugged and swung my feet up on the coffee table, settling back into the sofa’s deep cushions and clasping my hands together behind my head.

“The truth is a slippery business sometimes, Barry.”