THE KING OF MACAU (The Jack Shepherd International Crime Novels) (27 page)

The man tossed a piece of dark cloth to Pine. Pine caught it and held it out to Freddy.

“I’m going to have to ask you to wear a hood,” he said. “It’s for your own protection really. The less you know about our operations here, the better it will be for you.”

“I don’t know anything at all.”

“And take it from me, you want to keep it that way.”

Pine held out the hood and Freddy took it. What else was he going to do? He pulled it over his head. It wasn’t uncomfortable and he could breathe fine, but the inside of it smelled funny. Like steamed broccoli. It made no sense that the inside of the hood would smell like steamed broccoli, but it did.

Pine or someone pulled the drawstrings on the sides of the hood. They tightened around his neck and he was in darkness.

SOMEONE TOOK HIS ARM
and led him forward a few steps, turned him to the right, and tugged him gently forward. Freddy walked with a shuffling gait like his feet had been chained together, although they hadn’t been. It was simply a disconcerting feeling to have to walk without being able to see anything and it made you walk funny.

“We’re coming to the stairs.”

He was surprised to hear Pine’s voice close to his ear. He had assumed it was one of the heavies who was gripping his left arm and pulling him along, but apparently it was Pine.

“There are two flights. Walk slowly. I won’t let you fall.”

DOWN THE STAIRS,
another fifteen or twenty steps straight ahead, and they stopped. Freddy heard the sound of a door opening and he felt cool, moist air on his skin and heard that low murmur that every city gives off no matter how quiet the streets might be. They started walking again and he felt the surface change under his feet from indoors to outdoors.

“I’m going to put you in a van. You’ll be in the back. There’s a mattress on the floor and I want you to lie down on it. Do not take off the hood. One of my men will be watching you and it will go very badly for you if you try to remove it.”

Freddy had no intention of removing his hood. He didn’t want to see a damned thing. But when he heard the muffled sound of his own voice coming back at him from inside the hood he nodded instead of trying to talk.

Somewhere in front of them Freddy heard a metallic creaking sound that he assumed was the doors of the van being opened. With Pine tugging on his left arm he continued to shuffle slowly forward until he bumped gently into something solid about at waist level.

“Okay, you’re there,” Pine said. “Let me help you up.”

Pine tugged at his elbow and turned him around. With surprising gentleness, he tried to lift Freddy up into the van, but Freddy hardly budged.

“Man, you got to lose some weight,” Pine laughed.

Freddy shrugged. Even if he could have made himself understood through the goddamned hood he wouldn’t have been much interested in discussing his weight problem with Pine. He supposed that was the upside to being sent to Pyongyang. At least he would lose a little weight. Probably quite a bit of weight…

Pine took his hands away and a moment later Freddy was lifted from both sides, so he gathered Pine’s two thugs had taken over. He felt the metal floor of the van under his butt and his legs and, when he reached out with his hands to steady himself, he felt the mattress, too. He pulled himself further into the van and rolled onto the mattress. It was actually pretty comfortable. Better than the one he had been sleeping on for the last two days.

The back doors of the van slammed, followed a few moments later by both of the front doors. The engine started and Freddy felt the van begin to move.

FREDDY WONDERED IF HE
shouldn’t start counting or something so later he would be able to say how far they had driven. Since he had no idea where they were starting from, however, it wouldn’t mean much to know how long it took them to get to wherever they were going, would it?

He knew he wouldn’t be long. You couldn’t drive much more than twenty minutes in any direction in Macau, even if the traffic was heavy. The whole place was surrounded by water except for the narrow neck of land crossed by the Chinese border, and he seriously doubted that Pine would be driving across the Chinese border with a guy lying in the back of his van wearing a black hood. Besides, why would Pine want to take him into China anyway? Could the Chinese government somehow be involved with helping North Korea run their operations in Macau? No, there wasn’t a chance in the world of that. Whatever the DPRK was up to in Macau, they were doing it on their own. He had no doubt whatsoever about that.

Freddy tried to work out from the sounds he could hear where they were going. There was really no point in doing that either, he knew. When he got to where they were taking him, that’s where he would be. What earthly difference would it make whether he had figured it out in advance? Still, he listened and tried to guess since he didn’t have anything better to do.

For the first ten minutes or so he heard nothing he was able to identify, only the normal sounds of traffic all around them. The van did seem to be moving at a good clip though, which narrowed down the possibilities quite a bit. There weren’t many roads in Macau where you could drive steadily at speed rather than bumping along from one traffic light to the next. He felt the road surface change and heard the hollow sound tires make when they are crossing a bridge and suddenly he knew exactly where they were. They were crossing one of the long bridges that tied the Macau peninsula to the islands of Taipa and Coloane. But were they going north toward the Chinese border or south toward where his house was at the edge of the South China Sea?

Freddy’s guess was they were heading south. He had heard traffic around them when they first started out and there wasn’t any traffic to the south on Coloane. It was more likely they had begun the journey on the crowded peninsula and were now moving toward the less crowded part of Macau, not the other way around. The more Freddy thought about it, the more certain he was that he was right, but he also had to admit that his insight was of no value at all in getting his ass out of this before it got shipped to Pyongyang.

THERE WERE ONLY TWO
ways out of Macau if you didn’t count the land crossing into China, and Freddy had already written that possibility off. One was by air, and one was by sea. If he were being sent to Pyongyang, it would be one or the other.

Macau’s port was fairly small since no passenger vessels called there at all and most of the cargo for the area went through the huge container port in Hong Kong. There wasn’t much use in trying to duplicate Hong Kong’s extensive facilities in Macau. Hong Kong was too close and it was far cheaper to barge cargo back and forth to the port there. Still, there was a tiny container port in Macau and it was out on the north edge of Taipa close to the airport.

Freddy had never actually been to it, but he knew where it was, and he knew that occasionally North Korean ships called there. He had always wondered why they did, since surely the amount of commercial trade between Macau and North Korea was negligible. Maybe they were the line of communications between the DPRK and Pine’s operations in Macau. Maybe the DPRK moved their people in and out of Macau on the freighters making those occasional port calls here. Maybe now he was going to be one of those people.

Flying him out was the other possibility. The airport in Macau was small, too, and taking him out through the commercial side certainly wasn’t going to happen. They could hardly go out on a regular flight. There were no direct flights to Pyongyang and you couldn’t exactly sit in an airport lounge somewhere sipping a beer and waiting for your connection when you were traveling with someone you had kidnapped who was wearing a black hood over his head. If they took him out by air, it would have to be a private flight of some kind. Perhaps a cargo flight. That could be how the DPRK moved their people in and out of Macau. Not on ships, but on cargo flights.

THE VAN STOPPED AND
Freddy heard muffled conversation followed by a creaking noise. The van started rolling again right after that, but more slowly now. It sounded to him like they had probably passed through a gate.

After three or four minutes, the van stopped for a second time and Freddy heard more creaking and finally a bang. Had they pulled into some kind of parking area, a garage perhaps, and slammed a door behind them?

The more Freddy thought about it, the less it seemed to matter one way or another. Here he was lying in the back of a van with a hood tied over his head and Pine and his muscle boys were sitting in the front of the van. He closed his eyes and sighed. Pine was going to do whatever he wanted with him. The idea that he might find a way to escape or that Jack Shepherd might rescue him was a ridiculous fantasy.

His life in Macau was over. His dream of going to Hawaii was dead. All he had left now was to hope that he wasn’t dead, too.

On the other hand, if the alternative was to be shipped to Pyongyang…

COMPARED TO THE LADY
in yellow, the lady in black was a piece of cake.

I made a quick left off the walkway, wandered around among a bunch of blackjack tables until she passed, then turned and fell in behind her. I called Archie while I walked and told him to take Pete and get outside the exit across from the Wynn since she seemed to be moving in that direction. As long as she was inside the casino I could cover her, but this time I wanted to be ready if she went outside.

And that was exactly what she did. She left through the same exit the woman in the yellow t-shirt had taken, crossed over
Praceta 24 de Junho
, and went into the casino at the Wynn. She walked straight through the casino and, with the three of us rambling after her, she went right back out again through the front door. I didn’t think she was making an effort to shake off surveillance, just taking a short cut to…well, that was the question, wasn’t it?

The lady in black followed the Wynn’s driveway down to the double boulevard on which the hotel sits. She crossed under it using a pedestrian tunnel, rode an escalator back to street level in front of the old Hotel Lisboa, and walked north along
Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro
which everyone calls San Ma Lo. It is crowded, dirty, and noisy. Its sidewalks are jammed day and night with locals trying to make their way somewhere and tourists not going anywhere in particular.

We closed up on the lady in black a bit so we wouldn’t miss her if she suddenly dodged into one of the stores lining both sides of the street. But she didn’t. She crossed Senado Square, passed the Leal Senado Building, a graceful Mediterranean styled building that had been Macau’s seat of government since the eighteenth century, and kept striding purposefully northward.

It was a pleasant evening for a stroll. The fog had returned with the evening air and it gave the old city a gauzy, timeless feel. Once we crossed Senado Square, the crowds thinned and we dropped back a bit. We did our best to look like three pals out for a stroll between sessions at the tables.

“I think she’s headed for the Sofitel,” Archie said. “There’s not much else down this way.”

“Maybe not, but I doubt the North Koreans are laundering money out of the Sofitel.”

A TOWERING PILE OF
yellow stucco far newer than anything around it, the Sofitel is directly on the inner harbor, the old waterfront that was once Macau’s front door. I had stayed at the Sofitel a couple of times and liked it a lot. It’s a fine hotel, although a little out of the Macau mainstream, both because of its location and because it doesn’t have a big, flashy casino attached to it. Come to think of it, those are probably the two things I liked most about it.

The inner harbor isn’t much of a waterfront these days. It’s certainly not the front door to Macau anymore. It’s not even a decent back door. The Chinese mainland is directly on the other side, and decades of aggressive landfilling by the Chinese have narrowed the harbor to not more than a couple of hundred yards of open water. Now it looks less like a harbor than it does a lazy, not particularly important river. There isn’t much shipping activity there anymore either. A few ferries and some private boats come in from time to time, but that’s about it. All the real shipping has moved out to the new container port by the airport.

Regardless of all that, the old waterfront and the Barra district that surrounds it are still my favorite part of Macau. It’s almost all that is left these days of the exotic south China port of the fifties I first learned about in black and white noir thrillers on late night television. The Macau in those films had a seedy glamour that I would associate with Asia for the rest of my life. European men in wrinkled white suits, sloe-eyed local women wearing tight fitting cheongsams, and creaking ceiling fans slowly stirring the heavy, humid air.

Except for the Sofitel, the old waterfront is still pretty seedy, which is what I like about it. Some people preferred their world scrubbed, tidy, and vacuum-sealed. I like mine with a little dirt and a few odors. It seems more real to me that way, more worthy of being lived in.

We were less than a hundred yards from the Sofitel when the lady in black made an abrupt right turn off of San Ma Lo into a tiny lane. Breaking into a trot, we rounded the corner in time to see her disappear into a building a few doors down.

The lane was no more than ten feet wide with narrow sidewalks on both sides. Flush up to both sidewalks were unbroken ranks of four and five story buildings. They were all painted in pastel shades of yellow, pink, and blue, and they had balconies on most of their floors that were railed with intricate black ironwork.

The wispy fog had turned the ambient light bluish-white and it rendered everything in soft focus. The little street didn’t seem quite real. It could have been a flat-fronted replica of a Portuguese village constructed in some slightly off kilter Florida theme park.

“Let me walk down and back by myself and grab a look,” I said. “The three of us are way too conspicuous in this neighborhood.”

They both nodded and it seemed to me that Archie looked amused. I couldn’t immediately see what I had said that might have amused him, so I let it go.