“Only nobody knew it because we used about thirty different companies to buy and convert the bonds. It looked like a whole bunch of different companies each had a small piece.”
I doubted that. It certainly wouldn’t have looked that way if anyone was paying attention. On the other hand, Manila wasn’t much of a financial center and Barry had probably struck on one of the best places in the world to find exactly the right combination of credibility, stupidity, and greed he needed to make his deal fly. What passed for the banking authorities in the Philippines were mostly local politicians, none of whom would have particularly cared what Barry and his friends were actually doing with the ABC as long as they were taken care of.
The gist of the story that Barry had told me was beguilingly simple, but the implications were breathtaking. On the surface, he had just bought a broken-down bank that was operating in a reasonably respectable place and used a string of untraceable shell companies to control it. As a practical matter, however, Barry had done nothing less than hijack an entire country as a front for a gang of Russian mobsters.
“It sounds to me like you and your new pals are on the train to glory, Barry. So why are we having this conversation? I can’t believe you’ve discovered a sudden need to confess your sins.”
“Well…” Barry rolled some words around in his mouth for a few moments, but he didn’t seem to like the taste of any of them. “It’s this way, Jack. The bank’s wiped out. Somebody scammed us.”
He said it exactly like he was pronouncing a death sentence. For Barry, it probably was.
“In the last three months we’ve lost more deposit money than we can cover from capital. I swear to God I don’t know who took it, but eventually Jimmy’s going to decide it was me.”
I could feel a chill coming off Barry. He glanced past me toward the street and I turned and followed his eyes. The tall woman was standing on the sidewalk about fifty feet away. She was looking into some shop windows and seemed to be paying no attention to us at all.
“They’ll get me, Jack. If I can’t fix this, they’ll get me; and it doesn’t matter a fig how many people I have out there protecting me.”
“This is going a little fast for me, Barry.”
“Yeah, it went a little fast for me, too. But listen up now. Once you know what I’m about to tell you, there’ll be no turning back.”
“It’s not a question of turning back. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Barry shrugged. “But you’ll know what I know, and that will make you a threat to them.”
“I’m not a threat to anyone, because in just about a minute I’m going to get up and walk off.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m not?”
“Not a chance, Jack. I know you. You wouldn’t miss the rest of this for the world.”
I sighed and motioned vaguely for Barry to continue. What could it hurt just to listen?
“Whoever hit us, they got to us through our overseas depository accounts and drained most of our foreign currency holdings. About $180,000,000 disappeared a couple of months ago. Poof! Just like that. Somebody cleaned us out and then burned us to cover their tracks. That’s when all that shit about the bank started turning up in the papers.”
“Give or take.” Barry nodded slowly at me. He did it carefully, like a man with a really bad headache. “As a practical matter, Jack, it’s like this. The Asian Bank of Commerce has been robbed. Somebody else’s crooks fucked my crooks.”
I would have laughed, but I didn’t have the heart.
Barry stood up and stretched, then he went back to walking east along Sukhumvit again, moving slowly with his head down. I stood up, too, and walked along next to him, keeping pace. Barry seemed to have lost interest in conversation, which was okay with me since it gave me a chance to think.
I had always operated on the assumption that I had a fairly sophisticated understanding of the Asian financial scene. Finding out that a regional bank, even a modest one, had been taken over by Russian mobsters came as a considerable surprise to me, to say the least.
Regardless of Barry’s confidence that he had perpetrated his coup in complete secrecy, I doubted that. I was absolutely certain there had to be quite a few other people around who knew all about it. It was a common enough conceit among foreigners doing business in Asia that they had some kind of advantage over the locals and were invariably a step or two ahead of them. That was a presumption that many people I knew had ultimately come to regret.
Government officials, particularly those in Third World countries like the Philippines and Thailand, might seem sleepy to foreigners, but in my experience most bureaucrats around the region had a shrewd eye for opportunity. They were usually far from stupid, even if they played the part of bumbling provincials. I didn’t believe for a moment that every one of them had missed Barry’s little ploy. Of course, as long as the arrangement wasn’t general knowledge and the payoffs kept arriving regularly-tea money was the polite euphemism used in Asia for the practice of such official bribery-no one would make a fuss.
There were still an awful lot of screwy things about Barry’s story. It was unlikely, probably impossible, for vast amounts of money to have disappeared from ABC accounts all over the world at exactly the same time without the active collusion of somebody inside the bank. How could Barry not have thought of that since that was exactly the way he had scammed Texas State Bank in the first place? But he didn’t seem to have thought about it; or if he had, he chose not to mention it to me.
“So what does Jimmy have to say about all this?” I asked after a while.
“Are you fucking
“In other words, you haven’t told Jimmy?”
“No fucking way, man. No way he’d believe I wasn’t scamming him. Why do you think I’m hiding out in Bangkok?”
I glanced back at the woman again. She was about fifty feet back, right where she’d been since we left Foodland.
“So what are you going to do, Barry?”
“The way I figure it, I’ve got only one chance. I have to find that money and prove to Jimmy that I had nothing to do with it disappearing in the first place.”
All of a sudden Barry stopped walking and pointed his forefinger at me.
“You know more about international banking and money laundering than anyone I know, Jack. I need your help.”
“Money’s hard to hide. It always leaves footprints. A guy who knows how can follow them anywhere. You’re the best there is, Jack, so you’re my guy. I need you to find the footprints and tell me where they lead.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.
Barry looked back at the woman trailing us and held her eyes briefly. Then he lifted his left index finger and pointed to a pedestrian bridge just ahead of us that crossed over Sukhumvit Road to the Sheraton Hotel. Immediately she walked toward us, passed by without a word, and started up the concrete steps to the bridge. Barry kept his eyes on me.
“Come on, Jack. You can do this. Help me here. I’m twisting in the wind.”
“Look, Barry, even if I was willing to help you, and even if I somehow found the bank’s money, what good would it do? Somebody else would still have it and you’d still be screwed.”
“Yeah, but you haven’t heard the rest of my plan yet.”
The woman was about halfway up the steps, walking lightly on the balls of her feet like someone poised for a fast take off. There was no one within earshot, but Barry leaned slightly toward me anyway as if he wanted to be certain he was not overheard.
“After you find the money,” he whispered, “I want you to steal it back.”
Then Barry turned away, jogged up the steps, and caught up with the woman near the top. I just stood there and followed them both with my eyes as they crossed the bridge and disappeared into the Sheraton. I was too dumbfounded to do anything else.
