Laundry Man

The same Hong Kong corporate services office that SAI was using to administer their company engaged in Cambodia shrimp farming was also administering the Hong Kong operations of the Asian Bank of Commerce, whatever they actually were. No doubt several hundred other investment companies used Hong Kong Directors to manage corporate vehicles for them as well, but that was still quite a coincidence.

“Ah, screw it,” I murmured, burying the bones of the conspiracy theories that were rattling faintly in the back of my mind. It really was just a coincidence, I told myself. It had to be.

When I got back to the Mandarin Hotel, I stopped at the cigar shop in the lobby and bought a couple boxes of Montecristos. I didn’t really feel like going up to my room, so I went into the Captain’s Bar and ordered an espresso. Since it was still early in the afternoon, I had the place more or less to myself and I cracked one of the boxes and took out a cigar. The waiter noticed what I was doing and brought me a cutter and some matches when he served my espresso.

I began the ritual of cutting and lighting my cigar, but my mind was on Barry Gale and the ABC. Until Sunday night I’d barely even heard of the Asian Bank of Commerce, but suddenly I seemed to be stumbling over all kinds of connections with it. What the hell was really going on here?

My personal policy for dealing with perplexing questions was pretty simple. I had long ago learned that there was always somebody somewhere who already knew whatever it was I needed to know, and if I asked them nicely, well… sometimes they would just tell me. The problem, of course, was how to find whoever it was who already knew what I needed to know.

I smoked the Montecristo and tapped my forefinger against my espresso cup.

In this case, fortunately, that problem was easy enough for me to solve. I knew a guy and this guy would know all about the Asian Bank of Commerce, especially the part that no one else wanted to talk about.

I lifted the cup and downed the espresso in three quick sips. It was rich and strong and I savored the jolt as the caffeine hit me.

Even better, the guy was right here in Hong Kong.

The question wasn’t how much this guy knew, it was whether he would tell me what he knew. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of any way to find out but to ask him.

SEVENTEEN

I went up to my room and stashed the cigars I had bought, then pulled out my cell phone and checked the address book. Sure enough he was there. I hadn’t talked to Archie Ward in a long time, but it had been even longer since I’d cleaned out my address book.

I dialed his direct line at the main office of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. The woman who answered told me that Archie Ward no longer worked there, but of course that had been more or less what I’d expected her to say. Brushing aside the woman’s categorical insistence that she couldn’t help me, I gave her my name and told her that I was at the Mandarin.

Archie Ward was a redheaded, pathologically profane Aussie I had met a couple of years before. He told me then that he was a technology security specialist for HSBC and he had hired me to review a series of transactions that the bank thought had an unusually ripe odor to them. Large amounts of money had been moving back and forth between the bank’s main office in Hong Kong and some of its branches in Europe and Asia, and the coordinated way the transfers had been occurring had caused Archie to suspect that the bank was unwittingly facilitating some pretty questionable transactions.

Archie told me he had tracked all of the transfers among HSBC’s offices easily enough, but was having trouble understanding the movements of the funds once they had left the bank’s own system. He said that was why he needed my help, but of course it wasn’t. What he really wanted to know was exactly who was behind the transactions since he hadn’t been able to find out on his own. I understood that, and he knew I understood that.

Archie never said exactly who had referred him to me, but he used the name of a Washington lawyer I had known for a long time. When I called the fellow he gave Archie the sort of vague endorsement that was the traditional indication of an official sanction of some kind, although the lawyer was unwilling to be more specific. The whole assignment had felt a little screwy, but I liked Archie, and I had no real doubt that he was one of the good guys, so I had given him a hand without asking too many questions.

It hadn’t taken me long to figure out the corporate structure HSBC’s customer had been using to conceal the source of the funds. It was clever, but not that clever, and within a couple of weeks I knew that the instructions for the transfers had really been coming from a Greek-born arms dealer who now operated out of a ritzy beach resort about an hour north of Sydney. Somehow I got the impression Archie already knew that. He just hadn’t been able to prove it until I did it for him.

Naturally the connection between the source of the transfers I had uncovered and my friend Archie’s colorful Aussie accent struck me as something less than pure coincidence. By that time it was pretty obvious to me that Archie wasn’t actually employed by HSBC at all. To tell the truth, I had no doubt at all that Archie really worked for ASIS, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, but following accepted etiquette in such matters I pretended not to know. And for his part, Archie pretended not to know that I knew.

Archie had called me a few times after that with some general questions about corporate finance which happily I had been able to answer for him. He always ended our conversations by saying that he owed me one. This seemed to me as good a time as any to collect on the accumulated debt.

I had a couple of other Hong Kong numbers in my diary for Archie, too, so I called those for good measure. One was a mobile that didn’t even ring and had apparently been abandoned, but at the other number a woman’s voice answered with a simple, “Yes?” I smiled at her Australian accent, obvious even from that single word, and told her I was calling for Archie. Before she could protest her ignorance that any such person existed, I gave her my name, said I was at the Mandarin, and asked for Archie to call me there. Naturally, she said she didn’t know what I was talking about. I thanked her and hung up.

One of the numbers must have worked, maybe all of them, because about twenty minutes later the telephone in my room rang.

“You got your cell phone with you?” Archie spoke without preamble.

“I do.”

Before I even had a chance to give him the number he hung up. It was only a few seconds before it rang.

“Hello.”

“Good on ya, mate. She’ll be right now.“

“I won’t even bother to ask you how you got this number, Archie.”

“Shit, mate. I wouldn’t fucking tell you anyway.”

“So…” I hesitated a moment. “What’s new?”

Archie started laughing so hard I thought he might hurt himself.

“What’s new? Jack Shepherd, you are without a doubt the only bloke I’ve ever known who would have the nerve to ring me up and ask, ‘What’s new?’ You Yank ratbags are too much. You really are.”

“Just being friendly.”

“Well, mate, I’m as busy as a one-legged bloke in an arse-kicking contest, so let’s have it. What’s on your mind?”

“It’s all probably just a lot of nothing, Archie, but I need to collect on one of those favors you owe me. Something a little strange has come up and I thought you might be able to give me some background.”

“Reckon I probably can if I want to. What’s the subject?”

“The Asian Bank of Commerce. You ever heard of it?”

There was a short silence.

“Bloody oath,” Archie sighed after a few moments. “What are you doing mixed up with those bodgie mongrels?”

“Well, it’s a little hard to explain, but-”