“What do you mean?” Patrick asked.
“Superstition. The number eight in Chinese is pronounced ba, and that sounds like the word for wealth. Two figure eights resemble the way “double joy” is written. Having an eight in your address, on your licence plate, or in your phone number is thought to bring good luck, and the more eights the better. Except, of course, for Seto in this instance,” Ava said as she punched in the numbers.
The gate swung open. Patrick parked the Toyota next to the Mercedes. “The house code?” Ava asked.
“The same as the gate,” Anna said.
They walked to the front door. Ava held the woman by the elbow and Patrick had a firm grip on the back of Seto’s suit jacket. The walkway was uneven, making the blindfolded pair stumble; Ava held her charge steady and Patrick yanked Seto straight.
The house was remarkable in at least one way: when they entered, Ava saw a staircase directly in front of her, running straight from the door to the second floor. For anyone Chinese it was an unthinkable design. It would take only a minimal understanding of feng shui to know that it would bring the worst possible luck to the owners of the house. She figured that Seto, or most probably the woman, had bought the house as is.
To the left of the unlucky staircase was a dining room furnished with six chairs and a naked table. No sideboard, no plants, no pictures. It looked as if the room had never been used. The rectangular room on the right was about forty square metres in area, and all it contained was a cheap-looking leather couch, two beanbag chairs, and a large LCD television.
Ava walked towards the kitchen at the back of the house, pushing Anna in front of her. The room held a glass table with three napkins on it and a bowl of fruit, plus a counter large enough for a double sink and a prep area on either side. There was a cutting board and a set of knives in one prep area and the other had a substantial spice rack and jars of flour, sugar, and cereal.
“Bring Seto back here,” she shouted to Patrick.
Seto scuffled into the kitchen. The house was air-conditioned but there were beads of sweat on his forehead. “Take off his jacket,” she said.
Patrick undid the handcuffs, removed the jacket, and then put the cuffs back on, adding a hard tug on Seto’s arms for good measure.
Ava set Seto on a chair, lifted his hands over the chair back, and pulled them down behind. She then knelt down and grabbed his ankles. She spread them until they were aligned with the chair legs and taped his ankles to them.
“Pass me the jacket,” she said to Patrick. She quickly went through the pockets, extracting a wallet.
“Now, where is his computer?”
“Upstairs,” the woman said.
“Let’s go,” Ava said. “Patrick, stay with Seto.”
There were four rooms on the second floor. Two were being used as bedrooms, one was empty, and the fourth was a makeshift office. Ava took Anna into the master bedroom, which was furnished with a king-size four- poster bed made of heavy mahogany and matching massive wooden dressers; one wall was entirely mirrored.
The bed was littered with decorative pillows. Ava pushed them onto the floor and then told Anna to climb onto the bed. Then Ava taped her ankles together and taped her mouth. “Now stay here. Don’t move,” she said.
Ava walked into the office and sat at Seto’s desk. It had two drawers on each side and a laptop computer on top. Ava turned on the computer, and while it was booting up she went through the drawers. They were mostly empty, except for one, in which there was a copy of a plane ticket and two cancelled boarding passes. Seto had come to Georgetown from Port of Spain via Miami. There were also two passports. One was American, in the name of Jackson Seto, and the other Chinese, in the name of Seto Sun Kai.
She opened his wallet. There were four credit cards, all in the name of Jackson Seto, and a Washington state driver’s licence in the same name with the address she had visited in Seattle. He also had a Hong Kong ID card under the name Seto Sun Kai.
The computer flickered to life and asked her for a password. That could wait; she turned her attention to the rest of the room. The only things that interested her were six cardboard filing boxes pushed up against a wall.
When she opened the first box, she could see that Seto was neat and organized Everything was filed alphabetically, and when she looked in the Barrett’s Bank folder, the paperwork was ordered by date. She took the folder over to the desk and quickly scanned the documents from the oldest — a copy of the signature card from when he had opened his account — to the newest, which included a recent online bank statement. She had her notebook in her kitbag, and the account number on the statement matched the one she had written down.
The account was in the name of S amp;A Investments. There was only one authorized signature: Seto’s. She checked the dates. The account had been open for more than ten years but had been almost inactive until three years ago, when deposit activity picked up. The wire transfers of Tam’s money were the largest deposits by far, but Seto had been squirreling other funds away all along, mainly in the range of ten to twenty thousand dollars. Some much larger deposits had been made over the past year; she assumed that was the money Seafood Partners had been scamming from the Indian and Indonesian fish guys.
The two Tam wire transfers brought the account total to more than seven million American dollars. It was the kind of surprise Ava enjoyed.
She went downstairs to join the boys. Patrick sat quietly on the kitchen counter, jiggling his legs to some music in his head. “Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked.
She put Seto’s passports, his Hong Kong ID card, and the Barrett’s file on the kitchen table. “I didn’t do badly.” She moved closer to Patrick. “I’m going to speak to him in Cantonese,” she said.
Seto was slumped in the chair, his chin almost on his chest. She reached for the tape on his mouth and ripped it off. He yelled in pain.
“Seto Sun Kai, what made you think we would not come after you? And what made you think we would not find you?”
He shook his head as if he was confused, then licked his lower lip. She wondered if it had sunk in that she had used his Chinese name.
“Why would you or anyone else come after me? I haven’t done anything.” His voice was hoarse, his mouth dry from stress.
Ava took a glass from the cupboard and filled it from the tap. The water was a lighter colour than the hotel’s. Must be the neighbourhood, she thought.
“Here, drink,” she said, holding the glass to his lips.
He hesitated.
“It’s your own fucking tap water,” she snapped.
He took a careful sip. “Where is Ng?” he asked.
“Gone and not coming back.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe this: You don’t have friends here anymore. No one is going to come to your aid. This is strictly between us now, and how it goes and how it ends is your choice.”
“Who sent you?”
“I work for people who are friends of Andrew Tam. You remember Andrew Tam?”
“Where are you from?”
“Hong Kong.”
He became still. She knew he was now fully aware of his situation. She knew he would be thinking about how to extract himself from it. She knew that when he finished examining his options, he would be left with the one she wanted him to choose. But she also knew it wouldn’t stop him from trying other ways out.
“We did business, just business, Andrew and me. There were some problems with customers and I had to step in and salvage what I could, for all our sakes.”
“So you’re telling me you were looking after Andrew’s best interests.”
“We had inventory that was shit. I had it reworked and repacked, that’s all. It couldn’t have been sold any other way.”
“And you discussed this with Andrew?”
“There wasn’t time. And besides, he was just the money man. What did he know about the actual
