Bingo had just let himself into room 5318 when his cell phone rang. It was Arrow Donaldson and he briefly thought about ignoring the call, but Bingo made his way through the rest of the room and found the dead body of Ziggy Peng.
“Ziggy Peng is dead.”
“What? How?” Arrow asked.
“This was the work of Dale Gai and an American.”
“American?”
“He was in disguise, but he’s a movie producer named Billy Barnett.”
“Why would Dale Gai and an American kill Ziggy Peng?”
“This Billy Barnett seems to be more than a movie producer. And I think we both realize Dale Gai is more than an assistant.”
“Right,” Arrow said, slowly. Bingo knew Arrow to be a misogynist. He minimized the women around him at every opportunity, not realizing that it put him at a disadvantage.
“I’m also guessing he knows the attack on the CIA wasn’t the work of Sonny Ma.”
“We’ll deal with that later. I have to figure out what to do about this dead woman. I wonder if we should have just scared them with a minor attack instead of killing her.”
“Dead women don’t tell their secrets,” Bingo said.
Arrow disconnected from his call with Bingo and noticed Li Feng staring at him.
“You ask me to trust you, yet you lie at every opportunity?”
“And you lie to me,” Arrow yelled, waving his fists at Li Feng and clenching his jaw until his face began to twitch.
“This is all built on lies. So many lies.”
“I had a plan,” Arrow said.
“You had an idea. I helped you make it into a plan.”
“You agreed to that plan and for doing me a simple favor, I am going to provide you with a new identity so you can escape the life you have here and pursue whatever nonsense it is you want for your future. This vendetta against Sonny Ma has brought trouble to my organization that threatens to take us all down.”
“Your man said something to me in the car that might be relevant now,” Li Feng said.
“Do tell.”
“He asked me why I didn’t just kill Sonny Ma.”
“We’ve all asked that.”
“It’s not what I wanted at the beginning, but now that there is already a dead woman...”
“I’ll have Bingo kill this Billy Barnett and pin it all on Sonny Ma,” Arrow said.
“That sounds like a plan.”
Bingo was going to get something to eat when his phone rang. He almost didn’t answer it because he thought Arrow Donaldson was calling a third time. But the phone kept buzzing, to the point of distraction, so he took it out and noticed it was Kwok Lin, a local gossip who occasionally had useful information. It didn’t take long for Bingo to realize Kwok was calling to tell him about Billy Barnett.
“I’ve met many Americans and many movie producers. This man was too subtle, too smart, too quiet. It was quite disturbing,” Kwok said.
“My patience with this conversation is reaching its end,” Bingo said.
“The man was with a woman who works at the Golden Desert Casino. That’s Arrow Donaldson’s casino.”
It should not have surprised him that Dale Gai was involved. Bingo contemplated hanging up on Kwok Lin and going to follow Dale Gai to see what she was up to, but he wondered if he could use this fool first.
“Call the producer back,” Bingo said. “Tell him you found out that Sonny Ma is looking to get back into the crime business and this has all the marks of his operation.”
“Really? Sonny Ma is looking to get back in the game? I thought he made a bunch of money in the tech field.”
“Do as I say. Do not worry about context or truth.”
24
Teddy hung up after talking to Kwok Lin and frowned. After telling Teddy that the triads had no interest in the nonexistent film industry in Macau, Kwok Lin had called back and told him the opposite.
“You know of famous gangster Sonny Ma? I have some highly placed sources in the underworld, and they say that Sonny Ma is looking to get back to his criminal ways.”
From everything Teddy had read about Sonny Ma, this seemed unlikely. From all accounts he’d worked hard after being released from a harsh Chinese prison, and was now making a lot of money in the tech field. He was about to make his biggest investment yet in online gambling, which stood to make him an even wealthier man. Even a hint of scandal would be enough to blow the whole deal dead.
Maybe Sonny Ma was just a rotten apple who had no choice but to succumb to his criminal temptations, even when the risk was so high. Or, Teddy thought, someone was trying to frame Sonny Ma.
Teddy decided the best thing to do was stick to his original plan of playing the part of the annoying American movie producer, going around to the sites where Peter and Ben had been filming to see if he could shake anything loose. Peter and Ben said they’d been filming at the casino, and Teddy assumed they’d meant the Golden Desert. But according to Dale Gai, they’d been referring to a pawnshop the locals called “the casino one.”
The pawnshop near the casino was not what Teddy expected. Pawnshops in Macau were used mostly as underground banks to help tourists take out gambling money that the Chinese government wouldn’t know about. This pawnshop looked less seedy, more like a warehouse for an upscale auction house.
Even though the location was in the heart of an area that looked like a movie set designer’s idea of a Chinese pawnshop neighborhood, the interior of the wide-open space was bright and clean and packed with a highly organized stock of luxury goods. Teddy’s entrance was quickly noticed, and a short, elegant older man approached him.
“I am the owner here. How can I help you?” the man said.
“I’m a producer for Centurion Studios and wanted to follow up on a lead about filming at this location. I understand my colleagues already reached out to you?”
“Oh. The movie.”
The old man looked as if Teddy had just told him that his entire family had died. He stumbled backward a few steps, then took a seat behind the main counter of the store.
“Are you okay?” Teddy asked.
“I’m just tired of all of this. All dreams and no reality.”
“A strange perspective coming from a man who makes his living from the casinos.”
“I do not make my living from the casinos. I provide a mutually beneficial service, yes, but the casinos could go away tomorrow and I would still have my business.”
“My colleagues, two Americans. Did you talk to them?”
Teddy watched the old man’s face before he answered. The man wasn’t trying to place Peter or Ben, he was constructing a lie. Teddy had seen enough of it in his years with the CIA, and he’d trained plenty of agents himself on how to do it better. This man likely had to lie quite a bit professionally, but he looked uncomfortable lying to Teddy.
“They wanted to use my business to make their movie.”
“Did you agree to that?”
“No. There were rumors that things had happened at their other locations. I didn’t want to put my people in danger.”
“There were attacks at other locations?”
The man nodded and crossed his right hand over his left in front of him on the counter.
“What did you hear about the attacks?” Teddy asked.
The man leaned closer to Teddy like he was about to tell him a secret, then he smiled crookedly and leaned back in his chair.
“No. I’m not a gossip. I’m no fan of criminals, but once a man has paid his debt to society, I have no business with how he spends his time.”
Teddy felt like he was playing an amateur-hour game show, but the old man seemed to be enjoying himself.
“You would have been paid for letting them use your business, right?” Teddy asked.