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.”
“$180,000,000?”
“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 kidding me, Jack? You remember Harold Wilkins? He only lost one million dollars and you know what happened to him.”
“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.”
“Me? You want me to help you find your money?”
“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.
TWELVE
The next morning I overslept. I showered and dressed as quietly as I could in order not to wake Anita, got the Volvo out of the garage, and made straight for Starbucks. With any luck, I could soak up enough caffeine and sugar to set me up nicely for my ten o’clock class. The course was a real yawner, even for me-a lecture series on the application of American securities regulations to capital raisings in the United States by foreign companies-and I assumed my students really hated it. Today in particular, without a caffeine high and a sugar buzz I didn’t have a hope in hell of getting through it.
There were some people I knew who vilified Starbucks as an American corporate giant heartlessly homogenizing the unique cultures of the world in the headlong pursuit of profits. Strangely, I had noticed that the people who put the most energy into their vilifying were generally other Americans, mostly the kind you met abroad who were trying way too hard to be perceived as high-minded citizens of the world rather than just Yanks on the loose. I liked Starbucks. The coffee was good, the food was okay, and the chairs were comfortable. If that made me a closet imperialist, I could live with it.
It was a nice morning again by local standards. The night winds had come and gone and they had left behind a dazzling blue sky without the usual layer of brown crud to spoil it. I whipped up Ploenchit Road and pulled into the McDonald’s parking area just behind the Grand Hyatt. Smiling at the brown-uniformed security guard who came over to check me out, I transferred a red one-hundred-baht note smoothly into his lightly sweating palm.