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-”
“Never mind. Can you meet me right now?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Sure. Where are you?”
“Don’t worry about that. Just pay attention, Jacko. Do exactly what I tell you to do.”
I paid attention, then following Archie’s instructions I took the lift downstairs and left the Mandarin by the front entrance. Climbing a short flight of stairs just on the other side of the hotel’s service drive, I joined the rivers of pedestrians flowing through the networks of overhead walkways that knitted Hong Kong together and walked to the Star Ferry terminal.
The Star Ferry had been running back and forth across Victoria Harbour for over a century. The little green-and-white double-decked vessels crossed the harbor from the wharf on Hong Kong Island, docked at Tsim Sha Tsui at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula and then traveled back again, moving almost continuously over the same ten-minute route all day and through a good part of the night.
When each ferry bumped with practiced ease into its berth, a Chinese sailor in a blue uniform swung open an iron gate to allow boarding passengers to stream on even as disembarking passengers were still being funneled off in the opposite direction. After the ferry was filled-and it happened very quickly, like everything else in Hong Kong-a loud bell rang, a large traffic signal hanging over the gate snapped first to yellow and then to red, and a sailor-suited man pushed the iron gate firmly shut, stemming if only for a moment the relentlessly advancing crowds. Of course, there were always a last few stubborn stragglers determined to slip around the gate’s closing edge and leap across to the deck of the ferry as the gangway was being hauled away, all that in spite of the fact that another green-and-white ferry would be slipping into the wharf almost as soon as the first one was clear and the whole process would begin again after only the slightest interruption. This was Hong Kong after all. Wasted time was wasted money.