Mark Abernethy - Golden Serpent

‘This is ridiculous,’ said the head guy, shaking his head at his friend. ‘He needs an ambulance.’

‘Who are you?’ said Mac.

‘Who are you, might be a more appropriate question,’ the guy replied.

‘Really, champ?’

‘Ah. So we have the Australian,’ said the head guy with a knowing smile. ‘You must be McQueen?’

Mac didn’t like that. In the intel world, it was plain rude. ‘Don’t worry about the Australian, mate. Didn’t someone tell you never to creep up on the US Army? Might get the whole wrong idea.’

‘Can we get up now?’ the guy said, almost haughty.

Mac nodded and the Chinese bloke stood, brushed off his pants, held his suit jacket open. Sawtell sent off Spikey and Jansen, who came back with a couple of handguns.

The Chinese bloke held his hands open.

‘What’s your name?’ said Mac.

‘Call me Wang.’

‘I’ll call you wanker, you keep on like this,’ said Mac, moving his Heckler up a fraction. ‘What are you doing here?’

Wang chewed gum, arrogant, not in the least intimidated. ‘I’m the managing director of Kaohsiung Holdings – the owner of this facility,’ he said, hands on hips.

Mac was getting the creeps. Big time. He turned to Paul. ‘Mate, can you run that with Don, at the Chinook? Kaohsiung Holdings.’

Paul got straight on it.

Mac turned back to Wang. ‘Where you registered, Wang?’

‘Singapore, of course,’ said Wang, looking at the open roller door.

‘So you broke into my company’s premises?’

Mac could see how this guy got his start in life. He’d bet it was secret police. The whole answerin-aquestion thing.

‘Just needed to take a shit, actually,’ he said. ‘Found a great little dunny. Red car. Nice leather, comfy little throne room.’

‘I suppose you realise that this is technically a diplomatic zone?’ countered Wang, smirking.

‘I suppose you realise this is technically a crime scene?’ Mac snapped back.

Wang rolled his eyes, like he was tired of these games. ‘You are not going to like the diplomatic consequences of what you are doing, Mr McQueen.’

‘Really? The orange ovies and paper slippers might not suit you either when the United States government fi ngers you for thieving their nerve agent.’

‘What?!’

‘This is the last known transit point for a consignment of VX nerve agent that was stolen from the Department of Defense yesterday.

I’m just running your bona fi des through DIA right now.’

‘Oh, come on. We just got here,’ said Wang.

‘I have eyewitnesses who will swear that you turned up and took responsibility for the whole show.’

Paul interrupted, got in Mac’s ear. ‘Kaohsiung Holdings is a front company for the PLA General Staff. DIA have them as primarily an arms dealing group.’

Mac glanced at Wang, who was starting to look frazzled.

‘Look, McQueen, I’m under time constraints. What do you want?’ said Wang.

‘I want to know what connection your company has with the Golden Serpent terrorists,’ said Mac, unsmiling.

‘That’s ridiculous.’

He was too pompous too quickly. A liar’s tell. An honest man would have answered with confusion, slightly mystifi ed. Wang had been ready for it.

‘Okay, Wang. Tell me. There’s a bunch of PLA lads down there.

Dead. They’ve been shot at close range. Why would they have allowed their killers to get so close? Maybe they knew them, huh?’

Wang was confused now. ‘Dead?’

‘Sure. Young lads too.’

Wang rabbited something at his offsider. The bloke shrugged.

‘What’s happened in there?’ asked Wang.

‘Well, put it this way, Wang. There’s a lot of open spaces where the gold bars used to be.’

Wang’s chest seemed to defl ate in front of their eyes, his breath catching like a man with angina. He just managed to stop gulping long enough to croak at Mac, ‘The gold?’

‘There’s about two hundred bars left.’

Wang turned pale, looked like he might keel over. He shook his head absent-mindedly, possibly wondering how quickly he could get his immediate family to a new country. Fixing Mac with a stare which was no longer arrogant, he said, ‘Um, how? How did they -?’

‘Well that’s what we have to talk about, Wang. See, we need to fi nd your ship too,’ said Mac.

Wang spun on his heel and looked back at the quayside as if to say, I knew something large should have been there. He gabbled at his offsider, who shrugged again.

Wang turned back, totally panicked now.

Mac winked. ‘Now we’re in the diplomacy zone, champ.’

Mac and Paul spelled it out very clearly to Mr Wang and his associate: the VX was non-negotiable.

Sitting on the side of the Black Hawk they watched Sawtell’s boys get the butted Chinese suit on his feet again, vomit all down his jacket.

Wang was still in a state of shock. They’d taken him into the building, shown him around. Mac was disappointed with his priorities.

He’d winced at the dead boys upstairs, but when he got down the ramp and saw the space almost empty, Wang put his face in his hands as if he was going to cry.

So they’d talked it through. Mac wanted the name and codes and IDs for the ro-ro ship. He wanted them quick so he could get DIA tracking the thing.

‘What do we get? Where’s the gold?’ argued Wang.

‘Mate, the gold’s on the ship. Take the frigging gold – we don’t care. We have a couple of very bad blokes running around out there and they’re armed with VX nerve agent. You want that being detonated in Shangers?’

Wang shook his head.

‘So let’s hear it.’

Wang stammered, made a few false-starts – classic liar stuff. ‘Um, the ship is called Hainan Star.’

He looked pained.

‘Come on, mate,’ said Paul. ‘Time is money.’

‘I can’t talk about these matters,’ stammered Wang.

‘You’d rather I ask than you tell?’ asked Mac.

Wang nodded quickly.

‘ Hainan Star got all the satellite tracking gear on it?’ asked Mac.

‘No comment.’

‘ Hainan Star linked into that AIS maritime broadcast band?’

‘No comment.’

‘Any of that gold come from Burma, Iran, Syria, North Korea or al-Qaeda?’ said Mac.

Embarrassed, Wang whispered, ‘None of your business.’

Wang was right about one thing. The south end of Brani was a diplomatic zone. By the time Mac and Paul were out of the Black Hawk and hauling Wang in to meet Don and Hatfi eld, the Singaporeans and Chinese had a posse of chiefs doing their rain dance on the Keppel Terminal apron.

Mac couldn’t believe what he was seeing: it was classic offi ce guy stuff. There was an emergency with stolen nerve agent, but a certain type of man could always fi nd the time to make his little offi ce empire the priority. Mac and Paul twigged early: the Kaohsiung Holdings property was a clearing house and repository for the PLA General Staff. Singapore had the security, had the huge throughput that would hide an ‘invisible’ ship, and it had small armies of brokers, bankers, solicitors and accountants who could turn gold into all sorts of legitimate assets. Singapore was set up to do business, and the amount of business Kaohsiung Holdings did in the city was probably too great to allow legalities to get in the way.

There was another reason for Singapore’s pre-eminence as a gold and cash repository for the Chinese. It was the global centre of an underground gold-clearance and banking system called fi e chen. Similar to the Muslim hawala that operated in the Middle East, fi e chen was outside government or regulatory control and operated on a transnational basis of trust. It was racially exclusive, too, and family-delineated. You couldn’t partake in fi e chen unless you could show a multigeneration connection to it. One of the worst arguments Mac had ever had with Jenny had been about fi e chen. He’d said it was like the freemasons. She’d said bullshit, that secret transnational banking systems were one of the reasons slavers got away with it so easily.