Paper Fan by Terry Gould

Author:Terry Gould [Gould, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36930-7
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2004-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

One of my well-connected contacts and I had just come back from a hike to the Mosquito Creek waterfall above my house. It was late November and we were both soaked from the rain and the spray. We sat down at the kitchen table, where Leslie joined us with three bowls of hot soup. I briefed him on my discussions with swinging Richard and Longmuir. By then I’d spent a week in Richmond’s Chinatown, now the main hangout for B.C.’s Big Circle Boys and a reconstituted Lotus gang. I told my contact that, from winking answers to direct questions, I was convinced Steve was somewhere in Manila. I said I was leaving December 13: I’d check out the Jumbo Floating Palace in Aberdeen—the one that Ho was going to send to Manila; then I’d catch the lead-up to the handover in Macau; then take off for Cambodia, where I hoped to get Steve’s alias from Sum Manit. I’d continue on to the Philippines, snoop around Ho’s floating casino when it arrived, and meet with the NBI. I was going to make the call to Danny Mendez tomorrow. I opened a folder and showed him the list of people I’d met in 1993 whom I was planning on getting in touch with when I was over there. With Steve’s alias in hand, who knows but that the NBI might come up with him in the capital?

He seemed awfully restless listening to all this. He looked at Leslie, then down at the table.

“If you can just tell him something that would keep him from walking into a trap,” Leslie pleaded.

“I can tell you who not to see,” he said. “The police over there are corrupt, and he’s got himself tied in in such a way that any inquiry with the police in Manila—”

“Well, you know,” I said confidently, “there’s the PNP and the NBI, and the NBI guys I worked with, if they weren’t trustworthy, they could have arranged my disappearance no problem.”

“They could have,” he said—but that was six years ago, and things had changed. “Particularly in this case. Although they are the most trustworthy police force, it looks like that’s the police force that Steven has aligned himself with.”

“The NBI?!” I shouted.

“Oh my God,” Leslie said. “Terry, you can’t go.”

“So you’re not gonna find out what you wanna find out through them—unless you had somebody that you totally, totally trusted.”

“And I do,” I said. “Or—I did.”

“If it backfired on ya, you’d be in trouble.”

“That’s what I was gonna tell you,” Richard explained over the phone the day before I left. “The NBI over there got this agent system—call it CA—Confidential Agent. Five thousand of them. I can’t see your guy’s gonna be a main man—a full agent, because it’s like the FBI—you gotta have a Ph.D. or be an accountant or a lawyer, so they only got five hundred’a those. But these others, they’re deputies, they’re informants—they give them badges, they walk in and outta headquarters, but they’re just quasi. So they let the CA’s operate, protect them, and get their information.

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