Bitcoin Clowns, page 14
part #3 of Master Shanghai Series
“So, Mr. Bamboo, shall we?” Damon was a businessman after all. He produced his cell phone and there was a QR code which represented his own cryptocurrency wallet and gave it to Mr. Bamboo to scan.
“40 million Macademian Coins, right?”
“Right.”
“I wonder how you’d found these obscure alternative coins. Macademian Coins. Sounds delicious. They can’t have any practical value, can they? They are barely on any exchange and my guys have to sweep the web to find them. Water!” He asked, and Miss Cleavage gave him the glass of water again, which he used to gurgle and rinse his mouth.
“Boss, I have double-checked the recipient Macademian Coin wallet address provided by Max Venture. The coins are ready to be sent,” his minion, who had been fiddling with something on his phone as Mr. Bamboo was taste-testing the product, showed him the transaction page. The required passcodes for extra security had also been entered. The only thing that would take for them to transfer was a simple click of the submit button.
“Before I send you the coins Damon, let me ask you one last question. — What are you gonna do with them? Especially after yesterday, they are practically worthless.” Mr. Bamboo commented. “The announcement from your government really shook the market, but I guess it was my lucky day, I got them for half the amount. So, I guess my real question is, where’s your profit in all these?”
Damon looked at me and only smiled, his treacherous plans too devious for even the most sophisticated conventional criminals to understand. His smile scared me. Had he seen through me? — For the last few minutes I had been scanning the room for anything that I could do to thwart the trade.
Damon was smoking, that meant he had a lighter somewhere on him. I could steal it and burn the crates down, provided that I could get to the crates and ignite the cases underneath the fire-retardant wrappings quicker than I could get my hand chopped off by Damon and his people.
The worthless crypto exchanging hands was not a major issue, although hugely unfair, but the counterfeit AIDS medicine, should they go out into the market? What if they were bad replicates produced in contaminated environment? Instead of delaying, accelerating the death of the AIDS patients? Then me doing nothing at this moment would make me an implicit indirect, murderer. But, but what if the batches were good? All GMP-ed out and everything? Then I would be the Chinese version of Martin Shkreli[4]. I didn’t get born into this world just to become Martin Shkreli. My eyes darted from the crates to Damon’s pants, where the lighter was probably stored.
“Are you feeling okay, Jong?” Miss Cleavage walked over and checked on me. My conscience was totally soaked and my clothes were totally torn — oops, I meant my conscience was totally torn and my clothes were totally soaked, of course. “Come join me on the Presidential Suite later. You need a hot bath,” she winked suggestively at me, her skin glowing from possibly in an intense good mood for making a shit ton of money, having pumped the price of Macademian Coins artificially. I wished I could share the happy feelings, too, like Damon and Serendipity, but I was just a fake owner of the Max Venture accounts, and I had a feeling that I had only just skimmed the surface of the murky money soup.
“Boss, shall we?” Mr. Bamboo’s guy prompted his boss again. “The transaction has a 30 seconds expiration time.”
“This is a deal of a lifetime, Mr. Bamboo,” Damon said reassuringly.
“O…” Mr. Bamboo’s mouth was shaping into an ‘okay’, when suddenly someone climbed into the truck and fired a shot at the ceiling. On instinct, everyone scrammed and ducked for cover, except Damon, whose boring businessman outlook had me totally fooled. What kind of businessmen was not afraid of guns?!
“What the hell?!” Damon shouted when he saw who the intruder was.
Chapter 26: Shut Up
“What the hell, Terry!” Damon shouted at the intruder who turned out to be none other than his partner.
“You guys are good. Making a deal behind my back, huh?!” He shot at Damon and only barely missed. Damon turned out to have Matt Damon’s Borne agility as well, in addition to sharing the actor’s name. “What’s this?” He walked up to one of the crates and randomly clawed at the corner of the wrapped tower. “Flu meds? Damon, are you out of your mind?!”
“Are you done throwing a tantrum?” Damon was unfazed, he might have ducked at the shots, but somehow he had confidence that his betrayed business partner won’t really fire at him. “If you’re done then let us proceed with the trade, Mr. Bamboo!”
All eyes converged on Mr. Bamboo when suddenly Damon had shifted behind Terry, twisted his gun-holding arm behind his back and grabbed his gun, rendering him completely defenseless.
Mr. Bamboo and his assistant edged slowly close to the curtains. “I am afraid we can’t go through this deal.” He threaded his way out carefully, since it was now Damon who was holding the gun. “I don’t want to be involved in any internal gang struggle. When you guys have made up your mind, you can call me again.”
But it was not only Damon who had mastered the art of sneaking up on people. Mr. Bamboo’s assistant had grabbed his phone and clicked ‘confirm’ on the transaction page to send over the 40 million Macademian Coins. “I did it! I did it!”
“What?” I had the same question as Mr. Bamboo, who had now turned around and looked aghast at his own assistant, whom he thought to be someone he could trust just a second ago.
“He’s my guy,” Damon grinned evilly. Terry shook his head in disbelief. I just kept laying low on the ground with the terrified Miss Cleavage in my arm.
“Nope! He’s my guy!” You would not believe who materialized in front of my eyes just then. It was Brother Fei, looking every bit like an Asian version of Bruce Willis out in Die Hard 4. He winked at me, playing the role of Justin Long of course, as his team rushed into the truck and thwarted all activities immediately at gunpoints.
“Captain!” The guy who stole Mr. Bamboo’s phone was apparently a double agent. He gave Brother Fei a salute and handed the phone to a female policeman who bagged it with an evidence bag.
“Good job!” Brother Fei nodded to him, then waved his hand once in the air to release his ‘hounds’ onto the ‘preys’. Everyone was arrested, including Miss Cleavage, whom I had to hand deliver to a policewoman.
“You sold us out!?” She spat at me.
I held up my hands in the air and said, “I have no idea what’s going on! I swear!”
“Bullshit!” Handcuffed, she screamed as she was pushed and shoved out of the truck into the back of a police car, together with Damon, Terry and Mr. Bamboo.
Terry stared wild-eyed at me, sensing that I might be on the good side of the law and someone that could help him, “Jong! You saw when I got here. I am not part of this! Tell them! Jong! I beg you!”
I lowered my eyes and pretended to look for something on the ground, since I had not decided if I should choose sides so blatantly in front of a bunch of people who would like to have me dead.
Brother Fei came up to me, put away his gun back into the slot on his belt and grabbed me by the shoulder, “Let me have a look at you!” He gave me a once-over. “Still in one piece, good!”
“How’d you know to come here?” I was definitely surprised to find him here, despite how pleased I was, I had an eerie feeling that I was somehow being tracked. And being tracked was a hacker’s worse nightmare and sure sign that he was not up there yet with the famous hacker-gods like Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulsen. Maybe the trick was to change my English name into Kevin? Hackers are allowed to be superstitious, too, you know.
He shrugged. I supposed he all tips were kept anonymous to protect the identity of the informer.
“Do you think it’s Marvey?” I ventured a guess and observed Brother Fei’s reaction.
“Ha! Then you’ve got to thank your girlfriend for saving your ass.”
One of my eyebrows morphed into a Nike swoosh of skepticism. I had specifically told her not to call the police as yours truly was in the middle of an ‘undercover assignment’. What was she thinking?
“Don’t look so sour. You were the one who told her not to call the police.”
“And?”
“And so she called the Interpol.”
“Interpol!”
“And the Interpol called us,” Brother Fei looked really smug when he said that.
I was just completely balling at the logic. I could see Lt. Wu fuming now.
“Jong! Jong!” I heard Axe’s voice, and I poked my head out of the plastic curtain. “Hey! Don’t you try to run...” his voice trailed off when he spotted the vague shape of Brother Fei dressed the part of a police officer standing behind me. Another man from his team walked by with a clipboard in his hand and asked Axe, who was followed by Dumbo, as expected, who they were and what they were doing there.
“They’re nobody,” I answered kindly, although I tasted a hint of bitter regret in my mouth.
“You know these guys?” The officer looked at me suspiciously.
“Yes, they are just tagging along for the buffet...”
Dumbo looked up at me with the stupidest expression I wasn’t sure he knew I was doing him a big favor. And Axe instantly played his part of an old, clueless grandpa again, just like how he had appeared when I first met him.
“Go home now, you two. I’m busy.” I said to Axe, who got what I meant and hurried off with Dumbo immediately. I did not want to think that Jessie was starving to death somewhere because his grandfather was locked up in jail, given how unreliable his mother was when left to her own device.
I retracted my head back into the body of the truck and tried to observed whether Brother Fei had realized that Axe, a runaway prisoner, was standing only one ugly plastic curtain away from him just now.
“We caught the South American guy called Salamander in a room booked under your name, by the way, but we couldn’t locate Axe and the other guy Marvey described.”
I spun myself around so that Brother Fei would follow me with his eyes and turn away from the two men that were now jogging away towards the car park entrance as calmly but quickly as they could.
“They’re small potatoes anyway, nothing to worry about. This Salamander guy though, I heard that he belonged to a cartel.”
“Yup, drug cartel.” Brother Fei leaned closer to the crate of flu meds. “Hmm...these looked exactly like the ones in the photos Interpol sent over. Looks like we did good here. You have stumbled upon some serious criminals here, Jong, again.”
I couldn’t tell whether that was a compliment or sarcasm. My phenomenally bad luck indeed constantly surprised me.
Brother Fei continued, “Your cousin Cao and his business partners were getting these meds from the Argentinian drug cartel and is selling them to customers in Africa. He has put Shanghai on the map for international counterfeits trading and on Interpol’s radar.” He shook his head and clicked his tongue, with admiration.
“Ax...” I wanted to say Axe, but I caught myself before I made the mistake and coughed a few times to cover it up. “Salamander said he was having Max Venture laundering his dirty money. There was no mention of anything physical exchanging hands.”
“He’s a criminal, Jong. Do you think he’s going to tell you everything?”
I frowned, “so when he told me that Philip and Cao took his money, he meant that they didn’t pay him his money for the goods?”
“Or they paid and stole it back somehow, like a bounced check.” Brother Fei shrugged. “These criminals are transacting with those crapto-currencies you created nowadays...”
“It’s cryptocurrencies. And I have nothing to do with whatever they are doing,” I corrected him immediately to set the record straight.
“This stuff are all scams, if you ask me. The government is right to ban foreign marketplaces from operating in China. If I have my way, I would ban it all together, foreign or not. Anyway, I will tell you what really happened between them when the investigation report from the Interpol comes out and reaches me, in a few years,” he said with a self-deprecating chuckle. As a frontliner, Brother Fei was never responsible for the investigation, he was only responsible for the arrestment and the evidence collection. “Let’s go!” We climbed off the truck and just when my feet touched the ground, I saw Salamander in handcuffs and a paper bag over his head. Even though his face was covered, his massive, beefy physique was hard to miss. And besides that, he spotted me through the holes on the bag cut out around his eyes, and his bulging eyeballs were staring menacingly at me as he screamed, “You son of a bitch! You guys stole from me! You Chinese are all pigs! I will never, ever work with Chinese people again! Hijo de puta!” He hissed loudly. It annoyed the hell out of one of the unusually strong Chinese officers in plain clothes escorting him. The officer pushed him to the ground and grabbed him by his shirt collar such that his feet were dangling off the ground.
“Shut the fuck up!” the officer said, then added the translation in Spanish for his benefit. “¡Cállate, carajo!”
Salamander cursed in Spanish and lowered his head as if a child being reprimanded by his parents. The officer dropped Salamander back on this feet and shoved him towards the direction of their transportation. The other officer snickered in a stance that said ‘Don’t mess with us’.
Standing there with my mouth agape, I was utterly impressed. I had never seen a really muscular Chinese guy that could potentially qualify for, say, the bodybuilder contests in real life, and now there were suddenly two Asian-looking ‘Conan the Barbarians’ in front of me.
“They are from the Interpol. Probably ABCs (American-Born Chinese),” Brother Fei commented. I sensed a hint of jealousy in his voice. “Let’s go, your girlfriend’s waiting for you.” He put his hand on my shoulder and steered me towards the shotgun of his police vehicle.
Chapter 27: Jump
Lieutenant Wu crossed her arms and looked down from the broken window at the mark that indicated the landing location of the dead man. A Max Venture accountant had been pushed off the building the night before, and she was not very happy about it.
“This is what happens when we scare them,” staring at the darkness outside, the sharp wind made her bangs fluttered in the air, she murmured to no one in particular, although I sensed that it was probably directed at me.
I was brought to the scene to assist the investigation as, given that Cao was still missing, I was still the man-in-charge around here, however reluctant I might be.
Lieutenant Wu was very upset when she found out that the Interpol had been alerted during my undercover assignment, and that they had arrested all the major players we were investigating in relations to Philip’s murder.
On the surface, the cause and effects of the cases were clear. Salamander had admitted to killing Philip Zackary, and Cao had run away hiding, out of fear for his life. Their joint ventures with Damon’s Zinger Financials had been acting as a middleman for cross-border illegal drug trafficking, hence all its management were taken into custody. But the question remained. What was the nature of their cryptocurrency fund joint-venture? Lt. Wu was fairly confident there was a case of business fraud in there, and so do I, but the Ministry of Public Security of China in Beijing was now directly in charge of the investigation, framing this as an international drug cartel case. One did not need to be a genius to understand why Lt. Wu was pissed.
“Should we inform Beijing of the murder?” Officer Henry asked the obvious question to his boss.
Lt. Wu’s eyes darted around the sockets, as if she was busy settling the internal debate inside her head, and only after a minute did she finally said, “Yes, but write it off as an unrelated incident.” She turned around to look everyone presented in the eyes, trying to instill in us the importance of believing in the untruth collectively such that it would turn into a truth, for now. She needed this case in her care to continue her investigation in Shanghai. “The killer is out there. He’s the key. We must find him quickly,” then she added, “if it is a ‘him’.”
I swallowed hard. I knew what Lt. Wu was thinking. She had already assumed that Cao was the one who did this, and indeed we needed to find Cao as soon as possible so that he could clear his own name. My wuss of a cousin should not be blamed for life-sentence kind of crimes if someone else deserved all the credit instead.
“I have sent the samples to the lab. Hopefully we would get a match soon,” Officer Henry had found a set of fingerprints not belonging to the victim on the broken shards of glass panes on the ground, as well as some fibers that were likely scrapped off of the perpetrator’s clothing or gloves.
“Am I done here?” I tried to stifle an insuppressible yawn. I had been helping the police with different on-going investigations for the last 48 hours, and I hadn’t had a wink of sleep. It was time for me to go. Lt. Wu was unhappy to hear that I would leave her sight, but she had nothing on me, and so reluctantly she gave me a look of contempt and waved me off.
Kelvin had come to pick me up in his brand new Maserati GranTurismo. The ugly thing cost at least a hundred fifty grand Renminbi. I totally wanted to ‘bi’ (shoot) him when he complained to me that the crypto-market was falling again.
“Do I look like a stupid investment manager to you?” Getting annoyed, I vented my frustration as I fiddled with the knobs on the dashboard of the Maserati.
“Being an investment manager is only an insult to you computer types, not to regular people,” Kelvin retorted.
“You’ve participated in an exchange market. Prices go up and down. That’s how people make money, off of the volatility.”
“You know what, for someone who doesn’t give a shit about investing, you have a lot of theories.”
