Wong translated for Nick. “He’s a genuine travel agent, but he makes a little money on the side moonlighting as a broker to a snakehead. He’s sure that his contact works for a huge smuggling syndicate. Nick, the way he describes it, it’s like an Amway pyramid scheme. He has no idea who the big players are. He only knows the name of his contact and what he looks like. Contact goes by the name of Tu.”
“Chinese?” asked Nick.
“No, Tu’s Vietnamese,” translated Philip.
“How did Hum find this Tu?”
Wong spoke to Hum Byng, then told Nick, “Tu found him. But he hasn’t seen Tu in almost a month. Tu’s the one who always initiates contact. No one knows where he lives. Tu is a big-time people smuggler. But this Tu is not the kingpin in the people smuggling pyramid.”
The travel agent spoke in rapid Mandarin to Philip, who translated to Nick. “He said this is Tu’s territory. When he’s in town, the smuggler hangs out at several of the noodle houses on this strip.”
Nick, watching the man nod and smile, said, “Tell him we won’t charge him with breaking any laws if he continues to cooperate. Tell him we want him to come down to our offices and look at the photos of snakeheads and smugglers we’ve accumulated. Maybe Tu’s in there.”
Wong translated, then turned to Nick. “He said he’ll come after work tomorrow. I gave him our address.”
Back in the van, Wong asked, “What do you think?”
Nick looked out the window as he spoke. “He really hasn’t told us anything new. Except now we know for sure that we’re dealing with a multimillion or even billion-dollar illegal empire that looks like a huge pyramid scheme. With a Vietnamese connection recruiting legitimate business people to work as brokers. It says a lot for human ingenuity. What we don’t know is whether we’re looking for one ringleader or several. It may be one huge operation, or a network of independent agents or cells. There’s still a lot of questions we don’t have answers to.”
Nick paused. Philip did nothing to fill the pause until they were midtown at Bloor and Bay. “I’m not holding out much optimism that we’ve got a mugshot of this Tu character.”
“You never know,” answered Nick, “sometimes you just get lucky.”
“I’ve got to head out to Regional War Crimes in Etobicoke. Is it okay if I let you off here?” asked Philip.
“No problemo. I’m on home turf here. I’ll stroll through the university and grab a bite to eat.”
Lunch was a street-vendor hotdog dripping with mustard and relish. As he passed a storefront window, Nick checked his reflection. No obvious mustard and relish stains on his shirt or face. But there was the unmistakable shadow of stubble on his face. It had been over twenty-four hours since he shaved. That would be his excuse for his pathetic appearance these days. His faded black chinos and dark shirt with the bleach stain on the left cuff reminded him that he was also on the slippery slope of the dress code.
When he first joined Immigration and Citizenship he wore a suit and tie every day — until he learned, first-hand, that a tie could become a lethal weapon in the hands of an uncooperative deportee. Now he wore casual clothes to work. What was the use of throwing good money away on a suit only to have it damaged in a scuffle? His mother always said she’d never heard of a high-flying department head who dressed the way he did, but fortunately, his aging parents still lived in Rochester, New York, where Nick had grown up, so he didn’t have to pass his mother’s inspection often. Sure, he should probably dress in a manner befitting his position, but since the budget cutbacks in his department, which had been downsized to half its investigators, he had become a quick-change artist. He had one set of clothes for meetings and paperwork, and another set for confronting death in the field. It was standard department policy for all field investigators to wear body armour, but sometimes even a bullet-proof vest didn’t help. Like the time he went to deport a Somali warlord and found himself being clubbed with assorted kitchen utensils and household furniture by the warlord’s four wives and many children. Then they tried to push him out a twenty-first-storey window. Working in pairs was no guarantee of safety either. Only last month, he and another enforcement officer had gone to the home of an ex-cabinet minister from Haiti to hand the man arrest and deportation papers. His partner wrestled with the man’s dogs while Nick fought off a two-hundred-pound bodyguard who came at him with a dirty hypodermic and a mean set of teeth.
When he had joined the department a decade ago, inoculation against hepatitis had been standard procedure. Now standard procedure included — in addition to the body armour — face masks, flak jacket, side arms and a mobile phone to call for police backup. But you could take all the precautions you could think of, and sometimes that still wouldn’t be enough. Look at what had happened to Walter Martin.
Nick left the subway at the University Avenue station and dashed across four lanes of traffic. He was running late for his meeting with his friend RCMP Captain André Dubois. Their association had been long and fruitful, extending all the way back to Nick’s days as a prosecutor. Dubois had always been his first choice as an expert witness in cases involving organized crime, having spent his entire career investigating it. In the seventies Dubois had worked on major undercover operations to bring members of the Mafia and their crime bosses to justice. He had spent time in the eighties tracking down Italian and Latin American drug traffickers. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the nineties, he had been assigned to monitor the emergence of the new Russian criminal class. When the U.S. Congress had passed the Immigration Bill, Canada had joined with the Americans to form a joint task force to combat organized crime by non-citizens. As the president had said on television, it was a threat to our borders and national security. The day after Clinton’s speech, Dubois had been made the director of the RCMP Organized Crime Task Force.
Dubois was already sitting in the Mocha Java coffee house with a pot of caffeine and his favourite rag, the Toronto Star.
“Couldn’t you have picked a better place to meet?” asked Nick looking around him.
“You know how I need an afternoon shot of caffeine in my veins. Look at ya.” Dubois wagged a finger at his friend. “You could use a quick 100 cc of caffeine in your bloodstream, too.”
The coffee house, Nick pointed out, was packed full of hired guns coaching their clients one last time before they made their way into the courthouse around the corner.
“Are you kidding, Nick? I can’t think of a better place than this. When we’re in a place like this, we’re with the people.”
Nick rolled his eyes and grinned. It was the first time he’d smiled in days he realized. “Give me the homeless any day.”
“True. The defeated are much easier to handle than the self-righteous and the arrogant,” said Dubois.
“So, got anything interesting out of that botched illegal alien operation?” Nick ordered a pot of cream to go with his coffee.
“Sorry, I couldn’t talk to you at the wake.”
“Hey, I was in no shape to talk to anybody,” replied Nick.
“Yeah, I noticed.”
Nick kept his feelings under wraps as he stirred his coffee with a stir stick.
“You know the dead smuggler your officers were tailing?”
“Shaupan Chau. I remember.”
“Well, I ran his fingerprints through CPIC. He also went by another name. Sam Tan. Under Tan, he had a criminal record as long as your arm.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Well, this is gonna surprise you, Nick. VICAP had him listed as a tough and violent son of a bitch and a Flying Dragons gang member. But he made his money as a hired gun to the highest bidder whenever a gang needed to do something