The Flower Net (20 page)

Wang Yujen shivered uncontrollably.

“Hulan, I can’t let you do this,” David said.

“Then step out of the room!”

“You know I can’t and won’t do that.”

Jack Campbell poked his head in the door. “Is everything all right in here?” Hulan glared at him, but Campbell went on. “We’ve gotten all we can from next door. Can we come in and search Wang’s bags?”

Campbell and the other inspectors entered the room. They opened the suitcase and found a couple of folded white shirts, an extra suit, some underwear, and toiletries. Then the inspectors started on the plastic shopping bags that Wang had abandoned when he ran away. They found a bottle of whiskey and a carton of Marlboros bought in the duty-free shop in Tokyo, half a dozen sandalwood fans, a rice steamer, and a thermos. At these last two, Campbell said, “Wait a minute. The other guy also had these.”

“We get those all the time through here,” Melba said. “They like to bring them as gifts to their families here in the U.S.”

“This man has no family here,” Hulan said.

Melba glanced at her computer printout. “He says he does.”

“He lied.”

“Look, ladies, let’s not argue. Let’s think instead about these two items.” Campbell picked up the box that held the rice steamer, weighing it in his hands, giving it a gentle shake. He pulled the appliance out of the box. It looked like any other rice steamer—a metal cylinder inside, a clear lid, a plastic exterior decorated in a floral motif. “I don’t see anything strange about this. Let’s see that thermos.” It looked normal as well.

As Campbell did the inspection, David watched Wang Yujen. The man’s shaking increased and beads of sweat formed on his upper lip. When Campbell shook the steamer, a low whimper escaped from Wang.

Keeping his eyes on the Chinese man, David reached over and picked up the steamer again. He lifted the lid, pulled out the plug, shook the steamer. He looked closely at how it was put together, then asked, “Does anyone have a Phillips head screwdriver?” A couple of minutes later, David unscrewed the appliance. The inner cylinder came loose, and David lifted it out. Taped to the sides in the empty space between the outer shell and the cylinder were small glass vials.

“What the fuck?” Campbell said.

As David peeled off the tape, Campbell picked up the thermos and worked at it until it too came apart. At the bottom of the thermos’s cavity was a Baggie filled with a brown crystalline powder.

“Does anyone know what we’re looking at here?”

Peter picked up a vial. It looked like an amber-colored test tube topped with a cork stopper covered in red wax. Inside appeared to be more of the brown powder. A narrow sticker of gold and red was glued to the glass. The design showed a panda and several Chinese characters. “
Xiong dan
,” Peter said, and Hulan nodded.

Melba Mitchell said, “We know what it is. We just haven’t seen it brought in this way before. We’ve seen this stuff brought in coated in chocolate, floating in jars of honey, hidden in boxes of cookies, but this is a new one.” When she saw the Americans’ looks of incomprehension, she said, “It’s dried bear bile.”

David glanced over at Campbell. The FBI agent looked as confused as David felt. Melba repeated the words, then Campbell asked her to spell them out. “That’s what I thought you said.”

“So what’s bear bile?” David asked.

Melba gestured with her head at the Chinese. “They use it as medicine. You know, Chinese herbal medicine?”

“Like ginseng?”

“Ginseng is common, but they also use all sorts of exotic ingredients like Siberian tiger penis, rhinoceros horn, and bear bile.”

“So?”

“So, it’s illegal to import or export that stuff in any form—pills, powders, shampoos, teas, creams, plasters, tonics, whole organs. These animals are endangered species and are protected by international treaty—the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES for short. And I have to tell you something: This bear bile you’re looking at has a street value higher than heroin.”

“You’ve got to be joking.”

Melba shook her head. “I’m absolutely serious. Dried bear bile salts sell for anywhere between two hundred and fifty to seven hundred dollars a gram compared to three hundred dollars for heroin. Like any other contraband, price is determined by authenticity, availability, faith in the seller, and relative need.” She turned to one of the Customs inspectors. “What do you think we have here, Fred?”

“Depends on the weight,” the inspector answered, pulling out a pocket calculator. “But if we go conservative at five hundred dollars a gram for pure bile salts, you could maybe get about two thousand for each vial once it’s cut and adulterated. So, if you figure we’ve got about two dozen vials, that comes to forty-eight thousand dollars. Then thirty or forty grams in the Baggie—and that’s just a guess—puts us at between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars, if it’s pure. That translates to between sixty to eighty thousand dollars once it’s adulterated. Altogether, you’re looking at about a hundred twenty thousand dollars. Not bad for one trip.”

“Holy shit,” breathed Jack Campbell.

“I think we’d better take another look at Mr. Hu’s belongings,” David said.

A few minutes later, they had uncovered another cache of the dried bear bile in the rice steamer and thermos Hu Qichen had brought for his “relatives.” Customs inspectors then performed a more thorough search through both sets of baggage, tearing apart linings, opening up every bottle and container. In a jar that looked as if it might hold pomade, the inspectors found a dried piece of flesh about the size of a small pear. It was a whole dried gallbladder. Altogether, Customs had confiscated a minimum of $250,000 in bear products from the two Chinese men.

In all the excitement, Hu Qichen and Wang Yujen were temporarily forgotten. But once the evidence was taken away to be weighed and cataloged, attention turned back to the two men. Against all reason, Hu Qichen maintained his arrogance. Wang Yujen, however, seemed to sense how much trouble he was in. He hadn’t stopped shaking and mumbling to himself. Both men were arrested and taken to the Terminal Island detention facility.

Now David and Hulan sat in one of the holding rooms drinking coffee from paper cups. The case had just taken a 180-degree turn, and none of them seemed to know what to do next. “Well,” David said finally, “we’ve found our product and why the boys wanted Sammy Guang’s help. He easily could have unloaded the bile to his friends in Chinatown.”

“But a quarter of a million dollars’ worth?” Hulan said. She shook her head. “No, this was a lot bigger than that. The boys and whoever their other partners were must have brought in millions of dollars of the stuff.”

“Yeah, this is fucking big,” Campbell commented to no one in particular.

“Come on, everyone,” David said. “We’re going back to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I want you to meet Laurie Martin.”

When the whole group trooped into Laurie’s office an hour later, she was bent over massaging her swollen ankles. As David—with Campbell and Hulan interrupting every chance they got—explained what they had just found, she regarded them sardonically. “The office has always laughed at these cases. Now you’re coming in here for help?”

“I never laughed.”

Laurie gave David a look that said otherwise, but let it go at that. “And this has something to do with the body you found on the immigrant ship?” she asked. This question launched the group into another long explanation of the
Peony
, the body in Beijing, the triads, and now this discovery. “It doesn’t sound weird to me,” she said, her hands folded over her pregnant belly. “It sounds like exactly the move the triads should be making.”

As her statement sank in, they all began talking at once. Finally, Laurie held up her hands for silence, then said, “According to Interpol, human beings do about ten billion dollars a year in the international wildlife trade. About five billion of that is illegal. In California, the illegal trade in bear parts alone is valued at about a hundred million dollars. Do you know where that puts this stuff?”

When everyone shook their heads, Laurie said, “It generates more profit than illegal arms sales and comes in second only to the narcotics trade. But you’re ten times more likely to find someone walking down the street with wildlife on their person in the form of wallets, shoe, or belts, than drugs. Think about it.”

“If that’s so, then why do we all have it?”

“Because,” Laurie answered, “it’s not illegal to
possess
wildlife. You could enter a parade with a panda bear—one of the most endangered species in the world—and nothing would happen to you. Try that with a machine gun or heroin and you’re looking at serious jail time. But as you know, David, we prosecute when we can.”

“The snails?”

“Right, but other cases, too. We had a case a couple of years ago involving bear bile. I don’t know if you were here then. Customs opens some guy’s bag at LAX and they find pills, vials, things that look like little turds. Turns out the perp has about eleven pounds of bear bile, worth about one million dollars in those days. The rest was various compounds, mostly harmless, but it was enough to get a conviction. Twenty-one months.”

“Go back to what you said earlier about the triads,” David urged Laurie. “Where do they fit in?”

“Haven’t you been listening?” she responded irritably. “This stuff is profitable. There’s practically no competition. The market is growing. And the risk is negligible. You don’t have a DEA agent hiding behind every corner, informants in every shadow, no competitors trying to take you out. And, if you’re caught, instead of twenty years in the federal penitentiary, you get a slap on the wrist. But it’s not just the triads. We’re seeing lots of different organized crime groups getting involved.”

“Like?”

“The white supremacists, the Freemen, the Vipers—all those nuts up in Montana and Idaho. Poaching American black bears and selling their gallbladders and paws is one of the primary fund-raisers for the militia groups. A dealer then sells the stuff in Koreatowns and Chinatowns around the country, as well as exporting it to Asia.”

“Billy and Henglai must have been buying fresh gallbladders from the cowboys,” Hulan said.

But David wasn’t so sure. “What if you
aren’t
a white supremacist?” he asked Laurie. “Might regular people still shoot bears to earn money?”

“Where have you been?” Laurie retorted. “We kill about forty thousand bears in this country each year, and most of them are killed legally—with permits and all. Even a weekend hunter can be tempted to earn back his license fees and gas money.”

“What kind of money are we talking about?”

“For a fresh gallbladder? I’ve heard a low of two thousand dollars to as high as eighty thousand,” Laurie answered.

“That’s a lot of money in Montana,” David said.

“That’s a lot of money anywhere,” Hulan amended.

“That’s why we’re finding bear carcasses around the world with nothing taken but their gallbladders,” Laurie continued. “In China, bag a bear, sell its gallbladder—or sell it live to a bear farm—for about five hundred dollars U.S.; that’s more than a year’s salary. A damn good incentive, if you ask me, except for one thing. China has the stiffest penalties in the world because its bears are under a greater threat of extinction than anywhere else. The sun bear, the Asiatic black bear, the panda—all of them are on the CITES I list, meaning they’re threatened by extinction. Kill a panda bear—which, by the way, doesn’t secrete the right kind of bile because it isn’t a true bear—you get the death sentence. Kill a moon bear, you’re looking at making sneakers in some prison factory for the next hundred years or so. Farming and selling bear bile?
Totally
illegal, but it’s happening in China.”

“What are bear farms?” Hulan asked.

“You don’t know? Scientists in your country have figured out some way to extract the bile without killing the bear. But other than that, we don’t know that much about them either,” Laurie confessed.

Laurie stood and walked over to the window. Turning to the group, she held her arms out wide. “The world market for medicinal herbs—I’m talking the whole shebang now, the herbs, the animal derivatives, the roots, the patents, the raw drugs—is huge. In the U.S., between the people interested in holistic medicine and the Asian population, we’re spending like crazy. This stuff is cheap compared to Western medicine, and it seems to work in a lot of cases. But see, that’s what’s hard for us. We can go out and educate people not to wear fur coats or jewelry made from ivory, but how do you tell parents whose kid is dying from a strange form of liver cancer that they shouldn’t take a chance on bear bile? How do you ask a doctor—sworn to protect human life—not to prescribe rhino horn if he thinks it will save his patient?”

A hush fell over the conversation as David, Hulan, Jack Campbell, and Peter Sun tried to absorb all they’d heard.

“Our government has other concerns as well,” Laurie went on. “The Chinese manufacture thousands of different patent medicines. This stuff comes over here and shows up in Chinese herb shops, in acupuncturists’ offices, in health-food stores, in the Save-on down the street. Basically, they’re sold everywhere over the counter and they’re supposed to cure everything—headache, flu, the common cold, backache, cancer.”

“So what’s the problem?” David asked.

“Say a mother in Brentwood buys some Chinese cough syrup for her kid. The directions say one teaspoon twice a day. She thinks, Why not four times a day? Better yet, I’ll make it every four hours like Robitussin. She gives it to the kid and he goes into convulsions and almost dies. We send the syrup to the forensics lab and we get a call back that it has whatever herbs and minerals are advertised on the package, as well as arsenic or mercury. We’re talking about products with serious poisons in them that you can just buy over the counter.”

“David, this is starting to make sense,” Hulan said slowly.

He looked doubtful.

“We’ve got the cowboys and the bears up in Montana, right?”

He nodded.