The Snakeheads Read online

  As if on cue, Asler walked away to join his INS colleagues.

  When he and Longbull were left alone, Nick apologized for the presence of the police. The Grand Chief nodded his acceptance of Nick’s apology, still keeping a wary eye on the activity on the riverbank.

  “Did your people see or hear anything of the shootout early this morning?” Nick asked.

  “Sure, my people heard the weapons fire. But that ain’t nothing new.” Longbull shrugged. “Every day we hear automatic fire. People know better than to go out on the St. Lawrence at night. If it ain’t the automatic guns that will cut you down then it’s the smugglers’ speedboats that will cut you in half.”

  “So you don’t know what happened out there?” asked Nick, pointing towards the St. Lawrence River.

  “I’m telling you, Nick. Sure, there’s been cigarette and people smuggling here before, but this time there’s no Mohawks involved. I spoke to some of my people right after those INS officials told me about it. They say they don’t know anything about this smuggling job.”

  As usual, nobody knows anything, thought Nick. It wouldn’t surprise him in the least to learn that the Mohawks had sold docking rights to agent smugglers bringing in their human cargo. Outwardly, Nick accepted the Grand Chief’s explanation, and followed the crook of Longbull’s finger as he pointed towards a group of old men and women standing underneath a weeping willow.

  “They don’t like to see this. People aren’t proud that this stuff is going on. They feel shame about this, eh? But you know the economy the way it is, some folks get desperate and make money whichever way they can, just to put food on the table, eh?”

  “Longbull, I understand. No need for you to defend the actions of others. You’re only the chief and not your brother’s keeper,” Nick said in a conciliatory tone. He knew putting people on the defensive was no way to get answers on the identities of those who killed Walter Martin.

  Longbull smiled at him, then motioned another man to join them. “Nick, you remember Ronald Thunder?”

  Nick cocked his head to the man in the mirrored aviator-style sunglasses walking towards them.

  “The police chief. I remember.”

  His relationship with the police chief was more complicated. Thunder had always been formal and uneasy with him, as he was now. “Nick,” said Thunder in greeting. “I got nine patrol officers, which is not enough to cover twenty hectares. First we deal with cigarette smugglers. Then the booze. Now they’re moving people. What am I supposed to do, eh?”

  Pushing his luck, Nick asked, “How many illegals has your reserve taken in?”

  “Nick, you know where we are? An illegal could come ashore in somebody’s backyard right here on Canadian soil. By the time he reaches the road in front of one of those houses,” Thunder pointed, “he’s already on American soil.”

  Sounding defensive already, said Nick to himself. Instead, he replied, “Thunder, I understand. You can’t police everybody in your community twenty-four hours a day.”

  Thunder appeared to be satisfied. “People in the community have to earn a living. As police chief I ask myself, which is better? Cigarette or booze smuggling, or people smuggling? The thing is, eh, the smuggling of people ain’t a headache for us, ’cause they’re just passing through. It’s funny how they come from faraway places but it seems like they always know somebody in our community. One guy last month came from Nigeria. He sends a fax asking for Eagle Willie to pick him up at the church in Buffalo. You know that one? Casa Marie something, I think. Now, if you ask me, how come people from places like Timbuktu know the names of some of our people here, eh? Mohawks don’t have that kind of resources to handle this level of traffic from organized crime.”

  Nick stared hard at Thunder. Was the police chief trying to tell him something about Eagle Willie or organized crime? “What makes you think organized crime is involved in running illegal border traffic?” he asked.

  “I hear rumours.”

  “What kind of rumours?”

  Thunder shrugged his shoulders and lit a cigarette. “I’ve arrested a few of our people and they say they got into moving people from their big city connections with mob types in New York. You make what you want of that, eh.”

  Nick wanted to tell Thunder that he was full of shit. Instead he focused on his surroundings. He had been here hundreds of times before on immigration and smuggling operations. He could walk the narrow path hugging the water’s edge with his eyes closed. This was cottage country. A fine place for a picnic or fishing trip. But not today. He took a couple of steps back, moving away from Thunder. Talking to the man always produced more questions than answers. It was an exercise in frustration. Nick turned away, saying, “Good talking to you. Let’s follow up later.”

  With each step, he moved closer to the spot where Walter had died. If it wasn’t for the yellow tape, he would never have known that the place was a crime scene. Nothing said violence and death had happened here mere hours before. There was just the sunshine, the fresh morning breeze and the sound of water lapping gently against the river shoreline. Closer to the spot where Walter Martin fell, Nick could see flecks of blood on the blades of grass, and patches of soil stained red. That was all but it was enough. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. He remembered when Walter first joined the unit. The summer of ’92, when they’d worked a surveillance mission together, some of the deportations they’d carried out, the big immigration visa scam that had taken them to Holland. After that, there was Algeria, gathering information on those suspected of committing various atrocities. He remembered how Walter had always been ready with a joke under the most trying of conditions, his persistence in tracking down those with a multitude of IDs. Then two years ago Nick had promoted Walter to head of border control operations.

  Shit, Walter. Why weren’t you careful like always?

  Several of the officers looked at him with a sad, unwavering gaze, and one man put a hand on his shoulder. Nick knew they would have liked to offer words of comfort but didn’t know how.

  Suddenly a car pulled up about a hundred feet from where he was standing. Two women emerged, one in combat fatigues. He immediately recognized Kelly Marcovich by her cropped brown hair and lean muscular frame; the other woman was her assistant, an evidence technician. Kelly was one of his key U.S. counterparts in the fight to control people smuggling on both sides of the border. She called out to him and waited for him to catch up.

  “I’m sorry, Nick.” She wrapped both arms around him.

  “I’m all right, Kelly.”

  Together they stooped under the yellow tape and entered the crime scene.

  Allan Engle, the district director of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, turned to greet Nick as they approached. “I’m sorry about Walter, Nick. Good man, he was.”

  Nick nodded. No one was in the mood for small talk. When he found his voice, he put the question directly to Engle. “What’ve we got?”

  “Several cartridge shells around the area where the shooting happened. And another on the boat.”

  “How many shots were fired on each side?”

  “About fifteen cartridge cases on their side. Automatics and semis down below. A high-powered rifle hidden in the galley. The usual stuff you’d expect to find. Everything’s being tagged and bagged to be shipped to our forensics centre. We’ll e-mail you the list.”

  Nick would have preferred to send the evidence to the forensics lab in Canada, but he only said, “Put a rush on the results.”

  “The best part of it is, we found a box full of phony Canadian visas to enter the U.S. There was also a box of Ontario driver’s licences complete with photos of the migrants.”

  “A lot of work went into producing that,” said Nick. “Photo ID with their names. Authentic or phony?”

  “If it’s phony, it’s pretty good copy. We won’t know for sure until we do testing,” replied Engle.

  “Did you manage to get anything out of that snakehead?�
�� asked Nick.

  “Nope. And we’re not interested. He’s all yours,” replied Engle with a shrug of his shoulders.

  “Why the Christmas present?”

  “’Unofficially, Uncle Sam isn’t interested in paying his medical bills. Officially, it’s jurisdictional. The snakehead has landed status in Canada.”

  “You’re kidding me?”

  “The guys back at the station are trying to confirm it as we speak. And if that’s the case, I don’t need the hassle of dealing with your justice department.”

  Nick met his gaze.

  “Marcovich here will process the paperwork so we can ship him to you.”

  “We’ll take care of it,” said Kelly. “Top priority. I don’t need more headaches for my officers. The month’s just beginning and already we’ve intercepted over a dozen smuggling jobs. Five were booze and cigarette related. Lots of drug trafficking and other illegal substances.”

  “You know what they say — with smugglers, the commodity is incidental,” answered Nick. “Have you interviewed any of the undocumented aliens yet?”

  “Yeah, but they ain’t talking. Not even to a woman. Too scared. We’ll have one last go at them before we deport them back to their country of origin. If anything of interest comes up, I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Thanks, Kelly.” He joined the evidence tech who was combing the area one last time.

  Later that evening, driving back into Canada alone, he felt suspended in the darkness of the night, strangely detached even from the fatigue and grief he was experiencing, while another part of his mind was actively engaged with the realities he came face to face with every working day. In the world of human cargo trafficking, borders and security checkpoints had become mere inconveniences to be circumvented with forged passports, lies and guns. The going rate to be smuggled out of a country like China was fifty grand. The illegal-alien smuggling racket was hugely profitable, generating roughly $580 million a year for its bosses. It was a syndicated multinational operation stretching from China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand and Sri Lanka right into Central America and Eastern Europe.

  In the past fifteen months alone, four converted cargo ships had beached in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. And it was Nick’s job to stop the relentless wave of illegals from rolling into Canada. He had set up a surveillance operation and put Walter Martin in charge. Walter’s team had set up wiretap surveillance on the dead snakehead, Shaupan Chau. Now both men were dead.

  He’d have to start all over again. From the beginning. Except this time he was going after the ringleaders.

  chapter two

  When counsel was inept, when the witnesses were lying or had destroyed crucial evidence, when the asylum seeker had extreme criminality attached to his name and file, Grace Wang-Weinstein still did her best to keep the displeasure from her voice, and allowed no impatience or anger to show in her face. She did her damnedest to treat everyone who appeared in her hearing room with fairness and dignity. But the deck was pretty much stacked against petitioners who tried to cheat their way past her. It had not always been easy, but over the years Grace had learned how to assume the mask of judicial calm, and to cloak her feelings in the language of due process, procedural rules, and penal proportionality.

  This morning’s case, unpoetically titled B45690, promised to be a severe test of her acting ability. The police had barricaded the street below on either side. Only officially sanctioned vehicles could park in the metered spots. A squad of RCMP officers maintained crowd control in front of the building, while inside a retired Russian civil servant, his face twitching in the bright light of the hearing room, sat nervously in a witness chair, waiting to testify.

  After taking the oath to tell the truth, he tried to explain how when he arrived in Canada he had a savings account stuffed with twenty-one million dollars. Grace listened patiently to his attempts to be ingratiating as he described his wonderful good luck in his financial ventures in wonderful, welcoming Canada. Maybe if she was younger she’d be gullible enough to believe that being a Russian bureaucrat was a lucrative proposition. Here was a refugee claimant with no visible means of support, and yet within a year his $21 million had grown to $90 million. His counsel made his arguments in a bullying tone, perhaps hoping to impress this female judge, who was probably a financial ignoramus, with his assertion that the money came from market gains on technology stocks. But the wiretap evidence was irrefutable. Months of eavesdropping by RCMP agents had established that in Russia he had had ties to the KGB, and that he now had even closer ties to a biker gang, with whom he had been setting up a merchant bank on a Native reserve for the purpose of laundering drug money.

  Scattered on the table before her were fat accordion folders bulging with loose-leaf documents — immigration officers’ observations and notes, pleadings, news clippings, and FBI wiretap evidence. You would think, Grace silently complained, keeping her irritation to herself, that it was a black-and-white case for deportation. Add four lawyers and you had anything but. Money could buy you a lot of things, including in this case two pre-hearing conferences and two six-month delays while the claimant consolidated his financial gains in the country of his choice. His legal advisers were past masters at the art of stalling. By the time the case was wrapped up, it could be five years. Grace knew damn well that if she rendered a negative decision this morning, the high-priced lawyers would immediately file for leave to appeal her judgment at the federal court. With a current backlog of two years and counting, Vladimir Vladimirovich would be back in business without a care in the world.

  Sometimes Grace’s friends would ask her what it felt like to sit in judgement of others seven hours a day, five days a week, to hold other people’s future in her hands. When she was first appointed a judge on the Immigration and Refugee Commission, she had been excited to think that she could be the one who gave desperate people the chance to make a new life, granting them asylum and citizenship in one of the most prosperous countries in the world. She would be the one who deported false refugee claimants back to the place they came from. The stars in her eyes were long gone, but she still honestly tried to give every asylum seeker a good kick at the can.

  And when she was asked what it felt like, holding the lives of others in the palm of her hand, the answer depended on who was asking. To the public and press, her response was, “My determination is based upon my findings of fact and the relevant legal issues.” To friends and family, she was more likely to confess that it scared the hell out of her. Every day, she was in the hot seat. She never knew which case would land her on the front page of the morning paper. And the worst of it was that a wrong decision could send a failed asylum seeker home to face uncertainty, poverty, or even death.

  Right now, an hour into the proceedings, the hands of the clock seemed to have stopped. Counsel for the claimant and counsel for the government were engaged in a point-counterpoint match over the admissibility of documents to be entered as exhibit items.

  The clerk’s monotonous voice read into the microphone: “The arresting immigration officer was Nick Slovak. However, the minister’s representative is not present. In his place representing the Immigration Department is Rocco Corvinelli.”

  Nick’s name went through her like an electric shock, but her impassive expression did not change. She had not disclosed that she knew Nick. In her opinion, that private fact had no bearing on the case, and the last thing she wanted was more excuses for delay in the Vladimirovich case. She endured another hour or so of posturing by the lawyers, which was really only done for the benefit of the claimant — who was paying for the show — to demonstrate that his counsels’ billable hours were the real thing. The unspoken fact was that it made little difference if duplicate or similarly situated evidence was entered as exhibits. All parties had read the documents, and the damage was done.

  The fifth package of documents was from Nick’s office. His signature was on practically every piece of paper in the stack. Tha
t meant that the claimant’s removal from the country was something that was being taken very seriously by his department, the Enforcement and Investigation Unit of Immigration and Citizenship. The message was that she should give those exhibit items of evidence a full measure of consideration. Nick really didn’t have to emphasize the point so heavily, Grace thought. Cases involving gangsters who thought Canada was a nice, safe place to launder dirty money were not something she took lightly. But that was Nick.

  “I’ve got a dozen affidavits, all attesting to my client’s sterling business reputation and his high moral character, that I’d like to enter as evidence,” announced one of the opposing counsel.

  She flashed a look of impatience at the young lawyer. “More duplication of evidence we don’t need, counsel. I suggest we enter only those affidavits that will allow for cross-examination of the witnesses.”

  A few strands of hair fell across her face. Removing an elastic from a package of documents, she used it to tie her hair back in a ponytail. She rarely thought about her looks these days. It took too much energy and time to look good. As it was, she didn’t have enough time to do all the things she wanted to do in a day. Nor did she have the inclination to spend hours at the makeup counter or beauty salon.

  “But, your honour,” the older of the lawyers intervened, smoothly, “these affidavits are from businessmen who live all across the country. They can’t afford to take time to fly in and support my client’s asylum claim, but their statements are very significant to this case.”

  As Grace looked down on him from the bench she could feel her lip cynically curling up at one corner. Over the years she had grown to dislike lawyers who earned their living by representing the criminal elements of society.

  “Mr. Dalton, the Immigration and Refugee Commission is mindful of the time schedules of witnesses. That’s why we have video conferencing. The video conference calls will be set for next Wednesday.” Turning to the refugee claims officer, she asked, “Any objections, Caldwell?”