“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 minu
tes 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.”