They would fence the products through the triad’s legitimate businesses.

When he opened his eyes, he saw the array of stacks differently. They were ghost identities, cards ready to be imprinted with a rotating selection of Chinese names: Chins and Changs, Dongs, Fongs, and Gongs, and a lot of Lees and Wongs.

Stolen account numbers would be loaded onto the magnetic strip of the blank. The Chinese name would be matched to a recruited shopper, whose picture had been taken for a bogus driver’s license for picture identification. The fake licenses, computer-generated, were virtually undistinguishable from the real deal. Any of the mobile mills, with portable laptops and rented laser printers, could turn out acceptable forged passports and visas as well.

They’d refined forgery, fraudulent credit, and identity theft into an art and a science.

He reflected on the society’s Thirty-Six Strategies. He’d added a twist to Number Seven, Create something out of nothing, to use false information effectively. They were creating false identities, welding real account numbers to paper names, breeding phantoms who would bring millions to the Red Circle. To steal the dragon and replace it with the phoenix, steal account numbers and supply them with new faces.

It had begun with the Red Circle’s number forty-nines—sai gow jai, dog soldiers—who’d kidnapped an Asia Bank One executive in Vancouver, B.C., and managed to rip off a delivery of credit-card machines. The scam operations had worked well on a small scale at first, but now they were spreading east and west via Canadian Chinatowns.

Gee Sin would introduce the fraudulent organizations to America.

He felt proud, marveled at how smoothly everything fit together, how each scam unit found its way around the Fukienese, the latest wave of Chinese immigrants. They became fodder for the ever-expanding Chinese restaurant business, suckers for Chinese loan sharks, and desperadoes to enlist in the credit-card operation. The tour buses only made it easier for all the crews to move around. Paper Fan had foreseen that the buses connecting the many restaurants among the triads’ dues-paying members, transporting the Fukienese filling in as kitchen help, deported to far-flung kitchens in this strange gwai devil land, could be the basis for a network. Hung Huen card operators trolled the Fukienese employment agencies for unemployed Chinese willing to participate in fraud. The crews of recruiters, under Grass Sandal’s instructions, also kept an eye on the Chinese gamblers, high rollers, at the casinos in Atlantic City, and at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun as well, hunting for players who needed cash.

In addition, some of the Chinese restaurants yielded disgruntled employees who sold customer’s credit-card information to the triad, ten dollars for each account. The sai gow jai collected the information, and the tech mills manufactured the bogus driver’s licenses to match the fake cards. Underpaid salespeople at cell-phone shops and dishonest bank clerks sold clients’ personal information, too. The sweeper at a video-rental store might provide a hundred confidential application forms. There was no shortage of illegal immigrants at the ends of their ropes, convenient bodies with which to create new accounts. When the accounts were maxed out, the body would disappear to another forsaken kitchen in the hinterlands. If they got caught, Immigration gave them a free ticket back to China.

Gee Sin, the mastermind, took advantage of the Americans’ holiday preoccupation with gift giving, the annual buying frenzy that overwhelmed what was originally a religious holiday. Paper Fan realized how important these several weeks were to merchants, hoping to make sales to carry them through the year, which in the crazed crush of business made them careless and blind to credit-card fraud.

The bogus cards would be automatically approved by the retailer’s swipe-reader because the account number was legitimate. If the store required photo identification, there was the fake driver’s license that provided it. Cashiers readily accepted the machine’s approval, especially when faced with a long line of tired shoppers waiting to pay. During the holidays, credit-account spending levels normally scrutinized were relaxed, and high-end purchases were less likely to be questioned.

The Chinese shoppers had been instructed to buy certain brand-name merchandise, popular items that would be easy to move.

He took another taste of the brandy and his vision of the plastic decks changed again. Now he saw an array of Chinese communities inside American cities, each one under the influence of triad clans and tong-affiliated gangs. The three stacks on the right were Boston, New York, New Jersey. They’d partnered with the Fuk Chow on the East Coast. The three stacks on the left were the West Coast cities of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The Suey Ching ran the northern two, but the Viet Ching controlled the cards in L.A., and were tops in Texas Chinatowns as well. The middle decks were Columbus/ Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Richmond/Norfolk. The Sun Wo clan worked the cards in all those mid-American cities.

Besides dispatching Fukinese desperadoes to scam the local merchants, Gee Sin advised Grass Sandal to select the best English-speaking recruits to work the phones against the mail-order companies, directing Christmas gift merchandise to a series of storage facilities and shuttered storefronts. At these locations, designated triad officers with bogus identification would await the deliverymen and sign for the items. The phone-scam operators focused on high-end electronics that the Red Circle could sell easily through its network of merchants, expensive items like video camcorders, digital cameras, Walkmen and laptop computers.

They’d expected to steal several million dollars of merchandise over the holidays, all through fraudulent credit-card transactions. The legitimate account holder and the card-issuing company wouldn’t detect anything amiss until weeks after the holidays, when the monthly statements arrived in the mail. By then, Paper Fan and his operatives would be long gone, leaving only a trail of smoke and shadows.

His thoughts changed again as he felt a slow dull throbbing at his wrist, and he leaned back away from the stacks of cards. Occasionally he’d feel a sharp pain at the wrist. This occurred mostly in winter or in cold locations like Vancouver or Toronto, where he had first tested the credit-card operations.

Time to take it off, he thought.

The psychiatric member of the rehabilitation and therapy team at Kowloon had suggested to him the idea of residual pain, the severed nerves remembering the moment of the chop. It’s all in the brain, she’d said, you think you feel pain so you do feel pain. Mostly it was chafing, or too much pressure at the new joint, where scar-sealed bone and muscle bumped against the silicone-padded socket of the prosthesis.

He could remove the prosthesis to relieve the pain. Painkiller medication was prescribed.

Dew keuih, fuck, he cursed quietly. He knew it wasn’t the hand. It fit well and he’d trained on it, and willed it to work well. It wasn’t the hand.

It was the attack that he remembered, hazy but still horrific even after twenty-five years. The pain of a young man revived in the stump arm of an old man.

The glint of light from his left. Raising his bow arm reflexively.

It wasn’t the hand, marvelously sculpted and engineered.

He’d been knocked down. When he braced to get up he saw that he had no left hand.

It was the memory.

And he had survived the attack. The chop had been intented for his neck.

He detached the elastic and Velcro band that wrapped around his elbow, and slipped the hand off, placing it on the black marble. It always looked strange, removed from his arm, especially when he walked further from it, and viewed his hand in the near distance. His real hand felt like reaching for it.