Fiction

What Happens in Macau, Never Happened

Offered what he thought was the opportunity of a lifetime to manage the Asian branch of his twin brother's A.I. software company, Stephen Wilson leaves his floundering screenwriting career behind to start a new life in Macau, China. When Stephen closes his first deal with the Hermes casino VIP junket room, he enters an extravagant adult playground even more surreal than Hollywood.

The job turns lucrative when Stephen’s new client, Cash Cheang, a pompadour-topped and Johnny Cash-loving casino junket room operator, hands him a bag full of cold hard yuan to implement a facial recognition system in the casino's VIP room. However, the purpose of the system is to track the corrupt Chinese officials laundering money through the casino. Cash fears the Chinese government’s crackdown in Hong Kong will soon extend to Macau and threatening to blackmail the corrupt bureaucrats seemed like the best way to avoid prison.

Hearing about Stephen’s past life as a screenwriter, Cash offers him another job -- ghostwriting a biography of the colorful junket operator’s life rising from the mean streets of Macau to become one of the city's richest and most powerful junket operators. Stephen accepts the job while also agreeing to help Cash sell his latest scheme, a crypto coin aimed at raising funds for a floating casino in Macau. This catches the attention of Detective Fonseca, a Macanite of Portuguese descent who has little patience for another foreigner arriving in Macau to scam the naive locals. 

When one of Cash’s VIP clients is accidentally murdered by loan sharks working in his high roller room, Cash is arrested as an accomplice. Recognizing that he’s being framed, Cash pushes up the sale of his crypto coin and makes a highly generous offer for Stephen's company that comes with one risky demand – help get the millions in loot out of China to the Philippines.

As the plan unfolds, Stephen discovers that his sociopathic twin brother is setting him to take the fall in a huge money laundering scam. While outrunning several Chinese hitmen, Stephen teams up with the nosy Macau detective to take down his twin. After being stabbed in the back and left for dead, Stephen comes to realize family isn’t always something to cherish, twinships can be a curse, sometimes what you thought was gold turns out to be fool’s gold, and the bonds of blood are often barely bullet thick, but friends, you can never have too many of those.