Counterfeit Lies

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

As three o’clock neared, the two Korean operatives staked out the pier seeking to locate the attorney and the cowboy. The warm June sunshine made for a pleasant assignment. With school out, parents and their children and teenagers on bikes, Rollerblades, and skateboards dominated the crowd.

The homeless man trudged up and down the pier, occasionally begging for change, just to appear authentic. The other man, garbed in casual attire, covered all the attractions: the carousel and old-fashioned soda fountain, the arcade and food court, even the Heal the Bay aquarium and science center. Both predators struck out in finding their prey.

Park had given the order and wanted the lawyer disposed of but wanted nothing coming back to him or his daughter. The men seeking Reid were professional killers and valuable members of Park’s entourage. They could easily strike at any time, duplicating a Hollywood-like Mafia contract killing with a suppressed, subsonic .22 round to the head, a mysterious residential explosion and fire, or even the communists’ preferred assassination technique: a sudden stop after a long fall from a great height.

The assassins could have waited outside Reid’s office and attacked him as he walked to his car in the parking garage, but that manner of death might be too easily caught on a surveillance camera. Park wanted to make sure the killing didn’t come back to him or his organization. The men were hoping to find Reid at the pier and follow him to where they could make the homicide appear to be a common street crime or perhaps a carjacking, not the work of a disgruntled client.

H. Daniel Reid didn’t know it, but he was a dead man walking. The two men dispatched to eliminate him were unaware of all the particulars, but they didn’t need to know. Mr. Park had simply ordered the lawyer killed. If someone else got in the way — like the guy in the cowboy boots, with whom Reid met the day before — so be it.

The homeless man and his companion had no idea who the guy with the ostrich boots really was. They didn’t know his strengths or his record. And they didn’t care. They would take out the cowboy, too, if he got in the way. Mr. Park’s mission in the United States was far too important to allow interference from these bourgeois interlopers.

After searching the pier for nearly an hour, the two returned to a concrete table near the beachfront coffee stand.

Speaking in Korean, the homeless man said, “I don’t think we missed them.”

“We didn’t. I don’t think they came.”

“But why? Do you think we were detected yesterday?” asked the homeless man.

“I don’t see how.”

The homeless man reached into the pocket of his ragged, urine-stained trousers, pulled out an iPhone 5, and said, “I will call his office.”

In seconds the smartphone found the number and dialed the law offices of H. Daniel Reid. After speaking with the receptionist in perfect English, he ended the call and said to his colleague in Korean, “Reid is in court all afternoon.”

The older man smiled. The deed would be completed another day.