Fires of War

1

After taking them on a brief bus tour of the capital — the giant statue of the Great Leader was a special highlight — the North Koreans escorted the inspection team some ninety miles northward, installing them in a school dormitory about three miles from the waste plant.

The accommodations were not exactly deluxe; even the senior scientists found themselves sharing rooms barely big enough for the bunk beds that dominated them. Their hosts did not intend this as a slight; the quarters were the best available in the area. The military leaders who had met them — General Namgung, the commander of the armed forces in the capital area, and General Woo-suk, an official with the strategic weapons division — hosted a lavish dinner that lasted well past midnight, as toast after toast was offered to the visitors and their mission.

The next morning, the inspection team was presented with an elaborate breakfast featuring a variety of foods from around the world. Besides fried eggs and Korean-style pancakes filled with fruits, vegetables, and even meat, there were Western-style dishes, including bacon, potatoes Dauphine, and cheese Danishes. For a country where perpetual famine was a fact of life, the spread was obscenely impressive.

The provincial governor and some of his deputies sat at the head table with Dr. Norkelus. Thera, sitting across the room with her roommate, Lada Rahn, watched for a while as he tried to make conversation with the help of the translator. It clearly wasn’t getting far, but it was better than she was doing with Lada, who spoke English fluently with noticeable haughtiness; the syllables practically had ice dripping off them.

Thera’s adventure with the cigarettes in South Korea had given her a new status as the team’s bad girl, eliciting the interest of not only Evora but also many of the other male inspectors. This was charming in a junior-high-school kind of way: About midway through breakfast Evora came over to check on her coffee, asking if she needed a refill. She had no sooner given him the cup than another man, this one arguably the world expert in uranium isotopes, sprung up and galloped across the room, pointed at her plate of half-eaten toast, and asked if she would care for a fresh piece. She turned him down as politely as she could; as he left the table he shot Evora a glance several times more radioactive than anything they were likely to find today.

The attention continued as the team loaded up for the trip out to the site. Thera turned down several offers of rides and got into her usual truck with Julie Svenson, about midway in the pack.

“You’re awful popular today,” said Julie.

“They’re all looking for free smokes,” said Thera, buckling her seat belt.

Thera’s light mood held all the way up the twisting, rutted road to the waste plant. Then at the gate panic grabbed her by the throat. Foreboding welled inside her. She couldn’t shake the thoughts of what would happen if she were captured, as if the idea of being tortured was fluid choking her lungs.

She knew, absolutely knew, she would fail.

Four or five men with submachine guns watched the bus and trucks pull to a halt in the center of the compound.

They were going to shoot her.

Thera forced herself to her feet. She started to slip as she came down the steps. A man extended his arm outside the bus. She reached forward and grabbed it, holding tight, supporting herself, afraid that were she to let go she would melt into the ground.

“OK?” said the man. His English surprised her.

“I guess.”

“Nervous because you are in North Korea?”

“No. Just need a cigarette.” She looked up at him and smiled.

He smiled back. In his late forties or early fifties, he was about her height though considerably heavier. His temples had turned silver, and he had a perfect smile, his teeth radiant in his mouth.

“Cigarettes are bad for your health,” he told her.

“Everyone needs some bad habits.”

He smiled and wagged his finger at her, as if he were a kind uncle.

His finger brushed away enough of her fear to let her walk again. The paranoia retreated to her chest, hiding in some secret chamber of her heart as she joined the others for the introductory tour.

The layout of the plant was almost meter for meter the same as that of the site in South Chungchong Province, South Korea. There were fewer video cameras and slightly more soldiers outside the gate, along with a pair of very old tanks near the fence, but the buildings themselves were in precisely the same locations. The vegetation was browner, but the buildings were just as bright.

The North Korean officials were more long winded than their counterparts in the South, perhaps because they felt it necessary to insert the praises of the Great Leader into every other sentence. Thera found herself struggling to stay awake as the tour of the administration station proceeded in slow motion.

The man who had helped her from the bus stepped forward to speak. She’d thought he was simply one of the army of assistants, but he turned out to be a scientist responsible for “supervising precautions against pollution of the workers,” as the translator put it, reading from a prepared vitae. “Ch’o Tak has studied in Russia and France and is one of the world’s top experts in waste handling. A very important scientist for the People, who takes his duty most seriously.”

Dr. Ch’o kept his eyes fixed on the floor as she spoke, the tips of his ears turning bright red. When she finished, he raised his hand in a half wave.

“I have been blessed with good fortune,” he said, speaking in Korean and then immediately translating his words to English. “Korea’s Great Leader has directed us to answer any questions you have and to lay ourselves bare. I humbly pledge myself to cooperate fully. You may ask whatever you wish, and I shall answer.”

Norkelus glanced toward the rest of the group. When he realized no one was going to ask a question, he put up his hand, rose, and asked whether it had been difficult to install necessary safeguards. It was an extremely obvious attempt to be polite, but Ch’o took the question very seriously, saying that there had been great concern about expenses “and other considerations” among officials at different levels, but the directives of the Great Leader himself had prevailed and focused the actions of all. Money had been found and state-of-the-art precautions installed.

Norkelus thanked him. Ch’o, relieved, gave way to another official.

“What a ham,” whispered Julie as they passed out of the hall.

“He seemed sincere,” said Thera.

“Right. And Kim Jong-Il deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.”

2

A long sleepless night followed by a morning and afternoon filled with meetings had only increased Daniel Slott’s anxiety over the South Korean plutonium. He did his best to control it, but it was a losing battle. By midday he was wound so tight that when his daughter called him from college to say hello he nearly hung up on her.

Corrine Alston had called from New Hampshire to tell him what the president had said. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. Slott resented Corrine, but he thought it was probably better that she had told the president what was going on rather than Parnelles. This way, he figured, Parnelles looked as bad as he did.

It was more cover-your-ass thinking, and he hated it. He absolutely hated it.

When his four p.m. budget meeting finally dragged to a close, Slott headed toward his office, intending to call his daughter and apologize for being so abrupt.

“Daniel, there you are,” said Parnelles, intercepting him just before he got there. “Come and let’s have a quick chat.”

Slott followed silently as the CIA director led him down the hall to his office. Unlike many of the more recent DCIs, Parnelles was a CIA insider, a man who’d worked in the field as a case officer and held a host of other Bureau jobs before being appointed to head the CIA. There had been a gap of roughly ten years — he’d left the Agency and worked as, among other things, a bank vice president before being appointed — but otherwise he’d spent his entire adult life with the CIA, a throwback really to the handful of old hands who’d learned the business from the ground up.

“Where are we with Korea?” asked Parnelles when Slott sat down.

“Still trying to get more information.”

“What’s Seoul’s opinion?”

“I haven’t consulted them.”

Parnelles raised his left eyebrow slightly.

“I wanted to make sure we knew what we were dealing with,” explained Slott. “That it wasn’t a false alarm.”

“Is it?”

“The scientists say no. The first batch of tags were brought very close to a source, though it’s impossible to say where. The second set, which Ferguson recovered, had only one exposure. We’ve narrowed down the possible location, but we need more work.”

“And you don’t think Seoul can help?”

“I guess I’m wondering why they didn’t know about it in the first place,” said Slott. “Just as you are.”

“Do you think they purposely withheld information?”

“I’ve thought about that. I have thought about that.”

He had, for hours and hours.

“But I don’t,” Slott added. “I just can’t see Ken Bo doing that. I can see..”

The word incompetence seemed too harsh, so he said nothing.

“We may to have involve them,” said Parnelles, “if we’re going to find out anything. This has to have been a far-reaching operation, and I don’t know that we’ll gain anything from delaying at this point.”

“If the information comes out, it will jeopardize the disarmament treaty,” said Slott. “And if Seoul gets aggressive about pursuing it, sooner or later the ROK government will realize what we’re doing. Once that happens, I doubt we can keep the information under wraps.”

“That’s not really an intelligence concern, is it?”

“I guess it’s not,” said Slott, “but I wouldn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize the disarmament treaty.”

“How would you?”

By having the information leak out, thought Slott. It was obvious. Any bad publicity now — and certainly a reaction by North Korea — would send the Senate running for cover.

“I’m having a little trouble reading you,” said Slott. “I know you’re against the treaty, but—”

“That has nothing to do with it,” said Parnelles. “I’m not interested in politics. I’m interested in information. And our security.”

“If Seoul pokes its nose around, and something comes out, it would have a very negative effect.”

“Why should something come out?”

Slott couldn’t decide whether Parnelles was being disingenuous.

“You don’t trust your people in Korea?” Parnelles asked.

“I do trust them.”

“Then tell them to be discreet, but let’s find out what’s going on.”

“We’re going to have to find out why they missed this,” said Slott.

“Yes, but that’s of secondary importance right now,” said Parnelles. “Find out what it is they missed, first.”

“I guess you’re right,” said Slott, guessing Parnelles had probably already decided to clean house there. “I’ll get on it.”

3

Park Jin Tae ran his fingers over the fabric of the twelfth-century armor, admiring the fine craftsmanship of his ancestors. Park had made several billion dollars in his sixty-seven years; he had built more than a dozen companies from scratch and taken over so many others he’d lost track. He was among the most important businessmen in South Korea and, though he operated entirely behind the scenes, an important player in its politics as well. But nothing brought the South Korean businessman more pleasure than his collection of antiquities, and this suit of armor was the pinnacle.

The brigandine or fabric-covered armor had belonged to a high-ranking Korean official. The man’s wealth was evident from the rich cloth of the exterior. The metal plates beneath the armor were roughly nine and a half centimeters thick, strong enough to withstand a great blow. Yet the suit was constructed to allow the warrior great freedom of movement, for a Korean warrior expected to use his feet as well as his hands as weapons if need be.

He would use his very breath, Park thought. The men of ancient times were different, hardier and tougher. Just to wear the suit into battle took great strength.

What would such men say if they looked at Koreans now? They would scoff at their weakness.

Not every Korean was weak — Park knew many brave men, hundreds who would gladly sacrifice themselves for Korea — but the country as a whole had been seduced by Western materialism. It had forgotten its birthright and its past, both ancient and recent.

How else could one explain the fact that the South Korean president had spent yesterday showing the Japanese emperor Korean factories? The Japanese emperor.; son and grandson of a criminal, son and grandson of Korea’s most hated and brutal master.

The South Korean government had suggested that some of Park’s companies be included in the tour. He had declined, even though this was a breach of etiquette. Ordinarily, one had to be polite when dealing with visitors, but politeness would only go so far. It would not extend to Japanese criminals.

The enmity between Japan and Korea went back thousands of years, but Park’s familial hatred of the Japanese took its severe shape in 1941. It was the year Park Jin Tae was born. It was also the year his mother was made a “comfort woman,” a slave to the Japanese soldiers, an unwilling prostitute.

She had triumphed in the end, ending her life and that of one of her tormentors in a glorious fury of blood and revenge. But it was a bitter victory for her family, who were persecuted as a result. Her husband and brother were killed and their children sent to an orphanage where they were given Japanese names and taught to hate their country.

Park considered himself lucky. The war ended well before he attended school, and his personal memory of the outrages was, mercifully, dim. But his anger at the humiliation of his mother, the murder of his family, and the rape of his country burned ever stronger with each year he aged.

It burned so fiercely that if he spent too much time thinking about it, he would surely explode.

Park shook himself. There was considerable work to do. Thousands of employees worked for him — he was a man of great wealth and status, a respected man — and he could not afford to indulge himself in distractions. He left the display room and went to start the day.

4

It took Ferguson and Guns several hours to walk back to Guns’s hotel from Science Industries. Ferguson sat down on the couch; the next thing he knew it was several hours later and Guns was shaking him awake.

“Corrigan needs to talk to you,” Guns told him. “Sorry to wake you up, Ferg.”

“What time is it?”

“Oh eight hundred hours.”

“In real time that’s what, eight in the morning?”

“Something like that. It’s six o’clock at night back home. Eighteen hundred.”

“What, you got two clocks to keep track?”

“Only my head.”

Ferguson rolled out of bed, splashed some water on his face, and went down to the hotel cafe to get some coffee. All he could find was tea. He took two cups back to the room, did a quick scan for bugs to make sure no one had managed to sneak in while they were sleeping, and called The Cube.

“Ferg, how are you?” asked Corrigan.

“Can’t party like I used to,” he told him. “You get that information I told Lauren about? Science Industries?”

“Yeah. There’s an encrypted PDF file waiting for you to download. You can read it at the embassy.”

“Why the embassy?”

“Slott will explain. Hold on.”

“Great.”

Slott came on the line after a short pause.

“Good morning, Ferg.”

“What’s this about the embassy?” said Ferguson.

“We want soil samples from the waste plant, and as much other information as we can come up with. Seoul’s got to be involved.”

“I can get the samples without them.”

“There’s no need to cut Seoul out,” said Slott. “I want you to brief Ken Bo. He’s the station chief.”

“Me?”

“You have someone else in mind?”

Ferguson scratched the side of his head. Tea was fine as far as it went, but it wasn’t a substitute for coffee.

“It’ll take me a while to get up there.”

“Listen, Ferg, this situation is volatile, seriously volatile.”

“Yeah, I know the drill.”

“Ferguson, for once, will you listen to what I say?” snapped Slott.

“I always listen to you, Dan,” said Ferguson, who found Slott’s uncharacteristic anger amusing. “The question is whether I pay any attention to it.”

“If you need backup, ask for it, all right?”

“My middle name is Please,” said Ferguson. He took a swig of the tea and practically spit it out. “Listen, I gotta go. I think somebody’s trying to poison me.”

5

The North Koreans set up a midday feast for the inspection team in the reception building, once again importing massive amounts of Korean and Western specialties. Large banquet tables were placed in the center of the building with chairs clustered nearby. The team members and the Koreans escorting them ate with their plates in their laps.

The lunch might have had the air of a picnic or perhaps a wedding, except that it was hard for the guests to ignore the fact that the space they were sitting in had been designed for vehicles carrying nuclear waste. Julie Svenson shook her head the whole time she was eating, gulping her food and then going to the far side of the building.

When Neto Evora saw that Thera was alone, he came over and sat down beside her, asking how she was enjoying North Korea.

“It looks like the perfect place for a nuclear waste dump, doesn’t it?” said the scientist. “Deserted, cold, and desolate.”

“Actually, the countryside is very beautiful,” she said. “It looks almost like heaven.”

“Heaven? I don’t think so.”

“I don’t mean the government. Just the open fields.”

“If you are like me, a city boy, then you want excitement.”

“I guess I’m not like you,” said Thera.

Evora smirked. “Maybe we’ll chance a party this evening.”

“Here?”

“You never know.”

He got up. Thera watched him strut across the room, very full of himself. There was a thin line between confidence and conceit. Evora was far over the line.

Why hadn’t she realized that the other night?

Temporary insanity. And drinks.

She hadn’t actually gone to bed with him, so she deserved some credit.

Some people could push the line between conceit and confidence. Ferguson, for example. Fergie could push it very far. He exuded confidence but not really conceit — not in her opinion at least — maybe because he could back it up.

Not that he was perfect. He could be casually cruel and impish, like the way he loved baiting Rankin, even though he trusted him with his life.

He was nice to her. But maybe that meant he didn’t take her seriously.

Still hungry, Thera got up and went over to the food table.

“You should try the bulgogi,” said Dr. Ch’o, the scientist who had helped her out of the SUV earlier. “It is beef, marinated and grilled.”

“Thank you,” said Thera, holding her plate out for him to dish the food.

“My pleasure,” said the scientist, bowing his head slightly.

“You speak very good English,” said Thera. “Better than mine.”

“Oh, you are very good. What language do you speak as a native?”

“Greek.” Thera rolled off a few sentences about how she lived near Athens, then returned to English. “But everyone speaks English these days.”

“You have an American accent.”

“Yes, I have worked there. For the UN. A very interesting place.”

“Yes. I have never been myself. But I have been to Russia and Europe.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. Some years ago. When I received my degree.”

Another member of the inspection team asked Ch’o where he had been in Europe. Thera drifted away, then returned to her seat and finished eating. The beef was tasty, but a bit too spicy for her.

When she was done, she went outside to have a look around. Unwrapping her pack of cigarettes, she pounded the box end, then took one and put it into her mouth. She had just lit up when she saw Ch’o and another North Korean walking swiftly toward her, concerned looks on their faces.

Oh, crap, they don’t allow smoking here either, Thera thought to herself. I’m going to be arrested.

6

Ken Bo glared at Ferguson as he walked into his office, both hands on his desktop as if he were bracing himself against a gale. Ferguson pointed at him, smirked and sat down.

“How are ya?” said Ferguson. Bo had kept him waiting more than fifteen minutes in his outer office. Ferguson wouldn’t have minded so much if his assistant had had decent legs.

“Why did you pull a gun on one of my people the other day?” said Bo.

“I thought it was a cigarette lighter. He looked like he wanted a smoke.”

“I’ve heard about you, Ferguson.”

“Oh, good. You know why I’m here?”

“Slott told me,”

“Can we talk here?”

Ferguson glanced around. Generally offices in embassies were not used for very sensitive conversations, even though there was only a remote chance that they would be bugged or overheard.

Bo looked down at his desk, glancing around it as if looking for the answer. Suddenly he jumped into motion, leading the way out of the room.

Halfway down the hall he stuck his head into a door and called in to his deputy chief.

“Chris, I want you to hear this.”

“No,” said Ferguson. “Only you.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Take it up with the boss.”

“Hey, no problem,” said the deputy chief, backing away.

Bo shook his head and started walking again. Ferguson followed as the station chief went up two flights of stairs to a secure room within a room that had been built for sensitive discussions. There were no chairs or other furniture in the room — most likely to keep conversations short, Ferguson decided.

“What do you know?” asked Bo.

“Plutonium was detected at the Blessed Peak Nuclear Waste Processing Plant. An isotope that indicates there’s bomb fuel present. It looks like the South Koreans are building a nuke.”

“Impossible!”

“I wouldn’t say impossible.”

“Your data is wrong.”

Ferguson laughed. “You don’t even know what data I have.”

“It’s impossible. I’m sure it’s wrong. Or can be explained.”

“Yeah, probably you’re right.” Ferguson, realizing he was done, turned around.

“Where are you going?” Bo grabbed his arm.

“I have work to do.”

Bo glared at him. Ferguson glared back.

It didn’t take ESP to know what the station chief was thinking. A bomb project like this would have taken years to get to this point, and Bo had missed it. Good-bye job.

Ferguson hadn’t really been sold on the idea of working with the locals to begin with, but even if he had, Bo’s attitude warned him away. The station chief was looking at this as a threat to his job. He was going to be interested in covering his butt, not in finding out what was going on.

Not that he was surprised. Disappointed, maybe.

No, not even that. It was to be expected.

“Wait,” said Bo as Ferguson once more started for the door. “We can work together.”

“Don’t think so.”

“That’s all the information you have?”

Ferguson stopped and turned back around. “I don’t have much more, no. If you want the technical stuff, you’ll have to get it from Slott. I really don’t know it,” Ferguson said. “Listen, I need to use the secure communications center. If you don’t mind.”

“Bob — Can I call you Bob?”

“I really don’t know anything else. Honest.”

They stared at each other. Ferguson was so much taller than Bo that he thought he might get a crick in his neck if Bo didn’t blink soon.

“Well, keep us updated,” said Bo finally, looking away.

Ferguson didn’t feel like lying, so he simply shrugged as he left the room.

7

Thera braced herself as the North Koreans approached. There was no sense hiding the cigarette; both men had clearly seen her.

“You must be away from the building,” said Ch’o. “I’m sorry, Miss.”

“It’s a nonsmoking area?”

Ch’o gave her a strange look. “No. The train car. We are demonstrating the train car. You are on the track.”

He pointed behind her. Thera turned and saw that one of the remote-controller train cars was heading slowly in her direction from the temporary waste-storage area.

The other Korean began speaking in a very excited voice, telling her that she would be run over if she did not get away from the embedded tracks.

“The trains have sensors,” said Ch’o, “but they do not always work. There have been close-call accidents. We do not trust them.”

“I’m sorry,” said Thera, stepping out of the way.

Ch’o and the other man stood by her side as the train car went slowly by. The rest of the inspection team had gathered inside the building and was watching the train as it made its way slowly toward the reception building’s door.

“I didn’t know there were accidents,” said Thera when the train passed. “The South Koreans have the same system. They didn’t mention accidents.”

Ch’o translated what she said for his colleague. Thera picked up some of the reply but not all of it.

“Very possibly our cousins have not been one hundred percent candid,” said Ch’o. “Assuming that we have the same system.”

“You do.”

Ch’o glanced at her cigarette.

“You smoke?”

“Bad habit, I know,” said Thera, dropping the butt on the ground. “Thank you for warning me.”

She touched the scientist’s arm. He turned light red.

“Very welcome, very welcome,” he said, leading the other man away.

The rest of the afternoon passed slowly, the tour a slow-motion replay of the one they’d had in South Korea. Finally, the site director led them to the administration building for refreshments: seltzer water and kimchi-style hors d’oeuvres. Thera took a few sips of the seltzer, then went outside, ostensibly to grab a smoke but really to get another glimpse of the area and make sure she could plant the tags tomorrow.

It looked like it would be easy There were no cameras covering the interior of the compound, and the guards stayed close to the buildings. Thera took a short walk, testing to see if she was being watched.

No.

Could she get the tags in exactly the same places she had in South Korea?

Probably. But was that important now? The baseline they’d been looking for was from a plant with no plutonium.

Thera swung around to head back toward the administration building. The door opened, and a number of team members came out, followed by three or four North Koreans, one of whom was Ch’o.

“Miss,” said Ch’o. “Oh, Miss?”

“Me?”

“You must try these,” said the scientist in English, bowing his head slightly and holding a small package out toward her. It was wrapped in brown paper.

Thera took it. Two other Korean officials nodded behind Ch’o, motioning for her to open the package.

She pulled the rough string and opened the paper. There was a pack of cigarettes inside. It was only about half full; obviously Ch’o had improvised the present.

The package had Marlboro’s color scheme, but the words were in Korean.

“Our own,” said Ch’o. “Try.”

“You like, yes,” added one of the other men. “North Korean cigarettes number one.”

Thera felt herself flushing. “I—”

“You mentioned to the guard at the door that you needed a cigarette,” said Ch’o.

“Oh,” said Thera. “It was just an expression.”

By now other members of the team, including Dr. Norkelus, had come over to see what the fuss was about. More North Koreans joined them, and Thera found herself at the center of a small crowd. She held up the package; Norkelus rolled his eyes. Julie Svenson shook her head. Evora and some of the others laughed.

“I guess I should try one,” said Thera.

She took two of the cigarettes from the pack, then held the cigarettes out to the Koreans. They all shook their heads furiously. Finally, Dr. Ch’o, his lips gritted together firmly, stepped up and took one.

“I will try just a puff with you, out of hospitality. We cannot let a guest be alone.”

He turned and repeated what he had said in Korean, in effect scolding them for their bad manners. The others grinned sheepishly.

Thera took a drag and immediately began coughing. Horror flooded onto the faces of the Koreans nearby.

Then Ch’o laughed, and the others laughed, and Thera laughed as well.

“It’s good but very strong,” she said.

The translator, squeezing through the knot around her, explained in Korean. Everyone laughed again, nodding and saying in Korean that their cigarettes were good but took some getting used to.

“I’m afraid we should all get back to work,” said Norkelus finally. “We should continue.”

“Yes, we must continue and be perfect hosts,” said Ch’o.

He walked off very proud of himself, Thera thought.

She took a short draw on the cigarette as the others left. It tasted just as terrible as before, though this time she managed to keep herself from coughing.

Thera put her finger into the top of the package to pull the flap closed. When she did, she noticed there was writing on the margin of the paper. At first glance, it looked like a trademark notice, but of course that couldn’t be right.

The letters were so small she had to hold the package right in front of her face.

She nearly dropped it as she read the words: Help me.

8

Rankin took the binoculars from the lookout and panned them across the sea to the south. The small fishing vessel was just under a mile away. It had been sailing toward them for more than an hour, moving so slowly that it was hard to tell if it was being propelled by anything other than the current.

“I say we grab them if they get any closer,” said Michael Barren. Barren was the assault team’s first sergeant, the ranking noncommissioned officer on the atoll.

Grabbing the people in the boat was the safe thing to do, unless, of course, they botched it, or the people in the boat were expected somewhere else or managed to get a radio message off.

“No,” said Rankin. “We wait. They’ll pass by.”

“What if they don’t?” asked Barren.

The others moved a little closer, interested not only in finding out what they were going to do but also in seeing who was going to get his way

“If they don’t, we deal with that then,” said Rankin, handing the binoculars back.

The boat kept coming. Fifteen minutes later, it was a hundred yards offshore. Rankin, Barren, and two other soldiers crouched behind a fallen tree trunk on the island’s high point overlooking the beach. The helicopters were about a hundred yards behind them, down the hill. The rest of the assault team was spread out in hidden positions around the atoll.

“We gonna let them come ashore before we kill them?” asked Barren.

“We ain’t gonna kill them,” said Rankin.

“What?”

“We’re going to stay down, hidden, unless it’s absolutely necessary to grab them. Then we grab them. We don’t kill them.”

Barren thought this was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.

“Can we talk, Sarge?” asked Barren.

“We are talking.”

Barren glanced at the two other soldiers nearby. “We might want to make this private.”

“Nothing I say is private.”

“All right,” said Barren. “Why won’t we shoot them?”

“Because we don’t have to.”

“Jesus, Sarge. They’re North Koreans. The enemy.”

“Look, you can call me Stephen or Skip if you want,” Rankin told him. “Not Sergeant.”

“You’re not a sergeant?”

Rankin ignored the challenging, almost mocking tone. “This is my call,” he told Barren. “We leave these people be if we can. They come on the island, they see anything, we grab them. We don’t kill them.”

Frustrated, Barren turned away.

“Looks like they’re landing,” said the lookout.

Rankin moved to the end of the tree trunk, watching through his glasses as two men jumped from the front of the small vessel and pulled it onto the beach. A third man stayed with the boat.

If he gave the order to fire, they’d be dead inside of thirty seconds.

If he delayed, it was possible they might alert someone via radio.

But the best thing, the right thing, was to wait. It was much better for the mission that these people leave without seeing them. Kill them, and maybe someone would come looking for them.

Rankin knew in his gut he was doing the right thing, balancing the different chances in the mission’s favor. But it wasn’t like he could put it into a mathematical formula. The others would just have to trust him.

The Koreans took a large barrel from the boat. Rankin was baffled, until he realized they were making dinner.

He rolled back behind the log and told the others what was going on. Smoke was already starting to curl from the fire.

“What do we do?” Barren demanded.

“We hang loose and let them eat. If they get frisky and go exploring, then we grab them. Otherwise we wait and hide. It’s already getting dark. It won’t be hard.”

Barren shook his head, but said nothing.

“Relax,” said Rankin. “Food smells kind of rancid anyway.”

Only later, when the North Koreans had pulled out without seeing anyone, did Rankin realize that what he’d said was exactly the sort of line Ferguson would use to put him off.

“Ferg’s still a jerk,” he mumbled to himself, going to get some meals-ready-to-eat for dinner.

9

With the fader still in place on the security camera at Blessed Peak, Ferguson and Guns didn’t have to make another night jump — which was fine with Guns, since he hated parachuting during the day, let alone at night. They hiked into the nature preserve around four in the afternoon, getting their bearings before the sun set. They hid and waited until dark, when they hiked up the trail near the mountain that backed into the waste site, then headed in the direction of the fence. Between the sliver of moon and the clear night sky, there was enough light to see without using their night-vision gear, though every so often Ferguson stopped and put his on while he scouted to make sure no one was lurking nearby.

It took roughly two hours for them to reach the clearing in front of the fence. Ferguson led Guns through the pine trees to a rock outcropping that stood almost directly across from the video camera.

“You got clips?” Ferguson asked.

Guns nodded. The clips were large clothespins that were used to hold down the barbed wire at the top of the fence. He also had a Teflon “towel” tied around his shoulder to throw on top of the wire and keep it from snagging them as they went over. Because of the camera angle, they could leave the gear in place until they came back.

Ferguson took the remote from his backpack and sent the signal to the camera to move to the right. It didn’t budge.

Ferguson cursed and tried again. Still nothing.

“What’s going on?” Guns asked.

“Not sure. Let’s see if the fader’s working.”

The screen turned white, then grayed. Ferguson let it come back to full.

“I don’t know why the camera’s not moving,” he told Guns, “but the fader is.”

“You sure?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“All right.”

“If I yell retreat, retreat. OK?”

“Sure.”

“Hey, I thought marines never retreated,” said Ferguson, hitting the fader button and jumping to his feet.

Laughing, Guns scrambled to the fence, leaping about halfway up and climbing hand over hand to the top in about two seconds flat. He clamped down the wires, untied his towel, and twirled himself over and down to the ground.

Ferguson, several steps ahead, ran straight to the camera. Dropping down behind it, he saw the problem: One of his clips had fallen off the wire. He fixed it, made sure it worked, then went with Guns in the direction of the plant.

They had more than a mile and a half to go when Ferguson noticed a glow he hadn’t seen the other night.

“What’s up?” asked Guns.

“Looks like there’s a used-car lot down there, doesn’t it?”

Guns peered through the trees.

“What do you mean?”

“Place wasn’t lit up like this the other night. There are spotlights down there.”

“They going to see us coming?”

“I don’t know.”

Ferguson started walking again. About a half mile from the low-level waste area, he emerged from the ravine he and Rankin had used the other night, circling above and around the cavelike entrance. The rise in terrain gave them a better view of the area, though the brush and rocks were fairly low and they had to stay close to the ground to avoid casting shadows.

A dozen security guards stood near the reception building, warming themselves around large burn barrels. Another four or five stood around a barrel near the tracks, about a hundred yards from the low-level waste site but within full view of it. The train cars had been moved.

“This is new,” Ferguson told Guns.

“You think they saw something with the video camera?”

“No. They’d’ve sent somebody up to fix it. Or shoot us.”

“I mean when we went over.”

Ferguson studied the compound. It was possible that there had been an alert, but surely the response would have been more emphatic. This looked more generic, like something you might do if you heard bank robbers were over at the saloon having a drink.

Or if word had leaked out of the Seoul office that something was up.

A pickup truck swung around the compound. It was the same truck that had been used for patrols the other night, only this time there were men in the back. The pickup stopped in front of the low-level waste area, and the men got out, took a look around, then hopped back in.

Ferguson and Guns lay on the cold ground for another hour and a half, timing the patrols. There were seven during that time, almost nonstop. The men varied their patrol route as well.

“Something tipped them off,” Ferguson told Guns. “There’s no way we’re getting where we want to go without being seen.”

“What do we do?”

“Follow me.”

“We leaving?”

“Not yet.”

Ferguson retreated about a hundred yards up the hill, then began circling toward the far side of the entrance to the underground waste depository. He had to move slowly, trying not to kick too much dirt or rocks downhill. And every time the pickup truck came in the direction, he and Guns had to flatten themselves to make absolutely sure they weren’t seen.

Nearly two hours passed before they had reached the other side. Ferguson stripped off his pack and took out his small shovel and baggies.

“Chill for me here, Guns.”

“Hey, don’t get lost, man.”

“You’re getting a sense of humor. That’s dangerous in a marine.”

Ferguson got down on all fours and crawled out in the dirt toward the entrance to the low-level waste area. After roughly fifty yards, he reached the edge of a macadam parking area that sat off the loop road used by the pickup patrol. He was just about to get up and run across it when the security patrol swung in his direction.

Ferguson flattened his body in the dirt, nudging his face against the pebbles. His nose and mouth filled with the fine, claylike dust as he waited for the truck to pass.

Guns, standing in the shadows, watched helplessly as the truck veered in Ferguson’s direction. He had a smoke grenade in his hand, but what good was that? He reached for his pistol, even though Ferguson had told him they weren’t supposed to shoot anyone.

Ferguson heard the engine, then the staccato rhythm of the Koreans’ voices. The wheels crunched the gravel, spraying it to the sides. The truck jerked to the left, then sped up. They’d just missed seeing him.

Ferguson waited a full minute, then scrambled across the lot and the road, throwing himself down in the dirt. Two shovelfuls later, he had the bag filled.

“I thought they were going to spot you,” said Guns when he got back. “They were like, ten feet away.”

“Eleven at least,” Ferg told him. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

10

Thera lay on her cot, staring at the bottom of the empty bunk above her. Lada Rahn snored a few feet away. The sound rattled all of the metal in the room, like a kind of counterpoint to the hum of the fluorescent light fixtures from the hall.

Thera had destroyed the message in the cigarette box, but the words had been seared into her brain.

Dr. Tak Ch’o wanted to defect.

Why had he picked her? Was it a trap? A trick?

Thera wasn’t sure what to do. The scientist might be a big prize, but was he worth jeopardizing her mission for?

And even if he was, how would she go about arranging for his defection?

If there were answers, they weren’t in the dark gray light around her. But Thera continued to stare, unable to sleep.

11

Ferguson picked his way slowly across the rocks, crossing the hill behind the entrance to the underground low-level waste area. The whole night had been pretty much a waste — the soil samples were the lowest priority on the wish list the specialists had given him — but he had to contain his bile until they were out.

Ferguson stopped as he came to a deep crevice. He didn’t remember the fissure, which was about three feet wide and extended at least twenty. Unsure where he had gone off course, he stopped and took off his night-vision glasses to get his bearings.

“What’s wrong, Ferg?” asked Guns, tagging along behind him.

“You remember this hole here?”

“No.”

Ferguson reached into his pocket and took out his satellite photos. They’d gone farther up the hill on the way back than they had on the way in. It wasn’t a big difference, but if they kept going they’d end up at a cliff.

“We need to angle down this way,” he told Guns, pointing.

Within a few yards, the soil became extremely loose. Afraid that they were going to send enough down to alert the patrols, they backtracked again and looked for sturdier ground. They went over a steep stretch, finding handholds in the thin vegetation, finally arriving at a ledge about thirty feet from the ground.

Once again, Ferguson consulted the photos. They hadn’t made enough of a correction and were a good five hundred yards farther east of the spot where he thought they would come out. But that wasn’t necessarily bad. The ledge was out of sight from the compound, and though the ledge was narrow — maybe eight inches — following it would save them considerable time. Ferguson eased out slowly, keeping himself flat against the wall. After what seemed like forever, he reached a large boulder. He hugged it, spun his legs around, and landed on the side of the hill.

“Downhill from here,” he whispered to Guns, who was just starting across.

The marine grunted. He kept fighting the temptation to look down, narrowing his view to the rocks in front of his face. As far as he was concerned, the problem wasn’t that the path was narrow; the problem was that there were no handholds. He had to keep his weight pitched in toward the wall, which was difficult not only because he was carrying a backpack but because the ledge was angled the other way. He found himself sliding across on his tiptoes the way he imagined a ballet dancer would move.

Guns’s foot hit against the side of a rock he hadn’t seen. Surprised, he jerked his weight forward, then twisted to see what he’d hit. The shift in momentum threw him off balance, and the next thing he knew he was falling straight down.

Ferguson, barely two yards away, dove forward to grab his companion.

He caught the top of his shirt. Instead of stopping Guns, Ferguson was yanked downward with him, somersaulting around before losing his grip. He slid a good twenty feet before managing to snare himself on a rock.

Guns stopped about eight feet below him. He’d smacked the side of his head on a stone and gotten a mouthful of dirt. Much worse, he’d banged and twisted his knee as he fell.

The pain held off for a second. Guns felt as if he’d been plunged into a cold lake, totally numb. Then a hatchet seemed to chop the side of his kneecap. The pain reverberated up and down his leg, and he felt incredibly hot, sweat pouring from his forehead.

“Ferg.”

“Hey, Guns, I’m here,” said Ferguson. Gingerly, he made his way down to the marine, retrieving his night glasses as he went.

“Hurt my leg. I can’t tell if it’s my knee or what,” said Guns. “The right one.”

“No compound fracture,” said Ferguson, gently running his fingers above and below it.

Guns sucked air and bit his lip to keep from screaming. “This hurts like a mo-fo.”

“If we slide down a little way, we can get to the base of the ravine we used to come in. See it?”

“Can’t. Can’t see anything, Ferg.”

Guns’s glasses were attached to his face, held there by elastic at the back of his head; Ferguson wasn’t sure whether they malfunctioned or if Guns was losing consciousness. He pushed the glasses down so they fell around Guns’s neck, then wrapped his arm around his.

“All right, let’s go down together,” Ferg told him. “I know it’s gonna hurt, but we gotta get out.”

“It’s all right.”

Ferguson tucked his leg under Guns’s to cushion it. “On our butts. Ready?”

“Go.”

Guns ground his teeth together to keep from crying out. Ferguson kept his arm around his, but Guns’s leg jerked to the side and smacked against some of the rocks as they went down.

“All right, let’s get the hell out of here,” said Ferguson, standing a little awkwardly. He checked their gear, making sure they hadn’t lost anything.

“Leave me, Ferg,” croaked Guns.

“Yeah, right. Like that might work.” Ferguson laughed, barely able to keep his voice down. “Hang on, Gimpy.”

He dipped down, maneuvering his shoulders to get leverage, then lifted Guns up and onto his back.

“You’re going to have to go on a diet if you plan on doing this again,” he grunted, starting back in the direction of the fence.

Guns insisted he could pull himself over the fence. Though doubtful, Ferguson preferred climbing to cutting a hole, and agreed they would try it. To his surprise, Guns was able to pull himself up hand over hand, all the way to the top.

“Nothin’ compared to boot camp,” grunted Guns.

Guns had trouble getting over the Teflon blanket covering the razor wire, scraping his good leg on the sharp knife point next to it. He straddled the fence top, hyperventilating.

“All right, that was the hard part,” Ferguson told him.

“Yeah. Downhill from here “

With Ferguson’s help, Guns managed to get reasonably close to the ground before letting go, hoping to land on his good foot. But he collapsed immediately, falling backward in a swell of pain.

“Wow,” he said, looking up at the dark sky. “Imagine what being shot feels like.”

“Piece of cake compared to this,” said Ferguson, standing over him.

He meant it as a joke, but Guns took it seriously. “Gotta be ten times worse.”

Ferguson got the blanket and the clips, then pulled Guns onto his back and began hiking toward the exit. It was slow going; by the time they made it outside and to the car a halfmile away, dawn had broken.

“I’m sorry, Ferg,” muttered Guns as they drove back to Daejeon. “I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just rest for a while. We’ll get you cleaned up, then take you to a doctor and get that knee fixed.”

“I’m really sorry, man. I’m really, really sorry. I screwed up.”

“You didn’t screw up. Somebody must have tipped them off. And I have a pretty good idea who it was.”

12

Thera took out the pack of cigarettes, pulled two out, then pointed one in the direction of the North Korean soldier. The man — he looked more like a teenager, with dark peach fuzz above his lip — blinked his eyes, then looked left and right before taking it. Thera smiled and gave him her matches; he lit up furtively, turning from the wind.

In the six or seven seconds it took him to get the cigarette lit, Thera slipped the last tab into the slot between the metal panels of the reception building.

She was done. It had been easier to plant the devices here than in South Korea.

Her relief lasted about as long as it took her to light her own cigarette; she saw Tak Ch’o approaching from across the complex. The scientist had a big smile on his face, nodding and laughing as he caught her glance.

The young soldier stiffened and started to move away. Ch’o told him something Thera couldn’t understand. Though it was meant to put the young man at ease, the guard barely relaxed.

“You like our cigarettes then?” Ch’o told her in English. He immediately translated into Korean for the soldier.

“Oh, yes,” said Thera. “Very good.”

“And interesting?”

“Very interesting.” Thera stared into his eyes. If there had been any doubt that Ch’o had given her the message, his gaze erased it.

“So, you are Greek?” he asked in English.

“Yes.”

“From where?”

Thera described the town, adding that it was near Athens. Ch’o nodded, then turned to the soldier and told him what she had said. He clamped the young man on the shoulder and turned to her.

“My young friend comes from Hamhun, in the east,” Ch’o told her. “His father is an important and brilliant general.”

Before Thera could respond, the scientist continued, “It’s good to see two young people getting along. Scientists are not blind to matters of the heart.”

The soldier looked on quizzically, clearly not understanding what was going on.

“I–I’m probably too old for him,” said Thera.

“Old? You are so beautiful I couldn’t guess how old you are,” said Ch’o.

He turned to the soldier and told him enough of what he had said that the young man turned beet red. This made the scientist laugh.

“Well, then, I will see you both at lunch,” said Ch’o. He started away, then turned back quickly, pulling a cigarette pack from his jacket pocket. “I almost forgot… another present for you. I see you are low.”

Thera took the package.

“Save some for your trip. You will want to share with friends, no doubt,” said Ch’o. He laughed again, turned toward the soldier, then with a sideways glance as if he suspected someone were watching, took another pack from his pants pocket and pressed it into the young man’s hand.

“Haeng-uneul bireoyo,” he told the soldier, glancing at Thera. “Good luck.”

13

Guns had torn several ligaments in his knee, damaged his kneecap, and broken the top of his tibia. The knee was splinted so it couldn’t be moved until some of the swelling went down and he arranged to see a specialist. This meant he had a large cast and a pair of crutches that were awkward to use.

Ferguson decided — over Guns’s protests that he was starting to feel much better — that Guns should go home immediately, taking the dirt back with him for analysis. Corrigan arranged a military flight and even got an army driver to pick him up at the clinic where he was examined.

“I don’t want to leave, Ferg,” said Guns. “You need backup.”

“I got plenty of backup,” Ferguson told him as they waited for the car.

“I feel like a quitter.”

“What are you going to do, chop off your leg and march on?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

Ferguson laughed, but Guns was serious.

“Give it a rest, Guns,” Ferguson told him. “That dirt has to go back anyway.”

Guns shook his head, but there was nothing he could do. Ten minutes later, he grimaced as he pulled himself into the van that had come for him.

“Don’t forget to take those painkillers,” Ferguson told him as he closed the door.

“I will.”

“Two every six hours.”

“I only need one.”

Two hours after packing Guns off, Ferguson walked into Ken Bo’s office in Seoul.

“Why’d you tip off the waste site?” said Ferguson, pulling over a chair.

“Tip them off to what?”

“They were waiting last night when I went back. I couldn’t do what I had to do.”

“You went there?”

“Yeah, I went there.”

“We—” Bo stopped midsentence, trying to collect his thoughts. He’d been ambushed and was talking from the hip, not a smart thing to do.

“You what?” demanded Ferguson.

“I thought you were going to work with us,” said Bo angrily, turning to the attack. “You were going to keep us informed.”

“What does that have to do with you telling the South Koreans what’s going on?”

“We didn’t tell them. They don’t know anything.”

“Then why were they waiting for us last night?”

“We needed a way to go in, a cover story. So we came up with one.”

“Why?”

“What do you think, we’re sitting on our hands?” Bo’s eyes were pinpoints in the tunnel created by his furrowing brows. “Slott told us to get this figured out. We’re pulling out all the stops.”

“Slott told you what was going on because he didn’t want you messing it up. This is my gig, not yours.”

“Bullshit, Ferguson. Just because you’re the golden-haired boy around headquarters doesn’t mean you’re the only one who’s working around here.”

“My hair’s black.”

Ferguson folded his arms. He told himself that as long as he remained in his seat, he could be calm. As long as he didn’t mention Guns getting hurt, he could control himself.

“Start explaining,” Ferguson said.

“I don’t work for you.”

“Be damn glad of that. Now what the hell did you do there?”

Reluctantly, but realizing there was no point in not telling him, Bo explained that they had invented a story about having intelligence claiming that the North Koreans would try and infiltrate the waste site “to cause problems.” They had offered to conduct a security analysis to counter the threat.

“We needed a way to get in legitimately,” said Bo, “without tipping them off.”

“And what did you find?”

“We haven’t found anything yet. We’re going in next week.”

“Next week? Next week?”

“I need time to get our specialists in place.”

“You gave them a heads-up that something was going on, and then you gave them a week to get rid of whatever they’ve got there. Jesus F. Christ, Bo. How the hell stupid are you?”

Bo leapt to his feet. “Get out of my office, Ferguson. Out.”

“No, I want a fuckin’ answer. How the hell stupid are you?”

“We’re watching the facility. Nothing goes in or out without us knowing about it.”

“Oh, that’ll work.”

Ferguson got up from his seat. Bo leaned across his desk, his face red.

“You should have told us you were going in,” said Bo. “You were going to work with us. You screwed up, not me.”

“I screwed up?” Ferguson gave him a half laugh. “I screwed up? I screwed up. Yeah, that’s it. I screwed up. Oh, boy, did I screw up.”

“You think you’re a one-man show, Ferguson. That’s your problem. The Agency doesn’t revolve around you.”

“No shit.”

Ferguson’s father had taught him a great deal about life and the espionage business, but one of the most important rules the son had learned was one his dad failed to follow: Don’t get screwed by your own people.

In the early nineties, Ferguson Senior had been sent to Moscow to retrieve a high-level Russian agent from the Kremlin. Unbeknownst to his father — but probably not to the CIA’s deputy director of operations at the time, who felt they owed it to the man to try and get him out — the Russian agent had already been betrayed. Ferguson’s father walked right into a trap.

The thing was, Ferguson Senior was too good an operative to be blindsided. He turned the tables on the KGB team that was watching him, shot them, and got the spy out anyway.

Except it wasn’t the spy.

The KGB had replaced the agent before Ferguson Senior got there. Two people in Moscow supposedly knew the agent’s real identity; Ferguson Senior went to both after the gunfight for help. For reasons that never became clear, neither one said anything to alert him. It wasn’t until he got to Berlin that Ferguson Senior realized he still had a real problem on his hands. Once again, though, he managed to turn the tables on a KGB ambush.

That was his dad. Always pulling a rabbit out of his hat.

But the roof caved in anyway. Ferguson Senior was injured in the attack, and a bystander was killed. The German police got involved, and within a few days there was talk of a congressional investigation to “rein in the CIA cowboy.”

Ferguson Senior was cut loose by the Agency. The only person who stood up for him was his old friend and fellow officer Thomas Parnelles, the General. But Parnelles, who’d essentially been exiled to a meaningless headquarters job for his own supposed indiscretions, had little influence within the Agency and none outside of it. Ferguson Senior was forced to retire; he was told he was lucky he wasn’t going to jail.

Maybe it was his family history, but Ferguson couldn’t help but feel he’d fallen into a snake pit here in Korea. Even if he accepted Bo’s story at face value, which meant that Bo was a dope, how could the South Koreans have produced plutonium without the local CIA people finding out about it?

In some ways, it was an unfair question. The CIA operation was designed to spy on North Korea, not the South. Besides, intelligence agencies were historically more notable for their failures than their successes. This wasn’t quite on the scale of Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

Still, by definition it was an intelligence failure. And it seemed to Ferguson that something else was going on here that he didn’t know about. Slott had never directly interfered in an operation before.

If he’d been in the Middle East or Russia, Ferguson would have felt much more sure of himself, but Korea was very foreign. He needed some sort of backup, a check on his superiors just in case they were gaming him.

The sole possibility that came to mind was Corrine Alston.

A measure of his desperation, that.

But he needed some sort of insurance, just in case.

In case what?

He stared out the window of the train, not wanting to answer his own question.

14

Thera was walking with Julie Svenson toward the lunch buffet in the reception building when Dr. Norkelus stormed up, an angry look on his face. She looked at him expectantly, trying to think what she would say if he asked about the package of cigarettes she’d just been given. She knew there’d be another message in them, though she hadn’t had a chance to look for it.

She had the first pack, which was almost empty. She’d give that to him.

“I need a message sent to the secretary general’s special committee,” said Norkelus, practically shouting at her. “It’s absurd.”

“You want me to help prepare it?” said Thera, trying not to let her relief show.

“Yes.” He took a voice recorder from his pocket. “The details are there. It must go out by one p.m., our time.”

“One?”

“I know. It’s ridiculous. Bureaucratic fools,” replied Norkelus, turning on his heel and stomping off.

15

Corrine Alston was just about to curl up in bed with a good mystery when the phone rang. Thinking it was her mother, she picked up the phone on the night table in the bedroom.

“Hey, Wicked Stepmother, it’s Prince Charming.”

“Ferg?”

“I need you to get to a secure phone, but don’t go to The Cube.”

“Ferguson, what the hell are you doing?”

“Encrypted phone. Call me. You have my number.”

“But—”

“No buts. You have five minutes.”

The phone line went dead. Corrine scrambled to get her secure satellite phone. She punched the buttons, not entirely sure she remembered Ferg’s number.

“Grimm Brothers. Fairy tales are our business.”

“You’re not very funny, Ferguson, especially at midnight.”

“It’s only two o’clock here,” he said. “Must be the problem. Humor’s jetlagged.”

“What’s going on?”

“I need you to do me a favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

“Guns is on his way back home with a soil sample. He messed up his leg. Corrigan tell you that?”

“No.”

“One of the reasons he messed up his leg is that the South Koreans tripled security at the waste site where we found the plutonium. You know about the plutonium, right?”

“Yes, of course. Why did they up the security?”

“Sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. The leading theory is that our CIA station chief here is a boob, but there are other suspicions.”

“Like what?”

Ferguson ignored the question. “I have some things to check out, and I need, uh, I just need someone I can trust.”

“You mean from the Team?”

“This isn’t a team job I have in mind. I want them to do some translating maybe, and I may send them back with something for you.”

“For me?”

“Maybe more soil samples… I don’t know. I don’t want to use Seoul.”

“Why not, Ferg?”

Ferguson didn’t answer.

“Ferg.”

“Because, Wicked Stepmother, if they’re merely incompetent, they’ll screw it up. If they’re more than merely incompetent, who knows what will happen?”

So why was he cutting out Corrigan, Corrine wondered. And why had Slott decided to get the Seoul office involved in a First Team mission without telling her?

“You still there, Stepmother?”

“I’m here, Ferg.”

“Hey listen, one of these days you’re going to have to trust me,” he told her.

“I trust you.”

“Then see if you can find this guy for me. He’s retired. Used to work for the Bureau. Name is James Sonjae. Call him now and wake him up. Tell him to come to Seoul.”

“Ferg, it’s two o’clock in the morning.”

“He doesn’t sleep very well anyway.”

“But—”

“Like I say. Trust me, OK? Gotta go do some barhopping now. I’ll talk to you in a bit.”

Two hours later, Corrine arrived at a diner about a mile and a half off the Beltway. James Sonjae sat in the far corner, slumped down in the booth, a coffee and half-eaten bagel sitting on the table in front of him. He kept his gaze toward the window as she approached; it was only when she leaned over to ask who he was that she realized he was able to watch everything from the reflections there.

“Mr. Sonjae?”

“Please have a seat, Ms. Alston.”

“Corrine, please.”

He turned from the window and straightened in the seat. “You’re the president’s counsel?”

“Yes, I am.”

“You don’t have bodyguards?”

The remark surprised her. “I don’t need Secret Service protection.”

“I see.”

He picked up his coffee cup. He looked considerably older than his Bureau records indicated. His face was pockmarked and worn, his hair thin and gray. He was dressed in a light windbreaker, despite the night’s chill. A short, compact man, his shoulders sloped, giving Corrine the impression of someone who had been worn down by his years in government service.

“Bob Ferguson asked me to contact you,” Corrine told him.

“Ferg works for you?”

“In a way. He’s in Korea.”

“Korea?” Sonjae put down his coffee cup. “South Korea?”

“Yes. He needs… He needs a translator he can trust. And he asked for you. He needs someone right away. Very much right away. The sooner the better.”

Sonjae leaned back in the seat. Corrine guessed that he was trying to think of a way to say no politely.

“His father saved my life,” said the ex-FBI agent finally. “What does he need me to do?”

16

Thera rode back to the dormitory with two engineers who’d finished for the day and needed to record their findings. The two men headed off to have lunch; Thera jogged to her room to write up the report.

She took the cigarette pack out of her pocket and examined it while she waited for the laptop to boot up. She assumed the room was bugged, and thought it possible that there was some sort of camera monitoring what she did as well, even though she hadn’t been able to spot one. So she tried to be as nonchalant as possible.

The package was wrapped in cellophane, unopened. She slit it open with her fingernail, pulling the top off and crumpling the wrapper in her hand. She slit the top open and folded back the paper, looking for a message.

There was nothing on the flap, no paper between the cigarettes, no writing on the interior, at least not that she could see.

Was yesterday’s message an illusion?

Thera put the pack down and went to work.

It was only as she started to type Norkelus’s terse response to the committee that Thera remembered what Tak Ch’o had said: save some cigarettes.

Maybe the message was in the cigarettes.

Of course.

Thera out took the pack and tapped a cigarette free, playing with it as if to relieve tension or boredom. The cigarette quickly began to fray. She moved her hands back and forth, agitated, nervous. Absentmindedly she crushed the side of the cigarette and dropped it on the desk. Then, seeming to realize what she had done, she picked it up and flipped it toward the waste basket.

It missed.

She pulled the paper apart as she dropped it into the can. Nothing.

Back at her desk, Thera started working on Norkelus’s report, which said that the team had found nothing but was still “in preliminary stages.” She transcribed everything he said; his accent made it difficult to understand some of the sentences, and she had to stop and rewind, stop and rewind, and even then ended up guessing at spots.

If there was a message inside one of the cigarettes, it would look slightly different than the others, wouldn’t it?

Thera typed a few more words, then got up, and with exaggerated movements gathered her things so she could go outside for a smoke. Here she was definitely being observed, so she made a good show of things: opening the package from the bottom, taking out one cigarette, examining it, lighting it. A gust of wind came up; she scooped her hand over the end of the cigarette to shelter it, and dropped the pack. Most of the cigarettes scattered.

She dropped to her knees, picking the cigarettes one by one.

The third was slightly fatter than the others. She slid it behind her ear and scooped the rest into the box.

Inside, she palmed it, rolled the tobacco out in her pocket, and finally unfolded the wrapper, revealing a message so tiny she had to squint to make out the letters.

Nov 8 124.30.39.52 midnight

Thera’s first thought was that the numbers referred to an Internet site where a message would appeal tomorrow night. But as she went back to work on the report, she realized the numbers were actually longitude and latitude and referred to a spot roughly fifty miles south of the waste plant, whose own location she’d had to note for the records.

The team was leaving for Japan on the evening of November 8; they’d probably land by midnight.

Was it some sort of trap or trick?

Thera couldn’t decide.

Best let The Cube figure that out.

The problem was how exactly to tell them. She could imbed a message in the report she was typing for Norkelus easily enough. But none of the prearranged message sequences came close to covering this situation.

Working Ch’o’s name into the message was easy. Norkelus said they had been greeted warmly; Thera added a line quoting his brief speech the day they arrived.

She scanned down what she had, deleting some of Norkelus’s extraneous comments. He’d included a to-do list that was basically the inspection team’s agenda, ending with the flight at ten p.m. Nov. 8.

Thera added a line: Nov. 8 pckp 0000XXXX.

It looked as if it were something she’d stuck in, intending to finish or clear up later. She scrolled back, adding XXX’s and zeroes to some of the earlier parts.

Norkelus had given some initial readings taken by air monitors. She could stick the numbers in there, claiming she’d misheard or mistyped something, but how would anyone know to look for them?

What if she put in a new line, mangled from Norkelus’s notes?

She typed in the numbers, removing the periods. It looked more like an error than anything else.

Obvious enough?

Thera hit her spellchecker, which ran through the document quickly. She accidentally “corrected” one of the readings, replacing an abbreviation with the word Pluto. She left it, as if she hadn’t realized her mistake.

The coordinates were just there, on their own line. It would take ESP to realize they were part of the message.

The whole message would take ESP to interpret.

Maybe she shouldn’t send it at all. Maybe it was a trap.

A nuclear scientist who wanted to defect? Quite a prize.

Thera hesitated, her mouse over the Send button.

She had to make the coordinates obvious; otherwise there was no point to this at all. No point.

She scrolled to the findings list, looking at some of the samples. Particle quantities were noted.

Iron. The code for an emergency pickup was Iron; she was to insert the word or the chemical symbol, Fe, into a message to alert the Cube.

Thera typed FeBr into the list of first-day chemical samples — if anyone caught it, she would claim she couldn’t decipher something from Norkelus’s notes — then cut and pasted the coordinates in. Finally, she scrolled to the end of the message and put her initials in, making it clear she had prepared it.

Send, or not send?

Fear gripped her for a moment, fear, doubt and doom.

It filled her with anger. She zeroed the mouse on the SEND command and tapped furiously, practically breaking the plastic.

Gone, she told herself. Gone. And don’t look back.

17

“Iron is the code for pickup,” said Corrigan, “and I double-checked just to be sure: There is no test for iron bromine, which is what FeBr would be, presumably.”

Corrine glanced across the conference room table at Parnelles and Slott. Both wore grim expressions, clearly concerned about the message that had been imbedded in a routine UN report intercepted almost exactly three hours before. Corrigan had called them all immediately, waking Slott and Parnelles up. Corrine had only just returned from meeting with Ferguson’s friend, so wired on coffee she wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway.

“There are other typos in the message,” said Slott. “It may be nothing.”

“I doubt she’d be sloppy with something like that,” said Corrigan.

“November 8 at midnight, the team will be out of there by then,” said Slott.

“Maybe it’s tonight at midnight,” suggested Corrigan. “See, it’s out of sequence; maybe the wrong date was put there to throw anyone else off.”

“She’s not going to make a mistake like that,” said Slott.

“Then why ask for a pickup after they leave?”

“Let’s see where this is,” said Parnelles, rising.

Corrigan had brought an extra-large map with him. The DCI unfolded it and peered down at the spot the mission coordinator had marked. A lock of jet black hair fell across his forehead. Parnelles’s eyes had immense bags beneath them. The looks that appeared rugged by day seemed merely craggy at three in the morning.

“Fifty miles south of the site, along the coast, if you read the numbers as longitude and latitude, with minutes and decimals,” said Slott softly. “Just due south of Kawaksan.”

Parnelles grunted. “You have satellite maps of this?”

Slott slid over a folder.

“I think, uh, we ought to run the team in there,” said Corrigan. His voice squeaked.

“How would Thera get there?” asked Corrine, looking at the map. “She wouldn’t walk fifty miles.”

“Yes,” grunted Parnelles, continuing to stare at the map.

“Maybe she’s planning on taking a vehicle from the site,” said Corrigan. “I think we have to assume she’s going to be there.”

“Thank you, Jack,” said Parnelles. He looked up at the mission coordinator. “I believe Corrine, Dan, and I can take it from here.”

Corrigan didn’t want to leave, but of course he had no choice. He felt as if he hadn’t made a good enough case for a rescue mission; his gut told him Thera was in trouble, and he didn’t want her abandoned.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” said Slott after Corrigan left. “Why would she want a pickup after she’s gone? And if the sequence is supposed to be a clue, if it’s tonight, why did she give this location rather than O2, or one of the cache points? It doesn’t make any sense.”

O2 was a location a few miles outside the camp toward the coast.

“When you say midnight November 8, do you mean the midnight after the day of November 8?” asked Corrine. “Or the midnight that leads to the day of November 8? It might be interpreted either way.”

“She’d mean midnight at the end of November 8,” said Slott.

“Are you sure?”

“That’s the way we do it.”

“It would make more sense Corrine’s way,” said Parnelles. “She needs to be picked up before the UN team leaves, because she’s worried about something that will happen to her when she tries to go.”

“Midnight November 7 — the way she should have written it — that would be tonight,” said Slott.

“Then we better get there tonight,” said Parnelles.

Slott was skeptical that the message was even a message; it seemed to him likely that Thera had accidentally typed the wrong letters for a legitimate testing compound. Analysts were always seeing things that weren’t there, and Corrigan tended to be an overanxious den mother.

“Dan’s point about how far it is from the base does make a lot of sense,” said Corrine. “From this map, it looks like she would be driving right by one of the supply caches, not to mention O2.”

“Maybe she saw something at O2 that made it inappropriate,” suggested Parnelles. “Or maybe it’s not her who’s supposed to be picked up.”

“What? A defector?” Slott picked up his plastic mechanical pencil and began tapping it furiously on the desk. “No. She’d never blow her cover like that.”

“Maybe she didn’t have to blow her cover,” said Parnelles. “Can we get to this site without being detected?”

Slott glanced at the map. “I believe so. I’ll have to check with Colonel Van Buren.”

“Very good,” said Parnelles, pushing back from the table.

“Which night should we go in?”

“Both, if necessary.”

“Since we’re all here,” said Corrine, “there’s something I wanted to mention. Sergeant Young broke his leg and is on his way back to Hawaii for treatment.”

“I hadn’t heard,” said Parnelles.

“He fell off the side of ravine,” said Slott. “It didn’t affect the mission.”

“The circumstances seemed odd,” said Corrine, looking at the deputy director.

“Guns and Ferguson went into the South Korean waste site,” explained Slott. “Security had been increased, and they took a risk getting out. In any event, as they were leaving, the sergeant slipped down a ravine and got injured.”

“Why had security been increased?” asked Parnelles.

Slott let the pencil slide down through his fingers to the table. He resented Corrine for bringing this up now; her only motive, it seemed, was to embarrass him.

“Seoul had a plan to get into the facility,” Slott told Parnelles. “Unfortunately, they didn’t coordinate properly with Ferguson. Actually, it’s very possible Sergeant Young would have gotten hurt anyway. The site is very hilly.”

“Why is Seoul involved?” said Corrine.

“Why wouldn’t they be?” said Slott.

“This is a Special Demands mission.”

“Special Demands doesn’t have the resources for what we need to do. This is more a bread-and-butter assignment.”

“You should have told me,” said Corrine.

“Seoul is involved because I told Daniel to pull out all the stops,” said Parnelles. “Blame me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You don’t run the CIA, do you?”

“Mr. Parnelles.” Corrine gave him a don’t-screw-with-me look.

“The president wants to know about the bomb material. We’re pulling out all the stops,” said Slott.

“Did Ferguson know?” Corrine asked.

“Apparently not. I sent him to talk to Ken Bo.” Slott picked up his pencil again. “Obviously, they didn’t play together very well.”

“I’d appreciate being informed when something directly involves Special Demands,” said Corrine. “I should have been told.”

“You want me to tell you every little thing?”

“I don’t think that’s a little thing, but yes,” she added. “Everything that has to do with Special Demands.”

Slott turned to Parnelles.

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable that Ms. Alston be kept in the loop,” said the director. “She is the president’s representative.”

Slott had intended to tell Corrine but got caught up in other matters and simply forgot. But her demand now — and, more important, Parnelles’s backing it up — seemed like an unconscionable attack on his authority. In effect, they were saying he couldn’t do anything without getting her approval. Or at least that was the way he interpreted it.

“I don’t know that that’s going to work,” Slott said.

“Make it work, Dan,” said Parnelles, getting up. “You better get moving; you have only a few hours to get this pickup arranged.”

18

According to Corrigan, Science Industries was owned by the same man — Park Jin Tae — who had owned the truck company, though for the moment Ferguson saw that only as a coincidence. What was more interesting was the fact that Park — in Korean, it was pronounced like “bark” — was an important behind-the-scenes political player, albeit a frustrated one. Several years before, he had donated a considerable amount of money to a now-banned political party named March 1 Movement. The left-leaning group had argued for peaceful reunification with North Korea. It had also called for a dramatic boost in military spending, a measure that to Ferguson seemed contradictory with the goal of peaceful reunification, but was somehow compatible in the tangled world of Korean politics — or at least the March 1 Movement members thought it was.

The CIA report forwarded to Ferguson stated that Park hated Japan, apparently because his family had been persecuted during the Japanese occupation. Supposedly he had retired from politics since the banning of March 1 Movement, though in the last few years he had worked to strengthen ties with the North. Park was a part owner, with the North Korean government, in several factories in a special area near the capital. He also owned stock in a North Korean bank established by a Swede. The business arrangements were encouraged by the South Korean government and, while profitable, were not entirely about making money. Anyone who believed in reunification realized that the greatest barrier to it, besides the intransigence of dictator Kim Jong-II, was the North’s great poverty. Economic development in the North was absolutely essential if Korea was ever to be reunited.

“Now here’s the interesting part,” Corrigan told Ferguson. “Just before the political party was banned, some of the principles were being investigated for trying to buy weapons on the black market. Scuttlebutt was that it was just a trumped-up charge. But…”

“What sort of weapons?”

“Lots. Tanks. Artillery. Everything they could get.”

“Were they planning a coup?” asked Ferguson. He was walking through Daejeon’s shopping district. Even though the late afternoon air was cold, the streets were still crowded.

“Not clear. We have a news report here where one of the lawyers claimed that the weapons weren’t going to be used in South Korea. They don’t show up in any of the other reports, ours or the media’s.”

“Thanks.”

“So, Ferg. What are you going to do with this?”

“Process it.”

“Are you working with Seoul?”

“I’m in touch with them. Did you tell them about the trucks?”

“Well, no. Am I supposed to?”

“No,” said Ferguson. “I’m handling that myself.”

“Slott wants to make sure you’re cooperating. He doesn’t want a repeat of what happened to Guns.”

“Neither do I.”

Ferguson killed the communication, then turned down a side street, aiming for a motor scooter rental company he’d scouted a few days before.

Whether the trucks were a coincidence or not, Ferguson decided Science Industries was too interesting a place not to check out. His first thought was that he could scout the grounds from one of the hotel rooftops nearby, but it turned out that the one with the best view — the Han — showed the entrance driveway and two nondescript two-story buildings, nothing more. In fact, it was difficult to even get an idea of the size of the campus from the hotels; the landscape included a large number of evergreens on the hills and knolls that blocked the view. Only by going to four different high-rises was Ferguson able to determine there were six different buildings. The one where the trucks had been parked looked like a warehouse or perhaps a garage. It was arranged in a way that someone could make a drop-off or pickup without going through the rest of the campus; in fact, an inner fence cut off all but the rear of the building from the rest of the complex.

Two other buildings were very small cement structures, possibly for storage or machinery. One was round, the other square.

The last three were brown-brick structures with narrow, slitlike windows. The largest was three stories and only about two hundred feet long; the others were smaller two-story structures.

With a rough idea of the layout, Ferguson went to check out the perimeter, examining what sort of security measures protected it. A double fence topped by barbed wire protected the perimeter, limiting access to the single road Ferguson and Guns had taken two nights before. Security cameras were placed at irregular intervals, accompanied by floodlights to illuminate the grounds at dark. The building doors were all equipped with electronic locks that worked with card readers.

Ferguson found a spot on the road between the highway and the plant where he could watch for cars to come out of the facility. He hoped to follow them to a bar or restaurant, any place where he could get more information and maybe steal an ID card to get inside the buildings. But it was like playing the lottery — the first car he followed went onto the highway toward Seoul, and the second disappeared into a residential area west of the city.

The third was more promising — a Mercedes sedan with a driver and a passenger in the back. Ferguson had a little difficulty keeping up on the highway, but after about ten miles, the car turned off onto a local road. They drove past a series of high-rises until evergreen-clad hills burst around them, as if Nature had pushed man back and retaken its land.

The grade became steeper and steeper. When the road leveled off, Ferguson could see Daejeon laid out in the distance to his right. The afternoon sun gave the city an ethereal glow. It was a phenomenal view, but not one shared with many others — the road abruptly narrowed and turned to packed dirt.

The Mercedes turned into a gated driveway a few hundred yards beyond the end of the macadam. Ferguson slowed down, watching from the corner of his eye as the gate opened and the sedan pulled through.

Just after the driveway, the road veered to the left. A group of very old structures hugged the shoulder; a dozen men were working on one, refurbishing it with hand tools. Ferguson pulled around in a U-turn.

“Nice work,” Ferguson told the workers, getting off his bike. They either didn’t hear him or didn’t understand English, since no one paid any attention. This only encouraged him; he walked to the side of the building, staring up and nodding his head in admiration.

A man in a white shirt and tie came from around the side of the building and asked, in Korean, who he was. Ferguson stuck out his hand in greeting, then reached for the small phrase book, looking for the words for “very nice carpentry” while the man with the tie told him he should be on his way.

“They don’t have a section on carpentry,” said Ferguson cheerfully, closing the book. “But I hammer, saw.” He mimed the work, as if he were a carpenter. The man with the tie seemed to think he was looking for a job.

“No, no. On vacation. Love old houses. And big houses. Great work. I’m a contractor myself. Back in the States. Great work here. Fantastic. Make a lot of money doing this back home. You ever been?”

Ferguson’s admiration for the craftsmanship was so effusive that the man in the tie began showing him around the exterior. Ferguson, who in his entire life had been no closer to woodworking tools than the parking lot of Home Depot, bent over an ancient wood plane, admiring it as if it were the Grail.

It wasn’t the Grail, but it may have been older. The men were refurbishing the buildings with period tools to preserve the authenticity. Two of the older men began explaining their methods in great detail — and in Korean. Ferguson understood perhaps one word out of twenty, but he could be enthusiastic in any language. He spent more than a half hour admiring the project, and by the time he left he was sure he could show up in a day or so with a camera and have an enthusiastic audience.

He was also sure that the man who owned these houses and most of the surrounding mountain, including the property across the street, was Park Jin Tae: “a great and noble man, a leader of true Koreans and the heart of generosity and spirit,” according to the man with the tie.

19

One of the good things about being in the West Wing at a quarter to four in the morning was that no one was around to interrupt you.

One of the bad things was — it was a quarter to four in the morning.

Corrine waited as the coffee dripped through the coffeemaker, the aroma filling the small room. Her body cried out for the caffeine, but she knew from experience that the first quarter of the pot the machine made would be cold and taste like metal shavings; for some reason the pot had to be half full before the liquid was fit for human consumption.

She leaned back against the cupboard, waiting. And thinking of her conversation with Ferguson.

Clearly he didn’t trust Seoul, and he didn’t trust Slott. Whatever his suspicions were, they must be pretty strong. Ferguson didn’t like her at all, though obviously he trusted her to some degree.

Or he was using her.

Had she even done the right thing? Getting an outsider involved, even one who’d worked for the government in the past?

Slott’s reluctance to tell her that he was involving Seoul — even if Parnelles took the blame for the actual decision — told her that something was going on. Maybe it only amounted to Agency politics, but there was no way for her to figure it out without considerably more information from the principles, Ferguson especially.

Had she done the right thing?

If Ferguson was up to something illegal, he surely wouldn’t have involved her.

On the other hand, was it really in the president’s interest to be subverting the chain of command at the CIA?

Then again, some might say that her very presence on Special Demands subverted it.

Slott would certainly say that.

The coffee machine gurgled at her. Corrine grabbed the pot and poured herself a cup, then went down the hall to get a jump on the day’s work.

20

By the time Ferguson got back to Science Industries, it was nearly six p.m. Even so, there were plenty of workers in the complex, and within a few minutes five cars came out in a bunch. He went with the two that turned off the first highway ramp, following as they went into the bar district. Seven young women got out of the cars, joking and laughing as they went down the stairs to a hof, a Korean bar that served food and drinks.

By the time he parked the scooter and got inside, the women had found a place at the far end of the bar. Ferguson made his way over to them nonchalantly, ordered a maekju — beer.

“Saeng maekju?” said the bartender, asking if he wanted a draft.

Ferguson gave her one of his best goofy smiles. “Hang on,” he said, taking out his phrase book.

One of the women next to him glanced over.

“You speak English?” he said in a lost voice.

“English, a little,” said the woman.

“Do I want saeng maekju?”

The woman giggled, and tapped her friend. Within a few minutes Ferguson was surrounded by young women who found the handsome but clueless foreigner quite amusing. They got him a Hite — a brand of bottled beer popular in Korea — and a plate of food whose identity he couldn’t decipher.

Midway through the beer, Asian techno-pop began playing in the background. Ferguson proved deft on the nearby dance floor, dancing with three and four of the women at a time. When a slow song came on, he took the girl named Lin-So in his arms and held her close; she clung to him furiously, her head against his chest and shoulder.

She didn’t want to let go when the music stopped, but the punchy, driving beat of the next song got her moving. Ferguson took her by the hand and twirled her backward and forward, around and around several times before segueing into a kind of jig and sharing himself with two of the other young women, who’d been shooting jealous glances in their direction for several minutes now.

When the song ended, he excused himself to find the restroom; he went down the hall and slipped outside, having obtained what he wanted: Bae Eun’s identity card, with its magnetic key to open the doors at Science Industries.

Had Ferguson looked even the vaguest bit Korean, or if he had thought the plant routinely employed foreign workers, he would have used the ID card to go in the front gate; most guards rarely took a good look at credentials, especially when they were outside on a cold night. But the circumstances called for a slightly more creative approach: hopping the fence.

At half-past nine, a limo drove up the drive to the front gate. The driver told the guards that he had come to pick up Mr. Park. The men immediately ordered him out of the car. The driver objected, and within seconds one of the guards was holding him down on the pavement while the other was frantically calling for backup.

Ferguson, meanwhile, scaled the first perimeter fence, clamping down the barbed wire strands at the top with a pair of oversized clothespins. Though the spot he had chosen was only a few yards from the front gate, it wasn’t covered by a video camera, not so much an oversight as a commonsense decision by a security designer who had only so many cameras to work with and saw no reason to cover an area under constant human surveillance.

Now inside the compound, Ferguson trotted up one of the interior roads, circling around to a set of lights that indicated where one of the surveillance cameras had been placed. He blinded the camera with a rather low-tech application, the wrapper of a local fast-food restaurant artfully tangled and stuck on with a gob of mayonnaise. This done, he sprinted past it, racing for a second camera, located at the base of a tree.

This camera covered one of the nearby buildings as well as the route he wanted to use to get out, and here he had to rely on something more dependable than tainted mayonnaise. He inserted a fader in the back housing, hit the button to dim the view and then ran in front of it toward the nearby building.

By now other guards had responded to help their brother at the front gate. Red and yellow lights were flashing, illuminating the grounds. Ferguson trotted to the largest building on the campus. He walked around the side farthest from the gate to the back, trying to see through the windows as he went. But the windows had been designed to prevent that, and all he could catch was a glimpse of his own reflection.

The door at the back didn’t have a card reader or handle. It was also hooked to an alarm. Ferguson decided he’d leave the building for later, after he took some soil samples and checked out the trucks.

Getting across the compound without getting caught by the video cameras took a bit of work. It was relatively easy to see where the cameras were and what they covered — each used floodlights to illuminate its view. Ducking around them, though, was like running through a free-form maze. It took nearly two hours to get to the warehouse area where the trucks had been parked. Ferguson filled a dozen bags with soil on his way over.

The first thing he did was calibrate the gamma meter — a replacement for the one Guns had lost — and hold it next to the building. The needle didn’t budge.

Ferguson took two shovelfuls of dirt from the northwestern corner of the building, then climbed the eight-foot chain-link fence that separated all but the front of the building from the parking lot.

A camera sat under the front eave of the building, covering the lot. Unsure how far he could go before getting in its view, Ferguson considered climbing up and disabling it, but one look at the slick metal sides of the building made his knee groan. He decided he could reach the trucks without being seen if he stayed close to the wall. Ferguson slipped off his backpack and got down on his hands and knees to crawl.

He didn’t pick up anything from the gamma meter at the first truck. Pausing near the tailgate, he slid a gamma detection tag into the chassis just beneath the truck bed. Then he rolled to the next truck, repeating the process. When he reached the third truck without getting any indication from the gamma meter, he pressed the button to initiate the self-calibration sequence again, wondering if it was malfunctioning.

As he did, he heard the rumble of a car approaching.

21

Rankin leapt from the helicopter, rushing with the others as they ran into the open field overlooking the rocky shore. The team spread out: Half ran in the direction of a stone wall that stood near the road, the rest took positions along the cliffside. It was not quite pitch black, but seeing more than ten feet was impossible without his night goggles.

The field was empty, as was the nearby road.

Rankin scanned the area, turning slowly to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Then he took out the handheld global positioner and walked to the exact coordinates Colonel Van Buren had given him.

Nada.

“We making a pickup, or what?” said Sergeant Barren, his voice more a demand than a question.

“We’ll see what happens,” spit back Rankin.

“Fuggit,” muttered Barren, trotting off to check on the men near the road.

Rankin couldn’t necessarily disagree with Barren’s assessment. They were only a few miles from a North Korean army base. Sitting on the ground here for any particular length of time wasn’t all that good an idea, especially since they had to do it again tomorrow night if no one showed up.

But that’s what they were going to do.

Rankin went over toward the cliffside, checking on the men there. He squatted next to each one of the men, not saying anything — what was there to say? — just showing them he was there.

“Oh-twenty,” said Barren finally, coming over and pointing to his watch. “What do you say?”

“Ten more minutes,” said Rankin.

“You briefed fifteen, not thirty.”

“I want to make sure.”

“Right.”

The ten minutes passed more slowly than the first twenty. The wind stiffened. It wasn’t bitter cold — the temperature had climbed to the high thirties, a veritable heat spell — but it added to the discomfort nonetheless.

Finally, Rankin hopped over the wall and trotted to the middle of the road, taking one last look himself.

Nothing.

“Saddle up,” he told the others. “Let’s hit the road.”

22

The lights grew stronger. Ferguson tried to sink into the ground, hiding from them in the musky, oil-scented dampness.

This is what the grave will smell like, he thought.

The lights moved to his right, then came back. The car stopped and moved, stopped and moved; it was making a U-turn.

They Finally the lights moved away for good. Ferguson planted a tag, then made his way back to his pack, retreating around the building to find a way inside.

The door in the rear of the building had a wired alarm, with the wires running along the top and the sensor near the upper-left-hand corner. Ferguson worked a long, flexible metal strip into the gap between the door and molding, pushing it until it struck the alarm connection plate on the jamb. He used the current meter to make sure he had a connection, then taped the metal in place.

The lock was a high-quality German-made model that used mushroom pins in its works, a difficult challenge to pick. Ferguson had to alter his usual technique, gently and loosely prodding the inner workings of the lock before getting it to give way.

The door opened into a vast empty space. The concrete floor was swept clean, the ribs of the building bare. Ferguson made sure there was no motion detector, then slipped inside. He checked for radiation contamination — none — and put tags near the overhead doors at the front of the building.

Ferguson circled back across the compound, aiming at one of the two smaller buildings. Just as he approached the front door, he caught a glimmer of something on his right and jerked back.

It was a video camera.

He froze, silently cursing. Slowly he backed away, wondering how he had missed it.

It took him a few minutes to spot the light that was supposed to be illuminating the camera’s area. It was out.

So had he been seen? Or was there simply not enough light?

Ferguson ran his fingers around his mouth, considering the situation. Given how the guards had responded the other night, if he had been seen, the entire security force would be racing here.

No sense wasting time then, he thought, stepping to the door.

Ferguson swiped the card in the reader and tugged on the latch. The door didn’t open. He swiped the card again, but it remained locked. Leaving the card in the reader didn’t work either.

Maybe the security people had a way of locking down the campus buildings and were on their way.

Ferguson jumped back into the shadows, fingering a tear gas grenade. But after ten minutes passed, he realized no one was coming. The problem had to be with the card. It must be programmed to allow its user access only to certain areas or at certain times.

“OK, Miss Secretary,” he whispered to the card. “Let’s try you at door number two.”

Ferguson slinked through the shadows to the next building, the largest on the site. It had three stories and — most important for Ferguson — a card lock on the door at the rear that wasn’t covered by a video camera, not even one with a broken light. He checked for alarms, then took out his pilfered identity card.

The door buzzed as soon as he put the card into the reader. Ferguson held his breath on the threshold, listening to make sure the place was empty.

Red exit lights and pairs of dull yellow bulbs posted along the ceiling lit the hallway. Each door was made of wood; placards with Korean characters hung next to each. Ferguson photographed the hall and the placards, then chose an office door about midway down the hall. It was locked, and not just with a run-of-the-mill, any-screwdriver-will-do lock, but a Desmo, an eight-pin isolated key tumbler that was almost impossible to pick.

Almost.

Ferguson had to dig deep into his lock-picking tools to take it on, fiddling with a custom-made tension wrench and wirelike spring. The lock gave almost no feedback before suddenly giving way. Ferguson was so surprised that he dropped the screwdriverlike tension wrench on the ground.

“Real quiet, dude,” he whispered, scooping it up. He left the door slightly ajar and slipped inside.

He found himself in an office shared by three people; each had a small desk and his or her own computer. Stealing a hard drive would have been easy, but it would also be pretty obvious.

Pulling one of the computers out, he saw that they were networked, and that the LEDs were flashing. Unhooking it or even just leaving it and booting up might alert a remote system administrator, or at least leave a record of the intrusion.

Ferguson was debating whether the risk was worth it when he heard a sound from the hallway. By the time he got back to the door, footsteps were coming in his direction.

Easing the door back against the jamb, he kept his hand on the knob rather than risking the sound of a click as it snapped into place. Then he took a long, slow breath, pushing the air from his lungs as silently as possible.

Whoever was walking toward him was wearing plastic-soled shoes that squeaked loudly as he walked. Ferguson eased his right hand into his jacket and took out his pepper spray.

Keys jangled.

The steps were next to him.

Then they were past.

Ferguson heard the door to the next office open. The person who’d gone in began to whistle.

He glanced at his watch. It was already quarter to five. The operation had taken him considerably longer than he had thought it would. If he was going to get out to the fence before it got light, he had to leave now.

Ferguson looked back at the room. There were boxes of backup disks next to the PCs. Reasoning that they were less likely to be missed, he helped himself to a couple from each desk, choosing at random since he had no idea what the Korean characters meant.

Outside, light from the next office flooded the corridor. Ferguson got down on his hands and knees and crawled to the doorway, looking up from the bottom to see inside. A man sat with his back to him, facing a computer a short distance away.

Ferguson tiptoed past, stopped to make sure he hadn’t been seen, then continued to the end of the hallway.

He was just about to put his hands on the door’s crash bar when he heard the squeak of the man’s shoes once again.

Ferguson threw himself into the open stairwell to his left. As soon as he did, he realized this was a mistake; a set of vending machines sat on the landing between the floors above. He scrambled down the nearby steps, ducking just out of sight before the man and his squeaking shoes trotted up the steps to the vending machines.

The doors below the stairwell had narrow glass slits on them. Curious about what might be on the bottom level of the building, Ferguson eased down and tried one.

It wasn’t locked. He pulled open the door and entered a vast room of computers. Large mainframes and server units lined the walls and formed clusters around the pillars. Metal cabinets formed low-rising walls at different points in the space, which extended the entire width of the building.

The cabinets were locked, but it was a simple matter to pick them, and as soon as he was sure there weren’t any monitoring devices or alarms, he slid his tools in and opened one up.

Large tape discs, the type used to store and back up massive amounts of data, sat in the cabinet. Most if not all had been there awhile — there was a layer of dust on the bottom row. Ferguson selected one, then closed up the case. He took some photos with his small camera, and went back the way he’d come.

23

Thera rose before dawn, once more unable to sleep. Her roommate’s snores rattled the room, but it was the adrenaline of the mission that was keeping her awake. She wondered about the scientist, and at the same time wanted to be gone, back to Japan and then home.

She’d be back in three months to pick up the tags, and have to go through all of this again. But it’d be much easier then.

Unless Ch’o deserted.

Had they gotten the message? There was no way of knowing.

There’d always be tension, anticipation, adrenaline. She could handle that. It was fear she had trouble with, unfocused fear. But who didn’t?

Dressed and wrapped in her heavy coat, Thera slipped out into the hallway and walked down to the door. The night air was frigid and sky dark. Without even thinking, she took one of the cigarettes from her pocket and began to smoke.

God, I’m addicted, she thought, tossing it to the ground and stamping it out. She took one last look at the overcast sky, then went inside to get a head start on work.

24

Slott thumbed through the preliminary technical report on the soil that Ferguson and Guns had gathered at the South Korean waste site. The report contained several pages of graphs and esoteric formulas as well as a dozen written in almost impenetrable scientific prose, but the data could be summed up in one word: inconclusive.

No plutonium had been found, though the scientists weren’t sure that was because there was none there or because the field equipment they’d taken to Hawaii simply wasn’t strong enough to detect it. A further analysis of the soil would take place in two days at a special CIA lab in California. There, the dirt would be compressed in a chamber and pounded with a variety of radioactive waves in a process one scientist had compared to hightech gold panning. If there were any stray plutonium-239 atoms — actually, there would have to be a few more than one, but Slott wasn’t up on the specifics — the machine would find them.

There was one technical caveat. The analysis relied on the fact that anyone trying to hide plutonium would go only so far as necessary to prevent its detection by standard equipment. The nano technology the Agency was using was exponentially more powerful; still, in theory a scientist who was aware of the lower detection threshold might be able to counter it. But if that were the case, Slott reasoned, they wouldn’t have found anything in the first place.

Directly below the report was a response from Ken Bo regarding the plutonium and its possible origin. Stripped of its many qualifications — and complaints about the “unusual” operation that had found it — was a theory that the material had come from the closed TRIGA Mark-III research reactor in Seoul. The reactor had been used in the 1980s and probably the 1990s to conduct experiments testing extraction techniques from depleted uranium. Other experiments, continuing until 2004, had produced other isotopes.

While not generally known, those experiments had been detected by the IAEA roughly five years after they’d been reported to the president and the Intelligence Committee by the CIA.

Bo’s contention — he phrased it as a hypothesis — was that the plutonium that had just been discovered was merely waste material left from those activities.

The theory would make a certain sense to a layman; the readings had been found at a waste dump, after all. But Slott knew that wasn’t what was really going on. First of all, the experiments had never been aimed at or succeeded in producing plutonium. TRIGA Mark-Ill had been shut down, and all the material, even potential waste products, accounted for. Slott knew this because it had all happened on his watch in South Korea.

But few other people, even within the CIA, did. Much of the data on the experiments was highly classified and had not been found or reported by the IAEA. Information about the program had not been included in any of the briefing papers on the new treaty, and it was obvious to him that neither Corrine nor Parnelles for that matter was aware of it.

Bo’s theory could get Seoul — and, by extension, Slott — off the hook if they were criticized. By carefully controlling the release of information about the TRIGA experiments, Slott could easily make it seem as if the CIA knew about this material all along and had in fact told Congress and the president.

Bo would never put this in writing, of course. He was counting on Slott to understand and play along.

Slott got up from his desk and began pacing around his office. Five people had known the entire TRIGA story from the Agency’s perspective. Slott was one; Bo was another. A third was now dead. That left the former head of the CIA, now dying of Alzheimer’s disease, and an officer now working in a staff position in what amounted to semiretirement.

He didn’t even have to manipulate the records. If anyone asked, he could say that plutonium had been mentioned but not put in the reports for some reason he no longer knew.

Had it been found?

No. Definitely it hadn’t. Definitely not. They had access to the South Korean documents, and it wasn’t there.

And they were all the documents.

He knew that, because he’d verified it with the Korean document tracking system. But who in Congress or the administrative branch would know that? Even Parnelles wouldn’t know that.

They could find it out, if they knew the right person to ask, but it would be difficult.

Slott rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t lie. And he wasn’t going to play the CYA games. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. That wasn’t who he was.

Slott stopped in front of his desk, looking at the picture of his wife and kids. It was a year old, taken when they’d moved into their new house. His only boy — they had three older girls — had just lost his first tooth.

If he didn’t play the games, he might very well lose his job. They’d lose their house, have to move. He’d end up selling cars or insurance somewhere out West where no one knew who he was.

Or he could just keep his mouth shut and see what happened. Protect Bo, even though this raised some serious questions about Bo’s competency.

Everyone was entitled to one screwup, wasn’t he? And it wasn’t even clear this was a screwup.

Slott went back behind his desk. He still had his son’s baby tooth in the top desk drawer, an accidental souvenir he’d retained after exchanging it for a gold dollar.

The tooth fairy — a little white lie.

Not even that. His son had brought up the tooth fairy and the promise of money. Slott hadn’t said anything, one way or another.

Daddy didn’t lie, David. He was just protecting the family.

Would that be better to tell his boy or his girls than: Daddy’s not the incompetent screwup the congressmen are claiming.?

Slott pushed the desk drawer closed. He told himself he needed more information before he could decide what to do.

It wasn’t true, but it was the sort of lie he could live with.

25

Ferguson stuck his head under the shower’s stream, shaking as the ice-cold water sent shivers through his body. It was a poor substitute for sleep, as was the weak coffee he got in the lobby.

“Corrine wants you to talk to her,” said Corrigan when he checked in.

“What, does she think I’m working for her now?”

“You are.”

“You find anything else out about Science Industries?”

“Thomas Ciello got a list of some of the people who work there,” said Corrigan. “One of them is pretty interesting.”

“Who dat?”

“Guy named Kang Hwan. Wrote a paper on extracting nuclear material using some sort of laser technique. Real technical stuff.”

“Jack, you think a shopping list is technical.”

“Har-har. This is. I can upload a copy of it for you.”

“In Korean?”

“You’re a laugh a minute, Ferg. What if I busted your chops like this every time you called in?”

“You mean you don’t do it on purpose?”

Ferguson laughed, picturing Corrigan fuming at the communications desk in The Cube.

“Post me a file of the open-source information on him that I can access from a cafe,” Ferguson said.

“Anonymously?”

“No, Jack, I’m going to walk in and tell the people there I’m a spook. We lost the laptop, remember?”

“You can get the open-source stuff with a Google search. There’s nothing there. I can’t send the report that way.”

“I don’t want you to,” said Ferguson.

“You can get it at the embassy.”

“Don’t send it to them.”

“Jesus, Ferg. You sound more paranoid by the minute.”

“Yeah, I’m channeling my Irish grandmother. Just do what I say.”

“All right, but…”

After he’d finished with Corrigan, Ferguson called Corrine.

“It’s the Black Prince,” he told her cheerfully when she answered. “What’s going on?”

“Your friend is arriving in Seoul at six p.m.”

“Very nice. He may be returning home a little sooner than I expected with some things I want you to check out.”

“What’s going on, Ferg? Why are you bypassing the usual channels?”

“Insurance.”

“Against what?”

“Against things disappearing. Memories going bad. Interpretations of facts that can’t be trusted.”

“Who don’t you trust?”

Ferguson lay back on the bed in his room. He hadn’t planned on getting into this discussion right now — and, hopefully, ever.

“Maybe I’m just being paranoid,” he told her.

“You don’t trust Slott?”

He didn’t answer.

“You trust me?” said Corrine finally.

“I pretty much can’t stand you, Corrine. But I think you have a different agenda than those people do.”

“You saved my life,” she said.

Ferguson had to think for a moment before remembering. It had been in a nightclub in Syria. Or was that Lebanon?

“Yeah, well, that was a job thing,” he told her. “Anyway, don’t get your underwear all twisted up. I don’t know that anything’s going on. I just want to make sure I’m not screwed by it if it is.”

“Well—”

“A deep subject. Now how about that flight number?”

Ferguson spent a few hours looking for more of the National Truck Company vehicles. None of the ones he checked out seemed like very good candidates for the truck he’d seen at the waste site. Four of the seven had open beds in the back. One was painted a garish pink that he thought would have glowed in the dark. The other two were in various states of disrepair and looked as if they hadn’t been moved in months or maybe even years.

Checking on the trucks was the sort of necessary but tedious detail work that Ferguson had little patience for. The more he did it, the more he was convinced that Science Industries was the best lead he was going to get for the time being, and that he ought to concentrate there until something told him he was wrong.

In the early afternoon he took the train to Seoul but got off a stop before the city, showing up at a hotel that advertised it had a “business center” with high-speed computer access. Ferguson inserted what looked like a small memory key into the hotel computer’s USB slot and trolled for information on Kang Hwan, the scientist Corrigan had mentioned. The key contained a series of programs that enabled anonymous surfing and allowed him to erase any trace of the web pages and files he looked at.

The Google search brought up several hundred references, but most were about a half-dozen papers the scientist had written. The English synopsis of two of the papers said they were on the possibility of using lasers to speed up the separation of radioactive isotopes, especially in uranium.

Almost as interesting was a fact Corrigan had neglected to mention: The scientist, fifty-three, had died two months earlier. None of the obituaries in the translated Korean newspapers gave the cause of death, but a small item in the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal said it was suicide.

26

Tak Ch’o took one last look around the small apartment where he had lived for the past year. It was not a look of nostalgia; he was glad to be gone. He just wanted to make sure that he wasn’t leaving anything that would show where he had gone.

The bed was unmade; the medicine he had obtained for his supposed stomach ailment lay open on the table. It would look as if he had just stepped out when he left.

Ch’o had no way of knowing if the Greek girl on the inspection team had found either of the messages in the cigarette box, let alone if she had passed them along or been able to arrange for help. It didn’t really matter; he knew that his time at the plant was over. He’d only been kept on because the governor did not want to cause any problems before the inspection team came.

Tomorrow, Tak Ch’o would be fired. If he was extremely lucky, he would be stripped of his job and made a nonperson, allowed to scrounge his way back to his ancestors’ village on the eastern side of the country.

If he was not extremely lucky — and Ch’o had never been a man who believed much in luck — he would be put in prison for the rest of his life.

Not because he had committed a crime or even because he had failed to do his job well. On the contrary, he was being persecuted because he had dared to tell the ministry that several trucks had been turned away from the gate because they did not come with the proper paperwork.

Ch’o hadn’t even mentioned that the men in the trucks had thrown their barrels into a field along the highway. He had not said that the waste was from Pyongyang’s hospitals. He had not made a guess about the threat it might pose to the villagers who farmed the field and drew their drinking water from shallow wells nearby; in truth that was difficult to assess precisely, and Ch’o would not make an estimate without a great deal of study. The fact that the number of birth defects in the region, long used for haphazard dumping, was significantly higher than elsewhere in the country, was alarming, but not necessarily relevant to this particular case, from a scientist’s point of view.

Even so, Ch’o knew that simply writing the report would have severe consequences. It implicitly alleged all of these things, and implied that powerful men were not doing their jobs.

But reporting it was his duty. And so he did.

For a while, he naively believed that it would not have dire consequences.

No, he’d always known. What he hadn’t known was that he would be willing to leave Korea behind. Not to preserve his life, but to help his countrymen. The IAEA people would help him get the word out, and there would be a crackdown.

The officials, of course, would deny it. But then, quietly, the material would be picked up and dumped, the countryside scoured for similar transgressions. Party members would be reminded that they must follow the proper procedures — procedures Ch’o had helped write — or face dire consequences.

That was the best he could hope for.

Assured that everything was ready, Ch’o closed the door on his apartment and went outside, walking swiftly down the street to the shed where he had left the bicycle two days before. The bike lay against the brown grass where had left it, wet now from the day’s intermittent rain. Ch’o picked it up, tried in vain to dry the seat with the sleeve of his coat, then gave up and got on. He had a long way to pedal — more than seventy kilometers — and five hours to do it.

No matter. If he missed the rendezvous — if, as he feared, no one showed up — he would continue on. He would pedal south all the way to the border area, then find someone to help him across. Others had done it.

The wind blew a fresh spray of rain in his face. Even Nature was against him, he thought, as he started to pedal.

27

James Sonjae stepped through the Customs area, joining a surge of people flooding into the reception terminal at Incheon International Airport. He looked around at the waiting limo drivers, unsure whether Ferguson would send someone for him or meet him himself. When he didn’t find his name on a placard, he began walking around the hall, scanning slowly and expecting at any moment to spot Ferguson’s grin and raised eyebrows.

He didn’t, though.

For nearly half an hour he walked from one end of the terminal to the other, unsure exactly where to wait. He felt off balance, his equilibrium disturbed by the cacophony of sounds around him. The chatter sounded both familiar and strange at the same time.

Though born in America, Sonjae had been taught Korean as a child and had used it a great deal at home and with close relatives. Over the past two decades, he’d practiced it less and less; with the exception of some old people he looked in on for his church every few weeks, he rarely used it these days. The Incheon terminal overloaded his ears, overwhelming him with a strange sense of déjà vu and eliciting all sort of memories and associations — grandparents visiting when he was a child, distant relatives tearfully saying good-bye at Dulles. He struggled to keep his mind focused on the present, looking for Ferguson.

Sonjae tried to have Ferguson paged, but found it impossible to correctly decipher the operator’s instructions. Finally he gave up and found a place to sit where he could gather his wits and decide what to do next.

Thirty seconds after he plopped down, Bob Ferguson hopped over the row of seats and sat down beside him.

“Had a good tour of the airport?”

“Ferg.”

“Were you making sure you weren’t followed?” Ferguson asked. “Because you know, you walked back and forth about twenty million times.”

“A dozen. I wasn’t followed,” said Sonjae defensively.

“You’re right. At least I think you are,” said Ferguson. He pointed to the small carry-on bag perched on Sonjae’s knees. “That all you got?”

“I didn’t know what to pack.”

“Don’t worry. It’s all you need.” Ferguson grabbed the handle of the bag. “Come on. I have a limo waiting for us outside.”

Ferguson led him out to the drop-off area, where the driver he’d hired was arguing vehemently with someone. The man raised his hand to pop the trunk with his key fob, not even bothering to interrupt the argument.

“What are they saying?” Ferguson said as they climbed into the car.

“Damned if I know.”

Ferguson laughed. “Some translator you are.”

Sonjae flushed. “I, uh… I’m out of practice.”

Ferguson looked at his friend’s face, tired and worn. Just as well that he’d decided to send him back tomorrow.

“You all right?” Ferguson asked.

“I’m OK. What are we doing?”

“Depends on whether you’re going to fall asleep on me or not.”

“I’m awake.”

“Good. Then let’s go barhopping.”

28

“Iron Bird One, this is Van. Rankin, you hear me?”

“Iron Bird One. Rankin.”

“Cinderella has gone over the line.”

“Roger that,” said Rankin. The message meant that the plane with Thera on it had crossed out of North Korean air space. She was safe. “We are zero-five from Potato Field.”

“Be advised there is a flight of MiGs coming from the south on a routine patrol. Stand by for exact position and vectors.”

Rankin turned to the pilot and tapped his headset, making sure he’d heard.

The helicopter bucked as they passed over the coastline. They hit a squall of rain head-on. Water shot against the bubble canopy as if bucket after bucket were being thrown against them.

“Rain’s bitchin’,” said the pilot, struggling to hold the small chopper on course. “Sixty seconds.”

Rankin tensed. The rain made their infrared sensors almost useless. If anyone had seen or heard them the night before, a good hunk of the North Korean army might be waiting for them.

Buffeted by yet another gust, the helicopter tipped hard to the right. The pilot overcorrected, pitching the craft so low the skid bumped against the ground. The next thing Rankin knew they were down, stopped, in one piece and without crashing.

He jumped into the downpour, running toward the wall near the road as he had the day before.

“See anything?” he barked into the squad radio as he reached the stones.

A chorus of no’s jammed the circuit.

Sergeant Barren cursed somewhere behind him.

Rankin leapt over the wall, landing in a ditch at the side of the road. He sunk in water up to his thigh. Climbing out, he pulled his binoculars from his tac vest and looked down the road. The glasses fogged; even when he cleared them, all he could see was rain and blackness.

It was two minutes to midnight.

29

Tak Ch’o hunkered against the handle bars, fighting to stay upright as the wind pushed against him. He’d stopped looking at his watch more than an hour ago when it became obvious that he wouldn’t make it to the field by midnight. Now he simply pedaled, determined to get there as soon as he could, determined that he would at least accomplish the first stage of his journey. If he made it to the field at all, Ch’o thought, he would make it to South Korea and freedom as well.

Headlights appeared behind him. Taken off guard, Ch’o felt his entire body freeze. He tumbled into the road, a truck looming down on him.

Everything blurred together — the rain, the bicycle, his fear.

The truck veered to the right, crashing over the bicycle but missing Ch’o. As the vehicle disappeared into the raging night, a scream erupted from the scientist’s belly, a curse that had been years in coming. He raged against the rain and fate, then, the yell still emptying his lungs, hurled himself forward.

30

“Car or a truck,” said Rankin, spotting the headlights as they came up over the hill. “This may be it. Hang tight.”

He hopped back over the wall to wait. The vehicle came forward at a steady pace, no more than twenty-five miles an hour.

It was an truck, an army vehicle.

So there was a defector, Rankin thought. Hopefully he was important enough to justify the risk they’d taken.

Rankin started to get up but then stopped, realizing the vehicle wasn’t slowing down.

“Shit,” someone said as it drove past.

“What the hell we do now, Stephen?” said Sergeant Barren. He might just as well have spit the words from his mouth.

Rankin checked his watch. It was oh-thirty, a half hour past midnight.

“All right. Load ‘em up,” he said. He leaned over the wall, gazing up and down the road. The whole mission was a washout, in every sense of the word.

Had Thera screwed up? Had the people in Washington? Had something happened to the defector?

Most likely, no one would ever know. No one would care, probably, unless something else screwed up — if the choppers couldn’t make it back because of the weather.

A good possibility, Rankin thought, giving one last glance toward the road. The he turned and ran for the Little Bird.

Inside, he pulled off his sodden campaign hat and looked at the pilot.

“Ready, Skip?”

“Let ‘er rock.”

The rotor blades began churning above his head. The other helicopter took off first, twisting backward toward the ship they were supposed to rendezvous with to the south.

Rankin held on as the Little Bird bucked forward, stuttering in the wind. The wall loomed in front of them, suddenly taller than it was in real life, a trick of the shadows dancing in the rain. As Rankin stared at it, something seemed to shoot across their path.

“Flip the searchlight on,” Rankin told the pilot.

“Searchlight?”

“I think there was something back by the wall, near the road.”

Silently, the pilot complied, circling back.

There was nothing by the wall. Rankin had seen an optical illusion, a shadow thrown by the helicopter, but further down the road, a tiny figure appeared, waving its hands,

“There,” he told the pilot, pointing. “There. Let’s get him.”