Mortal Allies

CHAPTER 40

It made no sense to sleep, so we kept working. Carol wrote down English summaries of every relevant point contained in the nine reports we’d culled out. I read through her notes and tacked on recommendations on how to further winnow down the pack.

All nine remaining files appeared in some way suspicious, but three others stuck out like outrageously rotten thumbs. For one thing, like Janson’s, they contained no witness statements.

One concerned an Army major in the intelligence section whose Korean wife was caught running a blackmarket ring. When she was arrested, she was driving a van loaded with over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of American cosmetics. Korean women are nuts about foreign cosmetics, which have ridiculously heavy duties tacked on by customs in Korea’s staunchly protected economy. As blackmarket goods go, they’re hot sellers. Given that she was caught red-handed driving a truck filled with contraband, it seemed impossible the charges were dropped.

A second case involved an Air Force lieutenant colonel in the strategic plans shop who was arrested on charges of raping a fourteen-year-old Korean girl. You get an instinct for these things, and something smelled wrong. The girl’s photo was in the packet; she didn’t look fourteen. Not to me. But maybe she was just physically precocious. Another thing, though, there was a raw hardness to her face. It was like that hackneyed look an experienced streetwalker acquires after her third or fourth hundredth john. The American officer swore she was a whore, that he’d paid her, while she claimed he’d yanked her into an alleyway and forced himself on her. No medical exam was performed. The girl claimed she had five witnesses, but none of them were ever interviewed. There was no way to tell on such thin evidence, but it smelled like a setup.

The third case involved the Navy captain who was in charge of protocol at the headquarters. Protocol is the office that plans for and oversees all important visitors, making sure they have hotel rooms, cars and drivers, experienced guides, and security if necessary. It even puts together their schedules. In this case, the captain was arrested for a hit-and-run that resulted in a death. He was investigated for DUI and manslaughter, specifically for running over a twenty-year-old pregnant Korean girl, who survived but lost her baby. He’d attempted to flee but was forced to stop by a crowd of irate Koreans who witnessed the accident. Case closed; no grounds for prosecution.

By four-thirty, Carol was napping on the bed, and I decided to slip into the bathroom and take a shower. My body stank and I needed to clean and re-dress some of my stitched-up cuts.

When I came out, Carol was hanging up the phone.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Your co-counsel, Miss Carlson.”

“What did she want?”

“She didn’t say. She hung up.”

This didn’t sound good. “How come?”

“I don’t think she was expecting a woman. I told her you were in the shower.”

I had bigger fish to fry at the moment, so I merely grunted my acknowledgment, then asked Carol to call whomever to pick up these files.

We ordered a room service breakfast – in my case a greasy, cheesy omelet and another pot of coffee; in hers, a fruit bowl and two more Evians. Our eating habits, among many other things, implied we were not a compatible couple.

Then we straightened up the room and put all the files back in the boxes, excepting of course the nine we’d earmarked as suspicious. The food came. We dug in.

While we ate, I asked, “How come you get so coy and withdrawn around Korean men?”

She pondered that a moment, like it was some unconscious thing. “My father’s a very traditional Korean man. He loves America, but he stays with his Korean customs. I suppose I picked it up from him.”

“What? So every Korean male reminds you of your father?”

She chuckled. “I hope not. It makes Korean men more comfortable. Most American women get under their skin. They consider them bossy and pushy, rude even. They’re especially peeved when the woman is racially Korean.”

“Hah! And I thought you were liberated.”

“Misjudgments abound. I once thought you were a brash, sloppy, obnoxious bore.”

“Yeah?”

She looked around. “Your room’s actually fairly tidy. How could I have thought you were a slob?”

I stabbed and shoveled another slice of omelet between my lips. “New subject. Something I’ve been wondering. Why’d you bug my phone and hotel room?”

She looked up in surprise. “We didn’t bug your room.”

“Bullshit. Come on, I’m on your team now. Tell me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “We didn’t bug your room.”

“Well, I found a little black thing in my phone. And I found two more tucked here and about.”

“When was this?”

“Remember that day I ran out to the parking lot and you pulled away?”

“Of course. I couldn’t believe you did that. You might’ve been watched. You might’ve compromised me.”

“Hey, I lost my head. I’d just found three bugs.”

“And you thought we’d done it? What? You thought we were listening in on your plans for defending Whitehall?”

“Oddly enough, that’s just what I thought.”

“Drummond, believe it or not, the Agency’s got a few more pressing issues on its plate than listening to some lawyer talk about a court case.” Then a dumbfounded expression emerged. “How do you know your room isn’t still bugged?”

“Because Imelda, my legal assistant, has it swept every day.”

“So you removed the bugs?”

“Yeah. All gone,” I confidently replied.

“Did you think about long-range listening devices?”

“Those inverted megaphone things?”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Carol said, working her way over to the window. She pulled the curtain apart and looked outside. First light was just breaking. “Listen, Drummond, when you removed the bugs, you notified whoever was listening that you’d detected them. If you’re a target of serious interest, they’ll simply switch devices.”

She was putting on a very good act, but I wasn’t buying it. I’d fully expected her to deny it. I just wanted her to know I knew.

Her eyes were sweeping the parking lot, like she was looking for some vehicle, maybe a truck or a van, anything big enough to hide a long-range listening device.

I asked, “Can those things target a single room in a big hotel like this? Wouldn’t they pick up all kinds of babble and noise?”

“If the rooms around you were talking, there’d be bleedover and distortion. But not late at night, like now, when everybody’s asleep.”

She was really putting on the act. Give the woman credit.

I walked over and stood beside her at the window. She turned and looked at me.

I pointed my finger out the window. I yelled, “Quick! Get on the phone and tell your folks to move in on that vehicle right there.”

She started to say something, and I grinned. She looked out in the parking lot. Suddenly a gray van turned on its lights, backed out of its space, and literally tore out of the parking lot. You could almost hear the rubber burning.

“Jesus!” I yelled.

Carol ran to the phone. She punched in some numbers and waited impatiently for somebody to answer. She yelled, “This is Carol Kim. There’s a North Korean spy van headed from the Dragon Hill to the main gate. It’s gray and enclosed. Get somebody to stop it.”

When she hung up, she shot me a furious look. I couldn’t blame her; after all, I’d just ruined a perfectly good chance to catch some North Koreans. In my defense, I really didn’t believe her until I saw this with my own eyes.

I was getting ready to make my excuse when I came to my senses. There was something else we’d better do. And we’d better do it damned fast, too, or else.