Mortal Allies

CHAPTER 44

The problem was, we didn’t know who or what we were looking for. We didn’t really even know if he, or she, or they, would be there. Worse, I was the only one even remotely confident anybody would be there.

I think Mercer and Carol Kim were simply humoring me because I’d been so forceful and insistent. Or maybe they figured I’d been right on too many other things to ignore. When your horse wins the first two of the trifecta, you have a tendency to bet on it again.

So there we were with five of Buzz’s spook buddies, wandering through the crowd outside the Blue House, trying hopelessly to see if we could detect anybody who didn’t look like he or she should be there.

The problem was that nobody looked like they should be there. Or everybody looked like they should be there. Take your pick.

Some of them were Korean government bureaucrats who were there because the Korean president’s staff ordered them to come and make the Secretary of State feel like he was so damned popular people would stay out on the streets late at night to catch sight of him. And there were gazillions of reporters. Since the Whitehall trial was postponed, most of them were there to convince their networks or newspapers or magazines they were still finding honest ways to earn their pay. Then there were the genuinely curious idiots whose lives were so dull they’d go anywhere and wait forever to catch a fleeting glimpse of a real-life celebrity.

One of those curious idiots was about six foot three and had spiky hair, which you couldn’t miss because she towered over most of the crowd. I was surprised to see Allie mixed in with the rest of them, because she’d never struck me as the stargazing type. Maybe she’d just been passing by and decided to see what the commotion was about.

The Secretary of State was inside having dinner with the president of South Korea because the Secretary was scheduled to depart Korea the next morning. According to what Buzz had found out, they were supposed to finish their dinner at 9:15, then the Secretary of State was supposed to be driven by motorcade to the house of Minister of Defense Lee Jung Kim. There he would express condolences and apologies on behalf of the President of the United States, and all the American people, over the tragic death of Lee’s son.

None of this was particularly difficult information to come by, since his final day’s schedule had been published in the South Korean newspapers. See, the Secretary of State wanted the South Korean people to know what he was doing. He wanted cameras and newspeople cluttered at his every stop. He wanted the world to see the third highest official in the executive branch dining amicably with the South Korean president on his final day, as though a serious breach in relations had been miraculously healed. He wanted the South Korean people to see him make the very Asian gesture of stopping by to apologize and pay respects to the bereaved mother and father.

The only problem was that when he and his security detail had planned and publicized that schedule, they were unaware the alliance’s protocol officer was owned by North Korea.

That, I’d finally concluded, was why Choi wanted Harry Elmore in his stable. Elmore had access to the plans that involved VIP visits. He knew what the security arrangements were. He was one of the two or three guys who controlled access to VIPs. His office printed the passes, and took the requests, and decided who would and who wouldn’t get within spitting distance of the high and mighty. Even if the event was controlled by the State Department, all Harry had to do was call his counterpart, the protocol officer at the embassy, and tell him he needed two dozen passes. I’m sure they talked all the time. They probably horse-traded back and forth like Belgian gem merchants.

“Hey, Harry, I hear the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders are coming over for a military morale visit. Think you could slide me thirty tickets under the table?”“Hey, no problem, Bill, but listen, I’ve got twenty Korean buddies climbing all over my ass because they want to be seen in the proximity of the American Secretary of State. How about passes for that?”

Buzz had several guys sitting in a room right now combing over the lists of those who’d gotten passes to be inside the ropes. We knew it was hopeless. Whoever Choi sent to do the dirty deed would either use a false name or a name we wouldn’t recognize anyway.

Thus, we were reduced to what we were doing. Mercer had one of his guys inform the head of the Secretary’s security detail what we suspected, and the rest of us were combing through the crowd, looking for familiar faces or suspicious activities.

Part of the problem was these were North Koreans we were talking about. The same guys who walk around with poison pellets hidden in their teeth. Professional security people will tell you that any assassin willing to end his or her own life has something like a 90 percent chance of success. It’s generally true, too. Remember Lincoln’s assassination? President Garfield’s? Bobby Kennedy’s? John Lennon’s? Those all involved assassins crazy or willing enough to get close, to trade their chances of escape and survival to get their target.

Anyway, we finally ran into Carol and found a spot where we could overwatch the crowd and put our heads together.

Carol’s eyes roamed the crowd. “I’m bothered by something.”

“What?” her boss asked.

“Why would the North Koreans kill the American Secretary of State?”

I said, “Good question. Why would they?”

Mercer said, “Yeah. It would be too stupid for words. Even if it didn’t cause a war, we’d never pull another soldier off Korean soil until North Korea was a distant memory. That’s the last thing they’d want.”

Sometimes, even when you’re not trying, you come to a moment of truth. It just hits you in the face.

The assassin or assassins would have to be somebody you’d never connect to North Korea. But if a South Korean murdered the Secretary of State, the alliance really would be a trashheap.

And wouldn’t you know, just at that moment a large crowd of protesters came streaming around a street corner, headed our way. They were yelling and hollering and moving fast. They were carrying banners, and most of them were wearing white medical masks the way a lot of Asians do to protect their lungs from smog, or to screen their faces from being ID’ed by cops when they’re ready to rumble.

It was ten after nine. The dinner was supposed to be over in five minutes. The protesters had obviously planned their arrival to coincide with the Secretary of State’s departure from the Blue House. They wanted all those television cameras and reporters to see that the symbolic, everything’s-been-healed meal was a farce, that the South Korean people were still furiously angry over the death of Lee No Tae and wanted the lawless American troops off their soil.

On the other hand, it was a known fact that North Korean agents and sympathizers had thoroughly penetrated South Korea’s student and labor movements and could spark a protest or riot pretty much at will.

I looked at Buzz Mercer and he looked at me, and we exchanged a telepathic aw-shit. Somewhere in that crowd of protesters were probably one or two people with passes to get past the police lines.