Mortal Allies

CHAPTER 7

The South Koreans made their call at ten o’clock that evening. They waived jurisdiction. Not pretrial confinement, only jurisdiction. Whitehall was to be transferred from the Yongsan Holding Facility to the Seoul High Security Prison at ten o’clock the next morning.

And when it came to the matter of punishment, if I guessed right, what the Koreans intended was to wait and see how the sentence came out. If Whitehall got death, they’d probably be shrewdly generous and allow us to yank the electric switch and fry him. If he got life, he’d spend the rest of his pitiful days and years in a South Korean prison.

Janson called to inform me of this. He didn’t call Katherine, or Keith, or any of the rest of the covey. Just me. There was a subtle message there – I just didn’t know what it was.

However, I immediately called Katherine to inform her of our extreme good fortune. A woman’s voice answered. I had no idea who she was, and I asked to speak with Katherine. She said “okay,” then I heard the two of them giggling. It sounded like that flirty kind of giggle you hear when two folks get interrupted in the midst of some heavy petting.

Katherine coldly acknowledged the news and hung up. No “Gee thanks, Sean, I can’t begin to tell you what a great job you did in the minister’s office.” Not even the most grudging acknowledgment that I’d saved her bacon – just “okay,” click. She was either as mad at me as I was at her, or she couldn’t wait to get back to her girlfriend.

I was getting undressed when there was a knock at the door. I expected to see the maid coming to turn down my sheets and place a couple of those little chocolate tasties by my bedside. It wasn’t a maid, though: not unless maids are late-middle-aged Caucasian males wearing trench coats who are in the habit of peeking searchingly down both sides of the hallway before they shoulder past you.

“Buzz Mercer,” he announced, sticking out a hand.

I didn’t feel any particular need to introduce myself, so I said, “Nice to meet you. You sure you’ve got the right room?”

“Oh yeah, Drummond,” he said, with a man-eating grin. “You and I gotta have a short talk.”

“Would you care for a seat?” I asked.

He went over and fell into the chair. He was a nondescript-looking type, with a squarish, unassuming face, a tight butch cut, clear-rimmed glasses, and what I guess you’d call a sardonic grin pasted on his lower face. Not his upper face, though. His eyes were too intense to be anything but somber.

He said, “I’m the station chief.”

“Great,” I remarked. What else do you say to a man who’s just identified himself as the head of the CIA for all of Korea?

“Have a seat,” he ordered, so I did.

“I thought about asking you to come to our facility, but finally decided this’d be better. You and I are probably going to have a few chats over the next few weeks. It would be best for all concerned if nobody knows about it.”

You remember when I warned you I’m a bit impulsive?

I put a steely expression on my face and snarled, “Look, buddy, get this straight right away. You picked me ’cause I’m the only Army guy on the defense team. Not to mention the only hetero. Good thinking, except I’m not going to expose a single damned thing about this case. Not to you… not to anybody.”

He seemed halfheartedly amused. “Settle down, Drummond. That’s not what this is about. I’ve discussed this with General Spears. He agrees that this is the right way to handle this.”

“Handle what?” I asked, blinking wildly a few times, since in a matter of a few brief seconds I’d already managed to make a complete horse’s ass out of myself. This wasn’t a novel experience by any means, but humiliation is one of those things that doesn’t go down more smoothly with practice.

“This is classified. Don’t discuss it with anybody. Not even the rest of your defense team… no… make that particularly with the rest of your defense team. Got that?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, here’s how it is. This case is attracting attention in the wrong quarters.”

“You mean in the South Korean government?”

“Right country, wrong prefix. There are folks in Pyongyang who get copies of the Seoul Herald within hours after it hits the newsstands. They watch our television news, listen to our radios, even read those half-assed tabloids about Martians in the White House. They know what movie star’s screwin’ what movie star this week, and the latest fad diet that’ll help you lose forty pounds overnight. Kim Jong Il and his boys are well aware of what’s going on down here.”

I nodded right along. Given the rift our case was making in the alliance, of course North Korea was following it attentively. I hadn’t thought about it until that moment, but of course they were.

He bent toward me. “Do you have any idea how many agents North Korea has down here?”

“No.”

“I got news for you. We don’t, either. Nor do the South Koreans. It’s a lot, though. We know, for instance, that they left plenty of sleeper agents here in 1950, when MacArthur and his boys kicked their asses out of the south. And we know they’ve been recruiting more, and adding to them ever since. Some folks believe they might only have ten to twenty thousand agents. Others believe they have a few hundred thousand.”

“That’s a lot of agents,” I said, because sometimes it helps to restate the obvious, if for no other reason than to show you’re a conscientious listener.

“Yeah, it’s a lot.” He nodded, re-restating what I’d just restated, I guess to prove we were both conscientious listeners. “We’ve also noticed a step-up in North Korean infiltrations over the past two weeks. And we pick up the occasional radio intercept from North Korean cells here back to their controllers up north. That traffic’s picked up these past two weeks. Normally that’s a very grim sign that somebody’s planning something.”

“This is obviously not good,” I said.

“We don’t know yet. It’s pretty damned obvious that how this thing goes down might well decide the fate of the alliance. Maybe the South Koreans are just blustering about throwing us Meegooks off the peninsula… or maybe they’re not. But if I were a bigwig in North Korean intelligence, I’d sure as hell be sniffing around to see which way it goes. Quite possibly what they’re doing is increasing their reconnaissance, just in the event we get thrown off the peninsula and they decide to attack.”

“So what’s this got to do with me?” I asked, which was the response I was sure he expected.

“Maybe nothing. Then again, maybe a lot.”

“Have we been mentioned in some of this radio traffic?”

“There’ve been a few mentions, but we’re not certain what they mean. See, the North Koreans know we listen in, and they’re well aware of our sophistication at code-breaking, so they take precautions. They develop all kinds of ridiculous code names and circular puzzles to throw us off.”

“But you must’ve developed some kind of opinion, or theory, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Not really,” he said. “But ever since that September 11 thing, we always play it safe better than sorry. Maybe your defense team’s completely in the clear, maybe not. But if we come up with anything, we’d like to use you as our conduit. Of course, we’d like you to treat the information with the sensitivity it deserves. We sure as hell can’t approach Carlson and her freak show directly.”

He was right about that. The intelligence he was referring to was probably gathered through the most sensitive means available, and Katherine hadn’t shown herself to be someone the U.S. government should entrust with such deep dark secrets.

He stood up and started walking for the door. “Anything more comes up, I’ll keep you informed.”

“Anything specific you expect me to do at this point?” I asked.

He had the door open and was just walking out. “Nope.” Then the door shut behind him.

It was, all in all, a completely dopey conversation. He’d said something, and he’d said nothing. If I was the really suspicious sort, I might think he was probing to see if I was amenable to becoming his stooge, and I’d scared him off, so he’d resorted to that little cover story about North Koreans. That might sound fairly paranoid to most folks, but most folks haven’t spent as much time around spooks as I have. They lie to their own mothers just for practice.

If nothing else, this little tete-a-tete had made me suddenly aware of the importance the U.S. government was placing on our efforts to defend Whitehall. Face it, they’d be stupid to be complacent. Carlson was a ruthless fanatic, and fate had just handed her the power to take a meat cleaver to the alliance. Those folks back in Washington probably wanted her watched like a hawk.

I got a lousy night’s sleep. I kept trying to recall my Swedish stewardess with the Bronx twang and Italian name, but time and distance were rapidly diffusing her into a foggy ghost. Instead, a smallish woman with long, dark hair, an angelic face, and emerald-like eyes kept mulishly butting her way into my head. I knew I wasn’t having desirous thoughts, because I’ve never been a sucker for unrequited lust. I like my fantasies reciprocated.

When I awoke in the morning I felt grizzly and raw. I opened the blinds to explore the day.

Back when I was in law school, there was this professor named Maladroit who taught legal ethics. I’m not making this up, either. His name was Harold Maladroit III; a great name for a barrister, if you think about it. Anyway, poor old Maladroit didn’t put a whole lot of Sturm und Drang into his teachings, if you know what I mean. He normally arrived fifteen minutes late, shuffling into the classroom like it was the last place on earth he wanted to be. But he was actually a very brilliant and accomplished jurist.

He’d occasionally present us with case studies that were so waterlogged with ambivalence they made your head ache. I stared out the window at the skyline of downtown Seoul and got to thinking about one particular case.

The way Maladroit presented it, a private attorney had gotten a call from a man accused of murdering and then eating twelve people. He went and interviewed the accused, and to his vast surprise discovered a handsome young man, well-dressed, well-groomed, apparently well-educated, cultured, and almost impossibly likable. The attorney was astonished. He was also cautious. They spent five hours talking, because it took that long for the attorney to convince himself he was chatting with somebody far too sane and morally anchored to have committed such outlandishly heinous crimes. The attorney of course agreed to represent him.

The trial date was set for six months hence, and the attorney and his client used every minute of it to build their defense. They worked doggedly, becoming very close, achieving, if not a father-to-son relationship, then something not far from it. The most damning evidence against the accused man was a collection of tiny shards of bones that had been found in the old coal furnace in his cellar. The accused man swore the bones were those of Jackie, his beloved beagle, who’d died about two months before the police came. He’d considered taking the corpse to a pet cemetery, but in an effort to be thrifty decided he’d simply cremate the remains himself. This was before DNA testing, and successive medical tests ended up deadlocked: The bones could’ve been human, or they could’ve been a dog’s.

The attorney believed his client. He put all his considerable legal brilliance into the case. He labored fifteen-hour days, ignored his other clients, borrowed money from the bank to keep his practice going, and worked solely, completely, singly on this case. It became his obsession. He gambled dangerously with his financial future. He traded his entire client base for this one man, this one trial.

The day before the trial opened, the attorney and his client went through their preparations one final time. The attorney was so utterly convinced of his client’s innocence, and was so sure of the fine, wholesome impression he’d make with the jury, that he decided to take a great legal risk. He decided to put his client on the stand. They were rehearsing his testimony when they got to the part where the attorney asked his client about the tiny bone shards in the furnace.

“Oh, those,” the client said with the kind of infectious chuckle the lawyer was sure would warm the hearts of even the most hardhearted jury. “See, I had a dog named Max. A cute little schnauzer, a real great dog. I loved him dearly. He died and so I cremated him.”

The lawyer was gifted, or in this case cursed, with a fly-trap memory. Six months before, his client had told him the dog was named Jackie, only now the name was Max. And before the dog was a beagle; now it was a schnauzer. For the first time, he had grave doubts. If the story about the dog wasn’t true, maybe nothing else was true, either.

He lost a great deal of sleep over the following week. The trial progressed. The prosecutor threw his best punches and the defense lawyer counterattacked with a vengeance. He was superbly prepared. He had a convincing rebuttal for everything. He poked holes of doubt every which way.

On the seventh day, the prosecutor was scheduled to call the witness the defense attorney most dreaded – the police officer who’d performed the initial search of his client’s home. In the backyard, discarded behind some overgrown bushes, the officer had discovered some children’s clothing. A mother who lived four blocks away had identified a red shirt as being the same type her son wore on the very day he disappeared. The boy had been missing for four months.

The clothing could have been hidden there by any Tom, Dick, or Harry who’d passed by, and the shirt might or might not have been her son’s, since it was unmarked, and it was a popular generic brand. But the mere fact that it was there would be very damning with the jury. Everything about the prosecutor’s case was circumstantial, but one thing every criminal lawyer knows is that the weight of two pieces of circumstantial evidence is far greater than the sum of the parts.

The problem for the prosecutor was that he couldn’t introduce the shirt into evidence because in a pretrial ruling the defense attorney had convinced the libertarian judge that since the clothes had been discovered outside the premises of the dwelling, and the search warrant had specified the house itself, they were inadmissible.

The judge, however, wasn’t a complete dolt, so he limited his ruling to say the clothing was inadmissible only so long as the issue of what was discovered outside the home was never raised. The prosecutor was then instructed that he was barred, under any circumstances, from initiating discussion about the evidence found outside the home. Sounds loopy, but you have to understand that legal rulings have a perverse logic all of their own.

The quandary was this: The defense attorney was suddenly shattered by self-doubt. He suspected his client had misled and manipulated him for six long months. He just wasn’t sure. He’d built a strong defense. He’d covered every base. He was confident of his ability to neutralize the prosecutor’s case. All the key evidence was either inadmissible or easily refuted.

That is, unless the defense attorney in his cross-examination of the investigating officer inadvertently triggered a discussion about the evidence found outside the house. That would allow the prosecutor to get the shirt introduced as evidence. It would compound the case against his client. It would place his client at great peril. It would also devastate his own legal career, which was hovering on the verge of bankruptcy.

The attorney couldn’t sleep the whole night before. The nice, clean-cut young man he’d come to like so much might actually have murdered and then eaten twelve people, including six young boys. The thought sickened him. To rectify the situation, all he had to do was make one small verbal slip the next day, to allude in any way to the search of the grounds around his client’s home. The prosecutor would hear the slip and pounce.

He was still wrestling with himself when it came his turn to cross-examine the police officer. The officer’s name was Sergeant Curtis Lincoln, a big Black man with deep-set, uncompromising eyes who looked positively tortured, no doubt because the prosecutor’s case was falling apart. The defense attorney got up. He stood for nearly half a minute, so miserably conflicted that he became tongue-tied. The judge called his name three times. He looked at the police officer and Curtis Lincoln stared back searchingly. He looked at his client and the young man stared back even more searchingly.

In that instant, the attorney concluded that his lawyer’s oath took precedence over his own deeply held personal convictions. He told the judge he had no questions and fell back into his chair.

His client was found not guilty. It was an incredible victory. The press lauded the attorney as the second coming. He was interviewed on talk shows and heralded as the most promising legal mind in the city, probably the state, maybe the whole damned country. Offers poured in from firms promising instant partnerships, from wealthy suspects who wanted to pay top dollar for his services, from publishing houses wanting to ghostwrite his story.

Within a year six more people disappeared. Sergeant Curtis Lincoln got another warrant, did another search, found six sets of bones in the client’s basement, all neatly picked clean of meat. The client was arrested again, and the first thing he did was call the same lawyer.

Most everybody in the class chuckled when old Harold Maladroit III outlined this case. The irony was too excruciating, the story too perfect. It had to be fabricated. It simply couldn’t be true.

I wasn’t chuckling, though. I was watching old Maladroit’s eyes.

As soon as the class was done, I rushed down to the law library and researched for four hours. I finally found the right case; it was named State vs. Homison. It concerned an accused cannibal named William Homison who was brilliantly defended by an attorney named Harold Maladroit III. The reason the case made the law books was because of the groundbreaking argument Maladroit constructed to get the clothing excluded as evidence. No wonder the old coot fled from the practice of law to teach legal ethics.

Like lots of ethical issues faced by lawyers, the lesson of this one took you into all kinds of dark, twisted back alleys. Maladroit had done what his oath required him to do. He’d steamrolled his own conscience and forged ahead. He’d also sentenced six more people to death.

My oath now dictated that I should follow Carlson’s instructions to the letter and do everything in my power to prove my client innocent. Only, if I did, I might help sentence Whitehall to death. There were no guarantees either way, but a lawyer must appease his own sense of right and wrong. All attorneys gamble with the fates and lives of their clients: The trick is to gauge the odds, and make the bet you can live with regardless of the consequences.

The best bet for Whitehall was to pick apart the prosecutor’s case. To do that, though, I needed to learn a great deal more about what had happened. So I got on the phone. I called Imelda and told her to have the case materials delivered to my room at noon. I would’ve told her to bring them up right away, but I intended to be present when Whitehall was transferred from American custody to the Koreans.

Carlson was going to be in for a rude shock, and I needed to be there to stabilize her. I called her next and made an appointment to accompany her to the military holding facility at nine-thirty.

That settled, I flipped on CNN and watched the coverage of the Antigay March on Washington. It was a sobering sight. Over a million marchers participated. There was a very dramatic shot taken at the Mall of a tightly crammed crowd that seemed to stretch off into infinity. There were quick glimpses of one frenzied preacher after another standing at a lectern, haranguing the crowd, and condemning the President, homosexuals, and about anybody who liked or supported either of them.

Thousands of placards were visible. Nearly all of them had a big photograph of a single face. I recognized the face, of course: Thomas Whitehall. The common motto on the signs read ASK, TELL, GO TO HELL, a surprisingly un-Christian sentiment, if you ask me.

By nine-thirty, I was standing at the front entrance of the Dragon Hill Lodge when Katherine appeared beside me. Neither of us said a word. We exchanged cold, surly nods and climbed into the sedan.

A big black paddy wagon and ten sedans filled with Korean police were parked outside the holding facility. The Koreans must’ve been worried about being ambushed by a crowd of angry vigilantes and having Whitehall lynched in the streets of Seoul. It wasn’t reassuring that they had to be concerned about that kind of thing.

Inside, a surprisingly tall, frightfully tough-looking Korean in a cheap-looking black silk suit was standing beside the Army captain in charge of the facility. The Korean had wide, knobby shoulders and a face that was more scuffed and scarred than the inside heels of my shoes. He was signing some papers I assumed were the transfer documents.

A sergeant led us to Whitehall’s cell so we could exchange some brief words before he was taken away. Whitehall got up as we entered and coolly shook our hands. He didn’t look the least bit anxious or concerned. He should’ve, though. He should’ve been quaking in his boots.

I opened with, “Good day, Captain Whitehall. You know anything about South Korean prisons?”

He offhandedly said, “I’ve heard stories.”

“They’re nasty places,” I warned him. “But I guess they’ll isolate you for your own safety. The accommodations, though, and the food, aren’t nearly as swank as you get here.”

“I went to West Point,” he said, like that accounted for everything. “I can handle it.”

I wanted to say, Oh boy, buddy, are you in for a surprise: Comparing West Point to a South Korean prison is like comparing the Waldorf-Astoria to a Bowery homeless shelter. But why throw fuel on a fire that was already lit? He’d feel the heat soon enough.

A moment later, the tall, oxlike Korean strutted into the cell, accompanied by two only slightly smaller thugs in blue uniforms. He gave an indifferent glance in our direction as he roughly shoved Whitehall against a wall, efficiently patted him down, then signaled the two policemen to come over. With the kind of lightning speed that comes only from ample practice, they cuffed Whitehall’s hands and feet. The cuffs were connected by heavy black chains that were not nearly as elegant as the American variety.

They forcefully swung Whitehall back around and started pushing him toward the door.

“Stop this right now!” Carlson yelled.

They ignored her. Or actually, they didn’t ignore her. They shoved him harder.

With a ferocious snarl, she stepped courageously into their path. She held up her business card and waved it across their faces. “I’m his attorney. I’m ordering you to stop shoving my client. Right now!”

One of the policemen looked over at the tall Korean in the black suit. A cold, peremptory nod was bestowed before the cop reached out and shoved Carlson so hard she flew against the wall and landed on her tush.

My manly ego told me to step in and clobber the officer who’d shoved her. And I started to, too. Then I heard the sound of a pistol being cocked. The tall guy in the dark suit, I now noticed, had a nasty-looking.38-caliber revolver pointed at my chest.

I smiled and humbly stepped back. Then Whitehall was whisked out of the cell by a series of more hard shoves.

Katherine was just lifting herself off the ground. I offered a hand, but she stared at it like it was the last thing on earth she’d ever touch.

I said, “I warned you they were rough.”

She wasn’t the type who liked I-told-you-so’s. She just gave me a sullen glance before we rushed out to follow Whitehall’s convoy. Our driver fell in at the end of the procession and we rode for the next forty minutes without exchanging a word.

The convoy turned off onto a street about midway between Seoul and Inchon, two cities that had grown so spasmodically they’d become all but connected. The huge, forbidding front gate of the prison swung open and the black paddy wagon, followed by eleven cars, proceeded inside. The Korean cars formed a ring and an army of police officers climbed out like ants and assembled into a cordon.

Two overeager Korean camera crews were already set up and ready to roll. They had their lenses focused on the black paddy wagon, so that all of Korea could witness the accused American getting his righteous comeuppance. Suddenly I noticed two of the blue-suited police officers step directly in front of the cameras to block their view.

Then the rear doors of the paddy wagon flew open and a body came sailing out. Whitehall landed on the ground with a loud whoompf and lay there a moment, perfectly still, like he was unconscious. Nice try. It didn’t work.

Three of the Korean cops came over and roughly yanked him off the ground. I looked at him closely. I didn’t see any visible damage, but maybe they’d limited themselves to body blows on the ride over.

His composure had evaporated. He looked scared as hell. I didn’t blame him. This was the moment when the two police officers blocking the cameras’ views stepped away and let the film roll. What the whole of Korea saw was a very frightened prisoner being dragged on both feet through some menacing-looking double doors. It was a picture sure to bring merriment to all those Koreans who wanted the homo rapist-murderer humbled and punished.

Katherine and I tried to follow him through the doors, but the tall cop with the linebacker’s shoulders stepped into our path.

“We have the right to see our client,” Katherine insisted in her most frigidly commanding tone. The cop grinned and stared down at her. For all we knew, he didn’t speak a word of English.

“Please,” I very humbly lied, “we are only trying to ensure our client is given adequate treatment. We have an appointment to report back to Minister of Justice Chun. Would you please be so kind as to allow us to proceed?”

“No problem,” he finally replied, in almost perfect, oddly colloquial English. Then he gave us a big, frosty smile. “You can visit his cell. But you may not speak with him. Not today. In Korean prisons we believe the first day is crucial. The prisoner must learn to respect our rules. He must learn his place in our order. Whitehall will not be damaged as long as he obeys our rules.”

Odd that he chose the word “damaged,” as though he was referring to a piece of property rather than a human being.

Katherine had a horrified look, but frankly, even American prisons play by the same rule. Not as aggressively, perhaps, but it’s the same principle. Make the right first impression and things go smoother for everybody.

The officer led us inside. We walked down some long, well-lit hallways and through several sets of steel doors, until we found ourselves inside a large chamber with three floors of cells. Unlike American prisons, which are rambunctious and kinetically noisy, this chamber was profoundly silent. I thought at first it must’ve been empty, but as we proceeded, almost every cell contained a prisoner. They were all sitting upright on the floors, legs tightly crossed, like they were propped up at attention. Not a one of them was so much as breathing heavily.

“This is reading time,” our muscle-bound companion informed us.

“I don’t see anyone with a book,” I casually mentioned.

That brought a wolfish smile. “The book is inside their heads. We call it the Book of Regrets. They must spend three hours every morning contemplating their debt to society.”

He stopped and dug a key out of his pocket. Opening a cell door, he ushered us through the entry.

The cell was maybe four by seven feet. It looked like a tall coffin. There was a thin sleeping mat on the floor, and a small metal bowl for the toilet. There were no windows, only a dim light inside a cage on the ceiling. The cell was cold. It smelled – of human waste, of vomit, of despair.

Katherine looked around and shuddered.

“Don’t worry,” the officer assured us, beaming even more broadly. “I am personally responsible for Captain Whitehall. I will take excellent care of him.”

You can imagine how reassuring that was to hear.