Fires of War (22 page)

“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

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

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.”

~ * ~

wo 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

NORTH P’YŎNPAN PROVINCE, NORTH KOREA

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.

~ * ~

t 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.