The Sand Trap (20 page)

This was the last day of the fair and the
last fair they would attend this year. Soon they would be back in
Canada, and with the end of the school year coming, they would have
a break from the travel and the international work. She was looking
forward to the break and maybe starting some sort of social life
back home. She knew she was a very attractive young woman. People
described her as pert. They said she looked like Melanie Griffiths;
blond, petite and with a mischievous but attractive face. Gord told
her she was the university's most appealing asset in far eastern
and Asian countries. The young men lined up at their booth just so
they could talk to her. Since they travelled so much together there
was talk back home about her and Gord having a thing going and she
had to admit to herself that on a lonely night or two in India or
Ecuador or some other distant place, the thought had crossed her
mind. Who would ever know? He was a good-looking man -- for someone
fifty-eight anyhow. Gord was a great guy, very kind and
considerate, but he was also a little strange in some ways. Despite
his skill at a dozen languages he was a little nerdy. He could not
sit still for more than ten minutes. He never seemed to care for
the political or social issues in the countries they visited and
dressed like his mother might have dressed him in 1956, all baggy
and without style and looking most of the time like he had slept in
them. She had tried to buy him some clothes once in China but he
just said he was comfortable in what he wore. “Got me this job
didn’t they?” he would reply to any effort to change what he wore.
Even a new tie or two at Christmas proved fruitless.

She would always reply. “Sure. But it cost
you a wife!” She often joked it was because he was such a bad
dresser that his wife left him and they both laughed because they
knew that was not true. Like Monica’s own relationships that could
never endure her long and frequent absences from Canada, Gord’s
wife just grew tired of being lonely and moved in with a single
person who lived in the house next to theirs in Ottawa. Apparently,
at least initially, there was no yelling, no tears, and no anger.
They just parted ways. Their two children were grown up and gone.
Monica knew that both were older than she was, although Gord rarely
mentioned his kids. Apparently each child just went on with their
separate lives.

All Gord would ever talk about other than
work was blues music and golf. No wonder his wife left him. Monica
couldn’t think of two more boring topics in the universe than
these. She would die before she would ever take up golf. She needed
something far more active, but she guessed that for old people like
Gord it was OK. And blues? That was for old people as well. She was
not into listening to somebody in a smoky bar play their rendition
of a sharecropper’s “I’m hungry, lonely and sick, lost my love…”
song written in the thirties. The first thing Gord did when they
landed in a new country was to seek out the local golf course or
driving range, and then find the grungiest blues bar. He played
both whenever he had the chance and on their days off he left her
to her shopping while he went off to play a game of golf or play
his bass at an open mike blues club. He was such a klutz she often
wondered what he looked like on the golf course. He was no Freddy
Couples she was sure. At any rate that was all fine with her as
long he didn’t expect her to do these things as well. He never did
and thus they travelled together very well.

The Korean family was patiently waiting for
their turn at the booth so she put on her recruiting smile and
turned her attention from the escaping Gord to the hoping-to-escape
Korean student.

“I’m too fucking old for this anymore,” Gord
muttered to himself as he hurried through the large presentation
hall where the booths were crammed side by side and the passage way
clogged with young Koreans and their families with their bags of
brochures and give away swag – key chains, miniature LED
flashlights, iPad cleaning cloths, mouse pads, innumerable pens –
all with an institutional logo of some sort. Gord Salmy had been
the Vice President International at Pierre Trudeau University in
Ottawa for over twenty-five years now. It was not always named such
and one of his jobs was to let the world know that the new Pierre
Trudeau University established in 2009, was the same one as the
hundred-year-old Ottawa River College it had replaced. He liked the
name though. Like most Easterners he had admired Trudeau, so to
name a university after him was more than appropriate from his
perspective. It was not the same across the country though. He had
read that an initiative to rename a small elementary school in
Calgary after Trudeau, was shot down in the still hot flame of
memories of 30 years earlier when Trudeau the Prime Minister had
dared pass legislation that put dirty Federal fingers on dirty
Alberta oil. But Gord liked the name and was proud to have served
the Canadian government ever since the days of Trudeau when he was
recruited fresh from a Ph.D. in linguistics to government service.
Gord had a couple of special talents which at least one branch of
the Canadian government liked. Learning foreign languages was one
of them and he was happy to have found a way to use his skills for
the good of the country.

At this moment it was his Government role,
not the University Vice President job that he felt he was getting
too old for.

He glanced at his watch and figured he had
an hour to get everything done. He walked briskly, but not too fast
to be noticed, out the front entrance to the large conference hall.
There were a lot of people. Even if most were not a six-foot tall,
skinny, slightly balding Caucasian he didn’t think anyone would
take notice of one more foreigner heading to the washroom. And
indeed, that was where he was headed. The conference centre where
the recruitment fair was being held was part of a large rambling
set of buildings in downtown Seoul that included a Sheraton Hotel,
an underground market full of stalls selling everything from men’s
suits to live snakes, and a quartet of bank buildings that housed
Korea’s most influential banking families. They were all joined by
underground passages that allowed the human traffic to bypass the
vehicular traffic that clogged the capital city arteries. People
flowed in this subterranean world between the buildings like a
river of slightly viscous oil. Gord joined the flow of one such
river and he only branched off when he arrived at the washroom. It
was part of the shopping concourse below the bank building, on the
opposite side of the street from the conference centre. Gord
checked that the washroom was empty and waited until a father
helped his young son get his pants done up and his hands washed.
When he was alone he reached into his baggy jacket, pulled out a
sign in Korean that said “
Washroom Out of Service
” and hung
it from the door. He went over to one of the washroom stalls, broke
off the float in the back of the tank so the water wouldn’t turn
off and at the same time plugged the toilet with towels. In no time
the toilet was overflowing. Anyone who discounted the sign and came
in would see and smell the result right away and leave. He had to
be back before the water crept out the door alerting a mall
official who would come to check. He pulled some schematic diagrams
from under his shirt, pulled a facemask and rubber gloves from
another pocket, climbed up on a sink and removed a ceiling vent
grate. With a quick and very athletic move that belied his klutzy
reputation, he pulled himself up into the air vent above the
washroom. Once in the vent passageway he quickly stripped from his
suit jacket and pants, folded them into a small plastic bag and put
them aside. Underneath he was dressed in a full body suit that
looked like shiny long underwear that fully covered him from toe to
nose and hair. With a miniature LED light that he pulled from his
pocket and strapped to his forehead, he started crawling along the
vent passageway. If the schematics they had given him were correct,
the bank building was directly above him and in 30 feet he should
find the bottom of the elevator shaft for the building. In just a
few moments he was there and just as quickly he crawled to the top
of one of the elevators that was still on the first floor. Seconds
later the elevator started moving up. This was the unpredictable
part. His target was the 23
^rd
floor, except he had no
idea what floor the people in the elevator were going to, and at
worst he might have to go up and down until someone chose 23. The
passenger was going to 21. He figured this was close enough, so
when the elevator stopped he jumped off and began the two-story
climb inside the shaft to 23. When he reached that floor, he went
back into the air vent shaft and, examining his schematic as he
went, he crawled forty meters to a grill covered vent that looked
over a small but elaborately furnished office. He glanced at his
watch and saw he had been gone from the washroom for thirteen
minutes. This was going to be close. It would be a complete waste
of time if Sool beat him there.

Their intelligence had told them that Sool
spent between 4 and 5 pm each day alone in his office, heavily
guarded from the outside, drinking very old scotch and practicing
his putting. Despite being one of the richest bankers in the
country, he had two weaknesses. One was that he was a crook. It was
estimated that he had defrauded the country and the banking system
of over eight billion dollars over the past decade and it was
getting to the point where he was becoming an embarrassment to his
fellow bankers and the country. The other weakness he shared with
many other wealthy Koreans – he was obsessed with golf. Now as Gord
looked through the grate covering the air duct at Sool's office he
could see the putter leaning against his desk. The putting machine
was about fifteen feet away at the far side of the room. What he
was looking for was the glass and bottle of scotch that partnered
with the putter to give Sool his hour of respite from the rigours
of international banking. Gord spotted the bottle and the single
glass on a side table directly below the grate he was looking
through. He quickly removed the grate and lowered himself into the
office. He took a small vial the size of half a cigarette and
dumped the powder into the glass, checking by holding the glass up
to the light of the window, that the powder wouldn't be noticeable
with cursory examination. Satisfied, he pulled himself back up into
the duct, replaced the grate and waited. Two minutes later, right
on time, Sool entered his office alone, went directly to the scotch
bottle and poured himself two vertical fingers of a thirty-year old
Macallan. Then he put the glass down, picked up the putter and
began his practice ritual. Gord wanted to yell out “Keep your head
still!” but instead he very carefully started to make his way back
down the duct. Within half an hour of emerging from his putting
practice and as Sool walked over to the boardroom, the specially
formulated and concentrated Veratrum, Corn Lilly extract would
cause him to have a sudden and massive deadly heart attack. Since
he was a very overweight sixty-one, no one would suspect this as
anything but an unfortunate but natural event. Gord had assured his
bosses back in Ottawa that with the ten minute decay rate of the
extract, even if they were suspicious, they wouldn't find
anything.

The timing gave him thirty minutes to get
back to the booth before the alarm bells rang at the bank building,
so he quickly turned his attention to getting out of this
ventilation system and back to the recruitment fair before the
building and maybe the whole square were locked down. Until they
verified a heart attack, his guards and the other bank Board
members would assume some sort of assassination. He was not a
well-liked man and there had been other attempts on his life. Gord
was surprised, in fact, how easy it had been for him to actually
get close to Sool. It had been arranged for the infrared scanners
that gave warning of any warm blooded creature in the walls or
ceilings of the windows, to be down for repair for the one hour
time period that Gord would need. This suggested to Gord that the
bank or perhaps the Korean government itself was backing this
assignment and the Canadian government was just cooperating. He
laughed at the thought that he might be the first hot commodity in
the new Asia- North America free trade pact.

The first part of his escape went well. The
hardest part was not making any noise as he turned around in the
ventilation shaft and breaking Sool’s putting concentration.
However, despite being considerably less flexible than he was when
he started these assignments twenty-five years ago, he managed to
get back to the top of the next elevator that came to the 23rd
floor and he was down in the ventilation shaft leading to the
washroom within ten minutes. When he reached the bag that had his
clothes he was at twenty minutes and it was a five-minute walk back
to the convention hall leaving him a few moments to spare before
all hell broke loose. Then he heard the voices coming from the
washroom and he muttered a “fuck!” to himself. He carefully slid
over to the vent entrance and saw what he thought were two
maintenance men leaning over the towel stuffed toilet. There was no
way he could get down and out of the washroom without being seen.
He thought for a moment and then quietly removed the screen from
the duct entrance and holding his bag of clothing jumped down to
the washroom floor, still dressed in a black, full head covering
body suit and a facemask. Essentially only his eyes were showing
and he had a fleeting thought that it was too bad since they gave
him away as Caucasian. As soon as he landed, the closest worker
looked around too surprised to do anything but stare. The second
worker had time to react and to Gord’s surprise jumped over his
colleague and took a martial art stance.