The Sand Trap (36 page)

“That makes sense,” Gord offered. “The last
thing I remember was a sea of red in front of my face. That must
have been his brains spattering all over me. Nice.”

“Well she saved your bacon for sure. All
that was left was the clean up. Fortunately Ed’s crew was trained
and prepared for that as well.”

“Clean up? Like what?”

“I’m not sure where to start Gord. Let’s
begin with this.” Richard used the remote to start the DVD.

It was a video of a CTV newscast and Peter
Bainsbridge.
“In local news, there was a spectacular fire on the
canal last night as one of the newer houses in the historic Glebe
district burned to the ground in a display that lit up the whole
East end of Ottawa. CTV reporter Helen Johnson is on the spot.
Helen are you there?”

“
Yes Peter. I’m at the site of this
spectacular home fire on the canal. You can see behind me that the
house has been totally destroyed and fire crews are still putting
out some hot spots after the all night burn.”

As the camera panned to the building the
realization that this was his house slowly dawned into his whacked
out brain.

“
Thanks Helen. Do they have any idea of
the cause of the blaze?” Peter asked.

“
Here is Ottawa Fire department Captain”…
Helen checked her notes…“Rod Jones.”

The video flickered over to a smoke smeared
and tired face with his name captioned below the screen. Captain
Jones speculated that the fire started as the result of a short in
wiring leading to a large collection of electronic equipment in the
basement.

Helen took over again.

“
It appears that the owner was an amateur
musician and had a soundproofed studio in the basement that was
sound insulated with huge sheets of a Styrofoam like material and
that was the source of the huge wafts of billowing black smoke as
the house burned.”

The video had Gord’s full attention at this
point and at her next comment he spilled his cold tea.

“
It is too early to be definitive but the
coroner thinks that the deceased was probably asleep on the
chesterfield found in the basement and was overcome with the very
noxious smoke from the Styrofoam. He probably never woke
up.”

Peter probed further. “Do we know who the
victim was Helen? “

“
Again, Peter. It is too early to be sure
since the body was burnt beyond easy identification, but the house
is owned by …” Helen checked her notes again … “ a Dr. Gord Salmy,
recently retired VP International at Pierre Trudeau University.
Neighbours say he was the only one living there and a friend from
the Ottawa Valley Golf Club showed up this morning looking for him
when he did not show up for the second round of the club
championship. So it is fairly certain that Dr. Salmy died in this
fire.”

Richard flicked at the remote and turned the
TV off.

“That’s enough unless you wanted to see your
wife crying and interviews with people at the university saying
what a wonderful guy you were. You’re funeral was a very moving
event by the way. You would have loved it.”

“What the fuck! I’m alive for Christ sake!
We’ve got to tell everyone!” and Gord started to get out of bed
until his head and knee conspired to knock him back. No one said
anything for a moment until a much calmer Gord observed. “This
isn’t good news for me is it?”

“Depends upon your perspective I guess?”
Richard replied.

“Gord lay back on the bed and closed his
eyes. “Ok, the shock effect worked. Now fill in the blanks. What’s
going on?”

‘Ok, Mary, you start,” Richard ordered.

Mary took over, pulling out her iPad and
looking at some notes.

“First question. Who were those guys?” She
paused and answered her own question. “They were North Korean. The
cars, SUV and sedan were all registered to the South Korean embassy
here in Ottawa but the Embassy had never heard of them. I managed
to track their hack into our system back to Pyongyang even before
the attack on your house. The guy you fought was a high ranking
military officer who, by the way, had been a world Tae Kwon Do
champion in 1991. He also had an undergraduate and graduate degree
in English Literature from Jiao Tong University in Shanghai.”

“That explains his martial arts skill and
English language proficiency," Gord offered. “But why go after
me?”

“Ah…” Mary offered, “That gets more
interesting and will lead us to why you are now dead. Richard you
can fill in this part.”

“Gord, you never knew the reason why you
were sent on any a particular assignment except that a death was
necessary to make a better world.”

“That’s true Richard,” Gord offered. “But I
could read the paper the next day and figure it out. When the
operator of a child sex slave operation in Thailand tragically
falls off his boat and drowns it makes the news.”

“Well the hit in Korea was complex. To
truncate the story, we learned that the banker you killed was in
fact a North Korean spy and had been one since he was a youth. He
and his twin brother had been separated as infants during the
fifties after the war. One was raised in the North. The other, the
banker, was raised in the South. Unbeknownst to the South, the
banker was recruited as a teenager to the cause of the North by his
twin brother with horrendous stories of the torture of their
parents by South Korean military. Apparently they met at school and
at university abroad and conferences and so on and no one was the
wiser. With some North Korean help the one brother eventually rose
to the top of the South Korean banking system and for the last
decade had been siphoning off billions of dollars from the system.
At first it was just put off to Asian graft, but it was actually
Mary who traced the funds and found out they were in fact funding
the North Korean nuclear program. We informed NATO and South Korea
and you were assigned the formally approved hit.”

“OK, we’re getting there,” Gord offered.
“But what was his brother doing in an underground mall washroom
dressed as a janitor? And how did they find out what I did?”

Mary jumped in. “That surprised us as too. I
did a little hacking and found out that, quite coincidentally, they
were going to do an extraction of the banker that evening. They
felt things were getting a little hot and they were going to take
him home. It turns out the whole mall and bank building was full of
Northern agents positioned to do the extraction. Apparently the
washroom was going to be the command centre of the operation. You
fucked all that up, if you’ll excuse my language.”

“Shit!” was all Gord could say.

Richard continued the tag team explanation.
“We gather they simply assumed the South Korean government had
discovered them and so they focused on getting their people safely
out of the area and the country rather than on figuring out who you
were.”

Mary jumped in again. “And it was only later
when Sool looked at the tunnel tapes and saw a tall Canadian in a
baggy suit that he started to think in a different direction and
went into our system to prove his suspicions.”

“And that is where he found me.”

“That’s where he found you,” Mary
confirmed.

“But how did he do it? Are our systems that
hackable?”

“That puzzled me as well,” Mary offered. “In
fact I was not even sure that the ghost file was hacked. I couldn’t
find any footprint to say that someone or anything passed the
laser-generated password and into our system. It was not until the
night you woke up and mentioned that “nun” or “nuno” thing when I
figured it out. I think he was saying “nano” not “nuno”. When you
mentioned where our electronics are made I was sure I had the
answer and when I went back to our system and pulled it apart I was
right. Without getting into the mumbo jumbo of it, this is only
something I have read and never seen until now, it is possible to
put a very small ‘circuit’ into the manufacturing process of any
electronic device. By small I mean very small, something only
electronic microscope detectable. Thus the word “nano” by the way.
This invisible circuit acts as a sort of Trojan horse waiting to be
activated remotely by the originator. It works so well and so
insidiously because it is actually inside the system already and
doesn’t need any password to go to work sending files wherever
ordered. Its weakness, at least with today’s technological
limitations, is that it can only be used once. That is why we
detected only one minute electronic pulse and never found anything
else.”

She paused. “Are you following this? Am I
too technical?”

Gord looked at her impatiently. “Just get on
to what this means for me.”

Richard took over.

“Well the good news for the Agency is that
they blew this technology on your file. That guy must have really
wanted you, to waste such a deeply planted technology. He really
didn’t take anything else. Every member of NATO will now be looking
for similar “nano” plants in their hardware. This job came at a
very high cost for North Korea, and Sool, of course."

Mary continued. “The bad news is that he
blew this technology on your file. Gord your file is still out
there somewhere. All the jobs you did. Where you live. You family
and work history. The location of your money. Anybody who wanted to
extract any kind of revenge for what you have done could learn
this. After this fiasco in Ottawa I suspect that the North Koreans
will gladly sell your data to anyone who wants it.”

They both paused to let Gord absorb some of
this.

“Gord the only way to close the file would
be to kill you,” Richard announced.

He paused again.

“So, Gord Salmy was buried on July 11, 2011
in a wonderful ceremony at the Valley Presbyterian Church on York
Street. You don’t exist anymore.”

It took a moment for this to sink into
Gord’s banged up brain. “How did Monica fit into to this?”

Richard sighed. “Well she was not supposed
to die that’s for sure. In fact she was not supposed to have
anything to do with you. Her making contact with you was done on
her own initiative.”

“But she worked for you?”

“Each agent like you has a watcher assigned
to them to act as back up on the jobs they do. Like you, the
watchers have ordinary jobs when they aren’t on assignment. But
like you they are very highly trained and able to deal with any
sort of circumstance, violent or not. As you learned, Monica was a
crack shot. It was just lucky, and unlucky so it seems, that she
found a job working with you. Since you resigned from the
university she had already been assigned to someone else and told
never to see you again.”

“So I’m dead?” Gord pinched his arm. “Hmmm,
seems I still hurt. There must be something I’m not getting here
Richard. If Gord Salmy is dead, who is sitting in this hospital
room with a fucking big headache, and a throbbing leg?” He choked
back some tears. “And a big hole in his heart for a wonderful
friend.”

“We’re working on that right now,” Mary
offered. “You focus on your recovery and we’ll take care of the
rest.”

Richard interrupted her. “Get some sleep
now. We’ll get back to you when we have some more answers for
you.”

Richard called the nurse and with a little
extra pain medication the person who was once Gord Salmy fell into
a deep sleep.

Over the next week or so Gord had nothing
else to do but focus upon his rehabilitation and he worked hard
with the physio to get to the point where he was mobile. The swath
of bandages had been taken off and he could feel the scabs between
his growing beard. By the second week he was ready to take some
first steps. Either Richard or Mary came every day to visit and
brought him books and magazines, mostly golf magazines. Mary
brought him a set of “BEATS” headphones and a new iPad loaded with
six generations of blues music. He read the newspapers they had
saved for him and learned that one of the young university
scholarship kids had won the club championship with a sizzling five
under. After the first blush of stories there was nothing more on
the fire or his death. The first couple of weeks passed fairly
quickly as he focused on recovery, and not his conscience, his
grief or the many questions he still had for Richard and Mary. Too
much time on his own gave him too much access to all three.

One day Mary and Richard came together. They
had a laptop computer bag, a large binder, a Nikon D7000 camera, a
suitcase and a paper LCBO bag obviously holding a bottle. Gord
looked hungrily at the latter. Due to the painkillers he had not
had a drink since the house, but he was now finished with the pills
and needed the bottle. No one said anything as Mary organized the
computer on the table beside Gord’s bed and moved it so that all
three could see the screen.

Richard started. “Gord, I’ve got to stop
calling you that. We have been working to find you a new identity.
We are now ready to describe your new life.”

“What do you mean new life? I have a life
now.”

“No you don’t. You are dead. You don’t exist
anymore.”

Richard continued. “We are going to offer
you some things and you can say yes or no, but we will expect
something in return.”

“Why am I surprised?” Gord sarcastically
observed. “Go ahead.”

“Right. Well here is what we can do for you.
Firstly, we can arrange it so you are able to enter the qualifying
sectionals for the Champions Tour in 2013. We can’t guarantee you
will make the actual tour, which would be cheating.” Fairfield
chuckled at that aside. “The playing part is up to you. But we can
make you eligible for a shot at the qualifiers.”

Richard paused to let a shocked Gord absorb
this. On his own he would have been an incredible long shot to even
be able to enter the qualifiers. You have to apply and have a PGA
pro-verified scoring record…at that level a handicap is
meaningless… and have won at least a couple of amateur events
somewhere. The Ottawa Valley Country Club Senior Championship would
not have turned too many heads on the selection committee.