WW III

walkie-talkie aerial, Chin turned to the vendor. “You sure he acted suspiciously? Could have been a young buck hurrying to the gardens to meet his girlfriend — keep her warm during the curfew?”

“Yes,” said the vendor, “I’m sure. I’m telling you, it was nunchi.” He meant “eyemeasure”—beyond mere sight, a sixth sense. “And he didn’t know the price of the ants,” continued the vendor. “Everyone’s been reading about the fires down—”

“All right,” cut in Chin gruffly. “Where do you live?”

“In Chamshil.” It was the area of dozens of huge, look-alike cement high-rises clustered several miles south across the Han River near the Olympic village.

“We’ll get a car for you,” Chin told him, pulling out the walkie-talkie’s aerial again.

“Will you let me know what happens?” asked the vendor.

“Yes. Certainly,” said Chin, giving the vendor his card and signing a “pass through” chit for the blackout drill and curfew.

“Thanks for the tip,” said the younger agent. Soon another unmarked car quietly appeared at the far end of the alley.

“There’s your ride,” said Chin.

As the vendor walked away, five minutes before the onset of curfew and blackout, the younger agent tried to find out what his older colleague’s plan was without wanting to appear stupid. “He must know he’s being followed.”

“Not necessarily,” answered Chin. “Unfamiliar with the subway maybe, mistimed it. Rather than get caught in the curfew — probably decided to hole up for a while, stay out of sight till the morning. Garden’s as good a place as any, and there’s a lot of pavilions — in case it rains. Which,” he said, looking skyward, “I think it will.”

“I think we should go in and get him.”

“And if he is an infiltrator, what will you find?” asked Chin.

The young agent thought for a few seconds. “Maybe he won’t swallow it. While there’s life, there’s hope. Right? Look at Kim Shin Jo — came down to shoot Park, gets caught, and ends up with a nice suit and eating out. Peking duck. Some of the boys tell me that when he wanted, he even got to go to the Angel Cloud House, the kisaeng girls pampering and singing to him. Nice work if you can get it.”

“Yes, well, this guy isn’t Kim Shin Jo,” said the older agent, pausing, unscrewing the top from a Dristan bottle and tilting his head back, his voice more strained. “If we rush, our boy might pop the pill. Then where are we?” He paused, snuffling back the nasal spray while screwing the lid back on. “Damn summer cold.” He turned to the younger agent. “But let’s say there’s a slight chance he doesn’t know he’s being followed, that he simply ran out of time. Maybe he remembered the curfew but not the blackout — after all, blackout only happens once a month. Might be doing what a lot of others do — just sitting it out. So while he’s still got light to see by, he heads north on Sejong to Yulgog — then straight to the garden before blackout begins.”

“So?” asked the younger agent.

“In the morning we follow him home. That’s what we want. Why grab him now if we can get the whole cell?”

“You believe he doesn’t know we’re on to him?”

“No,” answered Chin. “But it’s a possibility. Old Kim Shin Jo didn’t know those woodcutters were on to him either. Did he?”

“You have a point.”

The air raid sirens were reaching full volume and the lights were going out all over the city, huge skyscrapers that dwarfed the Secret Garden’s gnarled pines and tile fluted walls suddenly appearing twice as big and brutish in the moonlight. “You want some gum?” offered the younger agent.

“Gives me gas,” said Chin, turning toward his younger colleague but unable to see him, the moon now enveloped by cloud. Even so, the younger man sensed the other tensing.

“What is it?”

“Unless,” began Chin, his voice dropping, “the garden is the meeting place and he has a set planted.”

The younger agent heard his colleague take out the walkie-talkie, his voice in whispered tones requesting the RDF — radio direction finding — truck to move in to pick up any signals coming from the garden.

“Ah,” said the young agent. “He’d be a fool to transmit from here. In the heart of Seoul!”

“You remember Sorge?” asked Chin. “Germans’ top Communist agent in Japan — the best of them. Told Moscow Japan wouldn’t be attacking through Siberia, so the Russians were able to move a million fresh troops from Siberia to Stalingrad. Changed the war. You know where Sorge transmitted from, my young friend?”

“You’re going to tell me. Right?”

“Used to give parties for all the big shots in the Japanese military aboard his yacht in Tokyo Bay. He’d slip away from the party — transmit from the cabin right below them.”

“He had balls then.”

“You think we have a Communist with balls here?” asked the older man, snuffling the spray again. “Not what you’d expect, is it — transmitting right under our noses?”

“No,” the young man conceded. “It isn’t.” After a few seconds he spoke again. “Shouldn’t you wait longer with that stuff?”

“What?” asked the older agent.

“Nose spray. It can screw up your sinuses if you take it too often.”

“Whose nose is it?”

Soon, in the darkness, they could hear the RDF truck rolling softly down the alley toward the entrance to the Secret Garden, crushing the ginkgo leaves blown down by the summer wind.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In Washington it was morning, and the president, James R. Mayne, was about to go jogging along the Camp David trails for the TV crews to get their clips for the evening news. But there was a problem: the forest-green jogging suit, which would blend in well with the woods and was being insisted upon by the Secret Service, was objected to by the president’s press aide, Paul Trainor. Trainor was advising the president to wear the white jogging suit, which would stand out more in contrast with the woods. It was silly, and normally Jean, the first lady, would have settled it on the spot, but she was away campaigning for the president in the Northwest. In her absence the chief executive left media tactics to Trainor. The election was only eight weeks off, all polls showing the race would be a cliff-hanger. Mayne was still getting high marks for what looked like another arms reduction treaty with the Soviets, but his challenger, Sen. J. D. Leyland from Texas, was batting well, too, with his promise to trim the “federal fat” from “overused, overabused” social programs so that he could in fact “reduce taxes” without weakening national defense.

Mayne’s election platform was based on his cuts in defense spending, directly related, as his campaigners pointed out, to his much-lauded success in having kept the United States from becoming embroiled in “other people’s wars,” particularly in Central America. He had also been successful in keeping down the costs of maintaining U.S. bases throughout the world, such as the forty-two-thousand-man force in South Korea.

Senator Leyland, on the other hand, was running on a platform charging that America was becoming “gravely weakened” by her cutbacks in defense and that the president’s nonintervention in the “wildcat” fires of Central America represented not so much a saving in America’s defense budget as a “bankruptcy” of national policy, which “ignores the demands of U.S. national security and global obligations.”

“Mr. President!”

It was Trainor, handing him The New York Times and Washington Post. “Latest polls, sir.” They confirmed it was still “neck and neck,” but increasingly the president’s “age factor,” sixty-one, against that of his challenger, fifty-one, was commanding more attention from the press.