3
Not counting Kim, there were four of us standing around the table pretending to be awake. Dawn wasn’t for another hour, and it was raining hard. The others were already there when I came through the door. That made me uneasy. I don’t like walking into a group that has already bonded. If this hadn’t been about SSD, I would have stayed in the hotel and sipped tea all day. There was a stand on Yonggwang Street not far from the hotel where they sold special tea. The doorman said he could get it brought to my door if I was too sick to walk over there, but it would cost me. To deliver a cup of tea? I told him to forget it.
“This is Inspector O,” Kim said to the group. “It’s his operation. You follow his orders. If you don’t, you’ll live to regret it. Or maybe you won’t live that long. Don’t try pushing the envelope.” Kim turned to me. “You know these guys?”
I looked at each one of them carefully. “No. All from where?”
“What do you care?” Kim said. “They’re here, and I picked them. That’s what matters.” This was going to be an unpleasant morning all around. My joints ached, my head ached, and Kim was a pain in the ass.
“Their pedigrees don’t interest me,” I said. “I really don’t care if they’re all hicks from the hills of Kangwon. I need to know what organization spawned them. Training differs; skills differ; operating philosophies differ. In some organizations, they’re taught to duck behind a woman if shooting starts.”
“You kidding me?” Kim sounded alarmed. “Up here? I thought you people chewed barbed wire for snacks. Who teaches ducking?”
“That would be SSD.” I watched the other three. Two of them smiled. I smiled back. It was the third one, the one who smirked, who worried me.
“Well, go ahead; introduce yourselves. You,” Kim pointed at a short man, “tell the Inspector something about yourself. Not much, just enough to give him a sense of who you are. Then the rest of you do likewise. For the next few days, maybe longer, you’ll be like brothers.”
“Maybe some of us don’t get along with our brothers.” The man from SSD looked at me. “Isn’t that right, Inspector?”
“Off to a good start,” I said.
The short man shook his head. “You want me to talk or not?”
“Sure I do; go ahead.” So the SSD man knew who I was; he knew that my brother and I didn’t get along. He probably knew plenty more. As far as I was concerned, this operation had died before it got out the door.
“You listening?” The short man raised his voice a notch. “Because if you’re not interested, I’d as soon save my breath.”
“You’re right. I’m all of a sudden uninterested. It’s better if no one knows anyone else. Instead, we’ll use the time to go over the operation.” I didn’t have a clue what Kim thought we were going to do. Not that it mattered. “There are lectures today at the Grand Study Hall. The first one starts at one P.M. Lecture Room Six. We go in and sit.”
“What are we looking for?” The SSD man took out a notebook.
“No notes!” Kim nearly leaped across the table. “You listen, that’s all.”
“Actually,” I said, “that is the interesting part of this whole thing. We don’t know what we’re looking for. Most of the time, the lectures start at four o’clock. Someone needed this one earlier, and we need to figure out why the hurry.”
“Can we take notes when we get in the room, or what?”
“On the lecture? Sure.” I looked at the list from the radio. “If you’re interested in ‘the application of technology to take care of the boiler water and heat net supplementary water through the separate lime softening method,’ or how about ‘the relevance of nanotechnology to self-replicating systems’? I don’t know for sure which one of those we’ll get.”
The short man looked glum. “How long do we have to sit there?”
“Until you’re so bored you think you’re about to die. Then pinch your bottom and sit some more.”
“I don’t like this,” said the other man, the one who hadn’t opened his mouth until now. “We get called in here the day of an operation and then find out no one knows anything about what we’re doing.”
Kim moved around the table and pushed the man so hard he almost fell over. “No one asked you for your opinion, did they? When someone asks, maybe then you can whine. Until then, you do as you’re told.” He turned to the other two. “Same goes for you. I thought that’s what you people did best, followed orders. If you can’t do that, there’s not much left, is there? All right, get out of here. There’s a room down the hall where you can sit around and complain. I’ve got a few things to go over with Inspector O.”
After the three of them left, Kim picked up the phone. “Get Li in here.”
4
Li stood at the door. “You wanted me?”
“Yeah, come on in. Tell the Inspector what we found out last night.”
“We were going through your file again. There was a piece of paper tucked away that said someone heard you had a stroke.”
“Not so.”
“It says your health is not very good.”
“I’m fine. Better than fine.”
“What was it, then? Something scared you off the mountain into a doctor’s office last year. That’s not like you.”
“It was nothing. Well, maybe it was something. A sign, an omen.”
“That’s what the doctor said?”
“In his own way. He said everybody dies eventually.”
“A doctor said that?” Kim threw up his hands. “I could have told you the same thing. Li could have told you. Some doctor you have. Who needs to hear that from a doctor?”
“How much longer you have?” Li looked a little unsure of how that sounded. “I mean, do you need a glass of water or something?”
“I’m perfectly fine, in the pink of health. Better than either of you, I’ll bet. And you want to know why? When I realized what had happened, I had this sense of ecstasy. I was in my cabin on the mountain, looking out the window at the trees, when all of a sudden my brain shook. And then I got weak; not just weak, it was beyond that, the other side of weak. It was like going through the secret door in the floor of our house when I was young.”
“It sounds like you were stunned, kind of in shock or something. The driver said the ceiling in your place looked kind of low. Maybe you hit your head.” Li was trying to be helpful. This was the Li I remembered from a long time ago, when we first worked together.
“Shock? No, I’d say it was the opposite of shock. Maybe revelation. In that instant, I realized that I wasn’t doomed to wind down like an old clock. I could go all at once, in a moment that I controlled. Not controlled consciously, of course, but something deeper, older, a self within, one that knew more, had seen more, like starlight passing through the earth, a speck of dust on the way to the other side of nowhere, everywhere, boundless.”
“Careful, you’re getting out of breath, O. Sit down. I think you might be hyperventilating.” Kim moved the green chair closer.
“I don’t need a chair.” My eyes must have had a strange gleam in them. Kim looked frightened, as if he wasn’t sure who I was. “Don’t you get it? It means I’m not on a leash. No one owns me.”
“Good. Forget the leash and sit. I’ll get you a glass of water.” He turned to Li. “Do we
