have a physician around here?”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “It’s only a power surge in the system. I get a little boost of energy once in a while, nothing to worry about.” I felt my blood pressure dropping back to normal. “It’s like stepping on the gas when the transmission is in neutral, that’s all. Probably helps clean the carburetor.”
“Don’t pay attention to him,” Li said. “Mechanical things are not his specialty.”
“Cancel your operation, Kim. The guy with the smirk is from SSD; I’m sure of it.”
“We now classify people according to their smirks?” Kim’s face ran through a dozen expressions. “What about these?”
“You think I’m kidding? If we’re lucky, they’ll leave us twiddling our thumbs and move things to another time. If they really want to make a point, they’ll do something ugly.”
5
The lecture hall was deserted when we walked in. It wasn’t a big room-maybe twenty chairs-and it was going to be harder to blend in if we ended up with only a lecturer, my team, and three or four SSD operatives. Kim refused to cancel the operation. He said I was afflicted with a fear of shadows, that it was a result of my living too long in a warped environment. That left us at the mercy of SSD. In the best case, SSD might send only one person, but I had a feeling there would be what we always called belts of security-the key agents, then a team watching them, then a team watching
I had assumed the room would also have a few students, several academics, a couple of bureaucrats desperately trying to learn new vocabulary that would help them keep their jobs, and the inevitable party types taking notes on what was said and who was there. It was beginning to look like my assumptions were wrong. At 1:10 there was no lecturer and still no one else in the hall. The short man leaned over to me.
“Maybe we’re in the wrong room.”
“You have inside information?” I said. “Maybe you know something the rest of us don’t?”
He sat back and let a faint frown settle around his mouth. The man from SSD had closed his eyes and was resting comfortably. The third man, the one who didn’t say much, was looking at his hands.
The room was still empty at 1:20 when the door opened. “The lecture has been canceled for unavoidable reasons.” A young woman walked to the front of the room. “We have another group coming in at one thirty, so you’ll have to leave.”
“When was it canceled?” I looked at the man from SSD.
The short man was on his feet. “And why didn’t someone bother to come in and tell us before? We’ve been sitting here waiting. Do you think that’s all we have to do?”
“I don’t know what all you have to do. I do know you’ll have to get out of this room.”
“Is it OK if he stays through the next meeting?” I pointed at the man from SSD.
“And why would it be OK if he stayed?” she asked.
“Because he’s dead.”
6
“Who knew?” I was sitting in a chair-not the green one, which had been moved to the other side of the room-in front of Kim’s desk while he chewed on pencils. “You could certainly argue that it was a day bad for
“I don’t think he just keeled over.”
“He didn’t keel over. He didn’t even slump. He was sitting up.”
“How did they do it?”
“How did who do what? I don’t have any idea what happened to him. All I know is that he sat down at one o’clock and by one twenty he wasn’t going anywhere.”
“They must have killed him.” Kim looked worried. “Why would they do that? He must have known something that he wasn’t supposed to know. Either that or he had plans to jump ship and they needed to stop him.”
“I doubt either one of those. I also doubt that SSD killed him. They don’t do that to their own people. It’s very bad for morale.”
“Maybe you were wrong. Maybe he wasn’t one of theirs.”
“Then whose was he?”
“I don’t know. It was in his file, but the file is gone.”
“Gone. Mislaid, I suppose.”
“Files do disappear sometimes, Inspector. This is a secure facility. I don’t think anyone here made off with it.” Kim was looking more worried by the second. The more he said out loud all of the reasons everything was all right, the more he realized that things were starting to go bad. “We’ll have to do an autopsy. That will tell us the cause of death. The police can take it from there.”
“The police? You really don’t understand this place yet, do you? The police won’t have anything to do with a dead SSD agent.”
“They won’t? Then who will investigate?”
“That’s a good question, Major. If he died of a heart attack, everyone will breathe a sigh of relief, because a big red check can go in the box on the file that says: ‘No Further Investigation Necessary.’ If his heart stopped for unexplained reasons, no one will answer the phone when you call.”
“What do we do? Forget it happened?”
“No, you keep it in mind at all times.”
“Was it a threat?”
“Against you? Not likely. They’re not going to threaten you. They aren’t sure who is going to come out on top. What if you emerge as top dog? They don’t want to be on your bad side.”
“They want to be on my good side. Then why murder that agent?”
“Fair enough: Why murder that agent? It could be they need you to keep some distance. Remember I told you to call off the operation? Actually, I don’t think they meant to kill their man to make that point. I think they meant to kill someone else.”
“You?”
“Could be. The question is, why?”
“Don’t they realize that killing you wouldn’t have mattered to me?”
“That helps.”
“They must think you’re working for me.”
“Or something.” It could be that. More likely, they got wind of my meeting with Kang in Prague.
7
Finally, I decided to ask the major. The man in the lobby, the one who stared at nothing but always seemed to watch as I walked in and out of the hotel, was there every day. The clerk said he’d been away for a weekend while I was traveling, but he was back on his chair the day before I returned. Who was he?
