change quickly, unless he found them. And the only way he was going to do that was if he found Melchior.
Falls Church, VA
November 5, 1963
The headlights on the the stretch Fleetwood went dark just before it pulled into the back parking lot of the Falls Church storage facility. Silent and invisible, detectable only by the glint of moonlight off chrome and glass and black lacquer, it sluiced across the empty asphalt like the lead ship of a naval battalion until it pulled up soundlessly in front of a lone man standing in the cone of darkness beneath a broken streetlight. A broad-brimmed hat further shadowed the man’s face, but beneath it a nervous hand fiddled with a tiny hole in the suit jacket, under the lapel, over his heart. For the past thirty-six hours Melchior had been trying to make sense of what he’d experienced at Millbrook—the rippling trees, the objects that seemed to fly of their own accord—but as soon as he saw the car he forgot all that. He’d heard that Song was doing well, but not
His regrets only increased when the tinted back window rolled down with a space-age hum, revealing a plush cavern lined with black leather, white silk, chrome accents—and a woman whose face, though familiar, still took his breath away. It had been almost seven years since he’d last seen Song. She was in her mid-twenties now—she’d been shady about her age even when he met her a decade ago in Korea. The features were still sharp, but they lacked the hollow, starved look they’d worn when Melchior first met her, had taken on a cast of polished onyx. The eyes were if anything larger and darker, but, though the anger was gone, it had been replaced by a hardness that was even more daunting.
Melchior couldn’t help himself. He whistled.
Song didn’t deign to look at him. “If you use the term ‘Dragon Lady’ in any context whatsoever, I’ll have Chul- moo shoot out your knees. Now, what’s so important that after seven years you suddenly need to see me personally, immediately, and at one in the morning?”
Well,
“Actually, I was going to say that if I’d known you were going to turn out this pretty, I’d’ve never—”
“One more word and I’ll shoot you myself.”
“You’re afraid I’ll offend poor ‘Iron Weapon’ in the front seat?” Melchior glanced at the chauffeur. “Is he even old enough to drive?”
“His license says he is,” Song said. “And he speaks no English, so the only person who will be offended by your banter is me. Let’s cut to the chase: what do you need?” Song looked at Melchior for the first time, from the ragged sandals all the way up to the battered fedora, proffering an ironic smile that sent shivers down his spine. “And what do you offer?”
In return for services rendered to the United States government during the war in Korea, Song Paik—Song to her friends, Madam Song to everyone else—asked only that she be allowed to emigrate to America. Melchior had traveled to Korea with the Wiz when he was all of twenty years old, had recruited her himself. She was that one in fifty asset who neither disappeared behind the 38th parallel nor turned out to have been a Communist plant. She’d been fourteen or fifteen then, a slip of a girl, all angles and lines, with sunken eyes that burned with hunger and hatred. Like Melchior, she was an orphan, but unlike him she’d known her parents and witnessed their murder—and the murder of her brother, her nanny, and six more members of her extended family, not to mention countless friends and neighbors—at the hands of Kim Il- sung’s soldiers. Melchior was pretty sure she’d’ve helped the Company even if the Wiz hadn’t offered her U.S. citizenship. No one carried a grudge like a Korean. Of course he hadn’t met any Persians at that point, so it was a qualified opinion.
In fact, after he and the Wiz had been in Korea for just over ten months, Douglas MacArthur made it clear he didn’t give a shit about intelligence as long as he had tanks and bombers and 155-millimeter shells and napalm— God only knows what would’ve happened if he’d gotten his hands on the thirty-eight atomic bombs he’d requested. Never one to stick around where he wasn’t wanted, the Wiz decamped for Persia to take care of Mohammed Mossadegh, dragging Melchior with him, while Song made her way to the States. Melchior kept tenuous tabs on her in the intervening decade. Though her presence in this country was legal, the rest of her activities appeared to be less above-board. He gathered that she’d tried a little bit of everything: smuggling, drug running, even espionage. Her primary source of revenue, however, was an exclusive brothel that offered every kind of Asian girl—Indian, Thai, Japanese, as well as more rarefied “varietals,” as she called them, as though they were species of orchid—and whose regular patrons had come to include captains of industry and congressmen, along with a regular flow of intelligence agents from around the world, who came there for the information that was on sale along with the girls. Although the official line at the Company was that Madam Song’s was allowed to operate unmolested because she funneled a large percentage of her income to organizations and individuals working for the overthrow of Kim Il- sung’s regime, the truth was she’d taken her cues from the Company and kept extensive evidence—photographic and forensic—on the most sensitive visitors to her establishment. A nosy reporter might take her down one day (assuming she didn’t have the goods on the paper’s publisher), but no government agency ever would.
Melchior shook his head now. “The years haven’t softened you, that’s for sure. I need to move something,” he said quickly, before she threatened to shoot him again. “Someone.”
“Some who?”
“That’s not important.”
“Some where?”
Melchior chuckled. “Kind of far, actually. San Francisco. I’d take him myself, but I have some business to attend to first, and this is a priority.”
“Seoul is kind of far. San Francisco is only six hours by plane, and I happen to have one.”
Melchior resisted the urge to whistle again. “I see I called the right lady.”
“You called no one. No one answered. Nothing will be moved. It just so happens that I enjoy visiting San Francisco. Usually I go in January, but I guess I can go in November this year.”
“Understood.”
“Sometimes when I’m in San Francisco I like to meet new people. Perhaps you know someone who could show me around?”
“In fact I do. He’s a nice man. A doctor.”
