“The officer, you mean?”

“Yes. A daewui.”

“A senior captain,” I said. Before leaving Seoul, I’d memorized the ranks of all the branches of the North Korean military.

“Yes. They are searching the area, moving fast. This is a densely populated neighborhood and they don’t have enough men to knock on every door and search every room. That means she’s working alone, not in an official capacity.”

“She’s a fixer,” I said.

“Who told you about them?”

“Hero Kang.”

She nodded at that.

“What do you suppose they’re looking for?” I asked.

“A Romanian officer,” she replied, “who can’t speak Russian.”

“Or an Albanian sailor who escaped from the Port of Nampo.”

“By now,” she said, “they know you were traveling on a Peruvian passport.”

“And you know too.”

“Yes. I know too.”

“We can’t just sit here,” I said. “They’ll find us.”

Doc Yong shook her head vigorously. “A full door-to-door search will attract too much attention. I don’t believe they’ll do that. Attention is what they’re trying to avoid, to make sure that the superiors of the authorities at both the Port of Nampo and the Pyongyang Train Station are not alerted to their miserable failure.”

“You mean their miserable failure in allowing me to enter the country.”

“Yes. What they’ll do is sit tight and hope that you’ll become frightened and poke your head out. Instead, we must wait for Hero Kang. He’ll know how to get us out of here.”

“You could leave,” I said. “They’re not looking for you.”

Doc Yong shook her head again. “Not yet.”

She grabbed the canvas pack that had been strapped to her back, untied it, and pulled out a large bag. It was rectangular, wrapped in water-resistant oil paper. Beneath the paper were the tattered remnants of a leather binding, reinforced with varnished bamboo slats. A book, not bound at the spine but rather shot through with half a dozen brass rivets that held the thick sheaf of yellowed paper intact. What scholars call a codex. The paper I recognized-it was the same thick vellum as the scrap that had been given to me by an Eastern European sailor in the Port of Pusan. Doc Yong thumbed through the pages.

“Here,” she said. “Here is the section I cut out. We must replace it.”

“We will,” I said. “It’s in Seoul, in a safe place.”

Actually, the fragment had been stolen from me by a homicide investigator of the Korean National Police known as Mr. Kill. As part of the deal for me to come up here, I demanded that he return the fragment. He did. Now it was locked in the CID safe at Eighth Army headquarters.

Gently, I touched the rough leather of the codex. “Tell me about it,” I said.

Outside, we heard the abrupt shouts of soldiers. We froze for a second, listening as their footsteps passed.

Doc Yong turned back to the manuscript. For years, she explained, scholars thought that the codex was nothing but a myth.

“Supposedly,” Doc Yong said, “in the early fifteenth century, during the rule of our Great King Sejong, a strange man was spotted in the mountainous precincts of Hamgyong Province. A ‘wild man,’ he was called, and some said he was not a man at all but a beast. A court official was appointed to track him, an inspector of the king’s, a man who held the rank of Five White Horses.”

“A cop,” I said.

“More like what the Europeans call an ombudsman.”

“A what?”

“Somebody appointed by the government to investigate anything unusual. Or anything that seems to have gone awry.”

“Okay,” I replied. “So this inspector of the Five White Horses starts chasing this wild man through the mountains. What happened?”

“He was accompanied by a scribe who wrote it all down. His name was Clerk Yi.” Doc Yong placed her hand on the codex. “That’s why we have this manuscript. It’s difficult for me to read not only because the writing is archaic but also because Clerk Yi had a very fluid style of penmanship, a style the Chinese call ‘grass writing.’ ”

In ancient times Koreans had no written language of their own. Educated people learned to read and write Chinese. If they were well off enough, they traveled to China to continue their studies. Indeed, some of the most revered poets in Chinese literature were Koreans.

“I’ve managed to translate about half of Clerk Yi’s manuscript so far,” Doc Yong said.

“Into English?”

“Both modern Korean and English,” she replied.

I shook my head, never failing to marvel at her brilliance. “So did they catch the beast?”

“I haven’t gotten there yet.”

“What was it? A man or an animal?”

“I’m not sure,” Doc Yong replied. “But I did get to the part about the tunnels, where the beast was being chased by the inspector and his minions and eluded them by entering ancient caverns.”

“The ones that tunnel beneath the DMZ.”

“Yes.”

“You got their attention at Eighth Army,” I said.

“I thought I would. And that’s why you’re here.”

“No. That’s not why I’m here.”

She waited, holding her breath.

“I’m here for you,” I said.

It was at that moment, while she gazed into my eyes, that someone kicked the door in.

4

Shards of wood erupted into the room, and a brown boot followed. A pair of hands grappled with the small door, ripping it off its already twisted hinges.

I grabbed the short table, dumping rice bowls and porcelain and pickled vegetables. Doc Yong clutched my bicep instinctively but was forced to let go when I rose to my feet and charged. Speed is everything in a fight-speed and unbridled aggressiveness. The small table was my shield; I rammed it full force into the face of the startled man who’d kicked our door in. He reeled backward under my onslaught. As he fell, I kneed him in the gut and he went down with me and the table on top of him. He let out a grunt and a whoosh of air, then lay very still.

I scrambled to my feet, searching for more enemies, but the hallway was empty. Doc Yong reacted quickly. She tossed my shoes to me and as I slipped them on and my uniform tunic, she put on her hooded cloak and grabbed the canvas bag that she’d packed in preparation for just such an emergency.

“Let’s go,” she said in English and ran past me toward the stairwell. As she did so, I knew that something was not right. The man lying at my feet wore a military-type uniform, even though these “fixers” were not a regular military unit. They wouldn’t have sent him alone; they might be shorthanded, but surely there had to be someone backing him up. Before Doc Yong reached the stairwell, I lunged forward, grabbed her elbow, and jerked her to a stop, just in time. A club whistled from around the corner in a vicious arc, missing her head by inches and slamming with a thud against the wall.

I leapt past her and grabbed the club, turning my back against the hand holding it. I pinned the arm against the wall and twisted, elbowing the backup man in the face. He released his grip on the club, but I kept twisting his arm until he bent forward at the waist. I grabbed the back of his head with both my hands, braced him there, and

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