“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Come on, Drummond. I’ve seen how you look at Keith and Maria and Allie. What in the hell did they ever do to you to provoke that kind of disgust?”
There really was no way to answer that. She had me dead in the crosshairs. So instead I took the first resort of every able attorney: When caught with your hand in the cookie jar, point at the refrigerator.
“Look,” I said, “you won’t do our client any good by running your mouth on TV. You don’t know the Koreans. Don’t piss them off. Don’t back these guys into a corner.”
“You’re acting like I started this. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice those cameras at the prison this morning? They were publicly humiliating our client. I’m fighting fire with fire.”
Again, she was right. Only this time, she was also wrong. Horribly wrong.
“That was just for public consumption. They gave up jurisdiction so they had to save some face. This is Asia, lady. That’s how the game’s played over here.”
“They beat him,” she said, and her green eyes sizzled like tiny little hornet’s nests with thousands of furious insects buzzing around.
“Did you see them beat him?” I demanded.
“I saw them shove him. And I saw him come flying out the back of that van.”
“Maybe he tripped,” I countered. “I’ll ask you once again. Did you witness anyone beating him?”
“I didn’t have to witness it. I saw the look on his face.”
“You’re supposed to be a lawyer. You’re supposed to distinguish between assumptions and facts. You just told an international network that our client was beaten. Can you prove it? Can you back it up?”
She ran a hand through her hair. She knew I had her.
I said, “Call CNN and tell them not to run it.”
She swallowed once, hard. “I won’t.”
“Do it. You were talking out your ass. We both know it.”
“If I was, the Koreans can take it as a warning shot. They’ll keep their hands off my client or I’ll publicly pillory them every day of this trial.”
We stared at each other for a long, fruitless moment. I finally spun around and left. I went back to my room. I paced around like a big, grouchy bear in his cave. Eventually I got tired of that, but I was too emotionally worked up to return to my reading, so I flipped on the TV.
Say this for those CNN clowns: They’re damned quick.
The piece opened with a great shot of me and Carlson walking out a doorway under the word HOMOS in big, bold, black letters.
CNN’s editors are real quick, too. And slanderously selective.
The next shot was borrowed from a Korean station. It showed Whitehall, looking like a miserable, saturated noodle, being dragged through some double doors. The next clip showed Carlson with her hand on my elbow and we looked frantically friendly, like we were discussing something and were in complete agreement. Then came the shot with Carlson under the tree saying, “My co-counsels and I are outraged at the beating of our client. He was worked over by several South Korean policemen. When I tried to stop them, I was assaulted.”
Then came the cutout of me with the microphone stuffed in my angry, pouting face. I growled, “No damned comment,” only the way it came across was like I was so damn furious that my client got beaten that I was too tongue-tied to spit out anything but “No damned comment.”
The phone rang within two minutes.
“Hello, General,” I said, before Clapper, the chief of the entire Army JAG Corps, could even begin to identify himself.
“Drummond, what in the hell’s going on over there?” he belched.
“Hey, it wasn’t like it looked. I swear, General. I got ambushed. Carlson set me up.”
He paused for only a moment. “An ambush?”
“Right. She called me up to our office and I-”
“Office?” he interrupted, “Is that the goddamned building with that ‘homo’ word written on it?”
Feeling the blood rush into my face, I feebly answered, “That isn’t like it looks, either. See, you have to read that sign real close. First, it’s ‘homos,’ with an s at the end, and it actually stands for-”
The earpiece exploded. “Drummond! I don’t give a shit what it stands for. The whole world just saw a picture of an American Army officer walking out a doorway with that damned sign. Have you got any idea what that looks like?”
“Now that you mention it, sir, I guess it-”
“You said she set you up?”
“Right. See, she called me to come up there, and then I-”
“Jesus, have I got the wrong man in there? Are you telling me she’s too smart for you?”
That hurt. I mean, that
“You better, Drummond. You really better.”
He hung up hard. I didn’t blame him. It was three o’clock in the morning back in Washington. He probably hadn’t been lying around in bed idly watching the late-night news. Somebody must’ve called him and frosted his ear. Probably somebody big, like the Chief of Staff of the Army. Or somebody bigger, like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Or maybe somebody even bigger than that.
My thoughts were interrupted when the phone rang again. This time it was General Spears. Personally. And he did this really excellent imitation of General Clapper. Next came Acting Ambassador Brandewaite, and I have to confide his imitation wasn’t nearly as good, because he was so florid and incensed all he could do was spit and sputter and curse. He hit all the octaves right, though, I’ll tell you that. Then Spears’s legal adviser, Colonel Piranha Lips, called, and he did the shorthand version. No barrage of questions, no rude interruptions, just a simple, abbreviated “Now I really don’t like you, Drummond. I’ll fuck you for this.”
It was really amazing. I’d been in Korea two days and already I’d managed to piss off every senior officer in the world, to get the acting ambassador so mad he couldn’t work up enough saliva to spit, and to get my face plastered on the international news in a way that was thoroughly revolting.
I owed all this to a short, skinny girl with malice in her heart and no sense at all about what she was unleashing.
To give her credit, she thought she was protecting her client. And back in the good ol’ U.S.A. what she’d just done might even have worked. Not here, though. Katherine Carlson was about to get a lesson in what the Asians call “face.” The Mafia has a word for it, too: payback.
CHAPTER 9
As I later pieced it together, Keith had decided to slip out the back gate for a little shopping. That happened sometime around nine o’clock that night. He dodged across a heavily trafficked boulevard and entered the Itaewon shopping district. Maybe they started tracking him right then. If so, he apparently never noticed.
He began dashing in and out of shops, picking up a few things here and a few things there. He got himself a snazzy leather bomber jacket with a fuzzy fur collar, some Nike running shoes, and a spiffy new leather wallet. By eleven o’clock he was halfway through Itaewon. He’d made it to a major intersection with cars whizzing by, and had paused to wait for the pedestrians’ traffic signal to show the little green man with his legs pumping, when a couple of strong hands lifted him off his feet and tossed him into the speeding traffic. He got bounced high up in the air by the first car and came down dead center into the bumper of the next. It took an ambulance twenty minutes to get there. Keith was loaded into the back and rushed to the nearest hospital.
The good news was he’d carried his passport with him, so the hospital got his identity and immediately notified the American embassy that some American had gotten hit by a couple of cars. The lady at the embassy night switch didn’t recognize his name, so she made a note to give to the night duty officer the next time he wandered by. He came by around four in the morning. He didn’t recognize Merritt’s name, either. He followed his standard operating procedures and called and gave the name to the desk sergeant at the Yongsan Garrison MP
