The voice came from a tape on Bales’s answering machine in his quarters. And it actually
Bales hung up the phone, more softly this time, and we could hear his chair creak, probably from him leaning back into it and trying to catch his breath. We heard him open a drawer, and then the sounds of things being moved around. He was searching for something.
Then he picked up the phone and dialed another number. Only this time, the real Choi answered. It had to be a cell phone number. We should have considered that, but we hadn’t.
“Choi, it’s me,” Bales said.
“Yes, Michael, what is it?”
“I got your message. What the hell’s going on?”
“What message?”
“The one you left on my answering machine.”
“I didn’t leave you any message.”
There was a moment of stunned, bewildered silence. Mercer turned around and we both smiled. The whole thing might be going south on us, but there’s still something perversely satisfying when you hear the bad guys getting tangled up in your web.
Sounding frantic, Bales said, “God damn it, Choi, I had that asshole lawyer in here a few minutes ago telling me he stumbled onto the fact you and Jin May weren’t from Chicago. He said he couldn’t find your hospital birth records, so he turned it over to the CIA. Then I heard your voice on my machine telling me to run. I know your fucking voice, Choi. It was you.”
Choi calmly said, “Michael, stay cool. I didn’t call you. Somebody’s playing games with us.”
“Right.”
Then Choi said, “Remember plan B?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Use it.”
“What about Jin May?”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know. She was in the house when I left this morning. But she didn’t answer when I called. That bitch could be shopping at the PX for all I know. Or they could already have her.”
“That bitch,” he’d called her. It didn’t sound like Mr. and Mrs. Bales were what you might term a blissfully married couple.
Finally, sounding strained, Choi said, “Don’t worry about her. I’ll see if I can find her, but if she gets caught she knows what she’s doing. Just get moving.”
Then Bales said, “What about phase 3? Is it still-”
“Michael, get moving.”
“Okay, okay,” Bales said, then they both hung up. Three seconds later, we heard the sounds of Bales getting up from his desk, then pacing across his office, then his door opening and closing.
Michael Bales was now on the run, but not before he’d called his buddy Choi, which was something we’d hoped to avoid. We wanted Bales on his own, isolated, without resources, confused about what had happened to Choi. Frantic men make stupid mistakes and that’s how we wanted him. Now we had to worry about plan B, whatever the hell that was.
The only good thing about the call was that it almost certainly confirmed I was right. What we had sounded like a full-blown espionage ring.
Mercer’s driver put the car in gear and we raced straight back to the CIA office complex. We rushed inside to the communications console that had been hastily set up in the large room outside Mercer’s office.
Five communicators were huddled around the console, each with headsets on, each taking reports or coordinating actions among Mercer’s field teams. The CIA might not have been able to figure out when the Soviet Union was falling, but it looked like they ran a first-class surveillance operation.
I stood and watched. I was impressed. A tracking device connected to a GPS satellite had been planted on Bales’s car, and there was a large electronic map display on the wall. You could see this little red light moving steadily away from Yongsan, toward the international airport located about forty minutes’ drive from Seoul’s city center. There must’ve been three or four chase cars following along with him, because progress reports kept coming in to the radio operators at the console.
One of Mercer’s guys handed him a cup of coffee and he stood sipping from it as he proudly surveyed the operation. I went and found myself a cup, too, then found a chair, because my damaged and dented body was tired of standing up.
The basic idea was to let Bales get to the airport, buy a ticket and make his way to the departure gate, then arrest him. The original plan hadn’t envisioned Bales calling Choi and thus had been built on the premise that there would be no evidence of his involvement in the plot. But Bales was a soldier; if he bought a ticket and attempted to flee, he was trying to desert, and that would put a nail in his coffin. Even now, he could make up some excuse about why he called Choi, but he couldn’t do the same about trying to flee from Korea.
I thought it was a bit extravagant, and frankly didn’t see why they didn’t just arrest him, but Mercer insisted it was critical to have something tangible to hang on Bales. The first step in breaking a traitor is forcing him to implicate himself. Mercer was the spymaster; what the hell did I know? Besides, it wasn’t my business.
About thirty minutes passed. After a while, surveillance operations get tedious, because all you’re doing is following a car, and you can get lulled into complacency. I don’t know if that’s what caused it, but suddenly the radio operators started screaming into their mikes and Mercer looked like somebody had stuck a burning match into his shoe.
What we quickly pieced together was that Bales had driven into a long tunnel. The chase cars didn’t want to stay too close to him, because they didn’t want to make him suspicious. When his car emerged from the tunnel, they followed him as usual, which meant that every three minutes a chase car passed his auto to get a visual on the driver. The first pass after the car came out of the tunnel, it was no longer Bales driving. It was a Korean.
Mercer yanked a microphone away from a communicator and screamed at his chase teams to force the car to pull over. They did. The Korean driver immediately jumped out. He leaped directly in front of a passing car and was splattered all over the roadside.
CHAPTER 36
You know that old saw about how when things get bad, they almost always get worse? Without hesitating, Mercer picked up the phone and called Kim, his KCIA partner. He hastily explained what happened and told him to pick up Choi immediately. Kim calmly explained that everything was under control, that Choi and three of his fellow cops were at that moment having lunch inside a kimchi restaurant in the heart of Itaewon. A KCIA agent had followed them inside, and four more agents were planted outside, observing the front of the restaurant. Good, Mercer told him. Don’t waste another minute. Send them in to get him.
Kim called back ten minutes later. The team had gone into the restaurant to get Choi, only Choi and his boys were nowhere to be found. They did find the agent who followed them inside. His corpse was propped up on a toilet inside a stall in the men’s room. His throat had acquired a nasty new gash that ran from earlobe to earlobe. While the surveillance team had kept watch on the front of the restaurant, Choi and his goons had fled out the back.
Kim was terrifically embarrassed by this, but Mercer was equally abashed about losing Bales, so it came out a wash. This was somewhat of a blessing. It spared me from having to witness the normal nasty catcalling and finger-pointing that would certainly have occurred if only one side had committed a gaffe. When it comes to government agencies, there’s always a lofty comfort found in a joint failure. The fact was, Choi and his colleagues were obviously trained agents and both Mercer and Kim had underestimated them.
But Mercer and Kim were pros, too, and rather than rehash their mistakes, they immediately instigated a
