I walked over and stood beside her at the window. She turned and looked at me.
I pointed my finger out the window. I yelled, “Quick! Get on the phone and tell your folks to move in on that vehicle right there.”
She started to say something, and I grinned. She looked out in the parking lot. Suddenly a gray van turned on its lights, backed out of its space, and literally tore out of the parking lot. You could almost hear the rubber burning.
“Jesus!” I yelled.
Carol ran to the phone. She punched in some numbers and waited impatiently for somebody to answer. She yelled, “This is Carol Kim. There’s a North Korean spy van headed from the Dragon Hill to the main gate. It’s gray and enclosed. Get somebody to stop it.”
When she hung up, she shot me a furious look. I couldn’t blame her; after all, I’d just ruined a perfectly good chance to catch some North Koreans. In my defense, I really didn’t believe her until I saw this with my own eyes.
I was getting ready to make my excuse when I came to my senses. There was something else we’d better do. And we’d better do it damned fast, too, or else.
CHAPTER 41
Here’s how the rest of the morning went. A number of Agency and military police cars raced around the base for hours trying to locate and collect the suspects Carol and I had immediately identified to Mercer.
Three suspects, it quickly turned out, had been reassigned out of Korea, so they weren’t in imminent danger, although Mercer still took the precaution of sending messages to their new commands to have them taken into protective custody until everything got sorted out. He’d made enough mistakes. He wasn’t taking chances.
A fourth suspect was on leave somewhere in Korea. Since we couldn’t find him, there was no particular reason to expect the North Koreans could, either. An all-points bulletin was sent through American and Korean channels to apprehend him on sight.
Suspects five through eight were picked up without incident, including Piranha Lips, who was literally dragged out of his office with two members of his legal staff watching. What I would’ve given to observe that glorious moment.
The ninth suspect, the protocol officer, was the unlucky one. He was found alone at his kitchen table with a big wound in his head dribbling cranial fluid all over his breakfast.
Nobody had a clue how it happened. Nobody saw anybody enter his quarters. Nobody heard the sound of a shot. Probably the gun was silenced. Probably the assassin was a pro. The captain’s skin was still warm and the blood was still moist, so the MPs who broke into his quarters guessed he’d been executed no more than an hour to thirty minutes before they arrived.
It was ten o’clock in the morning and I was having all this pointedly explained to me by Buzz Mercer himself. I would describe his demeanor as partly pleased, since he was arresting a bunch of suspected traitors, and thus was recouping some of the prior day’s humiliations. The other, much larger part of him, was annoyed, since I’d cued the North Koreans that we were on to them, making an already chaotic situation even more snarled.
The two other guys who were having this explained to them were General Spears and Brandewaite, who were seated just to my left. And if Buzz Mercer looked agitated, Spears seemed deathly worried, while Brandewaite looked ready to leap off a cliff. I wished he would.
“Jesus Christ, what a disaster,” he kept mumbling over and over.
Mercer was saying, “Of course, at this stage we don’t know how bad it is. Let me remind you, the eight men we have in custody, or are still trying to apprehend, are only suspects. We’re bringing them in for their own protection. And for questioning, of course.”
Brandewaite sniffed once or twice. “And when will we know more?”
“Can’t really say,” Mercer told him.
He said it in a breezy, deflective manner that gave me the impression there was no love lost between the two men. No surprise there, I thought. Brandewaite was the quintessential immaculately coifed, oily, narcissistic man of the nineties. Mercer was more of a crew-cutted, austere, meat-and-potatoes throwback to the fifties. Spies and diplomats; if you threw them both in a blender, you’d get something poisonous.
For my part, I was trying to blend into the woodwork, because the room was filled with powerful men who had no particular reason to think highly of me right at that moment.
Spears’s eyes kept glancing over from beneath those eaglelike, fierce brows. I wondered what he was thinking. On the other hand, maybe I didn’t want to know.
Mercer went on. “Anyway, right now we’re busy collecting legal counsels for all of them.”
“Did they all ask for lawyers?” Spears asked.
“Nope. We automatically provide it. We don’t want any procedural shit to come back and bite us in the ass down the road.”
Brandewaite said, “How stupid. You’ll slow the whole thing down.” He looked spitefully at me. “Once the lawyers get there they’ll all clam up.”
Mercer impatiently said, “Look, you stick to what you know, and I’ll stick to what I know.”
Brandewaite pointed a manicured finger in his face. “Right now, Mercer, you’ve got a bunch of American military officers in custody and one dead body. Don’t lecture me. Get results and get them fast.”
They went back and forth like that for a while and I found myself wondering about the Navy captain who got shot in the head. Why him? I mean, whoever was eavesdropping out in that parking lot overheard Carol and me mention the name of every one of the suspects. Probably some weren’t going to pan out. There’d be perfectly good explanations why their names weren’t in Bales’s file, or why Choi dropped the charges. But I was pretty sure there’d be no good explanations for at least three or four others. They were simply caught in Choi’s web.
So why only the Navy captain? Carol had notified Mercer of our concerns at 5:20, and the MPs had burst into the captain’s quarters at 6:36, which meant he could have been murdered as early as 6:00. In other words, as soon as the North Koreans learned what we’d figured out, they dispatched an assassin to bump him off. Mack Janson wasn’t arrested till 8:30. Another suspect wasn’t picked up till 9:00.
Did that mean I was wrong? That the others weren’t guilty? That the captain was the only fish who ended up in Choi’s net? Or were the others just too hard for the North Koreans to get to? Or was there something more here?
As much as I didn’t want to emerge from the woodwork, I said, “Hey, Mr. Mercer, why do you think they knocked off this Navy captain?”
Mercer and Brandewaite were into each other’s faces, so it took him a second to tear his attention away. “What?”
“That Navy captain?”
“Elmore. Harold Elmore.”
“Yeah, right… Harold Elmore. Why do you think they popped him? I mean, if I’ve got this figured right, they had two or three hours to kill some more, right? Why’d they rush right over and clip Elmore? Why just him?”
Mercer’s lips curled inward. “Damned if I know. Of all the suspects on the list, Elmore is in unquestionably the least sensitive position.”
I said, “You knew him, right, General?”
Spears said, “Damned right I knew him. Harry was my protocol officer. I saw him every day. He briefed me every morning. We get lots of important visitors and Harry handled all of them. Before this morning I would’ve found this impossible to believe.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because Harry was a damned good man. A Naval Academy grad, twenty-five years of good service, hardworking, honest, reliable.”
I gave him a respectful shrug. “Right, sir. And one night he went to a bar and had one drink too many. The next thing he knew he was driving home and there was a hard bump on his fender and a young mother was cartwheeling over the top of his car. Then he found himself in a foreign police station, being told he was gonna be
