“You’re laughing at me.” Jill said.
“Not laughing,” Ernie said. “It’s the oldest con in the ville. But usually it’s worked on GIs who are only thinking with their dicks. With you, she had to rely on your sympathy for a woman set upon by the male power structure.”
“Screw you, Ernie.”
“Any time. But you were taken, Jill. Miss Kim Yong-ai used you to get at that mafia meeting slush fund.”
She thought about it for a while. “No,” she said finally. “Miss Kim didn’t use me. I’m glad she’s free.”
“Free to work in a teahouse?” I said.
“How did you know?”
“If she’s not stripping, and not selling herself, the only place in Wondang that would stay open until curfew would be a teahouse.”
“She’s a hostess to wealthy men,” Jill said, “but it’s better now.” Then she stared at me and Ernie, defiant. “So how do we get the proof to bust these assholes?”
They both looked at me.
I sipped my barley tea. Madame Chon had left us but the old maid was rustling around the cement-floored kitchen. I found her and asked for a paper and pen. In a few minutes, she’d cleared the eating table, wiped it down, and laid out a ballpoint pen and a fresh pad of writing paper. I drew a map.
Camp Casey has four gates. The main gate, the supply/motor pool gate, and the gate leading to Camp Hovey are all guarded by Division MPs. They are heavily armed with automatic pistols, M-16 rifles, and. 50-caliber machine guns. The chain link fence surrounding the massive compound is topped with rolled concertina wire and is patrolled twenty-four hours a day by guards hired by a security contractor approved by the Korean government. All the Korean security guards are well trained, motivated to keep one of the few jobs in country with good pay and benefits, and almost all of them are Korean War veterans since they receive priority in hiring. Each guard is armed with an M-1 rifle and knows how to use it.
The fourth and final gate is the gate leading to the Camp Casey firing ranges where GIs practice their marksmanship. These gates are chained at night but not guarded by MPs, merely patrolled by the subcontracted security guards.
None of it seemed too promising as far as surreptitious entry went and Jill Matthewson, who’d actually visited all of these gates, didn’t like the idea of trying to sneak our way in.
“Those security guards are sharp,” she said. “They’re not asleep at the switch. They’ve had North Korean commandoes try to slip in before, and they know they’ll be fired if someone breaks in on their watch.”
“I don’t like it either,” Ernie said. “Too risky.”
“So how do we get to Colonel Alcott’s safe?” I asked.
“There’s a way,” Jill said.
We listened. She took a deep breath, as if revealing something very important to us. “Tomorrow is March first.”
I knew what it was. Samil jol, it’s called. The March First Movement. A Korean national holiday to honor the student-led civil uprising against the Japanese colonial occupation that took place March 1, 1919.
“All the students are off,” Jill said. “The GIs aren’t.”
“So they’re coming up here,” Ernie guessed, “for another demonstration?”
Jill nodded. “This is going to be the big one.”
“How do you know?”
Then she told us about the Colonel Han she’d mentioned, the man who’d helped her and Kim Yong-ai escape from the Forest of the Seven Clouds when Bufford and Weatherwax had come to arrest her. Colonel Han Kuk-chei was the Commander of the 1611 Communications Brigade. What made him unusual for a ROK Army officer was not that he frequented kisaeng houses. That was routine. Rather, it was that he was involved with student demonstrators and he was opposed to the current regime. He belonged to an old yang-ban family, Confucian scholars and landholders, and he considered the current occupant of the Blue House-the Korean version of the White House-to be an usurper of an office that rightfully belonged to him and his kind. That’s why he was cooperating with radical students.
His goal, however, according to Jill, was more radical than even the most radical student. His goal was to reunify the Korean Peninsula-both North and South Korea-into one country. A country to be ruled under traditional Confucian principles.
I took Jill’s hand. It wasn’t soft. It was a hand used to work, used to holding the butt of an automatic pistol, but it was a woman’s hand nevertheless.
“We can bust these black-market honchos at Division,” I said. “It won’t be easy but we can do it. But if you’re caught in the middle of some political game with the Koreans, there’s no telling what could go wrong. You could be hurt.”
“Thank you,” she said. “But I promised him.”
“’Him?’”
“Colonel Han.”
“You promised him what?”
“I promised that I’d help, at the critical moment. The plan is beautiful really. And when you listen to him talk about why it’s necessary, you’ll be as convinced as I am.”
“We’re Americans, Jill. This is Korea. It’s their country.”
“But we’re involved,” she answered. “We’re the reason why their country is divided.”
Ernie rolled his eyes. I felt the same way. That’s all we needed. A political radical along with all our other problems. I still didn’t know what all this had to do with us gaining access to Camp Casey and the black-market records held in Colonel Alcott’s safe.
The front buzzer rang. We sprang to our feet. Madame Chon appeared and whispered something to the elderly maid. She nodded and they both walked to the front of the house. The maid returned with our shoes and Madame Chon walked across the courtyard to the front gate.
“Nugu seiyo?” she asked. Who is it?
“Sohn Tamjong,” a man’s voice said. Agent Sohn. Then he asked if he might speak to her, using honorific verb endings and sounding very polite. I remembered the voice. I grabbed my shoes from the maid and asked her where to find the back exit. She led the way.
Ernie whispered, “What’s up?”
“That voice,” I told him. “I’ve heard it before. Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Ernie and I headed for the rear of the house. Jill grabbed her bag and followed. We reached the back door and went outside, past the byonso reeking of bleach, to a brick wall with a short metal door in it.
“Who was it?” Ernie asked.
“At the KNP station, here in Tongduchon, when we were interrogated, he sat in back of me. Observing. Only speaking at the end.”
“KCIA,” Ernie said. The Korean Central Intelligence Agency. The agency responsible for quelling internal political dissent.
“What makes you say that?”
“Who the hell else would it be?”
He was right. Only the KCIA had the power to butt in on KNP operations.
A padlocked, rusty iron rod barred the small back gate. The maid reached into the pocket of her skirt, pulled out a key, and popped open the padlock. Then she backed up and pointed. Ernie stepped forward, grabbed the rusty rod and, twisting it, managed to pull it free. With a squeak, the little door swung open. Ernie pulled his. 45 and peeked through.
Immediately, he ducked back inside. I stepped past him and looked outside. A narrow passageway between brick walls, barely wide enough for a man to pass through, ran off in both directions. To the right was a T-shaped intersection, but to the left stood two bored-looking Korean men wearing coats and ties. Their attention was on the front of the house.
“KCIA,” Ernie whispered.
I asked the maid if there was another way out. Some sort of subterranean drainage ditch or a passage over the rooftops, although I could see that the neighbor’s roof was too far for us to reach.
