'Sir, it's Ri. I'd like to send these prints over to Op-Center in Washington.'
Yung-Hoon exhaled hard through his nose. 'Have you nothing?'
'So far, no. But these may not be North Koreans or known criminals. They could be from another country.'
The second phone rang; his assistant Ryu's line. 'Very well,' the Director said. 'Send them over.' He punched off the first phone and poked on the second. 'Yes?'
'Sir, General Sam's headquarters just phoned with news: a U.S. fighter just attacked the air base at Sariwon.'
'One fighter?'
'Yes, sir. We believe a Nighthawk hit the MiG that attacked their Mirage.'
Finally, thought Yung-Hoon, something to smile about. 'Excellent. What's the latest on Kim Hwan?'
'There is no latest, sir. He's still in surgery.'
'I see. Is the coffee ready yet?'
'Brewing, sir.'
'Why is everything so slow around here, Ryu?'
'Because we're understaffed, sir?'
'Rubbish. One man successfully attacked Sariwon. We're complacent. This whole thing happened because we're fat and lack initiative. Perhaps we need some changes—'
'I'll pour whatever coffee is made, sir.'
'You're catching on, Ryu.'
The Director jabbed off the phone. He wanted his coffee, but he was right about what he'd said to Ryu. The organization had lost its edge, and the best of them was on his back in God only knew what condition. Yung-Hoon had been angry when he learned what Hwan had done, hauling in the spy and asking for her help. It just wasn't done that way. But maybe that's why it needed to be done.
Show compassion and trust where you usually show anger and doubt. Shake people up, keep them off balance.
He'd been raised by the old school, and Hwan was the new. If his Deputy Director survived, maybe it was time for a change.
Or maybe he was just balmy with exhaustion. He'd see how things looked after coffee. In the meantime, he lifted his long right hand and gave a small salute to the Americans for having done their part to keep the North off balance.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
The laboratory at Op-Center was extremely small, only nine hundred square feet, but Dr. Cindy Merritt and her assistant Ralph didn't need much more room than that. The data and files were all computerized, and the various tools of the trade were tucked into cabinets and under tables, hooked into the computers for control and observation.
The fingerprints from the KCIA computer came to Merritt's computer over a secure modem; the instant it arrived, the loops and whorls were already being scanned and matched against similar patterns in files that had come from the CIA, Mossad, MI5, and other intelligence sources, along with files from Interpol, Scotland Yard, other police sources, and military intelligence groups.
Unlike the KCIA software that superimposed the entire fingerprint over prints in its file— processing twenty every second— the Op-Center software Matt Stoll had developed with Cindy divided each print into twenty-four equal parts and literally threw them to the wind: if any part of the pattern showed up in another print, the entire prints were compared. This technique allowed them to examine 480 prints a second for every machine being used.
Bob Herbert and Darrell McCaskey had arrived when the print did, and asked Cindy if she could put several computers on the job: the unflappable chemist was able to give them three, and told them to stick around— it wouldn't take long.
She wasn't wrong. The computer had found the print in three minutes six seconds: Ralph brought up the file.
'Private Jang Tae-un,' he read. 'Soldier for four years, assigned to Major Kim Lee's explosives unit—'
'There you go,' said Herbert, an edge of triumph.
' — and is a specialist in hand-to-hand combat.'
'As long as the other guy didn't have a gun,' Herbert muttered.
McCaskey asked Ralph for a printout of the data, then said to the chemist, 'You're a miracle worker, Cindy.'
'Tell that to Paul,' said the attractive brunette. 'We could really use a part-time mathematician to help write software to improve the algorithms we use to model biomolecules.'
'I'll be sure to tell him.' McCaskey winked as he took the paper from Ralph. 'In exactly those words.'
'Do,' she said. 'His son will explain it to him.'
Hood was more concerned with Major Lee than with Cindy's request. With Liz Gordon and Bob Herbert at his side, both looking at the computer monitor, he reviewed the Major's ROK file that General Sam had sent electronically from Seoul.
The Director was finding it difficult to concentrate. More than at any time since the crisis began, he felt enormous pressure to find out who was behind the bombing: not only had the rising tension taken on a life of its own, but he felt that his diplomatic approach had caused the President to push Op-Center aside. Steve Burkow had phoned and informed him about the attack on the airstrip in North Korea just two minutes before it happened. The head of the Korean Task Force hadn't even been a part of the strategy team; the President wanted a fight, and was doing everything he could to provoke one. Which would have been fine if a fight was warranted.
If he was wrong about North Korea's innocence, he'd have more to worry about than losing the President's confidence. He would start to wonder if he'd been in politics so long that he'd actually become the fence straddler he'd once pretended to be. He forced himself to concentrate on what was on the monitor.
Lee was a twenty-year veteran with a justifiable dislike for the North. His father, General Kwon Lee, had been a field general who was killed at Inchon during the war. The Major's mother, Mei, was captured and hanged for spying on troop trains coming and going at the station in Pyongyang. He was raised in an orphanage in Seoul and joined the army when he was eighteen, and served under now— Colonel Lee Sun, who had been a separatist in high school, handing out leaflets and once having been arrested. Though Lee belonged to none of the underground movements like the Fraternity of the Division and Children of the Dead— the sons and daughters of soldiers who had died during the war— Lee was in charge of an elite counterintelligence group, was unmarried, and did a good deal of reconnoitering in the North to help calibrate U.S. spy satellites, measuring objects on the ground to give the NRO a frame of reference.
'What's it look like to you. Liz?' Hood asked.
'Nothing's ever open and shut in my end of the business, but this looks as close to it as vou're going to get —'
Bugs beeped.
'What is it?'
'Urgent call on the secure line from Director Yung-Hoon at the KCIA.'
'Thanks.' Hood hit the lighted button. 'This is Paul Hood.'
'Director Hood,' said Yung-Hoon. 'I've just received a most interesting radio message from the North Korean spy whom Kim Hwan was with tonight. She says he asked her to radio the North and find out about a theft of boots and explosives from anywhere in the DPRK.'
Herbert snapped his fingers and caught Hood's eye. 'That was the broadcast Rachel called me about in your office,' Herbert whispered.
