They passed a Hyundai sedan whose side had been caved in from an accident.
“Hey, back up,” Ferg told Guns.
“What?”
“I want to grab a picture of that banged-up car. Turn around.”
Guns checked his mirror, then jammed the brakes and made a U-turn.
“What are we doing now?” he asked after Ferguson came back with two digital photos of the car.
“Looking for a police station. We just had an accident.”
Ferguson reasoned that he was more likely to find a sympathetic policeman in a small town, and so he and Guns got off Route 19, wandering around the local roads. They finally found a likely looking place just outside of Baekbong, where buildings with curved-tile roofs clustered behind a row of two-story stores on the narrow main drag. After brushing up on his Korean with the help of his handheld translator and a phrase book, Ferguson left Guns up the block and went inside.
“I want to report an accident,” he said in Korean, addressing the squat woman behind the desk at the police station. “
It took Ferguson a second to untangle the phrase, even though he was prepared for it.
“No, no one’s hurt,” he told her in English, “but my car was damaged.”
Ferguson pulled out the camera with the picture of the damaged car. “It was a little road near Songnisan National Park, about a mile from the highway.”
By now three other officers had appeared. One spoke excellent English and began acting as translator.
“I need to fill out this insurance paper,” Ferguson told him, waving a form from the rental agency. “I need to find the truck.”
“What was the registration?”
“I’m not sure, but I know the kind of truck:
“Namhan Hoesa?”
“Maybe I’m not saying it right. The words mean ‘South Korean National Truck Company.’”
The officer gave him a strange look, wondering how he would know what the words meant if he could not pronounce them properly
“I have never heard of the truck,” said the policeman. “Are you sure it was not a Hyundai?”
“No, I’m positive. That’s why I figured you could help me track it down. Probably it would have damage on it. Couldn’t we search on the computer?” Ferguson stepped around the desk, pointing to the workstation. “For trucks? It’s an odd model—”
Going behind the desk meant passing over the invisible line separating police from civilians and was a major faux pas. The Koreans reacted quickly and fervently, shouting at Ferguson that he must get behind the desk. Ferguson raised his hands and backed away, trying to cajole them into giving him the information, but it didn’t work, and in the end he retreated, probably fortunate that he wasn’t arrested as a public nuisance.
“Didn’t work?” asked Guns when he got back to the car.
“Fell flat on my face.” Ferguson smiled. Then he reached into his pocket for his synthetic thyroid hormones, which he was due to take.
“Pep pills?”
“Oh yeah.” Ferguson dumped two into his palm, then swallowed. They tasted bitter without water.
“Why do you have to take that stuff, Ferg?”
“I never told you, Guns?”
The marine shook his head.
“I don’t have a thyroid,” Ferguson told him.
“Wow. How’d that happen?”
“Birth defect. Let me see if Corrigan has anything new.”
Corrigan — or rather the analysts working for him back at The Cube — had managed to come up with a list of the South Korean National Truck Company vehicles registered in South Chungchong Province. As rare as the trucks supposedly were, there were nearly three hundred.
“We’re working on the rest of the country, but this is a start,” said Corrigan.
“I thought you said this was a rare truck?”
“It is. You know how many trucks there are in Korea?”
“We have to narrow it down.”
“There’s about fifty that look like they might have something to do with hospitals or different companies, that sort of thing,” Corrigan added. “They deal with radioactive waste. Why don’t you start with them?”
For once, Corrigan had a good idea. Ferguson hooked the sat phone to the team’s laptop and downloaded the information from an encrypted website. Then they headed to the nearest hospital.
Parked near a small laundry building on the hospital grounds was a trio of trucks. One was a National.
“Wait for me a second,” said Ferguson. He got out of the car and walked over, took a picture of the license plate, and then used a handheld gamma detector to scan for radiation. The needle didn’t move off the baseline.
The gamma meter was designed specifically to find trace material. As powerful as it was, it couldn’t definitively tell whether the truck had been used to transport material, since properly shielded plutonium could have been transported without leaving any trace material behind.
Ferguson, though, theorized that the shipment hadn’t been well shielded at all, which would explain why all of the tags had turned positive the first time Thera visited the site. He also thought it possible that the plutonium had been moved after that first day, one possible explanation for the weaker hit on day two. And what better place to hide millions of dollars worth of plutonium than in a laundry truck?
None, but not in this truck. Ferguson opened the rear door and climbed into a compartment filled with stacks of linens bundled between brown paper. The needle still didn’t move.
“Anything?” Guns asked when he got to the car.
“Nada.”
“You think this is worth the effort, Ferg?” asked Guns. “I mean, all that’s probably going on is that these guys are illegally dumping waste, you know?”
“Yeah.” Ferg reached down for the bottled water. “Here’s the thing, Guns. We want to get into the site, right?”
“Yeah.”
“We can parachute in, or we can go over the fence. Either way is doable, right? Because me and Rankin just did it, and anything me and Rankin can do, you and I can do better, right?”
“I don’t know about better, Ferg.”
“But let’s say there’s something in there that’s pretty heavy, and we want to take it out—”
“Oh.”
Ferguson made his hand into a gun and fired at his companion.
“How’d you get to be so smart, Ferg?” asked Guns as they left the parking lot.
Ferguson laughed. “I’m not that smart.”
“You are, Fergie.”
“My dad taught me,” said Ferguson, suddenly serious. “He was the smartest guy I know.”
“He’s a spook?”
“Was. He died about a year and a half ago.”
“Oh.” Ferguson smiled, realizing the unintended double entendre. “Yeah, he was definitely a spook. A good one. The best. So good he got screwed.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Long story, Guns.” Ferguson unfolded the map to find the next truck. “Basically he trusted somebody he shouldn’t have.”
“Double agent?”
