“Mr. Sonjae?”
“Please have a seat, Ms. Alston.”
“Corrine, please.”
He turned from the window and straightened in the seat. “You’re the president’s counsel?”
“Yes, I am.”
“You don’t have bodyguards?”
The remark surprised her. “I don’t need Secret Service protection.”
“I see.”
He picked up his coffee cup. He looked considerably older than his Bureau records indicated. His face was pockmarked and worn, his hair thin and gray. He was dressed in a light windbreaker, despite the night’s chill. A short, compact man, his shoulders sloped, giving Corrine the impression of someone who had been worn down by his years in government service.
“Bob Ferguson asked me to contact you,” Corrine told him.
“Ferg works for you?”
“In a way. He’s in Korea.”
“Korea?” Sonjae put down his coffee cup. “South Korea?”
“Yes. He needs… He needs a translator he can trust. And he asked for you. He needs someone right away. Very much right away. The sooner the better.”
Sonjae leaned back in the seat. Corrine guessed that he was trying to think of a way to say no politely.
“His father saved my life,” said the ex-FBI agent finally. “What does he need me to do?”
16
Thera rode back to the dormitory with two engineers who’d finished for the day and needed to record their findings. The two men headed off to have lunch; Thera jogged to her room to write up the report.
She took the cigarette pack out of her pocket and examined it while she waited for the laptop to boot up. She assumed the room was bugged, and thought it possible that there was some sort of camera monitoring what she did as well, even though she hadn’t been able to spot one. So she tried to be as nonchalant as possible.
The package was wrapped in cellophane, unopened. She slit it open with her fingernail, pulling the top off and crumpling the wrapper in her hand. She slit the top open and folded back the paper, looking for a message.
There was nothing on the flap, no paper between the cigarettes, no writing on the interior, at least not that she could see.
Was yesterday’s message an illusion?
Thera put the pack down and went to work.
It was only as she started to type Norkelus’s terse response to the committee that Thera remembered what Tak Ch’o had said: save some cigarettes.
Maybe the message was
Of course.
Thera out took the pack and tapped a cigarette free, playing with it as if to relieve tension or boredom. The cigarette quickly began to fray. She moved her hands back and forth, agitated, nervous. Absentmindedly she crushed the side of the cigarette and dropped it on the desk. Then, seeming to realize what she had done, she picked it up and flipped it toward the waste basket.
It missed.
She pulled the paper apart as she dropped it into the can. Nothing.
Back at her desk, Thera started working on Norkelus’s report, which said that the team had found nothing but was still “in preliminary stages.” She transcribed everything he said; his accent made it difficult to understand some of the sentences, and she had to stop and rewind, stop and rewind, and even then ended up guessing at spots.
If there was a message inside one of the cigarettes, it would look slightly different than the others, wouldn’t it?
Thera typed a few more words, then got up, and with exaggerated movements gathered her things so she could go outside for a smoke. Here she was definitely being observed, so she made a good show of things: opening the package from the bottom, taking out one cigarette, examining it, lighting it. A gust of wind came up; she scooped her hand over the end of the cigarette to shelter it, and dropped the pack. Most of the cigarettes scattered.
She dropped to her knees, picking the cigarettes one by one.
The third was slightly fatter than the others. She slid it behind her ear and scooped the rest into the box.
Inside, she palmed it, rolled the tobacco out in her pocket, and finally unfolded the wrapper, revealing a message so tiny she had to squint to make out the letters.
Nov 8 124.30.39.52 midnight
Thera’s first thought was that the numbers referred to an Internet site where a message would appeal tomorrow night. But as she went back to work on the report, she realized the numbers were actually longitude and latitude and referred to a spot roughly fifty miles south of the waste plant, whose own location she’d had to note for the records.
The team was leaving for Japan on the evening of November 8; they’d probably land by midnight.
Was it some sort of trap or trick?
Thera couldn’t decide.
Best let The Cube figure that out.
The problem was how exactly to tell them. She could imbed a message in the report she was typing for Norkelus easily enough. But none of the prearranged message sequences came close to covering this situation.
Working Ch’o’s name into the message was easy. Norkelus said they had been greeted warmly; Thera added a line quoting his brief speech the day they arrived.
She scanned down what she had, deleting some of Norkelus’s extraneous comments. He’d included a to-do list that was basically the inspection team’s agenda, ending with the flight at ten p.m. Nov. 8.
Thera added a line: Nov. 8 pckp 0000XXXX.
It looked as if it were something she’d stuck in, intending to finish or clear up later. She scrolled back, adding XXX’s and zeroes to some of the earlier parts.
Norkelus had given some initial readings taken by air monitors. She could stick the numbers in there, claiming she’d misheard or mistyped something, but how would anyone know to look for them?
What if she put in a new line, mangled from Norkelus’s notes?
She typed in the numbers, removing the periods. It looked more like an error than anything else.
Obvious enough?
Thera hit her spellchecker, which ran through the document quickly. She accidentally “corrected” one of the readings, replacing an abbreviation with the word
The coordinates were just there, on their own line. It would take ESP to realize they were part of the message.
The whole message would take ESP to interpret.
Maybe she shouldn’t send it at all. Maybe it was a trap.
A nuclear scientist who wanted to defect? Quite a prize.
Thera hesitated, her mouse over the Send button.
She had to make the coordinates obvious; otherwise there was no point to this at all. No point.
