Mortal Allies (51 page)

“But you can get ’em?”

“I suppose. There are a lot of them, though. Box after box filled with them. We could spend all night.”

“I got nothing better to do.”

“I guess I don’t, either,” she sighed, not the least bit happy about that.

“Good,” I said, noisily licking some ketchup off my fingers. “Let’s get moving.”

Then, just as I was standing up, my legs suddenly buckled. If I hadn’t grabbed the corner of the table I would’ve done a free fall onto the floor. Carol rushed around the table and took hold of my shoulders, helping me straighten up.

“Are you all right?”

I shook my head a few times. “I don’t know. Must be the beatings. My body . . . uh, it’s not working right.”

“We don’t have to do this tonight. We can reschedule.”

“No, it has to be tonight. Please.”

I bravely tried taking another step and my legs buckled again.

So she slipped her arm around my waist, and I put an arm around her shoulder and let her lead me out. After one or two steps, I straightened. Every eye in the room was on us. A hundred disgruntled young faces looked like they’d kill their own mothers to be me.

I’m so slick, sometimes I’m ashamed of myself. But like I said, I’ll take it any way I can get it.

It took thirty minutes to get to the KCIA. It was a nondescript, blocklike gray building located on a busy street. You’d probably pass right by it, except it was the only building I ever saw that had no windows on the first three floors. They started on the fourth floor, and even those were small, pinched, scrawny-looking things.

Carol showed a guard her Agency ID, and she was allowed to enter a gated area and park. Then we left the car and went to the front entrance, where two fairly competent-looking guards took her CIA identification card, called a number, chattered in Korean for a few seconds, then gave us both plastic laminated passes with clips on the back.

Carol seemed to know where she was going, because she led me down a series of halls and up two flights of stairs and into a side office. There were about six men in dark silk suits lounging around drinking tea, smoking cigarettes, quietly bullshitting. They seemed to recognize Carol.

She jabbered in Korean for a few minutes, occasionally putting a finger to her lips in a fretful motion, like a sign of concern. Her manner seemed more reserved, almost subservient, in the presence of Korean men.

One of the men finally stood up and led us through two sets of doors and into another room filled with cigarette smoke. A Korean gentleman was hunched over a table, suit jacket on the back of his chair, tie loosened, sleeves rolled up. It was Mr. Kim, Mercer’s KCIA counterpart.

He got up. Carol bowed and made no effort to shake hands. She was reverting to Korean protocols. Then Kim looked at me and stuck out his hand. “Major Drummond, it’s good to see you again.”

“My pleasure,” I said. “How’s it going?”

He grimaced painfully. “It’s not been the best of days.”

I couldn’t resist. “Yeah, that was some screwup this afternoon, wasn’t it?”

“That bastard murdered one of my men. He cut his throat like a pig’s.”

I gathered Mr. Kim was no longer dubious about my overheated imagination.

“So how’s your prisoner?” I asked.

“She’s going to be tough.”

“Yeah?”

“She’s had good training. She hasn’t said a word.”

I wasn’t going to tell him, but when I was in the outfit, I’d had some training in interrogation myself. Only mine was always on the receiving end, because the outfit did most of its work inside the bad guys’ territory and was therefore justifiably concerned about our ability to withstand torture and interrogation. Some sadist figured that practice makes perfect, and they gave us lots of it. I therefore consider myself something of an expert in interrogation methods — strictly from the victim’s end of things, of course.

I said, “What are you doing to her?”

“Actually, we don’t use physical techniques. Everybody believes we do, and frankly we encourage the perception.” He lifted his shoulders a little. “It heightens the anxiety of our subjects. The truth is, we prefer sleep deprivation.”

I grinned. Sleep deprivation doesn’t get quick results like yanking out a few fingernails might, but it’s much more effective, because once a prisoner breaks, they break all the way. I know. In training, I’d had it tried on me once. I ended up babbling like a baby.

“Can I see her?”

He shrugged. “If you’d like. Just don’t talk to her.”

We entered a room off to the side. The walls and floors were thickly padded in some solid white material. The padding wasn’t for bouncing bodies off of, but was super-thick sound insulation. The lights in the ceiling were huge and very high-powered. The light was pure white and spectacularly bright, so bright it hurt your eyes and forced you to blink a lot, although even then it penetrated through your lids.

A woman was seated in a chair with her back turned to us. There were white straps completely immobilizing her, so she couldn’t move a limb or even her head. There was some kind of eye halter strapped around her head that forced her eyelids to stay open, which after a while gets pretty painful because the eyeballs get dry and sore. Even the chair was painted white. In fact, the only color in the room was the flesh tone of her skin. She was entirely naked. She’d been stripped and left nude to add to her humiliation and sense of vulnerability. The monochromatic whiteness was done to amplify the effects of her sleep deprivation. To multiply her humiliation, they would keep feeding her liquids and foods, so she peed and shat all over herself.

By the second or third day, she would be thoroughly exhausted, degraded, bored out of her wits, physically miserable, and, hopefully, ready to tell all. Even a Zen Buddhist who was nuts for meditation couldn’t withstand more than two or three days of this.

I walked to her front and studied her. She didn’t say a word. She just gave me a sharp, haughty look, but her expression did nothing to hide one simple, irreducible fact. The woman was utterly, breathtakingly beautiful. She had classically high cheekbones, large, alluring eyes, full, sensuous lips, and an exquisitely shaped face. Her hair was so thick and shimmery it almost looked artificial. Her body was an athlete’s fantasy, broad-shouldered, hard, sinewy muscles, and a washboard stomach. If there was an ounce of body fat on her, I couldn’t see where she hid it.

I felt uncomfortably like a voyeur, but my interest in studying Bales’s mate was purely professional. I had a theory bouncing around inside my head, and she was a vital piece in that puzzle.

I stared at her face, and she glared back defiantly. Faces can betray a lot about people. You can hide a lot of things about yourself, but a lifetime of expressions and attitudes eventually work themselves into a mask. Her mask spoke of supreme self-confidence, even arrogance. She had the face of someone who was used to commanding people. Well, sure, you might say, because beautiful women are often spoiled women, but this woman’s haughtiness wasn’t from being mollycoddled or indulged. She was an unusually disciplined, tough specimen, and her body didn’t get that way from lying around the house munching on bonbons and ordering the servants around.

I finally nodded at Mr. Kim that I’d seen enough, and we quietly slipped out.

Once we were back in the waiting room, Kim lit up another cigarette and asked, “What do you think?”

“I think you’re right. She’s going to be a bitch to break. She’s superbly conditioned, so the sleep deprivation will take much longer than normal. Plus she’s got an ego like a rock, so the humiliation’s going to roll off her back.”

He looked painfully unhappy to hear that, although I suppose I was only voicing what he and his technicians had already surmised.

I said, “Have you checked her teeth?”

“Of course. We found a cyanide pellet in the number three molar in the back.”

“No, I mean the quality of the dental work.”

“Yes, that too. Steel fillings, shoddy, coarse work.”

He seemed impressed that I would know to ask that. The one thing Communist spymasters nearly always overlook when they’re building camouflage for their spies is how truly lousy the dental work is in their own societies. If this woman had been born and bred in Chicago, she’d have silver or porcelain fillings and the work would reflect the level of craftsmanship demanded by a vain society that likes even repaired teeth to look like jewelry.

I leaned against the wall. “Why do you think North Korea would send a female agent that looks like her down here to work with Bales and Choi? And why would they position her in Bales’s house?”

“That’s what we’re hoping she’ll tell us.”

I glanced over at Carol, who was seated at the table playing the demure Korean girl who knew her place in this macho society.

“Did you hear her speak?” I asked her.

“I stood over her shoulder and listened to her most of the luncheon.”

“What’s her English like?”

“Excellent. Native quality, in fact. So were her manners. She used the fork and knife, even though the other American wives were using chopsticks. I thought that was interesting.”

I looked at Mr. Kim. “Maybe she’s one of those kids who were raised in that American village you mentioned?”

“Maybe.”

I turned back to Carol. “Any other thoughts?”

“I think it’s strange that she didn’t arrive here until five years ago.”

“Yeah, a little after Bales got assigned here.”

Kim quickly suggested, “A honeypot?”

“The timing would fit, I guess,” I admitted.

She certainly had the exquisite looks and body to be a honeypot, which to those uninitiated in the wormy arts of espionage is a woman who is used to lure a target into an affair, like bait, to entangle the target in an embarrassing predicament that can be exploited for blackmail.

Then I said, “But Bales wasn’t married back then, was he? And he wasn’t in a sensitive position with a high security clearance and access to valuable information?”

That seemed to obviate the way most honeypot ploys work. If the target is married and engaging in an affair, that makes him vulnerable. If the target has an important job and knows lots of important secrets, at some point the bad guys deliberately let him know the girl he’s sleeping with is a foreign agent, and that can also make him vulnerable to blackmail. Bales fell into neither category. If the bad guys told his bosses he was sleeping with a North Korean spy, his bosses would simply shrug and say, “Yeah, what’s she look like? Is she a great lay?”

I said, “You know, the other intriguing thing was the way Bales referred to her when he called Choi this afternoon. He called her a bitch. And when Choi told him to forget about her and run, he didn’t argue or sound the least bit upset. Doesn’t sound like much of a marriage.”

The other two were nodding, because the prisoner tied to that white chair was gaining significance. And an added layer of mystery.

But I had an advantage over them. I’d been thinking about Michael Bales for many days. And I had met him under several different sets of circumstances, so I had a greater window into his dark nature than they did.

I said, “How do you think Choi got Bales on his side in the first place?” I looked over at Carol. “Did your people have the FBI run a check on him?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

She looked at a wall and began reciting the facts. She had the lawyer’s gift of great recall, and it came pouring out crisp and factual.

“Bales was born in Warrenton, Nebraska, where his father owns a dairy farm. He joined the Army in 1987 when he was eighteen, right after graduating from high school. He enlisted in the MPs, did well, and made warrant. Never previously married, no money problems surfaced, no bad habits. He’s been background-checked for his secret clearance and there were no signs of trouble. The checkers talked to some of his old teachers and schoolmates, and one former girlfriend. Everybody said he was a great guy, honest, reliable, an all-American boy. No previous arrests, no scandals.”

I said, “So here’s a guy who gets to Korea five years ago with an impeccable record and a great future ahead, then suddenly he decides to start working for North Korea. Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

Kim said, “Money. It’s easy to hide it. When it comes to Americans, always follow the money.”

You might think he’d watched too many American movies and was starting to sound like a grade-B actor. Or you might say to yourself that he was a foreigner, so what the hell did he know. But you have to remember that Kim’s agency had recruited its share of American traitors — both discovered and undiscovered — so he did have a certain claim to expertise.

I looked at my watch; it was after 11:00 P.M. I nodded at Carol and she got the message, so she stood up and began getting ready to leave.

I turned to Kim. “Thanks. If we come up with anything we’ll call.”

He said, “I hope you do,” then sat back down.

I had the impression his punishment for letting Choi murder one of his men and slip away was to sit here and wait until the gorgeous, tough-looking lady in the other room finally started babbling. In other words, he was also sentenced to sleep deprivation.

Now that I’d looked at her, and at him, my money was on her.

T
here were probably many ways to approach this, but I persuaded Carol to have some minions deliver the boxes filled with Bales’s and Choi’s case files to my hotel room in the Dragon Hill Lodge. Somehow I didn’t think it was my charm that persuaded her. It would be midnight by the time we got back to base, and she still hadn’t eaten, and Korean restaurants close early. The hotel at least offered room service.

Besides, I had the impression she wasn’t the least bit afraid my manly charisma would make her swoon and end up in my bed. So why not do our work in a comfortable hotel room instead of some musty office?

Three-fifths of the boxes were stuffed with Choi’s files. They were written in Hangul, which posed an intractable problem for me, because the only Korean character I recognized was the one that meant “homosexual,” since I’d seen it written on so many signs lately. Thus Carol. Her job was to rummage through Choi’s files.