The Patriot Threat (6 page)

The second boat swept in close.

One of the men leaped across, slamming his body into Malone. He lost his grip on the wheel. They tumbled to the deck. The boat veered left. He catapulted the man off him and tried to regain control, but his assailant lunged. In the darkness he noticed Asian features, the compact frame hard as steel. He swung around, pivoting off the wheel, and kicked the man in the face, sending him reeling toward the stern. He stuffed a hand into his back pocket, found his Beretta, and shot the problem in the chest. The bullet’s recoil propelled the body over the side and into the water.

The second boat remained on him, pounding into the starboard side, trying to maneuver him out of the channel. They were racing along, still within the lights that defined out of bounds. He needed this over. Who these people were was anybody’s guess. Were they on the side of the folks who’d come to receive the $20 million? Or part of the team that stole it? Apparently somebody had worked a lot of planning for tonight. The only thing they hadn’t anticipated was a retired freelance agent screwing everything up.

He veered right, kissed the second boat, and grabbed his bearings. He was past Burano, near Torcello, in a quiet, darkened part of the lagoon. The lights of Venice burned miles to the south. He held the wheel tight and readied himself.

The hull was slammed again and recoiled.

Then another crash.

He worked the wheel and pressed his boat tight against the other, both craft racing ahead toward the right side of the channel. He kept close and did not allow the other boat any room to maneuver. The other driver’s attention seemed focused on him.

Big mistake.

He forced them more right, closer and closer to the edge. The next
bicole
was less than half a mile ahead and he intended to give his assailant a choice. Crash into it or go farther right, out of the channel. Left was not an option. The other man was all shadow, shaped similarly to the first one.

He continued to force the other craft over.

The piling approached.

A hundred yards.

Fifty.

Time for his attacker to choose.

Malone leaped left from his boat into the channel. He hit the water feetfirst and surfaced just as the boats crashed into the concrete tripod piling, both hulls vaulting skyward, engines whining, propellers beating only air. They careened down and splashed the water on the channel side, but did not float long, quickly sinking, their engines’ wild chaos drowned to silence.

He breaststroked to the far side of the channel and found a sandbar only a few yards beyond the defined perimeter, the water barely knee-deep. He suddenly realized how close he’d come to disaster. He searched the darkness for the man from the other boat, but saw and heard nothing. He stood in the lagoon, a good mile from the nearest shore, eyes burning, hair plastered to his skull. Only the silent islets, the faraway buildings of Venice, and the dim line of the mainland could be seen. Overhead, he caught the lights of a passenger jet homing in for a landing. He knew this water was not the cleanest in the world, nor at the moment the warmest, but he had no choice.

Swim.

He heard the growl of an engine, back toward the south, the direction he’d come from. No lights were associated with the sound, but in the darkness he caught the black outline of a boat cruising his way. He still carried his Beretta in his pocket, but doubted the gun would be of much use. Sometimes they worked after a dousing, sometimes not. He shrank down in the water, his feet now encased with a soft layer of muck.

The boat eased closer, cruising at the edge of the channel.

The nearest light was five hundred yards away at the next piling. The one that had been positioned here, nearby, had been obliterated in the crash.

The boat stopped, its engine switched off.

Another sleek V-hull.

A sole figure stood at its helm.

“Malone. You out there?”

He recognized the voice. Male. Younger. Southern accent.

Luke Daniels.

He stood. “About time. I wondered where you were.”

“I didn’t expect you to go Superman on me, flying through the sky.”

He freed his feet from the muck and trudged closer.

Luke stood in the boat and stared down at him. “Seems the first time we met you were pulling me from the water in Denmark.”

He stretched an arm up for some help. “Looks like we’re now even on that one.”

SEVEN

Kim poured himself a generous splash of whiskey. His penthouse suite two decks above Larks’ was a four-room monstrosity filled with mahogany and rattan furniture. He’d been impressed by the size and grandeur, along with its amenities like rich food, ample drink, and a massive spray of fresh flowers provided each day. The in-room bar came stocked with some excellent regional wines and American brown whiskey, both of which he’d also enjoyed.

A grandfather clock with Westminster chimes announced the presence of midnight and the beginning of November 11. Pyongyang was seven hours ahead, the sun already shining there on Tuesday morning. His half brother, North Korea’s Dear Leader, would be rising for another day.

Kim hated him.

While his own mother—kind and well bred—had been his father’s lawful wife, his half brother sprang from a long-standing affair with a national opera star. Both his father and grandfather had kept many mistresses. The practice seemed perfectly acceptable, except that his mother hated infidelity and became clinically depressed at her husband’s callousness. She eventually fled the country and settled in Moscow, dying a few years back. He’d been there with her at the end, holding her hand, listening to her laments of how life had treated her so cruelly.

Which it had.

He could say the same.

He’d been educated at private international schools in Switzerland and Moscow, first earning the respected title of Small General, then Great Successor. From living overseas he acquired a taste for Western luxury, particularly designer clothes and expensive cars, again not unlike his father. Eventually he’d returned home and worked in the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, then was assigned to head the nation’s Computer Center, where North Korea waged a covert cyber-war on the world. Next he would have garnered high military appointments, moving closer and closer to the center of power. But the incident in Japan cost him everything. Now, at fifty-eight years old, he was all but nonexistent. What had been the harm? He’d just wanted to take two children to Disneyland.

“We cannot rule without the army,” his father said. “It is the foundation of the Kim family’s hold on national power. My father acquired their loyalty and I have maintained that. But after your antics, they have no confidence in you.”

He felt an illogical mixture of shame at his error and pride in his stubbornness, so he truly wanted to know, “For what reason?”

“You are irresponsible. You always have been. Life to you is what you read in those adventure novels. What you write about in those wild stories of yours. The plays and shows you watch, they are all nonsense. None of it is real, except in your mind.”

He hadn’t realized his father knew of his private passions.

“You do not possess what is required to lead this nation. You are an incessant dreamer, and there is no place for those here.”

To him generals were like schools of fish, each floating in tune with the other, none ever wanting to risk swimming alone. What one did, all did. They were useless, except in times of war. But war was the last thing on his mind.

Lost confidence in him?

That was about to change.

His father had been a mercilessly practical man, depressing in appearance. He’d cut his hair in a short military style and, in public, wore drab Mao suits that looked ridiculous. His half brother emulated that style, another inept fool, thirty-nine years old, homeschooled by his whore mother and shielded from the world. But that had proven an unexpected advantage. While Kim had been sent abroad for an education, his father’s two other sons, both illegitimate, had been able to grow closer to him. The adoration that had once been his alone became spread among his siblings. And when he’d embarrassed his country on the world stage, those pretenders became players.

He glossed his throat with more of the whiskey.

One bright side, though, had emerged from tonight. No $20 million U.S. would be making its way to Pyongyang for any birthday. His half brother had ruled long enough to have amassed his share of enemies. Thank goodness loyalties ran shallow in North Korea. Some of his half brother’s enemies had become his friends and quietly reported the details of this year’s tribute. He’d intended on stealing the money and depriving his half brother of the funds, hiring a criminal group from Macao to handle the task. Now that money was gone. But for him, its destruction served the same purpose. Thankfully, personal finances were not an issue. He had more than enough monetary resources. On that score his father had not failed him.

He refilled his glass with more whiskey.

He’d actually never met his half brother. Custom required that a leader’s male children be raised independently of one another, the oldest son always favored. He’d heard that his half brother openly thought of his older sibling as an overweight, careless playboy, incapable of any serious responsibility, no danger to him at all. But underestimating him would be his half brother’s undoing. He’d gone to great lengths to create that carefree public image. He’d found that being considered an unimportant, embarrassing disgrace—a drunkard—brought with it freedom of movement. It also helped that he lived in Macao, out of the limelight, and never openly interfered in North Korean politics. From time to time the press would seek him out, but his comments were always silly and nonsensical. He was, for all intents and purposes, dead.

He smiled.

What a glorious resurrection he was about to experience.

The look on his half brother’s face would be worth the indignities he’d been forced to endure.

And all thanks to Anan Wayne Howell’s
The Patriot Threat.

Law and finance had always interested him. He liked how they were so intricately related, especially within the United States. Americans prided themselves on a strict adherence to law.
Stare decisis,
they called it.
To stand by that which is decided
. Most legal systems around the world rejected the concept, and with good reason since it came with a flaw. What if adherence to “that decided” meant disaster? Did you follow the law then? Not in North Korea. But the Americans? They would be a different story.

He emptied his glass with one long swallow.

His laptop sat on the table before him, its screen filled with a page from
The Patriot Threat.
He’d been rereading a part of it earlier before visiting Paul Larks. He studied the passage once again.

By an executive order signed in 1942, Franklin Roosevelt taxed all personal income over $25,000 ($352,000 in today’s value) at 100%. Can you imagine? Work hard an entire year, make good decisions, earn a respectable income, then give everything over $25,000 ($352,000 today) to the government. Congress disagreed with FDR and, in its infinite wisdom, lowered the rate to 90%. Eventually, tax rates were changed by Presidents Kennedy and Reagan. Kennedy lowered the top rate to 70%, Reagan plunged it to 28%. Following each of those tax cuts, government revenues skyrocketed and investments increased. Both the 1960s and 1980s were times of great innovation. The first President Bush raised the top rate to 31%, Clinton climbed even higher to 39.6%, the second Bush cut it to 35%. Currently, the top rate has returned to 39.6%. Taxes on personal income account for 82% of all federal revenues. Corporate income taxes contribute another 9%. So over 90% of federal revenues come from the taxation of income.

What was the proverb?

A crafty rabbit has three caves.

Just another way of saying—scatter your money and your attention.

When he was stripped of all rights to succession, his father’s propaganda machine had gone to great lengths to scandalize him publicly. He’d been ordered to accept the insults in silence, then move abroad. His father had wanted him gone.

That was fourteen years ago.

His father died two years after that, his half brother immediately taking the title Dear Leader and assuming absolute control.

And that could have been the end of it all.

But a few months ago, while prowling the Internet, he’d accidentally discovered Anan Wayne Howell, one of those events that could only be described as fortuitous. After scanning through the website, he’d downloaded Howell’s book and read every word, wondering if it might be his ticket out of obscurity.
Dreamer?
Why not? He possessed something his half brother would never enjoy.

Vision.

And that had allowed him to realize the potential from Howell’s radical thesis. One problem existed, though. Howell had not been seen or heard from in three years. Kim had to find him. Originally, he’d thought this trip was the way to make that happen. Now his only lead seemed the woman with the black leather satchel and a possibility that Howell might appear tomorrow.

He poured more whiskey.

When he’d tried to visit Disneyland in Tokyo it had not been solely for his children. He was a fan, too. So much that a framed print hung on his office wall back in Macao. It depicted Walt Disney himself, above a statement the visionary was noted for saying—
It’s kind of fun to do the impossible
.

That it was.

Hana stepped inside from the balcony, where she’d retreated once they’d returned from Larks’ room. Solitude had always been her friend. Of all his children she seemed most like him. She was twenty-three years old and, sadly, life had not been kind to her. Many scars remained in a sullenness that refused to leave her.

“You need to see this,” she said in Korean.

She spoke so little that he always listened to every word.