No Way Back (9 page)

I’M STALKING SLEEP THAT NIGHT, BUT SLEEP STAYS OUT
of range. I lie there, face feeling flushed and forehead hot, as if I’ve got a fever. Yet my hands and feet are cold.

I’m voodooed. Partly it’s the situation. Mainly it’s the way I was so ready to hurt Rob bad over a word. If it had been a street or bar encounter, I’d have done it without hesitation. If he’d flashed a weapon, I’d have capped him and walked away without feeling a thing.

No. I would have felt everything. Which is why, these past few years, I’ve tried to chill out edgy situations, remake them, manipulate whatever players are involved. So there’d be no bang-bang, no bodies but live ones, no brass shell casings gleaming in the dark red wet. So much for resolve, good resolutions. I can handle street punks with words usually, no need for my hands. Yet I didn’t say a thing tonight. Just clicked up to attack mode. Because of a nobody’s fucking tone.

What if the training—when they get you young enough, malleable enough—can never be truly undone? What if they get it in so deep it becomes all of what you are?

There’s more. An acute episode of free-floating anxiety, Annie would explain to me. This is not necessarily bad; keeps you sharp, if there’s some genuine reason for it; if you’re sure something’s out there—unknown but real—you may need to counter. Bad, though, if you cannot identify any threat beyond the phantoms in your head.

I’m sure there’s at least one real thing: the elaborate charade about who’s really running this mission. Why? It cannot be a delusion of Allison’s. Either she’s been ordered for reasons unknown to claim command, or she’s being duped by higher-ups at Langley into believing she has it. Both seem so doubtful, going against everything I know about the Company, about Westley. But there’s clearly a game in play, though I don’t know the goal, or what the rules are. Only that my role seems to be shaking out as some sort of pawn, low-value and expendable.

Chess! It hits me who I can go to. Rhino, the only person I’ve ever met who knew absolutely his opponent’s intentions four or five moves before the attempt. Not just on a chessboard, but in the field, in combat.

Rhino. I was his star pupil, his protégé, when I was a green eighteen-year-old and he was in charge of Special Forces training. He wouldn’t speak to me for two years after I went berserk at twenty-two during Desert Storm and slaughtered two dozen cringing Iraqi soldiers who were begging to surrender after a short firefight. That little move cost me my army career. I’d called Rhino as soon as I got back to the States. He wouldn’t let me say a word. “Discipline, asshole. The difference between a warrior and a psycho-killer,” he’d barked. “I busted my chops teaching you discipline. I was sure you aced the lesson. You let me down bad, maggot. Fuck you very much.” He’d slammed the phone down then.

But he finally got back in touch, and we’d stayed in touch pretty regularly—the only gap being my time in Sarajevo and the Swiss hospital. Five years ago, having done his thirty in Special Forces, he took a job offer from the Defense Intelligence Agency. Rhino was a legend in the special-ops world, and he had friends in every agency that ever mounted clandestine actions, because he was so often called in to consult, even by the CIA.

If Rhino can’t find out what I need to know, the information does not exist. Problem is, how to get him on the case, with no phone, no e-mail, no access to any sort of secure communication? My little balloon of hope starts to deflate fast. Until I recall one of Rhino’s maxims, delivered over and over in a roar to thousands of green kids who came under his tutelage: “The simplest way to your objective is always—always—the best way, you stupid fucks.”

Simplest? The U.S. Postal Service.

I’m out of bed and rummaging through the little desk almost before I finish the thought. Somebody will know I’m moving, but not what I’m doing; I gave my room a total toss after that first morning, and I’m monitored only by motion sensors, no cameras. I find a small set of stationery and one of the pens Allison had me use to write all those postcards to Annie. I’m about to scribble, scribble, scribble as she liked to say, when I freeze. It’s unlikely, but they might count the sheets, not like finding a couple missing.

But I still have one personal thing I’d brought to the spook house that never was confiscated: a little pocket notebook. I take it and the pen and go sit on the toilet. I spend the next half hour laying out my situation for Rhino, and what I urgently want to learn about Westley, Allison, and this op. Then I make an envelope out of two pages from the notebook and a couple of strips of Scotch
tape. I insert the letter, seal the envelope, slip it into one of my running shoes.

Still revved, I pick up the Kim dossier Allison had given me, slip into bed, and read it for the third time, looking hard for misinformation, omissions, any subtext that might alert me to things I should be concerned about.

Kim took over the family concern on the death of his father, five years ago. It was a planned succession of the first son, he’d been groomed for it. Bachelor’s in mathematics from Berkeley, a year as an analyst with Bear Stearns in New York, then an M.B.A. at Wharton. Excellent student, hard worker, partied hard, too, but not to excess. No overt displays of excess wealth, either; drove a 300-series BMW, shared a Manhattan apartment with two pals from Berkeley for that year at Bear Stearns, never flaunted his family fortune. Left a normal string of girlfriends in his wake when he went back to Busan.

There he worked one year at each of the various sectors of the conglomerate, always as assistant to the division chief: light manufacturing, heavy manufacturing, export, marketing, finance and currency. Five years, then a transfer to headquarters staff. Not as his father’s number two, either. Started as assistant to the CFO, moved on to assistant to the COO, with the plain title of vice president. Kim’s old man apparently followed the American corporate model, with himself as CEO and chairman of the board. Kim wasn’t appointed to the board until his second year as assistant to the COO—eight years after he started work.

Patient young man, it seems to me. If he chafed at the slow pace, he kept it to himself. Didn’t vent any frustration in his personal life, either. According to the dossier,
he lived pretty much as any salaried executive at his level would. Nice apartment in Busan, nice country house down south on the coast. No pleasure palaces, no flashy cars, no wild behavior. Quiet social life, dinners out and small parties in with good friends. One big interest outside business: flying. Began taking lessons as soon as he arrived at Berkeley and continued when he returned home from the U.S., working his way up the qualification ladder from single-engine prop to multi-engine prop to corporate-size jets. Got his pilot’s license for jets. Occasionally takes controls of a corporate plane on business trips, but not known to have taken one out joyriding. Ever.

My profile of Kim shakes out simply:

Heterosexual male, serial monogamist, no kinks at all.

Generally gregarious and easygoing, values friendships, socially adept and active, moderate alcohol consumption, occasional recreational drug use: weed and coke in the States, some opium in Korea, always in the company of close friends.

Even temperament, collegial attitude with employees, fair, strict when they make business missteps but always gives second chances. No tendencies to outbursts of rage, irrational decision-making, emotional volatility.

Americanized to a large degree but retains strong sense of certain traditional Korean values, including a strict structure of relationships based on age, education, and socioeconomic status, and the concept of
gibun
, which is similar to the Chinese concept of face: i.e., every effort is made to avoid situations or confrontations in which one party or the other may suffer embarrassment by having to back down.

Miscellanous: good sense of humor, sometimes plays mischievious jokes on close associates, business and personal. Generous and hospitable. Currently romantically
involved with a twenty-six-year-old girl, Korean, graduate of Stanford, employed as a junior executive in a bank. She lives in her own apartment, spends several nights a week with Kim in his Busan compound. She has no strong domestic political ties, no known connections with agents of any foreign government.

As for the
jaebeol
, Kim’s father ran it aggressively but honestly, no evidence of shady financial or other dealings. On Kim’s ascension, he retained his father’s CFO and COO, but appointed two trusted contemporaries from within the company as their assistants and presumed successors. He worked to build the
jaebeol
by friendly acquisitions, mainly in electronics and computer-related businesses. Took large stakes in some small, very edgy U.S. software start-ups. He made only one initiative his father would never have permitted: the development of trading ties with the North.

Christ. The man seems as decent as any big industrialist can be. He’s got no vices or bad habits that might make him vulnerable to pressure. He believes in democracy and free trade and America’s global role. His political views are moderate.

What’s not to like here? Anyway, all I’ve got to do is help keep him safe, so it wouldn’t really matter to me if he was kinked or perverted or a completely nasty fuck—so long as I knew about it, since you have to be extra-vigilant when your man is busy indulging vices.

It’s my own team that’s got me anxious, not Kim or any bent Russian generals.

Maybe I finally drift into sleep. Maybe I don’t. All I know is that at some point I’m aware of early light flowing through the window in my room, I’m up and getting dressed. I head down four minutes earlier than usual, which gives me time to find and score a stamp in the li
brary, stick it on the Rhino letter, put the letter into the kangaroo pocket of my hoodie. Allison seems a little down when I meet her in the foyer, but I don’t ask any questions. We go for our run. When Allison calls last lap, it’s no great trick to let her pull ahead a few yards and slip the letter into that one friendly blue mailbox on our circuit.

Subdued. That’s the way I feel over the next few days. That’s the atmosphere in the spook house. Only Nadya seems usually cheerful and sassy, gives me some genuine smiles now and then.

Mostly we discuss. Thoroughly, seriously. Not much about movement, logistics, who’ll be where when, but about personalities. Kim’s dossier and profile are the most complete, so Westley, like a professsor leading a seminar, steers us in other directions. Kim’s two chief business advisers, for instance. His chief security heavy. His girlfriend—she’s a screamer during sex, and Kim digs that. He sometimes tells her more than he ought to about what he does up North. She’s being watched.

Allison gives a report on the Pyongyang Four. It’s fairly thin, naturally. They’re contemporaries of the young maximum leader, not of his dead father’s generation. They seem to act as a team—or a cabal. They’re the leader’s inner cabinet, the ones with the most access, the most influence over a dictator as isolated as the worst Byzantine emperor. No hard intelligence on their personal lives, beyond the fact that they’re all married, all have a couple of kids. Believed to be loyal to their boss—so long as he comes around to their point of view, according to some sources. When he doesn’t, they bow in unison, remain patient and agreeable, but subtly keep up the pressure. There are some indicators they’d do whatever it takes to stop the boss doing anything insane—like invading the ROK, shooting down Chinese, Russian, or
American planes. But they let him rattle his saber as much as he likes.

Most of it’s boring and gets more tedious by the day. All this stuff may be important to Company careerists, who have a longer view, but it’s got little relevance to my task; all I want to know is who might be likely to try a burn on Kim, and how good they are.

Meanwhile, the clock’s ticking on my SOS to Rhino. On morning runs with Allison, I feel a little hope bleed away each time I pass the mailbox where I dropped the letter to him four, five, six days ago. Every afternoon when discussions finish, I go down to the dojo and punish the hell out of the small bag, the heavy bag, until my arms and legs are leaden with exhaustion. Twice a week Nadya takes me out to the range, usually has to drag me away from combat town because the groove I get into there is the only place my mind burns clear and concentrated. But it isn’t enough. My sleep each night becomes shallower, patchy, dream-tossed. Nasty dreams.

One evening, though, Nadya gives a rundown on her Russians, and that at least is entertaining.

“Bolgakov’s quite old school,” she says. “Married twenty-five years to a woman who wears the trousers. He comes right to heel whenever she calls. Terrified of her, absolutely. Can’t blame him, really. She looks like she was on the Soviet Olympic weight lifting team in her youth, gone a bit to fat now of course but still formidable.”

It’s “for-
mid
-able” in Nadya’s Brit-speak. The girl has no idea how erotic her smoky voice is.

“Little Tchitcherine—now, he’s a rogue. Rogering here, rogering there. Also married twenty-five years to a quite slim and lovely woman, who has a quite slim and lovely younger sister who has a stunning seventeen-year-old daughter. The dog’s defiling his innocent flower of a
niece as often as he can. The amount of his Viagra bills defies imagination.”

There’s a blurt of laughter from Westley. Rob and Allison stay buttoned up. They always stiffen in Westley’s presense.

“Bolgakov’s all stuffy and puritanical about this,” Nadya goes on, clearly enjoying herself. “Probably envy, I should think. He’d love nothing more than a nubile beauty of his own. But professionally they are in harmony. Shamelessly venal. Bolgakov’s under pressure now because his wife has developed expensive tastes. In any case, they started in a quite small way, post-Gorbachev. Diverting food and fuel alotted to their units onto the black market. Soon they were approached by a mafia composed mainly of ex-KGB types. And they’ve been handsomely rewarded for favors, such as arranging for heroin and cocaine shipped into Vlad by the KGB mob to be transported in military trucks and trains, that sort of thing. Not much more than simply turning a blind eye, that was all our generals had to do. Envelopes fat with cash got slipped to them under tables in restaurants. Their appetites whetted, they did not say no when the favors asked escalated to spare parts for vehicles, vehicles entire, ultimately, spare parts for weapons, which the mafia laddies were transhipping to former Soviet clients such as Iraq.