RW14 - Dictator's Ransom

by Richard Marcinko

  “Well, thank you for the information.”

  I started walking toward the elevated subway entrance about a block away. I was just about to go up the stairs when I realized Cho Lim was tagging along.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I am going to help you.”

  “You already have. Thanks.”

  “You will need more help in China,” she said. “You will have to talk to Yong Shin Jong. He won’t trust you.”

  “You know him?”

  “We’ve met.”

  “How?”

  “From distance.”

  “You’re friends?”

  “I have met him. From distance.”

  Cho’s English had a habit of getting worse as soon as she was pressed on a topic she didn’t feel like speaking about. If you’re thinking there was a bit more to the relationship than she was willing to let on, go to the head of the class.

  “I can be of great help,” Cho Lim added. “I speak Chinese fluently. I can pass for Chinese. You cannot.”

  I furled my fingers through my beard and squinted at her.

  “Maybe a little,” she conceded. “I am still big help.”

  “Let me discuss your information with someone I know,” I told her. “If it checks out, then you can come to China with me. If not . . .” I shrugged.

  “It will check out.”

  “Then I’ll meet you at Tokyo airport Monday morning at eight.”

  She frowned.

  “You will be there?” Cho Lim asked.

  “Have I ever lied to you?”

  She frowned again, but didn’t follow me into the train station.

  3

  [ I ]

  THERE WAS NO way to properly vet Cho Lim. Neither Kunika nor the CIA had ever heard of her, but given her age and nationality that wasn’t surprising. She apparently had used a South Korean passport to enter the country; the address she’d given the customs people was in Seoul.

  It was highly unlikely that she could have come from North Korea on her own. And while it bothered both my friend Tosho and Jimmy Zim that Sun hadn’t told me about the China villa himself, I knew that our brief conversation in Kim’s palace hadn’t been entirely private—everything had been recorded by the video camera in the corner of the room. Sun might have many reasons for not letting anyone know that he was helping me, or that he already knew where Yong Shin Jong was.

  Logically, I had two choices—either take Cho Lim’s information at face value and check out the villa, or pretend I hadn’t received it and track Yong Shin Jong’s path. It was a coin flip either way, so I decided I’d do both.

  I got up early Sunday morning and worked out, doing a five-mile run through Tokyo to sweat out some of the rust that had accumulated in my system over the past few days. Then I hit the hotel gym, pumping iron and breathing hard for about an hour and a half before finding my way back upstairs. My butt was dragging, but I was glad I could say that when Trace called from Kyoto to check in.

  She and lover boy were having a great time.

  “How many Shinto temples have you been to?” I asked.

  “There are temples here?”

  That pretty much summed up our conversation, not to mention her priorities. I wasn’t surprised when she barely made the plane the next day, arriving at the gate about five minutes before boarding was announced.

  Cho Lim, on the other hand, had gotten there before me. She glanced up when I passed by but kept her distance, pretending to read a Japanese paperback. As far as I could tell, no one else in the gate area was watching us.

  We landed in Beijing a few hours later. Doc Tremblay and his handlebar mustache were waiting for us when we cleared passport control.

  “Glad you could make it,” I told him.

  “Fuck you very much,” he grumbled. “Lo Po’s outside with the car. Who’s the shadow?”

  “She claims she knows where Yong Shin Jong is,” I said. “She works for Sun.”

  “We trust her?” asked Doc.

  “About as far as you can throw her with one hand.”

  By the time we reached the parking lot, Cho Lim had closed the distance between us. She followed silently as we made our way to the car Lo Po had rented. I introduced her to the others. She sat between Trace and me, mouth shut, gaze blank.

  Lo Po took us south, bypassing the capital and its rings of nonstop traffic as we swung through Daxing. Several miles south of the suburb we came to a country house owned by a family Lo Po had done work for. The family was on an extended vacation and had kindly let him use it while they were away; when you save the life of their only son, people tend to be thankful.

  The house was more a villa, set up on a hill away from what had once been a tiny, sleepy village. It was now an overgrown little city, where factories crowded up against housing developments and old stone buildings. Two of Lo Po’s men were waiting on the front portico, handguns discreetly concealed beneath their jackets.

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to search you and your bag,” I told Cho Lim as we pulled into the driveway. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  Cho Lim barely shrugged. Trace went inside with her and did the honors. Meanwhile, I brought Lo Po and Doc up-to-date. It was hard to say which one of them was more skeptical.

  “Are you sure this isn’t a Chinese plot to capture you?” asked Lo Po. “Maybe Kim is delivering you to the government. He’d do anything for a trainload of diesel oil these days.”

  “Or onions,” said Doc.

  “Obviously, there’s more here than meets the eye,” I told them. “But that’s not it. If the Chinese wanted to get me, they would have done it themselves.”

  Lo Po and Doc remained skeptical, even after Trace announced that our friend was carrying neither a weapon nor any electronic device capable of giving her location away. Cho Lim remained quiet as I laid out the agenda—Doc, Lo Po, and Trace would go into Beijing, find the hotel where Yong Shin Jong customarily stayed during his visits, and see if they could discover any useful information. Such information would more than likely be found in the hotel’s records, which they would have to acquire by whatever means came to hand.

  Cho Lim and I, meanwhile, would locate the compound she had identified and, if the opportunity presented itself, conduct a sneak and peek.

  “What is sneak and peek?” asked Cho Lim.

  “Kind of like playing peek-a-boo,” I told her. “Except we get shot if we get caught.”

  YONG SHIN JONG always stayed at the Beijing Guoji Julebu Fandian—better known as St. Regis Beijing—the number one choice for heavy hitters and world leaders, no matter who they were related to. The first step in tracing his footsteps was to confirm that he’d been there two months before. The only way to do that was to have a look at the hotel’s computers, where the registrations were kept.

  Like all top hotels, the Regis is known for its discretion, and part of that discretion involves keeping its databases from prying eyes. The system was protected against outside intruders by state-of-the-art firewalls, and used thumbprint readers as well as passwords to keep uninvited eyes from accessing the records. So obviously we needed to be invited to have a look.

  Trace began the operation with the cheapest trick in the book. She entered the lobby with a slip of a dress that stopped midthigh, highlighting the legs she used to kick our new trainees’ butts. She marched up to the reception desk, removing a wad of yuan notes as she went. Then just as she reached the desk, she stumbled. The notes flew out of her hand and scattered on the floor. Within seconds, she had a dozen hotel employees and passersby helping her pick them up—and another dozen, all male, trying to grab a peek up her skirt.

  Doc Tremblay had been at the counter when Trace came in, trying to reserve a room for next week. Concealed in his palm was a computer dongle, a small device that would freeze the computer and render it unusable—a necessary precursor to our breaking into it. The dongle had a USB plug at one end; all Doc had to do was slip it into one of t
he computer’s ports and we’d be ready for the next step in the plan.

  With everyone’s eyes on Trace, Doc had no problem leaning over the counter and pushing the dongle into the port at the rear of the computer. Or rather, he would have, if there’d been a USB port to plug into.

  USB stands for universal serial bus. It lets computers use a variety of peripherals, everything from disk drives to mice. It’s been included on even the most basic computers for at least ten years. You would assume that a high-class hotel like the Regis would have a computer no older than that, wouldn’t you?

  We certainly did.

  What had Ev Barrett, sainted chief and my first sea daddy, said about ass-u-me back when I was a tadpole?

  Doc slipped the gizmo back in his pocket and tried to figure out some other way of messing up the computer. All he could think of was the old standby—pulling the plug.

  With Trace’s money recovered and her dress safely covering her legs, she proceeded to the reservation desk. The clerk came over and saw that something had happened to his machine. Unfortunately, it took him all of five seconds to look in the back and figure out that the monitor plug had somehow come out of its receptacle. He had it rebooted and working a few minutes later.

  Which explains why he gave Lo Po a puzzled expression when he walked in and announced that he was there to fix the computer.

  “The computer’s fine,” said the man.

  “Not what they told me,” said Lo Po. He set his tool case down and snapped the locks open. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  “It’s not broken,” protested the man. They were speaking in Chinese, of course.

  “You’re from Hong Kong, I can tell.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Lo Po smirked.

  “Nothing wrong with Hong Kong, brother,” insisted the clerk.

  “Hong Kong, no,” said Lo Po, removing a large screwdriver from his toolbox. “But everyone knows, people in Hong Kong are cheap.”

  “This is the hotel’s computer. I don’t have to pay.”

  “Exactly. So let me do my work.”

  Exasperated, the clerk retreated toward the office for reinforcements. Lo Po quickly turned off the unit and opened the box. By the time the clerk reappeared with the manager in tow, he had the machine in several pieces.

  “It’s not broke! There’s nothing wrong with it!” said the manager.

  “Then why did you call?”

  “No one called,” insisted the manager.

  While they were discussing this very loudly, Trace returned from the room she’d just been given to complain that its view of the Forbidden City was blocked.

  The truth is, no room in the hotel has a view of the Forbidden City, but no one wants to disappoint a guest, especially one with ample cash and assets. The manager and clerk went to another computer to find a room; Lo Po pulled the hard drive, swapping it with a blank one he’d brought with him. Meanwhile, Doc ambled back over, picked up the old drive, and walked out the door with it, nodding at the doorman as he went.

  [ II ]

  WHILE TRACE, DOC, and Lo Po played who’s got the computer repairman, Cho Lim and I grabbed some light backpacks and took a leisurely bicycle ride around the neighborhood about five miles away where Yong Shin Jong was supposedly being kept.

  You probably think palatial estates don’t exist in China, since the country is communist and the “people” own the land. But then you probably believed in Santa Claus once, too.

  Even under Mao, China followed a complicated system of usage rights that effectively gave certain people rights that looked to an outside world a lot like traditional ownership. The Property Law passed in 2007 formalized some of the ownership arrangements, though like most laws adopted in the U.S., the legal code is so complicated only lawyers can make sense of it.9

  This property had been used by a prominent family in the nearby village for decades. Surrounded by woods and backing onto a steep hillside, the property contained a three-story main house barely visible from the road. It, along with two smaller buildings, were all made of red brick; they had curved bamboo roofs that made them look more like temples than personal homes.

  Two eight-foot chain-link fences ran around the perimeter; the space between the fences was nine or ten feet wide, and rutted with tire tracks. Beyond the fences grew prickle bushes. Botany not being one of my specialties, I can’t tell you what genus the plants belonged to, but I can say their prickles were large enough to be seen from the road a good twenty yards away.

  We cycled past slowly, following the road into a small community of brand-new town homes a half mile down the hill. Except for the roofs, whose clay tiles were accented by Asian-style curves, the concrete-sided houses would not have looked out of place in Arizona or New Mexico. Dust and grit swirled through the place as large earth-moving machines cut a new road and prepared foundations for a new set of buildings. Not far from a bulldozer, a middle-aged man used a long, thin stick to herd a pig toward one of the older houses clinging to the road at the side of the hill.

  Cho Lim held her bike silently. She seemed to be seeing all of this for the first time.

  A good sign? Or a good actress’s flourish?

  We turned the bikes around and rode back. This time I paid more attention to the area near the fence, trying to see if there were detection devices: motion sensors, video cameras, trip wires. I couldn’t spot any, but there was so much vegetation nearby that they would be easy to hide.

  I was just considering where to stash the bicycle when I heard something running through the vegetation. A brown wedge flew against the inner fence, barking ferociously. The dog was a Chinese Shar-Pei, reputed to be one of the best watchdogs in the world. A second came running up behind the first; then, from the other direction, came a third, this one in the path between the two perimeter fences.

  Good thing we have the fence between us, I thought.

  Just then I heard a fourth dog approaching, this one barking louder than the others.

  And, unfortunately, coming from the field opposite the compound, where there was no fence to stop him. I bared my teeth and did my best imitation of a junkyard dog growl. Whether this warned off the dog or not, it changed direction and sprinted after Cho Lim.

  Just as the dog reached for her leg, Cho Lim flew into the air. She came down on the animal’s back. Stunned, the Shar-Pei tried to reach back and snap her, but with Cho Lim’s two hands around her throat the animal had no way of doing any damage. Cho Lim jumped to her feet, raising the dog up high enough to deliver a quick heel kick to its midsection. Then she dropped it, leaving it whimpering at the side of the road as she retrieved her bike.

  “Animal lover, huh?” I said. “You should have snapped its neck.”

  “It is not right to harm a dumb animal,” said Cho Lim. “I use only force necessary.”

  “I’ll remember that if I decide to ask you for a date,” I told her.

  One of the great things about China’s rapid commercialization is that it is really very easy to get a Coke. Not only is it sold in a wide variety of stores and restaurants, but you find machines in the strangest places—including on a dusty road about a mile down the hill from the estate.

  “Thirsty?” I asked Cho Lim as I studied the machine, puzzling out the coins.

  She shook her head.

  I bought two bottles anyway, tucked them into my pockets, then rode back up the hill, stopping a good fifty yards from the compound. We pulled our bikes into the scrub near the road, then began hiking up the hill. The compound sat on higher ground, but there was enough brush and ground cover to make it difficult to see us.

  The first thing I wanted to do was find out where the dog that had attacked Cho Lim had come from. I hadn’t seen a hole in the fence, and besides, the dog had come from the opposite side of the road. I thought maybe there might be a lookout post or even a barracks in the property across from the estate, but a slow, careful sweep with my binoculars failed to pick it
up. The scrub filled field backed into a swamp, and the nearest buildings were on the other side of a small pond maybe a mile away.

  After staring at them for several minutes, I realized that a pile of rocks near the road didn’t really belong there; the stones were a different color than the others scattered nearby. Though at first glance—and second and third for that matter—they seemed haphazardly placed, they’d been carefully arranged to form a kind of pyramid just high enough to hide something on the other side.

  It took us nearly an hour to backtrack and circle around through the swamp to get close enough to verify my hunch. The rocks concealed an opening about a foot high and a foot and a half wide—big enough for a dog. The rocks were angled so that it was impossible to look inside from a distance. Even up close I couldn’t see more than a few feet down, as the tunnel turned sharply in the direction of the compound.

  Above the tunnel, a thick wire snaked through the rocks, connecting to a small video camera that faced the road. Obviously, we’d been watched by the security people in the compound; they’d loosed the dog to convince us not to hang around. Or maybe it was just their idea of fun.

  The trip through the swamp had left me cold and wet. I was wearing good boots—no way I would compromise on footwear—but in the interests of blending in, the rest of my clothes were tourist fare, which translated into wet and chilly pants and a muddy shirt. I’ve been much wetter and a hell of a lot colder, but I was still cranky by the time I satisfied myself that the video camera and tunnel entrance were the only parts of the compound’s defenses on that side of the road.

  Our next task was to set up our own video cameras so we could keep the compound under surveillance without having to physically be there. There are so many remote surveillance cameras available these days that it’s a buyer’s market; we probably could have picked up some cheap Chinese models in town. But quality pays, and so I stuck with units manufactured by Law Enforcement Technologies, Inc., a little company out in Colorado Springs that had the bad judgment of appointing me to its board. The cameras in the units covered a 270-degree arc, had daylight and night-time modes, and combined a 10X mechanical zoom with an electronic zoom that gave a virtual 150X—pretty standard stuff these days. They were very small, which was notable, but their real asset was the fact that they connected via a thin wire to a transmitter that could be as far as a half mile away.