by Larry Bond
Ferguson Senior was cut loose by the Agency. The only person who stood up for him was his old friend and fellow officer Thomas Parnelles, the General. But Parnelles, who’d essentially been exiled to a meaningless headquarters job for his own supposed indiscretions, had little influence within the Agency and none outside of it. Ferguson Senior was forced to retire; he was told he was lucky he wasn’t going to jail.
~ * ~
M
aybe it was his family history, but Ferguson couldn’t help but feel he’d fallen into a snake pit here in Korea. Even if he accepted Bo’s story at face value, which meant that Bo was a dope, how could the South Koreans have produced plutonium without the local CIA people finding out about it?
In some ways, it was an unfair question. The CIA operation was designed to spy on North Korea, not the South. Besides, intelligence agencies were historically more notable for their failures than their successes. This wasn’t quite on the scale of Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
Still, by definition it was an intelligence failure. And it seemed to Ferguson that something else was going on here that he didn’t know about. Slott had never directly interfered in an operation before.
If he’d been in the Middle East or Russia, Ferguson would have felt much more sure of himself, but Korea was very foreign. He needed some sort of backup, a check on his superiors just in case they were gaming him.
The sole possibility that came to mind was Corrine Alston.
A measure of his desperation, that.
But he needed some sort of insurance, just in case.
In case what?
He stared out the window of the train, not wanting to answer his own question.
~ * ~
14
NORTH P’YŎNPAN PROVINCE, NORTH KOREA
Thera was walking with Julie Svenson toward the lunch buffet in the reception building when Dr. Norkelus stormed up, an angry look on his face. She looked at him expectantly, trying to think what she would say if he asked about the package of cigarettes she’d just been given. She knew there’d be another message in them, though she hadn’t had a chance to look for it.
She had the first pack, which was almost empty. She’d give that to him.
“I need a message sent to the secretary general’s special committee,” said Norkelus, practically shouting at her. “It’s absurd.”
“You want me to help prepare it?” said Thera, trying not to let her relief show.
“Yes.” He took a voice recorder from his pocket. “The details are there. It must go out by one p.m., our time.”
“One?”
“I know. It’s ridiculous. Bureaucratic fools,” replied Norkelus, turning on his heel and stomping off.
~ * ~
15
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA
Corrine Alston was just about to curl up in bed with a good mystery when the phone rang. Thinking it was her mother, she picked up the phone on the night table in the bedroom.
“Hey, Wicked Stepmother, it’s Prince Charming.”
“Ferg?”
“I need you to get to a secure phone, but don’t go to The Cube.”
“Ferguson, what the hell are you doing?”
“Encrypted phone. Call me. You have my number.”
“But—”
“No buts. You have five minutes.”
The phone line went dead. Corrine scrambled to get her secure satellite phone. She punched the buttons, not entirely sure she remembered Ferg’s number.
“Grimm Brothers. Fairy tales are our business.”
“You’re not very funny, Ferguson, especially at midnight.”
“It’s only two o’clock here,” he said. “Must be the problem. Humor’s jetlagged.”
“What’s going on?”
“I need you to do me a favor.”
“What kind of favor?”
“Guns is on his way back home with a soil sample. He messed up his leg. Corrigan tell you that?”
“No.”
“One of the reasons he messed up his leg is that the South Koreans tripled security at the waste site where we found the plutonium. You know about the plutonium, right?”
“Yes, of course. Why did they up the security?”
“Sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. The leading theory is that our CIA station chief here is a boob, but there are other suspicions.”
“Like what?”
Ferguson ignored the question. “I have some things to check out, and I need, uh, I just need someone I can trust.”
“You mean from the Team?”
“This isn’t a team job I have in mind. I want them to do some translating maybe, and I may send them back with something for you.”
“For me?”
“Maybe more soil samples ... I don’t know. I don’t want to use Seoul.”
“Why not, Ferg?”
Ferguson didn’t answer.
“Ferg.”
“Because, Wicked Stepmother, if they’re merely incompetent, they’ll screw it up. If they’re more than merely incompetent, who knows what will happen?”
So why was he cutting out Corrigan, Corrine wondered. And why had Slott decided to get the Seoul office involved in a First Team mission without telling her?
“You still there, Stepmother?”
“I’m here, Ferg.”
“Hey listen, one of these days you’re going to have to trust me,” he told her.
“I trust you.”
“Then see if you can find this guy for me. He’s retired. Used to work for the Bureau. Name is James Sonjae. Call him now and wake him up. Tell him to come to Seoul.”
“Ferg, it’s two o’clock in the morning.”
“He doesn’t sleep very well anyway.”
“But—”
“Like I say. Trust me, OK? Gotta go do some barhopping now. I’ll talk to you in a bit.”
~ * ~
T
wo hours later, Corrine arrived at a diner about a mile and a half off the Beltway. James Sonjae sat in the far corner, slumped down in the booth, a coffee and half-eaten bagel sitting on the table in front of him. He kept his gaze toward the window as she approached; it was only when she leaned over to ask who he was that she realized he was able to watch everything from the reflections there.
“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
NORTH P’YŎNPAN PROVINCE, NORTH KOREA
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.
~ * ~
I
t 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 in the cigarettes.
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 Pluto. She left it, as if she hadn’t realized her mistake.
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.
She scrolled to the findings list, looking at some of the samples. Particle quantities were noted.
Iron. The code for an emergency pickup was Iron; she was to insert the word or the chemical symbol, Fe, into a message to alert the Cube.
Thera typed FeBr into the list of first-day chemical samples—if anyone caught it, she would claim she couldn’t decipher something from Norkelus’s notes—then cut and pasted the coordinates in. Finally, she scrolled to the end of the message and put her initials in, making it clear she had prepared it.
Send, or not send?
Fear gripped her for a moment, fear, doubt and doom.
It filled her with anger. She zeroed the mouse on the SEND command and tapped furiously, practically breaking the plastic.
Gone, she told herself. Gone. And don’t look back.
~ * ~
17
CIA BUILDING 24-442
“Iron is the code for pickup,” said Corrigan, “and I double-checked just to be sure: There is no test for iron bromine, which is what FeBr would be, presumably.”
Corrine glanced across the conference room table at Parnelles and Slott. Both wore grim expressions, clearly concerned about the message that had been imbedded in a routine UN report intercepted almost exactly three hours before. Corrigan had called them all immediately, waking Slott and Parnelles up. Corrine had only just returned from meeting with Ferguson’s friend, so wired on coffee she wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway.
“There are other typos in the message,” said Slott. “It may be nothing.”
“I doubt she’d be sloppy with something like that,” said Corrigan.
“November 8 at midnight, the team will be out of there by then,” said Slott.
“Maybe it’s tonight at midnight,” suggested Corrigan. “See, it’s out of sequence; maybe the wrong date was put there to throw anyone else off.”
“She’s not going to make a mistake like that,” said Slott.
“Then why ask for a pickup after they leave?”
“Let’s see where this is,” said Parnelles, rising.
Corrigan had brought an extra-large map with him. The DCI unfolded it and peered down at the spot the mission coordinator had marked. A lock of jet black hair fell across his forehead. Parnelles’s eyes had immense bags beneath them. The looks that appeared rugged by day seemed merely craggy at three in the morning.
“Fifty miles south of the site, along the coast, if you read the numbers as longitude and latitude, with minutes and decimals,” said Slott softly. “Just due south of Kawaksan.”
Parnelles grunted. “You have satellite maps of this?”
Slott slid over a folder.
“I think, uh, we ought to run the team in there,” said Corrigan. His voice squeaked.
“How would Thera get there?” asked Corrine, looking at the map. “She wouldn’t walk fifty miles.”