by Michael Crow
“Hunh. Good idea, some guy on the Russkis’ backs. Good idea, exchange in Mistah Kim’s suite. Nobody fool with us there. Dinner, I think, no worries. What we gotta watch is moving from hotel to airport after exchange. Anybody want to hit us, they do it then.”
“That’s when I’d strike, if I was on the other team,” I say.
“How you do it, if you a bad guy?”
“Three-car block, somewhere where the airport road leaves the city, enters the suburbs. Have to see the route to be sure, but I’d pick a place where traffic’s pretty thin, maybe an exit ramp. One car in front of Kim’s stops, two others come up fast, bump his butt and block a turn. Very close, cars touching. Quick snatch, no shooting unless Kim’s guys start it. Gone in thirty seconds.”
“I think Mistah Kim’s guys see anything like that coming, they shoot the shit out of the front blocker, drive real fast around it, and make it to airport okay.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I say. “One thing. Allison says there’s got to be no deviation from Mister Kim’s ordinary behavior and methods. I’m a deviation. How do we handle that?”
“Two men, always. Me and one of my guys. Two this time, you just a new guy, no big deal.”
“So how do we behave?”
“Kind of disappear, you know? Never real close to Mistah Kim. At dinner, we stand at bar, sit at a separate table. At meeting, we’re like statues. Don’t move, don’t talk, don’t stare. Act like we don’t understand shit. Usually there’s a couple of Russkis, acting just like that. Never make eye contact, pretend they don’t exist. You sense anything about to happen, you let me know before you act, right? Same-same for me. We make any moves, we move together, understand?”
“Sure. No problem.” And that’s half-true. I’ll team with Sonny, unless my cell vibrates and Allison gives me a word. Then I’ll move so fast it’ll be over before Sonny or anyone else can blink twice.
It’s what might happen after I’m done, what Sonny might try if he doesn’t like it, that troubles me a little. Allison’s factored that into the plan, for sure. Which means Allison reckons I’m expendable.
Nothing personal. Just business. Right, Allison? What asshole dreamed up that rationalization? Why do assholes like me go into situations, knowing that’s the twisted ethic? Answer: because we think we’re so good, so deadly, that nobody can take us down.
Never shows up in any postmortem: inflated ego as cause of death. The actual physical agent—bullet, knife, whatever—never would have found its mark if our fucked delusions hadn’t led us into the kill zone in the first place.
Allison and her kind know this, they count on it. I liked her better when she acted as if she had scruples, when she was still pretending—back in D.C., back in California—that I wasn’t just a tool she needed to do one thing and would leave behind without thinking twice after the thing was done.
Wonder if she ever worries I realize that? She sure didn’t bother acting or pretending today. Wonder if she ever considers I might not dig it, might really escape and evade, then come hard after her?
She should be afraid.
If she isn’t, she knows things I never will.
Fine clear morning, crisp air. Busan doesn’t look too bad on the way to the airport, from behind the tinted glass of one of Kim’s Lincolns. I’ve seen much worse. ROKs with Daewoos at the gate don’t hesitate, just wave our convoy through that single gate to the private aviation sector. A Gulfstream IV with that little Korean magic circle painted on its tail is warming up outside the hangar. The 747 is inside, asleep.
“Oh, he only uses the big one for longish hauls,” Nadya says, walking up to me once we’re out of the cars and on the tarmac. We didn’t get together, didn’t even speak, on the single day we could have, but she seems close to her usual cheerful, mocking self. “The big one’s for Singapore, Bangalore, Kuala Lumpor, Guangzhou, all the faraway places where our Mister Kim has assembly plants or factories or offices.”
“Sure,” I say.
“Vlad’s a shortish haul, relative to those. Anyway, Mister Kim doesn’t consider the airport there adequate for his 747. Something about runway length, careless air traffic controllers, poor ground crews,” she chatters on.
I watch Kim and Yoon, his numbers man, head up the gangway into the Gulfstream. Trailing Yoon is a stranger, tall Korean in maybe his late twenties carrying a big aluminum Halliburton.
“So who’s the new guy? Baggage handler?” I ask.
“Oh, that’s Tommy. Some kind of MIT genius, a wizard with computers. Whatever you do, don’t go near that case of his. He has guard-dog reflexes about that case,” Nadya says.
“What’s so special about a laptop?”
“It’s Tommy’s special laptop. He never lets anyone around it. Not even Mister Kim,” Nadya says. “NEC’s most powerful model. But Tommy, I’m told, has tweaked and supertuned it. Way beyond anything that comes from the factory. MIT Media Lab special. That’s why he’s so proprietary.”
“Don’t see any need for a guy like that and his gear. On a simple merchandise purchase.”
“Ah, think chemist doing a purity test on a cocaine buy,” Nadya says, then walks to the gangway, goes on up.
Damn! The item the Russians are selling is computer-related. Hardware of some type? Software’s more likely. I’m racing through the thousands of possibilities when Sonny waves me over, we board the Gulfstream. Soon as we’re in, the little Japanese flight attendant—she has that lifeless porcelain-doll face, but I can’t be certain she’s the same one we’ve flown with before—levers the door shut, bows, points toward some empty seats.
Sonny and I sit, buckle up. The setup’s like Kim’s U.S. Gulfstream: no rows, just a lounge with big leather chairs. Kim, Yoon, and the wizard are at the far end, facing forward. Nadya’s a couple of seats forward, her back to the portholes. Sonny and I will be flying backward. Doesn’t bother me, though Sonny’d prefer another arrangement, judging from the way he fidgets.
“Comfortable, Mister Prentice?” Kim calls. “Looking foward to the trip?”
“Absolutely, Mister Kim,” I say.
“Your first visit to Vladivostok, I believe?”
“Yessir, it will be.”
“Well, to be frank, it is one of those places that could be pleasant, should be interesting at least, but manages to be neither. In fact, it’s pretty damned nasty.”
This draws smiles from Yoon, Nadya and Sonny.
“But, then, we can’t always choose our venues in business,” Kim says. “Or with whom we do business, regrettably.”
“I understand, sir,” I say. “In my position, though, unpleasant, uninteresting, and nasty are actually an advantage.”
“How is that, Mister Prentice?”
“Encourages total concentration, total focus on my particular task,” I say. And maybe pushing it a little, I add: “Also provides an ideal environment for judicious application of my particular skills.”
No reaction for a moment. I have gone too far.
Then Kim laughs, and everybody else smiles. “Very aptly put, Mister Prentice. Truthful, too, I imagine,” he says. “I’m very much hoping, however, that you won’t have to apply any of your particular skills on this trip.”
“I’m sure it won’t be necessary, sir.”
twenty-five
VLAD. FADED NORTHERN COLORS IN THIN NORTHERN light. Rust-streaked steel, mold-stained concrete, cracked bricks and pitted mortar, peeling paint.
It could have been beautiful. Maybe it was once, little more than a century ago, when energy and money began turning a frontier outpost into a permanent city, rising on low, terraced hills from a fan of bays and inlets ribbed by peninsulas.
I can see this as we make our approach, angling in from the seaward side. The heart of the town is compact, buildings of three, maybe five stories, lots of decorative work around windows and entrances, reminds me a lot of places I’ve seen in old Austrian parts of Central Europe, down to the pastel stucco facades. But gaps have been t
orn in the rows, featureless concrete boxes crammed in. Also a lot of new work rising here and there, international corporate style: steel and glass. The working harbor—wharves, cranes, warehouses, a web of railroad tracks—is the usual wasteland. And so is everything surrounding the old center. Hard-worn blocks of classic Stalinist-style apartment slabs, a monotony of poured-concrete warrens nine to twelve floors high, and more still being added, probably using fifty-year-old blueprints.
I look away and catch Nadya’s eye as the Gulfstream banks and drops. She makes a sour face, points with her thumb toward the porthole. We’re passing fast over a huge, bleak, nearly deserted square. There’s a monumental bronze statue in the middle, the figure’s limbs too heavy, awkward. One very tall monolith flanks one edge of the square, dominating the smaller, older buildings around the other three sides.
“Square of the Fighters for the Soviet Power in the Far East,” Nadya says when I look back.
“Is that a leftover slogan? Too ridiculous to be anything else,” I say.
“The name,” Nadya says. “Even now. The ugly white box is the government building. People call it the White House.”
“Gimme a break,” I say.
“Well, this is still Russia, Terry, not one of the independents like the Baltic states or Kazakhstan. There is one rather large difference now, though.”
“What’s that?”
“People here can laugh at such names without fearing arrest for slandering the state.” Nadya smiles.
“People here can’t get arrested for nothing,” Sonny offers. “Any kinda crime you like, here you can do it. Police? Hunh. Criminals are laughing, damn straight, ’cause nobody knows who’s a crook and who’s a cop. Both behave same.”
I’d thought Kim was absorbed in quiet discussion with Yoon and the wizard, but apparently he’s aware of us. “Very different from Busan, isn’t that right, Mister Park?” he says.
“Good order in Busan, Mistah Kim. Everything top-class. Everything kept clean. New subways, big highways. And no street crime,” Sonny says.
“Exactly. It really makes you wonder about the Russians. How on earth did they become a superpower, develop a nuclear arsenal, orbit space stations?” Kim shakes his head, looks at me. “I’m not referring to the crime problem, of course, Mister Prentice. That’s a natural corollary of the collapse of any police state. It takes a while for order to reassert itself in a positive way. No, you’ll see what I mean when we’re on the ground.”
“How so, sir?”
“All the best new buildings, all the decent reconstructions and renovations of the old ones, were done by Korean, Chinese, and Italian construction workers, financed by foreign corporations setting up to do business here. Not by the Russians. Everything shoddy, shabby, recently made but already deteriorating, you can be sure it was done by Russians. You don’t find that careless sloth in Korea, any more than you do in Japan or Singapore. And that’s why I often wonder about missiles and space stations.”
“And that is the prime reason there is no more Soviet Union,” Nadya says. A Korean of Kim’s father’s generation would bristle at a woman asserting herself, but Kim doesn’t seem to mind at all. He seems to like it.
“The Soviets spent all their money on weapons tech, employed all their best minds on military matters, and rewarded them handsomely, by their standards,” Nadya says. “It drove the state bankrupt, being so single-minded, so paranoid. Moscow did not believe in tears. Nor in dangerously wired electrical systems in cheap apartment blocks, faulty plumbing and heating systems, inadequate food supplies, any of that. Because the nomenklatura never had to endure any of that. No wonder the people got fed up, restless, and slipped the leash soon as it loosened a little.”
“I believe that’s correct,” Kim says. “But, you know, I think there’s also something self-destructive in the Russian soul. An inheritance of history, nothing to do with ethnicity or genetics.”
“They do often seem that way, don’t they?” Nadya says. Is there more than a little irony in her voice? Kim doesn’t acknowledge it.
“Yes. That’s why they trouble me,” he says. “I’d much rather deal with the Chinese. They’re devious and duplicitous, of course. But self-interest, self-preservation is always paramount. They never act self-destructively when thwarted. Russians? You can’t be so sure.”
“In those specific terms, our special Russians are quite sinicized, I’m sure, Mister Kim,” Nadya says. “Love themselves madly, the generals do. Self-detonation would never cross their greedy little minds. Nor are they candidates for spontaneous combustion.”
Kim laughs. “Thank you for the trenchant analysis, Doctor Zheryova. You have very effectively put me and my generalizations in their place.”
“Not by design, Mister Kim.”
“But properly, nevertheless, Doctor. I’m aware I have tendencies toward old Korean insularity.”
First time I’ve heard Nadya’s last name. False as her first, for sure. But the “doctor” bit, that could be right. Probably she does have a Ph.D. Worked hard to earn it, then winds up going around posing as an expensive prostitute in shitholes like Vlad. But that’s just this op, and my own insularity. No doubt she poses as other things, at other levels in other places I’ll never know about.
The Best Eastern Hyundai isn’t the Lotte. The amenities are international standard, so’s the management and desk staff, but the rest of the help is all local: deliberately slow, unsmiling, sullen. Fuck ’em. What I’m thinking about, sitting at the bar having a beer with Sonny, what’s pushed the computer question out of mind, is the fifty klicks between the hotel and the airport. An hour and a half, that’s how long it took the two new Lada limos that apparently belong to Kim’s small Vlad branch office to get us to the hotel, even though the drivers, resident Koreans, drove aggressively, almost suicidally.
The road’s just a piece of shit nobody could navigate faster. Narrow, narrow-shouldered, potholed, and half-blocked here and there by heavy equipment generally used to repair and improve highways, but looking like it’s simply been abandoned there, nobody at all working. Major cramp in our style, if we have to move quick and slick for the plane. Somebody better have a fallback plan. A chopper’d be best, but I’m not counting on one.
Nadya, at least, is smooth as a mink. Within twenty minutes after arrival, max, I feel her slink up next to me, warm and sweet-smelling, her rooms sweep obviously accomplished. She’s so good. Nobody—not even a professional watcher—would suppose for a minute she was anything but the real thing: a Russian working girl plying her trade in a foreigners’ hotel. Just the right mix of hard whore calculation and seduction in her chat and laugh. The perfect calibration of makeup and clothes, down to the shade of red lacquer on the fake nails she’s glued over her real ones. I nod to Sonny: good to go. He drains his beer, walks over to the table where Kim, old Yoon, and Tommy the Wizard are sitting, murmurs to Kim, them follows them to the elevator.
“Dollars,” I say to Irena, as Nadya’s calling herself at the moment for the benefit of any long ears in the vicinity.
“Nyet, nyet. Euros only,” she insists, but trailing her fingers down my arm, eyes bright and inviting. We engage in a little more friendly negotiation. Maybe three minutes after Kim and company have left, she puts on her biggest smile, says, “Da. Da. Is okay.” We go up to my room.
“Christ!” she says, once we’re inside, pulling off one false eyelash set. “Feel like such a bloody tart, done up like this.”
“Well, you look a perfect bloody tart,” I say. “You go down to the bar alone, little Jap sararimen in blue suits will be patting Irena’s sweet ass, offering many, many yen for your services.”
“Bloody nuisance, that. Well, I’m dragging you with me as much as I can, since I have to stay done up like this,” she says. “Ouch. Bloody underwire push-up bras! I’d like to torture the man who invented them.”
“Think his name was Howard Hughes. And he’s already dead.” I say.
“Strange fact f
or you to know, Terry. Or are you having me on?”
“What do you think?”
“Well…I think perhaps our Terry, crypto-clandestine warrior, has a bit of a kinky flip side. Dress up in women’s clothing sometimes, do we, love? Ever wear, say, pantyhose, Terry?”
“Sure. Black nylon.”
“Balls.” Nadya snorts.
“Exactly. Helps keep those snug and warm, as well as legs. We all wore pantyhose under our camo. Gets real cold at night in the desert.”
Nadya tilts her head, regards me with her slightly canted eyes. Big doubts visible in them. Then she replaces the eyelash set. “What did we agree on, darling, down at the bar?”
“I believe you said, ‘Super time, you can’t believe.’ Or something to that effect.”
“Ah, light moment’s over, Terry. Work, remember? Did I say thirty minutes? An hour?”
“Thirty.”
“Then that means”—she looks at her wristwatch—“I can leave in twenty-seven. I’ll go up to my room, contact Allison, see if she’s located the dinner spot. You go over to Kim’s, check in with Sonny, familiarize yourself with the layout. Kim’s suite is quite clean, except for my mike. And don’t dare make any snide remarks about the delicious Irena to Sonny or anyone else. You will pay dearly for them later, I promise.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Irena. Work, remember?”
“Stay with Kim for an hour. Then meet me back here.”
“How’ll you get in?”
She holds up a thin plastic wafer. “I believe you’ve seen me use one of these before. You do remember, don’t you?”
“Vaguely. But wait a minute, wasn’t it Allison who broke into my room at the airport hotel that night? And kind of assaulted me?”
“Oh bugger off, you delinquent.” Then she laughs. “Well, at least you’re not one of those tensed-up types. Hell to work with, they are. I much prefer relaxed.”