by Gene Riehl
They set their glasses on the counter, and Bethany grabbed a stainless-steel omelette pan from a cabinet over the gas range. She lit the burner and allowed the pan to heat while she went into the small GE refrigerator for the makings. Back at the range, she cracked three eggs into the pan, then added a little milk. She sliced some ham, chopped the slices into little cubes, threw them into the mix, grated a small mountain of cheese and threw that in, along with chunks of onion and tomato. She pulled a plate from another cabinet and handed it to Monk, then gestured toward a table just beyond an archway leading to what looked like the dining room.
“You can set the table while I watch the omelette,” Bethany told him. She reached into a drawer next to the sink and pulled out a knife, fork, and spoon, handed them to Monk. He took them, along with the plate, through the door to the table, laid a place for himself. A few moments later she joined him with the omelette pan. She lowered the pan to his plate and slid the omelette onto it.
“Salt and pepper?” she asked. “Or some toast?”
“No toast, but hot sauce would be great. Or salsa, if you’ve got it.”
“That’s right, you are a California boy, aren’t you?”
She zipped back to the refrigerator, returned with a plastic tub of fresh salsa. Monk spooned it over his omelette, then put the salsa aside and used his fork to eat a bite. Bethany was watching. He looked at her.
“What can I say? It’s a masterpiece.”
She smiled as she sat down across the table from him. Monk put his fork down and looked at her. Suddenly Bethany’s eyes were not as cheerful.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Your white Lexus guy has probably gone on to somebody else by now.” He looked at her. “I’m not going to let anybody hurt you.”
She lifted her shoulders and dropped them. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. You’re right, I know, but …” Her voice died. Her eyes seemed to focus on something very far away, before they swung back to him. “Listen to me. I invite you to stay for dinner, and I won’t even let you eat.”
He started to protest, but she reached over and touched his arm.
“Eat,” she said. “Enjoy your omelette. Then we can talk.”
He left Bethany’s house at a few minutes after nine o’clock, but before Monk started the Saab he reached into the glove compartment and pulled out his spare house key to replace the one he’d just given her. He slipped the key onto the same ring with his car keys, then fired up the engine and headed back toward Lisa at the loft. As he looked for Dolly Madison Boulevard to get him back to the George Washington Parkway, he shook his head.
What the hell had he been thinking back there with Bethany?
Their conversation after dinner had been a lot more intimate than he’d liked. The gin she’d kept drinking after they moved to her living room had hit her much harder than his one martini had hit him. Her insistence on apologizing again for her behavior in the hot tub had been far too detailed—way too anatomical—than was necessary. Detailed enough that Monk began to see a reprise on Bethany’s big couch, specific enough to get him out of her house before anything could happen.
The two different Bethany’s continued to surprise him, Monk admitted, although he’d seen it often enough to know better. There was sober Bethany—a subdued chemistry professor dedicated to research—and there was drunk Bethany—dedicated to getting into somebody’s pants. No wonder he was drawn to her. He had a history with such a woman, with a bunch of women like Bethany.
Annie Fisher had been exactly the same way, a respectable veterinarian by day, a staggering harlot by night—in the best possible meaning of the word. Until she started the twelve-step program and turned into a respectable veterinarian twenty-four hours a day … and not nearly as much fun.
Annie and Bethany, Monk thought. And him. Flawed, all three of them. Baggage enough for an entire airport. He’d loved Annie to spite his father, she’d told him in the bloom of her self-improvement, and she was probably right. The old pastor would have shit. And now Bethany was rearing her very attractive head. The two of them were a match made in … Monk almost said heaven, before he laughed out loud. Definitely not heaven. The electricity they seemed to generate was a whole lot more earthly than heavenly. And something he had no interest in pursuing. Not when he had someone like Lisa, and Monk recognized the contradiction. Lisa Sands wasn’t a drunk, she didn’t gamble, but she excited him more than the other two put together. So what was that all about? Monk admitted he had no damned idea. What he did know was that he wasn’t about to make a mistake that would send Lisa away.
So why had he done what he’d just done? Why give her a key?
Bethany was frightened, but giving her his address would have been enough. Inviting her to come directly to the loft if she had any more trouble with the guy in the Lexus would have been enough, but giving her a key was way dumb. Monk pictured Bethany coming through the door and surprising Lisa as she came out of the shower. Jesus. He banished the picture from his mind, then made the left turn onto Dolly Madison Boulevard.
Lisa would be waiting in the living room, he told himself again. She would want to know how it went with Bethany.
Jesus.
TWENTY-FIVE
At Division 39 Headquarters in Pyongyang there were seven possibilities.
Besides the lieutenant general and his top colonel—the two men who ran the covert operations directorate and were therefore above suspicion—there were only seven men familiar with Sung Kim’s art-theft operations in the United States.
None of them knew about her mission to assassinate the prime minister of Japan, but that didn’t matter. Now that Sung Kim had reported the FBI’s interest in Thomas Franklin, the wet job was just as imperiled as the rest of it. And she had to be right about her suspicion that the Americans had somehow developed a mole in Division 39. There was simply no other explanation for the FBI agents’ presence at Franklin’s mansion the night of the party.
Which meant that one of the seven was a traitor.
General Pak Yong-sik had begun the process of discovery by administering polygraph tests to each of them. At the end of the day, there were only three men left, three whose lie-detector test results were inconclusive. Further interrogation of the three began around midnight, in the basement chamber beneath Pyongyang’s Central Prison.
Lee Song-jun was first.
The civilian intelligence analyst’s eyes darted toward the general as he was dragged through the chamber door by two uniformed guards, but he knew better than to speak. That it would only be worse if he begged.
General Pak waited patiently while a stumpy man in a white butcher’s apron and thick eyeglasses strapped Lee into the plain wooden chair that sat in the center of the room, directly beneath a wide fluorescent light fixture bright enough to cast shadows on the subject’s sallow terrified features. As the leather belts were tightened around his arms and legs, holding his arms tightly pinned to his sides, Lee began to writhe in the chair. His head swung to the right, his eyes on the table next to him, on the apparatus itself, then at the small man. Again he looked at the general, but this time he couldn’t make himself keep quiet.
“Why?” he asked, his voice barely discernible. “I told you I know nothing … I told you this morning I don’t—”
Lee shut his mouth when he saw General Pak nod at the small man. The small man reached to the table and picked up a pair of bolt cutters.
“No,” Lee whimpered. “Please, no.” His eyes were wild now. “Ask me anything … but I don’t know what you …”
His voice drained away as the small man stepped up and grabbed Lee’s right hand. Lee tried to jerk it away, but the strap was too tight.
“I don’t know anything,” he pleaded. “Why would you do this to—”
Lee’s face blanched as the small man tightened the jaws of the bolt cutter around his manacled wrist. Lee’s eyes widened and he began to shout.
“No! Not my hand! For the love of me
rcy, not my hand!”
General Pak nodded at the stumpy man, who applied pressure on the jaws. Lee began to scream as blood formed around the dull steel blades.
But the little man released the pressure, then pulled the bolt cutters back.
Lee quit screaming and began to sob.
“Thank you,” he said. “Oh, God, thank—”
His voice stopped as the dwarfish torturer slipped the jaws back on, this time around Lee’s pinky finger, and with a quick movement snapped them closed.
Lee’s finger fell to the floor.
It was rolling toward the recessed drain under the chair before Lee began to wail, a siren of a scream that had to have been heard by the waiting ones.
“That was to capture your complete attention,” the general told him. “You told me you don’t know what I want, so let me reiterate. I am not interested in what you don’t know.”
Again he nodded at the short man, but this time the man returned the cutting tool to the table, next to the electrical generator that took up most of the tabletop. The short man picked up a pair of jumper cables, returned to Lee and clamped the copper jaws at the end of one cable to Lee’s right arm before bending to attach the other cable to a steel bar extending from the concrete floor. Then he picked up a control switch—it looked like a TV clicker—and handed it to the general.
“It is my wish,” General Pak said, “that you survive this interrogation, but in the end it will be up to you.”
Lee’s head went up and down, tears running down his cheeks, a wet stain forming on the front of his trousers. “Anything, General … please … I’ll tell you anything.”
“Just one question, then. Have you sold your comrades to the Americans?”
This time Lee shook his head side to side, and his voice was barely a croak. “I told you already … earlier today. How could you even suspect—”
General Pak touched a button on the clicker.
Lee’s body stiffened and he began to howl.
The general touched a second button and Lee slumped back, his eyes closed. A few moments later they opened again, but now they were filled with hopelessness. General Pak asked the same question. Lee gave a variation of the same answer, bucking and straining at his leather bonds, howling even louder now as the general lifted the clicker.
Twenty minutes later, the general decided that Lee Song-jun was not the mole. He motioned to the small man to unfasten Lee from the chair. Then he turned to the guards standing at the door to the room.
“The next one,” he told them. “Bring us the second man.”
TWENTY-SIX
Sung Kim made three complete circles around the camera store in Towson, Maryland with her radio scanner tuned to the FBI’s Washington Field Office channels before she was certain she wasn’t under surveillance. Knowing they’d be using secure radio channels, she wasn’t expecting to hear the agents talking with one another. Her scanner wasn’t able to decrypt the digital codes that carried their voices, but if the agents were out there, she would know it anyway. Whenever she stopped at a red light, whenever she made a turn to a different street, the brief raspy cough of a carrier wave when they used their radios would tell her all she needed to know.
The timing was critical for this part of the Nakamura job.
Yesterday at this time, Sung Kim had watched from her Volvo wagon in the parking lot across the street from Yardley’s Camera Exchange, as the big brown Konitax Camera distribution truck pulled away from the store and disappeared into traffic on its way back to the warehouse in Rockville. The shipment was there, right on schedule. The first part of the operation was complete.
Now, Saturday morning, she was in the same parking lot as ten o’clock arrived and the store opened for business. She waited until she saw Yardley’s small parking lot begin to fill with cars, then hurried across the street and into the store.
Good, she said to herself, as she saw that the salespeople were busy with the dozen or so customers already inside. She didn’t need a sales-clerk for what she needed. She passed beneath a large yellow banner that read ANNUAL CLEARANCE SALE on her way to the Konitax display at the rear of the store. The freshly unloaded boxes of digital cameras were stacked head high back there, and she moved directly to the stack.
Sung Kim’s eyes ran up and down the boxes, until she saw the one she wanted, the one packed especially for her by someone she would never meet. She had to be careful not to topple the stack as she withdrew the box, before she turned and walked to the cash register up front. On the way, she couldn’t help thinking how well the box had been prepared. It was tricky to get the weight just right, and this time it was perfect.
The middle-aged register clerk with reading glasses hanging from a braided leather strap around her neck smiled as Sung Kim walked up and set the box on the counter. “Did you find everything you needed?” she asked.
Sung Kim smiled back. “I found exactly what I needed.”
The register clerk turned the Konitax box over, found the bar code and ran her handheld scanner across it. Then she frowned and picked up the box, examining it now. Sung Kim saw that one of the corners was very slightly crinkled, hardly noticeable but damaged nonetheless. It was the corner opposite the short black-ink mark Sung Kim had been looking for on the carton.
“Look’s like this one might have landed on its edge, honey,” the clerk said. “I’m sure there’s no damage, but we could open the box and make sure.” She glanced back toward the rear of the store. “Why don’t I just run get you another one?”
“Please don’t bother. These cameras are packed so well you’d have to throw one off a building to hurt it.”
The clerk laughed. “You’re right about that. I’ve never seen a Konitax damaged in shipping, but if we’re wrong you just be sure to bring it back.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Monday was cleanup day at the SOG.
Unlike the field office downtown, which had a nightly gang of security-cleared cleaning people, the men and women assigned to the Special Operations Group had to do the work themselves. The covert nature of the place made it too risky to employ a janitorial service, which meant that every Monday, unless a fast-breaking case intervened, one of the eight teams had the duty of cleaning what little office space there was, along with the bathrooms and shower, the locker room, the wiretap room, and the garage itself.
This week it was Monk’s team’s turn.
So he and the rest of Team 3 spent most of the morning with brooms, with bottles of Formula 409 and Windex, spraying and wiping, cleaning and dusting, tidying up enough to make the place bearable for another week. Not very glamorous, the Monday duty, a far cry from what you see on television, but a lot more real. They finished about noon, and Monk filled out an annual leave slip for the rest of the day.
Back in the Saab and on his way down I-95 toward Fredericksburg, Monk reached to turn up the radio, tuned as usual to WJZW, the jazz station he preferred. He recognized the distinctive guitar of Ottmar Liebert. He sat back and tried to enjoy the music, hoping to drown out the increasing wave of negativity that threatened to fill up the car. On his way for another hopeless try at getting rid of the dome house his father had saddled him with, Monk couldn’t hold back his resentment at what appeared to be the rest of the old man’s legacy.
The Madonna wasn’t the only thing.
It was all the rest of it. His memory. His driving. All of it. Pastor Monk had been the same way, before his mind slipped all the way over the edge, before the day the Fredericksburg police had called Monk at the office. Had told him his father was picked up wandering downtown, unable to give his name, address, or phone number. Without the wallet in his pocket, they still would have been trying to figure out what to do with him. A week later the doctor had given Monk the final diagnosis. Remembering her words, Monk’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. He still avoided using the actual name of the disease.
He came up on a slower moving car and switched lanes.
Wha
t was he going to do, he wondered, if his own PET scan went the same way? How would he make a living? He couldn’t be an FBI agent anymore, that much was certain. Without a memory, he would be useless to the bureau. Pretty much useless to everybody. His shoulders sagged as he formed an image of his father’s eighty-pound body on his deathbed. He forced the image away and reminded himself that the disease was not necessarily inherited. Having a father die from it doubled the odds against him, but there were lots of other factors just as important. Just because Pastor Monk had died not knowing who he was didn’t mean Puller Monk would end up the same way. It was just as unlikely as his becoming the rest of what his father had been. The pastor had destroyed his own family, driven Monk’s mother to suicide, refused even to speak to Monk in the years since, not until the day the son of a bitch had needed a place to die. No matter what the PET scan ended up discovering, Monk knew he would never turn into something like that.
At least that’s what he kept telling himself on the way to Fredericksburg. Until he was pulling into the driveway of his father’s ridiculous dome. He saw that his Realtor, Darcy Edwards, was already there. She had the buyers with her in the Cadillac. Monk couldn’t make them out very well, but he tried to tell himself they were smiling. By the time he got out of the car, the three of them were waiting near the front door. As he approached, Darcy gave him a big grin and a furtive thumbs-up. Monk felt his own smile forming. After so many disappointments—after dropping the price three times already—he was ready for her optimism.
Darcy made the introductions.
“Sam here is an engineer,” she said. “Microsoft just transferred him to their new facility over in Spotsylvania, and Janet does interior design.”
Sam Fitzpatrick was thin, but only halfway down. He was narrow in the shoulders, but potbellied and wide-hipped below, and wore tan khaki pants and a worn-out blue dress shirt. His wife was much better dressed, in a no-nonsense dark green suit with a purple scarf, and appeared to be a whole lot more attentive as well. The interior designer was already looking past Monk at the dome, but her brown eyes were narrow now, and his smile began to fade as he found himself wishing she were a schoolteacher instead.