by Ron McMillan
I spoke Korean to the nearest guy.
‘Mr Cho sent you?’
‘Yes.’
Rose looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face. ‘Just who the hell is Mr Cho?’
‘He owns nightclubs.’
She nodded, as if that explained a lot. It did.
Chapter Thirty-one
A few miles later we pulled over and Rose asked one of the Koreans what was happening. I got the gist of what he said, but Rose translated for me anyway:
‘They’re going to switch us to a different car before heading for Seoul.’
‘That makes sense.’
‘I’ve been thinking about how my face being on all the posters changes things.’
‘I’m sorry about that. I never – ’
‘It’s done already, but now I have to get on the phone to my folks and Francis, put their minds at ease, then put some distance between you and me.’
‘Get out of Seoul and turn up in a day or two, on your own.’
‘Right. Make a point of being seen arriving alone.’
‘Thanks to the German guy, the police are still going to give you a rough ride.’
‘Not if you get busy in the meantime. They have no actual proof that we were still together in Suwon. When I get back to Seoul, I stick to a story that we met up, but soon went our separate ways. If you can clear your name, I am not going to be in trouble for spending a day with you.’
The heightened crisis had brought about a stark change in her, and now I saw the cool professional who used to juggle millions of dollars of other people’s money before the rest of us had breakfast. Rose pulled a writing pad and pen from her backpack, and while we exchanged phone numbers she explained to the driver what we needed to do. I sat by, meekly acquiescent while she took care of things.
I hoped that police alerts would still be based on the notion that we had to be somewhere near Geoje Island. Even if word of our near-capture at Suwon had already gone out, surely they wouldn’t waste too many man hours on trains leaving the capital. We pulled up near a main branch station on the outskirts of the city.
‘Just when you make up your mind about Francis, you have to leave town again.’
‘I’ll speak to him tonight. You should do the same.’
‘Speak to Francis? Do you think he would like that?’
‘Funny. Call Jung-hwa. You owe her that much.’ She squeezed the breath out of me with a sisterly hug, then walked towards the station without looking back, shadowed discreetly by one of Mr Cho’s men. I wondered if Francis knew just how lucky he was.
Rose was right. I had to speak to Jung-hwa, even if only to find out how deeply she was involved in all this.
The Korean slipped back into the car.
‘Ga-seo,’ he said. She’s gone.
I sat low in the back seat as the driver weaved an indirect trail through sprawling suburbs, one watchful eye on his mirrors. Beside him, his partner kept eyes front, sweeping from one side of the road to the other, scanning parked cars and quiet side streets for any threat. Nightclubs in Korea operate on the fringes of organised crime, and the men Mr Cho had trusted to deliver me were professionals. To watch them at work was almost comforting. The chirrup of a phone broke into my thoughts, and the front seat passenger passed a mobile back to me.
‘No problems?’ Mr Cho.
‘No, it’s cool. Thanks, I mean thanks for everything – ’
‘We can talk later. My friends will bring you somewhere safe.’
‘Thanks, Mr Cho.’ I was speaking to myself. I tapped the shoulder of the guy in front and he palmed the mobile.
We pulled up in the gritty eastern district of Chongnyangni, where buildings off the main drag were densely-packed and single-storeyed with sagging tiled roofs. My escorts pulled soft bags from the boot of the car and led me up the stairs of an ugly three-storey building that stood alone among the traditional houses of a back street. Before I saw a sign or heard the slap of instep on leather, the peculiar odour mix of dust and dried sweat told me all I needed to know. Mr Cho met us at the entrance to the gym wearing his Tae Kwon-do uniform. My escorts bowed deeply, twice. Once to Mr Cho, and once to the Korean flag on the far wall. The dojang had maybe twelve people stretching and kicking and punching at bags and at mirrored reflections. My escorts pitched their holdalls onto a corner pile and plucked folded uniforms from a neat line of pegs under a line of windows that ran the lengths of two sides of the room. I kicked my shoes off and bowed to the flag before following Mr Cho into the gym.
‘We will start soon,’ he said. My participation in training was a given.
‘Can I make a telephone call first?’
‘Use the mobile phone on my desk.’
I backed out of the dojang, bowed to the flag, and turned into the small office with the wide window that looked out on the training area. The mobile was where Mr Cho said I would find it. I dialled the Hyatt switchboard, asked for Naz’s room, and listened to the telephone ring out until a voicemail prompt asked me if I wanted to leave a message.
‘Naz. It’s me. I’m worried about you, so for goodness sakes keep your head down and watch out for yourself. I’ll call back soon.’ I hung up, and headed back to the gym, where Mr Cho waited.
‘You have your tobok?’
My Tae Kwon-do uniform was in a bag at Seoul Station. Mr Cho spoke quietly to a grey-haired man who was stretched out on the floor nearby. I winced when he leapt from full splits to upright in one move. He told me his name was Cheung, and while we shook hands he measured me up with a look before going along the pegs reading the labels on the inside collars of the uniforms. He passed me a folded tobok, holding it by the belt that was wrapped neatly around it.
‘Ken-chun-ayo?’ Is that OK? He meant the belt, which like the tobok, was crisp and new and white, a novice’s.
I took the uniform with two hands and stole a furtive glimpse of Mr Cheung’s belt, grey-black with off-white flashes at its tips that made him a fifth-degree black-belt. He was about forty-five years old, and he was one of the students. Most of the other belts in the room told similar tales of decades of devotion to the national martial art.
‘That’s fine, Mr Cheung.’ In this kind of company, a novice’s outfit was about right.
I stripped off and changed as quickly as I could, then found a quiet bit of floor to warm up, and absently began to worry how much of a showing-up I was about to experience at the hands and feet of enthusiasts who trained several times a week.
Martial arts movies and magazines are obsessed with the notion of higher spiritual planes achieved through selfless devotion to the art of hand-to-hand combat. If such planes exist, I never saw one. Just the same, I knew that it was possible during dedicated training for a mind to divert itself to a place far removed from a body being worked at full steam. I was well into the familiar torture of the two-hour training session before it occurred to me that Mr Cho was forcing me to go there, to a place where the most opaque of conundrums clarify.
Before the class started, Mr Cho told me this was one of Seoul’s few remaining adult groups. Modern Tae Kwon-do, the Olympic sport, is a kid’s game, and no amount of guile or experience can counter the whippet speed and instantaneous reactions of youth. Most adults were too busy working and raising families to keep up their training, but Mr Cho’s classes still drew long-time students from all over town.
The training reminded me why, after more than fifteen years, I still made my way to a dojang as often as I could. The regular sweat sessions were part of a payback process, one that chipped away at the damage I did to myself from too much alcohol, long hours in the studio and binges of the lousy food that turns so many Westerners into lard buckets. The hedonist in me disregarded concerns over a plainly excessive lifestyle, but in turn, the pragmatist laughed in the hedonist’s face, and quietly relished every moment spent at lung-stretching pace in the gym.
Fifteen minutes of careful warming down brought the training session to an end. Mr Cho wen
t to the office to change while the rest of us did the informal locker-room thing at the line of pegs by the window. Mr Cheung and two others complimented me on my fighting skills, flattery that I talked down as modestly as possible. I felt like a house painter having his whitewash brushwork simultaneously admired by Rembrandt and Van Gogh.
I knocked on the office door and stepped into the room which, after the chilled neon of the dojang, felt cosy and dark. Mr Cho was talking on a telephone. I picked up his mobile and re-dialled Naz’s room at the Hyatt, but got the same unanswered ringing sound followed by the invitation to leave a message. Mr Cho wrapped up his call.
‘No answer from Naz,’ I said. ‘That’s twice, two hours apart.’
‘What about the mobile?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Your mobile. You told me to give her that number. Are there any messages?’
I had completely forgotten about it. I dug it from my bag, and as I thumbed the power switch, the Korean pop tune ring-tone came alive.
‘Naz?’
Complete silence. Then:
‘Alec, it’s me.’ Naz. Thank fuck, I thought. I mouthed her name to Mr Cho. He nodded.
‘Where are you? I’ve been calling the hotel. Are you OK?’
From the purple earpiece came only roaring mechanical noise, increasing in volume.
‘Naz? Are you there?’ The roaring receded, then:
‘She’s here alright.’
Oh no.
‘At a loss for words twice in one day, Brodie?’
I breathed deeply, tried to maintain some sort of control. Mr Cho looked on, concerned.
‘I’ll keep this simple Schwartz. You put so much as one finger on her, and I will hunt you down and bury you.’
‘Brave words.’
‘Brave nothing. I’ll break bones you’ve never even heard of. Then I will bury you and let dehydration do the rest. If you think I am bluffing you are even more stupid than I thought.’
‘You think about it. We have your ugly little friend, and we have the videotape. You have nothing. So save the movie hero bullshit threats for someone who’s listening.’
I was straining to hear him. There was roaring in my ears again, part internal seething and part fresh onslaught of screaming mechanical noise from the earpiece. Schwartz waited until the background din receded, and then he told me exactly what to do.
Chapter Thirty-two
Mr Cho pulled a jar from a desk drawer, spooned instant coffee into two cups and filled them from a thermos jug that lived on a shelf behind his chair. He handed me a cup, and waited. The man had the patience of a saint. I cradled the burning cup in a two-handed grip close to my lips and talked through the steam that swirled from it.
‘Schwartz has got Naz. I was right to worry about her, even if I was too late. I left her unprotected and vulnerable.’
‘What does he want?’
‘He wants me to surrender to the police, and to keep quiet about anything to do with K-N Group’s new stock market deal.’ I explained the GDR in detail. Mr Cho listened without interrupting, and spoke only when I finished.
‘If you do what he wants, how can you be sure that will make Naz safe?’
‘I can’t. But I do know how serious Schwartz and his friends are about the GDR. The Group’s survival depends on it. Their personal stakes must be in the many millions. They were somehow involved in what happened to Miss Hong, so how can I take a chance with Naz?’
It was about time I spared a thought for someone else, but even with the best of intentions, what could I achieve to make things better? I could do nothing for Naz from a police cell, so going to the authorities now, while the hunt for me was ongoing, was hardly an option. Worse, if word got to Chang and Schwartz that I was talking with the police, they would assume that I was spilling the beans on the GDR, something that in any case I had already done with the letters I posted this morning to the Press and to Whitehall. How the contents of those letters might affect Naz, I didn’t even want to consider.
‘There is another choice,’ said Mr Cho, as if reading the despair on my face.
‘What?’
‘Find out where your friend is.’
‘She could be anywhere.’
‘Think about your conversation with Schwartz. What did you learn?’
‘Apart from that he had Naz?’
‘Did it sound like he was talking on a, how do you call it – ’ he pointed to the office telephone on his desk. Unlike me, Mr Cho was still thinking straight.
‘A landline? No, I think it sounded like a mobile.’
‘Why? Could you hear something? Maybe they were in a car?’
I remembered the background din. ‘No, not traffic noises. It was sometimes very quiet, just the sound of Schwartz’s voice, then it quickly became very noisy, maybe like the sound of aircraft arriving.’
‘An airport?’
‘Hang on.’ Of course. Why hadn’t I thought of it earlier? I picked up the purple mobile and worked my way through the menu until a number came up. The last incoming caller, a mobile number – he had neglected to hide his caller ID. I dialled, and after a few seconds, I heard ringing.
‘Yoboseyo.’ Yes. I paused for a couple of seconds:
‘Schwartz. It’s me.’ I had to keep him on the line. There was a pause as if he was taken aback by me calling, and that worked fine for me.
‘What do you want now?’
I paused again, straining for anything at all, the smallest clue. Did it sound as if he was speaking from within a large open space?
‘Brodie?’
‘I was thinking – ’ Pause.
‘Thinking what?’ Still silence, but not just silence, something more than that. His voice, despite the tinny phone speaker, boomed like he was in a huge space, not out in the open but in a large indoor location. I might be on the right track – but my silence had gone on for too long.
‘What do you – ’
‘What if I do as you ask?’
‘What if you do?’ If only he’d keep talking. I stayed silent, and he spoke again:
‘I already told you. And don’t think I’m going to go through it again in detail. What do you take me for? You’re probably taping this.’
I wished I had thought of that.
‘How do I know you’ll do as you promised?’ Still, there was an airy silence at his end, but could I hear something brewing in the distance? Was I imagining a steady drone, building up, getting closer?
‘That is not the issue, Brodie, and you know it.’ He talked more loudly. The background noise was approaching, and growing fast.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s what happens if you don’t do as I – ’ He gave up as the roar exploded to a crescendo, drowning him out before it receded quicker than it had arrived. ‘It’s what will happen if you don’t do as you’re told that you should be concerned about.’
I had him. I knew that noise. It took an effort to keep the excitement out of my voice:
‘I’ll hand myself in tomorrow.’
‘Not a chance. If I don’t get a call from my police contact by midnight – ’ He left the sentence unfinished and the line went dead. I put the mobile in my pocket.
‘Mr Cho, you are a genius. I told you about the fake factory in the warehouse in Cholla-do? He’s there. The warehouse is on the edge of a military airfield. The roar I heard was fighter jets making low-level passes.’
‘Where is this warehouse?’
‘North of Kwangju, in open country, with rice fields all around, only one or two kilometres from the main highway. I can find it.’ I was getting ahead of myself. I looked at my watch, and my heart sank. Seven p.m. ‘Schwartz only gave me until midnight to hand myself in to the police, and the warehouse is five or six hours’ drive.’
‘Drive?’
He reached for a telephone book.
Chapter Thirty-three
Seven of us wearing dark track suits with the name of Mr Cho’s dojang on
our backs approached the security checkpoint. This was the bit that worried me most, where an alert official might connect my face to the sketches and photographs on notice boards and newspapers all across the country. Never mind that I was using a Swiss passport that said the guy in the photo – who even looked a little like me – was Berndt Tischler. When I asked about it, Mr Cho just shook his head. Some things I didn’t need to know.
We formed a ragged line for the X-ray machine and shoved our holdalls onto the rollers, Mr Cho first, with me close behind. As our bags disappeared into the machine, we shuffled forward casually.
Mr Cho walked through the detector frame. I glanced over my shoulder in time to see one of his students, the youngest one at the back of the line, stumble and go down hard. An airport gift shop bag burst against the polished floor, and eighteen shiny new golf balls flew off in eighteen different directions.
While every bystander within twenty yards watched four athletic men chase down bouncing golf balls I backed through the metal detector and past security guards whose smiles beamed everywhere except upon me. By the time the comic turn was over, Mr Cho and I were half way to the departure gate.
We took the nine p.m. to Kwangju, the last flight of the day between the capital and the biggest city in the country’s south-west, and an hour later, we piled aboard a black van outside the Kwangju terminal building. I looked at my watch. We had just under two hours before the midnight deadline Schwartz had set. We might still make it, but only if I guessed right – and only if they stayed where I thought they were.
A little over one hour later the van pulled up a hundred yards from the tall, windowless warehouse building which, surrounded by the impenetrable darkness of rice fields, stood out in the glare of floodlights fixed along its high roofline. Glimmers of cool fluorescence slipped out from beneath a concertinaed goods entrance. Four empty cars occupied lined parking spots a few metres away from the doorway. From a mile across country came the unbroken drone of highway traffic.