by Brian Haig
“Can I see her?”
He shrugged. “If you’d like. Just don’t talk to her.”
We entered a room off to the side. The walls and floors were thickly padded in some solid white material. The padding wasn’t for bouncing bodies off of, but was super-thick sound insulation. The lights in the ceiling were huge and very high-powered. The light was pure white and spectacularly bright, so bright it hurt your eyes and forced you to blink a lot, although even then it penetrated through your lids.
A woman was seated in a chair with her back turned to us. There were white straps completely immobilizing her, so she couldn’t move a limb or even her head. There was some kind of eye halter strapped around her head that forced her eyelids to stay open, which after a while gets pretty painful because the eyeballs get dry and sore. Even the chair was painted white. In fact, the only color in the room was the flesh tone of her skin. She was entirely naked. She’d been stripped and left nude to add to her humiliation and sense of vulnerability. The monochromatic whiteness was done to amplify the effects of her sleep deprivation. To multiply her humiliation, they would keep feeding her liquids and foods, so she peed and shat all over herself.
By the second or third day, she would be thoroughly exhausted, degraded, bored out of her wits, physically miserable, and, hopefully, ready to tell all. Even a Zen Buddhist who was nuts for meditation couldn’t withstand more than two or three days of this.
I walked to her front and studied her. She didn’t say a word. She just gave me a sharp, haughty look, but her expression did nothing to hide one simple, irreducible fact. The woman was utterly, breathtakingly beautiful. She had classically high cheekbones, large, alluring eyes, full, sensuous lips, and an exquisitely shaped face. Her hair was so thick and shimmery it almost looked artificial. Her body was an athlete’s fantasy, broad-shouldered, hard, sinewy muscles, and a washboard stomach. If there was an ounce of body fat on her, I couldn’t see where she hid it.
I felt uncomfortably like a voyeur, but my interest in studying Bales’s mate was purely professional. I had a theory bouncing around inside my head, and she was a vital piece in that puzzle.
I stared at her face, and she glared back defiantly. Faces can betray a lot about people. You can hide a lot of things about yourself, but a lifetime of expressions and attitudes eventually work themselves into a mask. Her mask spoke of supreme self-confidence, even arrogance. She had the face of someone who was used to commanding people. Well, sure, you might say, because beautiful women are often spoiled women, but this woman’s haughtiness wasn’t from being mollycoddled or indulged. She was an unusually disciplined, tough specimen, and her body didn’t get that way from lying around the house munching on bonbons and ordering the servants around.
I finally nodded at Mr. Kim that I’d seen enough, and we quietly slipped out.
Once we were back in the waiting room, Kim lit up another cigarette and asked, “What do you think?”
“I think you’re right. She’s going to be a bitch to break. She’s superbly conditioned, so the sleep deprivation will take much longer than normal. Plus she’s got an ego like a rock, so the humiliation’s going to roll off her back.”
He looked painfully unhappy to hear that, although I suppose I was only voicing what he and his technicians had already surmised.
I said, “Have you checked her teeth?”
“Of course. We found a cyanide pellet in the number three molar in the back.”
“No, I mean the quality of the dental work.”
“Yes, that too. Steel fillings, shoddy, coarse work.”
He seemed impressed that I would know to ask that. The one thing Communist spymasters nearly always overlook when they’re building camouflage for their spies is how truly lousy the dental work is in their own societies. If this woman had been born and bred in Chicago, she’d have silver or porcelain fillings and the work would reflect the level of craftsmanship demanded by a vain society that likes even repaired teeth to look like jewelry.
I leaned against the wall. “Why do you think North Korea would send a female agent that looks like her down here to work with Bales and Choi? And why would they position her in Bales’s house?”
“That’s what we’re hoping she’ll tell us.”
I glanced over at Carol, who was seated at the table playing the demure Korean girl who knew her place in this macho society.
“Did you hear her speak?” I asked her.
“I stood over her shoulder and listened to her most of the luncheon.”
“What’s her English like?”
“Excellent. Native quality, in fact. So were her manners. She used the fork and knife, even though the other American wives were using chopsticks. I thought that was interesting.”
I looked at Mr. Kim. “Maybe she’s one of those kids who were raised in that American village you mentioned?”
“Maybe.”
I turned back to Carol. “Any other thoughts?”
“I think it’s strange that she didn’t arrive here until five years ago.”
“Yeah, a little after Bales got assigned here.”
Kim quickly suggested, “A honeypot?”
“The timing would fit, I guess,” I admitted.
She certainly had the exquisite looks and body to be a honeypot, which to those uninitiated in the wormy arts of espionage is a woman who is used to lure a target into an affair, like bait, to entangle the target in an embarrassing predicament that can be exploited for blackmail.
Then I said, “But Bales wasn’t married back then, was he? And he wasn’t in a sensitive position with a high security clearance and access to valuable information?”
That seemed to obviate the way most honeypot ploys work. If the target is married and engaging in an affair, that makes him vulnerable. If the target has an important job and knows lots of important secrets, at some point the bad guys deliberately let him know the girl he’s sleeping with is a foreign agent, and that can also make him vulnerable to blackmail. Bales fell into neither category. If the bad guys told his bosses he was sleeping with a North Korean spy, his bosses would simply shrug and say, “Yeah, what’s she look like? Is she a great lay?”
I said, “You know, the other intriguing thing was the way Bales referred to her when he called Choi this afternoon. He called her a bitch. And when Choi told him to forget about her and run, he didn’t argue or sound the least bit upset. Doesn’t sound like much of a marriage.”
The other two were nodding, because the prisoner tied to that white chair was gaining significance. And an added layer of mystery.
But I had an advantage over them. I’d been thinking about Michael Bales for many days. And I had met him under several different sets of circumstances, so I had a greater window into his dark nature than they did.
I said, “How do you think Choi got Bales on his side in the first place?” I looked over at Carol. “Did your people have the FBI run a check on him?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
She looked at a wall and began reciting the facts. She had the lawyer’s gift of great recall, and it came pouring out crisp and factual.
“Bales was born in Warrenton, Nebraska, where his father owns a dairy farm. He joined the Army in 1987 when he was eighteen, right after graduating from high school. He enlisted in the MPs, did well, and made warrant. Never previously married, no money problems surfaced, no bad habits. He’s been background-checked for his secret clearance and there were no signs of trouble. The checkers talked to some of his old teachers and schoolmates, and one former girlfriend. Everybody said he was a great guy, honest, reliable, an all-American boy. No previous arrests, no scandals.”
I said, “So here’s a guy who gets to Korea five years ago with an impeccable record and a great future ahead, then suddenly he decides to start working for North Korea. Doesn’t make sense, does it?”
Kim said, “Money. It’s easy to hide it. When it comes to Americans, always follow the money.”
I looked at my watch; it was after 11:00 P.M. I nodded at Carol and she got the message, so she stood up and began getting ready to leave.
I turned to Kim. “Thanks. If we come up with anything we’ll call.”
He said, “I hope you do,” then sat back down.
I had the impression his punishment for letting Choi murder one of his men and slip away was to sit here and wait until the gorgeous, tough-looking lady in the other room finally started babbling. In other words, he was also sentenced to sleep deprivation.
Now that I’d looked at her, and at him, my money was on her.
CHAPTER 39
There were probably many ways to approach this, but I persuaded Carol to have some minions deliver the boxes filled with Bales’s and Choi’s case files to my hotel room in the Dragon Hill Lodge. Somehow I didn’t think it was my charm that persuaded her. It would be midnight by the time we got back to base, and she still hadn’t eaten, and Korean restaurants close early. The hotel at least offered room service.
Besides, I had the impression she wasn’t the least bit afraid my manly charisma would make her swoon and end up in my bed. So why not do our work in a comfortable hotel room instead of some musty office?
Three-fifths of the boxes were stuffed with Choi’s files. They were written in Hangul, which posed an intractable problem for me, because the only Korean character I recognized was the one that meant “homosexual,” since I’d seen it written on so many signs lately. Thus Carol. Her job was to rummage through Choi’s files.
I waited till she got off the phone to room service before I explained what I hoped to accomplish. I wanted her to rifle through Choi’s files and pull aside every crime sheet that dealt with an American committing a felony, witnessing a crime, or in any way being involved in aiding or abetting a crime in Itaewon. Don’t bother to read them, I told her. Sift them out and place them in a pile. And nothing older than three years ago. And be sure to write the subjects’ names and ranks in English on the cover sheets.
I dug through Bales’s files. The good thing about being a highly experienced criminal attorney was that I’d spent eight years looking at crime sheets. You do develop a certain expertise. You know which data sections are substantively important and which are filled with meaningless procedural details. You know which pages to flip to immediately and which to ignore.
The other thing was that Bales was highly organized, precise, and not the least bit wordy. I recalled that from his statements in the Whitehall packet, and the same characteristics were evident on his crime sheets. Too bad he was rotten right down to his skivvies. Other than that, he was a dream cop.
I ruled out any crimes committed by anybody lower than a major. Not that lieutenants and sergeants and privates aren’t possibly traitorous, or in vitally sensitive positions, because the clerk to the general in charge of operations sees almost everything his boss sees. I just couldn’t be bothered at this stage. Somebody else could sift through later and see if any of those crime sheets were worth investigating more thoroughly.
I pulled out every crime sheet involving a major or higher, including those that involved their wives and kids. Army regulations require active files to be kept two years back, and a third year back for inactive files. So what I had was Bales’s records going back three years.
It was surprising how many officers or family members were connected in some way or another with a crime. It took me three hours, and Carol and I ate as we worked, but I ended up with a stack of nearly one hundred files. Most of the crimes looked fairly petty — DUIs, shoplifting, blackmarketing PX goods on the Korean economy, Peeping Toms, that kind of thing. But you never know what pushes somebody’s hot button. One guy’s innocuous trifle is another’s unbearable embarrassment. And some of the crimes looked fairly salacious. Several involved prostitution, including the wife of a full colonel who got caught three different times. An Army captain was arrested for armed robbery. A major was caught peeking in a window at a general’s wife. A lieutenant colonel flashed some schoolkids.
Carol’s stack looked twice as large as mine, and she still had another box to go. Both of us were rubbing our eyes a lot. We’d been awake since two o’clock in the morning the day before, when she and Mercer had knocked on my hotel door.
I got up and stretched and then went to the bathroom and threw some cold water over my face. When I came back, Carol was pacing and sipping from her third bottle of Evian. She’d decided to get more comfortable. She’d removed her shoes and stockings and her suit coat, so she was wearing only a short skirt and a thin, sleeveless blouse.
I said, “Tired?”
“Exhausted. This reminds me of first-year finals at law school.”
I chuckled. “Now you see what us lawyers do for a living. See what you’re missing?”
She collapsed onto the bed and her body bounced. “God, this bed feels great.”
Before she could give up on me, I said, “Hey, why don’t you go through that box? I’m gonna start cross-indexing the files.”
She groaned but sat back up. “Is there a method to this?”
“Actually, yeah. Here’s the way I figure their scam works. Choi does the initial investigation anytime an American is involved in a crime in Itaewon, right? He’s the first one on the scene, the first one to gather the facts, interview the witnesses, and collect the evidence. Then he calls Bales. Say the culprit looks malleable and entrappable. What would they do next?”
She ran both her hands through her hair, massaging her scalp. “I don’t know. He’d bring Bales in to meet the suspect, to have an American police officer on the scene.”
“Right. When the suspect sees an American CID investigator, he knows the shit is hitting the fan. Suddenly it’s no longer some infraction committed off base, limited to the Korean courts. Suddenly it’s serious. It’s going to seep into American channels, be reported to his commanding officer, put his career in jeopardy.”
“Putting the fear of God into him.”
“Right. Then maybe Bales’s job is to decide if the victim’s worth the trouble — maybe run a quick background check, see if the culprit’s got any value, if he seems susceptible, if he looks like someone they want and maybe could get.”
“In the meantime, the suspect’s left twisting in the wind, wondering if his life’s over.”
“They let the fear and tension build.”
“I can see it.”
“Okay, say Bales comes back to Choi and says they don’t want him, or he doesn’t seem the right type. They decide to throw the fish back into the sea. How do they do that?”
“I guess Bales goes ahead and fills out an American investigation report on the suspect. He gets the crime entered into the garrison blotter.”
“Exactly. They put the wheels of justice in motion. The suspect has no idea he’s just been vetted and found unworthy.”
“So we’re looking for officers who were arrested by Choi but there’s no corresponding American report filled out by Bales?”
I smiled. “In some cases, it may turn out somebody other than Bales handled it from the American side. In others, maybe the investigation didn’t pan out. But I’m willing to bet we’re going to see some that smell like they could get convictions, except they mysteriously stopped at the American fenceline, if you get my drift.”
“And you really think Choi would keep those files around?”
“Any other course would be stupid. Dangerous even. My bet would be he stamps them ‘closed for insufficient evidence,’ or titles it a dead end, then stuffs it in with everything else. He’s the chief of detectives at the precinct. Who’s gonna backcheck his cases? Plus, what
happens if anybody ever asks, ‘Hey Choi, whatever happened to that old case with that American officer who got caught lifting that expensive Rolex from Old Man Lee’s jewelry shop?’ This way he can pull out the file and everything’s hunky-dory.”
Carol started going through another box, while I began cross-referencing the Korean and American files. I had organized Bales’s files alphabetically. That made it go faster. When I was done, I had about twenty unmatched Korean files.
I put them in a neat stack. Carol had culled six more out of the last two boxes. I quickly crossed-referenced the first four, but the fifth caught my attention real fast. It was Colonel Mack Janson, aka Piranha Lips, Spears’s legal adviser.
I put that one in a pile all by itself. The dessert pile.
Carol got on her knees on the floor beside me. We started going through our stacks. I asked her to read the crime, then what the witnesses said, and what evidence was collected. We eliminated six files right way, because the crime was too insignificant, or because the evidence was so flimsy the case probably fell apart under its own weight. Somebody else could double-check later to see if we underestimated or overlooked anything.
Then we hit the first one that looked suspicious; then after two more eliminations, another. When we were done we had nine that in some way smelled.
I had saved the best for last, of course. I handed Carol Mack Janson’s folder and asked her to read me the pertinent details.
She put a finger to her lips. “Let’s see. Arrested and detained on April 19, 1999, for . . . Oh my God, you’re not going to believe this.”
“Tell me,” I nearly yelled.
“Pedophilia.”
She flipped through several more pages, reading the details. Then she said, “Apparently there’s an American housing area that’s off base on the outskirts of Itaewon?”
“That’s right. Two big apartment buildings. One for junior officers and one for senior enlisted.”