“Fucking hell,” he muttered. “You’re very direct, aren’t you?”
Ah, here it was. The moment of truth. Some men could handle it, others couldn’t. Just call me the Colonel Jessup of dating.
“Do you have a problem with that?” I asked.
Eric threw back the rest of his vodka and set the glass down on the table with unnecessary force. “Not in the fucking slightest.”
Sudden, unexpected relief flooded through me. I had my defenses up, sure, but I hadn’t realized until right then how disappointed I would have been if this strange, unreadable boy’s interest broke from just a bit of challenge. The fact that it didn’t—the fact that he actually seemed more determined to be around me after I pushed his limits—was incredibly satisfying.
“Hey, preppy,” I said, grabbing the edges of Eric’s chambray shirt and appreciating the way the color brought out a tiny bit of blue in those gray eyes.
He looked down at my hands, then back at me with a hard, electric gaze. “What’s that, gorgeous?”
I smacked my lips and batted my eyelashes with my very best Betty Boop impression. “Time’s a tickin’. You want to get out of here or not?”
For a moment, he didn’t say anything, just engaged in a stare-off that would have put any tomcat to shame. Then, finally, he leaned toward me, brushing his cheek against mine, and growled in my ear: “Grab your bag and get moving, pretty girl. Or else I’m carrying you out of here myself.”
7
Present
After having yet another particularly vivid set of dreams about Eric and me the night before, I couldn’t stop thinking of that first, furious night. The way he had called me pretty girl all night long, imprinting my mind with the term the way he penetrated the rest of me. We didn’t sleep that night, and by morning, I was sweaty, sore, and completely his.
Maybe it was that fury that drove me as I reluctantly took Eric’s and Cho’s advice to lie low while Cho poked around the towns where the Hwaseong murders had occurred, looking for connections to John Carson. Follow the money, said every investigator I had ever worked with. So while I waited, that’s exactly what I spent the next day doing, much to Tony’s relief.
“Here’s what I want to know,” I said to Skylar as I clicked through a few more pictures on my computer. “What in the hell was he doing in South Korea to begin with? I can’t find anything. How can he be such a fucking ghost?”
I was steadily building my own digital notebook of research, listing every known company in every village and neighborhood in Hwaseong connected to those crimes. Chariot might have been private, but there had to be some records of its holdings, right? And maybe if that history couldn’t tell me exactly why John Carson was spending so much time in Korea in the late eighties, maybe it would tell me why he came back. And where he would have taken my mother.
Unfortunately, since Chariot wasn’t a publicly traded company, I had absolutely no access to that information either unless we could find a private investor willing to divulge the information. Another dead end.
“Hold on,” Skylar said as she stirred a pan of scrambled eggs, chatting at me through her iPad.
It was about seven in the morning back in New York, where they were awaiting Eric’s hearing. She beckoned to someone off the screen.
Brandon appeared, and with a horsey grin, he carried me over to what looked like the other side of the counter in the palatial Airbnb they were renting.
“You’re in luck,” Brandon said.
I sat up. “Tell me everything.”
“Well, as you know, private companies don’t have to report shit to the public. But they still have to be held accountable to their investors, if they have any. And, as it happens, Chariot had one investor Carson couldn’t quite shake after he took over. Her name was Celeste de Vries.”
My jaw dropped. “What?”
Brandon clicked his tongue. “Eric really should have spent more time with his grandma before she died. He might have learned that he was about to inherit a quietly effective five percent of Chariot Industries. Celeste apparently invested in Carson’s company on the ground floor.”
“What? Why would Celeste invest in Chariot?”
Brandon shrugged. “Honestly, I doubt she was the one who did it initially. It looks like Eric’s grandfather initially invested in 1983 or so. Eric said that’s right about when his father and Carson were both tapped. Granted, I don’t know all the ins and outs of the Janus society, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that all the members support each other’s business ventures. They are probably all constantly sticking fingers in each other’s pies.” He held up a handful of papers. “Nina brought these over last night when we arrived in town. Apparently they were in the files collected from Celeste’s old apartment. ”
“What are these?” I looked eagerly at the screen, craning my neck as if somehow that would help me see the blurry files better. Fucking technology. Maybe everyone was right. Maybe I should have stayed in New York.
“Reports for the last twenty-five years or so. These are the ones from the late eighties. Right after John Carson took over. Give me a second; I’ll scan and send you the encrypted files.”
A few minutes of chatting with Skylar later, my screen faced her and Brandon while they ate breakfast, and I looked through the pdfs Brandon sent.
“Here’s Johnny,” I sang as I clicked around, seeing signature after signature of the same pompous name I was coming to hate.
“What?” Skylar asked, clearly befuddled.
I shook my head. Was I the only one who thought it was funny that my maniacal biological father shared the same name as the legendary talk show host?
“Chariot Technics,” I murmured, looking through a list of acquisitions from 1987 and ’88. “Carson Electronics. Parthenon Chemical. God, look at all these loopty-loos. He was really trying to say something with his autograph, wasn’t he? Damn, he really bought up the joint too. How many subsidiaries did he found?”
“Carson wanted to expand when he took over, but he probably wanted to do it quietly,” Brandon said.
“He wanted something,” I replied. “Chariot operated in the red for three years after these. Jesus, what kind of business model is this?”
“A smart one,” Brandon said. “All those companies you just named make different parts necessary for a bunch of things that Chariot sells. He was cutting out all the middle men. It made it possible for Chariot to reenter ammunitions and basically take it over. Especially with the Asian market.”
I clicked a few more times. “These are all located in Hwaseong too. I guess we have our connection to this region.” There were a few outside the limits of South Korea’s most populous province, but nearly all of the companies newly acquired during that period were here. Except one. I frowned as I scrolled through the list of investments from 1989. “What’s KEPCO E&C?”
Brandon stilled on the screen. “What?”
“In 1989, Chariot purchased a whole bunch of shares from a company called KEPCO. What’s that?”
Skylar was watching her husband curiously as he set down his fork.
“That’s the Korean Electric Power Corporation,” Brandon said. “It’s still majority owned by the South Korean government, but they opened it up to foreign investment in 1989.”
“They’re headquartered in Seoul,” I said. “But it looks like right after that, Chariot also leased a bunch of land in…let me see…” I typed an address into Google Maps. “Goseong is up in the northeast, close to the North Korean border.”
Brandon started. “Wait, what?”
Skylar put down her mug of tea. “What is it?”
“Hold on a second.”
While Brandon got up to find his own computer, Skylar and I blinked at each other through the webcam, then waited patiently while he clicked around. When he looked up again, he wore a very peculiar expression.
I frowned. “What’s with the face, Colombo?”
Brandon swallowed. “That site in Goseon
g is home to a nuclear reactor. Started in the late seventies, abandoned when KEPCO ran out of funds to make it work on their own, and then finished in late 1989.”
“But that would be for energy, right? Do the South Koreans have nuclear weapons?”
Brandon shook his head. “They have the abilities, but they signed non-proliferation treaties. Their neighbors to the north, though, haven’t been so obedient. I’d have to check with Ray, but I’m pretty sure that everything those companies made together adds up to nuclear weaponry. Well after South Korea agreed to stop producing.”
I sat back. “Come again?”
Brandon abandoned his computer and edged closer to Skylar’s webcam. “I’m not a UN inspector or anything, Jane. But I’d bet money that John Carson was involved in nuclear weapons production in the late eighties. And given the proximity of that reactor to the border, I’m starting to wonder if it was maybe something to do with the North Koreans, not the South.”
“Brandon, that’s kind of a lot of jumps, don’t you think?” cautioned Skylar, though she looked just as terrified as I did.
“Red, this is just a working hypothesis. But here are the pieces: In 1985, South Korea joined 189 other countries in non-proliferation. We know that North Korea asked China and the Soviets to help them establish nuclear energy capacity. Initially, they both said no…but then Russia said yes. And we also know that quickly developed into warfare technologies. But the how is still a bit of a mystery.”
Skylar and I both remained still.
“What if…what if…John Carson had a hand in it?” Brandon continued. “He inherits a small munitions company in the mid-eighties, but now Chariot runs at two of the nuclear laboratories here on the Eastern Seaboard and funds several of the other major nuclear research centers. What if he was engineering nuclear proliferation in North Korea to line his own pockets? Until everything with the Soviets went to shit at the end of the Cold War?”
“He was planning to…” I shook my head. “You don’t think he was planning to sell nuclear weapons to the North Koreans. Really? That would be straight-up treason.”
“It would. But John Carson doesn’t strike me as someone who cares much about the rules. And like you said, he was in the red. He was trying to grow, at whatever the cost.” Brandon shrugged. “Like I said, it’s just a hypothesis.”
“It doesn’t explain what he was doing with the women in 1987,” I said.
“No,” Brandon said. “But it explains what he was doing in Korea to begin with. It explains why he left. And it explains why maybe he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know he was there in the first place.” He tapped a pen on the desk. “These murders…didn’t you say they stopped for a couple of years?”
“After 1989,” I confirmed.
“Right after the Berlin Wall fell,” Skylar added.
“So, think about it. The USSR collapses in the early nineties. Carson and Eric’s dad pull out of the deal as the Russians step back from their own work in Pyongyang. Skip forward a few decades…I wouldn’t say those threats were ever neutralized, but now the Russians and the North Koreans have been a lot more…active together…in recent years,” Brandon narrated. “Especially considering how, ah, warm the current administration here is toward their endeavors. So maybe that’s why Carson’s in Korea now, Jane. Maybe it has nothing to do with your mother. Maybe he’s just checking on his investments after biding his time for the last thirty years, and she just happens to be with him.”
8
2009
“How predictable,” I remarked as Skylar and I exited Torts.
“I think his name is Keith? That guy I met at Great Scott about a month ago.” I held out my phone, which currently had a picture of a medium-sized erect penis on the screen.
“Jesus!” Skylar averted her eyes. “Jane, holy crap. You could have warned me.”
“Why? It’s really not even that big. He trimmed his hedges so much it shifts the perspective.” I examined the picture again with academic interest. “Haven’t you ever gotten a dick pic before?”
“No!”
I tucked my phone away. “Patrick hasn’t ever sent you a dirty picture or two? Even with the long distance? Good God, how do you guys keep the fire otherwise?”
As if she needed the reminder, Skylar checked her phone for what had to be the thousandth time that day. I sighed. My roommate had serious issues with her boyfriend, who, from what I could tell across the hall, seemed like a philandering asshole. I mean, living free is well and good when all parties consent, but my roommate was the most monogamous creature on the planet. A one-track pony, so to speak. So, you tell me what to think when your man routinely waits two days longer to call you than he says he will, but constantly butt-dials from very loud nightclubs with a bunch of ladies squealing in the background. It didn’t sound like “working late” to me.
“He was supposed to text me this morning,” Skylar muttered, refreshing her messages yet again. “I was planning to go down again this weekend.” She shoved her phone away with a defeated sigh. “But no. No dick pics from Patrick. He’s too busy with work for that kind of thing. He’s too busy to call, period.”
“Work, huh?”
Skylar glared through the windows at the frost that matched her own expression, and I let it go. She and I got along pretty well, much to my surprise given our obvious personality differences, but we weren’t quite at the “criticize each other’s life choices” stage. We’d get there eventually.
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “He’s probably just busy.”
I pulled out my phone again as we exited Austin Hall. Our study group was meeting to split this weekend’s reading before we dispersed for a much-needed Friday night out.
“I thought you were seeing that Eric guy these days,” Skylar said. “Why are other guys sending you pictures of their genitals?”
“Hey, hey, hey, this isn’t on me. I don’t know why he was suddenly pornographically inspired. And I don’t know if I would call what Eric and I have been doing ‘seeing’ each other,” I said as we made our way down the path to the law library. “Unless that’s a new euphemism for banging like bunnies.”
One of Skylar’s red brows rose. “Is that really all it is? What happened to the poetry?”
Okay, so I’d told her about that. And also about Eric’s tendency to write new ones on my skin after we’d just made our own “poetry,” as he called it. Multiple times. Okay, at least ten in fourteen days.
It had become kind of a game. Post-orgasmic limericks. Who could create with the worst puns to dispel the electricity that never quite seemed to dissipate? The guy was addictive. It was becoming a problem.
And then, of course, there was that moment after our con law class two days ago. The one when, just after he had smiled and grinned and chatted away with Catie Sparler, the former Ms. Delaware, he had grabbed my hand on the way out and walked me all the way back to my apartment. Right when half the law school was pouring out of the building for the day.
Suddenly, I was right back in high school, with every student within fifty feet wondering what the hell Decker Carlson was doing with the weird girl and her nose ring.
That wasn’t exactly booty call action. And so I’d been ignoring Eric’s calls and avoiding him since. And he hadn’t done a damn thing to change it.
But before I could tell Skylar again that Eric and I meant nothing, we were interrupted by the Energizer Bunny himself bounding down the path after us.
“Crosby! Lefferts! Wait up!”
We stopped in the library doorway, and Eric grinned as he sidled past me much closer than necessary. The buttons of his wool pea coat scraped across my leather jacket, and he paused, trapping us both there for a moment.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he murmured. “I was trying to catch you after class, but you ran off. You busy later?”
Was I busy? Well, I was trying to be. And not with this walking ad for Scandinavian virility who was undoubtedly going to break my heart if I let him get
any closer.
The problem was that I couldn’t seem to keep that resolve when I saw him. Which is exactly why I’d been avoiding him in the first place.
“I…don’t know,” I said, shooting for aloof and failing miserably. Ah, fuck it. “What time?”
There went my resolve. God, he smelled so good, and those eyes of his shone so brightly.
“Ahem.”
We followed Skylar into the library, pausing our conversation until we were in the study room our group reserved on Fridays.
“Lord, there you are,” our friend Cherie said as we all piled in. “We need to make this snappy. I have a date tonight.”
“So do I,” Eric concurred. “A really hot one.”
I smarted. He had a date? Hadn’t he just asked me my plans? Was that for later, after he was done with a girl he actually wanted to be seen in public with?
But before I could spiral completely, I found Eric grinning at me with open intention. Oh…he meant me. Right?
He picked up my hand and pressed a kiss to my knuckles before cradling it in his lap. The knot in my belly relaxed. A little.
“Good lord, could they be any cuter?” Cherie asked Andre, another student.
“Looks like opposites do attract,” he replied.
Eric just calmly squeezed my hand, but inside, I was spurting irritation. Opposites attract? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Yeah, sure, Eric and I were as different as fire and ice, but only I was supposed to say shit like that. Not some passive-aggressive law student who didn’t know us from Adam. Was I really such a freak that people had to comment on the fact that someone like Eric would ever be attracted to me?
Goddammit. I was too old for this garbage.
Nevertheless, I spent the next forty-five minutes stewing while we pored over today’s lecture notes and divvied up the readings at last.
Opposites attract. Opposites attract. What in the hell?
“Picture, please!” Cherie pulled out her phone. “I promised my parents I’d send them photos of our group.”
The Love Trap (Quicksilver Book 3) Page 6