by Guy Adams
‘How are the Koreans taking it?’
‘A mixture of disbelief and righteous anger. South Korea is used to acts of violence against them from the North. I think Tae-young is ashamed, which is silly, but she was feeling guilty about the cost of life these talks had caused as it was, even more so now that one of their party is the culprit.’
‘It doesn’t matter where the assassin came from.’
‘Of course it doesn’t. Though I imagine our lot will be breathing a sigh of diplomatic relief. It’s easier for our public image if the killer came from their side.’
‘Politics,’ Toby sighed.
‘Of course. But come on, you’re a big boy, you know how these things work. Perception is the real power. What we do? Doesn’t matter. What we’re seen to do is everything. That’s precisely why I left active service and went into the more obscure dark arts of politics and diplomacy.’
‘I can never get my head around your career,’ Toby admitted. ‘Nobody can have done half the things you claim to have done.’
‘Can’t they?’ She smiled. ‘Perception is everything.’
They stood back as Fratfield was carried past them. Toby raised his hand as the man went past, relieved to see Fratfield nod gently in return.
‘He’ll be OK,’ said one of the paramedics. ‘He’s a lucky man, the shot couldn’t have been more perfectly placed had he tried. Straight through, should be no major complications.’
‘Good to hear,’ Toby said.
They lifted Fratfield into the back and the ambulance drove away.
‘Should we join the search?’ Toby asked Shining, the old man having joined them again.
‘I think we can leave that to the others,’ Shining replied, ‘our time would be better served chatting with Chun-hee.’
d) Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire
They gathered in the drawing room while the security officers continued to search the building.
Shining tapped Chun-hee on the shoulder. ‘I think we should pool our resources,’ he said.
The Korean looked at him for a moment and then nodded. ‘Perhaps that is fair,’ he agreed, ‘off the record.’
‘Oh, naturally.’
Chun-hee picked up a decanter of brandy and some glasses and they made their way to the library in order to find some privacy in which to drink it and talk about what they knew.
‘We were aware that this conference was likely to draw unfavourable attention from our enemies in the North,’ Chun-hee began, sipping at his brandy. ‘It was inevitable.
‘We received intelligence of a meeting held between representatives of the North Korean government and a private contractor. It took place a month or so ago at Mount Baekdu, close to the Chinese border. We had limited information. All we knew was that someone was being paid a good deal of money to involve themselves in our business. When you hire privately, people hear …’
‘But you are a safe distance away from the incident should the contractor get caught,’ said Toby. ‘Plausible deniability.’
‘Indeed. This has become standard practice of late. As the North attempts to convince the world of its honourable intentions, it turns more and more to others when acting outside its own borders. Perhaps pressure has been put on them by their allies in Russia and China – who wants to be embarrassed by the friend who keeps starting fights, eh?’ Chun-hee shrugged. ‘It is not important, it is simply the way things are at the moment.
‘We attempted to infiltrate the meeting but our agent never reported in. We can only assume he was caught. Our only thread was the contractor. A man some circles refer to as the Magician.’
‘An apt name,’ said Toby.
‘Perhaps,’ Chun-hee admitted. ‘These people call themselves all kinds of things. Names designed to intimidate or impress. I dedicated my time to tracking him down. He has done work for a handful of people over the years. He works for anyone who can afford his services. He is not as active as most in his line of work but he is expensive and the results are always impressive.’
‘The powers he calls on are not to be used lightly,’ said Shining. ‘The more you rely on them, the more you risk falling prey to them yourself. I’m not surprised he’s selective with his contracts.’
Chun-hee nodded. ‘I will be honest. I am a rational man. I am not someone inclined to believe in the stories I hear about the Magician and his work. Like all of his kind, he gets work by building a reputation. His is that of an assassin who cannot be traced. He kills in ways that defy explanation. They are deaths that cannot be held accountable to another person.’
‘Accidents,’ said Toby.
‘Just so. Impossible, unexplainable deaths. That makes him sought after. If nobody can even prove that your enemy was murdered, how can the finger of blame ever be pointed?’ He took another sip of his drink. ‘Perhaps he is as you say. A man who has knowledge of your …’ he reminded himself of Shining’s words from earlier, ‘“future science”.’
Shining smiled.
‘All I know is that I have traced his movements as far as I can over the last few years. I have tried to find him. To unmask him.’
‘And now you have?’ asked Toby.
Chun-hee thought about that for a moment. ‘Perhaps.’ He shrugged. ‘I suppose that is what we must assume.’
‘But you’re not convinced?’ asked Shining.
‘The greatest problem in our line of work,’ said Chun-hee, ‘is that so much of it is about assumption. We pick up tiny clues. We follow the finest threads trying to get at the truth. Along the way we piece those details together. We guess. The best, most logical, guesses but guesses nonetheless. We try and flesh out the invisible.’
Chun-hee paused again. Toby thought he was probably trying to decide how much he should say.
‘I had made my guesses,’ he continued. ‘I thought I was close to the Magician. I thought I knew who he was. And now …’
‘It wasn’t who you thought?’ asked Toby.
‘No. I had been following a man’s trail. A …’ He scratched at his face, becoming more and more reluctant to talk. ‘It is not fair to say. Because now the evidence goes against me. But I thought he was one of your men. I had traced his route around the world and found that he could often be placed near confirmed sightings of the Magician. This was too much of a coincidence, I had decided, these men are too often in the same place at the same time. But now … now I know that I cannot have been right. I cannot. And yet, this young man? This wealthy little fool? He is the man who has terrified client and victim alike for the last few years? I find it hard to accept.’
He drained his drink and topped it back up.
‘You think we may have been misled?’ asked Shining.
‘I do not see how,’ Chun-hee admitted. ‘Kim Man-dae has broken cover. Sometimes it is difficult to admit you have been wrong. And yet now I feel I must. The Magician is not who I thought it was, and I have been made to look a fool.
‘I was here to keep an eye on the delegates, to protect them from harm. I have been looking in the wrong direction and it is only good fortune that the killer has been unmasked. We must hope that, exposed as he now is, hunting him down and putting an end to this is within our grasp.’
‘Who did you think it was?’ asked Toby, looking towards Shining. ‘Now you know you were wrong surely there’s no harm in saying?’
‘There is every harm. I do not intend to allow a shadow to fall over a man who is clearly innocent. There is no chance it is the man I believed. That is now clear to me. I have been poor in my work. I shall not continue to be so.’ He got to his feet, abandoning his drink. ‘Now I must try and make up for it. The traitor Kim must still be in the building somewhere. We should not be sat here talking, we should be helping the others find him.’
‘Absolutely,’ Shining agreed. ‘You go ahead, we’ll see you shortly.’
The Korean left and Shining and Toby regarded what was left of their drinks.
‘I wish he would tell us,’ s
aid Toby. ‘You saw what happened when the smoke touched Rowlands. It went green. He’s not the innocent he appears.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Shining agreed.
‘Why would it have turned green if he wasn’t hiding something?’
‘The experiment proved nothing except for the fact that he’s had some exposure to magic. If Man-dae hadn’t been such an impetuous little idiot, he could have easily brazened it out. Why run?’
‘Because he thought we’d exposed him.’
‘Chun-hee is right to be suspicious. Are we really supposed to believe that the Magician, a man who has earned a reputation as a terrifying assassin, is spooked by a parlour trick?’ Shining sighed and slammed his glass on the table next to him. ‘It doesn’t fit. It’s nonsense and, deep down, if he could just get beyond his overinflated sense of damaged honour, Chun-hee knows it.’
‘So we need to keep working on him?’
‘We need to keep working on everything, yes.’
e) Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire
The Hall was searched from top to bottom. It was gone midnight by the time that Mark Rowlands was forced to angrily admit, ‘He’s not bloody here.’
Revising security details to patrol the building and grounds throughout the night, he went outside to smoke a cigarette and swear at shadows.
Those who had remained gathered in the drawing room were forced to retire to their bedrooms, locking their doors and lying uncertainly in their beds, wondering over each creak they heard in the old building.
None were more uncertain than Ryu Chun-hee, who ignored his bed in favour of the armchair by his bedroom window. He stared out at the night and tried to reconcile his chaotic thoughts.
He was certain that his initial suspicions as to the identity of the Magician had been wrong. He was not so old and stuck in his ways that he couldn’t admit failure. Still, he couldn’t believe Man-dae was the assassin either. Which only left one alternative: a third, hitherto unknown possibility. But who?
He watched as one of Rowlands’ security officers crossed the lawn outside his window, quartering the grounds, hunting for ghosts.
Eventually, he fell asleep, slumping in his chair.
When he woke it was still dark, his neck cricked from the uncomfortable position he had been sitting in. This was ridiculous, he decided, he should go to bed, get some proper sleep, then maybe, in the morning, once his head was clear, he might be able to piece things together.
He got to his feet, holding on to the back of the chair as pins and needles coursed through his legs.
Only then did he notice the shadow stood in front of his window.
Was this what had woken him? The awareness that he was no longer alone in his room? Once upon a time he had prided himself on his alertness. Nobody could get the jump on Ryu Chun-hee, he had said; even when sleeping, his senses were alert.
He thought about that as the shadow bore down on him, a hand clamped across his mouth and a sudden burning sensation in the back of his neck.
‘No dark theatre for you, I’m afraid,’ said a voice in his ear. ‘Your medical report tells me you’ve been having a little heart trouble. The good news is: you won’t be having it again.’
Chun-hee fought against his attacker, even as he realised the burning sensation for what it was, the dissipation of poison in his system from the point of a hypodermic syringe.
He struggled for another twenty seconds and then his fight was over.
f) Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire
Bateman walked out into the night and tried to let the cold wind blow the stuffiness from him. God, how he hated these diplomatic affairs. Just when it had looked like there was going to be an end to the pacing up and down and poking around in bushes, the little bastard had gone to ground and it was back to going over the place with a fine-tooth comb.
If you asked him – and of course nobody would – the Korean was in the wind. Why would he hang around? So the perimeter alarm hadn’t been triggered, who cared? That just meant the man had known what he was doing. But no, it had been decided he must still be on the property so now he had to forgo a few hours’ sleep in order to walk around in the bloody cold for a bit.
It was operations like this that made him wish he was back in the Middle East when it was still an interesting place to be.
His girlfriend disagreed but then she didn’t really understand the way your attitudes changed after you’d been shot at a few times. Not that she’d known what he was up to, of course. She thought he’d been embassy staff, filing paperwork and arranging cultural exchanges. Still, she had fretted.
‘I just never know if you’re going to come back in one piece,’ she had said to him one night when he had been home on a few days’ leave. ‘You hear stories of what it’s like over there.’
‘People exaggerate,’ he’d assured her, and that was true. He’d been known to do it himself when swapping stories in the barracks. ‘I’ve never seen a single bullet fired.’
Which certainly wasn’t true. He’d fired plenty himself.
Then he’d been sent back home and life had become dull. She couldn’t have been happier. She kept talking about kids. He’d nod and smile as they looked at colour schemes for converting the spare bedroom into a nursery but inside he was rotting. Everything was just so safe. It felt oppressive.
He knew he wasn’t alone in the way his time under fire had affected him. He talked with a few of the old boys. They got together once in a while. Shared a few drinks, relived both the good times and the bad.
‘Well,’ one of his old lieutenants had said one night, ‘I’m glad to be out of it. I sit out on my back porch and look up at the sky and I know that nobody’s going to fill it with incendiaries. What’s the point in fighting if you’re not trying to find peace, eh?’
Bateman hadn’t seen him again. Knew that they would never see eye to eye.
For him, the danger had become vital. It had been what made him feel alive. Now, when he really was doing paperwork and sitting in a claustrophobic office he felt himself withering away to nothing.
He kept fit. He’d taken up hang-gliding, surfing, climbing. He’d go away for the weekend with a couple of the old crew and they’d have a few beers and have a crack at one of the Cornish sea cliffs or, on one particularly brilliant trip, Dumbarton Rock. Hanging there, fingertips bleeding as he forced them into tiny handholds, he came close to the sense of being alive he had otherwise lost.
Then he went back home and looked at baby-wear catalogues.
Now this, knocking about a stately home on the off-chance someone wanted to have a pop.
He patted his pockets, hunting for the couple of cigarettes he’d cadged earlier. He was supposed to have quit – preparation for the theoretical bloody baby again – but he’d felt the urge tonight and decided to hell with it.
He still carried his old Zippo, smoker or not. It had been a companion ever since his training days and his pocket felt too empty without it.
He put one of the cigarettes in his mouth and squinted at the sudden burst of light from the zippo flame as he ignited it with his thumb.
The cigarette tasted strange. Like burning wood. It hadn’t been that long, surely? He coughed and took it from his mouth.
It flared, a bright yellow flame working its way down its length.
‘Cheap shit,’ he said, sneering at the way it burned down like a fuse. Bloody typical. He’d only cadged a couple and there was something bloody wrong with one of them.
As the flame reached the filter there was a small pop and a flare of blue light, like a Chinese firework. The light left a coloured after-image in his eyes. It looked like a string of pictograms. It made him think of the Cyrillic alphabet. He blinked a few times and then it was gone.
Hoping he’d have better luck the second time, he put the other cigarette in his mouth and – cautiously – lit it. There was a pleasing crunch of combusting tobacco and he took a lungful. Job done.
He walked away from the
building, cutting towards the woods at the rear.
The air seemed to grow colder as he moved away from the building and he briefly wondered if he should have gone back to his room for a coat. Then, angry at himself for what he perceived as proof of having gone soft, he turned up his suit jacket collar and walked quicker, getting a good lick on.
There was a distant rumble of what sounded like thunder and he turned to see if there was any sign of lightning.
The sky was clear, the stars bright.
Maybe someone was letting off fireworks somewhere.
He cut through the sculpture park, trying to make out the shapes in the half-light. He’d taken a look around the place the previous morning. All the usual modern crap, weird figures made out of bent wire and steel. Like a junkyard filled with the offcuts of a trainee welder. Now, as they became little more than silhouettes against the night sky, they somehow seemed more impressive. Strange, unfathomable shapes made out of darkness. One looked like a sailing ship, he thought, with a billowing, triangular sail. Another was a five-pointed star, its points tapering out into corkscrew shapes. Another was a see-saw, a long pole tipping to and fro on a circular fulcrum. He touched the end, snatching his finger away at the sharpness of its point. ‘Have someone’s eye out with that,’ he muttered. ‘They not heard of bloody Health and Safety?’
He touched it more carefully, smiling to see that it was perfectly balanced, one gentle push from his finger was enough to tip the pole towards the opposite side.
Well made, he admitted. Clever if you liked that kind of thing.
He kept going, heading towards the woods.
Halfway there, he heard the sound of thunder again. He looked around but, as before, saw no sign of cloud. Which made the rain, when it came, all the more unexpected.
He cupped the little that remained of his cigarette in his hand and made a run for the trees. It could hardly be more than a shower and he was likely to get wetter trying to get back to the house than taking cover there.
The rain seemed to follow him into the dense canopy of the trees. Their winter branches offering little in the way of protection.
