by Barry Lancet
CHAPTER 71
THEY surfaced in the darkest hour.
But before they appeared, another barometer confirmed their imminent arrival.
“Coming soon,” Pak said.
“How do you know?”
Our guide pointed across the river, into the darkness. “I seeing moving there.”
I squinted into the blackness. “What do you see? And how can you see without your binoculars?”
“You must finding shiny bouncy spot. Dark like night but shiny soft. Like a there. You see?”
He pointed to something on the North Korean side, about a hundred yards off. Four dark-green spots bobbed and flickered and trailed along the edge of the river about five feet off the ground with muted effervescence. They might have been fireflies with hangovers, if such a thing were biologically possible. Their movement was erratic. They stopped and started, drew closer then separated.
“What are they?”
“KPA guard.”
Soldiers from the Korean People’s Army who guarded the border. I trained night-vision binoculars taken from the trunk of Pak’s car on the group. Two more soldiers came up over a rise and the four became six.
“They have side pieces in covered holsters but no rifles,” I said.
“Rifle metal making big flash.”
I continued to stare through the glasses at the cluster of guards patrolling the riverbank, wondering what had caused the firefly effect. I finally caught a gentle wink in the green field before me.
“Got it,” I said. “The top button of their coats catches the light.” A gleam so mild you wouldn’t pick it up unless you knew to look for it.
Pak nodded. “They are coming together for waiting.”
“For Anna?”
“For crossing.”
* * *
“Thas the one,” Pak said. “You see big Party head walking?”
“Yes.”
“His greedy power wanting?”
“Yes, that too.”
And I did. It was all there in his body language. A supremely confident stride he made no attempt to disguise. Accompanied by a haughty look of self-satisfaction. Moist lips and plump cheeks at once sensuous and full told me he ate well, and better than most of his compatriots. But the face was also tempered with shrewdness and caution.
Tailored garments hung on his well-fed frame as if he’d been born to them. They were elegant and stylish and in direct contrast to the coarse outfits worn by nearly everyone else we’d seen tonight. A pair of tassels bounced gaily on each shoe.
Pak said, “Thas guide. He high-up North Korea. He taking girl across. Now we waiting kidnapper group.”
Five minutes later a guy in a shabby coat, bad hair, and shifty eyes turned the corner a block away and entered the noodle shop. The coat was as local as they come.
Pak stiffened. “Thas trafficker I know. Why he here is maybe for our business. But also maybe for other business.”
If Anna had been handed off to traffickers for the last leg of her journey, that could pose a problem.
“Why don’t I go for a bowl of noodles and see if they’re sitting together?” I said
I started to rise, but Pak put a hand on my shoulder.
“You cannot. You America. Everyone looking you if you go.”
He was right, of course.
Pak pointed at Noda. “We two go. Eat noodle. Talk. Speaking just only China in there, you know? Soft so people no hear Japan accent floating in air.”
It was a good strategy. Pak had taken a scissors to Noda’s hair and hacked away until the chief detective’s straight glossy locks looked like a field of knee-high barley that kids had trampled through. Pak had followed his hairdressing feat by clothing Noda like a poorer cousin, in a cheap Chinese getup purchased from a secondhand store in Jilin.
They shoved their night-vision binocs into our supply bag, eased open the shop gate, then walked away, Pak mumbling softly to Noda in Chinese and Noda grunting like he usually did but in a distinctly Chinese vein.
Thirty yards on, they turned into the noodle shop, passing between the black pillars with the dragons—and leaving me alone with the night and the crickets.
CHAPTER 72
PAK shot from the noodle shop like ketchup from a plugged squeeze bottle suddenly unblocked—inexplicably and far faster than advisable. He turned away from me and disappeared around the closest corner.
What the hell?
Next, our two targets emerged from the shop, arguing. The North Korean Party cadre snapped and snarled and threatened in the imperiously arrogant manner of one used to getting his way. The Chinese trafficker whined and backed away, ceding ground but clearly not handing over what the Korean wanted.
Noda exited next, two yards behind them, giving the bickering men a wide berth and what could pass for a worried look. He turned toward me. They ignored him. The chief detective nodded me over. I jammed my night-vision binocs into the supply bag, shouldered the sack, and joined Noda on the street, staying in the shadows under the eaves.
“The Chinese guy wants a bonus,” Noda told me in a low voice.
When the trafficker tried to turn away, the Korean grabbed his shoulder and jerked him around. The North Korean was big, and in his fury looked suddenly taller and bulkier and more powerful. He swung at the Chinese man, who stared dumbfounded as he took the blow full on the chin, folding up with a startled bleat of protest. The Korean began kicking him.
A second Chinese man appeared at the corner around which Pak had vanished, looking not unlike the downed man in dress and appearance. Threadbare garments, bad hair, five years younger. A brother or a cousin. He pushed a placid and confused woman before him, a blade to her neck, her left arm twisted behind her.
My heart leapt. It was Anna, and this time the miracle was no mirage.
The second man yelled at the Party cadre, who stopped in mid-kick and glared at the speaker. The Korean’s features were distorted in anger, his brown complexion a fiery red. He aimed a furious last blow at the downed trafficker’s ribs, cracking at least one of them, then advanced on the partner, shouting and alternately flailing and jabbing his hands in the air at Anna. Her captor grew nervous and backpedaled, dragging his dazed captive with him. The Korean stomped forward, bull-like and oblivious to the threat of the knife. He bellowed at the Chinese man, who shook his head, brandished the weapon in the air, then touched the point to Anna’s carotid artery.
Over the commotion I yelled in English, “She’s no good to anyone dead.”
Both men froze and turned to stare in my direction. The North Korean’s mouth fell open. The Chinese trafficker said, “Who you are?”
“Her friend.”
“Go away. I kill her.”
“You won’t kill her.”
He sneered and ran the back side of the blade across her cheek. Anna whimpered.
I took a step forward and he said, “Stop or I mark her. We still get double yuan for her. Japanese very valuable. Exotic.”
I turned to Noda. “How much money do we have?”
“Enough.”
“We’ll double the price,” I said.
He shook his head. “You trouble. Go away. This China.”
“Triple the money,” I said.
“Go away.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“What?”
“No going away.”
With the look of consternation, the North Korean eyes bounced back and forth between Anna’s captor and me.
The trafficker said, “You go now. Far away or I kill and find new woman tomorrow. Always many many woman.” He rubbed his pelvis against Anna’s thigh in a lewd manner, leering at me and showing a partial set of black, rotting teeth.
A shadow slipped up behind him. The light caught a glimmer of steel an instant before a blade slid across the trafficker’s throat, leaving a thin red trail that, a heartbeat later, parted and gushed a waterfall of blood. The black-toothed trafficker deflated without a sound. Behin
d him stood Pak. Anna seemed not to notice the change in her situation. She gazed at us but didn’t see us.
Pak pointed the soiled blade in the North Korean’s direction and said in accented Chinese English, “You want, mister?”
The man raised his hands palm-out in the universal sign of surrender, then backed into Noda, who let out a low feral growl. The Korean shrunk away from the chief detective, pivoted, and ran off into the night.
The beaten trafficker groaned and stirred. Calling out in Chinese, he dragged himself upright. Pak was on him in two steps and made a second pass with the knife. The man grabbed at his throat, eyes staring in shock at Pak as blood oozed between his fingers. He tried to speak but his lips succeeded only in forming a bubble of blood. He toppled back against the wall of the shuttered shop behind him and sank to a sitting position, still clutching his throat.
“What are you doing?” I said. “The first one I get but—”
“Doing is for my mother. For all mother.” Pak spit on his second victim. “Dirty China trafficker like this sell my mother maybe fifty dollar to farmer. I see, I kill. I kill all them.”
I opened my mouth to respond but in Pak’s eyes I saw a pain so raw, so all-consuming, I closed it again. The shrewd, world-weary rescuer of North Korean refugees had vanished. In his stead was the twelve-year-old child he had once been, with the bottomless anguish and uncomprehending agony he was to carry for decades to come.
Pak’s first target no longer stirred. Ten feet away, hidden in the shadows under the eaves, the second mark continued to bleed out. His body twitched. Color drained from his face in pronounced increments. Anna stood where her captor had left her, staring straight ahead in a vague unseeing manner. She took no notice of Pak’s shouting or the fallen bodies.
Nodding at Pak’s first takedown, Noda said, “Move him into the alley. I’ll handle Ms. Tanaka.”
Our luck ran out as I was dragging the dead trafficker into the closest alleyway.
CHAPTER 73
AT the end of the street a whistle blew. From four long blocks away, three sharp blasts cut through the night like an experimental jet through the ozone: swift, shrill, and with razor-sharp clarity.
“We need to leave,” Noda said.
But it wasn’t to be.
Anna Tanaka stood motionless before us, her expression one of placid compliance. Her black hair was greasy and tangled. She’d been drugged and registered nothing. She had no idea of what was unfolding around her. No idea whether she was free or in the hands of new captors.
I suspected it wasn’t the drugs alone. She’d gone through too much that was too alien to everything she knew. She’d been brutally seized at her mother’s funeral and trundled across Japan from one coast to the other, probably bound and gagged and tossed in the back of a van or the trunk of a car. Or possibly just heavily drugged and transported in a catatonic state from one point to the next. After her overland journey, she’d been thrown aboard a small watercraft and carted over the choppy, windswept waters to the coast of South Korea. Tossed into another vehicle and trucked through the back roads to the DMZ, or close to it, before her captors, warned by their confederates, reversed course, headed to the airport, and bundled her onto a plane to northern China. After countless hours in a drug-induced trance, she would be semiconscious at best. The only upside would have been a hands-off policy. There would be no molestation of such a highly valued prize.
Anna was staring at me. “Do . . . I know you?”
“You do. I’m a friend of your mother’s.”
But Sharon’s daughter hadn’t heard me. Or if she had, my response was funneled through a heavily medicated filter, emerging at the other end a distorted unrecognizable echo of the original. She stood on one spot, pale and silent and uncomprehending. Her eyes funneled into mine, dull and unblinking. There was no light of recognition. There was no light at all.
The whistle sounded again, three blocks away. A solitary policeman dashed in our direction at a sharp clip, shouting in Chinese and brandishing a wooden police baton.
Pak’s gaze leapt up the street at the advancing badge. “We going now. Do greeting later.”
In Japanese, Noda gently took Anna’s arm. “We saw your father and your grandmother two nights ago.”
With a reference to her family, the head detective hoped to prod her back to the present, but his words had no effect. She merely smiled and said, “Oh, Japanese. I love Japanese. It’s so musical.”
Another miracle drug abused. Long-term, two things gave me hope: her posture and her complexion. She stood straight and loose-limbed and unencumbered by injury or stress or any other overbearing trauma, and her skin was clear and glowed with the same creamy near translucence her mother had possessed. But short-term Anna was a liability. She couldn’t run. She could only be led, and even then only at a slow methodical pace.
The policeman was two and half blocks away and closing.
Pak dragged the body of his second victim into an alleyway, then pointed farther into the passage. “Bringing Tanaka woman here.”
I turned to Noda. “You three go on ahead. I’ll slow the cop down and follow.”
“You remembering place?” Pak asked, grabbing the bag of supplies.
“Yes.”
We’d camped out at a safe house five blocks away until sunset before setting up our stakeout of the noodle shop. A van, battered and road-tested and unremarkable, was parked in a nearby garage. Pak would pilot it from Changbai to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, a thousand-mile journey as the crow flies. The last leg of the trek was through the Gobi Desert. His people had worked up a South Korean passport for Anna as well, so documents weren’t a problem.
Noda shook his head. “I’ll stay. Pak can take her.”
“No,” I said, an eye on the advancing badge. “Pak can’t handle her alone in this state. You go. I’ll catch up, don’t worry.”
“I don’t leave people.”
“There’s no choice. All of us can’t leave without the police following. Go.”
Noda’s scar flared. “Bad idea.”
“It’s the only idea.”
A block and a half and closing.
Noda cast an unhappy look at the cop.
I said, “Anna comes first.”
He growled at his lack of options. “I’ll be back.”
“I’ll be right behind you.”
Reluctantly, Noda turned away, made a hurried bow to Anna, then hoisted her over his shoulder and trotted after Pak. Anna made giggling noises.
“The eaves,” my detective friend called back as he disappeared into the darkness.
CHAPTER 74
I TURNED to face the policeman.
He was fifty yards away and moving in steadily now. Not too fast, not too slow. He still flourished the nightstick in a threatening manner, but I found the club reassuring. If he’d witnessed the murders, he’d be brandishing a gun.
Conditions worked in our favor. Streetlamps were few and dim. He’d been four blocks away. For all he knew, we were dragging drunks off the roadway. Or he’d witnessed the tail end of a street brawl. Both were probably the norm for the district. Undesirable, yet neither was irregular nor life-threatening. But once he understood he was dealing with murder, the firearm would come out. I needed to prevent the discovery at all costs. Which meant I needed to distract and then disable him. That was the scenario necessary for me to rejoin my friends.
I stepped into the street and raised my hands.
* * *
The cop was young but he wasn’t dumb.
He approached with caution. Like any experienced officer would when confronted with a civilian, possibly a drunk civilian, not to mention a foreigner, in a scrimmage involving violence.
I drew up and waited for him to come to me. Take all the time you want. I only need to stall enough for my friends to get to the safe house five blocks away.
And then I changed my mind. Noda had had a better idea.
The perfect idea for
the time and place.
The eaves.
* * *
During our stakeout, we’d watched an amorous couple shelter from prying eyes under the deep overhang of one of the traditional buildings, in a nearly impenetrable darkness. The lovers were a short distance away, and yet, under the concealing cover of the eaves, they were nothing more than an indistinct bundle. They could have been a stack of barrels or a pile of firewood. Their embrace was an inky slow-moving mass within a midnight black field. That was all.
So, with the advancing cop fewer than twenty yards away, I retreated to the protective shadows of the shop overhang behind me. The badge stopped five yards out and squinted into the darkness. I edged sideways. He shouted at me in Chinese. I didn’t answer.
I wondered if he could see me with any clarity, and confirmed in the next instant that he couldn’t. His searching look roamed over the side of the blackened storefront, his eyes unable to find mine. In the cloistered entry of the grocery we’d used for our stakeout, our eyes had long been accustomed to the night and we’d still been unable to make out details of the passionate goings-on. My current adversary was under a heavier handicap.
The safe house was only a short five blocks away.
I could confuse the issue.
To stall for time.
I eased closer to the wall, then shifted sideways, away from the policeman, careful to maneuver within the shielding shadows of the man-made canopy. Then a step forward. Then back. My movements were slow, fluid, and random.
I mapped out a square. Then a rectangle. I moved diagonally. I bent at the waist as I shifted positions. I raised and lowered my arms. As if I were but one person among several. Indecision clouded the policeman’s features. His youthful confidence faded. He yelled out to me—or us—to step forward. At least, I presumed that’s what he said. His tone was demanding, presumptuous, yet wavered at the end.
I switched to circles. A small, tight one. A longish oval one. Sticking carefully to the confines of the eaves, I added counterclockwise circles. I cut across the diameter of each ring. The cop opted for containment. He roared at me again, frustration edging into his voice, then spoke into his shoulder radio. I’d stalled his advance. All time gained for my fleeing friends.
