Fires of War

by Larry Bond

  15

  ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

  Corrine Alston was just about to curl up in bed with a good mystery when the phone rang. Thinking it was her mother, she picked up the phone on the night table in the bedroom.

  “Hey, Wicked Stepmother, it’s Prince Charming.”

  “Ferg?”

  “I need you to get to a secure phone, but don’t go to The Cube.”

  “Ferguson, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Encrypted phone. Call me. You have my number.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. You have five minutes.”

  The phone line went dead. Corrine scrambled to get her secure satellite phone. She punched the buttons, not entirely sure she remembered Ferg’s number.

  “Grimm Brothers. Fairy tales are our business.”

  “You’re not very funny, Ferguson, especially at midnight.”

  “It’s only two o’clock here,” he said. “Must be the problem. Humor’s jetlagged.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I need you to do me a favor.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  “Guns is on his way back home with a soil sample. He messed up his leg. Corrigan tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “One of the reasons he messed up his leg is that the South Koreans tripled security at the waste site where we found the plutonium. You know about the plutonium, right?”

  “Yes, of course. Why did they up the security?”

  “Sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. The leading theory is that our CIA station chief here is a boob, but there are other suspicions.”

  “Like what?”

  Ferguson ignored the question. “I have some things to check out, and I need, uh, I just need someone I can trust.”

  “You mean from the Team?”

  “This isn’t a team job I have in mind. I want them to do some translating maybe, and I may send them back with something for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Maybe more soil samples . . . I don’t know. I don’t want to use Seoul.”

  “Why not, Ferg?”

  Ferguson didn’t answer.

  “Ferg.”

  “Because, Wicked Stepmother, if they’re merely incompetent, they’ll screw it up. If they’re more than merely incompetent, who knows what will happen?”

  So why was he cutting out Corrigan, Corrine wondered. And why had Slott decided to get the Seoul office involved in a First Team mission without telling her?

  “You still there, Stepmother?”

  “I’m here, Ferg.”

  “Hey listen, one of these days you’re going to have to trust me,” he told her.

  “I trust you.”

  “Then see if you can find this guy for me. He’s retired. Used to work for the Bureau. Name is James Sonjae. Call him now and wake him up. Tell him to come to Seoul.”

  “Ferg, it’s two o’clock in the morning.”

  “He doesn’t sleep very well anyway.”

  “But—”

  “Like I say. Trust me, OK? Gotta go do some barhopping now. I’ll talk to you in a bit.”

  Two hours later, Corrine arrived at a diner about a mile and a half off the Beltway. James Sonjae sat in the far corner, slumped down in the booth, a coffee and half-eaten bagel sitting on the table in front of him. He kept his gaze toward the window as she approached; it was only when she leaned over to ask who he was that she realized he was able to watch everything from the reflections there.

  “Mr. Sonjae?”

  “Please have a seat, Ms. Alston.”

  “Corrine, please.”

  He turned from the window and straightened in the seat. “You’re the president’s counsel?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You don’t have bodyguards?”

  The remark surprised her. “I don’t need Secret Service protection.”

  “I see.”

  He picked up his coffee cup. He looked considerably older than his Bureau records indicated. His face was pockmarked and worn, his hair thin and gray. He was dressed in a light windbreaker, despite the night’s chill. A short, compact man, his shoulders sloped, giving Corrine the impression of someone who had been worn down by his years in government service.

  “Bob Ferguson asked me to contact you,” Corrine told him.

  “Ferg works for you?”

  “In a way. He’s in Korea.”

  “Korea?” Sonjae put down his coffee cup. “South Korea?”

  “Yes. He needs . . . He needs a translator he can trust. And he asked for you. He needs someone right away. Very much right away. The sooner the better.”

  Sonjae leaned back in the seat. Corrine guessed that he was trying to think of a way to say no politely.

  “His father saved my life,” said the ex-FBI agent finally. “What does he need me to do?”

  16

  NORTH P’YŎNPAN PROVINCE, NORTH KOREA

  Thera rode back to the dormitory with two engineers who’d finished for the day and needed to record their findings. The two men headed off to have lunch; Thera jogged to her room to write up the report.

  She took the cigarette pack out of her pocket and examined it while she waited for the laptop to boot up. She assumed the room was bugged, and thought it possible that there was some sort of camera monitoring what she did as well, even though she hadn’t been able to spot one. So she tried to be as nonchalant as possible.

  The package was wrapped in cellophane, unopened. She slit it open with her fingernail, pulling the top off and crumpling the wrapper in her hand. She slit the top open and folded back the paper, looking for a message.

  There was nothing on the flap, no paper between the cigarettes, no writing on the interior, at least not that she could see.

  Was yesterday’s message an illusion?

  Thera put the pack down and went to work.

  It was only as she started to type Norkelus’s terse response to the committee that Thera remembered what Tak Ch’o had said: save some cigarettes.

  Maybe the message was in the cigarettes.

  Of course.

  Thera out took the pack and tapped a cigarette free, playing with it as if to relieve tension or boredom. The cigarette quickly began to fray. She moved her hands back and forth, agitated, nervous. Absentmindedly she crushed the side of the cigarette and dropped it on the desk. Then, seeming to realize what she had done, she picked it up and flipped it toward the waste basket.

  It missed.

  She pulled the paper apart as she dropped it into the can. Nothing.

  Back at her desk, Thera started working on Norkelus’s report, which said that the team had found nothing but was still “in preliminary stages.” She transcribed everything he said; his accent made it difficult to understand some of the sentences, and she had to stop and rewind, stop and rewind, and even then ended up guessing at spots.

  If there was a message inside one of the cigarettes, it would look slightly different than the others, wouldn’t it?

  Thera typed a few more words, then got up, and with exaggerated movements gathered her things so she could go outside for a smoke. Here she was definitely being observed, so she made a good show of things: opening the package from the bottom, taking out one cigarette, examining it, lighting it. A gust of wind came up; she scooped her hand over the end of the cigarette to shelter it, and dropped the pack. Most of the cigarettes scattered.

  She dropped to her knees, picking the cigarettes one by one.

  The third was slightly fatter than the others. She slid it behind her ear and scooped the rest into the box.

  Inside, she palmed it, rolled the tobacco out in her pocket, and finally unfolded the wrapper, revealing a message so tiny she had to squint to make out the letters.

  Nov 8 124.30.39.52 MIDNIGHT

  Thera’s first thought was that the numbers referred to an Internet site where a message would appear tomorrow night. But as she went back to work on the report, she realized the numbers
were actually longitude and latitude and referred to a spot roughly fifty miles south of the waste plant, whose own location she’d had to note for the records.

  The team was leaving for Japan on the evening of November 8; they’d probably land by midnight.

  Was it some sort of trap or trick?

  Thera couldn’t decide.

  Best let The Cube figure that out.

  The problem was how exactly to tell them. She could imbed a message in the report she was typing for Norkelus easily enough. But none of the prearranged message sequences came close to covering this situation.

  Working Ch’o’s name into the message was easy. Norkelus said they had been greeted warmly; Thera added a line quoting his brief speech the day they arrived.

  She scanned down what she had, deleting some of Norkelus’s extraneous comments. He’d included a to-do list that was basically the inspection team’s agenda, ending with the flight at ten p.m. Nov. 8.

  Thera added a line: Nov. 8 pckp 0000XXXX.

  It looked as if it were something she’d stuck in, intending to finish or clear up later. She scrolled back, adding XXX’s and zeroes to some of the earlier parts.

  Norkelus had given some initial readings taken by air monitors. She could stick the numbers in there, claiming she’d misheard or mistyped something, but how would anyone know to look for them?

  What if she put in a new line, mangled from Norkelus’s notes?

  She typed in the numbers, removing the periods. It looked more like an error than anything else.

  Obvious enough?

  Thera hit her spellchecker, which ran through the document quickly. She accidentally “corrected” one of the readings, replacing an abbreviation with the word Pluto. She left it, as if she hadn’t realized her mistake.

  The coordinates were just there, on their own line. It would take ESP to realize they were part of the message.

  The whole message would take ESP to interpret.

  Maybe she shouldn’t send it at all. Maybe it was a trap.

  A nuclear scientist who wanted to defect? Quite a prize.

  Thera hesitated, her mouse over the Send button.

  She had to make the coordinates obvious; otherwise there was no point to this at all. No point.

  She scrolled to the findings list, looking at some of the samples. Particle quantities were noted.

  Iron. The code for an emergency pickup was Iron; she was to insert the word or the chemical symbol, Fe, into a message to alert the Cube.

  Thera typed FeBr into the list of first-day chemical samples—if anyone caught it, she would claim she couldn’t decipher something from Norkelus’s notes—then cut and pasted the coordinates in. Finally, she scrolled to the end of the message and put her initials in, making it clear she had prepared it.

  Send, or not send?

  Fear gripped her for a moment, fear, doubt and doom.

  It filled her with anger. She zeroed the mouse on the SEND command and tapped furiously, practically breaking the plastic.

  Gone, she told herself.

  Gone. And don’t look back.

  17

  CIA BUILDING 24-442

  “Iron is the code for pickup,” said Corrigan, “and I double-checked just to be sure: There is no test for iron bromine, which is what FeBr would be, presumably.”

  Corrine glanced across the conference room table at Parnelles and Slott. Both wore grim expressions, clearly concerned about the message that had been imbedded in a routine UN report intercepted almost exactly three hours before. Corrigan had called them all immediately, waking Slott and Parnelles up. Corrine had only just returned from meeting with Ferguson’s friend, so wired on coffee she wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway.

  “There are other typos in the message,” said Slott. “It may be nothing.”

  “I doubt she’d be sloppy with something like that,” said Corrigan.

  “November 8 at midnight, the team will be out of there by then,” said Slott.

  “Maybe it’s tonight at midnight,” suggested Corrigan. “See, it’s out of sequence; maybe the wrong date was put there to throw anyone else off.”

  “She’s not going to make a mistake like that,” said Slott.

  “Then why ask for a pickup after they leave?”

  “Let’s see where this is,” said Parnelles, rising.

  Corrigan had brought an extra-large map with him. The DCI unfolded it and peered down at the spot the mission coordinator had marked. A lock of jet black hair fell across his forehead. Parnelles’s eyes had immense bags beneath them. The looks that appeared rugged by day seemed merely craggy at three in the morning.

  “Fifty miles south of the site, along the coast, if you read the numbers as longitude and latitude, with minutes and decimals,” said Slott softly. “Just due south of Kawaksan.”

  Parnelles grunted. “You have satellite maps of this?”

  Slott slid over a folder.

  “I think, uh, we ought to run the team in there,” said Corrigan. His voice squeaked.

  “How would Thera get there?” asked Corrine, looking at the map. “She wouldn’t walk fifty miles.”

  “Yes,” grunted Parnelles, continuing to stare at the map.

  “Maybe she’s planning on taking a vehicle from the site,” said Corrigan. “I think we have to assume she’s going to be there.”

  “Thank you, Jack,” said Parnelles. He looked up at the mission coordinator. “I believe Corrine, Dan, and I can take it from here.”

  Corrigan didn’t want to leave, but of course he had no choice. He felt as if he hadn’t made a good enough case for a rescue mission; his gut told him Thera was in trouble, and he didn’t want her abandoned.

  “It just doesn’t make any sense,” said Slott after Corrigan left. “Why would she want a pickup after she’s gone? And if the sequence is supposed to be a clue, if it’s tonight, why did she give this location rather than O2, or one of the cache points? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  O2 was a location a few miles outside the camp toward the coast.

  “When you say midnight November 8, do you mean the midnight after the day of November 8?” asked Corrine. “Or the midnight that leads to the day of November 8? It might be interpreted either way.”

  “She’d mean midnight at the end of November 8,” said Slott.

  “Are you sure?”

  “That’s the way we do it.”

  “It would make more sense Corrine’s way,” said Parnelles. “She needs to be picked up before the UN team leaves, because she’s worried about something that will happen to her when she tries to go.”

  “Midnight November 7—the way she should have written it—that would be tonight,” said Slott.

  “Then we better get there tonight,” said Parnelles.

  Slott was skeptical that the message was even a message; it seemed to him likely that Thera had accidentally typed the wrong letters for a legitimate testing compound. Analysts were always seeing things that weren’t there, and Corrigan tended to be an overanxious den mother.

  “Dan’s point about how far it is from the base does make a lot of sense,” said Corrine. “From this map, it looks like she would be driving right by one of the supply caches, not to mention O2.”

  “Maybe she saw something at O2 that made it inappropriate,” suggested Parnelles. “Or maybe it’s not her who’s supposed to be picked up.”

  “What? A defector?” Slott picked up his plastic mechanical pencil and began tapping it furiously on the desk. “No. She’d never blow her cover like that.”

  “Maybe she didn’t have to blow her cover,” said Parnelles. “Can we get to this site without being detected?”

  Slott glanced at the map. “I believe so. I’ll have to check with Colonel Van Buren.”

  “Very good,” said Parnelles, pushing back from the table.

  “Which night should we go in?”

  “Both, if necessary.”

  “Since we’re all here,” said Corrine, “there�
�s something I wanted to mention. Sergeant Young broke his leg and is on his way back to Hawaii for treatment.”

  “I hadn’t heard,” said Parnelles.

  “He fell off the side of ravine,” said Slott. “It didn’t affect the mission.”

  “The circumstances seemed odd,” said Corrine, looking at the deputy director.

  “Guns and Ferguson went into the South Korean waste site,” explained Slott. “Security had been increased, and they took a risk getting out. In any event, as they were leaving, the sergeant slipped down a ravine and got injured.”

  “Why had security been increased?” asked Parnelles.

  Slott let the pencil slide down through his fingers to the table. He resented Corrine for bringing this up now; her only motive, it seemed, was to embarrass him.

  “Seoul had a plan to get into the facility,” Slott told Parnelles. “Unfortunately, they didn’t coordinate properly with Ferguson. Actually, it’s very possible Sergeant Young would have gotten hurt anyway. The site is very hilly.”

  “Why is Seoul involved?” said Corrine.

  “Why wouldn’t they be?” said Slott.

  “This is a Special Demands mission.”

  “Special Demands doesn’t have the resources for what we need to do. This is more a bread-and-butter assignment.”

  “You should have told me,” said Corrine.

  “Seoul is involved because I told Daniel to pull out all the stops,” said Parnelles. “Blame me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You don’t run the CIA, do you?”

  “Mr. Parnelles.” Corrine gave him a don’t-screw-with-me look.

  “The president wants to know about the bomb material. We’re pulling out all the stops,” said Slott.

  “Did Ferguson know?” Corrine asked.

  “Apparently not. I sent him to talk to Ken Bo.” Slott picked up his pencil again. “Obviously, they didn’t play together very well.”

  “I’d appreciate being informed when something directly involves Special Demands,” said Corrine. “I should have been told.”

  “You want me to tell you every little thing?”

  “I don’t think that’s a little thing, but yes,” she added. “Everything that has to do with Special Demands.”