Chapter Twenty-Five
Kim Dong-Moon was not at home. Judging from the look of his apartment it appeared that he had not slept there for several days, possibly longer. Jake Carver had already telephoned the construction company that he knew that Kim was most commonly contracted to, only to be told that Kim had phoned in sick a week beforehand and had not been seen since: the manager had sounded annoyed on the phone, the company had another big project they were working on at the moment and, although labour was in cheap supply, someone with Kim’s experience was a rare commodity. Jake gathered that Kim was required to report back to work as soon as possible, or face the consequences. Jake’s next move had been to ring around the couple of hospitals that were most local to Kim’s district of Pyongyang, to check if anyone under his name had been admitted recently - not knowing the nature of Kim’s illness it was only human nature to suspect the worst. Carver’s paucity of the Korean language had defeated his investigative attempts at the first number he called, and at the second he had been politely but firmly informed that the hospital was not at liberty to provide such information. It was a long shot at any rate: Carver recalled a conversation he had had with Kim Dong-Moon only a month or so beforehand about the poor standard of care in New Korean hospitals, when Kim’s exact words had been, “I would have to be dead before I went near one of those places.”
Secrecy having been a key tenet of their relationship together from the start, it now occurred to Carver that the negative side of such discretion was the fact that he knew almost no one else who actually knew Kim Dong-Moon: he had met none of his friends; had not been introduced to any of his family; actually knew very little about his past existence. All he knew was the truth they had shared together, and up until now that had been enough. Carver stared blankly out of the window of Kim’s apartment block, looking directly at the twin structure immediately opposite; two small parts of a much larger estate of functional, workers’ housing, built on Stalinist designs and ideas. The despair that Carver currently felt, though, was not so much motivated by the depressing view, as by his own sense of inadequacy. He was a man of action, and he was not used to feeling so powerless. It was ironic, he thought: he had believed that the greatest luxury that money could buy was freedom, and now here he was, richer than ever he could have imagined, and, at the same time, shackled, as effectively as in any prison. It was still only a matter of hours since his flight from New York had touched down, and suddenly Jake Carver felt overcome by a sense of tiredness. He crossed to the small bed, in the corner of the room, that he had shared with Kim so very recently, and lay down, not bothering to remove his clothes. He could still smell the familiar aftershave of his friend on the pillow as he sunk his head into the cushion’s downy embrace. He was just so tired. He could not think. Perhaps he would wake up tomorrow morning and Kim would be here, and all the questions that were whirring around in his head, like a flock of anxious, squawking birds searching for a safe place to roost, would be answered. One question, above all else, he kept returning to; one anomaly that he could not understand. It had puzzled him since the very moment that he had opened the blackmail note on the aeroplane, had remained nagging away at him like an irate hornet ever since his arrival in New Korea, but now only actually revealed itself as a fully formed question, here in Kim’s apartment, as Carver was attempting to fall asleep: why had the blackmail demand been for such a vast amount of money?
No one knew about his unexpected inheritance. No, that was not quite true. Drisdale knew, of course, and now so too did that idiot nursemaid Meek, and he presumed that somewhere, out there, probably at this very moment, lying beside her semi-automatic rifle, one anonymous female sharp-shooter of Ukrainian descent, also knew pretty much the details of his new found wealth, but no one else. Certainly no one in Pyongyang that he was aware of. He himself had had no idea of the windfall that was awaiting him when he had been urgently summoned to New York by Garnet Wendelson’s solicitor, immediately after the billionaire’s fall; he had not contacted Kim since his departure - not through want of trying, just because of what he had presumed had been the vagaries of the international phone network - and there was no one else that he knew in Pyongyang whom he could think of who could have acquired such knowledge. So why such a huge demand? True, the Jake Carver of old was not a poor man, but twenty five million dollars? That was a sum far exceeding anything even the most successful of civil engineers would have been able to lay their hands on. No, there was something wrong here, somewhere. The blackmailer must have had prior knowledge of the fortune that was to be his. And yet it seemed impossible that anyone could have come by the information. Discover the source of the ‘leak’ and he would discover the identity of his persecutor. For some reason that he could not explain, Carver trusted Leyton Drisdale’s discretion implicitly. Martin Meek, though, now that was a different matter. There was nothing he could do that evening, but perhaps by the morning a course of action would become apparent to him.
Until then sleep would be the only escape.
••••••••••
Leyton Drisdale’s return phone call to Detective Richens was brief, but was the fruition of many hours spent pouring over the mountains of paperwork that had comprised part of the Wendelson legacy. The slip of paper, when he found it, had been insignificant to look at, but was confirmation of Drisdale’s growing suspicions as to the connection between his former client and the dead woman, Maria Gomez. It was a receipt, dated more than twenty years earlier, for a reimbursement of expenses for a visa application made out in the dead woman’s name, and written in Garnet’s familiar handwriting. The destination for which the visa was required was not specified, but it did not take Drisdale long, by comparing the dates he knew of Garnet’s past travels with the date written on the top of the receipt, to discover that the date would have coincided with an imminent departure of the Wendelson entourage for a trip to the Ukraine. No coincidence: on the contrary, it had been the result that Drisdale had been anticipating. The conclusion to draw from the discovery seemed apparent: Maria Gomez had been Garnet’s carer - in all probability only very briefly - during a period in the late nineteen eighties, quite likely having been engaged in Florida, during the final days of his southern sojourn, indeed, most likely immediately after Drisdale himself had visited Garnet in order to draw up the now notorious will. The trip to the Ukraine had followed almost immediately afterwards, a journey where Maria had been required to chaperone her new employer; a journey that had ultimately proved to be her death warrant. Drisdale presumed that Maria Gomez, whilst accompanying Garnet on this trip, must have either actually met the mysterious Medea or, at the very least, had acquired some knowledge about her identity which could now be used to trace her, and which meant that she constituted a threat to the assassin’s continued anonymity.
Drisdale knew why his own name was on Medea’s list - if he had not carried out his role as executor to Garnet’s will in the precise manner that the old man had demanded, he was quite convinced that he would not still be alive and sitting at his comfortable desk today - and he knew why Carver was on Medea’s list. Martin Meek was the real puzzle. Perhaps, like Maria Gomez before him, he unwittingly possessed some nugget of information which, while currently condemning him, might ultimately preserve him.
Interlude
Let me attempt to describe to you the beauty that I see in a soaring aeroplane. I know the Aesthetic is not paramount to all followers of the Church of the Higher We - for some the ritualistic aspect of faith is what is key, for others it is the camaraderie, for many it is the security of routine - but for me, it has been having my eyes opened to physical beauty and its associated Truth which is central to my own personal belief. Such thinking is not unique, I know: many ancient religions have held a reverence for the beauty of nature to be a tenet of their faith; many other organised religions have considered the very denial of such beauty to be a measure of the power of an individual
’s devotion, hence the great purges of graven images in Reformation England or in modern Islam, where any manmade, artificial constructs of beauty are considered to be false idols and only serve to distract from the purity of worship.
Before I continue, I feel that I should explain my own position a little more clearly: I was - and still am - a successful, independent, career woman. I wear trendy clothes, I go to fashionable shops, I eat out at some of the most expensive restaurants in Lower Manhattan. What I am attempting to convey to you, the reader, is that I am not a geek. I am not your average plane spotter, hanging out on the viewing platform at Kennedy, wearing a duffel coat and sandals, hopeful of glimpsing a new registration number, or a freshly painted aeroplane livery. Sorry, no, that just doesn’t do it for me, and, more crucially, it is nothing to do with what the Church of the Higher We is all about.
How many of us cannot truly say, that at some time, we have looked up and chanced to glimpse a passenger jet breaking through a cloud, or flying all alone in a perfect, clear blue sky, and not felt a sense of awe: not awe at Man’s ingenuity and invention, but in the pure, physical spectacle of several hundred tonnes of moulded aluminium alloy up so high, where we unaided can not presume to go. And does not such a vision always require a certain suspension of disbelief on the part of the onlooker, for who can really imagine, when one is standing, feet firmly planted on terra firma, that held safely within that sleek and shining hull, thirty thousand feet up in the thin airs, are other people just the same as we. And who, when actually on board an aircraft and flying high in the sky, in an environment alien to everything that as human beings we consider comfortable and familiar, can have failed to glance down at the diminished planet beneath them, and with a sympathetic nod of kinship at a largely Earth bound brethren, not felt a sense of superiority at being able to look down - if only temporarily - from somewhere quite so high.
(Extract from chapter four of We Can All Fly Together: How The Church of the Higher We Changed My Life by Amanda de Boek.)
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