Chapter Thirty-Three
“I really don’t think that you have anything to worry about.”
Leyton Drisdale wheeled his leather chair around from the computer screen so that he was facing his client, Jake Carver. He had just finished watching the inchoate documentary that Carver had received from Pyongyang. For Carver, it was the sixth time that he had viewed the same footage.
Carver exploded, “Nothing to worry about!”
“They look like amateurs. No network is going to pick up on this. It’ll do the round of a few administrators in the studios, find its way on to the slush pile of a few agents, and will be dead and buried inside a couple of months. It’s old news. No one cares.”
“That’s not the point. It’s what they found out. If they could...”
“What are you worried about?” Drisdale was sounding unusually confident. He reasserted the question seeing the slightly blank look on Carver’s face. “I mean what are you really worried about? Scared of being indicted in a murder investigation? Or more terrified of being outed?” He said the last word, harshly, cruelly, only too well recognising his companion’s Achilles’ heel.
“I...” Carver spluttered.
Drisdale waved the DVD containing the documentary film in front of Carver’s face as he handed it back. “Do you think there was anything on there that I didn’t know already? I’ve had my own men out in Pyongyang investigating ever since Garnet’s death. It’s surprised me that you haven’t been doing the same. I would have thought that you would have wanted to track down Medea.”
“I do. I’ve been busy,” said Carver.
“What? Blowing up buildings?” asked the black lawyer, facetiously. “I would have thought that my approach to our mutual assassination problem was slightly more practical, wouldn’t you agree?”
Carver sat back in his own chair, only too well aware of his own uncharacteristic inactivity in resolving a personal situation; once again conscious of an overpowering sense of emasculation in the presence of the lawyer’s critical analysis. He felt like a child, powerless and out of control, who has been unable to vocalise a specific worry or known how to tackle a particular problem, and who is now just relieved that a parent has stepped in and taken control of the situation. “What have you found out?” Carver asked.
Drisdale stretched out his arms in front of him, interweaving his fingers and making the bones crack audibly. He sat back in his chair, at the same time picking a stray piece of white cotton off the sleeve of his dark blue suit jacket, holding the thread of material up for examination before allowing it to fall into the waste paper basket beneath his desk. The cat who has had the cream, Carver thought, his impatience growing, as he watched Drisdale’s display of nonchalance. He was deliberately being kept waiting; being kept in suspense; made to suffer for his months of indolence. Finally Drisdale said, “Do you remember Garnet's mobile phone?”
Carver replied, “Mobile phone? No. Not really. Should I? You forget, I hardly knew the man.”
“No, of course. Apparently he kept it with him constantly during his final months. The contractors complain of him having bugged them almost constantly for progress reports on the building.”
“That’s true,” Jake Carver agreed.
“Like a kid with a new toy was one description I heard.”
Carver looked annoyed, realising that Drisdale was stringing out his tale. “Where is this leading?”
“The phone was not on Garnet’s body when it was fished out of the river.”
“So? Nor was anything much else, so I understand. There was mention of a missing plaque or something, if I recall. That was never discovered either.”
Drisdale bent forward and pulled open the bottom drawer in his desk. He withdrew a hard, flat, rectangular object, carefully wrapped up in a red velvet cloth, which he casually threw across the desk to Carver. “You mean this one?”
Jake Carver unwrapped the bronze plaque and read allowed the inscription, “To commemorate the opening of the Wendelson Building by Garnet G. Wendelson this day of 1st May 2009” His eyes widened and he looked back across to where the seated lawyer was resting back in his seat, his arms folded across his chest. “So that English nursemaid was telling the truth all along.”
“Surprised?”
“Where did you get this?” Carver asked.
Drisdale did not answer directly, “The Pyongyang police department, for all of their faults in their investigation, were nevertheless very thorough in their sweeping of the river bed for evidence.”
“But they did not find this.”
“No,” agreed Drisdale. “Nor this.” He withdrew from an inside pocket in his jacket a thin, sleek mobile phone. He revealed the keypad of the phone with a deft flick of his hand and pressed one button.
“Is this his too?”
“Garnet’s? No. My investigators have not been able to locate his phone’s current whereabouts, although they have a fairly shrewd idea of what has happened to it. I think if anyone could be bothered to organise a search of the Pyongyang refuse tip where your boyfriend and his mate’s bodies were discovered they would eventually turn it up.”
“But that would take months.”
“And would be a pointless activity, in any case.”
Carver looked puzzled. “So what have you got there?”
Leyton Drisdale looked at the small illuminated display on the phone in front of him before answering. He smiled slowly. “What I have is the telephone number of a certain lady that you might like to meet.” He handed the phone to Carver. “Would you care to ring Medea, or shall I?”
••••••••••
“It is amazing the power of satellite technology these days,” Drisdale explained. “A word in the right ear and it is possible to gain access to a world of hitherto invisible information: bugs, phone taps, e-mails, if you know where to look it is possible to discover who spoke to whom and about what for almost every single electronic conversation that takes place. It should be a lesson to us all.”
Drisdale had immediately retrieved the slim mobile phone from Jake Carver’s eager clutches, with the words, “It’s no good. She doesn’t answer. Don’t you think I have already tried to call her.” He had proceeded to explain, though, how he had come by Medea’s number.
“There is no longer any such thing as a private phone call. I wouldn’t have thought of it myself, it was my chief investigator out in Pyongyang that decided to check back through the records of telephone calls that Garnet had made from his mobile phone leading up to the day of his death. Not being in possession of the phone itself was obviously a hindrance, but it proved to be a relatively simple job to trace back through the records kept by the service provider to at least identify the actual numbers that he called. One phone call, or if I am being strictly accurate I should say text message, that he made struck my investigator as being of particular interest.”
“Yes?”
“It was made on 1st May 2009.”
“The day of his death.”
“Precisely. More intriguing still, from the satellite record of transmissions, it was possible to ascertain that Garnet made the call from the top of the Wendelson Building.”
Carver looked puzzled. “Meek never mentioned a call. He was there all the time, right?”
Leyton Drisdale shrugged, “Perhaps he was not aware of Garnet sending his message.”
“Or could his killer have been responsible?”
“Not from the time records. No, it appears certain that the message originated from Garnet Wendelson himself.”
“And so what did it say?”
“That we don’t know. We can trace the signal, the originator and the receiver, but there is no record of the actual message itself.”
Carver was catching on though, “But it was to this number, was it?” He pointed to the phone that the lawyer had previously shown him.
“D
ial 1-800-Assassin.” Drisdale said, amused.
“Interesting.” Carver scratched his head. “What could Wendelson have wanted to say? Hang on.” A sudden thought struck him, “That idiot Meek mentioned something about him planning to change his will. Do you think he was telling Medea to back off?”
“Well, it didn’t work if he was,” replied Drisdale, being realistic.
“What then?”
“I don’t know. And frankly I don’t particularly care. What is more interesting to me is that since we have gained this foothold of information about Medea, we have been able, to some extent, to track her movements, or at least identify which reception mast she is closest to each time she makes or receives a call.”
“Seriously?”
“The miracle of modern technology for you.”
“But you are no closer to actually identifying her?”
“You mean to put a face to the name? No.”
“So where has she been?”
“It was clear that she turned up in Pyongyang shortly before the assassination of Marcel Chin and was still here when your friend Kim and Pak Jin-Siek were murdered.”
“We hardly need mobile phone records to know all that.”
“Perhaps not,” Drisdale conceded.
A new thought struck Carver, “I suppose you have no idea why she killed Kim?”
“My investigator’s theory, which I tend to agree with, is that Pak Jin-Siek, before he toppled Garnet over the edge of the Wendelson Building, a premise where I am in agreement with the findings of your media team from South Korea, stole both his mobile phone and also this commemorative plaque. The plaque, my man discovered amongst Pak Jin-Siek’s possessions after his death, and before, you will note, your investigative journalists were swarming over the place, but as to the mobile phone, there was no sign. It seems likely that Pak, perhaps innocently ringing some of the stored contact numbers, inadvertently rang Medea’s extension, and that was enough to seal his fate. The rest is easy to imagine: Medea arranges a meeting, on what pretext we shall never know, but presumably for Pak to keep it there must have been a monetary advantage to him. Pak drags Kim Dong-Moon along as a backup, and Medea laying in patient ambush shoots them both, reclaiming Garnet’s phone from Pak’s dead body. Sound plausible?”
Carver did not answer, his mind recalling some of the happier times he had spent with Kim: the way he used to cover his mouth with his hand when he spoke when he was embarrassed; the appearance of the thick veins in his forearms that he found so attractive; his naïve innocence when it came to so much of twentieth century popular culture, the result of so many years spent in the isolation of the Hermit Kingdom prior to the Great Reawakening. He did not like to dwell on images of how his friend met with his untimely death, particularly in the circumstances that Drisdale was outlining. It was a dishonourable end: that is what Kim, himself, would have said. For all his faults, he had been a man who had known the meaning of the word honour. His association with a man such as Pak Jin-Siek would not have been through choice; it would only have been a misplaced sense of honouring a debt that could have thrown him together with such a strange bedfellow. Strange bedfellow. It was a description that could have perhaps more aptly been applied to his own relationship with Kim.
“Carver?”
Jake Carver looked up upon hearing his name. Leyton Drisdale was looking across his desktop at him, an anxious expression on his face.
“I’m sorry,” said Carver. “You were saying...”
“About Medea. From Pyongyang we have traced her journey here to New York. I think I already told you about the death of Maria Gomez?”
“The Latino nanny? Yes.” Carver had a thought. “Shouldn’t it be possible to get a name for Medea by relating her known movements to...”
“Airline passenger records? We’re one step ahead of you. My man is working on it as we speak.”
“So, is Medea still here, in New York?”
“No. For some months now we have reason to believe that she is in Central Africa.”
“Central Africa? Whatever for?”
The lawyer shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows. Just be grateful that she isn’t here.”
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