Mortal Allies (13 page)

Carlson then took the reporter’s arm and the two of them casually strolled to a shaded spot underneath a big tree. The cameraman followed them and Carlson gave a three-minute impromptu interview. I watched and smoldered. You could tell Carlson was very practiced in the art of interviews, because she even helped arrange the cameraman to get the best angle — away from the sun — and her movements in front of his lens had that theatrical, picturesque quality of a born actress.

When she finally finished, she and the CNN crew warmly shook hands and parted ways. My hands were shaking, too, only in anticipation of getting themselves clenched firmly around her tiny neck.

She ignored me as she walked by. I didn’t ignore her, though. I moved like a lion going after its prey. Her trio of co-counsels kept their distance, because it was pretty damned obvious that Chernobyl was about to bleed radioactive dust all over the countryside.

When we got to Carlson’s office, I slammed the door shut behind me. There was a thunderous bang. The whole building reverberated.

“You’ve got a problem, lady!” I yelled.

She fell into her chair and looked up at me. Her expression was anything but receptive. “I’ve got a problem?” she yelled right back.

“Yeah. A big one.”

“No, Drummond, you’re the one with the problem.”

“Yeah?”

She nearly exploded. “You still don’t get it, do you? My job is to protect my client. That’s supposed to be your priority, too.”

“You don’t protect your client by yammering in front of a camera every chance you get.”

“When it comes to homosexuals, it’s the only way you protect them. You have no idea how despised they are. No, that’s not right. Maybe you do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Come on, Drummond. I’ve seen how you look at Keith and Maria and Allie. What in the hell did they ever do to you to provoke that kind of disgust?”

There really was no way to answer that. She had me dead in the crosshairs. So instead I took the first resort of every able attorney: When caught with your hand in the cookie jar, point at the refrigerator.

“Look,” I said, “you won’t do our client any good by running your mouth on TV. You don’t know the Koreans. Don’t piss them off. Don’t back these guys into a corner.”

“You’re acting like I started this. Don’t tell me you didn’t notice those cameras at the prison this morning? They were publicly humiliating our client. I’m fighting fire with fire.”

Again, she was right. Only this time, she was also wrong. Horribly wrong.

“That was just for public consumption. They gave up jurisdiction so they had to save some face. This is Asia, lady. That’s how the game’s played over here.”

“They beat him,” she said, and her green eyes sizzled like tiny little hornet’s nests with thousands of furious insects buzzing around.

“Did you see them beat him?” I demanded.

“I saw them shove him. And I saw him come flying out the back of that van.”

“Maybe he tripped,” I countered. “I’ll ask you once again. Did you witness anyone beating him?”

“I didn’t have to witness it. I saw the look on his face.”

“You’re supposed to be a lawyer. You’re supposed to distinguish between assumptions and facts. You just told an international network that our client was beaten. Can you prove it? Can you back it up?”

She ran a hand through her hair. She knew I had her.

I said, “Call CNN and tell them not to run it.”

She swallowed once, hard. “I won’t.”

“Do it. You were talking out your ass. We both know it.”

“If I was, the Koreans can take it as a warning shot. They’ll keep their hands off my client or I’ll publicly pillory them every day of this trial.”

We stared at each other for a long, fruitless moment. I finally spun around and left. I went back to my room. I paced around like a big, grouchy bear in his cave. Eventually I got tired of that, but I was too emotionally worked up to return to my reading, so I flipped on the TV.

Say this for those CNN clowns: They’re damned quick.

The piece opened with a great shot of me and Carlson walking out a doorway under the word HOMOS in big, bold, black letters.

CNN’s editors are real quick, too. And slanderously selective.

The next shot was borrowed from a Korean station. It showed Whitehall, looking like a miserable, saturated noodle, being dragged through some double doors. The next clip showed Carlson with her hand on my elbow and we looked frantically friendly, like we were discussing something and were in complete agreement. Then came the shot with Carlson under the tree saying, “My co-counsels and I are outraged at the beating of our client. He was worked over by several South Korean policemen. When I tried to stop them, I was assaulted.”

Then came the cutout of me with the microphone stuffed in my angry, pouting face. I growled, “No damned comment,” only the way it came across was like I was so damn furious that my client got beaten that I was too tongue-tied to spit out anything but “No damned comment.”

The phone rang within two minutes.

“Hello, General,” I said, before Clapper, the chief of the entire Army JAG Corps, could even begin to identify himself.

“Drummond, what in the hell’s going on over there?” he belched.

“Hey, it wasn’t like it looked. I swear, General. I got ambushed. Carlson set me up.”

He paused for only a moment. “An ambush?”

“Right. She called me up to our office and I—”

“Office?” he interrupted, “Is that the goddamned building with that ‘homo’ word written on it?”

Feeling the blood rush into my face, I feebly answered, “That isn’t like it looks, either. See, you have to read that sign real close. First, it’s ‘homos,’ with an s at the end, and it actually stands for—”

The earpiece exploded. “Drummond! I don’t give a shit what it stands for. The whole world just saw a picture of an American Army officer walking out a doorway with that damned sign. Have you got any idea what that looks like?”

“Now that you mention it, sir, I guess it—”

“You said she set you up?”

“Right. See, she called me to come up there, and then I—”

“Jesus, have I got the wrong man in there? Are you telling me she’s too smart for you?”

That hurt. I mean, that
really
hurt. “I just wasn’t expecting it. I will be next time, though. I swear.”

“You better, Drummond. You really better.”

He hung up hard. I didn’t blame him. It was three o’clock in the morning back in Washington. He probably hadn’t been lying around in bed idly watching the late-night news. Somebody must’ve called him and frosted his ear. Probably somebody big, like the Chief of Staff of the Army. Or somebody bigger, like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Or maybe somebody even bigger than that.

My thoughts were interrupted when the phone rang again. This time it was General Spears. Personally. And he did this really excellent imitation of General Clapper. Next came Acting Ambassador Brandewaite, and I have to confide his imitation wasn’t nearly as good, because he was so florid and incensed all he could do was spit and sputter and curse. He hit all the octaves right, though, I’ll tell you that. Then Spears’s legal adviser, Colonel Piranha Lips, called, and he did the shorthand version. No barrage of questions, no rude interruptions, just a simple, abbreviated “Now I really don’t like you, Drummond. I’ll fuck you for this.”

It was really amazing. I’d been in Korea two days and already I’d managed to piss off every senior officer in the world, to get the acting ambassador so mad he couldn’t work up enough saliva to spit, and to get my face plastered on the international news in a way that was thoroughly revolting.

I owed all this to a short, skinny girl with malice in her heart and no sense at all about what she was unleashing.

To give her credit, she thought she was protecting her client. And back in the good ol’ U.S.A. what she’d just done might even have worked. Not here, though. Katherine Carlson was about to get a lesson in what the Asians call “face.” The Mafia has a word for it, too: payback.

A
s I later pieced it together, Keith had decided to slip out the back gate for a little shopping. That happened sometime around nine o’clock that night. He dodged across a heavily trafficked boulevard and entered the Itaewon shopping district. Maybe they started tracking him right then. If so, he apparently never noticed.

He began dashing in and out of shops, picking up a few things here and a few things there. He got himself a snazzy leather bomber jacket with a fuzzy fur collar, some Nike running shoes, and a spiffy new leather wallet. By eleven o’clock he was halfway through Itaewon. He’d made it to a major intersection with cars whizzing by, and had paused to wait for the pedestrians’ traffic signal to show the little green man with his legs pumping, when a couple of strong hands lifted him off his feet and tossed him into the speeding traffic. He got bounced high up in the air by the first car and came down dead center into the bumper of the next. It took an ambulance twenty minutes to get there. Keith was loaded into the back and rushed to the nearest hospital.

The good news was he’d carried his passport with him, so the hospital got his identity and immediately notified the American embassy that some American had gotten hit by a couple of cars. The lady at the embassy night switch didn’t recognize his name, so she made a note to give to the night duty officer the next time he wandered by. He came by around four in the morning. He didn’t recognize Merritt’s name, either. He followed his standard operating procedures and called and gave the name to the desk sergeant at the Yongsan Garrison MP station. The desk sergeant also didn’t know who Merritt was, but he dutifully listed the news in his log. That’s why we weren’t notified until seven o’clock the next morning.

Now the bad news. Keith was in the ICU, unconscious, and the doctors were wringing their hands and mumbling fretful things. His skull was fractured, one kidney had been punctured by a broken rib, one leg and one arm were shattered into multiple pieces, and the doctors were still trying to trace the source, or sources, of a flood of internal bleeding.

I learned this via a very hysterical call from Katherine. I rushed straight to her room. The door was ajar so I walked in. Allie and Katherine were huddled in a corner, hugging each other and sobbing pitifully. Maria sat at the desk, her face looking like it had twenty-pound weights dragging at the corners of her eyes and lips. I idly wondered if Allie was switch-hitting on Maria. The room had the air of a funeral parlor.

“He might die,” Katherine said, looking up at me.

“Uh-huh.” I gravely nodded.

I sat on the edge of the bed and stayed quiet. I knew what was going through their heads. None of us had any real idea what had happened, but the timing and coincidence were too damned close. You couldn’t escape the thought.

Finally, Katherine said, “Are these bastards that barbaric?”

I said, “Maybe.”

I hadn’t confirmed anything, but I’d equivocated enough to make them realize they’d been underestimating the risks.

I said, “Have your pictures been on Korean television?”

“We did a few interviews before you arrived,” Katherine sulkily responded.

“All of you? Did you all get your faces in front of the camera? Maybe in the local papers, too?”

“That’s right,” said Allie, releasing Katherine and walking over to stand beside Maria. “We were on TV and in the newspapers. So what?”

“Then don’t draw any hasty conclusions.”

“What that’s supposed to mean?”Allie asked in her typically defiant way.

“I mean it could have been somebody working for the South Korean government. They’ve got a couple of supersecret agencies responsible for internal security that have reputations for being pretty thuggish. Or it could’ve been someone else.”

Katherine spun around; her face was bitterly scrunched up. “Who else could it possibly have been? Don’t bullshit me, Drummond. It’s obvious who did it.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “By parading yourselves in front of the media so much, you painted bull’s-eyes on your chests.”

“Bull’s-eyes for who?”Allie asked.

“One of those anti-American student groups you always see rioting on TV. Or some group of South Korean soldiers who’re pissed off at having one of their brothers in arms murdered and raped. The one thing we’re not short of over here’s enemies.”

“Drummond, you are so full of shit,” Katherine said, with a positively barbaric stare.

“No, I ain’t. Now, I’m going to give you a little lecture. Maybe my timing sucks, but you better listen to me, for once.”

Katherine slunk over from her corner and I finally had all their undivided attention.

“Korea,” I explained, “is technically a nation at war. I’m not saying South Koreans are perfect, but they’re pretty damned good people. There’s an army of some three million men just twenty-five miles from where we’re sitting. There’s North Korean infiltrators and agents running all over this country. Only a few years ago, a North Korean sub got grounded on a sandbar off the eastern shore and out spilled ten commandos. Remember that incident? It was all over the news the entire week it took the South Koreans to chase them down and kill them. The only reason they were detected was because the sub commander screwed up and got his boat beached. Any of you want to hazard a guess at how many other boats and subs have landed agents and commandos that
didn’t
get caught?”

Maria had a disbelieving grimace, or maybe it was just her natural facial set, but when her lips came apart I cut her off with a quick slice of my arm through the air.

“Don’t talk. Listen,” I rudely ordered. “These people have been living like this since 1953. You got any idea what that’s like? Every year, there’s ambushes and shootouts on that border. This hotel room we’re sitting in is within artillery range of North Korea’s guns. In a split second this whole country could get pulverized. That has an effect on your psyche. This ain’t like America. Stop thinking it is.”

Katherine said, “Nothing justifies this!”

“I’m not justifying any damned thing,” I told her with a stern glare. “Stop being so damned argumentative. Listen. And for God’s sakes, don’t go holding another of your idiotic press conferences and start blaming the South Korean government. Maybe they did it; maybe not. Hell, it might’ve just been some band of pickpockets, and he caught ’em, so they tossed him.”