Mortal Allies (48 page)

“Yes, he is.”

“A guy like him had the world at his feet. He could be sitting in one of those gleaming towers downtown making millions. He could be trading on the bourse. But he chose police work, of all things.”

“Choi’s not motivated by money. Like you said, he’s quite a guy.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said offhandedly. “Only problem is, he didn’t have a sister.”

Bales’s elbows flew off the desk and he fell back in his chair, like this was the most comical thing he’d ever heard.

He actually chuckled. “I don’t know who ran the check, but you better go back and start over. My wife was born in Chicago in 1962. She and her brother lived together until 1970, when their parents were killed.”

I scratched my head and looked baffled. “Your wife’s maiden name is Lee Jin May, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Born in Chicago?”

“That’s right.”

“There’s no record of any Lee Jin May born in any hospital in Chicago between the years 1957 and 1970. For that matter, there’s no record of a Choi Lee Min born in any Chicago hospital, either.”

This was true. Mercer had asked the FBI to run a quick background check, and they had so far been unable to find any trace of Choi or his sister.

Bales came back forward and looked angry. “Maybe they were born at home. Maybe they used a midwife. Did you think of that? Their parents were poor immigrants struggling to survive. I’ve never asked Jin May, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Ah, I hadn’t thought of that,” I said, like, Oops, gee, stupid me.

“Well, you had no fucking business going through my background anyway. Or my wife’s. What the hell’s going on? Do I need to file a complaint against you?”

“No, no need to do that,” I assured.

He instantly became conciliatory. “Look, I know we’ve got this little problem between us. I don’t blame you for being sore. Don’t take it personally, though.”

I gave him a full grin, so he had a bird’s-eye view of the gap where I used to have a tooth. “Me? Take it personally?”

“Look, I’m sorry if things got a little rough back at the station. We thought you’d murdered an innocent cop. You know how us cops are when one of our own gets it. I’m not making an excuse, but I’m sorry, all right?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said with a full dose of insincerity, although frankly the intonation was wasted because we both knew there wasn’t any chance in hell I’d forgive him.

Then I abruptly got up to leave. I got to the door, then turned around like I’d just been struck with an afterthought.

I slapped my forehead. “Hey, one more thing.”

The overconfident prick actually gave me his Dudley Do-Right grin. “Sure, how can I help you, Major?”

“That thing about your wife. I’m sorry if I overreacted, but when I got curious about not finding her birth records, or her brother’s, I called the CIA station here and asked them to look into it. They’ve got smart guys, though. I’m sure they’ll figure out she and her brother were born at home.”

I wished I’d thought to bring a camera. You had to see his face.

I left the MP station, then walked two blocks to a gray government sedan that was waiting next to the curb. Mercer was seated in the front. I climbed in the back, next to one of his guys.

A radio was on the dashboard and a speaker was connected to it so we could hear what was happening inside Bales’s office. Early that morning, one of Mercer’s guys had gained entry and wired the office for sound, so Mercer had overheard every word of our conversation. He absently held up a thumb. His attention, though, was focused on the sounds coming from the speaker. My role in this affair was to give Bales an intimation of trouble to come, just enough of a whiff to put him in motion.

We listened for a while as Bales talked to somebody, probably an MP, about some details of a case they were working. He sounded impatient and curt, and was transparently struggling to hurry the MP along. Then we heard the sound of a door closing, then Bales dialing a number. One of the bugs was planted in the earpiece of Bales’s phone. We could hear every sound coming through his receiver. What we heard at that moment was that scratchy, hissy noise phones make when the lines are out of service. He tried the number again, then slammed down the receiver, hard.

Half a minute of silence passed. We could hear him breathing. Full, huffy breaths. We heard him pick up the phone and dial again. We heard the hissy sound again. We heard him dial another number.

It rang about three times, then the voice of an answering machine said, “Hello, this is the Bales residence. We are out right now, but please—”

We heard Bales punch in two numbers to code his home answering machine, then we heard Choi’s voice say, “Michael, take every precaution. Escape right away. American intelligence has us in their net. Change your identification and escape.”

The voice came from a tape on Bales’s answering machine in his quarters. And it actually
was
Choi’s voice. The message had been cut and stitched together from the conversation Carol had had with Choi earlier that morning. As soon as Bales’s wife had been lured out of their quarters, Mercer’s techs had called and played their tape.

Bales hung up the phone, more softly this time, and we could hear his chair creak, probably from him leaning back into it and trying to catch his breath. We heard him open a drawer, and then the sounds of things being moved around. He was searching for something.

Then he picked up the phone and dialed another number. Only this time, the real Choi answered. It had to be a cell phone number. We should have considered that, but we hadn’t.

“Choi, it’s me,” Bales said.

“Yes, Michael, what is it?”

“I got your message. What the hell’s going on?”

“What message?”

“The one you left on my answering machine.”

“I didn’t leave you any message.”

There was a moment of stunned, bewildered silence. Mercer turned around and we both smiled. The whole thing might be going south on us, but there’s still something perversely satisfying when you hear the bad guys getting tangled up in your web.

Sounding frantic, Bales said, “God damn it, Choi, I had that asshole lawyer in here a few minutes ago telling me he stumbled onto the fact you and Jin May weren’t from Chicago. He said he couldn’t find your hospital birth records, so he turned it over to the CIA. Then I heard your voice on my machine telling me to run. I know your fucking voice, Choi. It was you.”

Choi calmly said, “Michael, stay cool. I didn’t call you. Somebody’s playing games with us.”

“Right.”

Then Choi said, “Remember plan B?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Use it.”

“What about Jin May?”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. She was in the house when I left this morning. But she didn’t answer when I called. That bitch could be shopping at the PX for all I know. Or they could already have her.”

“That bitch,” he’d called her. It didn’t sound like Mr. and Mrs. Bales were what you might term a blissfully married couple.

Finally, sounding strained, Choi said, “Don’t worry about her. I’ll see if I can find her, but if she gets caught she knows what she’s doing. Just get moving.”

Then Bales said, “What about phase 3? Is it still—”

“Michael, get moving.”

“Okay, okay,” Bales said, then they both hung up. Three seconds later, we heard the sounds of Bales getting up from his desk, then pacing across his office, then his door opening and closing.

Michael Bales was now on the run, but not before he’d called his buddy Choi, which was something we’d hoped to avoid. We wanted Bales on his own, isolated, without resources, confused about what had happened to Choi. Frantic men make stupid mistakes and that’s how we wanted him. Now we had to worry about plan B, whatever the hell that was.

The only good thing about the call was that it almost certainly confirmed I was right. What we had sounded like a full-blown espionage ring.

Mercer’s driver put the car in gear and we raced straight back to the CIA office complex. We rushed inside to the communications console that had been hastily set up in the large room outside Mercer’s office.

Five communicators were huddled around the console, each with headsets on, each taking reports or coordinating actions among Mercer’s field teams. The CIA might not have been able to figure out when the Soviet Union was falling, but it looked like they ran a first-class surveillance operation.

I stood and watched. I was impressed. A tracking device connected to a GPS satellite had been planted on Bales’s car, and there was a large electronic map display on the wall. You could see this little red light moving steadily away from Yongsan, toward the international airport located about forty minutes’ drive from Seoul’s city center. There must’ve been three or four chase cars following along with him, because progress reports kept coming in to the radio operators at the console.

One of Mercer’s guys handed him a cup of coffee and he stood sipping from it as he proudly surveyed the operation. I went and found myself a cup, too, then found a chair, because my damaged and dented body was tired of standing up.

The basic idea was to let Bales get to the airport, buy a ticket and make his way to the departure gate, then arrest him. The original plan hadn’t envisioned Bales calling Choi and thus had been built on the premise that there would be no evidence of his involvement in the plot. But Bales was a soldier; if he bought a ticket and attempted to flee, he was trying to desert, and that would put a nail in his coffin. Even now, he could make up some excuse about why he called Choi, but he couldn’t do the same about trying to flee from Korea.

I thought it was a bit extravagant, and frankly didn’t see why they didn’t just arrest him, but Mercer insisted it was critical to have something tangible to hang on Bales. The first step in breaking a traitor is forcing him to implicate himself. Mercer was the spymaster; what the hell did I know? Besides, it wasn’t my business.

About thirty minutes passed. After a while, surveillance operations get tedious, because all you’re doing is following a car, and you can get lulled into complacency. I don’t know if that’s what caused it, but suddenly the radio operators started screaming into their mikes and Mercer looked like somebody had stuck a burning match into his shoe.

What we quickly pieced together was that Bales had driven into a long tunnel. The chase cars didn’t want to stay too close to him, because they didn’t want to make him suspicious. When his car emerged from the tunnel, they followed him as usual, which meant that every three minutes a chase car passed his auto to get a visual on the driver. The first pass after the car came out of the tunnel, it was no longer Bales driving. It was a Korean.

Mercer yanked a microphone away from a communicator and screamed at his chase teams to force the car to pull over. They did. The Korean driver immediately jumped out. He leaped directly in front of a passing car and was splattered all over the roadside.

Y
ou know that old saw about how when things get bad, they almost always get worse? Without hesitating, Mercer picked up the phone and called Kim, his KCIA partner. He hastily explained what happened and told him to pick up Choi immediately. Kim calmly explained that everything was under control, that Choi and three of his fellow cops were at that moment having lunch inside a kimchi restaurant in the heart of Itaewon. A KCIA agent had followed them inside, and four more agents were planted outside, observing the front of the restaurant. Good, Mercer told him. Don’t waste another minute. Send them in to get him.

Kim called back ten minutes later. The team had gone into the restaurant to get Choi, only Choi and his boys were nowhere to be found. They did find the agent who followed them inside. His corpse was propped up on a toilet inside a stall in the men’s room. His throat had acquired a nasty new gash that ran from earlobe to earlobe. While the surveillance team had kept watch on the front of the restaurant, Choi and his goons had fled out the back.

Kim was terrifically embarrassed by this, but Mercer was equally abashed about losing Bales, so it came out a wash. This was somewhat of a blessing. It spared me from having to witness the normal nasty catcalling and finger-pointing that would certainly have occurred if only one side had committed a gaffe. When it comes to government agencies, there’s always a lofty comfort found in a joint failure. The fact was, Choi and his colleagues were obviously trained agents and both Mercer and Kim had underestimated them.

But Mercer and Kim were pros, too, and rather than rehash their mistakes, they immediately instigated a nationwide search to catch the bastards. They started arguing about whose job it was to ransack Bales’s and Choi’s offices and apartments but soon, after a few terse exchanges, they decided to form joint teams so both sides would have firsthand looks at every clue and piece of evidence. I sat and listened, but it didn’t concern me, so I thought of other things.

Things like how Eddie Golden’s case had just gotten the floor pulled out from under it. The walls were still standing, but they were teetering and maybe ready to collapse. Two of his prize witnesses had just gone on the lam, and that was going to pose fairly intriguing challenges for Eddie. As soon as he learned of this, he’d be calling Carruthers to ask for a postponement while he tried to rebuild the state’s case.

Which reminded me: It was already after two-thirty, so I went to Mercer and told him I had other work to do, since I was still part of Whitehall’s defense team, and we still had a trial that started at eight the next morning. He scratched his head and tried to think of a reason to keep me around, but couldn’t, so he excused me, after making me swear not to tell a soul what had happened.

I said I wouldn’t, as long as he’d call Judge Barry Carruthers and inform him that two of the prosecution’s key witnesses had just disappeared and were wanted in connection with whatever plausible cover crime Mercer wanted to invent. He said okay, so I left.

By the time I got to the HOMOS office, Mercer had obviously already called the judge, and Carruthers had just as obviously called Katherine to break the news. Everybody was doing a war dance. Bad news travels fast, but catastrophic news moves like lightning bolts. Of course, what was catastrophic news to Eddie’s pearly ears was manna from heaven here.