Robert Ludlum's (TM) the Janson Equation, page 14
With Manningham’s .45 Beretta in hand, Janson quickly cleared the guest room and headed downstairs. Although Manningham wouldn’t talk, Janson was sure there would be more agents outside. He stayed clear of all windows, since his would-be assassins could well be snipers. He couldn’t rule out their taking over one of the neighboring houses or barns as a staging area. If Jina Jeon was involved—even more of a likelihood now that he knew about Manningham—setting up snipers’ nests around the house would have been easy as cake.
Jina Jeon.
It butchered him to learn he’d been betrayed by Heath Manningham, but if he was to discover he’d been double-crossed by Jina Jeon, it might be more than he could take. Her treachery could well spell the end of the Phoenix Foundation.
Janson couldn’t lie to himself, couldn’t pretend that it might be for the best; he was too invested in Phoenix and too proud of what he’d accomplished. He didn’t believe in “signs” or a god that worked in mysterious ways. At least in Manningham’s case—and who knew how many others?—he’d failed extraordinarily, by any measure. He and his team did their due diligence on Manningham, yet Edward Clarke and Consular Operations had outsmarted him. Janson would never again underestimate State, and he would never again question whether Cons Ops was an adversary or an ally. He only hoped it wasn’t too late, for him, or for Kincaid.
She was right all along. He grinned despite the grave situation. If we both survive this, I’m never going to hear the end of it.
With the fingers on his left hand he cautiously parted the blinds in the living room. The Jeon farm had a good deal of property, but several neighboring houses and barns remained within sniper range. Ducking low, he crossed under the large bay window and entered the kitchen.
Dare he?
Go big or go home, he thought as he scanned the room in which he’d eaten dinner with Jina Jeon and her mother just hours earlier.
After eyeing a block of cutlery, he opened several drawers and cabinets, as quickly and as quietly as he could. In one of the drawers he found a pristine set of silverware, in another a number of towels, hand and dish, and a couple of washcloths. He was surprised to find a bread box, less surprised to find it stocked with bread. In the cabinets, the usual things: dishes, glasses, canned and dry goods, and spices galore. Nothing called out to him as a viable alternative to his original idea.
In the end, there was no debate to be had.
He would do what had to be done.
* * *
ALL INTELLIGENT PEOPLE are lonely, Kang Jung told herself as she sat on her bed. We live in our heads.
As she surveyed her room in the faint light, locking briefly on her iMac, her MacBook Air, her iPad and her iPad Mini, her iPod and her iPhone, the irony wasn’t lost on her: she was so connected that she was disconnected. Kang Jung had hardly any life at all; Lord Wicked was world renowned.
As a criminal, she thought sadly.
Oh, how to escape this wasteful melancholy? She was worried for Grandfather; that was all. When you loved so few, you loved those few so deeply.
She trudged into the kitchen in her oversize pajamas. The linoleum was cold, almost cold enough to make her run back to her bedroom to fetch her slippers. But she’d be in and out. All she wanted was something to drink.
Opening the refrigerator door, she started at a light rap on the front door.
Janson?
No. Janson didn’t know that her mother had left; he’d have texted her, not just dropped in unannounced. Besides, he was in the DMZ, preparing to cross the border into North Korea. He wasn’t in Seoul making social calls.
The phone call her mother received earlier continued to nibble around the edges of her thoughts. Something about the call wasn’t right. Grandfather wouldn’t have stumbled into the hallway seeking help if he was having chest pains. Even if it was an emergency Grandfather was still Grandfather, as obstinate and self-reliant as ever. Despite his age, he’d retained all of his mental faculties. If he’d been experiencing chest pains, he would have picked up the phone and called for an ambulance himself.
Another rap at the front door, this one more insistent.
She eyed the ottoman in the living room. She could drag it in front of the door and peek through the peephole.
But what if whoever is standing on the other side has a gun?
A moment later it didn’t matter. The man or woman on the other side of the door had stopped waiting for her to answer and started working the lock with a key or some other device. She had only seconds to think.
Nowhere to run to. Nowhere to hide.
She was trapped like a rat in a cage. And whoever stood on the other side of the door would not be standing there for long.
The dead bolt was unlocked.
The doorknob began to turn.
TWENTY-THREE
Seconds before the explosion lit the night sky over Freedom Village, Janson pitched Heath Manningham’s unconscious form from the window of Jina Jeon’s second-floor guest room. He then hastened across the hall, lowered his head, and sprinted toward the mattress propped up against the window. He struck the mattress—and grabbed hold of its sides—just as he heard the pop of the exploding .45. As the bullet ignited the gas he’d leaked from the stove, he rode the mattress spread-eagled in a free fall until it struck the hard ground.
When it did, Janson felt as though he’d just been smacked in the chest with a baseball bat. Every last breath of air had been knocked out of him. He waited a moment before attempting a deep breath, hoping he hadn’t broken a rib and punctured a lung. Once he’d convinced himself that wasn’t the case, he rolled off the mattress, scrambled to his feet, and in a dash headed straight for the barn.
His entire plan was a gamble. He’d rolled the dice counting on the razor-slim possibility that Jina Jeon hadn’t betrayed him. If she had, he’d likely be running into an ambush as he made for his go-bag. Even if Manningham’s plunge and the subsequent explosion had created enough of a diversion to lure the agents away from the barn, he still intended to move forward with the plan that Jina Jeon herself had devised. Janson would snatch his go-bag and race north for the tunnel. If his means of crossing into the North had been given up by Jina Jeon, he was a dead man—even if he somehow managed to escape this initial attempt on his life.
He entered the barn cautiously, found no one. The purchases he’d made from Cal Auster in Chuncheon appeared intact. The lion’s share would have to remain behind; he could only carry so much. He ran the zipper across the go-bag to make sure he wasn’t strapping a bomb to his back; then he closed the bag and raced out of the barn, away from Jina Jeon’s property, into total darkness, heading north.
* * *
KANG JUNG RETREATED to her bedroom, her sanctuary. Lord Wicked’s lair. She scanned her possessions for something she could use to defend herself against the intruder.
Damn, why do they have to make electronics so small these days?
She might have had a chance with one of those bulky computer towers that housed her first hard drive, but what the hell could she do with a MacBook Air—impress her attacker with its advanced video-editing features?
No, she thought. But I can create a live feed at a private web address and send the link to Janson.
It probably wouldn’t prevent the intruder from killing her. But at least then the tall, dark, and handsome American could avenge her death.
She slammed her bedroom door, turned the lock, and pushed her small armoire in front of the door. It wouldn’t stop the intruder, but it would hopefully buy her time.
* * *
AS HE SCURRIED NORTH toward the tunnel, Paul Janson felt a light vibration against his outer thigh. He didn’t want to stop, didn’t want to sacrifice his momentum or his adrenaline. But it could be Kincaid. She could be in trouble, and Janson couldn’t risk ignoring the call.
He stopped dead in his tracks, dropped to the ground, and removed the BlackBerry from his pocket. It wasn’t a call at all. It was a text message, from Kang Jung. There were no words, just an odd link consisting of nine numbers and ending with .kr—the two letters appended to all South Korean domains.
Don’t click it, he thought, hearing Morton’s voice in his head. Don’t click anything, ever. One fucking click on an unknown—or worse yet, disguised—link, and you can inadvertently end the world as we know it.
Janson pictured Kang Jung’s inexpressive face, heard her soft voice saying, “There’s nothing out there for me.”
Could someone have gotten to her? Christ, she’d been the one who set up his meeting with Cy via an Internet Relay Chat. Janson had involved her in this. He alone was responsible for her safety.
Don’t do it, Morton shrieked in his head. Don’t fucking do it.
Janson clicked on the link in Kang Jung’s text.
And found what appeared to be a live feed from a young girl’s bedroom, though not your typical young girl’s bedroom. Stuffed animals and eerily lifelike dolls rested among a small fortune’s worth of state-of-the-art technology. In fact, were it not for the plush toys and figurines, what Janson saw could well have been a feed from an underground Apple store.
On the walls were posters: Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out. Carl Sagan staring off into the cosmos. Neil deGrasse Tyson eating a Yodel.
That answers my earlier question.
There was no doubt in his mind that this was Kang Jung’s bedroom back in the Cheongwha Apartments in Itaewon.
Janson fought off a wave of panic. Once he’d established that he was looking at Kang Jung’s bedroom, his first thought was that she’d been kidnapped.
From the BlackBerry’s tiny speaker he could hear the rattling of a doorknob. At first he saw no door in the frame, then realized that a white wooden armoire was pressed against the door, concealing it, and a pang of fear clutched at his chest again. He punched up the volume and watched the scene unfold, helpless to do anything from thirty-five miles away in the demilitarized zone.
* * *
KANG JUNG STARTED at the first pound on the door. Taking a deep breath for strength, she leaned over and peered into the eye of the MacBook’s webcam.
“I know you can’t get here in time,” she said, attempting to maintain a courageous calm but failing phenomenally. “And that’s OK.” She flinched at another strike on the other side of her door. She turned and noticed that the armoire had shifted. She spun and spoke to the camera, annoyed because everything that came into her head sounded so damn melodramatic. “I ask of you only one thing,” she finally went with. “If I am killed tonight, avenge me.”
She opened her desk drawer and withdrew an antique letter opener she’d bought at a flea market. The seller had told her it was used by an American general during the Korean War. She’d known the seller was full of shit but she’d bought it anyway, because the seller had been a sixteen-year-old boy and he’d been cute, even if he had been a complete dullard.
Kang Jung held the letter opener out like a sword, then turned it in her hand so that the blade was pointing down. It reminded her of the deranged man dressed like his mother in the shower scene from Psycho.
The sound of a female voice emanating from the other side of the door surprised her. The woman spoke with an Eastern European accent.
“Jung,” the voice said, “I just want to talk to you for a moment, honey. There’s a very bad man on the loose—a killer—and we know you’ve been communicating with him. I just need to ask you a few questions and then I’ll leave, I promise. I’m not here to hurt you, dear.”
Kang Jung gripped the letter opener and wondered if the female was the only one out there. If so, maybe Kang Jung could take her. The girls in school used to mess with her. Until two summers ago when she learned tae kwon do and returned to school and kicked some major mean-girl ass. She grinned. This woman on the other side of the door clearly didn’t know who she was fucking with. Not Kang Jung, the socially insecure computer geek.
Here in her room surrounded by her computers—you stepped onto my turf, bitch—she transmogrified into Lord Wicked.
* * *
JANSON, TOO, WAS SURPRISED to hear a female voice emanating from the opposite side of Jung’s door. But it didn’t diminish his fear. If anything, hearing that female voice amplified his alarm for the teenage girl who’d so selflessly assisted him. If his instincts were correct—and they usually were about things like this—on the other side of the door stood the woman who had followed his taxi from Seoul Station. And if so, her sweet voice was no more authentic than the gold Rolex watch a young man tried to sell him a few months ago in Shanghai. If this woman was working with Cons Ops, no matter what her background, she’d invariably be a heartless killer.
On his tiny screen, the armoire began to slide. Kang Jung stood just to the side of the camera, carrying what looked to be a small knife, but was more likely something as simple as a paperweight or letter opener.
What could Janson do? He quickly ran through his options. The police would never make it in time; even if they did, they would be walking into a slaughter. Most of the force wasn’t even armed. Kincaid and her new friend Park Kwan remained in southern Seoul, searching for Gregory Wyckoff. Even if they could cross the Han River in time, as much as he’d like to tell himself differently, their mission to locate the senator’s son was the more important one. Kang Jung’s life was at stake, but so were the lives of countless others.
That left Nam Sei-hoon.
“I was finally able to gain access to the boy’s computers,” Nam Sei-hoon had said. “As you suggested might be the case, the hard drives have been wiped.”
Janson had cursed.
“Not so fast, Paul. Remember, I am not a man without resources. I’ve had one of my trusted allies in the cyber-intelligence unit take a look at these hard drives. He was able to identify one of the individuals whom Gregory Wyckoff communicated with online via an IRC…It just so happens that the kid he chatted with is being watched vigorously…”
Cy, Janson thought. The National Intelligence Service was listening in on—or reading, as the case may be—Cy’s Internet Relay Chats.
That’s how they found Kang Jung—she’d arranged the meeting with Cy using an IRC.
On-screen, a young woman materialized. He couldn’t be sure but Janson thought that she indeed looked like the woman in the dark SM5 who had followed his taxi out of Seoul Station.
Christ, Janson thought. It was neither Jina Jeon nor Cal Auster who had betrayed him. The treachery had come from one of Janson’s oldest and closest friends.
Nam Sei-hoon.
TWENTY-FOUR
Nika Vlasic looked upon Kang Jung and saw a girl not much older than Nika was when she opened the vein in her right wrist. This girl looked nothing like she had. She was clean, she was dressed in fresh pajamas, she was surrounded by thousands of dollars of technology that would help her to learn and go to college and succeed in the world without killing, the little bitch.
This girl wasn’t the product of ethnic cleansing. She wasn’t violated when she was nine. She didn’t become pregnant by rape at age twelve, wasn’t forced by the man who’d raped her to undergo an abortion in a burned-out factory.
Nika grinned as she stared at the letter opener the girl held in her fist. Then she looked squarely into the girl’s eyes and began to swell with anger at the resentment this child harbored for her.
What the fuck did I ever do to you, kid? I told you I only came here to talk.
Nika ignored the threat from the letter opener and advanced, though she wasn’t going for Kang Jung as the girl probably thought. She went for the girl’s mobile phone instead. Quickly she scrolled through the call log.
No calls in the past half hour. Good. Even though a couple of agents were posted downstairs to delay or divert the cops, Nika didn’t want to deal with making a hasty escape from a high-rise apartment building.
The girl attempted to shuffle by her, but Nika snatched the collar of her pajamas and in one fluid movement tossed her onto the bed. As Nika drew near to her, the girl lashed out with the letter opener.
Swing and a miss.
Nika grabbed the girl’s right wrist and twisted it until the letter opener clanged to the floor.
“Why so hostile?” Nika said evenly.
“What do you want from me?” the girl cried.
“Where is the American?”
“Which American?”
Nika smiled, glanced down at the girl’s right wrist, which she continued to hold in her grip. Just as Nika suspected, this young girl had never attempted to kill herself. How nice that must be. She’d probably never been raped either. Probably she was still a virgin, the little bitch.
“If you want to live,” Nika said calmly, “do not play games with me.” She twisted the girl’s wrist again. “Understand?”
The girl yelped but nodded. Tears spilled freely from her eyes.
“Now tell me,” Nika said. “What is the American doing in the demilitarized zone?”
* * *
JANSON FROZE. If Kang Jung told her what she knew—about Diophantus and the Wikipedia entry and the South Korean spy Yun Jin-ho in Pyongyang—the operative would be left with no choice but to kill her. And if Kang Jung revealed what Janson was doing—crossing into the DPRK to locate the South Korean spy—his mission was over. Nam Sei-hoon would never allow Janson to get near Pyongyang. He’d start a war with the North if he had to.
Kang Jung’s only chance was to remain silent.
On his screen Kang Jung spoke so softly he could barely hear her, even in the quiet of the pitch-black field.
“The American told me that the Hivemind sent him there. He went to see a hacker named Cy at the university. I don’t know exactly who or what he was after, but Cy told him he’d find it in a secret Hivemind facility in the DMZ.”
Amazing, Janson thought. Even better than keeping silent, Kang Jung had fed the operative a plausible lie.
Unless they’ve already gotten to Cy. Then the woman would know Jung was lying, and it would cost the girl her life.
