Robert Ludlum's (TM) the Janson Equation, page 15
“This facility,” the woman said, pulling at her own jacket sleeve as she hovered over Kang Jung on the bed, “is that where Gregory Wyckoff is being hidden?”
Kang Jung shook her head slowly. “I swear to you, I don’t know. The American gave me only the information I needed to help him connect with Cy and…”
“And what?”
“And help him locate the facility.”
“And you did this?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?” the woman hissed.
“About forty kilometers north of Seoul. There’s a castle that looks as though it belongs to a fairy princess.”
The woman sneered. “You’re fucking with me, kid.” She gripped Kang Jung by the throat. “I assure you, fucking with me is not a good idea.”
“No, I’m not,” Kang Jung rasped. “I swear. You can look the castle up yourself on my computer. The facility’s in the basement of the castle at Everland Resort.”
“Everland Resort?” The woman loosened her grip.
Janson watched in amazement at the girl’s brisk thinking in the face of peril, as Kang Jung drew a desperate breath and said, “It’s a water park.”
* * *
KANG JUNG SLOWLY sat up on the bed as the dangerous woman stepped over to use her laptop computer. The woman unwittingly stared directly into the camera.
Kang Jung suppressed a satisfied grin. Now he knows your face, bitch.
She wriggled her butt toward the right side of her bed, keeping her eyes locked on the woman. Technology had made everything smaller, too small to be made into weapons. But it had also transformed all her devices into wireless creatures. Creatures that once or twice a day needed to be charged. So as not to lose any, Kang Jung assiduously kept all the wires and adapters in one drawer. In her nightstand. On the right side of her bed.
The woman glanced over but said nothing. Kang Jung could see that she’d pulled Everland Resort up on the screen. The woman was staring at the fairy princess’s castle.
“You’re not making this shit up, are you, kid?”
“No,” Kang Jung said. “Several of the Hivemind are teenagers who work at the park. That’s how they gain access to the castle anytime they want.”
The woman nodded as if to say, Makes sense. Her eyes remained glued to the monitor.
Kang Jung reached behind her and with a pinkie surreptitiously opened the tiny, soundless drawer. She reached her slender hand inside and pulled out the first wire she touched. It felt magnificently familiar, of course; it was the USB cord she used to connect her laptop to her printer when the Wi-Fi connection was down.
With her hands tucked behind her, she wound each end around one of her wrists to ascertain the size of the cord.
Briefly she wondered if she’d have entertained such a devious thought had the intrigue surrounding the American translator’s murder not come directly to her door.
Well, it did come to my door, didn’t it?
She glanced back at her nightstand. Unwound one end of the USB and snatched the TV remote control next to her lamp. She placed the remote in her lap on the bed and wound the USB around her wrist again, this time with both hands out in front of her.
She drew a deep breath.
Stabbed at the power button on the remote.
The television across the room blinked to life. On the screen, several scantily clad women danced vigorously to earsplitting K-pop.
The woman immediately spun toward the television.
When she did, Kang Jung launched herself from the bed. Swinging the USB cord around the woman’s neck, Kang Jung clung to the woman’s back for her life.
Beneath her the woman bucked like a mechanical bull, trying to throw her off. But Kang Jung only tightened the cord around her throat, wrapped her strong legs around the woman’s waist, and rode her harder.
As the woman thrashed from one side of the room to the other, Kang Jung swung her head in the direction of the camera.
Madly determined—but still terribly frightened—at the top of her lungs, she bellowed five blissfully histrionic words: “If I die, avenge me!”
TWENTY-FIVE
Unidentified Tunnel
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), South Korea
I’ve lived through worse.
That would be the best Paul Janson could say to Kincaid if he made it out of the tunnel alive. Even that would be a stretch. Hell, the smell alone was nearly enough to overwhelm him.
Since he’d returned to the United States following his eighteen-month captivity in Kabul, Janson had masked his feelings of claustrophobia. A master at disguising his fears, Janson found that hiding his panic in tight places was one of the most challenging obstacles in his everyday life. True, the Embraer 650 was convenient, maybe even necessary, for carrying out his work in connection with CatsPaw and thus the Phoenix Foundation. But the whole of it was that he couldn’t board a commercial airliner for any substantial length of time even if he tried. First class was tolerable—for a time; after a few hours he’d break out in a chilled sweat and have to throw off his seat belt and pace up and down the aisles. Coach was almost a physical impossibility for even the briefest of flights; he could barely survive a jaunt from Dulles to LaGuardia these days.
As he crawled along the dirt, the ceiling appeared to be falling in on him. It wasn’t a cave-in, he knew, but a symptom of his claustrophobia. He stopped, maneuvered himself as best he could to dip into his go-bag, and plucked out a canteen for a slug of water.
The Machine. He smirked; if only that were true, life would undoubtedly be much easier.
Some people, like Kincaid, wore their hearts on their sleeves. But Janson never had. Janson dealt with his emotions internally, no matter how brightly they burned. Perhaps that was why Janson had so much trouble achieving closure. The bombing that killed Helene and his unborn child in Caligo, the betrayal of his superior Alan Demarest in Afghanistan—these events haunted Janson with such a ferocity, it felt as though time had frozen. They were wounds he knew would never heal. Paul Janson was no Machine. He’d never been one. He simply lived in his head. Shielded himself from friends and lovers every bit as much as he shielded himself from his enemies. Because, as hard and cold as people thought he was, past pains simply ran too deep.
“There’s nothing out there for me,” Kang Jung had said. Even though he traveled the world and pushed himself into people’s lives to atone for the sins in his past, Janson often felt the same way.
In the blackness, he smiled sadly. He could still hardly believe what he’d seen on his BlackBerry only an hour ago. When Kang Jung attacked the woman in her room, he was sure the fight would end with the teenager dead. Instead, Kang Jung effectively applied an air choke, though she probably didn’t even know its proper name.
Using the USB cord, Kang Jung had executed the choke with rare precision. No doubt a result of her knowledge of anatomy rather than any specific training, she’d used the USB to cut off the air flowing to the woman’s heart and lungs by closing off her windpipe. It took the girl a full three minutes, during which she was nearly thrown from the woman’s back several times, but in the end, Kang Jung brought down her prey like a professional. Hooking her legs around the woman’s waist and keeping her face out of clawing range had saved Kang Jung’s life and nearly ended that of the assassin. In fact, Janson hadn’t been sure the woman was still alive until Kang Jung, wiping sweat from her forehead, leaned over and checked the woman’s pulse.
“Unconscious,” she’d said into the camera to her audience of one. “But her heart’s still beating. What do I do now?”
Janson had immediately called Kang Jung’s cell phone. When she picked up, he told her that she’d need to get to safety because there were no doubt agents who would come upstairs after a certain amount of time.
“You can’t use the door downstairs,” Janson had told her, “because they’ll find you. Do you have any neighbors with firearms?”
“I’m in Seoul, not Arlington, Texas.”
“Well, do you have any neighbors who you can completely trust?”
“Not with my life,” she’d said. “People can’t be counted on for anything.” She paused. “But wait. I do have the perfect hiding spot.”
Janson didn’t like the idea until he heard it in full, then he urged her to get there, and fast. “Bring your phone, but remove the battery, just in case they have a lock on you. Only put the battery back in the phone for sixty seconds so that you can check for a text message from either me or my partner, Kincaid, letting you know how we’re going to get you out of there.”
“All right,” she’d said.
“And, Jung…” He paused. “You did one hell of a job. Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it,” she’d said and then she was gone.
Janson had called Kincaid on Park Kwan’s phone and directed her to the apartment in which Kang Jung was hiding.
“How can she be absolutely certain it’s empty?” Kincaid asked.
“Jung has hidden cameras placed all over the apartment. The images go straight to her iPad Mini, which she has with her.”
“Cameras?” Kincaid said. “Why would she have hidden cameras stashed in her neighbor’s apartment?”
“Because she’s not just a hacker extraordinaire and world-renowned Internet villain. She’s also a bit of a vigilante. She’d hacked this guy’s computer and found kiddie porn. She thinks he might be an online predator, so she’s keeping an eye on him. The guy went away on vacation with one of his buddies.” He hesitated as he thought about the implications. “In Thailand.”
“The capital of sex tourism,” Kincaid said. “Wonderful.”
“It’s something that can be dealt with later. Right now, I need you to collect Kang Jung and get her somewhere safe.”
* * *
IN THE TUNNEL Janson continued through the stench, stopping every so often to retch. In addition to feeling as though the walls were closing in on him, he’d encountered all sorts of underground creatures in the past few hours—rats, cockroaches, things he couldn’t even name.
All this to get to the most inhospitable country on earth.
All this to, in all likelihood, get myself captured or killed.
Janson considered the latter preferable to the former. There was no way he could do time in a North Korean gulag. He’d spend his days and nights praying—begging—for death. Provoking his guards to the point where they would have no choice but to put a bullet in the back of his skull. He couldn’t live through another period like the one he’d lived through in Kabul.
He steered his mind away from thoughts of gulags and thought instead of the history that created this hellish hole in the planet.
The demilitarized zone, a strip of land 160 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, slashed the Korean peninsula in half and served as a buffer between the North and the South. Lined on both sides with electrified fences, landmines, tank traps, and armies in full battle readiness, the DMZ was the most heavily fortified border the world had ever known. In short, it was a powder keg just waiting to explode.
Over the past sixty years, since the end of the three-year Korean War, there had been numerous incidents and incursions that could very well have erupted into another full-scale war. In the sixties skirmishes claimed the lives of nearly a thousand soldiers, the fatalities split almost evenly between the two sides. In the seventies it was discovered that the North Koreans were planning an invasion through a series of infiltration tunnels. The invasion, had the tunnels not been discovered, would have included tanks and tens of thousands of troops.
Peace talks had been consistently unsuccessful. The South demanded of the North reforms that would inevitably collapse the illusions constructed by the Kim regime in order to keep control of its people. The North, for their part, needed all kinds of assistance, and would gladly take, take, take, but give nothing in return. Even in the face of a terrible famine that took millions of lives, the North remained belligerent, continuing its quest for nuclear weapons. Missile tests moved forward even as economic sanctions led to complete isolation and near collapse. Meanwhile, the North took umbrage at US–South Korean joint military exercises and consistently attacked unpopulated areas south of the DMZ in a futile attempt to stop them.
The collapse of the North Korean regime seemed inevitable, even to its closest ally, China. Yet no one seemed to be doing much to prepare. Even South Korean politicians were reluctant to discuss reunification, relentlessly avoiding questions from the international media, wholly ignoring the issue during their campaigns, merely touching on the sacrifices that would have to be made if the Korean peninsula became whole again in their inauguration speeches.
The adrenaline from the attack at Freedom Village had finally subsided; exhaustion was setting in. At any moment now any one of his limbs could give out. Short of breath, he feared he’d run out of air. Anxiety gnawed at him from within.
Still, Janson pushed on.
Given the events of the past few days, he wasn’t certain of much. Especially whom he could and couldn’t trust. Yet his instincts convinced him of one thing: he could be sure that if he did die in this tunnel, he would be dying for a good and noble cause. That in itself was enough to drive Janson forward.
* * *
“WHAT THE HELL do you mean you don’t know where he is?”
Edward Clarke couldn’t believe what he was hearing. On the other end of the line Vik Pawar became silent, save for his heavy breathing.
“That wasn’t a rhetorical question,” Clarke shouted. He reminded himself he’d have to be cautious with Vik Pawar. Pawar was Clarke’s representative in Korea. He was the only agent who knew the details of Diophantus, the only agent who could single-handedly make or break the operation.
“I told you what I know, sir. Once Manningham entered the home, we maintained radio silence as per our orders. I was positioned in a neighboring structure watching Trotter’s window through the scope of my sniper rifle. After nearly fifteen minutes I saw movement at the window, but I couldn’t make out who it was so I didn’t have a clean shot. Next thing I know Manningham takes a header out the window.”
“He jumped?”
“I don’t know, sir. That was my first belief, because seconds later the house exploded. But the way Manningham fell, he must have been unconscious. It was just a two-story drop, but he landed as though he’d just jumped off the top of the Empire State Building.”
“You think Trotter did him?”
“He was the only one in the house, sir.”
Clarke nearly slammed the handset against his desk but held back, gritting his teeth in the kind of frustration that causes cancer. “What happened after the explosion? Where was Trotter? Are you certain he wasn’t in the house?”
“I’m fairly sure he made it out, sir. A mattress was found on the ground on the east side of the house. It was in fair condition, which means it wasn’t blown through the window from the force of the explosion. More likely Trotter used it to jump to safety moments before the house went up in flames.”
Son of a bitch. Sandy’s right, Janson is a fucking golem.
Clarke bit down on his thumbnail, a habit he’d abandoned years ago. “And we have no intelligence on where he’s headed?”
“None whatsoever, sir.”
Without another word, Edward Clarke clicked over to the line holding Max Kolovos. “Where were we?” he said.
“Sir, I had just told you that I found Nika in the girl’s bedroom. It appeared that she had been strangled. I felt for a pulse and determined she was alive, so I removed her to an empty stairwell, where I performed CPR. She eventually came to, but she’s still out of it.”
“Is she with you?”
“No, she’s with the agent supplied by the little man.”
Nam Sei-hoon, the little prick. If he hadn’t helped Janson lose his tail after Seoul Station, Janson would already be dead. But no, Nam had to “keep up appearances.”
Now Nam Sei-hoon had led his agent to an apartment in Itaewon to get her ass kicked by a pint-size ninja with Mark Zuckerberg’s computer skills.
“And the girl?” Clarke said. “You have no idea where she is?”
“We’ve combed the entire area, sir. There’s no sign of her. It’s as though she’s a ghost.”
A ghost. This is the kind of shit I have to deal with.
“Well, Max, I’ll let you in on a little secret. She’s not a fucking ghost, she’s a little girl. Now find her.”
“Yes, sir.”
Clarke was about to hang up when he recalled something Max had told him before he’d taken the call from Vik Pawar. “Wait a minute. You mentioned something earlier. About the girl’s laptop. You said it was powered on and there was a web address still in the browser?”
“That’s right, sir. The page was for a place called Everland Resort. It’s apparently a water park roughly forty klicks north of Seoul.”
“North?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That may be just the break we’ve been looking for. Keep searching for the girl. I’ll contact the little man and see if Nika’s come around. If so, maybe she can tell us why she was surfing the net, exploring water parks when she was supposed to be interrogating a goddamn grade schooler.”
TWENTY-SIX
National Intelligence Service Headquarters
Naegok-dong, Seocho-gu, Seoul
Nam Sei-hoon arrived at his office before dawn, which wasn’t entirely unusual. To his colleagues, he seemed to be in a dark mood, which wasn’t entirely unusual either. From all outward appearances, in fact, there was nothing particularly unusual about Nam Sei-hoon this morning. Inside, however, he stood on the brink of fury like never before.
How could the Americans have been so stupid?
Even if no one else in Washington did, Edward Clarke knew the stakes of this operation. Yet over the past seventy-two hours, there had been one colossal mistake after another. First, the US envoy inadvertently allows the translator Lynell Yi to overhear a sensitive discussion concerning Diophantus. Once Clarke assured Nam that the translator would be taken care of, Nam had been ready to put the matter aside. But, no, it turns out that the translator’s live-in boyfriend is not only the son of a sitting US senator but an activist whose primary mission is to capture and disseminate state secrets. Fine, Nam had thought then, it could still be cleaned up. But then the assassin Clarke sends manages to eliminate the translator but allows the boyfriend—the true danger in all of this—to escape. And Nam still had not received a plausible explanation for this. A Cons Ops agent who can’t handle two adolescents in a tiny hanok? Nam wished he could know what transpired in that room, but he’d probably never be given the full story.
