Robert Ludlum's (TM) the Janson Equation, page 16
No matter, Clarke had pledged, the boy would be found and filleted before he could do any damage. But then the boy vanishes into the ether, and who but Paul Janson is called upon by the senator to locate his son. Still, Nam Sei-hoon had figured, because of his long relationship with Janson, he could maintain some control of the situation. And sure enough, Janson contacted Nam and arranged a face-to-face meeting immediately upon his arrival in Seoul.
All Clarke had to do was find the boy, and Janson’s visit would have been for naught. In the meantime, of course, Nam had to keep up appearances. He couldn’t simply refuse Janson’s request for assistance, and he couldn’t botch things to a degree that would give his participation away. Paul Janson was a brilliant spy; he’d know instantly if Nam Sei-hoon attempted to sabotage his mission right from the start.
Then Nam bore witness to another flurry of Clarke’s missteps. A botched attempt on Janson’s partner, the female sniper, Jessica Kincaid. And still Clarke’s people couldn’t find the boy. What incompetency. Yet on whom does Edward Clarke place the blame? Squarely on the shoulders of Nam Sei-hoon. And for what? For assisting Janson with a Cold War maneuver to escape his shadow. When Janson requested this simple favor, what was Nam Sei-hoon expected to say? Sorry, Paul, but I’m short-staffed; all my men have come down with the flu. Preposterous.
But, no, Clarke had something more sinister in mind. Clarke thought Nam should have ordered one of his men to kill Janson. To put a bullet in him in the rear of one of the taxis. Even more preposterous. This chaos wasn’t of Nam’s creation; it belonged fully to the Americans. Why should Nam order the execution of his old friend, a man he’d broken bread with more times than he could count? If Clarke wanted Janson dead, let him do the deed himself, the coward.
Nam Sei-hoon had already been forced into a number of shameful undertakings. The one he regretted most was giving up the young girl Kang Jung. He’d made Clarke guarantee that no harm would come to her, but Clarke’s word was good for nothing, even when it came to matters of life and death. From the beginning Nam had known that he could only trust Clarke insofar as their countries’ interests coincided.
Nam sighed. At this point he knew Paul Janson—a man he often thought of as a surrogate son—would have to die. And Nam would deeply regret the loss, to be sure. But the fact was, the future of the Korean peninsula was at stake. So, if Paul and a thirteen-year-old girl had to be sacrificed, so be it. Many, many more lives would be lost before all this was over. None, however, would die in vain. Nam would make damn sure of that.
He opened a secure line and dialed Edward Clarke in Washington.
“Have you located Janson?” Nam said.
“Not yet. After the explosion, my people scoured Daeseong-dong. We’re now watching our former operative Jina Jeon in the unlikely case that Janson makes contact.”
“Unlikely case? You had said they were lovers?”
“Right. But Janson may believe that Jina Jeon betrayed him.” Clarke told Nam about the mother’s medical appointment in Seoul.
Good, Nam thought, with no small measure of relief. Better Janson believe he’s been betrayed by Jina Jeon than believe he’s been betrayed by me.
He shuddered to think of what Janson would do to him if he discovered Nam’s treachery.
“What of the Korean girl in Itaewon?” Nam said.
Clarke hesitated. “We haven’t found her either.”
Again, Nam felt relieved.
As he waited for Clarke to continue, the director coughed loudly in his ear.
You are vile, Nam thought.
When Clarke spoke again, his voice was tired, resigned. “I’m afraid I have some more bad news. But first some good news. As you know, we recovered the girl’s laptop computer.”
“Go on,” Nam prodded.
“The last page opened was a website for Everland Resort, a water—”
“I know the place.”
“Right. Well, the female operative we sent in to extract information says the girl gave up the location of Gregory Wyckoff. She claims that a facility at the water park is being used as a headquarters for the Hivemind, and the Hivemind is hiding Wyckoff there.”
“That may be the dumbest thing I ever heard.”
“Well, I sent two of my peop—”
“Then bring them back. It’s a waste of precious resources. It is simply not true. The girl lied to your operative. This thirteen-year-old not only defeated your agent in combat. She outsmarted her, too. And you as well, evidently.”
Nam could hear Clarke breathing heavily, reining in his famous temper.
“Fine,” Clarke finally said. “Anyway, the other bad news is that this young lady visited a Wikipedia page recently as well.”
“So?”
“The Wikipedia entry was for Diophantus.”
A full minute of silence passed.
Nam was the first to speak. “If Janson and his…researchers…are using Wikipedia to discover the meaning behind Diophantus, then they don’t have any hard information. At least not yet.”
“Unfortunately, that’s not so.”
“What do you mean?”
“Apparently, the Wyckoff kid is even cleverer than we thought. He left a message behind on the Wikipedia entry. Not in full view; it was hidden. But apparently the young girl figured it out.”
Nam felt as though a spider were crawling up his esophagus. “What is this message, Clarke?”
“We don’t really know what it means,” he said. “But it reads, ‘Contact Yun Jin-ho, DPRK.’”
The spider reached the back of Nam’s tongue and he nearly gagged.
“Are you all right?”
Nam didn’t respond. His spy Yun Jin-ho was in no way connected to Diophantus, at least in no way that Nam was aware of. But then, why had the boy sent such a message?
Nam stared at the phone on his desk. He was helpless to contact Yun Jin-ho; the spy wasn’t scheduled to make another dead drop for ninety days.
Suddenly he was struck by a bolt of panic.
Is Yun Jin-ho still under my control?
“Does that name mean anything to you?” Clarke pressed.
“I will have to look into it and get back to you.”
Nam was about to hang up the handset when he heard Clarke call out: “There’s one more thing you need to know about.”
More? Nam just wanted to get off this damn phone and clear his throat with a drink of ice water. “What is it, Clarke?”
“We discovered one last thing on the girl’s computer.”
“Let me guess,” Nam said. “Is it a photo of you and me fishing on the Potomac in a boat named Diophantus?”
“It may as well be.”
Nam suddenly felt light-headed.
“The girl sent a link to a live feed capturing what was happening in her bedroom when our agent entered and interrogated her. We presume the link was sent to Janson.”
Nam thought about it. Janson knows they discovered Kang Jung? There was only one way that Cons Ops could have discovered that the girl was helping Janson—through Nam Sei-hoon himself, who received the information from his cyber-intelligence unit, which was monitoring Cy’s Internet Relay Chats.
Something I boasted about to Janson.
Nam’s light-headedness gave way to raw ire.
“Find Janson,” he yelled into the phone. “Find him now, Clarke. Find the Machine before he comes for me!”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Northern Side of the Demilitarized Zone
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)
Janson emerged from the hole just before dawn, his arms and legs caked with mud, his face as black as the tunnel walls. Though he could barely see through the heavy fog, he was grateful just for the clean breaths he could take as he belly-crawled on his elbows through the dampened, overgrown grass. Rising slowly from his hands and knees, he discovered that every inch of his body ached. His head was as heavy as a truck; he needed sleep. But this was no place to rest. If he were seen, he’d be shot on sight or, worse, delivered to a labor camp from which he’d never be released. And here, deep in the DMZ, he couldn’t rule out the risk of setting his head down on a landmine.
Rest would have to wait.
Though moving forward wouldn’t be much safer. He could stumble over a trip wire rigged with explosives. Enveloped in the opaque mist, Janson could walk directly into an electrified fence and not know it until his flesh started to sizzle. A copse of trees stood roughly a hundred yards away to his left; a bullet fired from a sniper’s nest could rip through his throat at any moment.
Undoubtedly, he was in far more danger now than he had been immediately following the shots that killed Silent Lynx at the construction site in Shanghai.
Because now, without question, Janson was behind enemy lines.
He crept low. Moved as quickly as possible while keeping his eyes peeled for booby traps. The fog made that challenge exceedingly difficult, but he took some comfort in the fact that if he couldn’t see a few feet in front of his face, North Korean soldiers couldn’t spot him either. Especially from any significant distance. To snipers he’d be all but invisible. A ghost.
Surely not the only ghost plodding through the high grass of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, he thought.
Unfortunately, the fog also prevented Janson from seeing where he was going. And with frigid winds blowing in from Siberia, he had to navigate through threadlike slits instead of wide-open eyes. He only needed to walk a straight line, but even that was a test in this weather.
He gritted his teeth. His blackened face was already frozen; he’d have to take precautions against frostbite. Frostbite led to amputations, not only of fingers and toes but also of ears and noses. He tugged on his ski cap, tucked his face into his black North Face coat, and moved forward.
His destination was the Reunification Highway, otherwise known as the Pyongyang-Kaesong Motorway. The distance from the DMZ to the capital city was roughly 215 klicks, or 133 miles. Much too far to walk, of course; Janson needed a vehicle. Once he obtained one, then he’d begin worrying about the numerous checkpoints and tank traps along the multiple-lane highway. Then, he promised himself, not a moment before.
A sound in the distance caused Janson to drop flat on his stomach. He listened. The noise resembled the hum of an engine. Janson knew he wasn’t yet close enough to the highway to hear its traffic. Which meant that the engine he heard undoubtedly belonged to a military vehicle on patrol.
He inched forward and continued to listen. The vehicle was moving east to west at no more than ten or fifteen miles per hour. Janson mused that its presence was as close as he’d ever come to describing something as a blessing in disguise.
He lifted his field glasses and spotted the vehicle just as it rolled to a stop. From Janson’s vantage point, it appeared to be a jeep, military green and as old as the DMZ itself. He couldn’t be sure but he thought he could make out at least two soldiers inside.
At least I’m not too close to a cluster of landmines, Janson thought. Unless even North Korean soldiers were occasionally caught by surprise. Certainly a possibility given what little he—or anyone else for that matter—knew about the country.
“Pyongyang is an intelligence black hole,” Jina Jeon had told him.
Through his field glasses, Janson watched the soldiers exit the jeep on either side. Each of the men carried what appeared to be a Chinese-manufactured AK-47. The fact that he could make out the weapons meant the fog was beginning to lift. For better or worse, it meant that Janson would have to work even faster than he’d anticipated.
He reached for his go-bag. Silently, he assembled his M110.
He set himself then peered through the scope. Instantly he spotted one of the soldiers standing casually behind the jeep.
He quickly scanned the area for the second.
The second man was no longer visible.
Where did you go? Why the hell would you wander off?
Before he finished the thought Janson’s instincts kicked in; he realized he’d been spotted. Maintaining a tight grip on his rifle, he rolled fast to his left just as thick patches of dirt and grass began kicking up all around him. The crackling of the AK-47 resonated in his chest.
Ignoring the universal pain in his body, Janson pushed himself to his feet and started running, stealing a look back to try to determine from which direction—directions, plural now—he was being fired upon.
In a serpentine pattern he crossed the stretch of open land heading south and slightly east toward the copse of trees. Following a few agonized seconds of internal debate, he’d decided that heading back toward the tunnel was suicide—even if his being spotted was just a stroke of poor luck and his point of ingress into the North hadn’t been compromised.
That tunnel, Janson intuited, was far less likely to serve as his means of escape than as his grave.
As he ran, Janson had no hope of consciously avoiding booby traps. Each time his combat boots hit the ground he risked detonating a landmine. Every time he lifted a boot to move forward he gambled his life on there not being a trip wire set directly in his path.
The soldiers’ shots were wild. A half dozen or so buzzed by within a few feet of him, but most of the bullets came nowhere close. Janson felt fortunate that the fog hadn’t lifted altogether. The mist made him an elusive target.
Not quite a ghost anymore, he imagined as he ran, but still more difficult to trace than an ordinary man.
Once Janson had moved far enough away, the shots became fewer and farther between. He slowed as he considered dropping into the tall grass and spinning around, setting his rifle and waiting for one of the soldiers to step into his sights. But then he heard the engine of the jeep roar to life.
He took off again.
When he reached the tree line, Janson experienced a small measure of relief. Although he wasn’t by any means safe, the trees would at least help slow the soldiers down, and hopefully help level the playing field.
As he checked his magazine Janson surveyed the area beyond the southern tree line. He was surprised to find just how close he was to the border. In the distance he could make out a tall metal fence topped with rings of barbed wire.
Shit. A shot from the soldier’s assault rifle struck the bark of a tree just a few yards away. Janson immediately slipped out of his go-bag, dropped the M110, and collected his Beretta. He fired once through the fog in the general direction of the soldiers—then bolted for the electrified fence on the border.
The grass surrounding the fence was waist-high on both sides.
Janson fired several shots from staggered positions then dove for cover behind a thick tree stump roughly halfway between the fence and the forest.
Over the next several minutes the air above his head grew still and silent as the soldiers searched for their quarry.
Turn the hunter into the hunted, he thought, breathing heavily, the predator into the prey.
Strangely, the silence remained absolute. Janson stifled a cough in his throat. The dead air of the tunnel still lay at the bottom of his lungs like a fungus.
Come on. Give me a sound, any sound, so I know where you are.
Still nothing but silence save for his steadying breaths.
Patience, Janson thought. Patience.
In the cold, wet grass he waited.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Outside 322 Sowol-ro
Yongsan-gu, Seoul
From the street Sin Bae watched the American woman escort the girl into the opulent lobby of the Grand Hyatt Seoul. From his pocket he extracted his phone. He would need to contact Ping for information on the hotel. In the meantime, however, Sin Bae couldn’t remain outside, exposed. So he headed for the pretentious apartment building looming across the roadway.
The girl’s name, he’d been told, was Kang Jung. She was thirteen years old, as fresh-faced and beautiful as his sister Su-ra had been at that age. Su-ra, all those years ago. Sin Bae profoundly regretted what would have to be done to the girl.
And he couldn’t help but accept the fact that her blood would be on his hands—in more ways than one.
Had he succeeded in eliminating Gregory Wyckoff when he did the interpreter at the Sophia Guesthouse, this child would never have become involved.
She should not be here, Sin Bae thought with a touch of sadness. This girl should be at her school.
Thinking of her, he flashed on the labor camp in which he’d been imprisoned as a child. At Yodok, Sin Bae and Su-ra had attended a school nothing like the one in which they’d studied in Pyongyang. At Yodok the teachers behaved viciously; fellow students fell out of their chairs from hunger. Some children went mad right before his eyes.
He often looked around the cramped classroom in terror. Dirt clung to every child’s hair, and fleas covered their bodies. There was no soap and little water at Yodok. Everyone was weak. All but a few were missing teeth.
After a half day in school, under the constant threat of violence from armed guards, Sin Bae chopped wood, hauled logs, grew corn, and pulled weeds, while his sister Su-ra worked from afternoon till evening in a dilapidated sweatshop on the opposite end of the camp. Everyone at Yodok was forced to work, even the too old and the too young. For many, labor quietly became a death sentence.
But Sin Bae was strong. He could handle the work, he could handle the constant berating from teachers, even the occasional beating. He could handle the appalling conditions. What he could not handle was being separated all but one hour a day from his sister, Su-ra.
