Robert Ludlum's (TM) the Janson Equation, page 7
She went almost an hour without seeing him.
Relieved, she was about to enter a Korean Starbucks to look for a public phone when her would-be assassin’s visage materialized in the reflective window.
Again she ran. Hard and fast and for what felt like forever. When she finally realized she was tiring and that it was just a matter of time until the killer caught up with her, she decided to try to turn the tide. As Janson was constantly telling her:
“Turn the hunter into the hunted, the predator into the prey.”
When she turned down what looked to be a quiet side road and spotted a massive glass-and-steel structure bleeding partygoers, she decided that was where she’d make her stand. She slipped the bouncer at the rope line a hundred dollars in American currency, checked her coat, and immediately lost herself in a horde of dancers.
As she searched over her shoulder, her body still pumping madly with adrenaline, she hoped like hell her pursuer had followed.
She wormed her way through the thick, sweaty crowds, watching for the killer while simultaneously trying to memorize the layout of the exotic four-level nightclub. Cher’s “Life After Love” gave way to an unfamiliar Korean pop song before the deejay spun a remixed cut of “Lose Yourself.” As the song ended, a catchy techno beat came over the speakers and the mood of the entire nightclub transformed at once. Energy levels rose to the roof; the dancing became faster and far more intense. The Vengaboys’ “We Like to Party” blasted from the speakers.
Less than a minute into the song, Kincaid finally spotted her armed stalker.
Only he won’t have a gun anymore, she thought. When patrons entered the T-Lound nightclub, they had to pass through a metal detector. She might not be able to outrun him. But Jessica Kincaid prayed that, by ducking into the popular dance club, she’d at least managed to level the playing field.
* * *
SIN BAE SLITHERED THROUGH the crowd looking for the woman. He’d had to strip and stash his Daewoo DP-51 before he entered the club. The disassembled handgun lay buried in a shallow grave in a small patch of earth between two concrete buildings just across the street. If all went well in the club he’d retrieve it and move on to Itaewon to terminate Paul Janson before renewing his search for the senator’s son.
Eliminating Janson’s partner, Jessica Kincaid, had proven far trickier than he expected. She was fleet-footed and equipped with more stamina than any woman he had ever known. Not only had Consular Operations and Janson trained her well, but she possessed some physical attributes that made her an even more difficult target. Her eyes, for instance; she had the sight of a hawk.
Although he was no longer advantaged with the element of surprise, Sin Bae decided he wouldn’t need it. This was hardly his first job. It was, however, the first time he’d been given an order to assassinate a pair of former Cons Ops agents. He’d previously killed members of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, as well as clandestine officers from the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency. But never an agent, former or otherwise, of Cons Ops.
Sin Bae was mildly curious as to how Paul Janson and Jessica Kincaid had come to draw the ire of Consular Operations. But he would never learn the reason and he could live with that. He had orders to carry out, instructions as urgent as they were clear. Once Janson and Kincaid were eliminated and the elusive Gregory Wyckoff was dead, he’d contact his handler Ping in Shanghai and await his next assignment.
He moved up the stairs to the second floor and spotted her almost instantly. Curiously, she had cozied up to a middle-aged Korean gentleman at the bar. A few moments later she guided the man toward the center of the dance floor.
Had she not seen Sin Bae enter the nightclub? Or did she think that because he had to pass through a metal detector she had nothing to fear? If that was the case, her overconfidence—and her severe underestimation of Sin Bae—would ultimately be her undoing.
Alternating colored lights made it difficult to see through the crowd to the dance floor. Disorienting, but not debilitating. He could still get the job done with no one the wiser. But he’d need to be smart about it. There were simply too many bodies on the dance floor. It would take time for him to get close to her, and he did not want to risk her spotting him as he made his approach.
So he stood back and watched. Waited. Was this beautiful young woman actually seducing a paunchy, balding stranger almost old enough to be her father? From the way she danced with him, it certainly seemed so. A waitress walked over to the couple carrying a tray of test tube shots and Jessica Kincaid quickly downed two of them. To calm her nerves, perhaps.
Good, he thought. That meant she indeed suspected that the threat had passed. Sin Bae might possess the element of surprise after all.
He considered his options. Perhaps he would kill her on the street as soon as she left the bar. Or perhaps he could do it right there in the club. If she no longer thought there was a threat, maybe she would head to the restrooms. With the right approach, Sin Bae could easily get to her in one of the ladies’ room stalls.
He was amused by her behavior, though somewhat surprised that she’d succumbed to a false sense of security simply because the metal detector downstairs had removed the handgun from the equation. Little did she know that Sin Bae’s true weapon of choice remained on his person.
As Sin Bae tugged on the arms of his suit jacket and shot out the cuffs, a drunk man—a European tourist, no less—suddenly knocked into him, spilling an amber liquid down the front of his jacket and shirt before dropping and shattering his glass on the floor. Sin Bae was tempted to take a shard of that glass and slit the man’s throat from ear to ear. But then, that would jeopardize his objective. Instead, he allowed the man to move on with a hard glare that left no question as to whether the man should come anywhere near him again.
When his gaze returned to the dance floor, he surveyed the crowd for Kincaid. He spotted the older Korean man she had been dancing with, the one with the round bald spot on the top of his head, but he appeared to be alone. And every bit as perplexed as Sin Bae.
Impossible. He’d taken his eyes off the subject for merely a few seconds.
Sin Bae cursed inwardly, then started searching the faces of each young woman in the crowd. This Kincaid was wily. He knew from the time he’d spent tracking her that she could lose a professional pursuer as easily as most can tie a shoelace. And she didn’t give up. Clearly, Miss Jessica Kincaid wasn’t ready to die.
Movement suddenly drew Sin Bae’s eyes toward the stairs leading back down to the first floor. He couldn’t be sure but he thought he’d spotted the back of her head. He should know it by now, he mused; he’d been chasing after it all night.
He started toward the stairs, stoic and confident.
He would find her.
And he would kill her.
He would finish her, tonight.
NINE
Who the hell was able to dox me?”
From the couch, Janson stared at the girl across the modest living room, trying to keep his jaw from dropping.
“You?” he said. “You’re Lord Wicked?”
The girl folded her arms across her flat chest. “Answer. My. Question.”
“I can’t tell you that. But rest assured, it took an entire team.”
The girl picked up a remote control and muted the flat-screen television on the wall above her head.
“I’m sorry to hear that you can’t reveal your sources,” she said. “Because this is a quid pro quo. You came to me for information? Well, I’m not going to tell you a damn thing unless you tell me who doxed me.”
Janson rose from the couch. “Look, I don’t care what you do for a…living. I just need help, and you may be the only person in all of Seoul who can provide it.”
“Then tell me who doxed me.”
“That issue is closed, young lady.” He caught himself pointing a stern finger in her direction and quickly withdrew it. “Look, this isn’t a game. I won’t leave here until you tell me what I need to know.”
“What are you going to do?” she said. “Torture a thirteen-year-old girl?”
Janson maintained his calm. “I don’t torture anyone.”
“No?” she said, her demeanor suddenly lightening. “Not even if you’re paid well? Because I will give you good money if you bring me the heads of everyone who was involved in doxing me.”
Christ. The girl looked completely serious. Janson wondered why she’d given up her identity to him without much persuasion if she was so hell-bent on keeping it secret.
He turned to the door. “This was a bad idea after all. I’m going to go pay your father a visit in Gangnam.”
“No,” she shouted. “Don’t go see my dad. Just tell me what you want to know. And hurry, because my mother will be home within the hour.”
So that was it. Her father was her Achilles’ heel. That was why she’d given in when he’d been standing in the hallway.
“All right,” he said. “I’m trying to locate a hacker who is somewhere in Seoul. I already have people watching his credit cards and his cell phone, but he’s not using either. So the only way I might find him in time is if I know more about him, and the guy I’m looking for supposedly lived most of his life online.”
“Find him in time?” she said. “What does that mean?”
Janson had wanted to avoid mentioning the police, but the clock was ticking. And if he was to give this girl—this “Lord Wicked”—the best chance of helping him locate Gregory Wyckoff, he’d need to be entirely honest with her.
“Have you heard about the murder at the Sophia Guesthouse? It happened less than seventy-two hours ago.”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s been all over the news. I’ve followed every update online.”
Janson frowned. “You don’t get out much, do you, kid?”
The girl shook her head. “There’s nothing out there for me,” she said softly.
Her words briefly froze him. He considered asking her about her business, where she was stashing her cash. Was she sure she was safe? But he had more pressing matters at the moment.
“The suspect’s name is Gregory Wyckoff,” he said, “and he’s nineteen years old. He’s the son of a sitting US senator, and he’s on the run. He may be innocent, and the senator’s hired me to find him and try to get to the bottom of what happened the other night.”
The girl nodded. “You want me to reverse dox him? That will take time.”
“I’ve already had someone reverse dox him.”
“The same guy who doxed me?”
Janson ignored the question. “His online identity is Draco-underscore-Malfoy-ninety-five.”
He hoped for a flash of recognition, but her expression didn’t change.
“OK, I’ll help you,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“But you’ll have to leave me with a way to contact you, because this will take a little while and if you’re still here when my mother gets home, she’ll call the police and have you arrested.”
“I understand.”
As Janson wrote down his number, he thought again about Jessie, who still hadn’t returned his call. Because time was of the essence (and because he doubted their involvement), he’d decided to go at State and Cons Ops head-on. By sending Kincaid straight to the US embassy, he was essentially shaking the tree to see whether anything fell out. He’d assumed that if Cons Ops was involved, they’d telegraph their moves and he’d see them coming from a mile away. Now he worried he may have made a lethal mistake—a mistake for which he knew he could never forgive himself.
“Here,” he said, handing the girl his number. “How long do you anticipate this taking?”
“I’ll have something for you within half an hour.”
Janson turned to exit the apartment.
“I’ve only let my guard down once in the past twelve months,” she said to his back. “To some guy I’ve been chatting with. He told me he lived in the UK, but I traced him back to the States.”
Janson looked back at her. “And?”
“Tell me something. This douchebag who doxed me, does he happen to live in New Jersey and drive a beat-up old Honda?”
TEN
Kincaid started down the stairs, weaving through the line of scantily clad women with martinis and highballs in their hands. She didn’t look back to determine whether her pursuer had followed; she could already feel his eyes on her, as surely as she’d felt them while standing across from the restaurant in the freezing cold in Dosan Park.
Gridlock on the landing between floors one and two required her to throw a few sharp elbows, which earned her a barrage of sharp words and dirty looks—but didn’t slow her down.
When she reached the bottom of the stairs she recalled the layout of the first floor and headed left toward the room where she’d checked her coat. As she moved through the crowd she felt for the reassuring outline of the handgun in her waistband.
On the second floor Kincaid had done what most of the single ladies in the club were doing—she’d looked for a man. At first she merely thought a guy would help her to blend in, allow her time to spot the killer before he spotted her, giving her an advantage, maybe allowing her the time to get behind him. Then she noticed something that sparked a much better idea. She went to the bar and squeezed between two men, a younger one flirting theatrically with a young woman, and an older one who looked as though he’d already given up for the night and was now determined to get sloshed.
She had spotted the older man from across the room, selected him because of the bulge beneath the left breast of his suit jacket. When she reached the bar she pressed her right side against his left to confirm what she’d thought she saw.
“Choésong hamnida,” she said, apologizing to the man for nudging him to the side and causing him to tip over his drink. She knew she’d slaughtered the Korean phrase, but hoped the floor-shaking music had drowned out all but its essence. She grabbed a rag off the bar and helped him clean up the spill.
“It is fine,” the man said in English, his speech clearly slurred. “You are American, yes?”
She smiled as she turned to face him. “Yes, yes, I am. Did my awful pronunciation give me away?”
“I love America,” he said cheerfully, ignoring her question. Though it was possible he hadn’t even heard her over the music. “I love the New York City. Is that where you are from?”
Kincaid kept an eye out for her stalker. “Not quite,” she said. “I’m from a small town in the heartland. It’s called Red Creek, Kentucky.”
“Ah, Kentucky!” he cried. “I love Kentucky bourbon and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Can I buy for you?”
She leaned into him, hoping she didn’t reek of sweat. “You want to buy me a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken?”
The man threw his head back as though she’d just dropped the funniest line he’d ever heard. Then his head came forward and butted the top of hers just as he started to speak.
“Terribly sorry,” he shouted. “So, so sorry.” When he saw that she was uninjured, he returned to his initial train of thought. “I meant, can I buy you a Kentucky bourbon? Wild Turkey, maybe? Or Jim Beam? Perhaps Old Grandfather?”
“Old Grand-Dad,” she said, correcting him.
“Very well!” He reached over the bar and shouted in the direction of the bartender. “Two shots of the Old Grand-Dad!”
Kincaid’s eyes caught sight of her pursuer climbing to the top of the stairs.
“Do you want to dance?” she said.
“Dance? Yes, sure.” He searched for the bartender. “Let me just get our drinks.”
“He can bring them to us. I really, really want to get out there with you.” She turned to the bartender. “Will you serve us the drinks out on the dance floor?”
“Of course,” the bartender said in near-perfect English, with a near-perfect smile. “I will have someone bring them to you.” He looked at the older gentleman in the suit. “Have fun, you crazy kids.”
When they reached the dance floor, Kincaid immediately got into the rhythm of the K-pop as her partner looked on, slack-jawed. She spun around and slowly backed her rear end into him, moving it methodically against his midsection.
He reached around her body and clasped his hands in front of her stomach. When he did, she quickly spun around to face him, leaving their lips only inches apart. She ran her hands up the sides of his legs, up his rib cage, and felt for the holster beneath his jacket.
There it is.
As she nuzzled his neck, she slipped her hands inside his jacket and ran her fingers up his torso. He threw his head back, his eyes rolling upward in ecstasy.
She shot a look across the dance floor and saw her pursuer standing near the top of the staircase with his arms folded across his broad chest, watching her.
A young woman in a short skirt carrying a tray of neon test tubes tapped her on the left shoulder.
“Two shots of Old Grand-Dad,” the young woman said.
Kincaid took one of the test tubes and threw it back. Her dance partner waved a hand in front of his face, declining his own. “No, thank you. But please, put both drinks on my tab,” he slurred.
Kincaid winked and grabbed the second shot and put it to her lips. Her dance partner’s eyes widened to show her he was impressed.
“They’re small,” she said as she pulled him close to her again. She let him smell the bourbon on her breath then planted a sensual kiss on his cheek as her hands once more traveled inside his jacket.
As she moved up toward the holster, she considered how he might have gotten inside the club with a gun. Probably he was a cop, though she knew from Janson that most cops in Seoul didn’t carry firearms. Which meant that her dance partner was most likely a specialist armed officer with the Seoul Metropolitan Police. Either undercover or off duty. Given his slurred speech and the pungent scent of scotch coming off him, she assumed it was the latter.
From the corner of her eye, she watched a drunk young European man collide with the killer, spilling a drink down the front of his jacket and shirt. A perfect diversion.
