Black Dragon, page 11
12
Seoul
South Korea
The long night slowly began to recede. On the horizon, the pink light of dawn crept up in the east.
It was just after five in the morning, and Seoul had yet to come to life. Soon the downtown core would turn into a teeming metropolis. Home to over ten million South Koreans, the city was more than just the nation’s capital . . . it was its heart.
Quietly sitting in a stolen Hyundai Santa Fe, two men sipped lukewarm coffee and incessantly smoked cheap Chinese cigarettes while they stared at the closed entrance to a towering downtown apartment’s underground parking garage. Tipped off by a South Korean government informant, they had been parked outside for hours and were beginning to think that their night, like so many others recently, was going to end in failure, when the garage’s metal door began to noisily rise up from the ground.
Both men leaned forward in their seats, watching intently as a highly polished black limousine drove up and then out onto the nearly deserted street. Turning left, the limo slowly drove past the parked Santa Fe, paying no heed to the men sitting inside, before turning onto a side street heading north.
A broad-shouldered man with a deep scar running down the left side of his face sat in the passenger seat and waited until the limousine was out of sight, and then quickly punched in the limo’s plate into his cell phone. His heart began to race in his chest while he waited for a reply. Less than a minute later, an agreed-upon code word appeared on the phone’s screen. With a wide grin on his face, he nodded to his partner, placed his phone away, and then stepped out of the car. After being cooped up for hours, the cool morning air felt revitalizing. Taking a deep breath to calm the growing anticipation inside him, he reached back and grabbed his peaked cap from the rear seat. Placing it on his head, he became indistinguishable from the thousands of other men who served in Seoul’s police force. After checking in the car’s side mirror that his blue uniform looked presentable, the broad-shouldered man looked over at his compatriot, dressed in an identical uniform. He reached down, drew his pistol from its holster, and checked that it was loaded and that the safety was off, before placing it back.
Without saying a word, both men strode purposefully to the front entrance of the apartment and then waited while a white-haired man in a navy blue uniform hurried over to open the locked door for them. The high-rise, located in the heart of the downtown core, catered exclusively to Seoul’s rich and elite. Most South Koreans never made enough in a year to afford a single month’s rent in the expensive building.
“May I help you, officers?” asked the white-haired man.
“We received a call of an attempted burglary on the eightieth floor,” replied the broad-shouldered man as he flashed his badge at the old man.
“I heard nothing about this,” said the old man as he leaned forward, trying to read the number on the badge.
“Well, we have,” said the second police officer, barging his way inside.
“I’ll have to accompany you,” said the guard, stepping back from the door.
“Sir, with all due respect, you’re a little too old to be coming with us. You can best assist us by staying at your desk and calling us if someone comes down the elevator that you don’t recognize before we do.”
“How will I call you?”
“We’re on frequency four,” said the broad-shouldered man, waving his Motorola in the air.
“Oh, very good then, I’ll monitor frequency four and call you if I need to,” replied the old man, eagerly nodding.
“Thank you, sir,” said the second police officer as he indicated with his hand to the guard’s workstation, letting him know that his services truly weren’t needed.
Mumbling to himself about being left out of everything, the guard dejectedly shuffled his feet as he made his way back to his desk.
A minute later, with a chime, the elevator doors opened and both men stepped out onto the dull, red carpet that ran the length of the eightieth floor. They looked both ways to ensure that they were alone. Quickly they walked to the far end of the hallway and stopped outside of apartment 8002.
Tension built up inside the men like an approaching lightning storm. Both were ex-cops, kicked out for drug trafficking, assault, and a myriad other offences. Selling their services to those who could afford them, they had become quite rich. Murder, arson, and blackmail had become their specialties. Hired to do another dirty job, they couldn’t wait to get it over with so they could enjoy the hundred grand each that they had been promised by their mysterious employer. Although they had never met their employer face-to-face, they knew from speaking with the middleman, another crooked cop, that the man was known to be reliable and always paid well for services rendered. The broad-shouldered man took a second to compose himself before looking over into the cold, dark eyes of his accomplice. With a slight nod, the other man told him that it was time. Raising his hand, he rapped his knuckles on the door and waited.
At first, nothing happened. The broad-shouldered man was about to bang his fist on the door when he heard a young woman’s voice ask who they were.
“Sorry to bother you, Miss. My name is Assistant Inspector Kim. I am with the police,” said the broad-shouldered man. “It’s important that we speak to you.”
“Show me your badge,” said the woman from behind her closed door.
“Certainly,” said the man, bringing up his badge to the peephole in the door.
“The other man, too.”
“Of course. I am Senior Police Officer Lee,” said the second police officer as he brought up his badge for her to see.
“What do you want?” asked the woman.
“Miss Sook, there’s been an accident involving your father,” said the broad-shouldered man.
The door was unlocked. In the doorway stood a beautiful and very slender woman in her early twenties. She was wearing a white robe over top of her bright blue silk pajamas.
“What has happened?” asked Miss Sook, her voice cracking with fear.
“Perhaps we should talk inside. It’s probably better if your neighbors don’t hear what we have to say,” said the second police officer.
“Certainly, please come in,” said Miss Sook.
Closing the door behind them, the men entered the luxurious apartment that overlooked the city. The aromatic smell of recently burnt incense hung in the air.
“My father, is he alright?”
“How the hell would I know?” coldly replied the broad-shouldered man as he drew his pistol and aimed it at Sook’s heart.
Fear gripped her body. “But you said he had been in an accident,” said Miss Sook, staring wide-eyed at the pistol.
“I lied. Now, Miss Sook, I want to know who was just here in this apartment with you.”
Sook hesitated.
“Answer the question,” demanded the second police officer.
“I cannot,” said Sook, fighting back the tears.
Raising his pistol until it was aimed squarely at her head, the broad-shouldered man said, “Tell me, or I will kill you. If you think I won’t, I suggest you look into my eyes and see what they tell you.”
A chill ran down her spine as she looked into the man’s uncaring eyes. He meant every word. Her mind fought her heart; she didn’t want to say who had been in her apartment, but neither did she wish to die.
“Tell me now!”
“President Park was here,” replied the girl, feeling as if she had just betrayed the nation.
The broad-shouldered man lowered his weapon and smiled. “I wonder how the press will react when they learn that the president of South Korea is having an affair with his Prime Minister’s daughter.”
“No, please, you cannot let them know. It would destroy him. He’s a good man. South Korea needs him,” said Sook.
“That is of no consequence to us or the people that hired us. In about thirty minutes, every news agency in this city is going to receive an anonymous email detailing your affair with the president and your subsequent suicide over his unwillingness to leave his wife for you.”
Sook tried to open her mouth to plead for her life, but found that she could not. Ice-cold fear gripped her heart. She knew that she was about to die.
An hour later, on the outskirts of Seoul, the stolen Santa Fe turned off a side street and leisurely made its way down a garbage-filled back alley. Driving into an old wooden warehouse, the two murderers parked their car in the dimly lit building and climbed out. The fetid smell of rotting garbage assaulted their nostrils.
“You are to be congratulated,” called out a man in the dark. “It is all over the news.” A second later, a morbidly obese man stepped out of the shadows. In his hand was a half-drunk bottle of beer.
“This place stinks, Zo. Couldn’t you have picked a better place to meet?” said the broad-shouldered man, stepping over a split-open garbage bag.
“Come, come, this is the ideal place to ditch your car. No one has been here for months,” said Zo.
“Our money . . . where is it?” said the second police officer.
“I have your reward,” said a man’s voice in the dark with French-accented English.
The two killers turned their heads and peered into the gloom. Slowly, a man walked out of the dark. He was dressed impeccably in a dark gray Armani suit with a white shirt and gray tie. He stood well over two meters tall with short, blonde hair above his pale, almost white, face. His ice-blue eyes fixed their gaze on the men, making them feel uncomfortable.
“What did he say?” asked the second police officer, not understanding a word of English.
Zo translated.
“Well, tell him we want our money, and we want it now,” said the broad-shouldered man.
The man raised his hand to stop Zo. “Don’t bother. I speak Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin, as well as Russian, Spanish, and English,” said the man in fluent Korean.
“They why didn’t you speak it to begin with?” said Zo.
“Harmless amateur theatrics,” said the man. “Now, I suppose we should conclude our business here, but before we do, can either of you fine gentlemen tell me what the first rule of assassination is?”
The three men exchanged a puzzled look, wondering what the question meant.
“No more games. Where’s our money?” demanded Zo.
All three men nodded, eager to get what was coming to them.
What they didn’t know was that they were being hunted. Out of the dark like wraiths emerging from the grave, three gray-clad assassins struck. Each run through the body with long, razor-sharp swords, the men looked down with unbelieving eyes as the bloodied swords slid from their bodies. With deadly precision, the blades spun through the air, lopping the dying men’s heads from their bodies. In seconds, it was over. Silently, the assassins sheathed their swords and vanished back into the shadows.
“The first rule of assassination, gentlemen, is to kill the assassins,” said the blond-haired man dryly.
He stepped over the bodies of the dead men as if they were just more piles of refuse and walked outside of the warehouse, where a black BMW SUV waited for him, its engine running. Climbing in the back, the man buckled himself in and then told his driver, a young Asian woman in a tight gray leather uniform, to take him to the airport. Behind him, the tinder-dry warehouse burst into flames. Located in a poor part of the city, it would take far too long for the fire department to reach the blaze. The warehouse would be long gone before they arrived.
He sat back in his comfortable black leather seat and turned to look out the window. His mind was already elsewhere. With a smile on his face, he thought of the look of horror on the crooked police officers’ faces when they realized that they had been betrayed. What did they expect? He couldn’t let them live and run the risk of one or all of them being caught. There could be no loose ends. He took his cell phone from his jacket and placed a call. It was to an answering machine in the intelligence office of the North Korean embassy in Beijing. He left a coded message, ended the call, placed his phone away, and then sat back in his seat, confident everything was unfolding as it should. Soon he would be rich beyond his wildest dreams. He wondered which Caribbean island he would buy when he was ready to retire and live out the rest of his life in unrivalled pleasure and comfort while his investments continued to make millions a day.
13
Dornogobi Hotel - Sainshand
Mongolia
Sam and Cardinal sat on the bed in their small hotel room, sipping back a couple of cans of locally brewed beer, while they waited for Mike Donaldson’s face to appear on Sam’s secure laptop. A moment later, Donaldson moved in front of his computer, smiled, and then waved at Sam and Cardinal.
He looked exhausted. His hair was uncombed, and his usually clean clothes looked rumpled and slept-in. Before they got down to business, Donaldson quickly passed along the news about the kidnapping and that Fahimah had been shot, but was doing well. She was expected to be back at work after a few weeks of rest and recuperation at home with her parents. Sam and Cardinal peppered him with questions about what had happened at the gallery, most of which he still didn’t have any answers for. Changing the topic, Donaldson, after looking at the photos emailed back to his office, agreed with Cardinal that it was odd that a vehicle designed for chemical detection had been seen heading out into the Gobi Desert. The parking lot filled with abandoned vehicles only added another layer to the mystery. After checking with local papers, searching the Web and digging around inside the Mongolian government’s mainframe, Donaldson couldn’t find a single reference to a military exercise being held where the vehicles were being stored.
Cardinal asked, “Could there have been a leak from an old Mongolian Army weapons depot that triggered the government into responding? I don’t know of a single government that would openly advertise to the media that there was a deadly chemical weapons leak going on.”
“I thought about that," answered Donaldson, “but there aren’t any chemical weapons in the country. I also looked into old Soviet facilities that could have held chemical weapons at one time, but the search turned up nothing. It’s a real head-scratcher.”
Sam joined in. “Mike, can you think of any reason why the missing students’ car would have been towed to a secure compound guarded by a lot of heavily armed soldiers?”
“Other than the army found it abandoned and wants it out of the way while they conduct maneuvers, I don’t know why it would have been brought along with all the other vehicles to that location.”
Cardinal said, “Something isn’t sitting well with me. I want to take a closer look at that Rover. Perhaps we could find something that may give us a clue as to what happened to the two students.”
“I’m with Gord on this one,” said Sam firmly. “The police said they found nothing, but their vehicle is sitting out there in the Gobi for all the world to see. Either they outright lied or are incompetent at their job.”
Donaldson scrunched up his face and then said, “Okay, I’ll inform the boss when he gets back from the hospital. Until then, sit tight and don’t go anywhere until I get back to you.”
“Sounds fair,” said Cardinal.
Sam said, “Mike, before you go, could you please send us a couple chemical agent detectors, just in case there is something going on out there?”
“Already way ahead of you,” said Donaldson. “If you check your inbox, you will see a receipt for two handheld chemical agent monitors. I had them shipped out this morning via UPS. They should be arriving in Ulaanbaatar later today. I had a hunch you might need them after seeing the picture of the BRDM-2 driving around in the desert.”
Cardinal grinned. Donaldson was always good at anticipating the needs of the people in the field well before they did. “Thanks, Mike. I guess there’s nothing else to pass on from this end, so we’ll wait to hear from you.” He turned his head to see if Sam wanted to add anything. With a quick shake of her head, Sam ended the conversation and closed her laptop.
Sam walked over to the small wooden table in their room and grabbed the keys for their Land Rover. With a smile on her face, she said, “My turn to drive.”
“I’m not sure there’s enough insurance coverage for you to be behind the wheel,” said Cardinal, thinking back to Africa when Sam stole a two-story truck and proceeded to flatten the better part of an oil refinery during an escape attempt. “Besides, Mike told us to stay put.”
“I’m sure he meant not to go back into the desert. There can’t be any harm in us picking up the chemical agent detectors.”
Checking his watch, Cardinal saw that there was plenty of time to reach the capital. With a smile on his face, he said, “After you, and please try to stay on the road this time.”
“You are too funny. Don’t give up your day job to become a comedian. You’ll starve to death.”
“Ouch,” said Cardinal as he locked their door behind them. A few minutes later, they were on the highway heading north. They passed the ominous sight of several long military convoys all heading south. Whatever had happened had been serious. To Sam and Cardinal, it seemed as if the entire Mongolian Army had been called out to deal with whatever had happened in the desert. Although neither said it, they both began to wonder just what they had stumbled upon, and if it was as bad as it appeared.
14
Hamilton Heights
New York City
The room was warm and comfortable. In a corner, a candle flickered as it slowly burnt down.
Jen rolled over in bed and placed her arm around Mitchell, only it wasn’t him; it was his pillow. Slowly raising her head, Jen looked around the dimly lit bedroom. The illuminated digits on her alarm clock told her that it was four-thirty in the morning. Taking a second to look around, she saw a light on in their living room. Jen rolled out of bed and threw on some shorts and one of Mitchell’s old army T-shirts before walking into the living room. Right away, Jen saw Mitchell sitting in one of their black leather chairs with only his shorts on, tossing a Nerf football up into the air and then catching it a second later, only to repeat the maneuver. She knew that something was bothering him. Jen had only seen Mitchell play with his football, a birthday gift from her brother’s kids, when he was deep in thought.
