“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
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.”