Kim picked up speed and ran through a yellow light just outside of the base.
“I have my orders,” Kim said.
“How well known are you in Korea?” Jake wanted to know.
“Not well. I just got here two months ago.”
“From?”
Kim hesitated. “I suppose if you wanted to, you could find out on your own. I understand you are a good friend of Kurt Jenkins.” He let that stand, as if waiting for Jake to respond. When Jake didn’t bite, Kim continued, “I was in China for three years. Before that, Singapore. Prior to that I worked at Fort Meade.”
“Air Force or Army linguist?” Jake asked.
“Air Force,” Kim said. “Ten years before the Agency recruited me.”
“Hmm. We have a similar background.”
“But you were mostly tactical human intelligence,” Kim said. “I was mostly stuck in a bunker listening to North Korean transmissions.”
The Korean turned and picked up speed as he entered the onramp to the freeway.
Thinking it over, Jake considered he might be better off keeping Kim close to him. He might pick up on the subtle differences between the South Korean speakers and their cousins to the North.
“Where are we heading?” Jake asked.
“Seoul.” Kim turned into the fast lane and picked up speed, passing slower cars and buses. “The station chief needs to brief you tonight. We have you booked on a flight to Gyeongju in the morning. The American delegation will fly in on a private jet tomorrow afternoon.”
“Isn’t that city way out in the east?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why Gyeongju?”
“Truthfully?”
“Is there any other way?”
Kim hesitated, his eyes shifting toward Jake and then back to the road. “Dog and pony show. I understand the chair of the house intelligence committee likes the golf course there. The South Korean delegation will have them tour Bulguksa Temple, the Seokguram Grotto and the tombs.”
“What’s the real purpose of the meeting?” Jake asked.
“That’s above my pay-grade, sir.”
“If you don’t start calling me Jake, I might have to hurt you.”
“In Korea we respect our elders,” Kim said with a slight smile.
“Ouch. But in this business if anyone hears you using deference to me, and they assume I’m the boss. The target.”
“Understood. Jake it is.”
They sat in silence for a long while, with Jake watching the tall apartment buildings out his window. He guessed that people would live this far out of Seoul and commute in by train. Although he had slept quite a bit on the plane ride, Jake was still feeling somewhat lagged. Perhaps the travel from South America and Montana was starting to catch up with him. Either that or he really was starting to get too old for this crap.
As they reached the southern edge of Seoul, which was really hard to discern since the sprawl from Osan seemed to be continuous, the sun was setting over Incheon to the west.
“Tell me about the station chief,” Jake said, more of a demand than a request.
Kim’s eyes shifted again. “She’s a good leader.”
“Demanding?”
“Is there any other kind of Korean woman?” Kim laughed at himself.
“I don’t know. I guess I haven’t known that many.” Jake thought about it and continued, “What’s her background?”
“Stanford undergrad in languages by age twenty. Graduate degree from Harvard by twenty-two. Fluent in Korean, Mandarin and French. Has been with the Agency for nearly twenty years.”
“What’s her name?”
“Pam Suh. Her mother was a French teacher and her father a cardiologist in Davis, California.”
Jake never crossed paths with her, but that wasn’t unusual, since he had been out of the Agency for so long. “Do you know where she has served?”
“She started here in Seoul for her first assignment. Then Paris, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Langley, and then back here. Of course she had special assignments all over the place.”
Jake could relate. “Where does she want to meet?”
“She’ll meet you at your hotel in the Myeongdong area at eight tonight. Dinner in the main hotel restaurant.”
Checking his watch, that was just a little over two hours. In the next few minutes they crossed the Hangang River that split the city in two, and then exited the freeway and wound through the busy city streets lined with the major hotel chains. Kim pulled into the entrance to a huge hotel complex nearly a block wide and stopped at the curb in front. Over the years, Jake had stayed at a number of Lotte hotels. They were all nice and this one looked like no exception. Someone at the Agency was treating Jake like royalty.
“What name did you use for my reservation here?” Jake asked.
“Johann Konrad, your Austrian persona,” Kim said. “You do have that passport with you.”
A door man approached to open Jake’s door, but he waved the man off.
Yeah, Jake had that passport, as well as a couple of others, along with driver’s licenses to accompany the passports from the U.S., Canada and Austria. “Are you coming by with your boss tonight?”
“No,” Kim said. “But I’ll pick you up right here in the morning at five.”
Jake lifted his chin and thanked Kim for the ride. Then he got out, retrieved his backpack from the back seat, and slung it over his right shoulder. As he walked toward the front desk, he considered his appearance and figured the Koreans were used to Americans and Europeans showing up from long flights looking like crap. But he was without major luggage, so he’d mildly complain to those at the front desk that the airline had lost his bag. If he complained too loudly, the polite Koreans would do everything in their power to help him find luggage that didn’t exist on a flight he had never taken.
After checking in, Jake got to his room and plopped down onto his bed for a few minutes, thinking about what had happened in the past few days. He wondered how Professor Tramil was doing right now up at his cabin in Montana. Then he tried to call his CIA contact, Toni Contardo, to get a little more insight as to what he was to do this week. Unfortunately, she wasn’t picking up on her private cell phone. Not unusually for her. She was almost impossible to contact. He considered calling Kurt Jenkins, but he wasn’t sure that was needed. After all, he just wanted some insight. And that was pretty self-evident. The Agency needed some outside security. Someone unknown. But with that whole testifying before the house committee recently, and his video going viral, he was feeling way too exposed.
He got up and went to the bathroom, glancing at himself in the mirror. Jesus, his hair had gotten long. It was curling up over his collar, and the normally dark locks were speckled with nearly as much gray. He also hadn’t shaved in days, the stubble thick enough to sandblast the hull of a battleship. No wonder Kim thought he was an old man. Time to change his appearance.
Within fifteen minutes, using his electric trimmer, he had cut all of his hair off and then shaved his beard into a short goatee. Satisfied nobody would tie him to that video, he jumped into the shower and turned the water to near scalding, letting the jet pulse stream pound his muscles. Then he put on his only clean clothes, shoved the rest into a plastic bag to turn in downstairs to be washed, and was about to head out the door, but stopped. He wasn’t thinking straight. He pulled out the two guns Toni had given him, and checked the magazines and chambers. Toni had given him full magazines, along with thin slip-free holsters that would fit inside his belt and not show the outline of the gun. He shoved one down his butt crack and covered it with his button-up long-sleeve plaid shirt. There. Now he felt human.
Once he dropped off his laundry, Jake lingered outside the main restaurant, waiting for his contact to enter. He guessed she would be late. A power play. And he was right. Fifteen minutes after eight p.m. he saw what had to be the station chief, Pam Suh. What Kim had failed to mention to him was the fact that Pam Suh could have passed for nearly any other Korean woman walking the streets of Seoul, despite her half-French ancestry. Her only giveaway was the fact that her eyes were not as definitely Asian, but a lot of the wealthy in Korea had taken to cosmetic surgery to alter the edges of their eyes, making them look more western. This made no sense to Jake. The station chief wore a tight red dress that clung to her body like plastic wrap to a sandwich. Her tiny stature was enhanced somewhat with three-inch black heels.