Could Peg have left Sumter, he wondered? Cliff was grown now, old enough to have a phone of his own. He looked up the area code, dialed information, and asked if there was a listing for Clifford Walters?
"I'm sorry," the operator said. "We have no Clifford Walters in Sumter."
"Do you have anyone with the last name Grippando?" He spelled it out for her.
After a brief pause, she said, "There's no Grippando, either."
Thinking back, he remembered the name of the law firm Peg had worked for when he last heard from her. She called it the "Three C's" — Collins, Cooley & Clinard. It was Clinard he had talked with after coming back from Alaska several years ago. The lawyer told him Cliff was in college and had expressed an interest in law school. He called information again and jotted down the firm's number.
"I'm trying to find Peggy Grippando," he told the girl who answered. "Does she still work there?"
"I believe I've heard her name," the girl said. "She was before my time, though. I've only been here a couple of years." Her slow drawl reminded him of his ex-wife.
"Could you ask one of the partners if they know what happened to her?"
"Hold on a moment." She was gone for a long moment. "Mr. Cooley says she left four or five years ago after he husband died. She moved to Jackson, Tennessee. He thinks she works for a law firm there."
Jackson, Tennessee? Maybe Cliff had gone there, too, he thought. Maybe he was a lawyer now, a member of the firm where Peg worked. It was a lot of maybes. He dialed area code 901 for Jackson information. The answer came back the same. No Peggy Grippando or Clifford Walters in Jackson.
Feeling frustrated, he bolted up from the chair, strode over to the window and stared down on the noontime crowd hustling along Sixteenth Street. For all the good he had done, he might as well have been down there stopping strangers on the sidewalk, asking if they might know his son or his ex-wife.
He went back to his desk and called Clipper Cruise & Travel.
"Isn't it about time you headed for home?" he asked when Lori answered. The funky mood he was in made it come out a bit more curt than intended.
"You don't trust me to know when my half-day is up?" she said, a note of agitation in her voice.
"I was afraid you might have gotten too busy to look at the clock. That wasn't why I called anyway. I've got a problem."
The pause that followed didn't surprise him. He had never been one to talk openly about his troubles. This must have struck her as something quite important.
"What's the problem?" she asked in a guarded tone.
"I thought it would be a simple thing to track down my son. Wrong." He told her the results of his phone calls.
"What are you going to do?"
"Looks like the only thing I can do is go down to Jackson, Tennessee and start digging."
"When?"
"Saturday would be the earliest."
"Did you forget Chloe and Walt invited us over for dinner Saturday?"
"I sure did. I could put this off till next weekend, I guess. But that'd be my last chance before leaving for Korea."
"Do you have a firm departure date yet?"
"We're due for our State Department briefing this coming Monday and leave for Seoul the following Monday."
He tried to put Peg and Cliff out of his mind that afternoon as he concentrated on reading some of the references supplied by the Amber Group researchers. He found the Korean story in the Twentieth Century a troubling one, marked by a series of miscalculations and failures to follow through on the part of a succession of American leaders. It began with the Portsmouth Treaty of 1905 that ended the Russo-Japanese War. President Theodore Roosevelt, who arbitrated the peace settlement, approved "the establishment by Japanese troops of a suzerainty over Korea." That led directly to the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910. Then, at the end of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson enunciated his famous Fourteen Points, including "national self-determination" for oppressed peoples throughout the world. This led to the March 1, 1919 movement when thousands of Koreans had demonstrated peacefully, only to be crushed in a bloody confrontation with Japanese police. The U.S.offered no help.
In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his British and Chinese counterparts met at the Cairo Conference and declared: "The aforesaid three great powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent." Russia's Joseph Stalin endorsed the pledge in 1945. But the Western leaders made the mistake of agreeing for Soviet troops to accept the Japanese surrender north of the 38th parallel, with American troops doing the same south of it. The country was effectively divided and separate governments established in north and south under Soviet and U.S. sponsorship. Soviet troops installed a puppet regime in North Korea and quickly built up a formidable indigenous fighting force. America's concern was establishing a democratic government among South Korea's contending political groups. When the U.S. pulled its troops out of the South in mid-1949, only 500 advisers were left to train a fledgling ROK Army. Secretary of State Dean Acheson tragically stated the following January that Korea was not of strategic importance to the United States. This led the North to miscalculate that America would not come to the aid of the South, and Kim Il-sung's troops struck suddenly across the 38th parallel June 25, 1950.
No wonder the Koreans had ambivalent feelings about America, Burke thought. We had come to the South's rescue in the war, of course, and helped protect and rebuild the country following the armistice agreement of 1953. But the South Koreans had managed most of the miracle of economic reconstruction on their own. If such a country were to acquire atomic weapons and embark upon a radical course, Burke realized, there was no predicting what havoc they might wreak.
Chapter 13
Hotel-owner Yang Jong-koo had lived in a large, modern home in an affluent section of Seoul. Seen from a distance, it was like a drawing in red ink. A long red brick house with a red tile roof, surrounded by a high red brick wall. Sweeping above the wall was a row of ginko trees, their leaves a blaze of red in the October sun.
Captain Yun sat in his car outside the Yang home, watching the shadows lengthen as the sun slipped toward the western horizon, and took stock of what he had accomplished. It was discouragingly little.
With just over half of the thirty days elapsed that Prosecutor Park had allowed him, he still had the barest of circumstantial evidence that the hired assassin, Hwang, had murdered Yi In-wha. He strongly suspected Hwang was involved in the disappearance of the two physicians in Hong Kong, since it was his base of operations, but he had to admit that was mostly conjecture. He had learned from the colony's police that the two men were seen getting into a car driven by a man who fit Hwang's physical profile. The man had short hair and no mustache, but then Yun had not expected to find one. The reported sighting offered scant evidential value, however. It would hardly convince a judge; juries did not figure into the Korean justice system.
Over the past week, members of his task force had questioned literally dozens of people in the area around Yang's house with no results. Admittedly, asking someone to remember a person they had seen only casually around a particular date seven months ago was a tall order. But they had one thing going for them. Using a forensic artist, a technique he had learned at the FBI Academy, and descriptions provided by Yi household employees, he had produced a likeness of the suspect. In fact he had several. From the original drawing which included a full head of hair and a mustache, the artist had modified the face to achieve different looks, without mustache, with glasses, with long hair, with short hair. The main reason he held out some degree of hope was that the murder had traumatized the area, giving people a reason to recall what they had been doing and what they may have seen at that fateful time. But so far, no one could recall having seen a stranger who matched any of the drawings.