Chapter 48
Burke took an extended lunch hour on Friday and dropped by the hospital to visit Lori and the twins. As he was walking down the polished tile corridor toward her room, he noticed three large potted plants sitting by her door. That's a hell of a way to deliver flowers, he thought. Why didn't they take them in the room for her? As he reached the doorway, he realized why. It looked like a greenhouse in there.
He stuck his head inside and saw Lori sitting on the edge of the bed, looking radiant in a new pink gown. Her dark hair was pulled back and tied with a matching bow. She was surrounded everywhere by cut flower arrangements and live plants.
"Is this a florist's showroom or what?" he said, a look of disbelief on his face.
"Come on in if you aren't allergic to greenery. Can you believe this?"
As he pushed his way through the floral menagerie, he glanced at the cards that hung from the baskets and pots, their sizes and shapes as varied as their content. Most were from an assortment of airlines, bus companies, tour packagers and hotel chains.
"I never saw anything like it," he said. "What'll you do if they bring any more?"
"Heavens. This isn't all of it. I've already sent a ton to other patients."
He shook his head, then leaned down and kissed her.
She held him tightly in a long, fervent embrace. "I'm glad you're home," she whispered. "I've missed you."
"Ditto," he said. "I haven't been hugged like that since I don't know when. Really didn't think a day-old mother would have it in her."
"I feel more like a day-old milking machine," she said. Her smile was tempered with a touch of weariness. "You never saw two such thirsty little characters."
Burke came back with a non sequitur that, nevertheless, seemed somehow appropriate. "Babies in Korea eat rice. As a matter of fact, everybody in Korea eats rice. Huge pots full. I had enough rice to last me a couple of lifetimes, but Jerry loved it. I guess the food reminded him of back home when he was a youngster. He was like a kid in a candy store."
A look of pride brightened her eyes. "My husband the Korea expert. When is it you go off hob-nobbing with the President?"
"In the morning. Would you believe he's sending a helicopter for us?"
"Why not? I'll wager you know more about what's going on over there than anybody on his staff."
Probably so, thought Burke. But he hoped to know a lot more as soon as Captain Yun returned from Pyongyang and talked to Jerry Chan.
"When can we take you and the kids home?" he asked, changing the subject. HANGOVER was getting too hot to even allude to except in the proper setting.
"Chloe said Sunday, if everything's still going as well as now."
None too soon, Burke thought. He was anxious to get everybody settled down to a comfortable routine. Living out of a hotel room for six weeks had been an irksome chore. Intelligence people were not supposed to be creatures of habit, but he relished the opportunity to get back to the familiarity of home.
Later that afternoon, he turned up another disturbing piece of the Poksu puzzle and set out to try and fit it into place. Following up on Will Arnold's tale of the employees who had shifted their allegiance to Korea, Burke had arranged through General Thatcher for inquiries at the two Department of Energy nuclear weapons laboratories, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. The answer came back much quicker than he had dared hope. Administrative wheels that normally turned in a leisurely fashion evidently began to spin furiously when a White House request appeared. According to the report, no less than half a dozen Korean-American scientists, including one of the key designers of the B61 warhead, had resigned over the past year. It was impossible to find out immediately if all of them had gone to Korea. As he moved the pieces of the puzzle about in his mind, he got the impression of a shifting creature with lots of elusive arms pointing in different directions. He had a feeling he might soon find himself wrestling an octopus.
When he got home that evening, he went straight to his rolltop desk and poked around in the pigeonholes for the business card Dr. Kim Vickers had given him. As he pulled it out, a slip of paper tumbled out with it, the note Will Arnold had left for him about the book on hackers. He looked at it for a moment, then laid Dr. Vickers' card beside it. He stared. Both contained the same San Francisco post office box number.
According to Will's note, the author advertising for expert hackers to interview listed his name as "K. Vee." Was that a curruption of the initials for Kim Vickers? Vickers had not impressed him as a man who would be writing a book on computer hackers. What was going on here? Vickers had told him that he provided employment counselling for graduates of the scholarship program. It was beginning to appear that he had been recruiting Korean-American students for key jobs in defense industries, then exporting them to Korea to bolster a nuclear weapons project called Pok Su. What relation could computer hackers have to that? One possibility immediately came to mind.
He called Will. "I just ran across that note you left for me when I was in San Francisco."
"Oh, yeah. The address for the writer of the hacker book."
"I was wondering," Burke said. "Could a hacker break into a computer at a nuclear weapons lab or a missile manufacturer?"
"Hmm. That's a good question. An unclassified computer, maybe. Classified computers at the nuclear labs are not physically connected to the outside world. Some defense contractors may have them linked to external networks, but they would be heavily protected with codes and passwords."
"What if somebody had access to the codes and passwords, like from a recently resigned employee?"
"Now you're really speculating. He could certainly break in from a terminal inside the operation." After a thoughtful pause, Will added, "From outside? Not from our company. I've built every kind of barrier known to man. As far as the others are concerned, I couldn't swear. But I'd have to guess it's quite possible. I might even go so far as to say quite probable."
Captain Yun had just finished breakfast and now scanned the sky as he waited in front of his hotel for Superintendent Pak's cousin. Pyongyang had missed the snow that blanketed Seoul two days before, but the clouds now hung over the city in heavy folds of gray, as if awaiting a signal to dump their frozen contents on a weary populace. In a town where life itself was struggle enough, they didn't need another complication.
Pak Oh-san soon arrived in his small, dusty car and rolled down the window next to the curb. "Are you Captain Yun?"
The Captain nodded and opened the door. "Here's where I need to go, he said, handing over the note with Chung Woo-keun's address on it. Pak studied it briefly, then lurched off into the morning gloom. Yun wasn't sure of the stocky man's ability behind the wheel, but he got the distinct impression that Pak had graduated from the Seoul School of Taxicab Driving.
With little more than an occasional hint of color, the city's skyline resembled a sepiatone print. They passed huge, stark, unimaginative government buildings and heroic-size monuments ranging from statues of socialist ideals to a sixty-foot bronze likeness of Kim Il-sung with arm outstretched, melancholy reminders of a system that had inevitably failed. Only the broken base remained of one monument that had been toppled by an angry mob intent on demonstrating their true feelings toward the slain dictator. As the car approached an endless vista of high-rise apartment clones, Yun turned to the driver.