"But-"
"If he"s got something better to do, we can always discuss it when I get back to the States."
[ II ].
THERE"S NO WAY I can ever visit Tokyo without calling on Toshiro Okinaga. Tosho supervises a Kunika team, working on counterterrorism. Kunika is a special unit of the j.a.panese police force; they shut down the j.a.panese Red Army in the 1980s, and have played an important role in fighting a variety of terrorists, foreign and homegrown, in the years since. They"re every bit as efficient and relentless as you would expect the descendants of samurai warriors to be.
I first met Tosho and friends back in my SEAL days, when Red Cell ran some exercises at a U.S-j.a.panese base at Yokosuka. He"s a h.e.l.l of a shot and a seventh degree black belt; he can also put away the Kirin like there"s no tomorrow, a truly important quality for a SpecWarrior.
We"d arranged to meet in a quiet noodle restaurant at the edge of Akasaka, which is Tokyo"s main business district. The restaurant caters almost exclusively to high-powered j.a.panese businessmen. Had we eaten there at night, Tosho would have had to mortgage his wife as well as his house to afford the meal. (Custom dictates that the host pay, and I would have insulted him severely had I even offered to do so.) Lunch, though, was very reasonable, with nothing on the menu more than a thousand yen-roughly eight and a half bucks.
Tosho was already waiting when I arrived; his loud voice carried across the room.
"Kusotare!"
"s.h.i.thead!" I replied, translating the term.
"It"s about time you got here, sturgeon breath."
"I lost your scent out back by the garbage cans."
Every eye followed me across the room as we continued to exchange terms of mutual endearment. They probably would have anyway. I was the only gaijin or non-j.a.panese in the place. When I reached the table, we one-upped each other with expletives and then toasted each other"s health with sake. Tosho ordered some sort of spiced octopus with noodles made of seaweed for me, then bragged about the pending addition to his family: a grandchild, due to be born in a few months.
"So why were you in North Korea?" he asked finally.
"How did you know I was in North Korea?"
Tosho frowned. The North Koreans and j.a.panese have an exceedingly testy relationship, and a good part of Kunika"s resources are spent tracking developments in their dysfunctional neighbor across the Sea of j.a.pan.
"Your flight was recorded," said Tosho. "And we received notification. It"s routine."
"And you knew I was on it?"
"I can add two plus two. A flight comes from Pyongyang early in the morning. A short time later my old friend calls me for lunch. That"s not exactly calculus."
I gave Tosho a rundown, leaving out the fact that the meeting had taken place at Kim"s new palace, and that the real purpose of my visit had been to get a good peek at the inside. But I did tell him about Kim"s request that I find his son.
"You"re going to do it?" Tosho asked.
"h.e.l.l no."
"Good bit of money, d.i.c.k."
I laughed.
"You"re not curious?" he added.
"Curious about what?"
"About what"s going on behind the scenes. I think I"d do it just for the giggles."
"You"re welcome to."
Tosho didn"t know much about Yong Shin Jong. So far as he knew, Kim"s illegitimate son hadn"t been part of any of North Korea"s operations in j.a.pan.
Sun, on the other hand, had an entire building of Kunika files devoted to him.
"General Sun Sang Min-a Chinese-Korean who is one of Kim"s secret police officials. He"s the number two man in the State Safety and Security Agency-Kim himself is number one," said Tosho.
State Safety is the Korean equivalent of the Gestapo, without the cool cars but with bigger cattle prods. State Safety has incredible power in North Korea; even the military is afraid of them. Which is why Kim Jong Il heads the agency personally.
"Sun is a very nasty customer," added Tosho as he slurped his noodles. "Killed his own brother to get ahead. And that"s just for starters."
The North Korean secret service had run a variety of operations in j.a.pan. For a while one of their favorite pastimes was kidnapping j.a.panese citizens. Though the entire operation was something of a mystery, it was believed to have been aimed at obtaining j.a.panese language teachers for North Korean spies. Sun, then a young operative, had been involved in at least one of the kidnappings. A few years later, he returned to j.a.pan and lived there for at least three years, posing as a Singapore citizen. It was believed that he had helped beef up the North Korean spy network. Escaping just as the j.a.panese closed in, he had surfaced in Pyongyang as the director of a program to exterminate North Korean defectors living in South Korea. His excellent track record there led to his promotion to section director for internal affairs; there he consolidated his grip on the orga ni za tion and moved up the ladder quickly.
"He is still very close to the Red Army," said Tosho, referring to the j.a.panese Red Army, or JRA. The JRA"s heyday had long pa.s.sed-the high point came in Israel in 1972 when they struck Lod airport. Since then, all the members have managed to do is get arrested, thanks largely to the efforts of Kunika. "He has many sources in j.a.pan. He may even be watching you now."
"If State Safety is so powerful, why wouldn"t he be looking for Yong Shin Jong himself?"
"You a.s.sume he wants to find him."
"Why wouldn"t he?"
"Wouldn"t he be a rival for power?"
"A puppet maybe. If he was a rival, wouldn"t he just kill him?"
"He will feel more constrained to act in China, because they are North Korea"s only ally," said Tosho. "But if I were you I would not think I had been given the entire story. More than likely there is much more here than meets the eye."
"Well, I"m not involved in it, so I don"t care."
"Not at all?"
"No."
"You went just for dinner?"
"And the booze. I also expected women, but there weren"t any."
"Ah."
"Ah" is one of those little words that means absolutely nothing on its own, but gains almost cosmic meaning depending on how it is said. This "ah" meant "I realize you have another reason but don"t want to say, therefore being j.a.panese I will not press you for it."
"Stepping back from the business?" asked Tosho.
"No."
"I think of retirement myself," said Tosho. "I want to devote myself to my family."
"That"s not it, Tosh."
"You"re not thinking of retiring?"
"Not that I know of."
"You"re just like the rest of us, you know. Age will catch up."
Nothing like an old friend telling you to your face that the gray hairs are starting to show. But Tosho has earned the right to say anything he wants.
"You watch out for Sun," he told me as we left the restaurant.
"Don"t worry, I"m not getting involved in this."
Tosho laughed. "Watch out for him anyway."
[ III ].
WHILE I WAS having lunch, Trace was riding a bullet train down to Kyoto, where she met Polorski and began exploring the sights.
Kyoto is the ancient capital of j.a.pan, and there are over two thousand Buddhist and Shinto shrines there. Some are magnificent works of art; others are basically falling down shacks with donation bins out front. Trace saw none of them. Her devotions were of a much more personal nature.
As for my love life, being thousands of miles from Karen made me cranky and cantankerous. No different than normal, at least when I"m not blowing things up. But I did miss her.
Karen was staying at Rogue Manor in my absence, and despite the late hour I decided to call. Sometimes she stays up late, catching up on her reading-she"s always reading some mystery book or another-and I thought I"d take the chance. The plan was that I"d let the phone ring twice and if she picked it up, great. If she didn"t-well I"d probably let it ring a few more times. Then if the answering machine picked up, I"d leave her a message.
She got it on the second ring.
"I was hoping you"d call," she said. "We had a computer meltdown, and it"s still going on."
I guess it was better than being told the lawn needed mowing.
"I missed you, too," I said. "What"s the problem?"
The computer in question turned out to be the mainframe at Homeland Security, not the PCs at Red Cell. The situation was not without its lighter moments-hackers had apparently planted robotic programs that sent spam for feminine hygiene products coursing through the Homeland Insecurity Network.
"Give Shunt a call," I told her. "He"ll be able to fix it."
Shunt is my self-anointed "computer dude" and all-around tech expert. His birth certificate claims his name is Paul Guido Falcone, but we call him "Shunt" because he has several in his head. They"re some sort of metal inserts placed into his skull because he was born with water in his skull. I think of them as brain gutters. He"s loads of fun in an airport, especially when you"re trying to make a plane.
"Shunt is on vacation in Iceland," Karen told me. "He recommended some guy named Matthew Loring. You know him?"
"Not at all. But if Shunt says he"s okay, you can trust him. Whether you"ll be able to understand a word he says is another matter."
We decided Karen would talk to Matthew in the morning, after running a preliminary backgrounder on him with the help of some of our police contacts. Business concluded, we talked about how much we missed each other and what we would be doing if we were together. She was planning on taking a nice warm bath as soon as we got off the phone; I had to take a cold shower.
[ IV ].
I REMEMBERED TOSHO"S WARNING about Sun having someone watching me as I headed back to the emba.s.sy for my meeting with the CIA debriefer. If you"re ever looking to become paranoid, go to Tokyo. The crowded, narrow streets feel like they"re closing in, and there"s always someone right behind you.
On the other hand, the crowds make it easy to give someone the slip. I didn"t see a tail, but I backtracked my way across town anyway, sliding in and out of two large stores and a train station before grabbing a taxi. Then just to be sure, I got out of the cab in the middle of the street while we were stuck in traffic and hopped in one going the other way. I suppose it"s still possible I was followed, but if so my tail was d.a.m.n good.
Most CIA officers don"t have much of a sense of humor, and the man who met me at the emba.s.sy was no exception. Jimmy Zim was also about as nondescript as they come: somewhere between twenty and fifty, of average build and height for someone of Asian descent, with a face you could forget while you stared at it. Perfect spy material.
Like most CIA officers, Zim was good with languages; he spoke fluent Korean, j.a.panese, and several Chinese dialects. He"d obviously seen some difficult times: the backs of his hands and lower arms had hash marks on them, tiny scars that I guessed had been made by a razor-undoubtedly souvenirs from a torture session. He was vague about his job but very specific about his desires: he wanted me to describe what Kim"s palace was like, and wanted to know everything that had happened while I was there. I gave him a full briefing.
If Jimmy Zim knew that Ken Jones"s real goal in urging me to visit Kim had been finding the nuclear weapons, he didn"t let on. They weren"t mentioned or hinted at. I didn"t bring them up either-there was no reason to, since I hadn"t seen them.
Zim was a patient man, listening without comment as I described Kim Jong Il"s underground palace. He took no notes, but I got the impression that he could repeat everything I"d said word for word if asked. I mapped the area out on a satellite photo he"d brought, approximating where Kim"s underground rooms were. There were a lot of places left where the nukes could be. Given the depth of the facility, an air attack aimed at the warheads would need a specific location. A ground a.s.sault would also be difficult. But those weren"t my problems.
"Well, that"s it. That"s what I know," I told him, getting up. "Pleasure meeting you."
"You didn"t tell me about Yong Shin Jong and Kim"s request that you find him."
"I didn"t think that"s what you were here for. Besides, didn"t Fogglebottom tell you?"
"Your account would be more precise."
He had me there. I sat down and told him what I knew, which wasn"t much. When I was done, he nodded.
"And you"re taking the job?" he asked.
"No."
Jimmy Zim put his lips together. It was the first emotion he"d shown, if that"s what it was.