Like just about everywhere else in the world, it seemed, it was snowing in Seoul, and about twenty-five degrees. There was no wind. That had apparently been and gone, leaving the place rattled, a vicious Siberian squall that had moved on to Japan to terrorize the island of Kyushu.
I took a cab from the bus terminal to the Hilton. I'd been to Seoul once before, but only for a few days and it was quite a few years back. My memory of the place was that the people ate a lot of pickled cabbage called kimchi, and not enough breath mints. They were also excruciatingly polite, mostly went by the name Kim, and used writing symbols that reminded me of crop circles.
Night had fallen, though the city's love of neon was doing a good job of keeping things lit up. The cab pulled into the hotel drive. I signed into my room and received an envelope with a message inside. I tore it open. It was an address and a time and an offer to meet up. The note was signed “Rossi.” The clock on the wall told me I had an hour and ten to get to the address.
An hour and five later, my cab pulled up outside a Korean BBQ joint in a relatively quiet street. I paid the driver his fare and went inside. The place smelled like the foyer of my apartment back in D.C. The restaurant was way too hot, around eighty degrees, causing a burning sensation on the tips of my ears. The lighting was on the moody side of dark. Most of the male customers seemed a lot older than the women accompanying them, which probably accounted for the lack of watts.
“Cooper?” said a voice behind me. I turned and a woman held out her hand to shake. “Haiko Rossi.”
We shook. Her hand was small, but the grip was firm. It was like shaking hands with needle-nose pliers. “You hungry?” she asked.
I looked around, searching for some sign in English. “They do bulgogi here?”
“Specialty of the house.”
“You eat here a lot?”
“Never been here before.”
“How do you know it's a specialty?”
“It's a specialty of every Korean restaurant.”
I followed Rossi to a booth. I couldn't place her accent. Midwest, probably, but the edges had been ground away by a long absence. Haiko Rossi was petite, maybe five six, anywhere between twenty-five and thirty. She wore tight, low-slung faded jeans and a fitted top with some kind of graphic on it that looked like an ink stain. Her boots were black polished leather. Her straight black hair was almost blue in places, except where she'd had it dyed dramatically blond. It was cut in layers and short enough on top so that it stuck almost straight up. Down the back, it was layered so that it followed the curve of her neck. There was a diamond stud in her nose, and one high up on the left ear. Her features were Asian, but European at the same time, her makeup expertly applied. Rossi was attractive, if the whole Eurasian/ exotic-beauty thing worked for you.
“Want to eat something?” Rossi asked, as I took the seat opposite, squeezing into the narrow booth.
“Sure. I'll have whatever, just as long as it's not tofu.”
“Don't worry; tofu's a dirty word in this place.”
“My kind of restaurant then,” I said, as a waitress appeared with menus. Rossi waved them aside and instead spoke rapid-fire Korean. The waitress scribbled and disappeared.
I felt Rossi's eyes appraising me. She said, “Your file photo doesn't do you justice, Special Agent. They either spent a lot of money on retouching it or the light here isn't doing you any favors.”
“Thanks,” I said. The light had nothing to do with it. My left hand was bandaged and the skin around both eyes and left cheek was alternating between purple and yellow. At least most of the stiffness and soreness from my forced stay in Pakistan had left my body. Basically, I looked worse than I felt. The waitress arrived with a couple of plastic bottles. “What's this?” I inquired.
“Beer,” Rossi announced. “This is the way the locals like it. Doesn't look like beer. Come to think of it, doesn't taste much like beer, either.”
I took a mouthful. Rossi was right on both counts.
“So, what happened to you?” she asked.
“I fell out of a plane without a chute.”
She looked at me, took a sip of her beer, and said, “Don't want to say? Sweet, I can dig it.”
I noticed she also had a silver stud in her tongue. “What's with all the body piercing?”
“The ones in my nose and my ear were for me. And this one,” she said, poking out her tongue and rolling the stud back against her teeth, “this one's for my boyfriend.” This seemed to quell our curiosity about each other, or maybe it was the arrival of the food that did it. The waitress slid the steaming bowls onto our table. “So, what about Chalmers?” I said. “Will he be joining us?”
“No, don't think so.”
“Because?”
“Because something's come up.”
“You wanna spare me the twenty questions, Ms. Rossi?” I said.
“We got confirmation twenty minutes ago. The package has turned up in Bangkok. The Company is working with the Thais, keeping them under surveillance. We have to leave.”
“When?” I asked.
She looked at her watch, then said, “Put it this way. Forget dessert.”
FIFTY-ONE
I was wrong about the world having frozen over. In the town of Mae Sot, a flyspeck up on the western border Thailand shares with Burma, the night air was hot, moist, and heavy, like inhaling soup. It had rained earlier, a rain so heavy it could have been a shower of polished nickels. Now the rainwater was evaporating, the eternal cycle on the upswing. I took a deep breath and caught the scent of lemongrass. I gave my eyes a rest from the monochrome picture presented by the SpecterIR scope and glanced up at the night sky. It was the color of black coffee and starless except for a constellation of flickering orange stars that reminded me — if I was to get poetic about it — of a snake coiling languidly.
“Beautiful, aren't they?” said Rossi, putting a bowl of something on the table, which explained the smell of lemongrass in the air.
“What are?”
“Those lights. They're candles carried up there by bags of hot air. The adults send them up as a tribute to Buddha,” said Rossi. “The kids do it for fun.”
I made a noncommittal noise in the darkness that surrounded us. In this business, I found it was sometimes easy to forget that most people actually did lead normal lives.
We had around ten minutes of moonlight left. Once it set, darkness would be total. I turned the scope back on the villa across the valley. If Mae Sot wasn't the last place on earth you'd expect the fate of the world could be decided, there weren't too many below it on the list. “Do you have any thoughts on why here?” I asked.
“Why here what?” she replied.
“Why would they choose this place to make the exchange?”
Rossi thought a moment before answering. “It's not really so unlikely. Not far from here is the Freedom Bridge. Across it, over the Moei River in the Burmese town of Myawadee, I'm told several high-ranking North Korean army officers have estates given to them as payment for helping Rangoon modernize, train, and arm their military. Our intel says one of these North Korean officers might be brokering the deal.”
“Okay, but why couldn't it be hammered out in Bangkok, or Seoul, or even Pyongyang?”
In the receding moonlight, Rossi was rapidly becoming no more than a faint gray shape. I could imagine her shoulders rising and falling with a shrug, but I couldn't see them. “Maybe Butler or Boyle or one of the Koreans doesn't like Bangkok. Or maybe it's not suitable for the same reason Seoul isn't — too many agents from the wrong side hanging around. And as for Pyongyang — if I had something the North Koreans wanted badly, I wouldn't go anywhere near the place, at least not until the terms of the deal had been thrashed out. Those North Koreans don't play fair. And then there's the fact that this area is famous for gem and drug smuggling. People here don't see a thing and haven't done for years, if you know what I mean. Or maybe I'm wrong on all counts. And why ask me anyway? I just work here.”