Crucial Intercept

Most important was the tracking device. Kim, looking sullen and bored, sat on the room’s other chair toying with the small plastic-shelled unit, which showed on a GPS overlay that their quarry was in the building they monitored from across the street. Yoon had no doubt that the American had provided the other foreign kill-or-capture teams with similar devices, for it explained easily how the Iranians and the French had repeatedly found Baldero, as Yoon and Kim themselves had originally found the man. Fortunately for all of them, those Iranian and French fools had yet to do anything but shoot up large portions of the state. Baldero had proved to be a wily prey and had evaded them every time, once set to running. They would keep finding him, most assuredly, but with any luck the Israelis would intervene and either evade the others or neutralize them for good. Once that happened, Yoon would suggest that Kim and his team move in, and they would steal Baldero for themselves.

To face their competitors directly would be suicide, and suicide of a type in which even Kim was reluctant to engage. They had many men, and they had weapons, but they were outnumbered by the other teams. No, they had to wait for the odds to change in their favor, the fortunate benefit of such a delay being that the other nations, were they discovered, would likely take any blame to be spread. Yoon and whoever did survive the mission could return to North Korea’s shores with no blood on their hands and no possibly irritating diplomatic problems following them—problems that Yoon was certain the West could use as convenient excuses to foist more onerous sanctions on an already unfairly beleaguered North Korea.

Failure to obtain Baldero simply was not an option. No less than the leader himself had expressed a desire to possess the man, and thus it fell to Yoon to make sure this occurred. Were he to fail in that, his only other option would be to make sure Baldero died, and that might yet lead to a long, slow death by torture once he returned empty-handed. Much was riding on this. If Baldero did not end up in their possession by the time it was finished, Yoon just might kill Kim and then himself. He would take his own life to spare himself pain; he would take Kim’s both from a sense of duty and for sheer spite.

On the face of it, it was daring, almost insane. A single American citizen held the key to potential military superiority for each nation to whom the program of his creation had been brokered. To Yoon’s knowledge—and he believed it to be reasonably complete—those nations, those customers, were Iran, dissident or covert elements within the French government, similarly rogue operatives formerly of Israel’s Mossad, and of course North Korea.

The Iranians were fanatics and fools; they posed no real threat. There were, however, a great many of them. At least, there had been a great many of them. Trailing Baldero using the tracking device to stay undetected at a safe distance, they had almost stumbled directly into the battle that had erupted in Williamsburg. It was there that Yoon had caught his first look at the night-killer of the legends. The more he thought about those apocryphal reports, the more he thought this man, this implacable killer who had scythed through the Iranians as if they were so much fragile wheat, was the man of which North Korea’s security agents had so long whispered. It was said that more than once such a man—tall, with dark hair and blue eyes, a killer so formidable that his passing was like that of a lightning storm—had fought the interests of the leader’s military and intelligence operatives, defeating them every time.

Even to breathe the nickname, “night-killer,” was to risk summary torture by the most zealous of the leader’s internal security forces. But if such a man, rumored to be an American mercenary or commando, truly existed, would he not appear when blood and gunfire erupted with the force of an invading army so very close to the seat of the American’s government? It seemed likely to Yoon. They had watched the night-killer destroy the Iranian force the man had encountered, then they had resumed their pursuit of Baldero, tracked him to his motel and taken up their observation posts once more. It was only a matter of time before the French or the Iranians, or both, arrived to try to kill him once more, and then the chase would begin anew.

That had been the plan, but Yoon was no longer sure. If the night-killer took Baldero, he had much less confidence that his team could take the prize from this deadly foe. He was, suddenly, glad of Kim’s presence, for if any man were monster enough to face the night-killer of legend and kill the man, it would be Kim. He was just crazy enough, and just dangerous enough, to match this unwelcome enemy.

The shotgun blast, when it came, deep and unmistakable, almost caused Yoon to jump. He was glad he did not; he did not wish to appear weak before his two companions. Kim looked up from the tracking device, interest and something like arousal crossing his face. Sitting on the edge of the bed, the woman, Hu Chun Hei, tossed her long black hair to the side in a reflexive motion and stopped manipulating the folding knife she carried.

They waited for long minutes, holding their breath. Nothing happened, and no one emerged from the hotel. The tracking unit, which Yoon could read from across the room, showed that Baldero was still inside the motel across the street. There was nothing to do but wait. Yoon tried to concentrate on the binoculars once more, hoping to catch a glimpse of Baldero or the big American who may well have met his end before the muzzle of the unseen shotgun.

Kim made a sound of disgust and slumped sullenly back into his chair, staring at the wall. It was at these times that he was most dangerous; when he grew still, it was never long before he exploded into violent movement, without warning and without provocation. In a way, Yoon could not blame him. The following, the waiting without action, were taking a perceptible toll on all of them. Only Hu remained impassive, but then, she was always inscrutable.

The sound of the knife whirling in the woman’s slim fingers told Yoon, who did not look back at her, that she had gone back to toying with the blade. She had been playing with the sharp, talon-shaped folding kerambit knife she carried since they had entered the room, silently spinning the vicious little weapon in endless circles from the finger ring in the handle. Back and forth, back and forth, completely around, then back and forth again—the knife’s movements were almost as hypnotic, were he to look at it, as was Hu’s beauty. She ranked highly in military intelligence, he knew, though no one in Kim’s unit was quite certain how high. She was Kim’s woman. That much had been made clear to him. As a result, none asked, and none dared question him…or her. Whatever arrangement Hu herself had with Kim and with their superiors was her business. It would, ultimately, be her neck, too.

Yoon had no instructions concerning Hu. She worried him, for if her loyalty was to her lover, Kim, and not to military intelligence and the leader’s government, she might interfere when it came time for Kim to die a hero’s death. If that happened, he would have to kill her, too, and he did not like the idea of incurring political debts to unknown individuals farther up the chain of power than he. Unfortunately, he had no choice in the matter. His primary and secondary mission objectives remained as they were regardless.

“I am going to call that fool, Tontro,” Kim announced abruptly. He removed a prepaid wireless phone, untraceable and readily available in the United States, from the pocket of the American jeans he wore. His black T-shirt, the jeans, and the American jungle boots he wore were a kind of uniform, among the North Korean team members. They were cheap, not very conspicuous and functional in the warm climate of Virginia. Yoon and Hu were similarly attired, though Hu’s clothing was significantly tighter.

“Tatro,” Yoon corrected automatically. It had become a mantra, and now Yoon suspected Kim did it on purpose, simply to nettle him. Little things like that were the man’s idea of humor, Yoon supposed, though he found the madman distasteful even at the best of times, and perfectly offensive when he was trying to be funny.

“Tatro.” Kim nodded, smiling his sickly, lopsided smile. He put his phone to his ear after redialing the number with a single press of his thumb. Yoon heard him and the American government man, the traitor James Tatro, exchanging meaningless pleasantries.

Yoon wondered if Tatro had the slightest idea just with whom he was in bed. North Korea was considered, laughably, a “rogue nation” among the Americans, though of course they would propagate such misinformation in their efforts to bully the leader’s people into submission. But the Americans, on the whole, especially those in their government, were curiously squeamish about violence. They would drop bombs on smaller countries from thousands of feet in the air, but the idea of actual blood flowing through their own fingers revolted them. Such was the stuff of Kim’s most pleasant dreams. If only this Tatro knew with whom he dealt, he would understand that he had truly signed a deal with someone he should consider a devil.

Kim’s family disgrace had started with a few easily covered-up murders. They had been servants, for the most part, and the occasional party or factory worker. Some had been transients. A few had been prostitutes, despite the leader’s best efforts to eradicate such practices from the streets of his nation’s fair cities. Kim had a sickness, one that drove him to need to kill as regularly as some men ate a heavy meal. The longer he went without indulging his impulses, the worse the expression of those dark inner desires was when it finally came to fruition. Forced by his family to give up his depredations, Kim had lived in what for him most surely had been agony, spending several months locked away in his family’s state-designated dwelling in Pyongyang.

When he finally escaped, he killed the person sent to guard him, an older cousin from his own family. Then he had escaped and murdered several families living in the public housing a few blocks away. It had been very, very difficult to cover up the evidence of those murders, to expunge all trace of those family’s many relatives and their connections to North Korean society in Pyongyang. Many threats had been made. Many citizens had been sworn to silence. Still many more had simply disappeared. It was not long after that, Yoon knew, that Kim had been consigned to this mission, a disgrace both to his family and to his work within military intelligence. He was an expendable, vicious animal who, once he served his purpose, would be put down like the rabid dog he was.

Yoon looked forward to that much of the mission.

“You have not informed us of something,” Kim finally said into the phone. Yoon could hear the other end of the line almost as clearly as Kim. The dangerous Korean had the volume of his phone set as high as it would go, the result of hearing loss in his good ear caused by a firearms “accident” when he was a teenager.

“I don’t understand,” the government man replied. Tatro’s reedy voice grated on Yoon’s already frayed nerves.

“You have not told us of all we face in our mission,” Kim said flatly, his tone hinting at deadly reprisals.

“But I have,” Tatro insisted. “I gave you full information on the size of the Iranian team and on the equipment I helped them smuggle in. The French team was delayed this morning when one of their trucks broke down, my spotters tell me, but they’re well on their way to you if they’re not there already. The Jews are around somewhere. That’s all.”

“There is another. A lone American. Big. Dark hair. Well armed. Very dangerous. The idiot Iranians spotted him on their trail and tried to kill him. Who is he?”

“I don’t have any information about a single operator,” Tatro whined.

“You have been paid a very, very large sum of money, American,” Kim threatened. “You were promised much more when we secured this fool whom you have so readily sold us. Do you think you can betray us now? With a single phone call, I can ruin you. I can see to it that your countrymen lock you away for the rest of your miserable life…or I can find you myself and see to it that you suffer for the very short span of whatever brief life I allow you to have.”