Ian Slater: WW III

“Thanks,” said the man, taking his leave.

The vendor turned off the carbide lamp, quickly asked a colleague to watch his cart, and followed the would-be customer out onto Sejongro’s sixteen-lane-wide avenue, where he saw the man walking north, drawing level with the huge statue of Admiral Yi. The admiral, in ancient armor, left arm akimbo, right hand gripping his enormous battle sword, had also been vigilant in his time, the vendor recalled, alert to foreign invaders, defeating the great Japanese invasion fleet of 1597.

The vendor, however, while full of the spirit of Admiral Yi, couldn’t see the yellow light of a police station, let alone a policeman. Where were they when you needed one? — always sniffing around when they wanted free samples from the cart. The only official in sight, her smart blue U.S. Navy-style cap barely visible amid the Hyundais and the noisy red and white buses roaring past, was an immaculately dressed and beautiful woman traffic director, her white gloves moving with the suppleness of doves in flight. But the vendor knew by the time he weaved his way through the river of oncoming vehicles and reached her, the man might disappear. Seeing a taxi sign above the crowd, the vendor dashed out to flag it down. But it was brown, only for military personnel, so he had to wait a second until he saw a green cab approaching. Barging ahead of others in line, he jumped into the backseat, glimpsing the yellow-uniformed woman driver as a blur, quickly instructing her to have her dispatcher alert the nearest police cruiser to meet up with them. To the vendor’s alarm, he heard the flag drop and the meter ticking.

“What are you doing that for?” he asked. “This is a public duty.”

“So?” She shrugged. “Someone has to pay.” He was astonished, but she was very young, and he knew that the horrors of the Korean War, so vivid in his childhood memory, must be nothing more than dead history to her generation.

For an anxious moment he thought they’d lost the stranger as they turned right into Yulgog Street, heading east near Changdok Palace and the zoo, but the young woman told the vendor to relax. She still had the man in view and was going to pass him, just in case he suspected he was being followed.

“How could he know?” asked the vendor. “With so many people about?”

“If he’s an infiltrator, he’ll have been trained in such things.”

After a few more minutes, amid the usual honking and insults to various ancestors, a beaten-up, off-white Sinji sedan drew alongside the green cab — two KCIA agents, the one driving telling the cabbie they’d take over, the other asking the vendor to point out the stranger in the crowd. Suddenly the man disappeared into an alley off the Sejong a hundred yards behind them. Without hesitation the vendor told the cabbie to stop, got out, and headed back toward the alley, the agents swearing, pulling sharply into a no-parking zone and following suit. It was now 11:45—fifteen minutes to blackout.

Five minutes later, at the end of the alley as the air raid sirens began their wailing, the two KCIA agents caught up with the vendor, who was now gasping, out of breath. “We’re in luck,” said the younger of the two.

“How d’you mean?” asked Chin Sung, his older colleague, a shorter man in his midfifties.

“He never got on the subway after all. He’s gone through Donhwamun Gate, so it’s either Changdok Palace or the Secret Garden.”

A strong wind hit them full force in the alley, kicking up dust and litter, forcing the shorter, older agent to lower his head, the grit bothering his contacts. “In luck,” Chin growled sardonically. “The garden alone covers seventy-eight acres.” Candy wrappers and fallen ginkgo leaves, their small, polished green fans turning black under a dim pole light, swirled scratchily about the men’s feet. For a moment the older agent felt nostalgic for the Olympics of ‘88— then the city fathers had made sure there was no garbage to be seen anywhere on the city streets, like the cleaner cities of Germany, where Chin had once been stationed, attached to the ROK embassy in Bonn and trade legation in West Berlin.

“Well, it’s just about curfew,” said the younger agent optimistically. “He isn’t going anywhere. Has to stay in there or risk being picked up the moment he leaves. And if he tries scaling the walls, we’ve got him!” Chin grunted, looking through the gate across at the pavilions of Changdok Palace, the home of the surviving royal family, and toward the lighted, wing-tipped roof of the pavilion by the Pandoji, the Korea-shaped pond, pathways radiating from it through maples, the wind moving through the trees like rushing water.

Chin took a small walkie-talkie from the inside of his coat. “All units — we’re going to lose him over the wall, whoever he is, if we don’t surround the whole area immediately.”

A voice crackled from somewhere on the other side of the gardens. “We’re cordoning it off now. You want us to send in the dogs?”

Chin shook his head in disgust. “No — I want to keep him in there. Trap him, not panic him.” Retracting the walkie-talkie aerial, Chin turned to the vendor. “You sure he acted suspiciously? Could have been a young buck hurrying to the gardens to meet his girlfriend — keep her warm during the curfew?”

“Yes,” said the vendor, “I’m sure. I’m telling you, it was nunchi.” He meant “eyemeasure”—beyond mere sight, a sixth sense. “And he didn’t know the price of the ants,” continued the vendor. “Everyone’s been reading about the fires down—”

“All right,” cut in Chin gruffly. “Where do you live?”

“In Chamshil.” It was the area of dozens of huge, look-alike cement high-rises clustered several miles south across the Han River near the Olympic village.

“We’ll get a car for you,” Chin told him, pulling out the walkie-talkie’s aerial again.

“Will you let me know what happens?” asked the vendor.

“Yes. Certainly,” said Chin, giving the vendor his card and signing a “pass through” chit for the blackout drill and curfew.

“Thanks for the tip,” said the younger agent. Soon another unmarked car quietly appeared at the far end of the alley.

“There’s your ride,” said Chin.

As the vendor walked away, five minutes before the onset of curfew and blackout, the younger agent tried to find out what his older colleague’s plan was without wanting to appear stupid. “He must know he’s being followed.”

“Not necessarily,” answered Chin. “Unfamiliar with the subway maybe, mistimed it. Rather than get caught in the curfew — probably decided to hole up for a while, stay out of sight till the morning. Garden’s as good a place as any, and there’s a lot of pavilions — in case it rains. Which,” he said, looking skyward, “I think it will.”

“I think we should go in and get him.”

“And if he is an infiltrator, what will you find?” asked Chin.

The young agent thought for a few seconds. “Maybe he won’t swallow it. While there’s life, there’s hope. Right? Look at Kim Shin Jo — came down to shoot Park, gets caught, and ends up with a nice suit and eating out. Peking duck. Some of the boys tell me that when he wanted, he even got to go to the Angel Cloud House, the kisaeng girls pampering and singing to him. Nice work if you can get it.”

“Yes, well, this guy isn’t Kim Shin Jo,” said the older agent, pausing, unscrewing the top from a Dristan bottle and tilting his head back, his voice more strained. “If we rush, our boy might pop the pill. Then where are we?” He paused, snuffling back the nasal spray while screwing the lid back on. “Damn summer cold.” He turned to the younger agent. “But let’s say there’s a slight chance he doesn’t know he’s being followed, that he simply ran out of time. Maybe he remembered the curfew but not the blackout — after all, blackout only happens once a month. Might be doing what a lot of others do — just sitting it out. So while he’s still got light to see by, he heads north on Sejong to Yulgog — then straight to the garden before blackout begins.”