01 Op-Center by Jeff Rovin

Author:Jeff Rovin [Rovin, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FORTY-THREE

Tuesday, 11:45 P.M., KCIA Headquarters

When he got the call from Bae Gun that the arrest had been successful, Hwan was of two minds: they’d done the right thing, though he was sorry to lose a most interesting figure in Ms. Chong. His cryptanalysts had not yet cracked her code, even though they knew the contents of some of the data she was sending, having fed it to her through Bae, who told her he had a son in the military and occasionally gave her real but unimportant troop strength, map coordinates, and changes in command. Now that she was in custody, Hwan doubted that she would help them along.

The KCIA had spent four years monitoring but not interfering with the current crop of North Korean agents in Seoul. By watching one they had found another, then another and another. The five operatives seemed to form a closed loop, with Kim Chong and a pretzel-maker at their hub, and Hwan felt he had them all. With the woman’s capture, he would have the others watched round the clock to see whom they contacted or what new agent might be moved in to take her place.

It bothered him, though, that in what little of her code they had broken, there hadn’t even been a hint of today’s attack. Indeed, the pretzel-maker-who baked information into salt-free nuggets—had even been told to attend the festivities and gauge the mood of the crowd toward reunification. While it was true the North could have executed the attack on a need-to-know basis and not told their operatives, Hwan doubted they would have put one in danger like that. Why bother sending him at all if they intended to terrorize the celebration?

The Desk Sergeant phoned up when the agents arrived, and Hwan stood behind his desk to receive them—and Ms. Chong. He had never seen Kim Chong herself in the flesh, only in photographs, and went through a traditional exercise Gregory had taught him to do when meeting someone he knew only by picture or voice or reputation. He tried to fill in the blanks, to see how close his guesses came to reality. How tall they were, what they sounded like—in the case of suspected enemies whether they would be irate, abusive, or cooperative. The process served no purpose other than as a useful review of what Hwan knew about the people before meeting them.

He knew Ms. Chong was five-foot-six, twenty-eight, with fine, long, coal-dust hair and dark eyes. And that according to what Bae had told his contact here, she was a tough nut. Hwan suspected that she would also have a musician’s sensitivity, the thorny temperament of a woman who had to endure the advances of men at Gun’s bar, and the habit of all foreign agents to listen more than she spoke, to learn rather than divulge. She would be defiant; most North Koreans were when dealing with the South.

He heard the elevator door slide open followed by footsteps in the corridor. Two agents walked in with Kim Chong between them.

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