The piece opened with a great shot of me and Carlson walking out a doorway under the word HOMOS in big, bold, black letters.

CNN’s editors are real quick, too. And slanderously selective.

The next shot was borrowed from a Korean station. It showed Whitehall, looking like a miserable, saturated noodle, being dragged through some double doors. The next clip showed Carlson with her hand on my elbow and we looked frantically friendly, like we were discussing something and were in complete agreement. Then came the shot with Carlson under the tree saying, “My co-counsels and I are outraged at the beating of our client. He was worked over by several South Korean policemen. When I tried to stop them, I was assaulted.”

Then came the cutout of me with the microphone stuffed in my angry, pouting face. I growled, “No damned comment,” only the way it came across was like I was so damn furious that my client got beaten that I was too tongue-tied to spit out anything but “No damned comment.”

The phone rang within two minutes.

“Hello, General,” I said, before Clapper, the chief of the entire Army JAG Corps, could even begin to identify himself.

“Drummond, what in the hell’s going on over there?” he belched.

“Hey, it wasn’t like it looked. I swear, General. I got ambushed. Carlson set me up.”

He paused for only a moment. “An ambush?”

“Right. She called me up to our office and I-”

“Office?” he interrupted, “Is that the goddamned building with that ‘homo’ word written on it?”

Feeling the blood rush into my face, I feebly answered, “That isn’t like it looks, either. See, you have to read that sign real close. First, it’s ‘homos,’ with an s at the end, and it actually stands for-”

The earpiece exploded. “Drummond! I don’t give a shit what it stands for. The whole world just saw a picture of an American Army officer walking out a doorway with that damned sign. Have you got any idea what that looks like?”

“Now that you mention it, sir, I guess it-”

“You said she set you up?”

“Right. See, she called me to come up there, and then I-”

“Jesus, have I got the wrong man in there? Are you telling me she’s too smart for you?”

That hurt. I mean, that really hurt. “I just wasn’t expecting it. I will be next time, though. I swear.”

“You better, Drummond. You really better.”

He hung up hard. I didn’t blame him. It was three o’clock in the morning back in Washington. He probably hadn’t been lying around in bed idly watching the late-night news. Somebody must’ve called him and frosted his ear. Probably somebody big, like the Chief of Staff of the Army. Or somebody bigger, like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Or maybe somebody even bigger than that.

My thoughts were interrupted when the phone rang again. This time it was General Spears. Personally. And he did this really excellent imitation of General Clapper. Next came Acting Ambassador Brandewaite, and I have to confide his imitation wasn’t nearly as good, because he was so florid and incensed all he could do was spit and sputter and curse. He hit all the octaves right, though, I’ll tell you that. Then Spears’s legal adviser, Colonel Piranha Lips, called, and he did the shorthand version. No barrage of questions, no rude interruptions, just a simple, abbreviated “Now I really don’t like you, Drummond. I’ll fuck you for this.”

It was really amazing. I’d been in Korea two days and already I’d managed to piss off every senior officer in the world, to get the acting ambassador so mad he couldn’t work up enough saliva to spit, and to get my face plastered on the international news in a way that was thoroughly revolting.

I owed all this to a short, skinny girl with malice in her heart and no sense at all about what she was unleashing.

To give her credit, she thought she was protecting her client. And back in the good ol’ U.S.A. what she’d just done might even have worked. Not here, though. Katherine Carlson was about to get a lesson in what the Asians call “face.” The Mafia has a word for it, too: payback.

CHAPTER 9

As I later pieced it together, Keith had decided to slip out the back gate for a little shopping. That happened sometime around nine o’clock that night. He dodged across a heavily trafficked boulevard and entered the Itaewon shopping district. Maybe they started tracking him right then. If so, he apparently never noticed.

He began dashing in and out of shops, picking up a few things here and a few things there. He got himself a snazzy leather bomber jacket with a fuzzy fur collar, some Nike running shoes, and a spiffy new leather wallet. By eleven o’clock he was halfway through Itaewon. He’d made it to a major intersection with cars whizzing by, and had paused to wait for the pedestrians’ traffic signal to show the little green man with his legs pumping, when a couple of strong hands lifted him off his feet and tossed him into the speeding traffic. He got bounced high up in the air by the first car and came down dead center into the bumper of the next. It took an ambulance twenty minutes to get there. Keith was loaded into the back and rushed to the nearest hospital.

The good news was he’d carried his passport with him, so the hospital got his identity and immediately notified the American embassy that some American had gotten hit by a couple of cars. The lady at the embassy night switch didn’t recognize his name, so she made a note to give to the night duty officer the next time he wandered by. He came by around four in the morning. He didn’t recognize Merritt’s name, either. He followed his standard operating procedures and called and gave the name to the desk sergeant at the Yongsan Garrison MP station. The desk sergeant also didn’t know who Merritt was, but he dutifully listed the news in his log. That’s why we weren’t notified until seven o’clock the next morning.

Now the bad news. Keith was in the ICU, unconscious, and the doctors were wringing their hands and mumbling fretful things. His skull was fractured, one kidney had been punctured by a broken rib, one leg and one arm were shattered into multiple pieces, and the doctors were still trying to trace the source, or sources, of a flood of internal bleeding.

I learned this via a very hysterical call from Katherine. I rushed straight to her room. The door was ajar so I walked in. Allie and Katherine were huddled in a corner, hugging each other and sobbing pitifully. Maria sat at the desk, her face looking like it had twenty-pound weights dragging at the corners of her eyes and lips. I idly wondered if Allie was switch-hitting on Maria. The room had the air of a funeral parlor.

“He might die,” Katherine said, looking up at me.

“Uh-huh.” I gravely nodded.

I sat on the edge of the bed and stayed quiet. I knew what was going through their heads. None of us had any real idea what had happened, but the timing and coincidence were too damned close. You couldn’t escape the thought.

Finally, Katherine said, “Are these bastards that barbaric?”

I said, “Maybe.”

I hadn’t confirmed anything, but I’d equivocated enough to make them realize they’d been underestimating the risks.

I said, “Have your pictures been on Korean television?”

“We did a few interviews before you arrived,” Katherine sulkily responded.

“All of you? Did you all get your faces in front of the camera? Maybe in the local papers, too?”

“That’s right,” said Allie, releasing Katherine and walking over to stand beside Maria. “We were on TV and in the newspapers. So what?”

“Then don’t draw any hasty conclusions.”

“What that’s supposed to mean?”Allie asked in her typically defiant way.

“I mean it could have been somebody working for the South Korean government. They’ve got a couple of supersecret agencies responsible for internal security that have reputations for being pretty thuggish. Or it could’ve been someone else.”