“That’s right.”

“Born in Chicago?”

“That’s right.”

“There’s no record of any Lee Jin May born in any hospital in Chicago between the years 1957 and 1970. For that matter, there’s no record of a Choi Lee Min born in any Chicago hospital, either.”

This was true. Mercer had asked the FBI to run a quick background check, and they had so far been unable to find any trace of Choi or his sister.

Bales came back forward and looked angry. “Maybe they were born at home. Maybe they used a midwife. Did you think of that? Their parents were poor immigrants struggling to survive. I’ve never asked Jin May, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Ah, I hadn’t thought of that,” I said, like, Oops, gee, stupid me.

“Well, you had no fucking business going through my background anyway. Or my wife’s. What the hell’s going on? Do I need to file a complaint against you?”

“No, no need to do that,” I assured.

He instantly became conciliatory. “Look, I know we’ve got this little problem between us. I don’t blame you for being sore. Don’t take it personally, though.”

I gave him a full grin, so he had a bird’s-eye view of the gap where I used to have a tooth. “Me? Take it personally?”

“Look, I’m sorry if things got a little rough back at the station. We thought you’d murdered an innocent cop. You know how us cops are when one of our own gets it. I’m not making an excuse, but I’m sorry, all right?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said with a full dose of insincerity, although frankly the intonation was wasted because we both knew there wasn’t any chance in hell I’d forgive him.

Then I abruptly got up to leave. I got to the door, then turned around like I’d just been struck with an afterthought.

I slapped my forehead. “Hey, one more thing.”

The overconfident prick actually gave me his Dudley Do-Right grin. “Sure, how can I help you, Major?”

“That thing about your wife. I’m sorry if I overreacted, but when I got curious about not finding her birth records, or her brother’s, I called the CIA station here and asked them to look into it. They’ve got smart guys, though. I’m sure they’ll figure out she and her brother were born at home.”

I wished I’d thought to bring a camera. You had to see his face.

I left the MP station, then walked two blocks to a gray government sedan that was waiting next to the curb. Mercer was seated in the front. I climbed in the back, next to one of his guys.

A radio was on the dashboard and a speaker was connected to it so we could hear what was happening inside Bales’s office. Early that morning, one of Mercer’s guys had gained entry and wired the office for sound, so Mercer had overheard every word of our conversation. He absently held up a thumb. His attention, though, was focused on the sounds coming from the speaker. My role in this affair was to give Bales an intimation of trouble to come, just enough of a whiff to put him in motion.

We listened for a while as Bales talked to somebody, probably an MP, about some details of a case they were working. He sounded impatient and curt, and was transparently struggling to hurry the MP along. Then we heard the sound of a door closing, then Bales dialing a number. One of the bugs was planted in the earpiece of Bales’s phone. We could hear every sound coming through his receiver. What we heard at that moment was that scratchy, hissy noise phones make when the lines are out of service. He tried the number again, then slammed down the receiver, hard.

Half a minute of silence passed. We could hear him breathing. Full, huffy breaths. We heard him pick up the phone and dial again. We heard the hissy sound again. We heard him dial another number.

It rang about three times, then the voice of an answering machine said, “Hello, this is the Bales residence. We are out right now, but please-”

We heard Bales punch in two numbers to code his home answering machine, then we heard Choi’s voice say, “Michael, take every precaution. Escape right away. American intelligence has us in their net. Change your identification and escape.”

The voice came from a tape on Bales’s answering machine in his quarters. And it actually was Choi’s voice. The message had been cut and stitched together from the conversation Carol had had with Choi earlier that morning. As soon as Bales’s wife had been lured out of their quarters, Mercer’s techs had called and played their tape.

Bales hung up the phone, more softly this time, and we could hear his chair creak, probably from him leaning back into it and trying to catch his breath. We heard him open a drawer, and then the sounds of things being moved around. He was searching for something.

Then he picked up the phone and dialed another number. Only this time, the real Choi answered. It had to be a cell phone number. We should have considered that, but we hadn’t.

“Choi, it’s me,” Bales said.

“Yes, Michael, what is it?”

“I got your message. What the hell’s going on?”

“What message?”

“The one you left on my answering machine.”

“I didn’t leave you any message.”

There was a moment of stunned, bewildered silence. Mercer turned around and we both smiled. The whole thing might be going south on us, but there’s still something perversely satisfying when you hear the bad guys getting tangled up in your web.

Sounding frantic, Bales said, “God damn it, Choi, I had that asshole lawyer in here a few minutes ago telling me he stumbled onto the fact you and Jin May weren’t from Chicago. He said he couldn’t find your hospital birth records, so he turned it over to the CIA. Then I heard your voice on my machine telling me to run. I know your fucking voice, Choi. It was you.”

Choi calmly said, “Michael, stay cool. I didn’t call you. Somebody’s playing games with us.”

“Right.”

Then Choi said, “Remember plan B?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Use it.”

“What about Jin May?”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. She was in the house when I left this morning. But she didn’t answer when I called. That bitch could be shopping at the PX for all I know. Or they could already have her.”

“That bitch,” he’d called her. It didn’t sound like Mr. and Mrs. Bales were what you might term a blissfully married couple.

Finally, sounding strained, Choi said, “Don’t worry about her. I’ll see if I can find her, but if she gets caught she knows what she’s doing. Just get moving.”

Then Bales said, “What about phase 3? Is it still-”

“Michael, get moving.”

“Okay, okay,” Bales said, then they both hung up. Three seconds later, we heard the sounds of Bales getting up from his desk, then pacing across his office, then his door opening and closing.

Michael Bales was now on the run, but not before he’d called his buddy Choi, which was something we’d hoped to avoid. We wanted Bales on his own, isolated, without resources, confused about what had happened to Choi. Frantic men make stupid mistakes and that’s how we wanted him. Now we had to worry about plan B, whatever the hell that was.

The only good thing about the call was that it almost certainly confirmed I was right. What we had sounded like a full-blown espionage ring.

Mercer’s driver put the car in gear and we raced straight back to the CIA office complex. We rushed inside to the communications console that had been hastily set up in the large room outside Mercer’s office.

Five communicators were huddled around the console, each with headsets on, each taking reports or coordinating actions among Mercer’s field teams. The CIA might not have been able to figure out when the Soviet Union was falling, but it looked like they ran a first-class surveillance operation.

I stood and watched. I was impressed. A tracking device connected to a GPS satellite had been planted on Bales’s car, and there was a large electronic map display on the wall. You could see this little red light moving steadily away from Yongsan, toward the international airport located about forty minutes’ drive from Seoul’s city center. There must’ve been three or four chase cars following along with him, because progress reports kept coming in to the radio operators at the console.