She looked up in surprise. “We didn’t bug your room.”

“Bullshit. Come on, I’m on your team now. Tell me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “We didn’t bug your room.”

“Well, I found a little black thing in my phone. And I found two more tucked here and about.”

“When was this?”

“Remember that day I ran out to the parking lot and you pulled away?”

“Of course. I couldn’t believe you did that. You might’ve been watched. You might’ve compromised me.”

“Hey, I lost my head. I’d just found three bugs.”

“And you thought we’d done it? What? You thought we were listening in on your plans for defending Whitehall?”

“Oddly enough, that’s just what I thought.”

“Drummond, believe it or not, the Agency’s got a few more pressing issues on its plate than listening to some lawyer talk about a court case.” Then a dumbfounded expression emerged. “How do you know your room isn’t still bugged?”

“Because Imelda, my legal assistant, has it swept every day.”

“So you removed the bugs?”

“Yeah. All gone,” I confidently replied.

“Did you think about long-range listening devices?”

“Those inverted megaphone things?”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Carol said, working her way over to the window. She pulled the curtain apart and looked outside. First light was just breaking. “Listen, Drummond, when you removed the bugs, you notified whoever was listening that you’d detected them. If you’re a target of serious interest, they’ll simply switch devices.”

She was putting on a very good act, but I wasn’t buying it. I’d fully expected her to deny it. I just wanted her to know I knew.

Her eyes were sweeping the parking lot, like she was looking for some vehicle, maybe a truck or a van, anything big enough to hide a long-range listening device.

I asked, “Can those things target a single room in a big hotel like this? Wouldn’t they pick up all kinds of babble and noise?”

“If the rooms around you were talking, there’d be bleedover and distortion. But not late at night, like now, when everybody’s asleep.”

She was really putting on the act. Give the woman credit.

I walked over and stood beside her at the window. She turned and looked at me.

I pointed my finger out the window. I yelled, “Quick! Get on the phone and tell your folks to move in on that vehicle right there.”

She started to say something, and I grinned. She looked out in the parking lot. Suddenly a gray van turned on its lights, backed out of its space, and literally tore out of the parking lot. You could almost hear the rubber burning.

“Jesus!” I yelled.

Carol ran to the phone. She punched in some numbers and waited impatiently for somebody to answer. She yelled, “This is Carol Kim. There’s a North Korean spy van headed from the Dragon Hill to the main gate. It’s gray and enclosed. Get somebody to stop it.”

When she hung up, she shot me a furious look. I couldn’t blame her; after all, I’d just ruined a perfectly good chance to catch some North Koreans. In my defense, I really didn’t believe her until I saw this with my own eyes.

I was getting ready to make my excuse when I came to my senses. There was something else we’d better do. And we’d better do it damned fast, too, or else.

Here’s how the rest of the morning went. A number of Agency and military police cars raced around the base for hours trying to locate and collect the suspects Carol and I had immediately identified to Mercer.

Three suspects, it quickly turned out, had been reassigned out of Korea, so they weren’t in imminent danger, although Mercer still took the precaution of sending messages to their new commands to have them taken into protective custody until everything got sorted out. He’d made enough mistakes. He wasn’t taking chances.

A fourth suspect was on leave somewhere in Korea. Since we couldn’t find him, there was no particular reason to expect the North Koreans could, either. An all-points bulletin was sent through American and Korean channels to apprehend him on sight.

Suspects five through eight were picked up without incident, including Piranha Lips, who was literally dragged out of his office with two members of his legal staff watching. What I would’ve given to observe that glorious moment.

The ninth suspect, the protocol officer, was the unlucky one. He was found alone at his kitchen table with a big wound in his head dribbling cranial fluid all over his breakfast.

Nobody had a clue how it happened. Nobody saw anybody enter his quarters. Nobody heard the sound of a shot. Probably the gun was silenced. Probably the assassin was a pro. The captain’s skin was still warm and the blood was still moist, so the MPs who broke into his quarters guessed he’d been executed no more than an hour to thirty minutes before they arrived.

It was ten o’clock in the morning and I was having all this pointedly explained to me by Buzz Mercer himself. I would describe his demeanor as partly pleased, since he was arresting a bunch of suspected traitors, and thus was recouping some of the prior day’s humiliations. The other, much larger part of him, was annoyed, since I’d cued the North Koreans that we were on to them, making an already chaotic situation even more snarled.

The two other guys who were having this explained to them were General Spears and Brandewaite, who were seated just to my left. And if Buzz Mercer looked agitated, Spears seemed deathly worried, while Brandewaite looked ready to leap off a cliff. I wished he would.

“Jesus Christ, what a disaster,” he kept mumbling over and over.

Mercer was saying, “Of course, at this stage we don’t know how bad it is. Let me remind you, the eight men we have in custody, or are still trying to apprehend, are only suspects. We’re bringing them in for their own protection. And for questioning, of course.”

Brandewaite sniffed once or twice. “And when will we know more?”

“Can’t really say,” Mercer told him.

He said it in a breezy, deflective manner that gave me the impression there was no love lost between the two men. No surprise there, I thought. Brandewaite was the quintessential immaculately coifed, oily, narcissistic man of the nineties. Mercer was more of a crew-cutted, austere, meat-and-potatoes throwback to the fifties. Spies and diplomats; if you threw them both in a blender, you’d get something poisonous.

For my part, I was trying to blend into the woodwork, because the room was filled with powerful men who had no particular reason to think highly of me right at that moment.

Spears’s eyes kept glancing over from beneath those eaglelike, fierce brows. I wondered what he was thinking. On the other hand, maybe I didn’t want to know.

Mercer went on. “Anyway, right now we’re busy collecting legal counsels for all of them.”

“Did they all ask for lawyers?” Spears asked.

“Nope. We automatically provide it. We don’t want any procedural shit to come back and bite us in the ass down the road.”

Brandewaite said, “How stupid. You’ll slow the whole thing down.” He looked spitefully at me. “Once the lawyers get there they’ll all clam up.”

Mercer impatiently said, “Look, you stick to what you know, and I’ll stick to what I know.”

Brandewaite pointed a manicured finger in his face. “Right now, Mercer, you’ve got a bunch of American military officers in custody and one dead body. Don’t lecture me. Get results and get them fast.”

They went back and forth like that for a while and I found myself wondering about the Navy captain who got shot in the head. Why him? I mean, whoever was eavesdropping out in that parking lot overheard Carol and me mention the name of every one of the suspects. Probably some weren’t going to pan out. There’d be perfectly good explanations why their names weren’t in Bales’s file, or why Choi dropped the charges. But I was pretty sure there’d be no good explanations for at least three or four others. They were simply caught in Choi’s web.