Crucial Intercept. Don Pendleton

her long black hair to the side in a reflexive motion and stopped manipulating the folding knife she carried.

      They waited for long minutes, holding their breath. Nothing happened, and no one emerged from the hotel. The tracking unit, which Yoon could read from across the room, showed that Baldero was still inside the motel across the street. There was nothing to do but wait. Yoon tried to concentrate on the binoculars once more, hoping to catch a glimpse of Baldero or the big American who may well have met his end before the muzzle of the unseen shotgun.

      Kim made a sound of disgust and slumped sullenly back into his chair, staring at the wall. It was at these times that he was most dangerous; when he grew still, it was never long before he exploded into violent movement, without warning and without provocation. In a way, Yoon could not blame him. The following, the waiting without action, were taking a perceptible toll on all of them. Only Hu remained impassive, but then, she was always inscrutable.

      The sound of the knife whirling in the woman’s slim fingers told Yoon, who did not look back at her, that she had gone back to toying with the blade. She had been playing with the sharp, talon-shaped folding kerambit knife she carried since they had entered the room, silently spinning the vicious little weapon in endless circles from the finger ring in the handle. Back and forth, back and forth, completely around, then back and forth again—the knife’s movements were almost as hypnotic, were he to look at it, as was Hu’s beauty. She ranked highly in military intelligence, he knew, though no one in Kim’s unit was quite certain how high. She was Kim’s woman. That much had been made clear to him. As a result, none asked, and none dared question him…or her. Whatever arrangement Hu herself had with Kim and with their superiors was her business. It would, ultimately, be her neck, too.

      Yoon had no instructions concerning Hu. She worried him, for if her loyalty was to her lover, Kim, and not to military intelligence and the leader’s government, she might interfere when it came time for Kim to die a hero’s death. If that happened, he would have to kill her, too, and he did not like the idea of incurring political debts to unknown individuals farther up the chain of power than he. Unfortunately, he had no choice in the matter. His primary and secondary mission objectives remained as they were regardless.

      “I am going to call that fool, Tontro,” Kim announced abruptly. He removed a prepaid wireless phone, untraceable and readily available in the United States, from the pocket of the American jeans he wore. His black T-shirt, the jeans, and the American jungle boots he wore were a kind of uniform, among the North Korean team members. They were cheap, not very conspicuous and functional in the warm climate of Virginia. Yoon and Hu were similarly attired, though Hu’s clothing was significantly tighter.

      “Tatro,” Yoon corrected automatically. It had become a mantra, and now Yoon suspected Kim did it on purpose, simply to nettle him. Little things like that were the man’s idea of humor, Yoon supposed, though he found the madman distasteful even at the best of times, and perfectly offensive when he was trying to be funny.

      “Tatro.” Kim nodded, smiling his sickly, lopsided smile. He put his phone to his ear after redialing the number with a single press of his thumb. Yoon heard him and the American government man, the traitor James Tatro, exchanging meaningless pleasantries.

      Yoon wondered if Tatro had the slightest idea just with whom he was in bed. North Korea was considered, laughably, a “rogue nation” among the Americans, though of course they would propagate such misinformation in their efforts to bully the leader’s people into submission. But the Americans, on the whole, especially those in their government, were curiously squeamish about violence. They would drop bombs on smaller countries from thousands of feet in the air, but the idea of actual blood flowing through their own fingers revolted them. Such was the stuff of Kim’s most pleasant dreams. If only this Tatro knew with whom he dealt, he would understand that he had truly signed a deal with someone he should consider a devil.

      Kim’s family disgrace had started with a few easily covered-up murders. They had been servants, for the most part, and the occasional party or factory worker. Some had been transients. A few had been prostitutes, despite the leader’s best efforts to eradicate such practices from the streets of his nation’s fair cities. Kim had a sickness, one that drove him to need to kill as regularly as some men ate a heavy meal. The longer he went without indulging his impulses, the worse the expression of those dark inner desires was when it finally came to fruition. Forced by his family to give up his depredations, Kim had lived in what for him most surely had been agony, spending several months locked away in his family’s state-designated dwelling in Pyongyang.

      When he finally escaped, he killed the person sent to guard him, an older cousin from his own family. Then he had escaped and murdered several families living in the public housing a few blocks away. It had been very, very difficult to cover up the evidence of those murders, to expunge all trace of those family’s many relatives and their connections to North Korean society in Pyongyang. Many threats had been made. Many citizens had been sworn to silence. Still many more had simply disappeared. It was not long after that, Yoon knew, that Kim had been consigned to this mission, a disgrace both to his family and to his work within military intelligence. He was an expendable, vicious animal who, once he served his purpose, would be put down like the rabid dog he was.

      Yoon looked forward to that much of the mission.

      “You have not informed us of something,” Kim finally said into the phone. Yoon could hear the other end of the line almost as clearly as Kim. The dangerous Korean had the volume of his phone set as high as it would go, the result of hearing loss in his good ear caused by a firearms “accident” when he was a teenager.

      “I don’t understand,” the government man replied. Tatro’s reedy voice grated on Yoon’s already frayed nerves.

      “You have not told us of all we face in our mission,” Kim said flatly, his tone hinting at deadly reprisals.

      “But I have,” Tatro insisted. “I gave you full information on the size of the Iranian team and on the equipment I helped them smuggle in. The French team was delayed this morning when one of their trucks broke down, my spotters tell me, but they’re well on their way to you if they’re not there already. The Jews are around somewhere. That’s all.”

      “There is another. A lone American. Big. Dark hair. Well armed. Very dangerous. The idiot Iranians spotted him on their trail and tried to kill him. Who is he?”

      “I don’t have any information about a single operator,” Tatro whined.

      “You have been paid a very, very large sum of money, American,” Kim threatened. “You were promised much more when we secured this fool whom you have so readily sold us. Do you think you can betray us now? With a single phone call, I can ruin you. I can see to it that your countrymen lock you away for the rest of your miserable life…or I can find you myself and see to it that you suffer for the very short span of whatever brief life I allow you to have.”