By the time Ferguson got back to Science Industries, it was nearly six p.m. Even so, there were plenty of workers in the complex, and within a few minutes five cars came out in a bunch. He went with the two that turned off the first highway ramp, following as they went into the bar district. Seven young women got out of the cars, joking and laughing as they went down the stairs to a hof, a Korean bar that served food and drinks.
By the time he parked the scooter and got inside, the women had found a place at the far end of the bar. Ferguson made his way over to them nonchalantly, ordered a maekju—beer.
“Saeng maekju?” said the bartender, asking if he wanted a draft.
Ferguson gave her one of his best goofy smiles. “Hang on,” he said, taking out his phrase book.
One of the women next to him glanced over.
“You speak English?” he said in a lost voice.
“English, a little,” said the woman.
“Do I want saeng maekju?”
The woman giggled, and tapped her friend. Within a few minutes Ferguson was surrounded by young women who found the handsome but clueless foreigner quite amusing. They got him a Hite—a brand of bottled beer popular in Korea—and a plate of food whose identity he couldn’t decipher.
Midway through the beer, Asian techno-pop began playing in the background. Ferguson proved deft on the nearby dance floor, dancing with three and four of the women at a time. When a slow song came on, he took the girl named Lin-So in his arms and held her close; she clung to him furiously, her head against his chest and shoulder.
She didn’t want to let go when the music stopped, but the punchy, driving beat of the next song got her moving. Ferguson took her by the hand and twirled her backward and forward, around and around several times before segueing into a kind of jig and sharing himself with two of the other young women, who’d been shooting jealous glances in their direction for several minutes now.
When the song ended, he excused himself to find the restroom; he went down the hall and slipped outside, having obtained what he wanted: Bae Eun’s identity card, with its magnetic key to open the doors at Science Industries.
Had Ferguson looked even the vaguest bit Korean, or if he had thought the plant routinely employed foreign workers, he would have used the ID card to go in the front gate; most guards rarely took a good look at credentials, especially when they were outside on a cold night. But the circumstances called for a slightly more creative approach: hopping the fence.
At half-past nine, a limo drove up the drive to the front gate. The driver told the guards that he had come to pick up Mr. Park. The men immediately ordered him out of the car. The driver objected, and within seconds one of the guards was holding him down on the pavement while the other was frantically calling for backup.
Ferguson, meanwhile, scaled the first perimeter fence, clamping down the barbed wire strands at the top with a pair of oversized clothespins. Though the spot he had chosen was only a few yards from the front gate, it wasn’t covered by a video camera, not so much an oversight as a commonsense decision by a security designer who had only so many cameras to work with and saw no reason to cover an area under constant human surveillance.
Now inside the compound, Ferguson trotted up one of the interior roads, circling around to a set of lights that indicated where one of the surveillance cameras had been placed. He blinded the camera with a rather low-tech application, the wrapper of a local fast-food restaurant artfully tangled and stuck on with a gob of mayonnaise. This done, he sprinted past it, racing for a second camera, located at the base of a tree.
This camera covered one of the nearby buildings as well as the route he wanted to use to get out, and here he had to rely on something more dependable than tainted mayonnaise. He inserted a fader in the back housing, hit the button to dim the view and then ran in front of it toward the nearby building.
By now other guards had responded to help their brother at the front gate. Red and yellow lights were flashing, illuminating the grounds. Ferguson trotted to the largest building on the campus. He walked around the side farthest from the gate to the back, trying to see through the windows as he went. But the windows had been designed to prevent that, and all he could catch was a glimpse of his own reflection.
The door at the back didn’t have a card reader or handle. It was also hooked to an alarm. Ferguson decided he’d leave the building for later, after he took some soil samples and checked out the trucks.
Getting across the compound without getting caught by the video cameras took a bit of work. It was relatively easy to see where the cameras were and what they covered—each used floodlights to illuminate its view. Ducking around them, though, was like running through a free-form maze. It took nearly two hours to get to the warehouse area where the trucks had been parked. Ferguson filled a dozen bags with soil on his way over.
The first thing he did was calibrate the gamma meter—a replacement for the one Guns had lost—and hold it next to the building. The needle didn’t budge.
Ferguson took two shovelfuls of dirt from the northwestern corner of the building, then climbed the eight-foot chain-link fence that separated all but the front of the building from the parking lot.
A camera sat under the front eave of the building, covering the lot. Unsure how far he could go before getting in its view, Ferguson considered climbing up and disabling it, but one look at the slick metal sides of the building made his knee groan. He decided he could reach the trucks without being seen if he stayed close to the wall. Ferguson slipped off his backpack and got down on his hands and knees to crawl.
He didn’t pick up anything from the gamma meter at the first truck. Pausing near the tailgate, he slid a gamma detection tag into the chassis just beneath the truck bed. Then he rolled to the next truck, repeating the process. When he reached the third truck without getting any indication from the gamma meter, he pressed the button to initiate the self-calibration sequence again, wondering if it was malfunctioning.
As he did, he heard the rumble of a car approaching.