Ferguson stuck his head under the shower’s stream, shaking as the ice-cold water sent shivers through his body. It was a poor substitute for sleep, as was the weak coffee he got in the lobby.
“Corrine wants you to talk to her,” said Corrigan when he checked in.
“What, does she think I’m working for her now?”
“You are.”
“You find anything else out about Science Industries?”
“Thomas Ciello got a list of some of the people who work there,” said Corrigan. “One of them is pretty interesting.”
“Who dat?”
“Guy named Kang Hwan. Wrote a paper on extracting nuclear material using some sort of laser technique. Real technical stuff.”
“Jack, you think a shopping list is technical.”
“Har-har. This is. I can upload a copy of it for you.”
“In Korean?”
“You’re a laugh a minute, Ferg. What if I busted your chops like this every time you called in?”
“You mean you don’t do it on purpose?”
Ferguson laughed, picturing Corrigan fuming at the communications desk in The Cube.
“Post me a file of the open-source information on him that I can access from a café,” Ferguson said.
“Anonymously?”
“No, Jack, I’m going to walk in and tell the people there I’m a spook. We lost the laptop, remember?”
“You can get the open-source stuff with a Google search. There’s nothing there. I can’t send the report that way.”
“I don’t want you to,” said Ferguson.
“You can get it at the embassy.”
“Don’t send it to them.”
“Jesus, Ferg. You sound more paranoid by the minute.”
“Yeah, I’m channeling my Irish grandmother. Just do what I say.”
“All right, but . . .”
After he’d finished with Corrigan, Ferguson called Corrine.
“It’s the Black Prince,” he told her cheerfully when she answered. “What’s going on?”
“Your friend is arriving in Seoul at six p.m.”
“Very nice. He may be returning home a little sooner than I expected with some things I want you to check out.”
“What’s going on, Ferg? Why are you bypassing the usual channels?”
“Insurance.”
“Against what?”
“Against things disappearing. Memories going bad. Interpretations of facts that can’t be trusted.”
“Who don’t you trust?”
Ferguson lay back on the bed in his room. He hadn’t planned on getting into this discussion right now—and, hopefully, ever.
“Maybe I’m just being paranoid,” he told her.
“You don’t trust Slott?”
He didn’t answer.
“You trust me?” said Corrine finally.
“I pretty much can’t stand you, Corrine. But I think you have a different agenda than those people do.”
“You saved my life,” she said.
Ferguson had to think for a moment before remembering. It had been in a nightclub in Syria. Or was that Lebanon?
“Yeah, well, that was a job thing,” he told her. “Anyway, don’t get your underwear all twisted up. I don’t know that anything’s going on. I just want to make sure I’m not screwed by it if it is.”
“Well—”
“A deep subject. Now how about that flight number?”
Ferguson spent a few hours looking for more of the National Truck Company vehicles. None of the ones he checked out seemed like very good candidates for the truck he’d seen at the waste site. Four of the seven had open beds in the back. One was painted a garish pink that he thought would have glowed in the dark. The other two were in various states of disrepair and looked as if they hadn’t been moved in months or maybe even years.
Checking on the trucks was the sort of necessary but tedious detail work that Ferguson had little patience for. The more he did it, the more he was convinced that Science Industries was the best lead he was going to get for the time being, and that he ought to concentrate there until something told him he was wrong.
In the early afternoon he took the train to Seoul but got off a stop before the city, showing up at a hotel that advertised it had a “business center” with high-speed computer access. Ferguson inserted what looked like a small memory key into the hotel computer’s USB slot and trolled for information on Kang Hwan, the scientist Corrigan had mentioned. The key contained a series of programs that enabled anonymous surfing and allowed him to erase any trace of the web pages and files he looked at.
The Google search brought up several hundred references, but most were about a half-dozen papers the scientist had written. The English synopsis of two of the papers said they were on the possibility of using lasers to speed up the separation of radioactive isotopes, especially in uranium.
Almost as interesting was a fact Corrigan had neglected to mention: The scientist, fifty-three, had died two months earlier. None of the obituaries in the translated Korean newspapers gave the cause of death, but a small item in the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal said it was suicide.