Mickey Kostmayer found Emma Marshall at the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park West. It was her favorite hotel in the city with an impressive view of Central Park outside the massive windows on the second floor. She had just finished her breakfast and was sipping her coffee when the brash Company agent slid into a chair opposite her. She was not surprised to see him. It was a meeting she had been dreading ever since she flew into New York. She had seen Kostmayer when he had come into the Company building to be debriefed about the United Nations evacuation. She knew he been down in a parking facility beneath the U.N. buildings holding a homemade device filled with C4 explosives waiting for the bomb disposal squad to arrive. The device had been defused by Colonel Michael G. Ralston — Gunner to friends and foes alike — but there had been a secondary device and Kostmayer had had to wait for twenty agonized minutes for the bomb squad to find him and declare that the secondary fuse had not been triggered. Emma knew it had left Kostmayer shaken. He and Gunner had saved everyone’s life that night at the United Nations, but she understood that the experience had weighed on Kostmayer. He usually kept his ironic, edgy persona in check, but right now his nerves were frayed. She recognized the signs. She had seen enough Company agents while being Control’s secretary to know when they were still recovering from trauma.
But she smiled at him and said: “Good morning, Mickey.”
Kostmayer came straight to the point. “I talked to Assad Malifi at the Company last night. I know that there is a classified mission running. Assad wouldn’t give me more intel that that, and I had to threaten him with thumbs screws before he would tell me that the mission concerned Robert McCall.”
“Control hasn’t authorized any new missions that are running at this time.,” Emma said.
“Doesn’t matter if it’s sanctioned or not. It is in motion or Assad Malifi would have not been in a briefing room giving McCall what intel he had. I am guessing it is a mission for him to fly to North Korea and rescue Granny from the prison camp there. The same one that I escaped from. I need whatever intel you can give me.”
“I can’t discuss sensitive information with anyone, even one of Control’s top agents. You know that.”
“Just tell me if Granny is alive or dead?”
Emma took a deep breath, looking out the window at the carriages pulling tourists down Central Park West. Finally, she said: “We don’t know what has happened to Granny.”
“But McCall must have reason to believe that he’s still alive.”
“He believes it is a possibility.” Emma looked back at Kostmayer. “But it is a solo mission.”
“That’s what I wanted to know.” Kostmayer got to his feet. “Sorry to interrupt your breakfast, Emma. Good to see you back in the fold. Take care of yourself.”
Kostmayer walked away from the table. Emma looked at him with concern in her eyes. “This is going to end badly for you, Mickey,” she said, quietly
Granny and Walter Coburn waited until midnight before they left the large hut. There were the usual North Korean guards patrolling, but not as many as during the daylight hours. They had to time it just right, avoiding the sweeps of the searchlights on the three high watchtowers. Granny had reconnoitered the shed where the guards kept their Hurricane Lamps. While Coburn stood guard, Granny broke the padlock on the door, which was rusted, and found two large Vintage style Black Hanging Hurricane Lamps, battery operated with a Dimmer Switch. Granny put the padlock back on the door, handed one of Hurricane Lamps to Coburn who led the way to the front of the prison camp. There they had to avoid the third watchtower which only intermittently swept the area. The wooden huts that housed the Korean prisoners were grouped close together. Nothing stirred in any of the windows. Granny followed Coburn through the heaped-up rubble that was scattered across the ground to where Coburn knelt down. There was an old storm drain buried in the debris of bricks and steel. Coburn lifted a rusting manhole to reveal a metal ladder leading down into the darkness. They waited until the next sweep of the searchlight which came in just two minutes. Then Coburn climbed down the metal rungs, carrying the Hurricane Lamp. Granny was right behind him. With Coburn’s help he lifted the heavy metal manhole cover back into place.
They stepped down into rank, ankle-deep water that had pooled in the storm drain. They lit their Hurricane Lamps which provided a wan radiance at best. Their voices echoed in the confined space.
“There is a series of tunnels down here around the storm drain,” Coburn said. “I think North Koran inmates of this prison tried to dig their way out at some point. Let us see where this leads to.”
“No talking,” Granny said, softly. “Use hand signals.”
Coburn nodded and moved down the storm drain. They came to the first tunnel which branched out into two more, but the ceilings were no more than eight feet above their heads. The Hurricane Lamps illuminated their way like they were in a maze. More rubble was strewn everywhere. They had to climb over piles of bricks until finally they came to a tunnel that opened into a larger space, maybe twelve feet long and six feet deep. Dust drifted across the tunnel and more of it sifted down from the ceiling. Coburn gestured to Granny that he was going to go to the end of tunnel to see where it led to. No sense of them both reconnoitering it. The tunnel walls looked like they could collapse at any moment. Granny indicated that he understood. Coburn moved further into the tunnel, the Hurricane Lamp leaping in front of him as it splashed light on the rocky walls. Then his figure disappeared into the murky gloom.
Granny hefted his Hurricane Lamp and splayed the light across another tunnel that led off the main one. It only travelled about ten feet before branching out into two more narrow passageways. Granny backtracked to the first tunnel and found it branched off into two more. Obviously, whomever had dug these tunnels had been fueled with despair. They led a few feet and then collapsed into the rock wall. Granny found one last tunnel, wider than the others, but not higher. The ceiling above Granny’s head must have been four feet high. He had to stoop down to crawl along it. Then the tunnel opened to twelve feet, but there was barely enough space to turn around. Granny looked up at the earthen roof of the tunnel. Then he retraced his steps back down the tunnel to where it joined the first one. The height of this passageway was ten feet. He had to transverse back to the main tunnel where he had left Coburn. He set down his Hurricane Lamp on the ground. He heard the sound of the contractor returning. He stumbled into the smear of white light that streaked the tunnel and collapsed on one of the rocks that studded the interior. He was breathing heavily and, Granny thought, asthmatic.
“No bloody good!” he panted.
Granny moved his hand down to shush him.
“You think the gooks can hear us down here in this bloody coffin?” Coburn asked.
Granny had not heard the phrase “gooks” since Vietnam. It made him smile. “Take it easy, Walter.”
“These tunnels lead nowhere!” Coburn said. “They just bloody stop! So, whoever built them, they hit bedrock or sheet metal, so they downed tools and turned around and hacked out another tunnel that led bloody nowhere too! I came to six tunnels and all of them petered out after a few feet at rock walls. I will give them an A for trying, but it was obviously a futile exercise. I cannot image how long it took them to burrow down here and then to come to dead ends. They never got out of the labyrinth. They just went back up top, closed up the main tunnel and resigned themselves to their fate. Bloody idiots. They should have kept digging. There is forty feet to the fence here. Poor bastards never made it even that far.”
Granny had given up trying to shush the Aussie. He waited until he was finished and had nothing more to say. Then he looked at Granny. “You find anything in the other tunnels?”
“Just dead ends, like you found.”
‘’Bloody hell!”
“But that’s okay,” Granny said, and smiled lopsidedly.
“How can it be okay? You want to have a picnic down here? Maybe I should have brought down some bloody sandwiches and soft drinks and potato chips?” Then he looked at Granny’s blue eyes and it pulled him up short. “What’s that look for?”
“I know where we are,” Granny said, softly.
McCall was waiting for Kostmayer at the Upstairs Bar at the Dead Rabbit Grocery & Grog in the Financial District. It had the feel of an Irish American saloon named after the group in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. It was packed with tourists and locals, the ambience rowdy and friendly. Warm wood framed the walls around the booths along one wall with their high stools. McCall sat beside the fearsome eagle at one end of the bar, sipping a Glenfiddich 21. On a flat screen above the bar the Knicks were playing the Pacers, the sound turned down low.
Mickey Kostmayer entered and slid onto a vacant bar stool beside McCall. A tall, gorgeous brunette moved over to serve him, but he shook his head.
“What makes you believe Granny is alive?” Kostmayer demanded, with no attempt to even say hello.
McCall had been expecting this, even if Emma Marshall had not called him with a head’s-up that Kostmayer would be looking for him. McCall took out his cellphone from his pocket, scrolled down and turned it around so that Kostmayer could see the screen.
Odds against me. Still a prisoner in NK. Come and get me and others. Granny.
Kostmayer looked back up at McCall. “That means that Granny is still alive.”
McCall returned to the full screen and slipped the phone back into pocket of his leather jacket. “No, it doesn’t. Someone else could have sent that message. Maybe the Commandant of the prison camp. Maybe it was traded by one of the guards for a package of cigarettes. Maybe one of the North Korean children stole it to play with it. Whatever the truth is, I’ll find out.”
“I’m going with you,” Kostmayer said.
“Not this time,” McCall said.
Kostmayer leaned a little closer to McCall. He had been drinking. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep and stress. His voice had a husky quality to it that took McCall by surprise. The raucous atmosphere in the bar masked anyone else hearing them. This was for McCall’s ears alone.
“Granny was my friend long before he was your friend, McCall. I could not take him with me when I escaped from that North Korean prison camp. I did not go back for him and left him for dead. I am not going to do that again. What do you always say? Leave no one behind.”
McCall’s voice was quiet and measured. He knew how much Mickey was hurting, but that did not matter when it came to the safety of the mission.
“It was a miracle that you managed to escape from that North Korean prison when you did. No one else could have done that. Good thing for the sake of your country you did, or the United Nations buildings might be a pile of burnt-out rubble right now and all of those innocent people you saved would be dead. You cannot do it all, Mickey. I know how Granny’s presumed death has eaten away at you. But you would not be any good to me on this mission. You would be a liability. You would only slow me down. Granny deserves a better chance than that.”
The harsh words were spoken in the same quiet tone, but they had the desired effect. Kostmayer looked like he was going to throw a punch at the man he idolized. Then he settled back, his hands clenching, staring at Robert McCall with fury in his eyes. McCall noted that Emma Marshall had just walked into the bar, but she held back, watching the two men she knew so well.
“I could fly to North Korea without you,” Kostmayer said, his words a little slurred.
“You could,” McCall said, “but you won’t. There has been too much history between us. You know I’m right.”
“Go to hell, McCall,” Kostmayer said, and slid off the barstool. He slammed out of Dead Rabbit bar, clattering down the stairs to the ground floor. Emma took his place.
“That didn’t sound good,” she said.
“It was the way I knew Mickey would react. I would have done the same thing in his place.”
“Where can we talk?” Emma asked him.
McCall slid off the barstool and moved with Emma to one of the booths. She took an envelope out of her bag and slid across to him. Once again, their voices were lost in the overall ambiance of the place.
“From Control,” she said. “New passport with papers to enter South Korea. Here is as much as we can give you on the aerial footage on North Korea. Some of these photographs will give you a broader picture of the terrain, but it is all pretty much the same. The drones we sent up have yielded some grainy shots, but none of them show a prison camp shrouded in the forest. The camp that Mickey Kostmayer escaped from must still be there, of course.”
“He doesn’t know where it is,” McCall said. “He was disoriented and lost his way in the forest. NK patrols were searching for him. He does not know how he made it to the Yalu River at the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge. That prison could be five miles from that location or fifty miles. I can use the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge as a landmark, but that’s all.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
McCall shrugged and smiled. “Improvise.”
She put another envelope on the booth table. “This is more intel on your two contacts in South Korea. Kyu-Chul is still working at the American Embassy in Seoul. He knows you are coming, but he does not know when. Yo-Han is out of country right now, but he is expected to return tomorrow. By the way, they call him ‘Harry’. Both of them hate the regime in North Korea, but that is no guarantee that they will help you. People have their own agendas. But there is a meeting arranged with them as soon as you can get there. That’s as much as I’ve got for you.” Emma glanced over to where Kostmayer disappeared down the steep stairs from the Dead Rabbit Grocery & Grog bar to the street. “Is Mickey going to be okay?”
“He will be,” McCall said, “if I can come back with his friend alive and in relatively good condition.”
“What are the chances of that?”
“Not good,” McCall said.
Emma looked back at him. “Are you going to be all okay?”
“Ask me in five days.”
Emma took McCall’s hand in both of hers. “No point in my telling you that what you’re contemplating here in madness?”
“No.”
She leaned over and kissed him gently on the lips. When she broke from him, she said softly: “Take care of yourself, Robert. You are very precious to me. You saved my life in that pub in London. I won’t forget that.”
She slid out of the booth and was swallowed up by the crowd. McCall glanced up at the television above the bar. The Knicks-Piston’s game was over. The Piston’s had won by a score of 107-101. Tim Hardaway Jr. for the Knicks had scored 37 points, one rebound and one assist. A valiant effort, McCall thought. He finished his Glenfiddich 21, slid out of the booth and headed down the stairs of the Dead Rabbit bar to the street.
He hoped that his Korean grocer had something for him.
If not, then he was hoping for a miracle.
Granny had emerged from the debris around the manhole cover below the first watchtower careful to not be seen. He narrowly missed a patrol of North Korean guards who would have crossed their path if Granny had not pulled Walter Coburn back underground and heaved the manhole cover over their heads. They waited five minutes before they ventured out again. They came around the rubble-strewn area, timing the sweep of the searchlights from the two remaining watchtowers. They ran in the darkness to where the large main huts were constructed. Granny climbed fast onto the wooden porch and threw open the door for them.
As soon as entered the hut, he knew something was wrong.
Deva Montgomery was at one of the cots, with Fredrik Jorgensen and Daniel Blake, the new AP correspondent whom Granny had met briefly before he and Walter Coburn had left under cover of darkness to get to the underground tunnels. They tended to stay together as one group for fear of reprisals.
Liz Montgomery was not with them.
Her sister Deva rushed over to Granny, distraught and shaking with fright. “They took Liz about an hour ago! Just dragged her out of here with two of the Korean guards. They took her to the Commandant Jang’s hut. There was nothing any of us could do.”
“We’ve been checking every few minutes for Liz to be returned,” Jorgensen said.
“Stay here,” Granny said. “All of you.”
Walter Coburn offered to stay with them. Granny left the hut and jumped down the porch steps. He saw Liz Montgomery immediately. She was moving from Commandant Jang’s two-story hut with some difficulty. He ran toward her. Two of the North Korean guards had opened the gate for her and closed it again. She stumbled before Granny caught up with her. She had been beaten. Angry purple welts and bruises were on her face, arms and presumably her legs. Her tunic had been ripped open, exposing her large breasts. Her left eye was almost closed. Her lip was swollen. She was soaking wet. Her dark hair was a rat’s-nest that hung down her back and in her face. The four Korean guards watched Liz’s progress but didn’t impede it. Another set of guards were patrolling the perimeter of the compound watching them.
Granny steadied her. “I’ve got you!”
“I can walk,” Liz said in a hoarse whisper.
“What did Jang do to you?”
“He let me live,” she said, and tears flooded her eyes.
Granny knew what had happened. “Jang had you waterboarded.”
“I am sure that was coming next. He stripped me and threw me to the ground of his hut. One of his guards threw a bucket of cold water over me. Then Jang held me down while the guards watched. He raped me repeatedly. Every time he pulled out of me he had one of his guards pour more freezing cold water over my body while the other guards held me down. Then Jang would enter me again. I did not struggle. It was like he had picked up a sopping little mouse from the floor and was playing with it. I was a dead thing. I felt nothing. Must have driven the fucker crazy. After about thirty minutes he got tired of me and motioned to the guards to let me go. My prison uniform was thrown at my feet. I put it back on and the two guards dragged me onto my feet. Jang just gestured to the door. I wanted to walk out of there without help. Jang let me. Not because he was concerned with my dignity, but because he wanted to see if I could make it through the hut door. I walked down the porch steps. His two guards came out behind me, but they did not follow. I made it as far as fifty yards before I could not stand anymore. That’s when you got to me.”
Granny looked instinctively behind them. Rage coursed through him. Myang-Sook-Jang stepped out on the wooden porch, shook out a du Maurier cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke. Liz clutched Granny’s arm to spin him around. He saw that Deva Montgomery and Walter Coburn were sprinting toward them. Behind them was Fredrik Jorgensen and Daniel Blake.
“Don’t tell Deva what happened to me,” Liz pleaded. “I was beaten by Jang’s guards. Because I had no intel to give Jang. After half an hour he let me go. Please, Granny. It would destroy her.”
Granny nodded. With trembling hands Liz buttoned up her prison tunic. The others had reached them at this point. Deva took one of Liz’s arms and Coburn the other. Fredrik Jorgensen and Daniel Blake supported her.
“What did that monster do to you?” Deva asked her sister, her face as white as a sheet.
“I guess I don’t respond well to assholes questioning me,” Liz said, her voice still a rasping whisper. “I’m all right. I really am.”
“Let us get you back to the hut,” Fredrik Jorgensen said, very concerned.
Walter Coburn let them take Liz’s weight as she walked. He looked at Granny and their eyes met. The contractor knew immediately what had happened to Liz. But he moved after the others. Granny turned back to Myang-Sook-Jang’s quarters. The Commandant was watching him with a quizzical expression on his face. As if he excepted him to charge past the two North Korean guards and leap up onto the porch with his hands around Jang’s throat. The look was meant to mock him.
“Don’t worry, Commandant,” Granny said, softly. “I am going to kill you.”
Then he moved after the group reaching the main hut in the compound.
Myang-Sook-Jang watched him with dead, cold eyes.