“Oh, and that wasn’t a lawyer I saw, after all,” Kissinger apologized to the Korean. “It was a cockroach.”
“Same difference,” Agent Howland wisecracked.
The door to the examination room suddenly swung open and a nurse rushed in, drawn by the clamor.
“They’re trying to torture me!” Cho called to her desperately.
Kissinger shook his head and told the nurse, “Guy was resisting arrest.”
“We’ve got it under control,” Howland told the woman as he continued to keep Cho’s legs pinned to the floor. “As you were…”
The nurse eyed the strange tableau briefly, then retreated from the room. Once she’d closed the door behind her, Kissinger dropped the other crutch. It glanced off Cho’s temple, raising a welt. Kissinger knelt beside the Korean, wedging Cho’s head between the second crutch and the floor.
“Actually, I lying when I said you were in hell,” Kissinger told the Korean. “This is actually just purgatory. Hell is what comes next if you don’t start cooperating.”
Tears of rage began to fill Cho’s eyes. He spit at Kissinger and began to curse again. Kissinger ignored the outburst and glanced over his shoulder at Howland.
“I don’t think he wants to cooperate.”
Howland shrugged again. “What can I say? Maybe he wants to go to hell.”
“That must be it,” Kissinger said.
Cho continued to shout obscenities as he tried to move out from underneath the crutches and the combined weight of his two tormentors. He was trapped, though, and each movement only aggravated the pain in his side.
“Let me help you with that bloody nose,” Kissinger said. He shifted his right knee onto the second crutch, freeing his hand so that he could grab the pillow that had fallen from Cho’s bed. He dabbed away some of the blood streaming from the Korean’s broken nose, then pressed the pillow against Cho’s face and held it there until Cho stopped his shouting.
When it looked as if the REDI agent was about to pass out, Kissinger yanked the pillow away and cast it aside. Cho gasped for air frantically. The fight had finally gone out of him.
“No more,” he pleaded. “I’ll tell you what you want.”
“The truth?” Kissinger said. “Because if you try to lead us on some wild-goose chase, we’re going to take off the kid gloves and show you some real pain.”
“What do you want to know?” Cho said.
“The safehouse,” Kissinger asked again. “Where did they take the defector?”
Cho glared at Kissinger as he caught his breath. It looked for a moment as if he were going resume his cursing, but then he swallowed and hoarsely muttered, “Goffs. They took him to a place called Goffs.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Goffs, California
By the time Mack Bolan reached the isolated stretch of Route 66 running through Goffs, four California Highway Patrol cars had already converged on the turnoff leading to the REDI safehouse. Two of the vehicles were barricading the off-road; the other two were parked at the abandoned filling station. Officers milled around as Bolan disembarked from the Clark County Metro helicopter that had brought him from Las Vegas. The chopper had joined the Bureau’s Apache gunship in conducting the unsuccessful aerial search for Hong Sung-nam, and when Bolan had received word from Kissinger on the possible whereabouts of the REDI agent, the Executioner had convinced FBI Agent Ed Scanlon to secure use of the Metro copter. Scanlon had ridden aboard the chopper with Bolan, as had Jayne Bahn. Once all three of them were on the ground, the copter lifted off again, intent on circling the safehouse and joining another CHP contingent that had blocked off the north end of the off-road.
“We’ve got them boxed in,” CHP Captain Roger Fielder reported once he’d introduced himself to the new arrivals. “There’s no way out except by this road.”
“Good job,” Scanlon said. “Now we just need to figure our next move.”
Storming the safehouse had already been ruled out. Given the likelihood that defector Li-Roo Kohb had been taken to the site, care had to be taken to avoid to prevent the hostage from being killed.
“The road’s all dirt,” Fielder said, “so even if we drive in with out lights out, the dust clouds would tip us off.”
Bolan nodded. “And the chopper’s too loud.”
“I sent out a few men on foot just before you got here,” Fielder said. “Another ten minutes and we’ll at least have some kind of loose perimeter.”
“That’s a start,” Scanlon said.
While the others had been talking, Jayne Bahn’s attention had been drawn to the general store near the filling station. There were no lights on, but there were two 4-wheel-drive Land Rovers parked alongside the building near a flight of stairs leading up to a second-story living quarters. Mounted on racks to the rear of each vehicle was a knobby-tired mountain bike.