“Whose bikes are those?” Bahn asked.
“Folks who own the general store,” Fielder said. “They’re home, but I told them to stay put and leave their lights off.”
“I don’t suppose they’d mind if we borrowed the bikes,” Bahn said.
“They would if they saw the way you rode them,” Bolan told the woman.
“Be nice. I was going to invite you along.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
“Well, I guess that’s more good news than bad,” Hal Brognola said once Barbara Price had passed along Akira Tokaido’s latest update on his cousin.
“If this is just a straightforward kidnap-ransom thing, we should be able to resolve things easily enough.”
“You have your doubts?” Price asked.
She had just gotten off the phone with Tokaido, while Brognola had been conferring with Aaron Kurtzman, who had somehow managed to rig up a comp-link between the Sensitive Operations Group database and that of the security detail at the Laughlin Shores Casino. Shores Security Chief Harmon Wallace had contacted John Kissinger shortly after the interrogation of Cho Il-Tok, saying that he’d edited together all available surveillance footage of Li-Roo Kohb’s activities at the casino in the days leading up to his abduction by North Korean REDI agents. Apparently Kohb had met up with several other Asians during his breaks from the poker tables, and now that Kissinger had helped set up the comp-link, Kurtzman was going over the footage, trying to determine the identities of the contacts. Brognola had said he’d be back momentarily to check on Kurtzman’s findings. For the moment, however, his focus had shifted to the matter of Lim’s kidnapping and its possible repercussions on the crisis situation in North Korea.
“I just plain don’t trust these guys,” Brognola told Price. “With them, there’s always some kind of hidden agenda. If you ask me, they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble and risk of nabbing somebody as high-profile as Lim unless they had something else in mind besides collecting a little ransom.”
“The ransom’s not that little,” Price countered. “Do the conversion and we’re talking twenty-five million dollars.”
“That’s one black-market arms shipment to the Middle East,” Brognola said. “In the greater scheme of things, it’s a drop in the bucket. I’m telling you, there’s got to be something more to this.”
“Well, I guess time will tell,” Price said as they left her Annex office and headed back to the Computer Room. “In any event, we’re pretty much out of the loop. Akira wants to be at the Joint Security Area when the exchange goes down, but he’ll be strictly observing.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Brognola said. “I hope everything goes off without a hitch and that that will be the end of it.”
“I’ll second that.”
Things were quiet in the Computer Room. Hunt Wethers was still in Baltimore brainstorming with his think tank colleagues and Carmen Delahunt was on break. That left Kurtzman, who was right where Brognola had left him, huddled over his computer station, clicking away on the keyboard like a man possessed.
“Come up with anything?” Brognola asked as he and Price joined the man at his station.
Kurtzman nodded, finishing a few keystrokes before interrupting his work.
“Whoever this Wallace guy is, he’s a computer geek after my own heart,” he told the others. “Guy went on a fishing expedition and landed himself the catch of the season.”
“Something to do with these people Li-Roo met with?” Price interjected.
“Just one of them,” Kurtzman said. “Hang on a second.”
The computer ace closed out a few of the screens on his monitor, leaving the grainy black-and-white image of two men standing on a dim-lit stage in what looked to be a cocktail lounge. Brognola recognized the man holding the microphone as Li-Roo Kohb.
“They have a karaoke night at the casino twice a week,” Kurtzman explained. “Apparently Li-Roo’s a sucker for that stuff.”
“I seem to remember something about the FBI finding a karaoke machine at his house,” Price recalled.
“Yep,” Kurtzman said. He used his cursor to highlight the face of the man standing next to Li-Roo, then blew up the image and positioned it next to a passport photo, much as Ed Scanlon had done back in Laughlin when he’d determined that Bryn Ban-Ho was the head of the REDI team that had abducted Li-Roo at the casino.
“This guy’s the missing link,” Kurtzman explained to Brognola and Price. “Shinn Kam-Song.”