“I think so,” Bahn said. “He must’ve high-tailed it back here and hooked up with the guys who grabbed Li-Roo.”
Bolan turned back to the Metro officer. “I assume you got a make on the car.”
“Sure did,” the officer replied. “It was a ’98 Toyota. I called it in, so we’ve got a record of the plates.”
“Well, if the body’s here, the odds are the car came with him,” Bolan said.
“I hear you,” the officer said. “I’ll get an APB put out.”
“Good idea,” Bolan said. “Now we just have to hope they don’t pull another switch on their way to wherever they’re headed.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Bahn said. “CHP told me that pickup you went joyriding in was stolen, and these guys did a switch right after they snatched Li-Roo. My guess is they’ll stick to the same MO with the Toyota.”
“If that’s the case,” Bolan muttered, “we’re back to square one.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Laughlin, Nevada
Once he’d disclosed the address of the safehouse in Goffs, REDI operative Cho Il-Tok had run out of bargaining chips. Yes, he suspected there were other members of the nuclear team being targeted by North Korean operatives, but as FBI Agent Ed Scanlon had speculated earlier, Cho knew nothing about the ill-fated REDI assignments in Chicago and Washington, D.C. As for Shinn Kam-Song, Cho could only confirm that care had been taken to bring in Li-Roo Kohb alive because it was hoped he might be able to lead them to the missing defector. And now, having heard back from Bolan after the raid on the safehouse, Kissinger felt certain that the North Koreans’ ploy had worked.
“Bad news, huh?” Harmon Wallace said as Kissinger got off phone with Bolan.
“Looks that way.”
Kissinger had left Cho Il-Tok in the care of FBI Agent Holland back at the care center and returned to the Shores, where, for the past hour, he’d helped Wallace root through the casino’s backlogged surveillance footage for some clue as to Shinn’s whereabouts. They’d hope to make quick progress by concentrating on SUR-CAM footage of the resort’s registration area, but, as luck would have it, this week the Shores was hosting a weeklong convention of the Pac-Rim Investors Council, and two-thirds of the people signing up for rooms were either Asian-America or natives of PRIC’s three overseas members: South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
Each time Wallace came across a guest who even remotely resembled Shinn, he had to freeze the footage and wait for Kissinger to download the frame onto the computer linking him with Stony Man Farm so that the image of the guest’s face could be highlighted, blown-up and tweaked by one of Kurtzman’s pixelization enhancers until the features became clear enough to cross-match with a head shot of the missing defector. It was a cumbersome process, and after another ten minutes, Wallace sounded an even more troubling prospect.
“It’ll be a real bummer if we go through all this footage and it turns out this guy never even checked in,” he groused.
“What are the odds of that?” Kissinger said. “I mean, we’ve got footage of him getting on the elevators, then coming out with a tote bag. Add it up.”
“I know,” Wallace said, “but just because he stayed here doesn’t mean he’s the one who took out the room.”
“That’s a long shot,” Kissinger murmured. “I think we’re on the right track here. We just need to stick with it.”
“I know, I know.” Wallace reached for the coffee cup next to his viewing monitor. He took a quick sip, then checked the wall clock. It was a little after four in the morning. Yawning, he ventured, “Well, on the bright side, we’ve already gone through two hundred guests. Only another thousand or so to go.”
“Maybe we’ll figure out a way to speed things up,” Kissinger said.
Wallace managed a grin. “Too bad computers don’t drink coffee.”
The men fell silent and lost themselves in the monotony of the task. Several times they perked up momentarily when it looked as if they might have spotted their man, only to discover, after enhancing the still frames, that the man registering at the desk was somebody other than Shinn Kam-Song.
When they finally did get a break, twenty minutes later, it was from another quarter.
FBI Agent Scanlon strode into the security office, carrying a cardboard tray loaded with doughnuts and fresh cups of coffee.
“Got some good news to go with this,” he told Kissinger and Wallace.
Scanlon quickly explained that while they’d been unable to pull anything useful out of Li-Roo Kohb’s computer, his phone records had turned up three incoming calls made over course of the past week: two the day before Shinn’s visit and one the day Shinn had turned up on SUR-CAM footage of the karaoke lounge.