Sword of God(59)

Payne came in next. Polite. Respectful. Empathetic. None of it an act of any kind. He’d lost his parents at an early age, killed by a drunk driver when he was in junior high, so he was all too familiar with sudden loss. His years as a soldier, surrounded by death and destruction, hadn’t dulled any of those feelings, and they never would.

They’d be a part of him forever.

“I know some of these questions are going to be difficult, probably the last thing in the world that you want to talk about, but I wouldn’t be asking them if they weren’t so important.” Payne paused, trying to ease into the interview.

“Obviously, if you’d feel more comfortable speaking in Korean, we can use Kia as an interpreter.”

Chung-Ho shook his head. “My English is good. So is my son’s. We speak good.”

“Yes, you do. Much better than I speak Korean.” He smiled, hoping to keep the conversation friendly. “To make things easier, I’d like to start with you. I figure the more you can tell me, the less I’ll have to ask your son. In the long run, I think that would be best. Don’t you?”

He nodded in appreciation, thankful for Payne’s kindness.

Meanwhile, Yong-Su sat in a chair in the back corner, staring at the floor in a semidaze. Kia sat next to him, telling him about her childhood in Korea, occasionally brushing the black hair from his eyes, like a mother might do. More worried about his well-being than the interview that was taking place ten feet away.

“If we can,” Payne said, “I’d like to talk about last Saturday.”

Chung-Ho described what he could remember. Yong-Su had stumbled home from the cave, covered in blood. After checking him for injuries, Chung-Ho went from neighbor to neighbor, asking if they had seen anything, but no one had. Soon they discovered a trail of blood leading toward the cave. Panicked, he rushed to Kim and asked him what he should do. Kim’s advice was to take his son and leave town immediately. So he did, just like that. His wife and family were supposed to follow and meet them an hour later. But the people from the cave prevented it.

“Have you been to the village since?”

“No. It is not safe.” He looked back at his son, choosing his next words carefully. “When my wife not arrive, I call Mr. Kim from pay phone. He tell me what happen to village. He tell me never come back and not call police. He handle everything.”

Kim hadn’t mentioned the phone call, but it explained why Chung-Ho had never returned to check on his wife and the rest of his family. He already knew what had happened to them.

“Did you see anyone from the cave that day?”

“No.”

“What about beforehand? Maybe a stranger walking in the woods?”

“I see nothing. We stay in village. They stay in cave. No strangers.”

“But your son,” he said delicately. “He saw some people, didn’t he?”

Chung-Ho turned and looked at his boy.

“Did he tell you what he saw?”

He took a deep breath, then nodded. “He see blood. People in cave with blood.”

“You mean dead people?”

He shook his head. “No. People still alive. They were talking.”

Payne paused, confused. Until that moment, he had assumed that Yong-Su had stumbled into the scene after everyone was dead, possibly overhearing the killers talk about the black stone as they left the cave. But now his father was telling him the exact opposite. Yong-Su was in there while people were still alive.

In a heartbeat, the direction of the interview had to be changed.

Payne thought back to the cave, recalling the layout of the initial chamber. A desk and a chair were bolted to the middle of the floor. A single lightbulb, equipped with a tiny camera, hung from the volcanic rock. Everything was bathed in blood—the floor, the ceiling, the walls. On the bright side, if there was one, the blood was primarily contained in that one room, the place where interrogations occurred. And since Yong-Su was covered in blood, he’d obviously been in there. Maybe during a torture session. If so, who knew what he could answer?

The possibilities were endless.

Payne sorted through all the questions in his head— who was being tortured, what was being said, who killed Schmidt and his crew—trying to figure out which was most important. In the end, he realized the most pressing question was one that Chung-Ho couldn’t answer.

They needed to speak to the boy himself.



Payne asked Kia to join him in the hall, where they were met by Jones, who’d been watching the interview in an adjacent room. He wanted to take a more active role but realized the bullet hole in his arm might be disconcerting to Chung-Ho, since he had pulled the trigger. Jones spoke first. “We need to talk to the kid.”