kept to himself, and so did I.” I shouldn’t have been revealing even this much about an operation, even an old one that didn’t matter anymore, but Pak could be trusted.
“You weren’t interested in knowing more about someone who might soon have your life in his hands?”
“Nothing seemed very complicated in those days. Just in and out, they said. The less we knew about details, the better. That’s what they said. Like teaching someone enough to jump out of a plane only one time.”
“Not good.”
“Awful. I think about it sometimes. I wonder if we were set up. Nothing went right from the start, nothing. When we got to the target, someone was supposed to have left a door open for us. They didn’t. It was locked, and no one had bothered to teach us how to get past a locked door, not one like this, anyway. We managed to work the lock, but it took extra time we didn’t have to spare. Guard schedules, that sort of thing.”
“Why didn’t you abort? I thought there were hand signals or something.”
“You never went on one of these, did you?” I thought I saw Pak move in an odd way, nothing much, but something suddenly surfaced and then dove back into the deepest part of him. I let it go; it wasn’t my business. He never spoke about what he did before he joined the Ministry, and I never pressed him to find out. Anytime we got to the edge of the subject, he found a way to steer the conversation onto something else. “The one thing they emphasized over and over to us was that there was only this single chance. Miss this and it would never come again, they said. The chief of operations wanted this done, they said, and he wanted it done right away. They never mentioned anything about aborting the mission.”
Pak snorted. “Bunch of crap. There’s no such thing as only one chance.”
“You sound like my grandfather. One of your definitive bugle calls would have been helpful at the time. But you weren’t there, as I recall.”
“Neither was your grandfather.” Pak mused a moment. “What happened to your friend Mun?”
“Something exploded. We finally got in and were looking around. There were some wires I had to cut, and I was concentrating on that. Red wire this, green wire that. Or the other way around. It’s not the sort of thing I’m very good at.”
“Details, you mean.” Pak swiveled his chair to gaze out the window. It never bothered him, that there wasn’t much to see. “No, actually, you’re pretty good at details, Inspector.” He sat for a moment, as if he might want to say something more, then turned his chair back and gestured for me to go on.
“Mun must have spotted something, because he moved a few steps to my left. I remember it was to my left, because I had the red wire in my right hand. One minute I saw him picking up a small box, the next minute he didn’t have a face anymore, or a neck. No hands, either. He dropped like a cow that’s been shot in the head. No moaning, nothing. Just a lot of gore that wasn’t moving. Funny thing, whatever it was barely made a sound. No explosion, none that I remember, anyway.”
“So you left.”
“Not right away. First, I located what we had been sent in for, most of it, anyway. On the way out, I checked again, but he was dead. I stepped over him and walked back to where the escort team was supposed to be waiting. They weren’t at the primary point so I had to go to the backup, which was not easy to find. I cursed the whole way. When I got there, I was sweating buckets. They were sweating, too, looking at their watches and mopping their faces. They didn’t ask why I was alone.”
“Why bother? They could see you were in no mood to talk.”
“No one was, believe me. They were nervous, real edgy. The whole way back they wouldn’t look at me, not even at each other.”
“Now your dead teammate shows up again. In pursuit of this Israeli who tells us he is a Swiss Jew.”
“What makes you think he’s Israeli?”
“What makes you think he’s not?”
“His mother is Hungarian,” I said lamely, “that’s why his name is Jenö. It’s not Italian, by the way.”
“Who cares about his mother? He’s an Israeli as sure as I’m Korean, and he was up here