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  One of Mr Cho’s men, the grey-haired Mr Cheung who had befriended me at the training session, slipped silently from the side door of the van, stripped off his track suit and turned it inside-out before he pulled it back on, white flashes and dojang lettering gone from view. As he merged with the darkness we waited in silence for what felt like a very long time. I scanned the gloom for any hint of Cheung’s return but saw nothing until he scared me by slipping noiselessly into the van, his breathing calm and regular. He murmured a few words to Mr Cho, who turned to me.

  ‘It’s good. No security cameras and no guards outside.’

  ‘But four cars could mean twelve or more people.’

  ‘No problem.’ The standard Mr Cho response to any challenge, no matter how daunting. Speaking softly, he outlined his plan. We got out of the van and reversed our track suits and removed our shoes. Carrying a t-shirt and a jerry can, one man crept forward. Stopping behind the car closest to the warehouse he pulled a screwdriver from his belt and gently eased it under the metallic flap that hid the petrol cap. The crack as the lock sheared was muffled by the t-shirt but in the still of the night, it made me jump. He stopped and we all strained for reaction from inside the building. There was none. He opened the jerry can, drenched the t-shirt in petrol and, using the screwdriver, stuffed one end of it into the fuel tank opening.

  Six of us edged towards the warehouse. Above the doorway and about eight feet from the ground, protection from the weather took the form of a three-foot-wide concrete ledge that butted out from the warehouse wall. We waited while Mr Cheung put his ear to the metal door. He shook one hand at us, palm out, an urgent request for silence. A clanging sound came from inside the building, something hard and metallic being thrown down, followed by angry shouts coming closer. With nowhere to hide we made like statues, all watching Cheung, whose ear never left the door’s surface. Seconds stretched to minutes, until at last he gave us a rolling hand movement. Go.

  A pair of stocky athletes leaned into each other like a two-man rugby scrum, heads and arms interlocked while Mr Cho moved them into position. Another man quickly went down on all fours, and I stepped from his back onto the top of the two-man scrum and reached up to grasp the ledge. Two men climbed me like a ladder and secreted themselves face-down above the doorway. The entire move took less than five seconds, and was achieved in complete silence.

  The two guys below lowered me to the ground, and we hurried back to the van, which we carefully pushed into place behind the car with the t-shirt poking from its bodywork.

  So far everything had gone painstakingly slowly. Now, somebody hit the fast-forward button. The t-shirt came to life, fire glinting off paintwork, thick black smoke backlit by the glare of warehouse floodlights. The side door of the van lay wide open, a shoe jammed in its track. The fire starter jumped aboard. Four of us huddled by the open door like a parachute display team ready to leap. The car’s petrol tank blew and the van shook, first from the nearby explosion and next from its engine firing up, revving hard.

  At close range, the ferocity of the petrol fire was terrifying. Glass popped, explosive aftershocks rocked the entire car, and fresh blasts of flame shot skywards.

  Beyond the fire and smoke a gap appeared at one end of the concertina door and three figures carrying what looked like lengths of pipe ran out and stopped, hands raised against the glare. Twin shadows floated to the ground behind them and one of the three turned straight into a front snap kick. A fresh explosion obscured them from view and when the flames receded, the other two opponents were down and out of the game. A dark-suited shoulder hit the concertina door hard, and our driver ground the accelerator pedal to the floor. As the fluorescent rectangle grew, the second point man gripped two groggy figures by the scruffs of their necks. He almost got them clear but van wheels hiccupped over two sets of shins as we thundered into the building, tyres wailing. Our driver brought the van to a squealing broadside halt that fired the four of us out the side door in a dead run.

  Bare feet on cool concrete, we pulled up in a lop-sided V-formation, Mr Cho half a step in front, the two point men joining us from the doorway, one on either side. The van engine roared, rubber tracks smoking as it shrieked to a halt facing the door. Squaring up to us, eight Koreans with bad haircuts and blank, street thug expressions fanned out in front of the phoney factory building. A warehouse office door behind them opened and out poured four more. There was no sign of Naz.

  Six against twelve was bad enough, but with every one of the twelve swinging an aluminium baseball bat, whichever way we looked at it, this was going to hurt.

  They formed a loose arc, far enough apart to swing their weapons, but close enough to make the line seem impregnable.

  Two of them slouched forward. One offsider and an obvious alpha male who was so ugly it hurt just to look at him. About thirty-five, he stood maybe five foot eight, with a bald full-moon head and facial features like fungi on a log. A black hat baddy straight from Korean Central Casting, a troll without the hair, he didn’t have an ounce of fat on him, and his unblinking black-brown eyes held not a trace of emotion. They didn’t even blink when Mr Cho roared:

  ‘CHOOM-BEE.’ READY.

  I feared for the innocents I had dragged into this, even if they were here for Mr Cho, a man they would follow into a burning house. By now I should be used to bringing grief upon the innocents around me. Miss Hong, Rose, Bobby’s family and Naz. And Jung-hwa. Now Mr Cho and his student friends were dragged into life-threatening roles in my private nightmare. These middle-aged dads owed me nothing, yet they were squared up to hired thugs who would merrily decorate the warehouse with their brains.

  If the alpha male gave a signal to his offsider, I failed to detect it. Leaping forward, the offsider flicked his bat high and brought it down in a deadly arc aimed at Mr Cho’s neck. What happened next was like a dance move made murderous. Mr Cho glided under the strike and with a windmill sweep of one arm pinned the attacker’s wrists under his left tricep. The attacker’s momentum drove him forward and down, Mr Cho going with him, legs bending until everything went into reverse and he drove upwards, his right forearm locked under the other man’s elbows. Through the offsider’s screams I heard a sound like fenceposts shearing, and the baseball bat rattled off the floor. The thug’s eyes turned opaque and he went rubbery at the knees even before Mr Cho folded him in two with a side kick that surely destroyed much of the man’s rib cage.

  Action erupted all around me. I sensed as much as saw other combatant pairs dance and strike with deadly effect. A glancing blow from a bat pitched one of our guys to the floor. The bat rose for a finishing strike until a flashing kick from Mr Cho changed the batsman’s looks forever, splatter trails of blood and mucus flying. Mr Cho whipped around to see another goon lurch towards him. He drove the knife-edge of his foot into the side of the thug’s knee. More screaming, and surely more work for the bone setters.

  Meanwhile, the alpha male chose me for his own. He presented one shoulder and crept directly forwards, primed like a batsman at the plate. I fell into the classic Tae Kwon-do defensive stance, left leg leading, feet at ninety degrees, arms front and high, fists lightly clenched. I had a vacuous knot in my stomach and a ready stance honed over thousands of gym hours. Up against a thug with no fear waving a baseball bat, I didn’t much like my chances.

  I went for him at floor level, feet first, legs scissoring around his ankles, body twisting like a crocodile death roll. He fell onto one hip, and I was back on my feet, measuring up my next strike, when a bat came at me from nowhere and nicked the crown of my head, setting off bells and knocking me off balance. The guy swinging it turned away to face one of Mr Cho’s men who swept in to my assistance.

  I dipped a shoulder and turned the hit into a forward roll that threw me back to my feet. The gang leader’s bat whispered through the air and rattled the floor behind me. I walloped both of his arms with a spinning kick that knocked the bat flying, and a quick feint sent the arms up. I half-spun again
and drove my heel deep into his midriff, but the bastard was tough, and he surprised me with a round-house right to the kidneys that brought us into a clinch, his face only inches from mine. I tried to head butt him but he dipped forward, and the clash of skulls hurt me more than it did him, but it distracted him long enough for me to clamp my left hand hard between his legs and jerked downwards. He gasped in pain, his arms fell and I twisted my hips, put every ounce of body weight behind the heel of my right hand, and drove it upwards, clean through the end of his ugly nose. Bone and flesh and cartilage turned to bloody pulp in my hand and his eyes rolled into the back of his head. He was unconscious before he hit the floor, and I wished he wasn’t. I wanted to wake the bastard up and do it to him all over again.

  One of our team, the young one who’d done the airport stunt with the golf balls, was down, eyes open and unblinking, a thin line of blood running from forehead gash to floor.

  Mr Cho held a plot of ground that he had made his own, four broken bodies lying around him like litter. A writhing tangle crossed between us: Mr Cheung going hand-to-bat with two opponents. Before I could react Mr Cho picked one of them out with an axe kick to the face and battered the other in the kidneys with an elbow strike. The goon twisted in agony, and Mr Cheung put him down with a straight-arm to the throat.

  Fast movement. Two men ran for the office door that four guys had come out of just minutes before.

  ‘Mr Cho,’ I pointed as I broke into a hobbling run, trying to ignore loud screams from various points in my body.

  One guy fiddled with the door handle. The other faced up to me, bat high and ready. Naz had to be beyond that door, so there was no way these two were getting through it before I did. I was so pissed off that all I could see was the door. Mistake. A full swing of the bat took me high on the upper arm and bounced me sideways.

  Numbing pain froze the arm long enough for me to fear for what came next, until Mr Cho arrived in mid-air with a flying front kick that caught the goon in the sternum. He fell straight back and his head rapped concrete with an eggshell crack. The second thug, face wide with panic, still struggled with the door. My friend and mentor flew at him, the thug side-stepped, and as Mr Cho blew the door open with both feet, he clothes-lined the other guy with a forearm to the side of the head. I followed Mr Cho in.

  Naz leaned forward in a padded armchair, wrists and fingers bound with heavy tape, ankles taped tight on either side of a solid concrete block.

  ‘Hi, Mr Cho.’

  After a strained attempt at a smile, she turned to me and her gaze cooled.

  ‘You took your fucking time, Brodie.’

  Chapter Thirty-four

  We were an hour into the trip to Seoul before Naz even looked at me.

  ‘Schwartz left about an hour before you showed up. He said that whether or not he saw me again was up to you. I don’t know what he was on about.’

  I was getting good at summarising the huge GDR con game, how it was vital to the survival of the debt-ridden K-N Group, and how my threat to bail out of the scam cost Miss Hong her life.

  ‘Schwartz gave me until midnight to hand myself in to the police and keep quiet about the GDR, or you were dead. Not in as many words, but that was the message.’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘I was there a few days ago, shooting pictures of the fake factory. We could hardly hear ourselves think for the noise of fighter jets flying overhead. When I spoke to him tonight on the phone, the background noise was enough to tell me where you were.’ I didn’t tell her that I remained uncertain until the moment I set eyes on her, but typical Naz, she read it somewhere in my body language.

  ‘Enough to take a chance on not handing yourself in before the deadline?’

  ‘We did alright, didn’t we?’

  ‘Mr Cho and his friends did.’

  Mr Cho was in the seat beside the driver, eyes front, face intermittently bleached white by lights from oncoming vehicles. His expression gave nothing away.

  The rear of the van was unfurnished. Six of us lay spread over the ribbed floor, backs to thin metal walls that buckled and flexed with the roar and rumble of passing traffic.

  The warehouse gamble had been kind to us. Mr Cho of course looked unscathed, while the rest of us wore only a variety of scrapes and bruises. The young guy who was knocked out sat in the corner. He had a cut on his forehead and one eye swollen shut, but his moody silence spoke loudly of a dented pride hurting worst of all. He had put everything on the line the same as his friends had done, and I felt for him.

  The Doppler-effect wail of a truck horn scared me from a shallow sleep busy with confused thoughts. I ached all over, especially around the shoulder that the last thug had caught with his bat, the same shoulder Naz was now using as a pillow. I tried to move my legs, but they stayed where they were, knees drawn up in front of me as if all lines of communication between brain and limbs were cut. I pushed at my thighs with the palms of my hands and waited for the agony of circulation regained. While excruciating pain tore through my leg muscles, I tried to recall the final sliver of the dream sequence that was interrupted by the wailing truck horn. Something to do with last night and how and why it happened. I had fallen asleep thinking how fortunate we were, which sparked another line of thought. Were we clever and lucky – or just plain lucky?

  The threat to Naz – and to the rest of us when we got to her – was real enough, but the way things worked out owed more to the presence of Mr Cho and his men than even I had previously thought, because the set of circumstances that led us to Cholla Province left too many questions unanswered.

  Why was Naz held so far out of town – and why was it so easy for me to work out her location? Schwartz had played me like a grifter, setting me up with sufficient clues to convince me I was being clever, when in truth he led me by the nose all the way to the warehouse. Even the timing of his call was probably calculated to let me hear military jets roaring overhead. I was duped.

  The misplaced conviction that I had discovered something vital nullified my immediate threat to the GDR and forced me out of my unknown place of sanctuary and into a zone where Schwartz held control.

  He even gave me enough time by throwing in an arbitrary midnight deadline. Why give me hours, when I could walk out of any building anywhere in Korea and inside five minutes turn myself over to the nearest policeman?

  The unanswered questions did not end there. Why surround one small woman with a hardened squad of mercenaries? The conclusion was shockingly obvious. Naz was the bait and I was the target. I was meant to find Naz – and the goons were there to make sure we both disappeared. Mr Cho and his men were not the only reason we were safe. They were they only reason we were still alive.

  There was mumbling in my ear, and Naz sat up and rubbed at her face. The pain surges in my legs at last receded to a dull ache, and I stretched them into a narrow gap between two prone track-suited figures.

  ‘You alright?’

  ‘Yeah. Sorry I was such a grouch.’

  ‘I deserved it.’

  ‘I know you did.’ In the gloom, I saw her face rise in a half-smile.

  I remembered. The videotape.

  ‘Did Mr Cho get a videotape to you before Schwartz’s boys picked you up?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t even get to see it because the camera battery was dead. Schwartz was delighted to get his hands on it.’

  ‘I really messed up there. It was the tape that put you in danger, but I thought you could work out why it was so important.’ I explained about fixing a video camera in my hotel room to film the fun with Miss Hong. Naz shook her head like a disbelieving mother.

  ‘Boys and their toys.’

  ‘I know. But this one could have been important, and I was banking on it helping me somehow.’

  Mr Cho turned around to lean over the seat back. ‘We can see it when we get back to Seoul.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I knew it was important, so I copied the tape to DVD before I g
ave it to Naz.’

  If I had the strength to raise my arms, I could have hugged him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  He fired me a look of reproach. ‘What was the purpose of the trip to Cholla?’

  I thought about that for a second. He was right, of course. ‘To protect Naz.’

  The tape was important, but our priority was to make sure that Naz was safe. And now, thanks to Mr Cho and his friends, both were safe and well. I lifted the aching arm and wrapped it around her shoulders. She didn’t resist.

  It was gone four o’clock in the morning when the driver pulled into a quiet lane that backed onto a line of houses hiding behind high walls topped with broken glass. Mr Cho murmured to the driver who sounded the horn, three short beeps, irregularly spaced. The neighbours must have loved these visits. I followed his gaze to a video camera high on a post next to a heavy metal gate hung with gleaming tiaras of razor wire. The camera pivoted and swept the alley in both directions before the gate pulled aside with a low electronic hum.

  I shook hands with the rest of the crew and thanked them as profusely as my language skills allowed. They waved me away as if I was making a fuss over nothing. Mr Cho spoke quietly to his friends before the van drove off and left the three of us facing the open gates.

  A door at the other side of a tidy courtyard opened. Mr Cho led us forward and shook the hand of a small man of about sixty. He wore an immaculately pressed yellow satin shirt and navy trousers with a beltline so swollen it looked in danger of letting go at any moment. Mr Cho made the introductions.

  ‘Alec, Naz, this is Mr Ryu. Mr Ryu is my good friend. We are safe here.’ Behind us, the gate hummed shut.