The Korean Intercept (18 page)

"In here, gentlemen! Right this way! The prettiest girls in Tokyo! Lap dances! Cheap drinks!" When Galt passed him on his way in, the man said, "Excellent choice, sir, and have a good—"

His words were lost beneath the assault on Galt's senses as Galt stepped across the threshold, into the club.

The floor and walls of the place were shuddering to recorded rock music that vied in decibel level with the inebriated hooting and hollering of drunken men. On small, round stages, placed strategically throughout the club, shapely young women danced provocatively beneath baby pink stage lights. The smoky atmosphere, the rowdy patrons and the slam-bang music combined to make it seem to Galt as if there was not enough oxygen in here.

He brought an elbow into play and nudged his way through to the American-style oak bar that ran the length of the club. The bar was lined three-deep with patrons. Galt stood at one end of the bar and beckoned a harried-looking Japanese bartender who wore a spotless white shirt and bow tie.

The bartender sidled over to him. "Yes sir, what you drink?" He had to shout over the surrounding racket.

Galt leaned across the bar, getting jostled from both sides. "I want Barney Markee."

"I not know him," the bartender said promptly, and turned his back on Galt to attend to a cluster of raucous American servicemen, some of whom had their arms around scantily clad "party girls," employees of the club supplied to help get the patrons drunk while they themselves drank watered-down cocktails before offering sexual favors—for a price, of course.

"I'll find him myself," Galt muttered under his breath.

There was a beaded curtain to one side of the bar, and he commenced elbowing his way in that direction. He saw that the archway led to a narrow stairway to the building's second level. Galt stepped through the archway and, with a last glance over his shoulder in the barman's direction, he saw the bartender pausing in his work to speak hurriedly into a house phone next to his cash register, his eyes on Galt as he spoke.

Galt climbed the stairs, two at a time, to a well-lighted landing. A carpeted hallway, lined with doors, stretched in either direction from the landing.

A pair of Japanese men, wearing casual slacks and tropical shirts, stood before the first door to the right. Each man was of average Japanese height and build, but each had obviously spent more than a little time working out. Their muscles bulged beneath their T-shirts. One of the men was replacing the receiver of a wall phone. There was no doubt in Galt's mind that the man had just finished speaking to the bartender. He glowered at Galt.

"What you want, cowboy?"

Shoulder to shoulder, they blocked Galt's approach to the door behind them as if they were sentries. The second one sneered, as if dealing with errant Americans was nothing new.

"No girls up here, buster. You go downstairs. Watch titty dancers. Get nice girl. Go next door. Good cat house."

"I don't want a cat house," said Galt. "I want to see Barney."

"Barney," the first one repeated. "That funny name, cowboy. You go now, or you get hurt."

The other one snickered. "No Barney. You Americans have strange names."

"Don't we, though?" said Galt. "And you know what's even more strange? Barney Markee happens to own this den of iniquity. Now doesn't that make it even stranger that you've never heard of your boss?"

The man on the left frowned. "Den of what?"

"I said take me to him," said Galt quietly, "or I'll take myself."

The one on the right snarled, "We take you, cowboy, out back and beat shit out of you, that's what we do."

They came at Galt in unison, the one on the right bringing up his fists, which were adorned with brass knuckles. His partner swung a leather sap out and up from a back pocket, arcing it around at Galt's head.

Galt clamped both of his hands like a vise around the wrist of the arm swinging the blackjack and shoved that wrist back so the sap sharply smacked the other man between the eyes with enough force to knock him off his feet, breaking his nose. Galt then brought the man's arm down across his raised knee. The crack! of the arm breaking was unusually loud in the confines of the hallway. The man dropped. He opened his mouth to shout his pain but, before he could, Galt released the broken arm, grabbed the man's head by either side and smashed his face into the wall. The man collapsed, sprawling across the carpet, next to his companion, a thin trickle of blood oozing from one nostril of his broken nose. Their ragged breathing filled the corridor. Galt turned when he sensed movement behind him.

Barney Markee had positioned his wheelchair in the doorway. He regarded the fallen men as he fired a cigarette from a Zippo lighter. Then he shifted his gaze to Galt through a cloud of exhaled smoke.

"Looks like I need to hire me some competent help. Hey, Trev."

"Hey, Barney."

Barney Markee was fifty-four years old, with owl-like features, a balding pate and deep, knowing eyes that were magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses. He had the gruff, authoritative manner of a big man, despite his diminutive stature in the wheelchair. Large-boned, gray-bearded, he possessed an easygoing personal style that, Galt knew, would have remained unchanged in the presence of the pope or a pimp.

Footfalls clumped up the stairway, and another pair of bouncers arrived. They took one look at the situation and threw themselves toward Galt. Barney raised a hand, halting them in mid-stride.

"Let him be," he commanded quietly. He indicated the fallen men. "Get these two out of here. They're fired. See that these bouncers bounce when you toss them out the alley door."

"Yes sir, Boss," both men chimed in unison like harmonizing parrots. They each tossed one of the unconscious bouncers over a shoulder and trundled them away.

Galt relaxed, stepping over to trade a firm handshake with the man in the wheelchair.

"Thanks, Barn. Sorry about the fuss."

Barney chuckled. "Hey, it's not like bonehead goons aren't a dime a dozen in this town… or anywhere else, for that matter." He back-wheeled his chair from the doorway. "Come on in, buddy. Help yourself to some coffee, if you dare."

The office appeared at first to be a hodgepodge of male disarray, but was in reality a utilization of every available space for stacks of books and plants. A tawny-colored pet ferret left its cage, and came over to make a sniffing circle around Galt before returning to the cage, completely disinterested. Classic jazz filtered softly from unseen speakers. The office's most prominent feature was the enormous plate glass window that provided an ideal vantage point, a bird's-eye view, of the crowded, smoke-filled, raucous strip club interior below. The office was obviously soundproofed, creating a strange effect, thought Galt, like viewing a silent movie nightclub scene accompanied by classical music.

Barney scanned the carnal madhouse beyond the glass. He frowned, emitted a growl of displeasure, and picked up a phone from beside a computer in a corner work area.

Galt saw the same busy bartender he'd spoken to moments earlier. The harried man picked up the house phone next to his cash register on what must have been its first ring. Galt turned to a coffeepot to draw himself a cup as Barney commenced barking orders into the phone like a military field commander.

"Those three sailors right in front of you," he snapped at the bartender. "They're fixing to tussle with those army guys next to them. I see it coming. Get some hostesses over there fast to level things off. And that jerk at table seven. I saw him pinching that lap dancer's titties just now, and that's a goddamn no-no. See that he's bounced."

He didn't wait to listen to the chattering reply across the connection, which Galt could hear from across the room. Barney hung up the telephone receiver. He wheeled around to face Galt.

Barney Markee had been struck by polio at age ten, and wheelchair-bound ever since. But this terrible illness, and life in a wheelchair, had in no way blunted Barney Markee's zest for life. It was much as when a blind person's system compensates with an increased awareness of his other senses. Trevor Galt III was to the manor born. Barney was from a far different background. His folks were live-in nanny and assistant to a rich family down the road from the Galts in rural Maryland. Barney's parents would have been called a maid and a butler in earlier times. They lived in a house behind their employers', and somehow Barney and Trev had become buddies around the age of eight. One of their favorite pastimes had been taking hikes in the woods around where their families lived. Barney couldn't do any serious hiking, obviously, but with Trev pushing the wheelchair, they'd make forays into the woods and have long conversations, discussing girls and movies and girls and what they would become when they grew up and, of course, girls… until that time came when they began actually dating girls instead of just talking about them.

After attending college, Barney had gone on to work professionally and with distinction in the field of psychology before he dropped out, utterly uninterested in the "bullshit politics" of that profession, as he had informed Galt at the time. Blessed with an IQ in the genius range, Barney had gone on to teach himself computers, mastering them to such a degree that Galt had been instrumental in arranging a "working" visit by his best friend to Fort Huachuca, the little known U.S. military installation in Arizona that straddles the U.S. border with Mexico. Huachuca is home to the Signal Corps, the "AT&T of the military" which rapidly deploys to places like Kuwait and Kosovo during international U.S. military operations. Fort Huachuca also handled a high-tech covert surveillance "listening station" for intercepting communications, everything from eavesdropping on closed-door government meetings in Mexico City to tapping cell phone conversations between drug dealers in Bogota. Such electronic intel is automatically routed to the agencies concerned. Galt had so availed himself of the Fort's "services" that, by the time he was assigned to the White House, he had managed to isolate several glitches in the Huachuca operation. Though far from computer literate enough to have any idea of how to fix such trouble spots, he had recommended his old friend Barney for the job, knowing that there would be a big enough government payday for his buddy to buy whatever lifestyle he wanted. After massive background checks, security clearances and the like, a process that had pushed Barney to being as grouchy and irascible as Galt had ever seen him, Markee traveled to the Arizona desert to not only fix those computer glitches but go on to completely overhaul and redesign the relay program software that rerouted encoded transmissions to Washington. The government drew on its best computer personnel for duty at Huachuca, and after Barney's overhaul, after witnessing this astounding self-taught computer whiz in action, the post commander had taken the unprecedented measure of requesting that he be permanently assigned in a civilian tech support role. The only roadblock was that, after his work was done, Barney had taken his fat paycheck and disappeared. That was the last time Galt had seen him, though Barney had given him this Tokyo address before dropping out of sight.

Now, Barney replenished his own coffee cup and regarded Galt over the rims of his Ben Franklin glasses that had slid to the tip of his nose. He took a noisy slurping sip of the bitter brew that he had always referred to as rocket fuel. The man in the wheelchair regarded him with an owlish gaze from behind thick glasses.

"So, did they give you a pass out of the White House basement? You're on the loose a long way from home, Trevboy." It was a name that Barney (and only Barney) had been calling Galt since boyhood.

"I'm more than out on the loose, buddy" said Galt. "I'm off mission. I'm in the cold."

"I have heard something about that, now that you mention it." Barney nodded to his PC. "I monitor the classified op tac nets the way some old boys back home monitor the police band for recreation."

"I know. So what do you know about me that I don't know?"

"For starters," said Barney dryly, "they're afraid you're about to start World War III. And I am not indulging in idle hyperbole." Barney's owlish gaze was dead serious. "I suppose you could conceivably know what you're doing."

"Do you know about the shuttle?"

Barney's glasses had slipped down to the end of his nose. He absently index-fingered them back onto the bridge of his nose, more or less. "I know everything."

"And that," said Galt, "is why I'm here."

Barney snapped his fingers like someone really disappointed. "Damn, and I thought you came all this way because you like the taste of my coffee."

Galt glanced into his cup and winced. "Is that what you call it?" He finished the cup's contents with a slurp and set the cup down. "We can't let the bad guys get their grubby hands on that shuttle, Barn."

"No one, as far as I can tell, is disagreeing with that."

Galt grimaced. "But they're not doing a damn thing about it. The president seems to have his hands tied. The military is on alert, but we're not even sending in a search and rescue team while everybody knows the North Koreans and the Chinese are doing everything but leveling those mountains to find a trace of the
Liberty
and its crew."

"You forgot to mention that the president's wife is not among the missing crewmembers."

"Yeah, I guess I did forget that. Are you suggesting that Kate being one of the astronauts is clouding my mind?"

Barney's shrug was one of nonjudgmental eloquence. "Just making an observation, is all." He nodded again to the PC. "I've been picking up plenty of traffic on you. They have a hunch that you've come to this part of the world."

"I'm willing to bet that all of Tokyo is wired for my arrival."

Barney chuckled. "And that's the kicker, isn't it? Because they know that you've got more ability than anyone they've got. Fact of the matter is, Trevboy I've been half-expecting you."

"And?"

"What the hell do you think? They want you home. All is forgiven."

"Right. World War III? Even if I make it home with my ass intact, it'd be a toss-up between which they do first, skin me alive or throw me into solitary for the rest of life."