Yin Yang Tattoo (15 page)

He drove with the practised ease of a professional who spent much of a long working day in dense traffic. Smoothness and confident arrogance in equal measure are the true assets of the big city chauffeur; this guy never missed a gap, however small – and where there was no gap he made one. When a battered taxi cut across our bows to make an insane late exit from the expressway, my man hardly let off the gas and kept his hand away from the horn. As a dozen other car horns raged, I took my foot from the footwell where it had lunged involuntarily for the brakes, and said in Korean, ‘Crazy sonofabitch.'

Chang's driver nodded in silent agreement, eyes sparkling and shiny skin tightening across high Mongolian cheekbones, accentuating his badly-set nose.

At K-N Towers the sight of the Chairman's Mercedes nosing onto the narrow rampway scared a rushed salute from the security man in the glass cabin as we accelerated beneath the barrier, spiralled downwards, rubber screeching, and pulled into a reserved space. Before I even reached for my seat belt another uniformed figure held open my door and pointed me towards a private elevator. Inside it, the guard used a key to access the only floor available before he stepped backwards and saluted the doors closed.

The lift rushed skywards fast enough to make my ears pop, and I hardly heard the muted ping as the doors opened into a private hallway, where the same middle-aged PA who dealt with me yesterday bowed a forced welcome.

‘This way.'

At the heavy wooden entrance I watched her do the trick with the security pad and swing the big door inwards.

Chang was sitting in the same seat he had occupied when I walked out on him the day before, and he showed no signs of having spent much of the night dealing with the police. Schwartz sat in the other seat next to Martinmass the banker, who had divined a third matching armchair from somewhere. The man seemed incapable of hiding his feelings, and right now he looked on the verge of blowing a gasket.

Chang waved me to a straight-backed wooden chair that towered over the low coffee table, which bore only three cups. The pretence of politeness was gone.

‘We spoke yesterday about the importance of the GDR to my company.' It was not a question, but a statement.

My plan was to stay calm. ‘I am facing a murder charge, and you want to talk business?' So much for the plan. Schwartz looked at me with undisguised contempt.

‘Shut up and listen.' He was enjoying this. Martinmass cracked his knuckles. Chang spoke again: ‘I am in a very difficult position now.'

Not as difficult as mine. Or Miss Hong's.

‘I had nothing to do with – '

‘Korea does not have the tradition of tabloid journalism that exists in your country, but things are changing here, and any connection to this nasty business of yours could have very damaging consequences.'

My nasty business.

‘Do you really think I killed her?'

‘Some say I have already done more for you than you deserve.' Schwartz and Martinmass nodded in unison. Chang went on:

‘I convinced Detective Kwok not to put you under arrest – '

‘I appreciate that, but – '

‘Let me finish. I am trying to protect the K-N name, but if you are found guilty – '

‘I didn't do a thing to Miss Hong.' I was shouting. He waited to be sure my outburst was over.

‘If you are
found
guilty, it will not only damage my company, but it will cast a bad light upon me personally.'

‘What about me? I am innocent.'

‘Your guilt or innocence is of no interest to me. My only concern is K-N Group, and at the moment that means the successful implementation of the GDR.'

He sat back as if there was nothing more to add, leaving me still in the dark.

‘So what's your point?'

Chang looked to Martinmass, who lifted a heavy handful of printed materials from his lap and let them fall to the table. With an involuntary start I jumped in time with the coffee cups. Prospectuses for the GDR. They had been busy.

It was your typical four-colour corporate hard-on. I have worked on hundreds of them, commercial profiles that opened with the requisite cliché-ridden corporate portrait, before jumping quickly into sales mode, touting the company's latest venture in page after page of upbeat prose and glossy illustrations, many of them blatantly diversionary.

Much of the gloss and almost all of the photographs were down to me. A sweet twilight view of K-N Towers faced the introductory passage watched over by a tight headshot of Chang. I speed-read it. Unbridled optimism over the GDR and the future of South-North economic cooperation that hinged on the success of K-N's visionary investment in the North Korean manufacturing sector.

I never tire of looking at my own photographs when they are well laid-out, but as I flicked from page to page, fears confirmed sent beads of sweat running down my spine. For days I had known I was in the shit, but now I had an idea how deep. I was up to my neck in the stuff.

It was what came after the introductory pages that scared me. A pictorial feature, ostensibly on K-N's business activities in the North, most of the pictures selected from the stock I supplied Mr Rhee in London. The camera may not lie, but wrapped up cleverly in the right text, it
can
tell a story far removed from the truth.

The text told of clothing industry start-ups in the North, factories already in production and exceeding targets, much of the output destined for high-demand export markets in China, Russia and the old Eastern Bloc. It explained that textiles were no more than a modest beginning to a multi-billion-dollar master plan; supposedly in place were planned K-N sister plants for consumer electronics, heavy engineering, shipbuilding and car production aimed at next door's booming Chinese market. Splashed throughout were my shots from the fake factory in Cholla province, their credence shored up by genuine North Korean street scenes drawn willingly from my London files. To my fast-growing list of grievances I could add the fact that we had not agreed on a fee for the usage of those stock pictures, but maybe now was not the time to bring that up.

To pull off this sort of illusion the pictures were everything, and the photographs enjoyed a cohesion and unity of quality and film stock and photographer's angles and vision that came together seamlessly. As a package it presented credibility that money could not buy, except that the mere promise of money had brought me running all the way from London.

Just in case I was still kidding myself, there, staring out from the inside back page, was my portrait taken from my own portfolio. Below it were two paragraphs that inflated my role as corporate advisor and researcher for documentation backing K-N's Global Depository Receipt. Alec Brodie, editorial and corporate photographer of international repute, whose client list included some of the world's best-known news and business publications, and
‘whose recent work in North Korea on behalf of K-N Group so ably illustrates the visionary potential of the Group's investment in the North.'
Talk about being caught between a rock and two hard places. Major-league corporate fraud, bankruptcy – or a murder charge. Or all three.

Chang plucked a tiny mobile from his shirt pocket and pressed a soft pink fingertip to one button. I thought I heard the answering chirp of a phone nearby before the door from the corridor blew open and three men, Chang's driver one of them, came straight for me. Before I could react the driver had me in a headlock. His friends took hold of one wrist each and twisted hard enough to make me squeal, which the driver put a stop to by moving the headlock up to cover my mouth with the crook of an arm that felt like it was made of mahogany and reeked of stale cigarette smoke. As I fell from the chair I kicked out, sending cups flying but doing nothing to put off my attackers, one of whom responded by leaning a heavy knee across my thighs. I was helpless.

No-one appeared in the least surprised. Schwartz looked smug and Martinmass clearly enjoyed the show, eyes flicking excitedly from me to Chang and back again. Chang spoke:

‘Geoff doesn't trust you. Ben agrees with Geoff, and I see no point in questioning their judgements, do you?'

My face buried in the chauffeur's jacket sleeve, I took that for a rhetorical question.

Chang nodded to Schwartz. While my captors manhandled me into position Schwartz unbuttoned my shirt down to the waist, ran his hands across my chest and around my back, then loosened my trousers to check inside my beltline, and patted down my pockets and both sides of my legs. He winked at me then he pulled off my shoes and squeezed my socks before shaking his head at Chang who, with a raise of his chin, signalled that I be released. My three attackers brushed their hands over their suits and backed out the door as Chang spoke to me.

‘What we have to discuss here goes no further. We have to be sure you are not wearing any kind of recording device.' While I tried and failed to regain some sort of composure, Chang continued.

‘Do you have any idea how far Korea has come in recent decades? Forty years ago we were the poor boys of Asia, lower down the economic ranks than even the Philippines and Burma. In the sixties the West laughed at our pleas for investment but today, every EU member state is on its knees at our door, begging us to build new factories to shore up
their
run-down economies. Korea is now the twelfth-largest trading power in the world.'

I waited for him to get to the point.

‘You know Koreans are driven. We are committed. We put everything we have into anything we do, whether it is business, sport, politics or religion. Look at the spectacular success of the Korean Olympics or the World Cup we shared with Japan. Outsiders poured doubt and scorn on us until we showed them how to run major international events without so much as a hiccup.

‘K-N Group is no different. I started out on my own, travelling the world from one trade fair to the next, nothing to show but a suitcase full of textile samples and a list of Korean suppliers desperate to work on any order I sent them, never mind how small it might be. One telex from anywhere in the world set production lines rolling.

‘Today, over fifty thousand Koreans work for K-N Group. Fifty thousand families are dependent on the company. But now the Group is in trouble, and if I don't sort out the problems, every one of those jobs is in danger. So now we,' he waved at himself and Schwartz and Martinmass, ‘We have a way to turn it around, to get the Group started on the road back to profitability, to safeguard those jobs.'

‘And this is it?' I slapped a hand on a prospectus. ‘A huge shell game built on a non-existent North Korean investment plan?'

‘The plan exists, though perhaps not quite on the scale presented here. This is about much more than investment in North Korea. It is the new beginning for the Group, something that will draw investment from all over the financial world.'

‘Driving up your share prices in the process.'

Chang drew me a look of pure contempt. ‘You Westerners take
such
a short-term view of things.'

It was Schwartz's turn to butt in:

‘This guy is a nobody who came running at the first sniff of money – '

‘Money I've seen not a penny of.'

‘You could still see your money,' said Chang.

‘Could?' I shook my head in disbelief. ‘Could?'

‘It is simple enough. If you want the fee, all you have to do is your job.'

‘I came here to take photographs.'

‘That remains a major part of your job.'

‘What's the rest? Helping pull the wool over the eyes of investigators who can't get near North Korea to see these non-existent factories for themselves?'

Schwartz was furious: ‘I get it now, asshole – you're just angling for a bigger share for yourself.'

‘You forget that I haven't seen a dollar of my fee.'

Chang looked at me over the rim of his coffee cup. ‘If you don't start showing some interest in what we propose, you never will.'

There it was, on the table at last. Blackmail.

No wonder they were so cagey about security that they insisted on the heavyweight frisking before the real agenda emerged. Chang spoke again:

‘You seem to forget that it is only thanks to me that you are not facing a murder charge. That is, not
yet
.'

Martinmass and Schwartz exchanged knowing looks. Chang continued:

‘Finish your assignment, do as you are told and go back to London with a handsome fee. We know you need the money. You get paid well for your role, and nobody gets hurt.'

What about Miss Hong?

‘Do I have a choice?'

‘There is the option of a very public trial whose verdict will be a foregone conclusion. Followed by maybe a year or two in jail while you await the death penalty. A process that I will do nothing to obstruct.'

I tried to suppress a shiver.

‘I still don't get it. This is worth hundreds of millions to K-N, right?'