Yin Yang Tattoo (33 page)

‘Yoboseyo.'
Yes.
I paused for a couple of seconds:

‘Schwartz. It's me.' I had to keep him on the line. There was a pause as if he was taken aback by me calling, and that worked fine for me.

‘What do you want now?'

I paused again, straining for anything at all, the smallest clue. Did it sound as if he was speaking from within a large open space?

‘Brodie?'

‘I was thinking – ' Pause.

‘Thinking what?' Still silence, but not just silence, something more than that. His voice, despite the tinny phone speaker, boomed like he was in a huge space, not out in the open but in a large indoor location. I might be on the right track – but my silence had gone on for too long.

‘What do you – '

‘What if I do as you ask?'

‘What
if
you do?'
If only he'd keep talking.
I stayed silent, and he spoke again:

‘I already told you. And don't think I'm going to go through it again in detail. What do you take me for? You're probably taping this.'

I wished I had thought of that.

‘How do I know you'll do as you promised?' Still, there was an airy silence at his end, but could I hear something brewing in the distance? Was I imagining a steady drone, building up, getting closer?

‘That is not the issue, Brodie, and you know it.' He talked more loudly. The background noise
was
approaching, and growing fast.

‘What do you mean?'

‘It's what happens if you don't do as I – ' He gave up as the roar exploded to a crescendo, drowning him out before it receded quicker than it had arrived. ‘It's what will happen if you don't do as you're told that you should be concerned about.'

I had him. I knew that noise. It took an effort to keep the excitement out of my voice:

‘I'll hand myself in tomorrow.'

‘Not a chance. If I don't get a call from my police contact by midnight – ' He left the sentence unfinished and the line went dead. I put the mobile in my pocket.

‘Mr Cho, you are a genius. I told you about the fake factory in the warehouse in Cholla-do? He's there. The warehouse is on the edge of a military airfield. The roar I heard was fighter jets making low-level passes.'

‘Where is this warehouse?'

‘North of Kwangju, in open country, with rice fields all around, only one or two kilometres from the main highway. I can find it.' I was getting ahead of myself. I looked at my watch, and my heart sank. Seven p.m. ‘Schwartz only gave me until midnight to hand myself in to the police, and the warehouse is five or six hours' drive.'

‘Drive?'

He reached for a telephone book.

Seven of us wearing dark track suits with the name of Mr Cho's
dojang
on our backs approached the security checkpoint. This was the bit that worried me most, where an alert official might connect my face to the sketches and photographs on notice boards and newspapers all across the country. Never mind that I was using a Swiss passport that said the guy in the photo – who even looked a little like me – was Berndt Tischler. When I asked about it, Mr Cho just shook his head. Some things I didn't need to know.

We formed a ragged line for the X-ray machine and shoved our holdalls onto the rollers, Mr Cho first, with me close behind. As our bags disappeared into the machine, we shuffled forward casually.

Mr Cho walked through the detector frame. I glanced over my shoulder in time to see one of his students, the youngest one at the back of the line, stumble and go down hard. An airport gift shop bag burst against the polished floor, and eighteen shiny new golf balls flew off in eighteen different directions.

While every bystander within twenty yards watched four athletic men chase down bouncing golf balls I backed through the metal detector and past security guards whose smiles beamed everywhere except upon me. By the time the comic turn was over, Mr Cho and I were half way to the departure gate.

We took the nine p.m. to Kwangju, the last flight of the day between the capital and the biggest city in the country's south-west, and an hour later, we piled aboard a black van outside the Kwangju terminal building. I looked at my watch. We had just under two hours before the midnight deadline Schwartz had set. We might still make it, but only if I guessed right – and only if they stayed where I thought they were.

A little over one hour later the van pulled up a hundred yards from the tall, windowless warehouse building which, surrounded by the impenetrable darkness of rice fields, stood out in the glare of floodlights fixed along its high roofline. Glimmers of cool fluorescence slipped out from beneath a concertinaed goods entrance. Four empty cars occupied lined parking spots a few metres away from the doorway. From a mile across country came the unbroken drone of highway traffic.

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.