“And you think this murder was carried out by Consular Operations?” Janson said.
Wyckoff bowed his head. “The murder and the subsequent frame—all of it is just too neat. Our son is not stupid. If he were somehow involved in Lynell’s murder—an utter impossibility in and of itself—he would not have left behind a glaring trail of evidence pointing directly at him.”
“In a crime of passion,” Janson said, “by definition, the killer isn’t thinking or acting rationally. His intellect would have little to do with what occurred during or immediately after the event.”
“Granted,” Wyckoff said. “But according to the information released by the Seoul police, this killer would have had plenty of time to clean up after himself.”
“Or time to get a running head start,” Janson countered.
Wyckoff ignored him. “Lynell’s body wasn’t found until morning. She was discovered by a maid. There wasn’t even a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. Whoever killed Lynell wanted her body to be found quickly. Wanted it to look like a crime of passion.”
Janson said nothing. He knew Wyckoff’s alternative theory was based solely on a parent’s wishful thinking. But what else could a father do under the circumstances? What would Janson himself be doing if the accused was his teenage son?
“Tell me, Paul,” Wyckoff said, dispensing with the formalities, “do you honestly believe that powers within the U.S. government aren’t capable of something like this?”
Janson could say no such thing. He knew what his government was capable of. He’d carried out operations not so different from the one Wyckoff was describing. And he would be spending the rest of his life atoning for them.
“Before I became a U.S. senator,” Wyckoff continued, “I was a Charlotte trial lawyer. I specialized in mass torts. Made my fortune suing pharmaceutical companies for manufacturing and selling dangerous drugs that had been pre-approved by the FDA. I made tens of millions of dollars, and I would be willing to part with all of it if you would agree to take this case. Name your fee, Paul, and it’s yours.”
For something as involved as this, Janson could easily ask for seven or eight million dollars. And it would all go to the Phoenix Foundation. A payday this size could help dozens of former covert government operators take their lives back.
And Janson had to admit, he liked the idea of looking closely at his former employer.
And if by some stretch of the imagination the U.S. State Department was indeed involved in framing the son of a prominent U.S. senator for murder, the government’s ultimate objective would likely have widespread repercussions for the entire region, if not the world.
“I have one condition,” Janson finally said.
“Name it.”
“If I find your son and uncover the truth, you’ll have to promise to accept it, regardless of what that truth is. Even if it ultimately leads to your son’s conviction for murder.”
Wyckoff glanced at his wife, who bowed her head. He turned back to Janson and said, “You have our word.”
2
Dosan Park
Sinsa-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
As the brutal cold burrowed deep into her bones, Jessica Kincaid couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being followed. She lowered her head against the gusting wind and stole another glance over her left shoulder but saw no one.
You’re being paranoid. You’re the one doing the following.
Across the way, Ambassador Young’s chief aide entered an upscale Korean restaurant named Jung Sikdang. Kincaid cursed under her breath. She couldn’t very well walk into the restaurant; Jonathan would recognize her right away. And she sure as hell didn’t want to wait around outside in the bitter cold for an hour while Jonathan enjoyed his evening meal. Damn. She’d been so sure he was heading straight to his apartment, where Kincaid could knock on the door and hopefully corner him alone. But no. An hour of surveillance, wasted.
After leaving the U.S. Embassy, Kincaid had headed north to the Sophia Guesthouse in Sogyeok-dong. It was her first time visiting a traditional hanok and she was instantly charmed. Fewer than a dozen rooms surrounded a spartan courtyard with a simple garden and young trees that stood completely bare in solidarity with the season.
Rather than poke around uninvited, she went straight to the proprietors, a husband and wife of indistinguishable age. Both spoke fluent English. Although wary at first, they gradually opened up to Kincaid once she agreed to join them for afternoon tea.
Seated on low, comfortable cushions, Kincaid asked the couple whether they had ever seen Lynell Yi or Gregory Wyckoff before their recent visit. Neither of them had. Nor had they personally overheard the loud argument that was alleged to have taken place the night of the murder. The guests who had overheard the argument—a young Korean couple from Busan—had already checked out. Kincaid had seen their home addresses listed in the police file Janson had obtained on the plane, so she moved on.
After tea, Kincaid asked if she might have a look around, and the couple readily acquiesced. As they walked through the courtyard toward the room where Lynell Yi’s body was found, the husband launched into a semicomposed rant about the disappearance of the hanok in South Korean culture. The one-story homes crafted entirely of wood, he said, were victims of the South’s “obsession with modernization.” As he pointed out the craftsmanship of the clay-tiled roof, he noticed Kincaid’s chattering teeth and explained that the rooms were well insulated with mud and straw, and heated by a system called ondol, which lay beneath the floor.
The wife took a key from her pocket and opened the door to number 9, the room in which Wyckoff and Yi had stayed. It was located in the newer section of the hanok. Kincaid was surprised to find that the two-day-old crime scene was already immaculate. There was no yellow police tape, no blood or footprints or any other evidence to be seen. According to the husband, a team had rushed in and cleaned the place up and down the moment the police indicated they were finished. Kincaid made a mental note to check whether this was normal procedure in the Republic of Korea.
The room itself was cozy, about half the size of a one-car garage. But it was also elegant in an understated way. There were no beds or chairs, just traditional mats, a pair of locked trunks, and a small color television set you probably couldn’t purchase in stores anymore. She’d seen the room in evidence photos, but the pictures didn’t do the place justice.
Kincaid walked to the window, which was made of a thin translucent paper that allowed in natural light. She placed her hand on one of the speckled walls and thought that if she gave it a solid punch, her fist would land in the next room. So much for proving that fellow guests couldn’t possibly have overheard an argument between the victim and the accused. But what truly puzzled her was that the police noted no signs of a struggle. Given the size of the room, that seemed all but impossible, especially considering the fact that Lynell Yi had apparently been the victim of manual strangulation.
“Tourists from the West still love to stay in hanok,” the husband said, collapsing her thoughts. “They do not come to Seoul to stay in a high-rise they can see in New York City or London.”
Kincaid nodded. She understood his passion, and unlike Janson, she could certainly understand why the young lovers might have slipped away from their modern apartment nearby to experience an amorous night in a traditional Korean home. Maybe she was just more romantic than Paul—or maybe Paul had previously been inside a hanok and had been reminded of the six-by-four-foot cage he’d been kept in during the eighteen months he spent as a prisoner of the Taliban in Afghanistan. That would certainly be reason enough for him to dismiss the hanok as a desirable place to stay. Either way, Kincaid didn’t think Janson’s theory that the young couple had been on the run held much water.
Following her visit to the Sophia Guesthouse, Kincaid waited in line for a dish of spicy chili beef then headed south back to the U.S. Embassy. By then it was nearing five o’clock Korean time, and she was hoping to catch Jonathan exiting the e
mbassy after calling it a day. Jonathan was probably in his mid- to late twenties, not a teenager but certainly closer to Lynell Yi in age than most people employed at the embassy. And when Kincaid asked if there was anyone in the office who knew Lynell Yi well, the ambassador’s glance toward the doorway made her suspect that Jonathan might hold some of the answers to questions she had about Yi’s job, maybe even her relationship with Gregory Wyckoff.
Jonathan exited the embassy at a quarter after five and walked to the subway station at Chongyak. There he took the 1 line, and Kincaid hopped into the subway car trailing his. He got off just two stops later and boarded the 3. On the 3 train, he seemed to settle in for a lengthy ride. And lengthy it was; he didn’t step off the train again until they were south of the Han River in Gangnam-gu, the district made famous—or infamous—by that obnoxious pop song Kincaid heard over and over at clubs around the world.
Sweet Jesus. Now that she’d thought about it, she couldn’t get the damned song out of her head.
Kincaid continued to watch the restaurant. As she held her arms across her chest against the cold, she experienced that feeling again. That odd sensation that while she was watching Jonathan, she too was being watched. But by whom?
She searched the faces of the few people on the street braving the freezing weather. She eyed a group of teenagers huddled at the far corner of the park. She counted four males and two females, all probably under the age of eighteen. An unlikely bunch of spies, to say the least.
To her left, she spotted a vagrant hunched over on a park bench.
A vagrant? In these temperatures? How could he possibly survive the night?
The sun was dipping low behind the mountain; dark was falling fast. If she didn’t identify her stalker soon, it would be all but impossible. She reached into her pocket for her phone to call Janson but then thought better of it. She’d already informed him that she’d followed Jonathan to the restaurant. She could handle this on her own.
She turned away from the restaurant, retreating back into the park. The group of teens paid her no attention. The vagrant didn’t stir. Two males were walking fast straight toward her, but as they approached she noted they were holding hands, exposing their fingers to the cold. In this weather, that was true love.
A minute later she moved past the couple, deeper into the park. She stole another look over her shoulder. Had any of the people she’d seen earlier followed her? None that she could tell. But she felt a pair of eyes on her nevertheless.
Kincaid quickened her pace as her pulse sped up and her head filled with images of men in fedoras and dark trench coats, with handguns hanging at their sides.
In the center of the park, she spun around and spotted movement in a copse of trees. An animal? No. Unless a grizzly bear escaped from the Seoul Zoo, this creature was too large to be anything but a human being.
She continued moving forward as though she’d seen nothing. But she heard a rustle and was suddenly sure that whoever was following her knew he’d been made. Which meant that he was probably a professional.
With no one else in sight and the cover of dusk protecting him, her attacker finally made his move and launched himself out of the shadows.
Kincaid didn’t hesitate, didn’t bother looking back, just took off in a sprint across the park in the direction of the river. Over the shrieking gusts of wind she heard her pursuer make contact with bushes and low tree branches as he cut a parallel course north toward the Han, attempting to overtake her.
But Kincaid was fast. Fastest in her class at Quantico, where her professional life began. In the time since she’d left Virginia to join the FBI’s National Security Division, she’d put on a few years but not a single extra pound. And her world hadn’t paused since she’d been stolen away by the State Department after catching the eyes of some spooks from Consular Operations.
It was times like this when brimming with confidence counted, and that was a trait she’d had in spades all the way back to her childhood in Red Creek, Kentucky. She’d taken that confidence with her when she’d boarded a Greyhound bus, leaving her daddy behind for the first time in her life. And over the years that confidence had been refined, first by the Bureau, then by Cons Ops, and most recently by Paul Janson.
She charged through a row of bushes and found herself back on a street. She paused a moment to catch her breath, which was billowing in large white puffs before her eyes. Through the mist she eyed a taxi, and her arm shot up almost instinctively.
The orange taxi slowed and pulled to the curb and Kincaid opened the door and dove into the backseat, shouting, “Go, go, go.”
As the taxi peeled away Kincaid raised her head just in time to see a tall Korean man breaking through the bushes, stopping on a dime, then raising his arms with a gun in his hands. She watched him take aim and nervously waited for the sound of a gunshot, the shattering of window glass, the buzz of a bullet as it streaked by within inches of her face.
Mercifully, the assassin never fired.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
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Acknowledgments
The Covert-One Novels
About the Authors
Praise for the Covert-One Series
Teaser
Newsletter
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Myn Pyn, LLC
Excerpt from The Janson Equation copyright © 2015 by Myn Pyn, LLC
Cover design by M80 Cover photo of man © CollaborationJS / Arcangel Images
Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Jacket design for The Janson Equation by Michael Boland for The Boland Design Co.
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ISBN 978-1-4555-7757-6
E3
Robert Ludlum, The Geneva Strategy
(Series: Covert-One # 11)
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