Chapter One: Duped

Treasure Island
© Fox

Slumped in a chair is how I remember him in the hinterland between sleep and waking, badly injured. Tense. Night was closing in fast as it does close to the tropics. A time of day I otherwise enjoy, but not now, not in the fall. At this time of year it fills me with melancholy and longing. I have the hunger of unsatisfied dreams.

He stirs, not for the first time but close to the last.

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much and today it kicked my ass.”

“Jesus, is that Marlow speaking?” I thought aloud.

“Marlow? You smart-ass. You haven’t a clue who he was or what he saw. And if I could, I’d beat myself off one last time right in front of you just to fuck with your sensibilities about what is truly decent. But let me tell you this about the road to hell, it’s paved with good intentions so before I take my last breath I’ll give you the heads up. They’ll come looking for me here before the sunrises tomorrow on this shit hole, and you, my friend, will be all the richer if you keep your mouth shut about what I’m about to tell, ‘cause it’s the last paving stone I’m gonna lay. And it’s a rich brick.”

“Come on Corey. You’ll be fine. Let me get you down to the hospital,” I offered meekly.

“The hospital. You think the doctors have a cure for what I’ve got. I’m givin’ off more x-rays than Hiroshima.”

“What the hell are you talking about? You’ve got a broken collar bone at worst.”

“Shut the fuck up and listen. They’ll take one snap of me and it’ll comeback as if they’d taken a shot of the sun. Do you have any red wine in this dump?”

“I don’t understand. Red wine? Of course, but you’re kidding, right?”

“To hell I’m kidding. It slows the process.”

“What process?”

“Radiation poisoning. You get me that wine and maybe I’ll be around long enough to line your limey pockets with more dough than Dunkin’s have squirreled away.”

“OK Corey. Slow down. I’ll get you a drink. You’re not making any sense.”

“You’d better bring a few bottles.”

I slipped into the kitchenette. He was right my place was a dump. It was tiny, dirty and rundown. I don’t know how I’d let it get like this; a perpetual launching pad but to where and for God only knows what purpose. It had utility but stuff all else and no love.

I’d known Corey for years. He had a job at AIT as a functions’ organizer but I suspected there was a lot more to this bloke than making sure the marquee was straight and the booze arrived on time. He spent forty percent of his year traveling abroad to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, even the friggin’ Horn of Africa. Who the hell needed his functions’ expertise in Nairobi? But he knew everybody and spoke to everyone. It went with the territory. No one is going to ask questions about why you’re speaking to the functions’ organizer. Everyone’s got a reason to talk to him. On the odd occasion, when he would invite me to one of these do’s, I’d skulk behind my drink and watch him work the room. He dressed like 007 and as incongruous as it seems to the reality of spying, I believe he was pulling it off. I walked back into the living area with a couple of bottles of Jacob’s Creek.

“You got that wine yet?”

“Here.”

He took the bottle and necked it.

“What away to go. God. Two weeks ago I was on the beach in Bali and now I’ll be lucky to see this week out.” He took another enormous swig from the bottle. He didn’t hand it over; it was clearly for medicinal purposes.

“Hell. I’m sorry Corey. What happened to you, man?”

“Listen Paul. I’m gonna give you the rundown here because basically I like you and I’ll be dead within a week or two. I don’t want you freaking out on me now ‘cause what I’m going to tell you, you probably don’t want to know but if I don’t tell somebody my life has been worth shit.”

“What is it mate?” I grabbed the bottle from his hand. “It’s cheap but effective.”

“If only that were true,” he managed a laugh at his own expense. “For 10 years, I’ve been working as contact case officer for Colonel Chang Hsein-Yi. We recruited him in the 60’s as a military cadet and have nurtured his development ever since. Ever heard of him?”

“No.”

“I’m not surprised, neither has the rest of the world, but they will have by press time tomorrow. He’s gonna go down in the annals of intelligence history as our greatest coup ever and I’m not gonna be a footnote. Que Será, I suppose.”

“Go on. I’m listening.”

“Last week, the Colonel came to me and told me he wanted out. He’s risen through the ranks to deputy director of Taiwan’s nuclear research institute. If he wants out it can only be one of two reasons either he’s been compromised or his mission is complete.”

“What do you mean by his mission is complete?”

“Since the Chinese tested their first nuclear weapon in ’64, Taiwan has been angling for their own bomb. They’ve been successful at it too. Throughout the 70’s they developed all the technology they needed and before we quashed their ambitions at that time, they were within only a few years of building the bomb. China has always threatened that should Taiwan get the bomb they would implement their first strike capability. The reality is nuclear capability is virtually useless for Taiwan. If Taiwan launched first, they simply lack the places to hide from a retaliatory attack. There’s no room for maneuvering so it has no strategic value, but they’ve persevered and now they’re with in months of developing it.”

“Months?”

“Months. Chang keeps an office at the Chungsan Institute. It’s a military set up right next to their nuclear energy research facility. That’s where I’ve been tonight. I went to collect him. Our plan was simple, because of his position as deputy director he was simply to fly to the States to give a regular briefing and then turn over all the documents he could collect on the program. He’s a cool one our Colonel Chang. Until I arrived there tonight, I thought he was leaving because we considered his mission complete, but it wasn’t exactly the case. He’d been compromised. He needed out and a little house keeping with it. When I got there he took me on a tour of the facility. This is a highly secure location and the Taiwanese wouldn’t let just anybody waltz around it, but my CIA cover is so transparent that they consider it an inspection. We’ve had cameras through out the whole facility for over a decade and known about their enrichment and plutonium extraction for almost as long, but we thought we’d put a stop to it.”

“So what happened to you? I mean, how did you get sick?”

“Suffice it to say he had me tickle the dragon’s tail”

“Jesus Corey. Don’t speak in riddles.”

“It’s an expression. During the Manhattan Project, a physicist conducted a risky experiment using two hemispheres separated by only a screwdriver blade. The experiment was known as “tickling the dragon’s tail” ’cause the dragon could turn around and burn you, I guess.”

“And did it?” I asked incredulously.

“It did for him and me this afternoon.”

“I don’t get it. What’s that got to do with you?”

“There was a story that Chung Ching Kuo had ordered two sets of lian dan-chi balls to be lathed for the director and deputy director of the nuclear research institute.”

“Lian dan-chi balls?” I asked.

“You know. Sometimes they are called health or massage balls. They’re those two kinda heavy balls you see old guys fiddling with in the park,” he smiled.

I felt pangs of admiration for Corey. He was obviously doing poorly, but he could still manage a little humor in his demise.

“Oh yeah. I know the ones,” I laughed emptily and then regretted it.

“Well, apparently Chung Ching Kuo had them made from plutonium for the directors as an ironic reminder of their responsibility. Nobody, I know ever believed it. It just seemed mad. He gave them to me as a gift when I saw him off at the airport.”

‘Wasn’t he afraid of the radiation?” I asked amazed at such cavalier handling of the most dangerous substance known to man.

“Huh. Plutonium by itself isn’t nearly as dangerous as people think. The radium we use in medicine releases much more radiation than plutonium. He had it in a beautiful thin-lead lined box, easily enough to absorb the radiation. Anyway what you’ve got to understand about these people who are about radioactivity all their lives is that they become blasé about it, even negligent. Perhaps that’s why Chung Ching Kuo had the health balls made. He’s no idiot.”

I could see Corey was struggling with the reality that he’d been fatally duped.

“Give me another tug on that wine buddy. I don’t know what’s making me feel worse the radiation, or my own stupidity. The first thing I did when I got back to my car was open the case. And you know somewhere in the back of my mind I knew when I opened that case I was done for, but it hadn’t all registered yet. I picked up those balls, they were slightly warm, and as I twirled them in my palm they touched and fuck.”

There were tears in Corey’s eyes now. I reached out and touched his arm. He instinctively repelled then yelled in agony as he felt the break in his collar bone.

‘Sorry Corey. Sorry mate.” How do you comfort a guy like this?

“When those balls touched there was a flash of blue light and it threw my arm back with such force it broke my fucking collar bone. That light is a sign of a chain reaction. A criticality accident they call it but this was no accident. Chang knew what he was doing. Thankfully, I hadn’t done it in the airport, you know? What a prick. What a frigging prick. Anyway so I’m done for, for sure. Stuffed.”

“And what happened to the balls?” My mind was now racing out of control. “Where did you put them?”

“They flew apart and just dropped onto the floor of the car. I picked them up and put them back in the box.”

“And?”

“They’re in the boot of my car.”

I stood up and instinctively started pacing the floor rubbing my hands over my face and eyes and through my hair trying to wake myself to the reality of Corey’s woes which I could sense were quickly becoming my own. I felt like asking him what the hell he was doing here landing me with all of this, but decency, curiosity and a sense of august at the frightening notion of Einstein not knowing what weapons would be used to fight World War III, but knowing for certain World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones, kept my tongue at bay and I forced myself to sit, listen, drink and think.

“So why do you think Colonel Chang would want to kill you? You must have known each other well enough.” I asked.

“That’s the 64 thousand dollar question. And more than that why does the CIA want me out of the picture? This ain’t the kind of stunt you can pull and hope to get away with unless you’ve got guarantees.”

“You think the CIA wants to kill you? Why?”

“You can’t just knock off your handler and then walk into the CIA offices, not without some kind of serious, serious cover. It can’t be anything officially sanctioned; it’s a rogue action, but it must be taking place within the CIA or he’d be walking into his own funeral.”

“It has to do with what you know about the plutonium production,” I ventured.

“Perhaps, but there’s more to it than that; there simply must be. I’ve got the highest weapons’ clearance available. Nobody is going to sweat what I know about plutonium production here. That’s my mission. It must be something they think I know.”

“Or something you know, but don’t know you know it?”

“You ought to get a job as a Defense Secretary; but, you’re right and whatever it is, it’s worth more than my knowledge about plutonium production- to somebody at least.”

“And that probably means it’s got a dollar and cent value.”

“That’s what I’m guessing too. If it were a military interest, I’d only be an asset so there’d be no call for killing me. The US government doesn’t care enough about money to have me killed over it, they can just siphon that off the masses, but they do care about power and an individual or a group of individuals would care about both, money and power.”

“So there’s money and power out there up for grabs, what’s knew about that?”

“Nothing, but for the fact that I must be awfully close to it; too close for their comfort and whatever it is, it’s attainable by an individual or I wouldn’t be a threat,” Corey gave an ironic smile. “I’ll be no threat to them now so they succeeded there, but you’re another story Paul. In the boot of my car, there’s a box of reports Chang and I put together over the past 10 years some of it’s in a kind of code, we were spies after all, and it might be a bit confusing but the answer’s there; it’s a complete record of my time with that asshole. I want you to get it and go. It’ll be a few days before the Chinese wake up to Chang.”

“But you said they’ll be coming tonight?”

“The Americans buddy or whoever the hell they are.”

“I can’t just leave you here Corey,” I said. “It’s just…”

“I’m dead already,” he smiled. Then “a blackout” not so unusual in Taiwan back in those days, but given the circumstances a power cut felt suddenly sinister.

“Look out the window. The powers on in every other building but ours. They’re here,” Corey whispered. “Down on the floor.” I went down on my haunches feeling slightly ridiculous.

“Is this for real, Corey?” He threw me his car keys as an answer. “Lane 391, Alley 8; as close as I could park.”

I scurried on all fours, trying to keep the lid on a rising panic, to my bedroom where I kept an earthquake bag with a change of clothes, passport, cash and departure ticket. It was a kit that had made me the butt of many jokes, who’d of thought?

“I’m going down to meet them,” said Corey. I lived in a fourth floor flat with no lift. “You gotta get out through the roof buddy.” All these old apartment buildings had roof access at the top of the stairs.

I slipped my kit over my shoulder pocketed Corey’s keys then on all fours we crawled to the door. I felt a little like Butch Cassidy and Sundance except when we stepped through that door I’d be heading away from the action and Corey straight into it. He was cool perhaps it was training or resignation I don’t know but he was cool and it injected me with confidence. My legs had been shaking when I stood, but they felt stronger now.

“Wait a minute! You didn’t see Lafors out there did you?” asked Corey his blue eyes blazing through the darkness. He’d read my mind; straight from Butch Cassidy.
“Lafors? No, why?” I played along.
“Thank God for that. For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.”

Then straight through the door. I bounded up the stairs and Corey started yelling in Chinese. “Wo zai zebien. Nimen zhao wo ma? Nimen zhao wo? I’m right here. Are you looking for me? Are you looking for me?” All with a “you fucker attitude” that was loud and brave and covered my sounds brilliantly as it echoed through the stair well. “Nimen yingai shang lai. You’d better climb the stairs. You lazy fuckers.” Corey kept raining abuse down the stairs until all the neighbors started coming out of their flats in an assortment of pajamas, underpants and wifebeaters, the Chinese home fashion show of the eighties. The whole scene cut a sordid picture as candlelight flicked on distressed faces, the grime on the walls and broken dusty window panes of the stair well. The road to hell.

“Corey-san. Kite kudasai. Boku wa peresento ga anata ni agiteiru.”

“Japs?” yelled Corey before he started bounding down the stairs yelling wildly and incomprehensibly in Japanese. I’d made it by this time to the roof and peered over to see Corey spin out onto the alley and straight into a pair of numchukers before being kicked to his knees. The numchuckers had abruptly silenced Corey’s ravings; a silence that was punctuated by the drawing of a Japanese saber. Corey wouldn’t have seen it coming but he would have heard it and probably welcomed it. He definitely raised his head; proud and defiant.