The Love Trap by Nicole French

7

Present

After having yet another particularly vivid set of dreams about Eric and me the night before, I couldn’t stop thinking of that first, furious night. The way he had called me pretty girl all night long, imprinting my mind with the term the way he penetrated the rest of me. We didn’t sleep that night, and by morning, I was sweaty, sore, and completely his.

Maybe it was that fury that drove me as I reluctantly took Eric’s and Cho’s advice to lie low while Cho poked around the towns where the Hwaseong murders had occurred, looking for connections to John Carson. Follow the money, said every investigator I had ever worked with. So while I waited, that’s exactly what I spent the next day doing, much to Tony’s relief.

“Here’s what I want to know,” I said to Skylar as I clicked through a few more pictures on my computer. “What in the hell was he doing in South Korea to begin with? I can’t find anything. How can he be such a fucking ghost?”

I was steadily building my own digital notebook of research, listing every known company in every village and neighborhood in Hwaseong connected to those crimes. Chariot might have been private, but there had to be some records of its holdings, right? And maybe if that history couldn’t tell me exactly why John Carson was spending so much time in Korea in the late eighties, maybe it would tell me why he came back. And where he would have taken my mother.

Unfortunately, since Chariot wasn’t a publicly traded company, I had absolutely no access to that information either unless we could find a private investor willing to divulge the information. Another dead end.

“Hold on,” Skylar said as she stirred a pan of scrambled eggs, chatting at me through her iPad.

It was about seven in the morning back in New York, where they were awaiting Eric’s hearing. She beckoned to someone off the screen.

Brandon appeared, and with a horsey grin, he carried me over to what looked like the other side of the counter in the palatial Airbnb they were renting.

“You’re in luck,” Brandon said.

I sat up. “Tell me everything.”

“Well, as you know, private companies don’t have to report shit to the public. But they still have to be held accountable to their investors, if they have any. And, as it happens, Chariot had one investor Carson couldn’t quite shake after he took over. Her name was Celeste de Vries.”

My jaw dropped. “What?”

Brandon clicked his tongue. “Eric really should have spent more time with his grandma before she died. He might have learned that he was about to inherit a quietly effective five percent of Chariot Industries. Celeste apparently invested in Carson’s company on the ground floor.”

“What? Why would Celeste invest in Chariot?”

Brandon shrugged. “Honestly, I doubt she was the one who did it initially. It looks like Eric’s grandfather initially invested in 1983 or so. Eric said that’s right about when his father and Carson were both tapped. Granted, I don’t know all the ins and outs of the Janus society, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that all the members support each other’s business ventures. They are probably all constantly sticking fingers in each other’s pies.” He held up a handful of papers. “Nina brought these over last night when we arrived in town. Apparently they were in the files collected from Celeste’s old apartment. ”

“What are these?” I looked eagerly at the screen, craning my neck as if somehow that would help me see the blurry files better. Fucking technology. Maybe everyone was right. Maybe I should have stayed in New York.

“Reports for the last twenty-five years or so. These are the ones from the late eighties. Right after John Carson took over. Give me a second; I’ll scan and send you the encrypted files.”

A few minutes of chatting with Skylar later, my screen faced her and Brandon while they ate breakfast, and I looked through the pdfs Brandon sent.

“Here’s Johnny,” I sang as I clicked around, seeing signature after signature of the same pompous name I was coming to hate.

“What?” Skylar asked, clearly befuddled.

I shook my head. Was I the only one who thought it was funny that my maniacal biological father shared the same name as the legendary talk show host?

“Chariot Technics,” I murmured, looking through a list of acquisitions from 1987 and ’88. “Carson Electronics. Parthenon Chemical. God, look at all these loopty-loos. He was really trying to say something with his autograph, wasn’t he? Damn, he really bought up the joint too. How many subsidiaries did he found?”

“Carson wanted to expand when he took over, but he probably wanted to do it quietly,” Brandon said.

“He wanted something,” I replied. “Chariot operated in the red for three years after these. Jesus, what kind of business model is this?”

“A smart one,” Brandon said. “All those companies you just named make different parts necessary for a bunch of things that Chariot sells. He was cutting out all the middle men. It made it possible for Chariot to reenter ammunitions and basically take it over. Especially with the Asian market.”

I clicked a few more times. “These are all located in Hwaseong too. I guess we have our connection to this region.” There were a few outside the limits of South Korea’s most populous province, but nearly all of the companies newly acquired during that period were here. Except one. I frowned as I scrolled through the list of investments from 1989. “What’s KEPCO E&C?”

Brandon stilled on the screen. “What?”

“In 1989, Chariot purchased a whole bunch of shares from a company called KEPCO. What’s that?”

Skylar was watching her husband curiously as he set down his fork.

“That’s the Korean Electric Power Corporation,” Brandon said. “It’s still majority owned by the South Korean government, but they opened it up to foreign investment in 1989.”

“They’re headquartered in Seoul,” I said. “But it looks like right after that, Chariot also leased a bunch of land in…let me see…” I typed an address into Google Maps. “Goseong is up in the northeast, close to the North Korean border.”

Brandon started. “Wait, what?”

Skylar put down her mug of tea. “What is it?”

“Hold on a second.”

While Brandon got up to find his own computer, Skylar and I blinked at each other through the webcam, then waited patiently while he clicked around. When he looked up again, he wore a very peculiar expression.

I frowned. “What’s with the face, Colombo?”

Brandon swallowed. “That site in Goseong is home to a nuclear reactor. Started in the late seventies, abandoned when KEPCO ran out of funds to make it work on their own, and then finished in late 1989.”

“But that would be for energy, right? Do the South Koreans have nuclear weapons?”

Brandon shook his head. “They have the abilities, but they signed non-proliferation treaties. Their neighbors to the north, though, haven’t been so obedient. I’d have to check with Ray, but I’m pretty sure that everything those companies made together adds up to nuclear weaponry. Well after South Korea agreed to stop producing.”

I sat back. “Come again?”

Brandon abandoned his computer and edged closer to Skylar’s webcam. “I’m not a UN inspector or anything, Jane. But I’d bet money that John Carson was involved in nuclear weapons production in the late eighties. And given the proximity of that reactor to the border, I’m starting to wonder if it was maybe something to do with the North Koreans, not the South.”

“Brandon, that’s kind of a lot of jumps, don’t you think?” cautioned Skylar, though she looked just as terrified as I did.

“Red, this is just a working hypothesis. But here are the pieces: In 1985, South Korea joined 189 other countries in non-proliferation. We know that North Korea asked China and the Soviets to help them establish nuclear energy capacity. Initially, they both said no…but then Russia said yes. And we also know that quickly developed into warfare technologies. But the how is still a bit of a mystery.”

Skylar and I both remained still.

“What if…what if…John Carson had a hand in it?” Brandon continued. “He inherits a small munitions company in the mid-eighties, but now Chariot runs at two of the nuclear laboratories here on the Eastern Seaboard and funds several of the other major nuclear research centers. What if he was engineering nuclear proliferation in North Korea to line his own pockets? Until everything with the Soviets went to shit at the end of the Cold War?”

“He was planning to…” I shook my head. “You don’t think he was planning to sell nuclear weapons to the North Koreans. Really? That would be straight-up treason.”

“It would. But John Carson doesn’t strike me as someone who cares much about the rules. And like you said, he was in the red. He was trying to grow, at whatever the cost.” Brandon shrugged. “Like I said, it’s just a hypothesis.”

“It doesn’t explain what he was doing with the women in 1987,” I said.

“No,” Brandon said. “But it explains what he was doing in Korea to begin with. It explains why he left. And it explains why maybe he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know he was there in the first place.” He tapped a pen on the desk. “These murders…didn’t you say they stopped for a couple of years?”

“After 1989,” I confirmed.

“Right after the Berlin Wall fell,” Skylar added.

“So, think about it. The USSR collapses in the early nineties. Carson and Eric’s dad pull out of the deal as the Russians step back from their own work in Pyongyang. Skip forward a few decades…I wouldn’t say those threats were ever neutralized, but now the Russians and the North Koreans have been a lot more…active together…in recent years,” Brandon narrated. “Especially considering how, ah, warm the current administration here is toward their endeavors. So maybe that’s why Carson’s in Korea now, Jane. Maybe it has nothing to do with your mother. Maybe he’s just checking on his investments after biding his time for the last thirty years, and she just happens to be with him.”