Joan Rosely Ryan’s appearance created the first general meeting of all the employees at the Principal Financial Group office.  Everyone was dancing, singing, and drinking God knows what kinds of mixed concoctions.  It was a madhouse, and I was struck mostly dumb.  The woman was an expressive freight train of a personality, totally unlike anything I had seen when I was suffering from serious dehydration coming out of the desert.

“You,” I said to her, after things calmed down a bit and I got the music turned down.  “Settle, and listen,” I went on seriously.

“Do I call you sir, doctor, or boss, or what, from here on out?” she asked.

I noted that she was dressed and made up like never before, and the package was not unattractive at all. Not too much, but maybe just right to turn heads a little as she centered into her role as an emergency medical technical nurse.

“You need some training and some testing since you’ll be flying a lot on small aircraft,” I said to her, waving away the small drink in a plastic glass she held out to me.

“Nice touch,” I commented, pointing at the little flag sticking up out of the upside-down cone shape of the thing.  It was a Marine Corps flag, so the woman had done some homework, it appeared.

I settled Joan down and gave her more details about what training and assignment she would have, and then made sure the office personnel dispersed and the place became peaceful again.

I was still beaten down from the prior activities, so I headed home to get some rest.  Once there, I showered and went to bed, hoping I’d wake up in some shape to board the flight to L.A. and then on to Korea.

Morning came, but I was still a mental and physical mess.  Mary, sensing my condition, volunteered to drive me to the airport.  We didn’t talk much on the way.

I boarded the aircraft in bad shape.  Mary had gone into a pharmacy and been forced to sign a register to purchase codeine cough syrup without a prescription  The syrup was for me.  Not because I had a cough but because I needed to somehow accommodate getting on a series of airplanes to travel thousands of miles to places I didn’t care the least about and leave everything I was trying to build behind. The drugstore part of the huge grocery operation near our home called Albertsons would not let me sign the register again.  I’d purchased a bottle two days before and they had some sort of pharmaceutical rule about the volume of the opioids being ordered by the same patient in the system.  That she would do what she was doing was not only astounding it was nearly unbelievable.  Why would she support this half-assed drug assist to help me get to Korea where she really didn’t think I ought to be going?

She walked out of the store, carrying a small paper bag.   ‘

“Next time have your idiots do this for you,” she said as she got into the front passenger seat and tossed the bagged bottle at me. “I’ve no idea how you expect to drug yourself for the flights, make the connections, and then somehow function when you get there and I’m not going to give it a lot of thought while you’re gone except to say that we can’t keep living this way…at least not for long.”

We didn’t speak again, not even when I got out got my bags and she drove away.

“Cold as the driven snow,” I murmured under my breath, letting the outside luggage guy take my bags except for the Hartmann briefcase which I kept close.

I walked inside and headed for the gate.  Once I got close I found a men’s room, went into a stall and downed half a bottle of the cough syrup.  Then I sat down to wait.  It took ten minutes for it to hit me, and a gentle calm came over me.  I had come to understand that the feeling was inside me, not exhibited to those outside of me.  My sphere of influence increased with the usage of the drug and all depressive thoughts disappeared.  I could do the mission.  I could sleep on the plane if I could find five seats across in the middle at the back and I would be okay.

In spite of all advice and good sense to the contrary, I was ready and equipped for what I was about. I knew that at some point they’d stop selling codeine without a prescription or I’d no longer need it upon occasion.  It was better than drinking no matter how I looked at it.  The biggest downside was that my wife thought less of me for the weakness and there was no getting around that one.

When the plane got off the ground I checked out the back section.  It was only a two hour flight to L.A. for the changeover to the flight that would take me all the way to Kimpo in Korea.  No sleep on the short flight but it was the long flight I would need it on.  I had half a bottle of the ‘elixir’ left so I would save it for that flight.

I was seated in an aisle seat but never sat down until the flight was ready to put down.  I was more comfortable standing in the back area and talking to a few passengers and some of the crew than just sitting and waiting.  L.A was the usual comfortable American mess.  Good materials, tepid products and strange fast-moving human beings.  I talked to no one.  Security was a walk through alarm thing that never went off.  Once aboard the 747 to Korea things changed.  There were back rows empty so I secured one for myself, using the blankets and my stuff to occupy the spaces on takeoff.  There were actually six seats across in my row number 48 in economy.  Once the seat belt light went out and the plane was getting to altitude I was able to spread out, but not like I’d expected.  A woman of middle age, normal body type and unremarkable looks wedged into the far end of my extension of six seats across.  I had not lain down yet.  I stopped what I was doing and stared at her.

“I know you want to use these seats to sleep in but so do I,” the woman said, rather forcefully.  The engines were still at full power launching us ever upward toward forty thousand feet so it wasn’t yet easy to hear.  I moved toward her and we met in the middle.  Three seats with the arms pulled up didn’t quite allow for a full extension of the human body to sleep.  I looked into her eyes and knew that she knew what I knew.  There were only two ways to accommodate both of us if we laid down.  Heads against the unmovable aisle arm and feet toward the center, or the reverse of that. A combination wherein my feet encountered her head or her feet encountered my head wasn’t going to work.  Without any comment both of us began to arrange the long bench ‘halves’ with blankets and pillows.  I laid down with my feet touching the aisle arm and my head against the back cushion of the third seat back, or a bit more.  The woman did the same thing.  We settled in, covering ourselves with the blankets.  My face was presented to the lower seat back crease and it was okay.  The flight was eleven hours in the air.  At about the eighth hour I awakened for no reason.  My eyes opened in the faint light, the blue blanket half across my face.  I shook it loose and stared at a woman’s lips not two inches from my own.

The woman was facing me.  I angled my head but couldn’t see her eyes unless I was willing to get up and I wasn’t.   She had nice lips.

“Go back to sleep,” they whispered, and so I did.

The hustle and bustle of unloading a plane with about three hundred people aboard came up and down the aisles like successive small tsunamis.  The woman with the nice lips was packed up and gone before I knew it. No name.  Just the nice lips and suggestive order.  I waited in the taxi line as there was no one to meet me and no Tuk Tuks anywhere to be seen.  I’d envisioned a limo waiting for me with some driver holding up a sign with my name on it, instead rode toward the Hyatt Regency Hotel in a red sedan called a pony and made by Hyundai a company nobody ever heard of.  I realized that the Tuk Tuks of yore were fast disappearing, as were the white gloves all drivers had worn on my first visit.  Westernization was occurring at near light speed.

The KIA took me to the hotel without wasting any time.  I was near delirious in the back seat, partially from fatigue and partially because the codeine was almost all the way through my body and mind.  I registered automatically, handing over my passport without complaint, as I might have otherwise made at losing possession of it.  I briefly thought about having a rum and coke to ‘settle me out’ but then thought maybe that wasn’t such good idea.  I was on a mission and I had to get my mind straight even if that meant not self-mdicating to feel better.

The room was a suite and that part was great because it included a king-sized bed.  I stripped and fell into it, not bothering to take my usual shower before bedtime.  I lay awake for moments, staring at the ceiling, somehow embedded with tiny sparkles of some kind or other.

Murder Island beckoned me.  I could feel its draw.  Once I got to Miami I knew I was going to discover that Miami wouldn’t work, not as a place to purchase or operate a boat.  The boats were all owned by people who lived in the state part time.  The real Floridians didn’t boat much, they just lived. Allowing the swirl of tourists constantly moving to pay the bills and do whatever they might want to do.  Renting a car was easy from Hertz, as the points I was accumulating on United counted toward their own reward system but in the orient,  it was always better to rent a driver rather than a vehicle.

Seoul was changing. Blade Runner, the movie had come out.  The grizzled, twisted, confusing and almost downright awful nature of life on and around the streets of either Hong Kong, Tokyo or Seoul resembled almost exactly what was the downtown condition of the urban scenes in the movie.  ‘Awful’ was an emotionally descriptive word but one that so fit what was coming about as the tremendous pressure of Asian humanity crammed itself into ever shrinking geographic city centers.

The mission in Seoul was vital.  Signing the medical complex web of South Korea together with direct payment of insurance reimbursement was the foundational key element of the entire plan.  With direct pay, cross cultural trust was established and then built upon.  Claims were generated by ex-pat Americans, submitted to doctors, nurses and hospitals all over Seoul, submitted to one central place for payment in the United States (BCBS of the National Capital Area) and then the cash distributed by the CIA back to all the practitioners and medical facilities.

I slept peacefully for the first time in in weeks, letting the pressure’s fall away, the codeine wear off and no real fears to dredge up nightmare material.  Only the one nightmare of the Vietnamese civilians sitting along a road spiraling down a mountainside, all staring at me without expression, continued to reappear from time to time but not this last night.  Vietnam would never leave me entirely and I had come to accept and unwillingly accommodate that fact.  No drugs or therapy would ever get rid of the experience in my mind no matter what might be the latest of new treatments. Injecting some substance into the back of the brain was the latest brainchild.  That one made me laugh. It was supposed to take away bad memories.  Sometimes I wondered just who were the mental cases, the therapists or the patients.

The ride to the International School of Seoul was fairly short but the traffic thick and with little in the way of either traffic cops or traffic control devices.  I walked in to be immediately introduced to the head of the Korean Medical Society.  The school officials and the Society leader and I all got back into the car and headed to the hotel again.  Evidently, although it was unspoken, whatever business we had was too confidential to discuss at the school.  That thought made me a bit uneasy.  I’d quickly come to realize that the most simple or even diplomatic missiom could have the wheels come off at any time and then it could be Katy bar the door time.  The quickest way to die in service was to be combat without knowing you were in combat until your own exploded body parts flew by overhead.

We sat down at one of the lobby tables whereupon an attractive female attendant immediately descended.  Not standing but sliding into a kneeling position on the thick plush rug.

“Your request,” she said, bowing her head and holding out both hands,  The hands empty and clasped together.

I was taken aback.

“My request? I asked, feeling like an idiot, my mind racing through a set of scenes not discussable in public.

“Coffee or tea,” the Society head whispered over to me.  The other two men form the school smiled knowingly, having an understanding of what had flowed in into and straight out of my head.

“Coffee,” said.

The woman rose up gracefully, backed away her hands coming to her sides.

“Cream and sugar, I tried to say but here back was fast disappearing.

“They bring it all,” the Society man said.  “Cream, milk, sugar and more,” he went on.

“I should have remembered,” I murmured in response, “but I was never served in the lobby before.”

“The papers are all here from your company, and I’m Mr. Kim by name.

“Like Smith in the U.S.” I replied, with a smile.

“Like what?” Mr. Kim asked, his face flat and serious.

“Never mind,” I replied, not sure whether Kim had understood or was just playing a negotiating tactic to assume more control.

The contract has avoided a very necessary portion,” Kim said, sighing, as if he understood that whatever omission he was referring to was some sort of clerical error.

“Your cut?” I asked, knowing I wasn’t being polite and having a pretty good idea the man would not know what the colloquial word ‘cut’ meant.  “Touché” I thought rather than said.

“Cut, yes, the Society’s percent,” Kim replied, surprising me.  The man was more culturally aware than I was.

“The companies and the enrolled individuals and families pay premiums to my company,” I began, but he cut me off.

“We understand the business we are about here,” Mr. Kim said.  “We are here to claim two percent of all premiums paid for the Society to endorse this new and rather enormous change to our system.  There are expenses to be paid.”

“How much?” I asked, knowing right away that there would be resistance from the Agency about paying any amounts that might be considered inducements to make the deal.  Bribes were loosely interpreted but could have severe repercussions.

“Two percent,” Kim said, holding up two fingers, like making a peace sign.  But there was no peace at the table.  I sensed the tense atmosphere as all three men leaned in toward me slightly.

I sensed that all three were deadly serious about the ‘tariff’ so to speak.

“I have to make a call on that,” I said, looking at my watch.  It was coming up late in the evening back home and later still in Washington, but I wanted to spend as little time with the men I was with as possible.  I knew some of the skittishness was the codeine effects wearing off.  I knew I had to lay off that stuff or I would not only ruin my career, I could lose my wife or even my life, which were about one and the same thing.

None of the men said anything as the servant approached with a tray with my coffee and many small bowls of supporting stuff to go in it.  I remembered that when you ordered in Korea they did not come out with a pot and pour the coffee into a waiting cup.  The cup came filled and to be carried on a tray that the attendants never seemed to spill on.

I stood up and looked at the men, but they didn’t move.  The two percent was worth the patient wait, I presumed. I moved to the nearby counter and secured one of the private phone booths.  I was in number four again.  I wasn’t sure they remembered or whether it was merely coincidence, although I was finding that there was not much coincidence in Korea anywhere,

“I dialed the number which was not answered “CIA” because it was detected that I was calling from outside the country.  I gave the man my code number and waited.  Without saying a word, I was connected directly to Tony.  Nothing rang or any of that.  He was just there.

“I’ve been wondering,” he said.  “Maybe if this all works you’ll get to fly first class in the future.”

“Very funny,” I scoffed.  Agents in the field never ever were paid to fly first class. If enough miles were flown then they could be upgraded but that was it.

“Vigorish is two,” I said, using the mafia word for extra interest.

I waited while Tony processed this new development.

“Over time that could be a lot but to begin not much,” he finally said.

“We are in the right now period,” I replied, knowing that every word of what we said was being recorded and quite likely played back to the men at the table at a later time.  The line to the hotel was far from secure.

“I think you’re giving me a conclusion, pardoner,” I said, trying to stay as cloaked as possible in discussing something that was potentially so sensitive.

“I reckon so,” Tony answered, his voice one of restrained humor as both of us had slipped into some of the script from the movie Outlaw Josey Wales.

I was about to add another cowboy comment but the line went dead.  Tony assumed correctly that I was intending to approve the deal.  I didn’t like it, as the three men presumed I wouldn’t but there was little choice.  The whole program, not just in Korea, but then transferring country to country around the world might be imperiled.  I waited a few minutes.  The booth was cold, which felt good to my rather weakly weaving system. I wanted to go back to bed which might be possible once I was done in the lobby.

The men sat as before.  My coffee cup steamed. I noted that the coffee had cream in it.  I sat down and took a sip from the expensive thin ceramic cup.  It was sugared as well.  The woman walking away had heard my request.  Korean service was amazing.  I shook my head.

“So, the big decision makers are refusing us?” Mr. Kim said, his tone one of mild anger.

“I was shaking my head about how great the service is here, not about what we’re doing.  They agree that your two percent isn’t as problem and will be written into the contract right here and initialed if you like.

“It’s three percent now,” Mr. Kim said, he and the other two looking at me with deadpan expressions.

I frowned and breathed in and out heavily for a few seconds, getting a handle on my growing anger.  I put the coffee cup back onto its saucer, wondering what to do next.

“It is a joke,” Mr. Kim said, and all three men began laughing.

My shoulders dropped in relief.  There was no way I would have made a call to raise the vigorish, which the three in front of me knew.  I felt like an FNG again, playing a game where the rules would be revealed only as I made one mistake after another.

A short Korean man wearing  business suit with a vest and very delicate glasses approached.  Mr. Kim introduced him as the notary for signatures.  The attendant who’d served me coffee brought my passport which had been held at the counter and extended it out in her hand.

I took the document and we smiled at one another.  I got the distinct impression that if I were to stay another night I would not have to stay alone, although such an offer I would never make nor accept.

“One other thing, not about the money,” Mr. Kim said, holding out a pen for me to take.  “No Koreans may be covered by this plan, as this country will soon sign documents to make health care universal for all citizens.”

“Why would you care?” I asked, a bit mystified.

“Koreans will want to have the plan because not all medical services will be covered under universal health care and Koreans will know that and get favored treatment everywhere over other citizens.”

“I still don’t understand,” I said, as the notary walked around the table and extracted the passport still in my hand.

“Any doctor or hospital here will understand that a claim made on a U.S. policy will be paid immediately and in U.S. dollars without much question.  Here that’s like paying in solid gold ingots and we can’t have that.”

“Oh,” was all I could think to say.  I’d already learned that the U.S. dollar was the king of all currencies on the planet, or at least the countries I’d visited. Even restricted currency countries, where outside currencies were severely controlled and illegal use of them a crime, the US dollar was nearly universally accepted in payment for anything.  Not credit cards but cash.

The papers were signed, and my passport was handed back.  The men got up as one, noded formally and then headed for the hotel lobby entrance.  There was no shaking of hands or any celebration that one of the signature agreements in Korea’s new history had just been successfully signed. What surprised me the most was that I was the signatory for the USA, using the cover of Blue Cross Blue Shield of course.

Murder Island was all that I could think about, however, as I mentally prepared for a different kind of mission altogether.