When she was twelve, her father sold her to a Frenchman who operated a small shipping line consisting of three tramp steamers that plied the coastal ports between Pusan and Hong Kong. The line prospered and Min Koryo bore Ren6 Bougainville three sons.

Then the war came and the Japanese overran China and Korea. Rene' was killed in a bombing rain and the three sons were lost somewhere in the South Pacific, after being forced into the Imperial Japanese Army. Only Min Koryo and one grandson, Lee Tong, survived.

After japan surrendered, she raised and salvaged one of her husband's ships which had been sunk in Pusan harbor. Slowly she built up the Bougainville fleet, buying old surplus cargo ships, never paying more than their scrap value. Profits were few and far between, but she hung on until Lee Tong finished his master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of business and began running the day-to-day operation. Then, almost magically, the Bougainville Maritime Lines grew into one of the world's largest fleet of ships.

When their armada totaled 138 cargo ships and tankers, Lee Tong moved the principal offices to New York. In a ritual going back thirty years, he sat dutifully near her bedside in the evening discussing the current dealings of their farflung financial empire.

Lee Tong wore the misleading look of a jolly Oriental peasant.

His round brown face split in a perpetual smile that seemed chiseled in ivory. If the justice Department and half the federal lawenforcement agencies had wanted to close the book on a backlog of unsolved maritime crimes, they would have hung him from the nearest streetlight, but, oddly, none had a file on him. He skirted in the shadow of his grandmother; he was not even listed as a director or an employee of Bougainville Maritime. Yet it was he, the anonymous member of the family, who handled the dirty-tricks department and built the base of the company.

Too systematic to place his faith in hired hands, he preferred to direct the highly profitable illicit operations from the front rank.

His act often ran on blood. Lee Tong was not above murder to achieve a profit. He was equally at home during a business luncheon at the "21" Club or at a waterfront throat cuttingHe sat a respectful distance from Min Koryo's bedside, a long silver cigarette holder planted between his uneven teeth. She disliked his smoking habit, but he clung to it, not so much as a pleasure but as a small measure of independence.

"By tomorrow the FBI will know how the President disappeared," said Min Koryo.

"I doubt it," Lee Tong said confinently. "The chemical analysis people are good, but not that good. I say closer to three days. And then a week to find the ship."

"Enough time so no loose threads can be traced to us?"

"Enough time, aunumi," said Lee Tong, andressing her in the Korean term for mother. "Rest assured, all threads lead to the grave."