The Ingenue: Political Spy Thriller

by Terry Toler

  “Call me as soon as you hear something,” Amin said.

  “Of course. You do the same.”

  Hamid hung up the phone slowly. It was going to be a long night.

  ***

  The next morning, Hamid’s phone rang. He answered it on the first ring. “Annyeonghaseyo,” Hamid said into the phone, using the informal greeting of hello.

  “Ambassador, my name is Ji-ho. I’m the Senior Colonel of Police in Wonsan.”

  North Korea had two domestic law enforcement agencies. The secret police, officially called the Ministry for Protection of State security and the local police, officially called the Ministry of People’s Security. Based on his title, Ji-ho would be the highest-ranking police authority in the city of Wonsan.

  If he was calling, it couldn’t be good.

  “How may I be of service to you, Colonel?” Hamid asked, dreading the response.

  “Do you know Assad Fathi?” he asked.

  Hamid’s heart sank.

  “Of course,” Hamid answered, not wanting to give away too much information until he knew the reason for the call. If Assad had been arrested, it was better to keep a distant association, even though he had diplomatic immunity. In North Korea you were guilty until proven innocent. Hamid had read that there were only twenty not guilty verdicts in the North Korean judicial system over the last year. Even Iran had more than that.

  “Why do you ask?” Hamid asked, trying to be proactive in the conversation.

  “Assad is dead. His body was found on a walking trail early this morning by a hiker. Shot to death.”

  Why was Assad on a mountain trail? He was to meet his contact in a restaurant by the sea.

  “How did you identify Assad?” Hamid asked, wanting to ask about the satchel but waiting for the right time.

  “His passport and papers were in his suit coat pocket.”

  No mention of the satchel.

  Assad had entered North Korea on a business visa and the higher ups in the DPRK were fully aware of his identity and presence.

  “Do you have a suspect?” Hamid asked.

  “We don’t at this time. It looks like a professional hit to me. The shot was precise. It went right through his heart. Whoever shot him was proficient with a gun. There’s no other evidence at the scene.”

  Here came the most important question as Hamid finally got up the nerve to ask. “Did you find anything else on him? A briefcase or satchel?”

  “No,” Ji-ho said. “We didn’t find a weapon either. The scene was completely cleaned of evidence. The only thing we know is that he was having dinner at a restaurant down by the boardwalk. He abruptly left shortly after his meal was brought to the table. Mr. Fathi didn’t even finish his meal, nor did he pay for it.”

  “That’s strange.”

  “Somebody led him away from his meal, to his execution. Are you aware if Mr. Fathi had any enemies?”

  “I was going to ask you that question,” Hamid answered. “Why would someone kill Assad? Do you think it was a robbery?”

  “His wallet was still in his pocket,” Ji-ho answered. “He had a watch on his wrist and a ring on his finger. A robber would’ve taken those.”

  “That rules out a robbery,” Hamid said, playing along. He already knew that the satchel was the real target. It had to be a professional. Assad was too skilled to be killed by a local robber.

  But who was the professional assassin who hunted Assad down and stole the satchel, and why did he kill him? That was obvious. Assad wouldn’t have given up the bag easily. He died a hero protecting the bag. But how did the assassin even know what was in the bag?

  He had more questions than answers.

  “There’s one surveillance camera in the area,” Ji-ho said. “We’re checking it to see if it caught any images of the killer.”

  “Please let me know, Colonel, if you find out anything. I’m concerned that an Iranian businessman would be targeted for assassination.”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I have more information,” Ji-ho said.

  “Thank you.”

  Hamid hung up the phone and called the Director on his direct, secured line.

  “Assad is dead.”

  “I know. I just heard,” Amin said.

  Hamid was surprised, although he realized immediately that he shouldn’t have been. The reach of the MOIS never ceased to amaze him. They usually knew things before he did.

  “I just spoke with an investigator,” Hamid said. “No satchel was found.”

  “This is a disaster.”

  “Should I contact the General?” Hamid asked. He was referring to Im Song, the man who coordinated the transfer of the codes and was one of the highest-ranking members of Min Yang’s inner circle.

  “You’d better,” Amin said. “I have to go break the news on my end.”

  Hamid was glad that Amin was no longer using a threatening tone with him. A somber resignation had set in over him.

  “How can we find that satchel?” Hamid asked. “Someone has it. The investigator said it was a professional hit job.”

  “The Americans!” Amin said almost shouting. Hamid heard something slam down on the other end. His fist or some object in his office.

  “Most likely. The investigator said that there is a surveillance camera near where it happened. Assad was having dinner, and someone interrupted him. He left without eating or paying. He was killed up on a mountain trail.”

  “We have to get our hands on that video surveillance tape,” Amin said. “It might shed some light on what happened.”

  “How can we do that?” Hamid asked. “The investigator won’t give it to me.”

  “The North Koreans aren’t the only ones who can hack into a computer,” Amin said. “I’ll get my own people working on it. Most surveillance tapes are stored on the cloud. Let’s just hope this one is.”

  “Good idea. Let me know how I can help.”

  “Go to Wonsan,” Amin said. “Ask around. See if you can find out anything. Somebody saw something. I want whoever did this hunted down and shot like a dog.”

  “Director, I’m an ambassador,” Hamid retorted nervously. “I’m a diplomat. I’m not trained to take on an assassin.”

  “I’m not talking about you,” Amin said roughly. “I’m sending two men. Omid Froohan and Jaffar Abdi. They are two of my best killers. Make all the arrangements for their arrival. Let the Koreans know so they aren’t harassed. We must find that satchel.”

  “I’m leaving for Wonsan, now,” Hamid said. “We’ll find whoever is responsible for this.”

  “Inshallah,” Amin said.

  God wills it.

  8

  The term hacker had always been a somewhat controversial term. Some cyber criminals argued that they were the good guys, waging war against the big corporations and those who oppressed the poor and polluted the environment. Others said they were just pushing the boundaries of knowledge, with no intention of doing anyone any harm. They preferred the term unauthorized user.

  I’d always considered myself a soldier in a battle between good and evil.

  After spending the last ten hours with the notorious Gi Man Pok, the most infamous hacker who ever lived, I could see where the lines were blurred. Under any other circumstances, we would be the best of friends. Like me, he didn’t do it for the money. He did draw questionable ethical lines, refusing to participate in schemes that stole money from the poor, but willing to steal what did not belong to him, nonetheless. More than once, he insisted that he only stole from those who could afford to lose it and from financial institutions he believed were the real criminals in the world; the corporate elite who accumulated wealth on the backs of oppressed people.

  “I’m like that American hero, Robert Hood,” he’d said.

  “Robin Hood,” I corrected.

  “Right. Right. Right.” Pok said the word right a lot, inserting them between the words fairly often. Not unlike teenagers who inserted the word like in almost every sentence whe
ther it needed it or not.

  Such were the rants I listened to most of the night, mixed in with diatribes espousing the virtues of communism and socialism.

  “Everyone in North Korea gets free health care, right?” he had argued.

  I held back answering, just nodding occasionally.

  “All the people get a minimum guaranteed income. Right? Every month,” he said defensively several times.

  That guaranteed income is below the poverty line I wanted to argue back but bit my tongue. Almost every American had a cell phone, cable television, a refrigerator, and most other basic conveniences that a large portion of the world didn’t have. While our system of democracy wasn’t perfect, we built the most prosperous country in the history of the world. An opinion I kept mostly to myself.

  “What’s criminal,” Pok said, “is that there are so many millionaires in America. Right?”

  “Everyone in Venezuela is a millionaire,” I countered. “But no one can afford a loaf of bread!” He may have just been trying to get a rise out of me. If he was, then he succeeded.

  His arguments would’ve actually held some weight if he didn’t practice his vast skills on behalf of the most oppressive government in the world. One that consistently persecuted and ruled its people with the ruthlessness of a Stalin, Lenin, Mao, or Hitler. Only Min Yang and his family were billionaires in North Korea. A few elites and oligarchs lived in luxury. Everyone else barely eked out an existence.

  Pok made some vague attempt at justifying his criminal activity that fell on deaf ears with me. As time went on, the lines of good and evil re-formed in my mind and helped me to confirm my moral superiority and justification for what I intended to do, which was to bring his organization to its knees.

  By the morning, I had grown to despise the man, even more than I did before I met him.

  I no longer even admired his skills. A serial killer might be good at killing and not getting caught, but his abilities were not to be lauded.

  Pok went to get us some breakfast, which was great because I was starving and tired. The night before, I only grabbed a couple hours of sleep on his couch. I wanted to go lie back down but had work to do before Pok returned.

  Halee, sleep when you’re dead, Curly had said during one of his many training exercises where we had to go days with only a few hours of sleep.

  I’d feel better when Pok got back with coffee. That would give me a burst of energy. At the moment, I appreciated the time he was away. It helped me to formulate my plan.

  As far as Pok was concerned, we had become the best of friends, and he had come to appreciate my skills. I had little to no compunction about keeping up the ruse and even formulated a thought about possibly kidnapping and delivering him to the CIA. The world would be better off without the menace preying on society, no matter how altruistic he thought his motives to be.

  I ruled out that option. Gaining access to his computer was my primary focus. He’d given me limited access to his computer network. I could get in now, but the risk of getting caught was greater. When he got back, I would take complete access—with or without his permission.

  My work was interrupted by an alert that came up on his computer.

  I opened it, but not before looking around to see if anyone was watching me. From my vantage point, I had a clear line of sight to the elevators and would know when Pok arrived back at the building, so I decided to open it.

  The alert signified a potential hack to his network. More than likely, he got thousands of them every day. I wondered what was so important about this one.

  I started investigating. Several minutes later, I discovered that someone was trying to hack into the Korean Internet service provider, Star JV. Apparently, Pok had the responsibility of protecting North Korea's government-controlled internet called Kwangmyong, along with his task of attacking foreign websites. To use a football analogy, Pok played on both sides of the ball. Both offense and defense.

  Min Yang was known to heavily surf the internet, and it became clear that Pok had the responsibility to protect him from his sometimes reckless behavior. It probably kept Pok up at night.

  General phishing scams weren’t much of a threat to North Korea. The government only gave permission for roughly thirty businesses to even have a domain. Most commoners had no access to the internet and might not even know about its existence, so the risk of malware and email scams and viruses infecting individual computers was low. The Supreme Commander was one of the few who ventured out onto the net far enough to become a prey for hackers.

  This particular alert was interesting to me. I also saw it as an opportunity to show Pok more of my skills. First, I needed to discover the source. Pok arrived right after I did so.

  “Here are your four egg sandwiches,” he said almost mockingly, like he couldn’t believe I could eat four at one time. “And your three cups of coffee,” he added with a chuckle.

  “What?” I said, taking the bag from him. “I’m still a growing boy.”

  Pok was older than me, but only by a couple years. I figured him to be twenty-eight or twenty-nine. Like most Asian men, he barely weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, soaking wet. From my experience, Koreans ate like birds. Not surprisingly, he finished his one sandwich, shortly after I finished my four.

  “Someone’s trying to hack into your system,” I said. “You got an alert.”

  Pok exploded out of the side chair on the other side of the desk and bolted around to where I was sitting and demanded I get up.

  “You opened the alert!” he said roughly. “No one gave you permission to look at my personal information.”

  “Settle down,” I said, with anxiety rising in me. I needed to calm him down. “I already identified the source for you.”

  He ignored me as he read the alert. His fingers typed furiously. I walked to the other side of the desk to give him privacy and also to try and remain calm. With the coffee and his sudden outburst, adrenaline flowed through me like a volcano about to explode. I couldn’t let him see my concern. Maybe it was a mistake to open the alert. I might’ve blown all the goodwill I’d built up overnight.

  I decided to press the issue further to make him think I didn’t do anything wrong. I got up from my chair and walked behind the desk and looked over his shoulder.

  “You go back and sit down,” he shouted, putting his hand up to block the screen.

  “All right,” I said, lackadaisically. “But I can save you a bunch of time. I already know who’s trying to hack your system. By the time you find out, they’ll already be gone.”

  “I know what I’m doing. If I don’t hurry, they’ll get in.”

  “They’re already in,” I said. “You’re too late. I can even tell you what they’re looking for.”

  “That’s impossible,” Pok argued. “That alert only came in a few minutes ago. It takes several hours to find the source, even if it can be found. Most hackers are getting good at hiding their identities.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  He continued typing with a purpose.

  “Do you want my help or not?” I said, sarcastically.

  “No. I don’t need your help. I should have you arrested for even looking at the alert.”

  “The Iranians are the hackers.”

  He stopped typing. His eyes went from the computer screen, to me, then back to the screen without even moving his head.

  “How do you know that?” Pok said.

  “I told you. I already found them. If we hurry, we can find out what they’re looking for before it’s too late.” I’d lied earlier when I said I knew what they were looking for, but Pok didn’t catch the inconsistency of my words.

  He stopped typing and stood to his feet, making a motion with his hand for me to take his place.

  Several keystrokes later, I was at the source.

  “See,” I said. “This is an Iranian computer trying to hack your system.”

  “That’s incredible,” Pok said with his mouth opened and h
is eyes widened in amazement.

  “Let’s find what they are looking at,” I said.

  More keystrokes for several minutes led me closer to the source.

  “There . . . in the Azure Cloud,” Pok said.

  “Do you want me to stop them or let them keep going so we can find out what they’re looking for?”

  “Let’s follow them around,” Pok replied. “But don’t lose them.”

  “They’re snooping around Wonsan. What’s in Wonsan that the Iranians would be interested in?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Pok said. “That’s strange behavior, right? The Iranians are an ally. We never see a hack from them. Are you sure someone is not pointing to them, but it’s originating from another source? The Americans maybe?”

  A computer hacker had many ways to disguise his activities. A common practice was to make it look like the hack was coming from a different source.

  “They are using the Tor network, but I know how to get around it,” I said. The Tor Network used multiple tunnels across the globe and bounced the signal around various servers, making it hard to track. It still had to originate at one source and with one Tor browser. Iranians weren’t as sophisticated as the CIA in tracking, so they were easy to catch. That’s why I could find them so fast.

  The question of why the Iranians would be looking for information in Wonsan was still unanswered, and I was curious. I opened up another browser and began searching for information.

  “Don’t lose the Iranians,” Pok said with urgency.

  “I won’t. I’ll find them. But look at this,” I said. I had entered a search for chatter related to Iran and Wonsan over the last twenty-four hours.

  Pok read what I found out loud. “An Iranian MOIS operative, was killed in Wonsan. A professional hit job. The CIA is suspected.” Pok looked at me suspiciously.

  “Don’t look at me,” I said jokingly, raising my hands in the air in a fake surrender pose. “I never did field work. I prefer working out of an office where I don’t get shot at.”

  That wasn’t true. I was happiest when I was in the field. Like in college. I preferred football practice and games to sitting behind a computer. It just happened that computers were what I was good at. In training, Curly said I had the second-highest score in hand-to-hand combat and weapons proficiency.