The Korean Woman

by John Altman

  She put water on to boil. As she was measuring rice, the latch on the front door worked. Jia burst out of the living room. “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”

  Mark set down his calfskin bag and scooped up his daughter. He was lightly suntanned, as usual during warm weather, and glowing with good health, his tie jauntily askew. “Oof!” he said.

  He came into the kitchen, holding Baby Jia. He kissed Song’s lips, copping a squeeze of her left buttock with his free hand. Then Dexter came flying out of the living room. “Daddydaddydaddydaddydaddy!”

  “Oof again!” Mark managed to heft the boy up beside the girl. “My poor back!”

  “Oof again!” Jia mimicked joyfully. “Oof again!”

  A sizzling came from the stove, and Song rushed to take the frothing pot off the burner.

  Princeton, NJ

  The rearmost guard of dense Macedonian ranks could not, standing shoulder-to-shoulder behind eight armored men—a ringtone made Dalia pause for a beat; then she finished typing the sentence—have actively attacked as spearmen.

  She answered the call. “Ma nishma?”

  “Say ‘happy birthday’!”

  Small voices chorused, “Happy birthday, Grandma!”

  “We love you, Savta Dalia!”

  Dalia smiled. “I love you, too, my little kätzchen.”

  In the background, a cartoon blasted in Hebrew: “I earned the Iron Fist! I use it to the best of my ability. I honor that power through my actions …” The sound faded as Dalia’s son moved into a quieter room. “You’re home? Thought maybe you’d be out celebrating.”

  She looked at the mug of Moroccan chamomile beside her laptop. “No, a quiet night in.”

  “Did you get the scarf we sent? Udi picked it out himself.”

  “Give him a big kiss for me. Tell him he has good taste.”

  “Raya’s on the night shift, but she sends her love.”

  “Send mine back, please.”

  “She’s worked every night this week. She keeps saying the schedule will change, but it never does.” He paused. “We miss you, Mom.”

  “I miss you too, neshama.”

  “I hope your birthday wasn’t all work.”

  “I … met with a friend.”

  A brief silence ensued. Birds convened noisily outside Dalia’s study window, then fell quiet.

  “Mom, I hate to run, but I kept the kids up late so they could talk to you. It’s way past their bedtime. I just wanted to say happy birthday.”

  “Thank you for calling, Zvi.”

  “Enjoy your evening. Talk soon.”

  “Talk soon.”

  Dalia set the phone down slowly. She checked to make sure she had not missed a call from her daughter. Well, a few hours of birthday still remained.

  After a moment, giving her head a small shake, she bent again to her work.

  The primary role of the rear guard in phalanx warfare was to keep its fellows from fleeing. Such has been the true purpose of all rear guards throughout history: bolstering the will to combat, smothering the instinct for self-preservation, driving yet another generation into the breach.

  As Jim McConnell was always trying to do with her. He fought to keep her in the present, in the fray, despite her natural inclination to flee into books, into the past. But the terms of their deal had been satisfied. The Kremlin-NATO scenario had been her last.

  Once you see what’s going on, I have a feeling you’ll want to help out …

  A coxswain counted strokes right outside her window—the lake’s surface carried the sound with eerie clarity.

  All our fates are entwined, she taught her students.

  It was truer today than ever before. And Dalia Artzi—a sabra, one of the first generation born in Israel—knew better than anyone the price of isolationism.

  But she had done her part. She had earned her books and her solitude. The military-industrial meat grinder would grind along just fine without her.

  She focused. Champing at the bit to engage Darius, Alexander made a rare miscalculation. Moving southward, he left his lines vulnerable. Coming up behind, Darius sat across those lines. Thus, the Macedonians were given a simple choice: turn and fight, or starve. But the young king brilliantly regained the initiative, snatching victory from a force more than twice the size of his own. He countermarched, engaging Darius on a narrow coastal plain where the Persians could not make use of their superior numbers. Alexander then mounted his horse and, with a brazen direct charge, drove Darius from the battlefield in panicked disarray.

  The lesson of Issus, she told her classes: timing and maneuverability trumped brute force. This, too, was truer today than ever before. It was the small mobile squad—the OPSEC team, the lone wolf—that had enabled 9/11. And that would likely enable, in the not-too-distant future, nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological catastrophes. Against a small, resolute, and unpredictable rogue player with nuclear or biological capability, all the bombers and land assault vehicles in the world made little difference. Fortress America was, in reality, a house of cards.

  And Israel, home to Dalia’s children and grandchildren, was even more vulnerable.

  She rubbed at the loose skin around her eyes. The rowing crew was gone. The birds were gone. The study was silent.

  She picked up her tea. It had gone cold.

  She sighed, then set down the mug and reached for the phone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  New CIA Headquarters Building,

  Langley, VA

  Beyond the double-paned windows, daylight was quickly failing.

  A more observant Jew would now be lighting candles, honoring the Sabbath by abstaining from work. Dalia Artzi, however, was getting down to business.

  The officer in charge—fortyish, fair, poised, in a blue twill suit that offset somber blue-gray eyes—had introduced himself as Benjamin Bach. “I’ll be honest, Professor. You’re here because Jim felt you should be here.” Bach’s voice was pitched low, inviting attention instead of commanding it. “He considers you the greatest strategic thinker since John Boyd. And I admit, he can be convincing. But left to my own devices, I would not choose to include a foreign national, whatever her security clearance.”

  The four other men seated around the table made no comment. One was Jim McConnell. To his left was Shyam Radha—“call me Sam”—from the CIA’s Computer Ops Division (COD), known to one and all as “Codpieces.” Third was Sonny Romano, from Science and Technology, the gadget shop. Fleshy and sensual, he wore his blond hair cut just long enough to lie flat against his scalp. The last, seated between Bach and McConnell, was Charlie DeArmond, broad-shouldered with a chevron mustache, from the FBI’s Directorate of Intelligence.

  Bach swiveled around in his chair to face a wall-mounted monitor. That was Sonny’s cue to draw the shades on the secure room and Sam’s to chew on one thumb and bend over his laptop. The official CIA seal, eagle astride a compass rose, appeared on-screen, followed by “top secret, classification k.” Author attribution had been redacted.

  The name file concerned one Song Sun Young. Affiliation was RGB, Reconnaissance General Bureau, the North Korean foreign intelligence apparatus.

  A surveillance photograph showed a crowded subway platform. A woman with the brim of a baseball cap pulled low had been circled in red. She was East Asian, in her early twenties, with fine, ardent features and shoulder-length black hair. A shana maidel, Dalia’s mother would have said. Pretty girl.

  “Meet Song Sun Young, a.k.a. Park Ha-Soo, a.k.a. Mi-Hi Pyung, a.k.a. Mi-Hi Abrahams. This photo, coming to us courtesy of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, is eight years old.” Bach gestured to Sam without turning. “If you want to see what she looks like today …”

  Another window opened, time coded just five hours ago. In buttery late afternoon sunlight, a woman on a city street corner had been photograph
ed from above. She held a small boy’s hand and towed a toddler in a plastic wagon. Sam zoomed and enhanced. The black hair was cut shorter, the fine features carved in sharper relief. Enough of her T-shirt’s legend was visible to suggest the rest: “California Dreaming.”

  Sam’s mouse clicked. The first window scrolled to the cover of an official DPRK Workers’ Party Politburo folder: blue sleeve, red tab, slightly lopsided and blurry from a hasty scan. “The woman’s songbun file,” Bach said.

  Dalia blinked. She had never seen an actual songbun file before. According to Pyongyang, the dossiers did not exist. But according to defectors and moles, every citizen of the DPRK was born with a rating that determined where they could live, and thus the quality of soil they were given to work; access to food, education, employment, and membership in the Party—their songbun. The highest rating, “core,” included the ruling elite, called yangban, and their peers. “Wavering,” or neutral, citizens made up fully half the population. “Hostile” citizens included criminals, prostitutes, foreign collaborators, citizens of mixed blood, landlords, merchants, Christian ministers, fortune-tellers, shamans, and descendants thereof.

  “Where did you get this?” Dalia asked.

  “Straight from the horse’s mouth. We hacked the primary RGB server almost two years ago.”

  The text was in Munhwaŏ. Translation and editorial remarks had been added by the CIA. Sam clicked through slowly enough that Dalia could keep up.

  Song Sun Young had been born with a songbun rating of “hostile.” The poor score was a result of her father, Song Jun Ran, getting into trouble with the Public Standards Police. A remark in the margins explained that beulsun, tainted blood, was a common enough albatross inside the DPRK. Enemies of class, Kim Il Sung had decreed in 1972, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations. The policy rewarded good behavior; troublemakers saw not only themselves but also their parents, children, grandparents, and grandchildren suffer the regime’s wrath. Officially, the elder Song’s crime had been failure to properly maintain his portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. In reality, the nameless analyst suggested, he had probably gotten on the wrong side of some government apparatchik or someone in his inminban, the neighborhood watchdog group.

  Song Jun Ran had died two years after his daughter’s birth. The official cause of death had been a heart attack. But the death had come during the most severe period of the 1994–98 famine known as the Arduous March. During this period, the analyst observed, DPRK hospitals had been forbidden to report starvation as a causal agency.

  Song Sun Young and a younger brother had then been raised by their mother, a kindergarten teacher in the factory town of Chongjin. When Song was eight years old, the mother was arrested by the Electric Wave Inspection Bureau. Apparently, she had used a sewing needle to bypass preset government-approved stations on her TV.

  In the Hermit Kingdom, guilt by association was not only legal but mandatory. The younger Songs had been sent with their mother to Camp 15, a.k.a. Yodok, the so-called family prison.

  The next year, the mother had died. Again the official cause of death was heart attack. But diphtheria and whooping cough, the analyst noted, had sent thousands into Yodok’s mass grave.

  At age ten, Song and her brother had escaped the camp. An accomplice’s corpse had been found wedged in the electric fence. The weight of the body had sagged the lowest strand of wire down to the frozen ground, conducting enough current into the earth that Song and her brother could scamper to freedom using the corpse as a bridge. By the time the body was found, it had burned to a crisp, preventing authorities from determining whether the incident was premeditated—the accomplice betrayed and murdered—or altruistic suicide, or simply opportunistic.

  The guard deemed responsible had been executed. Song and her brother had been arrested again in Chongjin the following year. The punishment for prison escape was death. But for whatever reason—their tender ages, the whims of a capricious system—they had been spared. Back into the kwan-li-so system they went, this time to Camp 14.

  And again they escaped, just two months later, climbing into the bottom of a coal train, burying themselves beneath the cargo, risking suffocation but ultimately surviving.

  At this point, the CIA analyst speculated, the Party bosses in Pyongyang realized they had a couple of extraordinary specimens on their hands. Song Sun Young and her brother, Song Man Soo, had escaped two high-security prisons while still children. Juche, the official state ideology of North Korea, expressed that the individual was “master of his destiny.” The closest English translation was “self-reliance.” Clearly, Song Sun Young and Song Man Soo had juche in spades.

  Thus, the siblings managed that most difficult of tricks, increasing their songbun rating from the lowest, “hostile,” to the highest, “core.” That they managed it while still fugitives, via the criminal conduct of repeated prison escapes, was an irony, the analyst noted dryly, truly worthy of North Korea.

  Three years after the second escape, they had been recaptured again in Chongjin.

  Here the songbun file ended. The girl’s story was picked up by an RGB dossier, similarly translated and annotated.

  “Interviews”—Dalia wondered at the euphemism—had determined that Song Sun Young was the leader between the two. She had been sent to a training camp on Paektu Mountain, considered by Korean mythology to be the place of ancestral origin. Here, on the banks of Heaven Lake, she had joined an operation code-named (after the roaming police units that patrolled the streets), Kyuch’Aldae. Her younger brother had gone to Pyongyang as a guest of the regime. Dalia read between the lines. In the event that Song Sun Young betrayed her masters once she got beyond their reach in the field, she did so knowing who would bear the cost of her insubordination.

  For five years, Song had been trained, reeducated, refitted from the inside out. Details had been dutifully recorded. The RGB agent doing the reporting used a tone of awed admiration as he was pleasurably stunned again and again by the intelligence and thoroughness of his own great agency.

  Song had grown out her hair, putting flesh onto her bones with rice and meat—slowly, shrewdly, so that her stomach would not reject the nourishment to which it was so profoundly unaccustomed. She had undergone extensive dental work. She had received double eyelid surgery, a common gift for high school graduates in the ROK, from which she would pretend to hail. She had learned English and the Gyeonggi dialect of Seoul, and Konglish, the commonly spoken pidgin that was a hybrid of the two.

  She had watched Hollywood movies and South Korean TV, listened to K-pop and American top forty, read Cosmopolitan and Wink magazines, and browsed the internet, venturing well beyond the usual restrictions imposed by Pyongyang. She had learned from kidnapped South Korean tutors the finer points of manners: to clap in the South Korean style, hands vertical, instead of with one hand atop the other, as they did in the north. She had learned to sing with South Korean vibrato, wearing a South Korean facial expression—considerably less dramatic than that of the north. She had learned to dance with less grace, with more boldness and energy. She had learned to accept a man’s proffered hand without flinching. In South Korea, couplehood was highly prized and dating was everywhere. In the north, no dating culture existed, and marriages were usually arranged, often by Party secretaries. Public displays of affection, including hand-holding, were scandalous. Not so in the south.

  And at the end of every month, for five years, she had taken a polygraph test to gauge her developing loyalty. Usually, only people personally connected to the Kim family were trusted to undertake overseas missions. But the girl’s exceptional juche had made her a rare exception. Still, the powers that be were taking no chances.

  She had come to see, according to the report, how Chosun’s brave leaders had stood alone in the world against American imperialism, tyranny, and hypocrisy. She now realized that she and her mother had, through the
ir disobedience, done their great nation no worthy service. She had been grateful and flattered to learn that thanks to her exceptional juche, she would be given a rare chance to redeem herself.

  She had undertaken nightly sessions of chonghwa, “total harmony,” during which she was compelled to criticize her own mistakes and failings of that same day. She had been shown rap sheets of her family’s offenses, beginning with her father’s lack of care of his portraits, extending to her mother’s theft of television signals, and then continuing to cousins she had never met, guilty of “brutality” and “disruption of public peace” and, in the case of one distant uncle on her father’s side, suicide—strictly forbidden. She had signed oaths of fealty, first with an inked thumb and then, as she learned to read and write, in Munhwaŏ, Gyeonggi, and English.

  As she was being reeducated politically, she had studied tradecraft: self-defense, cryptography, covert entry, surveillance and countersurveillance, steganography and eavesdropping, dead drops and brush passes, interrogation and counterinterrogation and assassination.

  Her debut as an RGB operative had come eight years ago. In the Bundang district of Seongnam she had contrived to accompany a high-ranking North Korean defector back to his hotel room, where she used VX nerve agent to stop his heart. The NIS surveillance photograph that had opened the file, Dalia gathered, had been captured from a subway platform near the hotel.

  After her adventure in areh dongae, “the village below,” Song had been deemed ready for the main event. She had passed a final battery of loyalty tests and had been allowed, via telecom, to say a final goodbye to her little brother. Then she had come to the United States as a South Korean named Park Ha-Soo, with a B-1 domestic employment visa.