The Korean Woman

by John Altman

  No, she could not turn herself in.

  Stay the course. Soon enough, she would receive further instruction. She would hand off the equipment. And then she would be finished.

  But of course, she had indulged similar fantasies before. When the CIA director had visited her country as an emissary of peace, when the Panmunjom Declaration had formally ended the war after sixty years, when the thaw between nations had, briefly, seemed undeniable … She had dared let herself hope. Détente would be her salvation.

  She had been naive. Every diplomatic thaw was followed by another freeze. She would never be set free.

  For many minutes—at least, it seemed that long—she sat without moving. Wrapped in her 900-gram Egyptian cotton towel, dripping onto her Donna Karan silk quilt. These were the trappings of the life she had earned for herself.

  Trappings. Trapped. The rock and the hard place.

  A thought nosed up from the substrata of her mind. The flash of intuition she had while videoing her son’s recital.

  You are being watched.

  More: You are being videoed.

  She remembered walking to the bar to find Walsh. Her sixth sense insisting …

  “Mom?”

  She almost jumped. Almost screamed. But somehow, she managed not to react at all.

  She turned slowly. Her son was standing in the bedroom doorway, in his Star Wars pajamas.

  “Can I watch another episode before dinner?” he asked hopefully.

  Langley, VA

  With the shades drawn tight, the light in the conference room never changed. Dalia covered a yawn. She checked the time code in a corner of the live ARGUS feed. Twenty-four hours had passed since she came to this place. During that time, she had slept, patchily, for less than three hours.

  On-screen, Sam resized his windows, moving the ARGUS feed into a neat line on the left side of the screen. The row also contained the ongoing effort to decrypt the RGB’s message, and two other windows, displaying Mi-Hi Abrahams’ Facebook and Twitter accounts.

  In her Facebook profile pic, the woman grinned broadly, arms around two kids in Halloween costumes. Both kids wore overalls and fake mustaches and hats: one red, one green. The Super Mario Brothers. Beneath the picture, a box offered personal information. Mi-Hi Abrahams identified herself as self-employed, profession unspecified. She had studied early childhood education at Ansang University in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea. She lived in New York City. She was married.

  Beneath this were thumbnail photos. Mi-Hi standing with her husband—a tall, tanned, handsome man—before sun-kissed water. A smiling selfie of the whole family together, the toddler looking away with a comical frown. A black-tie charity event, Mi-Hi posing in elegant evening wear beside two similarly attired women.

  Beneath the thumbnails were Mi-Hi’s Facebook friends. She had 290. The list included some well-known New Yorkers: prominent lawyers, a Philharmonic performer, a bestselling author, and a justice of the New York Supreme Court. The common denominator was a private kindergarten on the Upper West Side, well represented on the Facebook wall via Back to School nights, PTA fund-raisers, and visits to upstate farms.

  The Twitter profile handle was @mihiabrahams. Harried and happy mother of two #momslife. The tweets were all retweets. One day, when my kids are grown with their own homes, I’ll come over, grind food into all their keyboards, and lie about it. @MomOnFire. Someday, my son will have warm, loving memories of watching kids’ movies while I looked at my phone. @TheRealDratch.

  On the right side of the screen another row of windows streamed live feeds from spoofed phones. Song’s iPhone sat on a flat surface, faceup. The camera afforded only a view of a blank ceiling with a faint water stain. But the microphone, with signal boosted, provided a vivid window into the apartment nevertheless. She was putting her kids to bed in the next room, reading aloud. “Do you choose to chew goo, too, sir? If, sir, you, sir, choose to chew, sir, with the Goo-Goose, chew, sir. Do, sir …”

  Song’s affection for the children seemed genuine. Perhaps she and Dalia had more in common than one might think. Both had come of age with the stench of labor camps in their nostrils: Song firsthand, Dalia through her mother and father, who had survived, respectively, Auschwitz and Treblinka. Surely, survivors of camps valued family in a way that few others could ever grasp.

  And yet, whatever they had in common, certain truths could not be ignored. The woman was an agent working for a regime that placed Dalia’s own family, her children and grandchildren, in peril. Pyongyang saw Israel as an extension of American tyranny. Their gestures toward accommodation struck her as manipulative, opportunistic, untrustworthy.

  Using an invisible hand, they empowered those who would destroy the Jewish homeland. The Simorgh launching platforms of Iran’s Fateh-313 missiles bore more than a passing resemblance to DPRK technology. Pyongyang had advanced the Syrian and Iranian nuclear programs, shared with Hezbollah and Hamas its expertise in subterranean tunnels, and invited Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah to receive training personally in the late 1980s.

  “… a tweetle beetle noodle poodle bottled paddled muddled duddled fuddled wuddled fox in socks!”

  Two other windows streamed William Walsh’s phone. After a day of movement—breakfast at South Street Seaport, a lunchtime meeting with a friend near Grand Central, where conversation had largely focused on the waitress’ ass—the device had returned to Liberty Plaza. There it had remained since midafternoon, the video feed dark, the audio silent.

  Sam was resizing and moving windows to no purpose. Nervous energy.

  Bach paced. Dark divots underscored his eyes. He leaned against the beveled black edge of the conference table, scowling.

  “I want to see what she’s up to,” Sonny Romano said suddenly.

  Dalia could guess his thinking. The woman’s cell phone, according to Sam, showed no evidence of having communicated with the RGB server that had sent the message. This suggested that she possessed a second device, still unknown to them. And this device might be receiving messages from a server they remained unaware of.

  The man from Science and Technology brooded, his fleshy lower lip folding down. Among the densely packed skyscrapers of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, satellites and drones could not achieve sight lines into a fifth-floor apartment. The Stingray spoof was limited by the location of the phone. But installing and servicing surveillance devices was risky enough when an apartment was empty.

  “Thermals,” Sonny suggested at last. “Get into a neighboring apartment. Or …”

  “Or?” Bach said.

  “Emergency sprinkler inspection. Feed them in from the hallway. Right above her head. Add some contact mikes while we’re up there.”

  Dalia shook her head. “Shwya, shwya.” Easy, easy. “You’ll tip her off.”

  But Sonny had made up his mind. “I want to see what she’s up to,” he said again.

  Manhattan, NY

  “You guys burn the midnight oil,” Mark was saying as he came through the door. “The nine-thirty-on-a-Saturday-night oil.”

  He was talking to someone in the hallway. Song left the sofa, where she had been paging through the latest InStyle, to look past him. Two men with a ladder were doing something above the paneled ceiling. They wore blue jeans, name tags, and white shirts emblazoned with a triangular logo. New York State Fire Marshals: Inspection, Investigation, Education.

  “Sprinkler system’s on the fritz,” one said.

  “Don’t work too hard.” Mark was using his man-of-the-people voice. “It’s bad for you.”

  He closed the door, then worked the locks quietly, not wanting to imply anything about the men in blue jeans. Song went to him, leaned up on tiptoe to peck him on the cheek. “Back from the salt mines,” she said.

  He nodded. “Long day.”

  “Did you eat?”

  “I grabbed something. I n
eed a shower.”

  “Go.” She slapped his bottom playfully.

  He went. She dallied for a moment in the front hall, head canted, listening for sounds of activity from the corridor outside.

  Then she switched off the living-room lights and started the dishwasher. When she first moved in, she had been disconcerted by the Whirlpool’s rhythmic churning. Chum-chum-chum-chum-chum, alternating with creepy sibilant hissing, like a wild animal. The only standard appliance in Chosun was ondol, a system using hot water under the floor to heat the home—silent except for the occasional gurgle or sigh.

  She turned off more lights and went into their bedroom. The shower was already running. The bathroom door was cracked open, letting out billows of steam. She changed into sleep clothes, then lay down, closed her eyes, and breathed.

  She could fall asleep right now and sleep the sleep of the dead.

  Something skittered above the ceiling. Her eyes opened.

  The sound came again.

  The sprinkler system.

  A steep downhill grade led into the next thought: You are being watched.

  The thought encircled her.

  Maybe paranoia. Or maybe not.

  Maybe they had hacked into her smartphone. Maybe they had hacked the RGB device, despite Bureau 121’s best efforts to prevent it. Maybe the very “sprinkler system” they were now fixing was, in fact, a network of microphones, sensors, X-ray scanners, thermal cameras …

  The shower stopped. She reached quickly for her Kindle, not wanting to be caught staring into space.

  Mark emerged naked from the bathroom, toweling his hair. He looked at her significantly. He must have noticed that the Tampax were back under the sink. Saturday night, kids in bed …

  Turning him away would invite suspicion. Instead, she smiled. He came forward, tossing the towel aside. He was in excellent shape for a man his age: strongly built, toned from regular exercise, well nourished since early childhood. After all these years, she still desired him.

  He put a hand behind her head. Her lips parted as he leaned in for a kiss. She wondered fleetingly if he might somehow smell another man on her. Ridiculous. She had showered twice since last night. Yet the fear, irrationally, remained.

  He tasted of mint. She reached down and found his erection. She set the Kindle on the nightstand, then pulled down her panties and guided him inside her.

  It was faster than usual. She was hungry for him. She gasped with pleasure and came quickly, digging her nails into his back.

  Only when it was done, when the lights were off and the damp hair matted against her neck was drying, did it occur to her that they may have been watched.

  Langley, VA

  “We’re in business.”

  In six new windows, six thermal images portrayed Apartment 5D in shades of neon.

  Three views were top-down, from cameras fed into the ceiling. Three were side-on, imaging through thin drywall. Metal—mostly piping and appliances—showed pink. Wood was dark orange. Organic matter was a vibrant violet. Shower, dishwasher, and recently extinguished bedside lamps blazed vermilion.

  “The five-year-old”—Sam pointed with the cursor at a motionless figure—“in his bedroom. The two-year-old in the nursery. And the main attraction …”

  Two figures lay still, limbs entwined, in the master bedroom. Sam expanded another window, running Stingray IMSI, now also hooked into Mark Abrahams’ phone. From the dresser top, the phone conveyed the same quiet audio—slow, even breathing—as the contact microphones freshly installed in the ceiling.

  As they watched, a thermally rendered figure stirred, stealthily extricated itself from the tangle of limbs, and got up from the bed.

  Manhattan, NY

  She connected the battery, logged on, and entered her password. Still nothing.

  She ran her index fingers beneath her eyes, disassembled and hid the phone, and went back to bed.

  The traffic light reflected off the ceiling. Yellow, red … green.

  Above the ceiling, wires hummed. She could feel them in her back teeth. She could feel eyes crawling over her like ants.

  She needed sleep.

  No. She needed to trust her intuition. And get the hell out of here, get away from the crawling eyes, before it was too late.

  Sprinkler system’s on the fritz.

  Union workers—New York State employees—toiling at nine thirty on a Saturday night without the slightest whiff of woe-is-me? My ass.

  She thought of courtrooms and prison cells. Needles and gurneys. She had envisioned the moment many times. The middle-of-the-night knock. Just like the knock before the Electric Wave Inspection Bureau arrested her mother and sent them all to Yodok. The sleep-addled family trying to make sense of it. You are under arrest for espionage as an agent of a foreign power, in violation of USC Title 18. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to consult an attorney.

  She had researched this. Espionage in America was punishable by death. The United States federal government offloaded responsibility for executions onto the state where the crime was committed. If that state had no death penalty—New York, for instance—the judge simply chose another state to do the deed. In some states, the prisoner had the right, if lethal injection did not suit her temperament, to request an alternative method. Electrocution, gas inhalation, firing squad, or hanging.

  She would choose lethal injection. First an anesthetic, then a paralytic, then potassium chloride to stop the heart. Quick and painless.

  She tumbled into a light, troubled sleep. In the dream, her tae kwon do instructor at Heaven Lake put her through her paces. His soft, musical voice belied his penchant for brutality. Speed is more important than size. Song was panting, bathed in sweat, hair in strings. Bring as many muscles as possible to bear on a strike, but strike the smallest area possible. The left side of her rib cage throbbed dully where he had kicked her. Relax the body between blocks, kicks, and strikes. Present a soft underbelly, inviting attack. Master the dwi chagi, the subtlest of maneuvers, in which one turns one’s back to the enemy, feigning weakness …

  Beside her, Mark gave a snuffling half snore and rolled over.

  His breathing settled again.

  Gingerly she left the bed.

  Tiptoeing to the bedroom closet, she poked through shoes and slacks and dresses. The Kate Spade bag was undisturbed in a back corner. She took it out and cradled it to her chest. Enough cash in it to start a new life. But only as a worst-case scenario.

  After a moment, she carried the bag and some clothes out of the bedroom. She gentled the door shut behind herself with one hip and dressed in the front hall. The dishwasher, in its last cycle, thrummed rhythmically from the kitchen.

  Behind the Thomas the Tank Engine umbrella, she found the leather bag containing the NYMEX pass-card data.

  She found her smartphone and, in a kitchen drawer, the phone case she never used. She used a screwdriver to loosen two screws by the phone’s charging port so she could reach the battery quickly.

  She went into the study and found the RGB device in the desk. She found her keys.

  She listened by the bedroom door. Mark still slept.

  She started toward her children’s rooms. Then stopped. Why make this harder than necessary?

  Because—get the thought out into the light—she might never come back.

  She went to the nursery. Baby Jia’s door was cracked open. A rind of light illuminated the tiny Cupid’s-bow mouth.

  Goodbye, Baby Jia. I love you.

  She went to her son’s room. He lay tangled in his blanket, mouth agape.

  Goodbye, Dex. I love you.

  She spent a last moment looking at her sleeping son, then went.

  CHAPTER SIX

  She waited in the lobby wearing an empty smile, ho
ping nobody she knew would come through.

  A car passed outside, playing loud pop music. Everyone within earshot was implored to “shake it off, shake it off.” Song’s Volvo pulled up out front. “Thank you, Ted,” she told the doorman.

  “G’night, Miz Abrahams.”

  She left her bags in the passenger seat and set her phone, inside its camera-blocking case, in the cup holder.

  She headed for the FDR. Turning onto a small feeder road, she saw no boats on the water. The east side unrolled around her like a string of luminescent pearls. Half a mile downtown, Roosevelt Island, straddled by the Queensboro Bridge, sparkled like a light-up toy surrounded by darkness.

  Present a soft underbelly, inviting attack. Master the dwi chagi, the subtlest of maneuvers, in which one turns one’s back to the enemy.

  God willing, she was wrong and nobody was watching. And she would be back home in a few hours, awaiting instructions for the rendezvous. Soon enough, she would hand off the data and this would all be over.

  But if they were watching, she would force them to show their hand.

  She joined the flow of traffic heading south.

  Langley, VA

  They watched the Volvo turn onto the FDR.

  Red crosshairs tracked the car: past Gracie Mansion, past John Jay Park, past Sutton Place. The audio feed provided the dense white noise of tires against pavement, an occasional faint horn.

  “Meeting Walsh again?” Bach sounded unsure. “Same bar?”

  “Why didn’t she set it up?” McConnell said. “Why take her own car this time?”

  Sam quit gnawing his thumb long enough to say, “Maybe she did set it up. With the second device.”

  “Then why didn’t we see it on his phone?”

  “Maybe he’s got another device, too.”

  They watched the red crosshairs pass the United Nations Building, the Queens Midtown Tunnel, Kips Bay, Bellevue. Two pairs of green crosshairs followed a hundred yards behind.