The Korean Woman

by John Altman

  His eyes closed. He could see his man losing his nerve. Turning himself in. Throwing Bach under the bus. It could happen.

  In a way, it would be a relief. Let someone else take the responsibility, and let him die a normal, quiet death.

  But no. Only he had the means, motive, and opportunity.

  Maybe it wasn’t necessary. Maybe the peace process, given enough time, would actually pay dividends.

  But he knew how the Norks worked. He could see the yellow canary feathers poking out from the corners of the Supreme Leader’s mouth with every promise he made.

  He exhaled jaggedly. He was very tired, but sleep didn’t come for a long time.

  * * *

  The doctor removed his glasses in a way that felt staged: an actor using a prop to create a pause during a monologue. He lifted his chin, donning an invisible mantle of authority. He was a big man, fiftyish, with a broad, honest face, and creases around the eyes that fell into place when he smiled.

  During the examination, he had made smoothly disarming small talk about March Madness as he fed a tube up Benjamin Bach’s left nostril, then the right. “Almost done,” he had said, forcing the tube farther up. “So how do we feel about Michigan?”

  Bach felt the tube curling inside his sinus, shaping itself to his skull.

  Now the doc asked gravely, “Have you ever been exposed to any unusual environmental contaminants?”

  After fourteen years with the Company, dissembling was second nature. Bach invented from whole cloth a history of summer work during college: contracting, construction, asbestos, fiberglass, Formica, God knew what else.

  He had booked the appointment under the name Jim Brenner, an alias he sometimes used in Beijing. Jim Brenner had an entire backdrop—birth certificate, passport, Social Security number, tax history—and health records that exactly duplicated Bach’s own. The doctor was up in Boston—good reputation, but far enough away that Bach would not likely run into someone he knew. If his worst fears proved true, he didn’t want Langley hearing about it. He would not be forced into early retirement. He would maintain control.

  If there was any skepticism about the summer-work story, it remained carefully veiled. “Well, you’ve got one hell of a drip. We’ll do a CAT scan. And then, if we find what I expect, we’ll take aggressive preventive measures—immediately. That means a sinuplasty. We go in and scrape the sinuses clean. Prevents brain and respiratory cancer from developing. I’ll be honest, it’s no picnic. But it beats the alternative.”

  * * *

  As far as Langley knew, he caught a flu.

  Three weeks later, he went back to Beijing.

  A puddle jumper brought him to Yanji in Jilin Province—the closest a white face could get to the North Korean border without announcing itself as CIA or Christian missionary, neither of which was welcome. Climbing down from the Harbin Y-11, he felt pretty much okay. The scraping had been tough, but he was healing. The cough and drip were much improved, though not entirely gone. He had moved on. Do-mode.

  He spent the next nine months living out of the same old suitcase, hopping between the same old fleabag hotels in Yanji, Beijing, and Vladivostok. Sometimes, he spent a week at the US Embassy in Seoul, or a month on a fishing boat or a Company freighter, sending and receiving radio transmissions from the Hermit Kingdom. North Koreans, desperate to feed starving families, proved open to collaboration despite the dire personal risk. He successfully cultivated army officers, comfort women, party officials, nuclear and ballistic technicians, operatives inside the Reconnaissance General Bureau. Paid with food or wan or forged ration books or the promise of relocation for themselves or their children, these assets helped find targets at which to aim the left-of-launch program.

  And there were many successes. A large proportion of the DPRK’s test missiles exploded on the launchpad, veered off course, disintegrated in midair, plunged into the Sea of Japan. Bach’s technical team pushed the envelope relentlessly. To their arsenal of malware, lasers, signal jamming, and sabotage they added high-powered microwaves, frying target computer chips, turning North Korean missiles into so many tons of directionless junk.

  But Pyongyang had successes of its own. The newly installed Supreme Leader had doubled down on the path forged by his father and grandfather, accelerating the nuclear and ballistic programs. According to the CIA’s psychological profiling unit, he was only sticking with what had worked for him in the past. Projecting strength had vaulted him up the line of succession, ahead of two older brothers. Soon after assuming command, he had sent a stark and effective message by purging not only party members deemed disloyal, but also their children and aides, using theatrical methods such as a flamethrower and antiaircraft artillery. And over the years, aggression as a policy had served North Korea well in strong-arming international concessions. But the aggression had always been tempered by shrewdness and compromise. The father of the new Supreme Leader had spent two decades waiting in the wings, learning to read his enemies’ tolerance for provocation, before taking power. The son, by contrast, had spent only two years. At best, he was an unknown quantity; at worst, a loose cannon with nuclear capability.

  The new regime quickly launched a three-stage Taepodong/Unha rocket. They conducted a triumphant nuclear detonation. They tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile, and an initial failure was quickly followed by a successful launch. They flexed their own cybermuscles with the humiliating Sony hack, an embarrassment compounded by Sony’s promptly pulling from theaters the movie that had raised the DPRK’s ire. (The controversial film had come to DirecTV regardless. Bach had been unimpressed.)

  The whole chess game was too close for comfort. Bach ground his teeth and wished for Luna Moth. Bringing light to the darkness on gossamer wings, giving the power to outmaneuver any cryptographer in the world. Complete cybersecurity dominance.

  Then he learned through a back channel that the program had been discontinued. The laws of quantum physics had refused to bend to the Pentagon’s needs. A pipe dream after all, as the director of CERT had said. Back to the drawing board, the fleabag motels, the Company freighters.

  Benjamin Bach was made station chief in Seoul. His devotion to the work was all-consuming. He had no close family still living. In all his years in the CIA, he had allowed himself only a single romantic dalliance. His first mentor in South Korea had been a woman named Esther Yong, eighteen years his senior. The sex had been clumsy. She had been too ill at ease in her own thick-shouldered frame. When she suggested that the affair complicated things, got in the way of work, he had readily agreed. Deep down, he had been relieved.

  * * *

  The year after the sinuplasty, he found himself back in Arlington, this time at the Hyatt. He was moving up in the world.

  The ride to the Pentagon was provided now by a private security detail. Benjamin Bach was not the only one moving up. Woody Whitlock had been promoted, as predicted, to director for operations of J3. Nevertheless, he came to meet Bach at the River Entrance. Whitlock was still strikingly down-to-earth, friendly, and charismatic. But something had changed. The soft-spokenness that had distinguished him from most career military was gone. He spoke crisply, forcefully. Of course, it might have been just the promotion. In any case, Bach noticed, walking past the River E-ring offices, Woody Whitlock now inspired salutes instead of grins and handshakes.

  In the subbasement conference room, they found the usual suspects from DIA, FBI, NSF, NIST, DHS, NASA, DARPA, and J3—and, to Bach’s surprise, the same young man from the NSA and the same young woman from IARPA. This was his first inkling that perhaps Luna Moth had not been as decisively discontinued as advertised. Instead, it had gone black.

  His second inkling came when he realized that the personnel around the table now included some very heavy hitters. There was the United States director of intelligence himself, and the directors and deputy directors of the FBI and CIA, NCS and N
SA (the NSA director doubled as commander of United States Cyber Command), and NSA Directorate leaders including J2, Cryptography, and T, the Technical Directorate, as well as Company station chiefs from Moscow and Paris and Tel Aviv.

  The director of intelligence, well-fed, graying at the temples, looked like an ordinary businessman. “If you’re in this room,” he began, “you have been deemed an integral part of America’s defense. And you are about to be honored with the details of the greatest US intelligence coup of all time.”

  A drumbeat of excitement began in Bach’s solar plexus. And all at once, he knew.

  “You all recall a program called Luna Moth.” Beat. “Officially discontinued.” Double beat. “But unofficially, ladies and gentlemen, a resounding success.”

  The technical specifics would be made available to those who cared to try to comprehend them. Good luck with that. (Laughter rippled around the table.) But the upshot was that America’s quickest and cleverest had banded together and vaulted humanity into a brave new future. Inside NASA’s Advanced Supercomputer Facility at Ames Research Center, amid an array of wires, mirrors, lenses, and laser beams, the impossible had been made possible. Ions of ytterbium had been trapped, bumped into quantum states, entangled, assembled, and stabilized. To these men and women charged with safeguarding democracy, the development meant a dramatic new tool in their arsenal—but one that must be deployed with the utmost caution.

  He alluded to Operation Double Cross during World War II. Every person in the room knew the story. During the early days of the war, MI5 had arrested and turned every Nazi spy inside England. As a result, the British had gained absolute control of the flow of information back to the Wehrmacht. To keep their secret, they had played a complex and dangerous game. Information had been mixed with disinformation to prevent the Nazis from realizing that their network had been compromised. Battles had been lost, lives sacrificed, saving up capital for the massive deception of D-day. The good of the many had outweighed the good of the few.

  Similarly, Luna Moth would provide maximum value only so long as America’s enemies remained unaware of it and, thus, took no measures to counter it—quantum-resistant cryptography was labor intensive but possible. Hence the official cancellation of the program, when researchers had begun to see their goal coming within reach. And hence their policy moving forward, modeled on the approach of Operation Double Cross. Every use of Luna Moth would be specifically approved by both the DI’s office and the White House. Calculated losses would be not only accepted but invited. All too soon, America’s enemies would duplicate Luna’s achievement. Until then, the USA would maximize its advantage by focusing on quality of victories over quantity.

  Through it all, the paunchy director of CERT smiled beatifically. Looking at him, you’d think he had been nothing less than instrumental in this accomplishment, urging on his troops through the inevitable patches of threadbare morale.

  Fuck him. The achievement, Bach knew, was greater than any one person. And it was greater than politics. It was a true watershed moment, a paradigm shift as promised.

  And it came not a moment too soon. North Korea’s leaps in ballistic missile tech had been rivaled by its leaps in cyberpower. After the Sony hack, but more quietly, Bureau 121 had stolen eighty-one million dollars from the New York Federal Reserve, and hundreds of millions more from South Korean Bitcoin exchanges. They had hacked into a British television network to prevent the airing of a show about a kidnapped nuclear scientist. They had used the website of Poland’s financial regulator to host a “watering hole” attack, installing malware onto systems belonging to the central banks of Brazil, Chile, Estonia, Mexico, Venezuela, and even the Bank of America.

  Now Bach could enjoy free run of Pyongyang’s servers. Like the proverbial kid in a candy store, but instead of Mike and Ikes, he could fill his pockets with nuclear infrastructure schematics and profiles of aerospace engineers. But of course, he would show restraint. To the outside world, and to the Hermit Kingdom’s ruling regime, the game must seem to continue. Things would be missed accidentally-on-purpose. And so, when a true moment of crisis came, America would have a hole card to play.

  * * *

  Thrice yearly, Benjamin Bach became Jim Brenner and went to see the ear-nose-and-throat guy in Boston.

  He paid for the comprehensive physicals and preventive scans out of his own pocket. First responders were entitled to free medical treatment through the Environmental and Occupational Health Services Institute. But while Benjamin Bach was a 9/11 first responder, Jim Brenner was not.

  Scan after scan came up clean.

  Until one didn’t.

  The doctor maintained steady eye contact as he delivered the news.

  When he was done, he paused, letting the words sink in. Eye contact still direct. A small dollop of snot visible in one nostril, beside a silvering hair. After a few seconds, he leaned away, taking off his glasses—the pause in the monologue. “I’m honest, Jim. It’s not always pretty, but it’s the only way I know how to be. This is not good news.”

  When Bach had been a boy in the Bronx, a snow day seemed to go on forever. Summer vacations had encompassed eternities. Here, now, he was rediscovering that childhood temporal perspective. Perhaps five seconds had passed since he got the news, but it felt like forever.

  “Chemo?” he managed.

  “If we choose to go down that road … We’d start with surgery. Then chemo, yes. And radiation. And there are some very promising immunotherapies in trial. Keytruda, Opdivo. I’ll make some referrals, if you like. I have a friend at Sloan. He’s very good.” Pause. The voice lowered. “But I won’t bullshit you. We’re looking at a tough slog. There’s no denying that the treatment can be harsh. That’s actually what kills most patients, not the cancer itself. And once you go that way, it’s hard to turn back. If it’s going to lead to the same place in the end …”

  “Do I have other options?”

  “Another option is palliative care. We focus on enhancing quality of life. For however much time remains.”

  “Which is …”

  “I hate to put a number on something like that.”

  “If you had a gun to your head.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  Bach felt himself nodding. What was the etiquette here? Did you thank the doctor who had just told you that your body was riddled with cancer?

  Outside the window, traffic droned past. The brakes of trucks wheezed. A siren rose and fell. The endless breath of life on earth, of mass transit and ambulances. It would continue merrily along, Bach suddenly realized, without him on the planet.

  He closed his eyes. Blood-soaked children, melted badges. Cherry pickers floating aimlessly, shrouds of ash. He felt the itch in his lungs. He smelled smoke and melting steel and combusted jet fuel and pulverized concrete and scorched flesh and fingernails and bone and hair and pulverized Formica and asbestos and polystyrene foam.

  He could picture it: the toxic smell becoming a toxic post-nasal drip, sliding down his throat and ruining his stomach, his liver, his kidneys, his bladder. Spreading, mutating, killing him, all this time, from the inside out. He sat here alive. But in fact, he had died almost two decades ago. He had died on 9/11. Like father, like son.

  Emerging into the blindingly bright parking lot a few minutes later, he blinked stupidly. He donned sunglasses. Then he paused, keys in hand, beside his Mercedes.

  The impression of the doctor as an actor remained. Bach felt not entirely convinced that this wasn’t actually a play or a movie. The momentous news did not reconcile with the banality of tractor-trailers droning past on the nearby highway, with the smell of oil and frying food from a McDonald’s down the road.

  He got into the car. His reflection looked back from the rearview mirror. He took off the sunglasses. Heavy smudges underlined his eyes. Otherwise, he looked okay. Thin, maybe. And tired. But not dying.


  Not dying.

  * * *

  He lay in his hotel room that night, staring at the unblemished cream-colored ceiling. He thought of jet planes arrowing across television screens. Massing oily black smoke. The world’s biggest tire fire. People trapped on a roof. Opting to jump rather than burn. Holding hands. Had his father jumped? Somehow, the question had never occurred to him before. Somehow, he had avoided it.

  He thought of the days following 9/11—days he usually didn’t let himself think about. He had met other volunteers by the score. They had come from New Mexico, Tennessee, Canada, Ohio. Fire trucks designed to travel five miles at a stretch had driven seventy-two hours straight on interstates. He had met a young couple, social workers, who had postponed their marriage to drive up from Georgia. They all were in Do-mode. They all were locking their trauma away deep inside. How many of them, in the years since, had received diagnoses like the one he just got?

  He had spent the second night at Stuyvesant High School. The school, half a mile north of the smoking pile now called Zone One, had been refitted as a staging area. A Red Cross nurse had given him two Tylenol PM. He had stolen three fitful hours of sleep on a thin mattress on a cot. The next morning, he had tried again to call his father. The phone line had popped and sputtered like grease on a hot grill.

  When he made the walk down to Zone One on the third morning, it felt almost familiar. Muscles throbbing across his back, shoulders. Down the thighs and calves. Food stations everywhere, Michelin three-star restaurants doling out free sushi and filet mignon around the clock. He ate a California roll and drank a cup of coffee.

  The situation was changing, federal and state agencies taking over. Security had appeared, chasing away those who did not belong. But the combination of the medical badge and the dust-encrusted two-canister mask gave Bach the right to stay.