The Korean Woman

by John Altman

  “Enlighten me.” But Whitlock did see, it seemed. At least, he was beginning to.

  “The EAM.” The Emergency Action Message sent from STRATCOM, authorizing a nuclear strike. “That’s impossible to fake. Even with Luna.” The EAM contained the Sealed Authenticator System Code, a random key generated by a machine that stamped only two copies. It was never seen by human eyes until the key holder was broken. One copy, the so-called biscuit, was carried in a satchel by an aide who never left the president’s side. The other was sent to NMCC, which Whitlock was in charge of. But NMCC cryptovaults were double-locked. No one person could gain access, not even Woody Whitlock. “But come into the process after the EAM. After the keys would have been turned in the silos …”

  Understanding dawned. Access the launch system inside STRATCOM’s secure internal network, and you could fire every land-based nuke, regardless of DEFCON, regardless of the SAS code, regardless of foot-draggers and naysayers and ass-coverers.

  “Internal network uses AES encryption.” The look on Whitlock’s face now was hooded. “Gold standard. And it changes every day.”

  “You guys drill constantly. Does each drill use a dedicated algorithm?”

  Whitlock shook his head.

  “So picture two guys like us, having a conversation like this. Someone like you agrees to get a version of the encryption, and someone like me agrees to have Luna Moth waiting on standby to crack it.” He was thinking already of Song Sun Young, the sleeping RGB agent in New York City. The master of her destiny. Song’s activation would justify using the quantum computer. Bach, who had unfettered access to Pyongyang’s servers, could pose as RGB and activate the agent himself.

  “We could do it, Woody. Two guys like you and me. One bold stroke. That’s all she takes.” He heard himself sounding too eager. He shaved off the edge, then repeated more mildly, “That’s all she takes.”

  Whitlock raised his glass and lowered it without drinking, staring unseeing into the middle distance. After a moment, a weird smile appeared on his lips. He quickly wiped it away.

  He favored Bach with a gimlet eye. “Buddy,” he said, “you’re scaring me.”

  His tone was light, but his expression was crafty. Bach tried again to gauge the man’s thinking. Was he getting on board? Or was he scanning, parsing, judging?

  Whitlock’s mouth twitched. And suddenly, Bach realized that his friend was straining to affect casualness every bit as much as he himself was. Antennas were extended, rotating to pick up a signal.

  Retreat!

  Bach made a loose gesture. “I’m trying to scare you. You see how it could go down. Just like this. Eventually, someone else will have this conversation. Then we’ll really be fucked. Everybody with access to Luna needs to be watched. Closely.”

  Woody Whitlock gave Benjamin Bach a long, measured gaze. Then he sighed and nodded. He raised his drink and polished it off.

  * * *

  DeArmond was shaking him.

  Sitting up, Bach put his feet flat on the floor. Outside the window, the sun had lowered noticeably. Monday was winding down. Wordlessly he gave his place on the couch to DeArmond.

  When he checked his phone in the men’s room, he found no message waiting. He leaned against the sink’s edge. In the mirror, the divots beneath his deep-set eyes had become chasms. His skin looked nearly translucent. Fine lines webbed the eyes; deeper ones bracketed the mouth.

  He remembered his high school cross-country coach. Run through the cramps, the man counseled. Run through the pain, through the fear, through the fatigue. Nothing mattered except taking that next step. Do-mode.

  He turned slightly, considering his reflection from another angle. Between the new health regime and the cancer, all the fat had melted away. His face was all sinew and skin and bone. A man pared down to the essentials. Only pure resolve, pure strength, remained.

  He saw his father’s face there. And also, now that every ounce of excess fat had been trimmed away, his grandmother’s, near the end. And also, for the first time, his grandfather’s. Dad’s dad had been a boxer in World War II—so gifted a fighter, according to family lore, that Bob Hope and the USO had excused him from combat, tapping him instead to entertain less-fortunate troops who would serve as cannon fodder. Razzle Dazzle Bach, they had called him. The Battling Tail Gunner. He’d had no education beyond fifth grade. But in America, land of opportunity, he had always found work. First boxing and then, as he aged past his prime, modest but honest labor—construction or house painting or loading and unloading at docks and warehouses. He had given his wife six children before the heart attack took him.

  Bach had never met the man. But he had seen pictures in Grandma’s row house in Queens. He had seen the fire in the eyes—the same fire he now saw in his own.

  Razzle Dazzle.

  He splashed water on his face and straightened, nodded once, and went back to the conference room.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Lake Togue, NY

  Song blinked awake, reprimanding herself. She could not allow such weakness, or she would never survive.

  The light coming through the window had taken on a tinge of gold. She sat up. Her mind sluggishly engaged. Monday evening—dinnertime back home. Of course, not a regular Monday. The Monday after Mom went missing. But still, a Monday. Still, you had to eat.

  Even after days of deprivation, she had no appetite. The buttermilk pancakes from the café breakfast sat like concrete in her stomach.

  In Chosun, families were old hands at dealing with betrayals from loved ones. Your own mother, daughter, father, son, spouse might denounce you or steal your food. They were only doing what they had to do to survive. You could not blame them for surviving.

  But Mark came from a different world. Softer, gentler, more spoiled. What did he know about survival?

  What had he told the kids? What was he thinking?

  Her gaze moved to the Android phone.

  She opened the nightstand drawer. Beneath Super Glue and rubber bands and old coupons, she found a power supply that fit the phone. She plugged it in and switched it on.

  One percent power. But charging. The device automatically found a neighbor’s unsecured Wi-Fi network. She opened a web browser, bracing herself against what she might see.

  The same headline blared: an AP dispatch picked up by multiple outlets. the disappearance of mi-hi abrahams: what we know now.

  It has been two days since Mi-Hi Abrahams was abducted by terror suspect Yusuf Bashara …

  Hypertext led to a video. She clicked, then watched in disbelief. It was the video that the screen capture had come from. Her Volvo, pulled over onto a nighttime street corner. She was driving. A suspicious-looking man with a black beard emerged from a doorway and entered the car. Brandishing a gun, he searched the Volvo’s interior. The car pulled away and vanished offscreen.

  Song shook her head in bafflement. It had never happened. Yet here it was.

  Her eyes watered. She wiped them absently and read on. Less than one hour after the abduction, a violent confrontation with Bashara sent two federal agents to Newark Beth Israel Hospital, where they remain today. Both are expected to make full recoveries.

  These must be the two federal agents she had gunned down outside Newark Airport. How had this become “a violent confrontation with Bashara”?

  Mi-Hi’s husband, Mark Abrahams, delivered a dramatic plea on Sunday night to both his wife and Yusuf Bashara. But so far, police efforts have failed to uncover even a clue to the woman’s whereabouts.

  An embedded video followed the text: Mark, frozen and blurry, sitting on the couch in their Lexington Avenue living room. Song felt something tilt and slide in the pit of her stomach. Her children were sitting beside her husband. Dex looked stunned, as he did when he didn’t get enough sleep. Baby Jia was distracted by something offscreen.

  You don’t need to
watch it.

  But she watched anyway.

  First came a photograph from Martha’s Vineyard, her in a yellow sundress, Mark with a protective arm slung around her shoulder. Some segment producer had selected this picture to give tragic context to her disappearance. The way they were. Then Mark sitting on the couch with the kids, addressing the camera:

  “Mi-Hi. If you can see me or hear me, please know we are looking for you. We will find you. You will be okay. And to Yusuf Bashara: Turn yourself in. If you don’t, there’s no telling what might happen. The authorities promise me that every effort to be fair will be made if you turn yourself in. We are going to get you one …”

  She floated away, not hearing the rest.

  For a timeless moment, bewilderment reigned. How had they gotten footage of a man who didn’t exist entering her car? What the fuck was going on?

  Then clarity came.

  Of course the video had been manufactured. Digital trickery, sleight of hand. It was a message from whoever had dispatched the vans to follow her in the first place. For the first time, Song got a sense of this presence. Someone, somewhere out there, was onto her. Following her. Watching her. Behind all the satellites and surveillance drones, behind the cameras and emergency-sprinkler inspection and the bad nunji, and now behind the video—all the same someone. She sensed this presence as a blurry, larger-than-life phantom. Genderless, ageless, ethereal. An intelligence, a life force. The counterbalance to all the faceless but powerful someones back in the RGB, back in Pyongyang.

  The message of the video was, we can provide a story that will give you an out. The terrorist from Central Casting was the story element that would let Song off the hook. She had been kidnapped. She had not been in control of the situation. Once everything was worked out, she could go back to her life.

  This someone was going a step further. We have the means to make this story real. Witness the video. The stock footage, or whatever it was, of the stock terrorist. Come turn yourself in, and we’ll write the end of the story together.

  Song knew the power of a story. Stories could get you sent to labor camps or to the executioner’s chamber. Stories had the power of life and death.

  But, of course, the way to con someone was to offer the illusion of getting away with something. That was how all scams worked. You let the mark notice the bent corner of a card, so they thought they were getting away with a cheat. Then when they weren’t looking, you unbent the corner and bent another card. Or a wealthy Nigerian prince appealed for your help in moving a vast illicit fortune out of his home country—“I must solicit your strictest confidence in this transaction …”—only to con you out of a “processing fee,” by whatever name. The someone realized that Song wanted more than anything a return to normality, to her home life. Hence the appeal to Song’s need, to her greed. Come work with us and you’ll get everything you want—your family, your husband, your children, your life, your freedom!

  A trick. A con. It was hard to cheat a cheater.

  She watched the video again. Relishing, she realized, the brief glimpse of the kids. Relishing the glimpse of Mark. It had been only two days. It felt like forever.

  How would the someone explain the fact that Song had left the apartment of her own free will, bearing luggage, and taken the car from the garage, and picked up this man on a street corner? How would they explain that?

  It didn’t matter. The bait—for that was all it amounted to—would remain untouched. She would not give herself over to this someone’s machinations.

  She could never touch that life again. No matter what.

  * * *

  She turned off the phone and laid her head back against the pillow.

  She remembered the first time she met Mark. They had sat together over crudités, and her future husband had looked at her with frank, undisguised sexual interest. His leg had casually brushed hers when he leaned forward to pick up his drink. He had smiled knowingly.

  Song had read about men like him in magazines. She had seen actors portray them in movies. But she had never before encountered one in person. Where she came from, there were no men like this. Hookups, as Americans called them, were unheard of. In Chosun, one could not check into a regular hotel without the appropriate travel permit. Hotels would not accept unmarried couples. Just a century ago, middle-class Korean women had not been allowed to leave the family home, except at special times when the streets had been emptied of men.

  Mark’s brand of flirting had been uniquely American. That gunfighter-with-belt-slung-low quality, that deep-rooted, unexamined assumption of entitlement. A cowboy, through and through. Except that, instead of spurs and six-guns, he equipped himself with merino suits and encyclopedic legal precedents.

  Even with all her training, she had struggled to play his game. At Heaven Lake, she had learned seduction from a kidnapped South Korean woman named Jeong Mi-Hwa. (The name, meaning “beautiful flower,” had been the basis for Song’s chosen alias, Mi-Hi.) The tutor had been a product of her own upbringing, and so the lessons had been shot through with South Korean values. In areh dongae, culture was very much geared toward twosomes. Couples coordinated outfits right down to their underwear; they worked out together, using each other as counterweights. Valentine’s Day encompassed three separate holidays, with girls giving their boyfriends chocolates on February 14, then boys giving their girlfriends candies one month later, and then, a month after that, on April 14, Black Day, single people eating black noodles and lamenting their loneliness.

  Americans put less emphasis on coupledom—that cowboy mentality again. Men overly eager for domestic bliss were perceived as soft. Hence Mark Abrahams’ undisguised aggression and vaguely predatory male gaze.

  Song, fumbling, had improvised. She bit her lip; she touched her hair. A shy pose with an undertone of eroticism. She knew that many American men fetishized East Asian women. She operated on instinct, batting her lashes, gazing submissively down.

  It worked. She reeled him in even as Eliza Crystal shot her sideways looks. Eliza had harbored her own designs on Mark Abrahams, having invited her friend to the dinner party only as her wingwoman. The friendship with Eliza had not survived that night. But it had served its purpose: providing access to Mark Abrahams.

  Song had engineered an encounter with Eliza inside MoMA’s sculpture garden six months earlier. She had struck up a conversation about a piece that seemed to defy gravity, a cylinder floating impossibly atop a pyramid. Chatting, they had discovered common loves in Picasso and Matisse. The friendship had evolved naturally, from meals to yoga classes, from movies to Netflix binges. All for this moment: the casual brush of the leg, the knowing smile.

  Song had genuinely enjoyed the courtship with Mark. He was handsome, rich, tall—two full heads taller than the tallest Young Pioneer in Chosun, where an entire generation had grown up stunted by the Arduous March. He knew opera. He knew restaurants. He squired her through a real-life fairy tale.

  She remembered a six-course meal at a restaurant in Gramercy Park. The salad had contained pears, celery, red lettuce and cheese, and something she couldn’t identify—some distant cousin of the artichoke. This had been early spring. Back home in Chosun, people suffered a lack of food at the end of every winter. Pyongyang responded by ramping up rhetoric about American dogs who starved them with unjust sanctions, about the imminence of Seoul being turned to a lake of fire. But you could not eat rhetoric.

  If you pause while eating, set down your silverware on the plate. She had learned American manners at Heaven Lake, from a woman named Seungwon. How Seungwon had learned American manners, Song didn’t know. Maybe from Emily Post.

  In America, utensils should never touch the tablecloth. Not even handles. If you’re pausing for just a moment, set them down any way, as long as they’re completely on the plate. If it’s a longer pause—if your companion has said something particularly fascinating and you’re to
o absorbed to keep eating—put the flatware on the right side of the plate, so it crosses into the middle.

  Whatever the source, Seungwon had been surprisingly on target. American manners were very different from Korean, where slurping noodles, chewing with mouth open, and eating with both hands at once, brandishing two utensils, were not considered rude.

  The napkin goes into your lap the moment you sit down. Sitting up straight, elbows into the body. No elbows on the table. When you use the napkin, you’ll be delicate. A little dab around the lips, another if necessary. The napkin shouldn’t get dirty at all. When you’re finished with the meal, place it lightly by the side of the plate. No twisting, no folding; just set it down loosely. And never on your chair.

  One winter night, inside a horse-drawn carriage on Fifty-Ninth Street, surrounded by holiday shoppers and carolers and holly and lights reflected on snowdrifts, the fairy tale had reached its natural climax: Mark Abrahams asking for her hand in marriage.

  And she had enjoyed the marriage as much as the courtship. He was kind. He was considerate, steady, faithful. A good father, a devoted husband, a passionate lover.

  But she had always held some part of herself in reserve. Because someday, she had realized even then, the fairy tale would end.

  Now that day had come.

  She should get going. She must risk the roadblock. She must move on.

  To her new life.

  Whatever, and however short, that might prove to be.

  * * *

  She woke up thinking about the cell phone. What if she used it?

  They could place it only to the nearest tower, and maybe not even that. Cell phones, she knew, used an algorithm to choose a tower, based not on proximity but on signal strength, tariffs, and existing mobile traffic. So she could call and they might not be able to pinpoint her location, and then she would be able to say a few crucial words to Mark, to make sure he and the kids understood that no matter what else she had been, she had been, first and above all else, in her truest heart, a wife and mother. There had been lies, yes. But it had not all been lies. The part that mattered most had not been a lie.