by John Altman
She looked at the helicopter feed from Lake Togue again. A clean-up operation now. Police tape, windbreaks, forensic teams, big lights on scaffolding. Song Sun Young had been carried on a stretcher into a medical van.
“Let me talk to her,” Dalia said suddenly.
The director, McConnell, Sonny, Sam, and DeArmond turned toward her as one.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
In a conference room next door, Dalia settled into the chair, faced the laptop, and nodded. Sam touched a key, then leaned quickly out of frame. But the agent on the other side hadn’t logged on yet. The connection remained dark.
Dalia took the moment to get her thoughts in order. She reminded herself to consider the woman who would soon sit before her, not as a North Korean, not as an enemy, not as a foreign agent. But only as a woman who, like Dalia, knew the horror of labor camps. Who, like Dalia, loved her two children.
The laptop’s screen flickered.
Song Sun Young appeared on-screen. Face swollen, hair bedraggled, dried blood framing the upper lip. Dark eyes fatigued, and clouded from whatever painkillers they had given her. One eye was bloodshot. Broken blood vessels laced the nose. Yet still, she gave an impression of wiry strength, of coiled springs and calm readiness.
A small window containing Dalia’s own face appeared in a lower corner of the screen. “She’s all yours,” said someone on the other end.
A moment passed as they regarded each other.
Song moved slightly. She was reclining on a cot inside the van. She unveiled an ironic smile. “The someone, at last,” she said.
Dalia let a moment pass before answering. “I’ve met your children.”
A twitch of annoyance, as if at a mosquito, briefly marred the face. Then the ironic smile returned.
“Lovely children.” Dalia lowered her voice. She leaned in closer, as if sharing a secret. “The boy takes after his father. But the girl takes after you.”
Something changed in the set of Song’s face. She looked at Dalia impassively, but with something veiled underneath.
“I love my children, too,” Dalia said. “More than America. More than Israel, my homeland.”
Silence.
“I am more than my homeland. My life has been devoted to tikkun olam. Repairing the world. Regardless of race, religion, national borders.”
Song looked at her through hooded eyes.
“You are also more than your homeland.” Dalia raised her chin. “Song Sun Young,” she said, “a missile is about to strike Korea.”
The hooded eyes shone with cold fire.
“This is not an act of war. It’s the act of a rogue agent. A desperate man. Now contained. If Pyongyang retaliates with full force …”
The eyes flickered.
Dalia repeated it slowly, as if the words contained a riddle. “If Pyongyang retaliates with full force …”
She spread her hands plaintively.
Pyongsan, North Korea
Even this early, the marketplace was crowded. Kahn Gun moved between stalls, scowling. He saw no rice, no corn, and only shriveled, sad-looking jujube. In Pyongyang, he’d heard, they were eating well. They had dried squid and meat, rice, and lotus root. But here in Pyongsan, there was never enough. Things were not quite as bad as during the worst of the Arduous March, but they were getting close.
A clutch of Workers’ Party special police pushed aggressively through the throng, jeering, looking for trouble. Kahn Gun, recognizing the better part of valor, left the market empty-handed.
He took the long way home, hoping to find seeding grass or weeds in the countryside to take the edge off his hunger. It was an imperfect solution. His own growling belly might be calmed by a few bites of weeds or bark. But his young daughter had a tender stomach and could not keep down such rough fare.
He searched in vain. Every edible thing growing up between dusty stones had already been picked. Except for acacias painted white to assert government ownership, which he dare not touch, trees had been thoroughly denuded of bark.
He would need to go into his carefully hoarded supply of soup once he got home. The thin broth of dried turnip leaves was all they had left. Or maybe … The neighbor was a friend. But Kahn Gun had found a jar of kimchi buried in the backyard.
His gaze tracked a shooting star hurtling in his direction.
The morning sun birthed a twin.
A thrill moved down his lean body—dread mixed with excitement.
The second sun moved to join the first. Boiling furiously, climbing into the heavens.
A boom roared, reverberating. Reflexively he covered his head. The earth shuddered, groaning on some fundamental fault line.
Then came heat. He ducked into a crouch, covering his face.
He peeked between his fingers, darkly fascinated.
A mushroom of fire was rising, spreading, slow and regal, wearing a skirt of dust and debris. He saw a flying bird disappear in a flash. Then the government-owned acacias turned to ash.
Keen winds pummeled him. His eyelashes singed. Every hair on his body stood on end, then disintegrated. His clothes caught fire. Then his skin. The wind lifted him off his feet. He was flying. And pebbles, dirt, trees, railroad ties—the world flew with him.
The sky was red, blue, purple, orange, emerald. Every color he had ever seen, and many more. Reality itself cracked open—a red, gaping wound. The sight was beautiful and terrible, stunning and grotesque.
He could not close his eyes. His eyelids were gone.
Then the colors faded and combined.
First to white.
And then, mercifully, to black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Jarrettsville, MD
McConnell drove slowly, scowling through his bifocals. He was about to speak, no doubt to ask Dalia to consult the map again, when the Range Rover’s GPS interrupted him. “Your destination is coming up on your right. You have reached your destination.”
The property was screened by box hedges set far back from the road. Tuesday’s rising sun backlit a grand center-hall Colonial. There was no fence, no garage, no window sticker advertising an alarm company, nothing suggesting unusual security. Curtains on the first floor glowed softly. Potted plants hung from the underside of a porch roof.
McConnell parked beside a Ford Ranger with smoked windows. A bird somewhere clucked bossily. Dalia caught a vague hint of poplar, an undertone of spruce.
A lantern-shaped fixture blazed by the front door. A single straggling white moth circled it. Dalia chose the brass knocker over the doorbell and gave it two brisk thumps.
Moments passed. She had the feeling of being watched, although she saw no camera or spyhole. McConnell waited beside her, humming absently under his breath. She didn’t think he was aware of doing it.
Multiple locks worked: deadbolt, rim latch. Someone audibly programmed a four-digit code into a keypad, and the door swung open. A man with a shaved head gestured them in. Dalia’s eye was drawn to a weapon in a side holster, almost concealed beneath tailored Hugo Boss. Her nose twitched, registering a complete lack of cooking or cleaning odors. Judging from the echoey acoustics, the sprawling house beyond the foyer was big but sparsely furnished.
The living room had a maritime theme: oils of ferryboats, Chinese junks, outrigger canoes, and topsail schooners. A large screen above a fireplace displayed an idyllic beachscape with palm trees and seagulls. The curtained windows let in only the barest gleam of sun.
In the kitchen, a heavyset man wearing a holstered weapon stood to meet them. He used a key to unlock a door, then moved downstairs into shadow. Dalia held the railing carefully, cane in her free hand, and descended with McConnell behind her.
The basement windows had been bricked over. A separate exit had been sealed with steel. Yet the space did not feel like a prison. The lighting was dim but kind, the air pleasant
ly scented, touched with honeysuckle.
Song Sun Young reclined on a black love seat. Her left leg had been bandaged and splinted. She took her time acknowledging her visitors. Arrogant. Or maybe the painkillers had slowed her. Maybe some of each.
McConnell opened his mouth, but Dalia cued him with a glance to remain silent. She set the cane and moved forward alone, leaving Jim McConnell and the heavyset man in the gloom near the base of the stairs.
“The someone,” Song pronounced caustically.
“What does that mean?” Dalia asked.
No reply.
Dalia lowered herself onto a chair beside the couch. She caught subtler odors: decontaminants and antiseptics, latex and fresh laundry. The smells of hospitals.
Several moments passed. Dalia leaned in, speaking quietly, so the men couldn’t catch the words. “We’ve done something good together,” she murmured. “Let it be the start of something. Not the end.”
Half of Song’s face was hidden in shadow. The other half was swollen, battered—but perfectly composed, like a doll’s.
“Nobody wants war.” Dalia paused. “But at the same time, nobody dare look weak. See how this played out. We estimate the DPRK lost six thousand last night …”
She had meant to present that fact more gently, but there it was. Perhaps the bald number, stated so nakedly, was her own effort to gain distance, to reduce the human cost to a statistic, to make herself feel some vestige of control.
“And there will be more losses in days and weeks to come. A radioactive plume blows downwind from ground zero. Fortunately, winds are light and trending east. There’s no reflective cloud layer. It could have been much worse. But it is, by any measure, a terrible catastrophe. A profound crime against humanity.”
Song said nothing.
“And yet,” Dalia continued, “Pyongyang heeded your warning that retaliation would result in mutual destruction. They believed your message that the launch was accidental. They must have realized that the American government had gotten to you, but they listened anyway.” She paused again. “I find that reassuring.”
No response.
“Rather than retaliate, today they fight to save face. Instead of reporting a missile strike, they announced an accidental detonation, set off when they dismantled a testing site as promised during the Singapore summit.”
No reaction.
“And the rest of the world conspires to maintain the illusion. Even China and Russia, who must have tracked the missiles, help to cover the truth. Because nobody wants Armageddon.”
No reaction.
“You and I, working together, might sustain a unique back channel. We might make sure this never happens again.”
No reaction.
Dalia leaned even closer. “Jews have a concept called teshuvah.” Her voice barely above a whisper now. “The person who makes a mistake and then works hard to make amends, to repair the harm they have caused, is holier than the person who has never sinned at all.”
No reaction.
But Dalia thought she caught something in the woman’s eye: a small, hot spark, which was quickly hidden.
* * *
For several minutes after they left, Song sat motionless on the love seat. At last, she stirred. Moving cunningly in case of hidden cameras, she dipped her fingertips behind a cushion of the couch. She brought her hand to her mouth, as if covering a cough, and slipped two pills onto her tongue.
She swallowed. The pills left a bitter aftertaste. She found two more, covering a yawn as she put them in her mouth.
She swallowed again.
She would never go back to prison.
She would rather die.
She was the master of her destiny.
She had hidden ten of the pills since last night, stoically bearing the pain they were meant to take away. No one had noticed. Americans were too distracted by the ready availability of food and tobacco and alcohol and entertainment and sex, perfume and makeup and hair dye, lavish clothes of cotton and linen and silk, without a stitch of vinylon to be seen. They were too caught up in their limitless freedom.
Ten pills, she thought, would do the trick. She was considerably weakened. To call her stomach empty would be an understatement. And after swallowing the first two, last night, before realizing that she should hoard them, she had floated away on a bed of soft, sugary clouds. Even as she sent the message to the RGB, using the code phrase proving her identity, she had been floating, swaddled in light, watching from somewhere outside her own battered body.
She swallowed two more. Then told herself to be patient. Vomiting them back up would defeat her purpose.
She wished she could talk to Mark just once more. The kids. Her eyes teared up at the thought. She thrust the idea away viciously. Don’t draw attention, fool; you’ll ruin it.
Her family was dead to her. They had never been real, anyway.
Breathing was becoming a chore. Like when she had hidden in the coal train, escaping from Camp 14, with her brother huddled close against her. A great weight pressing down on them both. Black dust in her lungs, itching. She had willed herself not to cough, not to give them away. They would escape. They would survive. By sheer force of will. Or they would die trying.
She had pulled her brother close. Pressed her ear against his chest. Listening to the tick-tock of his respiration, using it to calm her own.
Her brother was far away now, beyond her reach. But the memory was here. Tick-tock. Yes.
She was okay.
She could do this.
Four pills remained.
When she reached between the cushions again, her hand seemed to go down forever. Maybe the six she had already swallowed would do the job. But she wanted to be certain. She wanted to take all ten. Feeling around with fingertips as blunt and heavy as anvils, she brought two more pills up at last, reminding herself in the final instant to cover the motion. Hidden cameras. They would pump her stomach if they realized …
She casually rubbed her mouth again, and the pills fell in. Then she closed her eyes. She felt sleepy. Behind her eyelids she saw guttering candles, buzzing flies, rats splayed open on shovel blades. The man she had killed by the Tumen. Someone’s son, she had thought. A husband, a father.
Dex taking his insolent bow after his piano recital. Baby Jia wriggling around in Song’s lap, her tiny Cupid’s-bow mouth pursed.
Two pills were still in her mouth, sour as vinegar. She swallowed. Almost there now.
After a hard life, she deserved a good rest. But she did not believe in deserve. There was only playing the hand you were dealt. Nothing else.
She found the last two pills. When she tried to lift them, her hand had grown terribly heavy. But somehow, she managed. When she tried to open her mouth, she lacked the coordination to get the tablets onto her tongue. And then to swallow. But somehow, she managed. That was what it should say on her tombstone, she thought wryly. Somehow, she managed.
Goodbye, Mark.
She swallowed. She smelled a trace of flowers now, fragrant honeysuckle.
Goodbye, Man Soo. Goodbye, Baby Jia. Goodbye, little Dex.
She should have left a note.
Too late.
She leaned back, settled her head comfortably against the armrest, and dreamed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Princeton, NJ
Dalia Artzi was back home by noon. They passed the Princeton Battlefield, an open, hilly plain where, on January 3, 1777, George Washington had capped off a spectacular rally that began nine days earlier with the crossing of the Delaware River. Deftly applying the core tenets of maneuver warfare—moving faster than the enemy thought possible, striking a blow and then withdrawing unexpectedly, decentralizing command, adapting to difficult terrain—he had provided his troops with a much-needed boost in morale. And not a moment too soon. In late December 177
6, the early successes of the American Revolution were already a quickly fading memory. General William Howe, having received bountiful reinforcements, controlled over thirty thousand troops in America, the largest British expeditionary force in history. In contrast, Washington’s Continental Army and its attendant militias numbered fewer than ten thousand. They had been ill trained and poorly equipped, racked by hunger and disease. For General Washington, the flash of military brilliance had been exceptional. The man possessed many undeniable strengths, but as a tactician, he had been mediocre at best. Yet he had come through when it mattered.
The Range Rover passed a small white pattern-book cottage, once home to Albert Einstein, then turned right onto Prospect Avenue with its mansion-like eating clubs—Princeton’s version of fraternities and sororities. Preparations for the night’s festivities were already gearing up as boys with linebacker shoulders unloaded kegs from 4Runners and Tundras.
Beyond “the Street,” as it was known, houses came in a jumble of styles: midcentury moderns with lots of glass and flat rooflines, a few regal Queen Annes, and a handful of teardowns waiting to happen if only aggressive real estate developers could gild the right palm.
Drawing up before Dalia’s duplex, McConnell eased to a stop. He looked at her through his smudged lenses. She nodded curtly and found her cane.
“Dalia,” he said. “Thank you.”
She grunted.
Inside, her desk looked just as it had on Friday afternoon. A slanting pile of books: Clausewitz, Keegan, du Picq, von Moltke, Dragomirov. Her laptop, waiting for her to get back to the banks of the River Pinarus in November 333 BC.
Bee-beep—McConnell giving a double blip on his horn as he drove away.
She sighed, and leaned more heavily against the cane. For a moment, she felt her mind slip, slip … and then catch, like a transmission clicking into drive.