Vortex

by Chris Ryan

  'It is Kasparov,' he said curtly when his call was answered. 'I am ready to be collected.' He flicked the phone shut and walked into the front room.

  It was dark in there, but he didn't bother to switch the light on. Instead he stood at the window and looked out over the wide expanse of countryside ahead of him, silently contemplating what he had to do. A group of renegade North Korean politicians were furious that their leader appeared to be losing his ambition for military supremacy. They had won his boss's little auction for the weapon this scientist had been developing without the knowledge of his RAF employers. It was Kasparov's job to check that everything was as it should be before the Vortex device was finally delivered. Once that happened, he could return to Russia, resign his commission and head straight to the little dacha in the countryside where he could allow himself time to decide how to spend his life and his money.

  Gradually he became aware of headlamps in the distance. They grew hypnotically closer as Kasparov watched them impassively. Only when they were really quite near did he move. He walked out of the front door and waited for the car to stop.

  When it did, another RAF soldier stepped out of it.

  'Lieutenant Colonel Kasparov?'

  'Flight Lieutenant Johnson?'

  Johnson nodded. 'You have a coat?'

  Kasparov shook his head. 'I am used to the Russian winter,' he said scornfully. 'I will not need a coat.'

  Johnson shrugged. 'Whatever,' he said. 'Shall we go?'

  'Yes,' Kasparov replied. 'We shall. I wish to see the Vortex device as soon as possible. Take me there now.'

  And without a further word, he stepped into the back of the car, waiting impatiently for Flight Lieutenant Johnson to do as he had instructed.

  Chapter Twelve

  Chin-Hwa slept. As he slept, he dreamed. And as he dreamed, he saw terrible things.

  He saw the cities of the world, their streets full of panicked people. He saw the fear in their faces, and the chaos all around them. He saw lines of hospital beds, their occupants thin and gaunt – the unmistakable look of the dying. He saw burning fireballs in the air, and heard the screams of the aeroplane passengers as they fell to earth, and to their death. He saw nuclear missiles flying undetected towards the West, and he wondered whether their arrival might not be a blessed release to the people they were sent to destroy.

  And he saw Vortex. Small. Silent. Lethal. It did not care whom it affected: men or women, adults or children – everyone's life would be destroyed.

  He shouted out in his sleep and awoke sweating. It took him a moment to realize that his dream had not been real, but in a way that was small comfort. It could be only too real, and very soon. And Chin-Hwa would have to take his share of the blame.

  The meeting he'd had with the government men kept playing around in his head. London, New York, Los Angeles, Madrid. He never expected things to get this far. Vortex was just a deterrent. It was meant to keep the peace and stop the West from invading his country. No one ever intended to actually use it – at least that was what he'd been told. He was just being ordered to copy it. If he didn't do it, someone else would.

  But as he dressed and stomped around his sparse apartment, he imagined more of the devastation the weapon could inflict on those major cities. He imagined the chaos. He imagined the death, the destruction. He told himself that it was not his fault. This would have gone ahead without him. And if he hadn't complied – his eyes flicked over to the door of the bedroom in which his mother now slept, even though it was the middle of the day. She spent more and more time in bed now; but he knew the fact that she was frail would not stop the government stooges from carrying out their threat. He was doing the right thing, he told himself, in keeping his knowledge to himself.

  But what would she say? What would she say if he told her about Vortex and the terrible things it could do? And that thought led his eyes to fall upon a picture of his father. Ki-Woon had been a good man. Honest. Principled. Willing to die for what he believed in. He had told Chin-Hwa to look after his mother, but hadn't he himself followed his conscience all those years ago?

  As he sat there, Chin-Hwa felt the absence of his father more bitterly than he ever had before. He would have known what to do. And Ki-Woon seemed to stare out of the picture at his son. 'Look into your heart, Chin-Hwa,' he seemed to say. 'Do what you think is right.'

  In that moment Chin-Hwa knew he was fooling himself. All those times he had been brought into the government buildings and asked the same questions again and again. In his expert opinion, would Vortex work? Would it be effective over the range that was being claimed? Once they had their hands on the machinery, would he be able to copy it? Each time he had answered in the same way: the theory of Vortex was sound, but it would be a very difficult device to engineer. Yes, if they managed to engineer it, then the range was realistic. And yes, he would be able to copy it. He didn't really know if he could, but what else could he say?

  And he had known, even then, that these shadowy government officials did not want Vortex simply as a deterrent.

  They wanted it as an instrument of war.

  Chin-Hwa understood how devastating it could be, and as he stared at his father's picture, he knew with a sudden clarity what he had to do. He knew he had to put things right.

  He stood up abruptly and walked into the small kitchen. At the back of one of the almost empty cupboards there was a small box. He opened it and removed a thin wad of crumpled notes, money that he had saved over a long period of time in case of an emergency. Really he had been thinking about his mother needing medical care, but this, he realized, was a different kind of emergency. The worst kind of emergency. And if he did nothing to stop it, he would have only himself to blame.

  Chin-Hwa walked to the window. It was still raining outside, and as he looked down the twenty storeys of the high-rise building in which he and his mother lived, he saw that the pavements were almost bare.

  Almost, except for the one man in a heavy raincoat who was standing on the other side of the road. Standing and watching. Watching and waiting.

  Chin-Hwa had become used to being followed. They were clever at it, never sending the same man twice so that he wouldn't recognize his pursuer, but he had become aware of it soon after that first meeting with the government men. Wherever he went there was somebody nearby, as dependable as his own shadow. Following. Watching. Sometimes Chin-Hwa would play games with them, walking down a deserted side street and then stopping to look back. His pursuers would not try to hide. They would just stand there, still and expressionless, then start following him again as soon as he went on his way.

  Today, though, he was going to have to lose him.

  He stepped into the small bedroom where his mother slept, bed-bound for most of her time now. 'I'm going out,' he said softly, and was relieved to note that she was asleep and so unable to question why he was stepping outside in this rain. He grabbed his one coat that he had to make do with, whatever the weather, then left the flat.

  There was only one way out of the apartment block, and as soon as he descended the concrete stairwell and stepped outside, he saw the man on the other side of the road stand up a little straighter, then start to follow him as he walked through the rain towards the tram stop. He took the tram every day – like most North Koreans he was too poor to own a car, and the Pyongyang metro was too unreliable – and was used to waiting at that little tram stop, his shadow never standing more than a few metres away.

  By the time the orange and white tram trundled along, Chin-Hwa was soaked to the skin. The doors hissed open and he stepped up into the tram, closely followed by the man in the heavy coat, then shuffled halfway up the carriage to where there was another set of doors. He stood close by them, listening carefully for the telltale hiss that would indicate they were about to shut.

  When the hiss came, he slipped outside again.

  The doors shut firmly behind him, and as the tram moved off, he caught sight of his pursuer through the window,
his expressionless face now marked with anger. Their gaze remained locked until the tram took him out of sight.

  He hurried quickly in the other direction, knowing that the tram's next stop was not that far away, and his shadow would return here as soon as possible. But as he pattered down the street he became aware of something else.

  Footsteps.

  He looked over his shoulder and saw another raincoat-clad man walking about ten metres behind him, clearly trying to keep up with Chin-Hwa's energetic pace. He had seen enough of these guys to know when he was being followed, but there had never been more than one of them before. He felt a sense of rising panic as he realized that the surveillance must have been increased very recently – since this morning, in fact – and he cursed himself for having asked too many questions in the government meeting.

  He was followed all the way into the centre of Pyongyang. As he walked he desperately tried to think of a way to lose his shadow. There was no way he could pull the tram trick again; he could head for a metro station, but trains were unlikely to be running as it was not the rush hour. In the end, he headed for the huge white building of Department Store Number 1, one of the capital's biggest shops and a place he would never normally set foot. Maybe, just maybe, he could lose his trail here.

  The store was not crowded. His clothes dripped onto the shiny floor as he walked past aisles of goods he could not afford – business suits in the menswear department, wooden machine guns in the toy area. All the while he kept checking over his shoulder; all the while he saw that the man in the heavy raincoat was following.

  On a whim, he darted left, past a row of children's clothes that were all of an identical style. He swung round to his right, then to his left again. Ahead of him was a flight of steps. He ran to the stairs and thundered down them, then hurtled through a door and out into the street again where he ran with all the energy he had. As soon as he could make a turn off that road, he did; then he did all he could to lose himself in the unfamiliar streets. If he didn't know where he was, Chin-Hwa reasoned, then nor would his shadow.

  Sure enough, when he looked back, there was no sign of him.

  Chin-Hwa would pay for this, of that he was sure. Nobody could prove that he had lost his trail on purpose, but that didn't matter in North Korea. He'd be hauled in, questioned, maybe even tortured. Perhaps they would come for his mother. He couldn't think about all that, though. If he did, it would distract him from what he had to do. And he knew what that was.

  There was only one Internet café in Pyongyang, and that had recently opened. It was never full, however, because the price of half an hour on the computers cost more than most Koreans earned in a month. It was really just for foreign visitors, and to present the image of North Korea being a modern state, even though only a tiny fraction of the population had ever used it.

  When Chin-Hwa walked in, he attracted strange looks; they became even stranger when he pulled his wad of damp notes from out of his sopping pockets and handed them to the man in charge, who counted them out carefully. Warily, he was shown to a computer terminal. 'Half an hour,' he was told curtly.

  Chin-Hwa nodded. Half an hour to save the world. It didn't seem like long. He put his fingers to the keyboard and started typing.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The cell in which Ben, Annie and Joseph found themselves was empty apart from a flickering strip light on the ceiling and a metal plate by heavy electric doors that had hissed firmly shut when they had been unceremoniously thrown in here. Flight Lieutenant Johnson had at least removed the handcuffs that were by now cutting into the skin around their wrists, but then he had left them without a word.

  There were no windows in the cell – just concrete walls – and in the weak artificial light it was impossible to judge how much time was passing. Joseph had walked to the far corner of the cell, sat down and huddled his arms around his knees; Annie, on the other hand, was pacing up and down, fuming. 'What's going on here?' she demanded of nobody in particular. 'I don't understand. What's Vortex? Why are we being held?' She turned to Ben and pointed a slightly threatening finger at him. 'If you try and tell me that these people are doing this with the full knowledge of the RAF—'

  Ben raised his hand to quieten her. 'I don't think that, Annie,' he said softly. 'Of course I don't think that.' He looked meaningfully over at Joseph, then back at Annie, who closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath and then gave him a nod. Together they approached the old man, who was still sitting in the corner, staring impassively into the middle distance. Ben felt a bit uncomfortable, towering over someone so much older than him.

  'I think we need to talk, Joseph,' he said quietly. 'I think you need to tell us what's going on. What was your brother talking about? When were you sent away? What's Vortex? Why are you here?'

  Joseph looked slowly up at them. His eyes were faintly bloodshot and his floppy hair straggled over his face.

  'You'll have to excuse me,' he replied, his voice hoarse. 'It has been rather a shock for me to see my brother again after so many years. I never thought he would still be here. I thought he would have settled into a quiet retirement. It seems I was very wrong.'

  'Joseph,' Ben insisted urgently, 'I think we're in danger. You got to tell us what's going on.'

  'Danger?' Joseph replied with a sinister little chuckle. 'Oh, we're in danger, all right. There's no doubt about that. I told you to stay away from this place.'

  'Yeah, well we didn't,' Ben answered him shortly.

  Joseph smiled. 'No,' he said. 'You didn't.' He tapped the cold concrete floor where he was sitting. 'I suppose you'd better both sit down. It's a complicated story.'

  Ben and Annie exchanged a glance, then did as they were told.

  'My brother Lucian is two years older than me,' he began. 'When we were young, we both followed the path of the sciences. We were both physicists. That's how we ended up working here.'

  'At Spadeadam, you mean?' Ben asked.

  'Yes. At Spadeadam.' Joseph's eyes misted over. 'It was like a magnet for scientists in the late nineteen fifties. They were developing the Blue Streak missile, and there was a real outlet for our skills, and a chance for us to learn.'

  'But there was more going on here than just Blue Streak, wasn't there?' Ben asked intuitively.

  'Oh, yes,' Joseph replied. 'A great deal more. It was all top secret, of course. It had to be – this was not the sort of science that anyone wanted to become public knowledge. And it was the sort of thing to which Lucian was bound to be attracted. He was never comfortable with the fact that – forgive me for saying it – his younger brother was a more natural scientist. He was attracted towards realms of scientific endeavour that he knew I would go nowhere near.'

  Ben found he was holding his breath. 'Like what?' he asked.

  Joseph shrugged. 'Certain areas of weapons research, for one.'

  'But . . .' Annie faltered slightly. 'There's nothing wrong with that, is there? I mean, everyone researches new weapons, don't they? It's not like we go to war in Spitfires any more.'

  Joseph's bloodshot eyes fixed Annie with a piercing stare. 'You are too young to remember Hiroshima,' he said starkly, and Annie fell silent.

  'In any case,' Joseph continued, 'I don't believe we are talking about the same kind of weapons research. The experimentation that was being done here fifty years ago would have been repellent even to you, my dear.'

  Ben sensed Annie flushing with embarrassment.

  'I admit,' the old man said, 'that perhaps I am as guilty as anyone. I worked on Blue Streak. I helped develop missiles. But Lucian' – and here Joseph shook his head sadly – 'got wind of other experiments being conducted in secret, in underground laboratories much like the ones we are in now. Experiments involving human subjects.'

  Ben and Annie looked aghast at him.

  'Mostly they used criminals,' Joseph carried on regardless of their evident horror. 'The men in grey suits offered them shorter sentences in return for their permission to let people like
Lucian treat them as if they were little more than laboratory rats. My brother was always interested in the effects of electrical stimuli on the human brain, and here he was given free rein to conduct his loathsome research without any thought for what he was doing to the poor people who had unwittingly volunteered themselves.'

  Ben's eyes narrowed as he listened to what Joseph had to say. Men in grey suits? Evil scientists? Human experiments? It all sounded a bit far-fetched to him, like the conspiracy theories he had read about on the Internet. But then he looked around, reminding himself that he was currently trapped in a concrete cell far underground during what was supposed to be a pleasant bird-watching holiday. More than that, there was something in Joseph's voice that had the desperate ring of truth.

  'But that's not weapons research,' he heard Annie saying, the shock in her voice clear to hear.

  'Really?' Joseph asked. 'Weapons come in many forms. Some of them we deem to be acceptable, others we don't. Lucian boasted to me that he was developing ways of forcing prisoners of war to give us information we might want. He boasted that he and his associates were close to being able to alter the memories of enemy forces – real psychological warfare.'

  'Why did he tell you all this, if he knew you didn't approve?' Ben asked.

  'I don't know,' Joseph replied. 'Pride, I suppose. Perhaps it made him feel good to be in the know about something. And of course, he thought he had some sort of hold over me now.'

  'I don't understand,' Annie asked. 'Why?'

  Joseph looked at the two of them in turn. There was a sadness around his eyes now, as though telling them all this had drained him emotionally.

  'Lucian and his associates tried to manipulate their subjects' mental states to alter brain function, using electrical and chemical means. But you can't just attach an electrode to someone's head, or pump them full of drugs, and expect them to lose all their mental faculties. These techniques only really work to their full effect if there is already a history of mental deficiency in the subject. Lucian was trying to scare me, because he knew that I had a history of mild mental illness.'