“Can I go on, my friend?”
The man hadn’t said anything wrong, but Ko would have to shut him up if he did. He twisted his wrist, glancing at his watch. No need to hurry, and now he was curious. How did he keep his door open, a light on, and chill off the air? It certainly wasn’t by selling coats at twenty-five thousand won. He’d never suspected it before, but this man was shrewd. He had other income. Maybe a whorehouse, or bootleg distillery, or maybe something legitimate. Ko had never been a businessman, but wages for soldiering were no longer consistent. Father had taught him how to catch fish, but Ko never took to it as a living. At Army Ground Force basic training, he’d finally hit his own stride, turning into a salmon in a stream. This shopkeeper...he’d just dropped a hook into the water. But what was he fishing for? “Go on.”
The storekeeper bowed twice, then held Ko’s gaze. His chest heaved; then he said, “I know where your sister is. I can help her.”
Ko’s blood rose hot in his neck. He stood straight and balled his hand into a hard fist, but resisted the urge to punch the older man. “You know nothing.”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“Where?”
“Hwasong.”
Ko shuddered. He turned to the door, and back again. Sweat ran down his cheek like a spider on skin. Hwasong had been his second post, a prison guard back then. When he’d arrived it took a week to keep his food down. The first day a prisoner in a tiger cage had baited a mouse with a moldy carrot. He’d snatched it and bit the head off, slurping its bowels like spaghetti. “They aren’t people. Weaklings. Societal defects,” his commander had said, stern faced, kicking the chest of a prisoner, hands strung behind his back. Pigeon torture, he’d called it.
Guards forced confessions—no care for truth. Many prisoners were incarcerated for crimes of family members. Still more claimed they had no idea why they were imprisoned. He was dizzy every time he gave torture, but he gradually numbed. He learned to trust the filth were in Hwasong for reason. They deserved death, but the homeland was merciful for allowing them to live. Then, when he almost started to enjoy it, his assignment was over and he was back to border patrol.
The nightmares came a few months later, memories he didn’t know were there, shoved deep and forgotten. He awoke sensing the pounding stench of blood, vomit, and feces filling the air. It was as if their remembrance clamored to get out, and found a weakness during his sleep. In time they subsided, and left completely for five years. The years of his wife’s terminal cancer, and his daughter’s gangrenous hand. Other dreams took their place.
But now the nightmares were back again. They’d begun one night after he received transfer orders, back to Hwasong. He’d awaken in sweats. Last night even sitting up and dry heaving till Eun Hee came, asking if he was OK. Apparently they’d never left, the nightmares, sneaking back, like an infection unhealed. The infected flesh needed to be cut out.
Ko turned to the door then back to the man, pacing several times. He stifled a scream of frustration. He wanted to belt the guy till he confessed what he knew, but that wouldn’t help his sister if he was telling the truth. “How can I trust you?”
“You will see with your own eyes soon enough, Sangsa. You are headed there again, no?” The shopkeeper pointed to Ko’s hands. “You are tearing the coat.”
Ko looked at the bundle in his grasp. His fingers wouldn’t let go. He strained his mind and the grip loosened till the coat thudded to the floor. Wait. The man had to be lying. “They would never assign me to a camp where my sister was a prisoner. They wouldn’t trust us. Not even me.”
The shopkeeper’s smile left him. “They don’t know who she is. If they did, you would be a prisoner as well just because she’s a blood relative.”
“You’re lying!” He swung an arm, gesturing around the room. “They know everything. And they know who is loyal and who is a tyrant. You, sir, are a tyrant!”
“I have said nothing of the sort. I am loyal to the homeland. My home follows juche. I have only said I know where your sister is, and that I can help her. There is nothing tyrannical about that.”
Ko grabbed the man’s collar and cocked his fist. “Then tell me what you know about her.”
The shopkeeper winced, bracing against the counter. “You don’t need to beat me to tell you.”
Ko took a breath. Then another, and finally he let go.
The man rolled his neck and said, “She is a political prisoner. Christian, I believe.”
No. His sister, Soo Jin, was too strong for them. She could never be wooed by such weak political heresy. There is no God. He recalled an image of her standing between him and six men, swinging her pocketbook, daring them to take a step closer.
It had been when Shin-Il, a bully from Ko’s primary school, had moved back to town the last year of secondary. Ko had thickened in the meantime, his body hard from growing up with two older brothers, rowing Father’s boat when the wind didn’t blow, and hours on the soccer field. Shin-Il heard about Ko and boasted he was going to beat him up again. Ko had come out of biology class, a black-and-white film on the reproduction system. He squinted in the light, eyes adjusting after a second to see Shin-Il blocking his path and a small crowd around them both. The heat beaded sweat in his hair and sweet cut grass wafted across from the soccer field.
“Remember me, little Ko?” Shin-Il raised his fists. He waved them weakly, and tossed back black hair like a ballet dancer.
Ko stepped toward him. “Shin-Il. I just saw a movie with you in it.”
His lip curled.
“Yeah, I remember you. I remember you like your father’s goats, but I prefer your little sister when no one’s around.”
Shin-Il screamed something from a karate movie and swung a roundhouse kick, much more quickly than his stance suggested he could. But it was too low and Ko tensed, absorbing the blow to his gut with a grunt. He clamped down on the leg and struck him in the balls with an uppercut that lifted Shin-Il from the ground. He crumpled without a sound, crawling on the earth, dragging his face in the gravel. After what seemed like a minute, a faint wheeze came from his lips, growing louder with each breath.
That’s when six of Shin-Il’s friends had stepped from the crowd, eyes set on Ko. Soo Jin had jumped in front, swinging a pocketbook. “This is over! No one touches him!”
And no one had.
Yes, she was much too strong to believe in a poisonous foreign religion. He sneered at the shopkeeper. “Not Soo Jin. Plus, they would have known she was my sister and come after my family, too. She was in my house.”
“Like I said, they don’t know. There is a guard she talks with there. He said she mentioned her religion once. Remember? But you had forbidden her to speak of it ever again.”
Ko stroked his cheek, feeling the fuzz close to his ear. She had said something about a man at work who told her about a prophet, but only once. “I haven’t seen her for...five years. She moved away. Said she got a government job in Kimchaek.”
“But it wasn’t government. She knew you were stubborn and would never listen. She went because she thought the government might have been watching. She used a different name. Once caught, she was no longer a Ko. It was for your own protection, what she did.”
Ko had looked for her once while on temporary duty near the city, when the letters stopped coming. But by that time her old roommate had moved away. He knocked on every door on the apartment floor, but no one knew her name. At one flat, however, a wife’s eyes had broadened when Ko showed her a picture of Soo Jin. Casually ignorant before, she adamantly denied knowing her, backing away behind her husband, who shut the door. Ko had looked at the picture held between his knuckles, then realized he should have changed from his uniform before asking questions.
Now, Ko picked up the red coat from the floor and brushed it off. A hand-me-down from a privileged wife. Probably wore it once before thinking it unstylish, tossi
ng it aside. Their class was never hungry. Even in the famine, they had enough. Rumors had circulated there wasn’t a famine at all, but the government had held back food to subdue an uprising among the people. Ko hadn’t allowed himself to believe, until doubt had crept back in, along with the nightmares.
Those prisoners didn’t deserve the sewer-hell of Hwasong, no matter what they’d done. It only held prisoners with life sentences. No one was ever released. And no one escaped. If Soo Jin had gotten mixed up with the wrong people, she could be there, in the special block for religious and political prisoners. If so, she was strong. She would last a couple of years, but no more. The fire in the crematorium cooled only for cleaning. He’d be back there within two weeks. The camp had been closed for a year but now was back in full operation.
It would be his turn now, to step out from the crowd, to swing his fists and dare anyone touch her. But how? He couldn’t hide her. If caught, he’d be a prisoner in Hwasong himself, and they’d take Eun Hee as well. “If you know so much, tell me one thing. Ask Soo Jin how she broke the heel off her uniform shoes. Till then, this conversation is over. I’ll be back next week, same time. Have my answer.”
Ko stepped into the bitter wind from the river. The same coffee scent blew past. He stood still for a minute, looking for a fish, but none jumped. If the man’s answer was right, he had contact with Soo Jin and could be trusted. Because, if his answer was wrong, he either didn’t have contact, or Soo Jin misled him because he wasn’t trustworthy. It would be a long week.
Chapter 13 – Active
Rappahannock General Hospital, Virginia
Red lowered himself to a short stainless-steel stool. He tried twisting the seat down but instead the legs spun, scraping the floor. His knees hit tube rails of the hospital bed where Lori lay semi-inclined. The sanitizer dispenser mounted across the hall squeaked as nurses passed, rubbing the germ killer between palms. The alcohol scent reminded him of wiping Nick’s hands with the stuff again and again. The kids—thank goodness for Lori’s sister. They’d stayed at her house for Red and Lori to have a date night. Because of the relocation, the CIA had advised breaking contact with their regular babysitters, Red’s parents, for at least a year. The dispenser squeaked again and he clasped Lori’s hand.
Wish there was as easy a way to clean up this mess, thought Red.
Lori’s eyelids closed and she brushed them with a wet wipe, then handed the black-smeared cloth to him. He wadded it and shot it like a basketball into a shiny corner can. “Same song, second verse.”
Lori huffed. “Forgot about that. Just here last week with Penny. The Harmons move to town and we’re already adding the ER doc to the Christmas card list.”
“You and Penny can hobble around the house together. We’ll have mother-daughter clubfoot races.”
“I won’t be in a cast. Not for this wound.” She sighed and put her chin to her chest. “Tony, if we have to move again, I’m going to scream. I can’t do this. I feel old.”
He pushed his fingers back under her palm, and she squeezed them. Her wedding ring was halfway twisted on a knuckle, green diamond resting next to her pinky.
“A mine-cut di-á-mond,” their Egyptian jeweler had said when he mounted the stone. He always pronounced diamond in three syllables. “You could recut it and the value go up. But a green stone”—his voice had cracked—“very rare. I would be scared to do it.” The stone had been in the family for four generations now. Great-Grandfather had smuggled it back from northern Italy after losing three toes to a Kraut grenade in 1917. He’d said a lovely woman in a yellow lace beret had given it to him, after he’d moved his headquarters from her home without damaging it. He’d fancied the stone a cheap emerald. Only the men of the family knew he’d swiped it. They’d been sworn to secrecy, fearing what the ladies would think if they knew the truth.
The white curtain hanging from an extruded aluminum ceiling track yanked open. A brunette with sagging eyes in blue scrubs carrying a laptop stepped next to Lori’s bed. “Mind if I open this up? You’ve got a private room. Only one we have down this end.”
Red pulled the cloth shut again. “Thanks, but she likes it closed.”
She put her hand on Lori’s. “How you feel, girl?”
Lori lifted her sore leg, gripping the hospital bed side rails. “Like I’ve been stung by a hornet the size of a Doberman.”
“Want something to take down the pain?”
She pulled herself up in the bed. An electric motor spun, and the mattress rose to meet her. “Just some more Advil, please.”
“I’ll have a nurse bring them...your leg should be OK. The bullet went right through the meaty part of the calf. Not much tearing. It didn’t tumble on the way through. It’ll look like hell for a while, but the bruising will go away in time.” She turned to Red. “You’ve got to take care of her elbows. Lost most of her skin there. I picked all the gravel out of them I could find. Clean all the wounds twice a day, morning and night, till the skin grows back. Triple antibiotic, plus fresh bandages. We’ll give you some samples for home. Enough for a day or two. Don’t neglect them. They’re more susceptible to an infection than the leg.”
“She’s in good hands.”
The doctor stood and pulled the curtain back again. “You take care of yourself. I don’t want to see you down here again. OK? The meatheads outside tell me you’re not going to be my patient anymore.”
Lori scowled. “They’re not making trouble, are they?”
“It was a pissing contest. Same thing happened last year when a different fed got brought in.” She tossed her head. “I know how to make them fall in line. They’ve turned off all the mics on the entire floor. Got some agent hovering at the nurses’ station. If I hadn’t put my foot down, they’d set a tank outside the door. Said they were taking you somewhere else, probably within a half hour. I told them you should stay put, rest for the night. But if they send you to Johns Hopkins, be sure to drop my name when they ask you who stitched you up. OK?”
She closed the curtain behind her. The door clacked shut.
“They’ve swept the room. We’re OK to talk. You call Carter yet?”
“No.”
“Tony, I don’t care what it takes. We’ve got to get this fixed. We might have to go off the grid completely. Permanent. There’s a place I know in Ontario where we can disappear for a couple years.”
“We’ve got to see what Carter turns up. Need to give him a chance.”
“We may not have time. Shit, this is twice. I thought last time they were after you. But this time they were gunning for me.” She put her hands to her sternum. “I mean, what the hell? Why would anyone want to kill me? You know how frustrating that is? That pisses me off.”
Red smiled. There she was, the Lori he loved. “Eventually you learn to not take it personally.”
“I don’t want to learn. I’m financial intelligence, for crying out loud. I left fieldwork so I didn’t have to deal with this crap.” She grabbed his collar. “What could be more boring than fintel?”
Red took her hand and held it between his. “Maybe it’s not about your job. Maybe it’s something from the past. Maybe about your dad. Or me.”
“Dad?”
“Kind of a coincidence that your dad gets involved right before someone takes a shot at you.”
“Tony, I know you’ve never hit it off with my family. But he’s not trying to kill me.”
“Didn’t say that. Maybe just someone he talked to. Someone connected to him. Guess that’s for Carter to find out.”
“Or maybe it’s the Det,” she shot back. “Marksman seemed to know something was going to happen.”
Red stood and turned to the wall, bracing himself against it. One of those funnel lights they stick in your ear fell from its holder and dangled from its cord like a noose.
Lori’s voice was soft. “I’m sorry about Marksman.”
Marksman. How the hell had he shown up? Red had always thought he was a spook with the CIA doing business mainly in Europe. He trusted him because that’s what you did with your team. But he’d made a connection with Marksman on a different level somehow. An unspoken covenant. Marksman was unpretentious. As if you could simply trust his words as truth, the few that ever came from his lips.
But how had he shown up at just the right time? Was he trailing Red? Or maybe Lori? What did he mean by she’s not the enemy?
“He was a good man,” Lori offered, rubbing a thumb.
How would you know? “But why was he there tonight? You’re right. That means the Det could be involved. But I’d know about it, wouldn’t I? The Det, we’re a small group.”
“You’re new to the command. You may need to clean house. It only takes one.”
“One what?”
She shrugged, her exasperated expression asking, Do I have to spell this out for you? “One leak. Mole. Whatever you want to call it. The Det has always been an accident waiting to happen. It’s got too many connections, too many agencies involved, and even plays with some foreign governments. Co-ops, you call them. Ask me, as soon as more than one person knows a secret, it’s only a matter of time till it gets out.”
“But we’re just a fusion cell...sort of. Only a few of us see the whole picture. Not the co-ops. That’s how we control leaks. The co-ops just contribute assets.”
“In exchange for what, Tony?” She soft-pounded a fist on the bed rail. “Information. Intelligence. Data. And an occasional service. It may be spoon-fed to them, but there’re still connections going on. People connecting with people. And people build relations. And relations can be manipulated. Who’d Marksman belong to?”
Red hooked a stool leg with his foot and pulled it over. He sat forward, elbows on his knees, rocking. “Don’t know for certain. I’ll do some digging when I get to the office.”
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