by D. B. John
A mouth was opening and closing with globs of greasy fish on the tongue. It took him a second to realize that one of the Central Committee men was talking to him. With an intense effort Cho forced himself to appear interested and listen. But his ears soon pricked up. The man was telling him matter-of-factly that the apartment below Cho’s had been vacated; the cadre who lived there had been sentenced to six months’ reeducation through labor in the mountains, along with his family. Mr. Thein was living there temporarily—Yong-ho’s idea. The Committee man wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and gave low belch.
For the remainder of dinner Cho said little, chasing flakes of fish and kimchi around his bowl. He was in a paralysis of nerves and anxiety, all the time having to smile and appear to bask in the glow of his triumph. Only his wife could tell something was amiss. When everyone had finished eating, she announced that her husband was exhausted after the long flight and should rest before his debriefing tomorrow. In ones and twos the guests said their good-byes and left. His parents said goodnight and embraced him and congratulated him again, followed by the Central Committee men and their wives.
But before Yong-ho’s peculiar guest could take his leave, Cho said in English, “I’m interested to know what industry you’re in, Mr. Thein.”
The smile switched on again. He looked as if he’d been set an intriguing puzzler. “I advise your government on synthetic consumer goods, you could say.”
“Would one of those consumer goods be crystal methamphetamine by some chance?” He turned to Yong-ho. “Bingdu it’s called here, isn’t it?”
All the warmth went out of Mr. Thein’s face. His expression changed to something colder. All pretense gone.
Yong-ho stepped over, his voice low and furious. “What the hell’s got into you?”
“Get him out of my home,” Cho said calmly. “You and I need to talk.”
26
CIA Headquarters
1000 Colonial Farm Road
Langley, Virginia
Dawn had not yet risen when Fisk collected Jenna and drove her along silent streets toward Langley. To a casual observer he might have appeared his usual calm, equable self, but Jenna knew him well enough by now to spot signs of nerves. A slight edginess to his movements. A nick on his cheek from an overhasty shave. The director had summoned Fisk for an 8:00 a.m. meeting the day after Thanksgiving because Fisk was in trouble.
In the underground parking garage of the Original Headquarters Building a member of the director’s security detail was waiting for them next to the private elevator. They rode with him in silence to the seventh floor and were escorted through a deserted open-plan area. The sun was just rising above the treetops, sending golden bars of light across the carpet.
In the glass-walled office at the far end the director sat working in his shirtsleeves.
“How am I going to explain it to Congress, Charles?” he called, getting up and walking around to the front of his desk when he saw them approach. He glowered at Fisk from behind beetling eyebrows and a large nose. “Crazy Kim launches an attack against South Korea, a close US ally, in a transparent ploy to screw us for aid …” His voice rose to a shout. “… and it works?” He threw his arms open and began to pace around the desk, becoming, Jenna thought, more Italian the angrier he got. She liked him. “And this comes just weeks after a rocket test we also knew nothing about.” He smacked the paper of a report in his hand. “Was there no chatter out there prior to this attack?”
“No, sir,” Fisk said, “nothing.”
“Not even a breeze? A whisper?”
Fisk looked down, like a schoolboy.
“Caught napping again, they’ll say, yet we have the gall to justify a budget bigger than NASA’s.”
The director paused for a moment with his back to them, peering at the blue-gold sky through shatterproof glass. “The president is deploying the USS George Washington to the Yellow Sea as a show of force, but he wants to combine it with some kind of peace mission. Speak softly and carry a big stick. He’s also calling for fresh ideas for tackling Kim, and he’s not asking the State Department.” The director turned and threw the papers onto his desk. “He’s asking us.”
Fisk began to speak. “Sir, we’ll get onto it—”
“Specifically, he’s asking you, Dr. Williams.”
“Me?”
“Our president is a thoughtful man, and an avid reader. It seems your report on North Korea’s secret lab impressed him. Congratulations. I’d like your draft recommendations by the end of the day.”
Simms let Jenna use his office, one wall of which was a huge white-board covered in photographs and screen grabs, with colored marker lines connecting each.
Her fingers poised over the keyboard. She was feeling alert and clearheaded. And she was feeling a buzz of nerves and excitement.
Fresh ideas, he said …
She knew that what she wanted to say was radical. It would overturn decades of policy. In a sudden burst of inspiration she wrote:
Just as many diets to lose weight can have the opposite effect in the long term, so isolating and punishing a tyrant for his aggression can make his behavior worse. We cannot hope to change a regime by isolating it from change …
She explained her reasoning, in bright, plain prose, drawing on her years of thinking about North Korea. She worked through the day, stopping only to eat food out of vending machines. She was so engrossed that she even managed to put to the back of her mind thoughts of last night’s Skype call with her sister’s abductor, though that, too, was feeding into her excitement.
She concluded with a list of recommendations she knew would raise eyebrows. Using the CIA encryption software that was unique to Top Secret Special Access files, she sent the report to the director, and no one else. He would probably throw it straight into the shredder.
Something else had been at the back of her mind all day, too. As she left the empty building that evening she remembered what it was: the director’s mentioning something about a peace mission.
27
The “Forbidden City,” Compound of the Workers’ Party Elite
Joong-gu District
Pyongyang, North Korea
Cho closed the door on the last guest and turned to face his brother. Yong-ho’s face was crimson with rage, his brow dripping, as if he were sweating pure alcohol.
“Mr. Thein was our guest,” Yong-ho hissed. His voice was ill controlled, struggling to contain a shout. “Have you picked up Yankee manners now? Is that how you speak to—”
“It’s over for us. Isn’t it?”
Yong-ho stopped. His mouth opened and closed like a landed fish. The dead calm of Cho’s voice seemed to derail him completely. Anger evaporated from his face, and was replaced by a dull fatigue. After a long pause he said, “What’re you talking about?”
Cho poured them each a shot of soju. He was starting to feel wired and awake, even though it was almost midnight. His body was on New York time. The apartment was silent except for a ticking in the floor as it began to cool, and even though he kept his voice very low, each word was flinchingly clear.
“Whatever crime they’ve uncovered in our real family’s past, our blood carries the guilt. It’s just a matter of time before they act. Our rank won’t protect us. You know that.”
Fear sparked in his brother’s eyes and then died down, leaving them empty and dark.
“You’re jumping to conclusions.”
Cho shook his head slowly and handed him the glass.
“There probably won’t be a trial. They’ll just make us vanish.”
He was breaking a taboo and it was making him feel strangely serene. No one spoke of the reality behind the state’s facades. To avoid even thinking about it, it was necessary to maintain two mental sets of accounts, one public, one secret—the ability to know and not know at the same time. Cho had done this all his life. It was the only way to reconcile the daily contradictions between propaganda and the evidence of one’s eyes, betw
een orthodoxy and the kinds of thoughts that could land you in the gulag if they were ever spoken aloud. The secret set of accounts was never acknowledged because there was no emotion or idea, no aspect of life, public or private, that fell outside the state’s authority. A disloyal remark was all the Bowibu needed for an arrest. Sometimes, simply a look was enough.
He turned to the window and looked down at the silver Mercedes-Benz sedan in the courtyard—his gift from Kim Jong-il—now in a monochrome gloom.
“I don’t think they’ll arrest my wife. As the daughter of a Heroic Family she’s protected. Omma and Appa are safe, because they’re not our real parents.” He knocked back the soju and winced. “But you and I, elder brother …” He felt his chest tightening. “… and my son … are in real danger.”
“You’re forgetting something.” Yong-ho was mopping his brow with a paper napkin, sweating streams. “Loyalty. The Leader has thanked me in person for my work. He’s embraced me.” He put his hand to his heart. “Do you know what that makes me?” His voice was trembling now, but whether from affronted pride or fear, Cho couldn’t tell. “One of his most trusted, one of his most loyal. He values loyalty above everything. He will not forsake us because of some wrong committed—fuck knows—” He made a sweep of his arm. “—generations ago.”
Yong-ho slumped against the wall.
Cho sat on the low windowsill with his arms folded. Behind him a half-moon trailed a silvery veil across the city. “The closer a cadre is to the top, the more violent his end when it comes. That’s how it goes. And as for this work you’ve done for him …” Cho shook his head vaguely. It was funny how he’d almost forgotten his grievance against Yong-ho. The counterfeit bills. The drugs in the diplomatic pouch. None of that seemed to matter now. “… that may mean we’re in even graver danger than we could even imagine. You know what Appa says about our Dear Leader. Get too far from him and you freeze; get too close and you burn. I think you, elder brother, have been much too close.”
A silence opened between them for a moment, until a glass smashed and cascaded as the soju slipped from Yong-ho’s hand. His body seemed to crumple from the middle, making him slide down the wall. Folded up on the floor in a zigzag, his sharp knees touching his face, he looked vulnerable, a defeated animal, his tall, cocky stature diminished. Shards of crystal surrounded him on the parquet, and Cho heard a sound like the lowing of a wounded ox. For the first time in his life he was seeing his big brother weeping. He crouched down on the floor next to him and tried to put an arm around him, tried to hush him, but the cry became a keening sob, broken by gasps for air. Some lifelong defense inside Yong-ho was cracking and falling. Cho clasped his brother’s head to his own. Soju-scented tears flowed over Yong-ho’s cheeks. “I’ve always been loyal,” he said. His shoulders heaved again, his sobbing so loud it threatened to wake the courtyard.
Cho put Yong-ho’s arm around his neck and lifted him heavily up onto his feet. “Let’s get some air.”
*
They sat in the Mercedes beneath the pines of Moran Hill Park. Military police patrols passed them every quarter hour, but the car’s 2★16 license plate was a powerful amulet. No one approached them. The air was clear and Manchurian cold. In the light of the half-moon Pyongyang lay sprawled below them like a city of the dead, without electricity except for the red-glass flame of the Juche Tower on the far side of the river, and the floodlit colossus of Kim Il-sung on Mansu Hill, bronze arm pointing into darkness, the nation’s destiny. The hemisphere of stars reached to the horizon. Yong-ho opened the sunroof a few inches to smoke and Cho looked up. The Milky Way trailed brightly westward toward the Yellow Sea, and the branches of the pines were black and sharp against it.
“Remember coming up here to look for girls?” Cho said, taking a swig from the soju bottle he was nursing in his lap. He passed it to Yong-ho.
Years ago, in their Socialist Youth days, they’d bring a cassette player up here among the picnicking families in summer.
A smile spread across Yong-ho’s face. “You’d dance with the prettiest girl, and I’d have to take turns with her mother and grandmother.”
They lit cigarettes, though Cho seldom smoked. He clasped his brother’s hand. It was as if they were meeting for the first time since those far-off days.
Cho stared at the glowing tip of his cigarette. The place was so quiet he could hear the paper crackle as it burned.
“Why did you let me travel to New York with a diplomatic bag full of drugs and fake dollars?”
Yong-ho raised his hands to his face. “Younger brother …” Shame emanated from him in a soft groan. But his confession, once it began, seemed to salve him, and took on a momentum of its own. Faster than Cho could take in what he was hearing, with one revelation eclipsing the next like fireworks in a display, the secrets of Yong-ho’s work came tumbling from him.
Cho’s first shock was to learn that his brother was the First Deputy Director of Bureau 39 of the Party—in effect, chief of the most secret organization in the country and one of the highest-ranking cadres. He had held the position for four years and reported solely to Kim Jong-il. Yong-ho glanced at Cho, waiting for him to say something, but Cho’s mouth was hanging open.
Bureau 39, Yong-ho explained, had been set up back in the seventies to manage Kim Jong-il’s personal wealth and to provide a secret powerbase separate from his father. The Great Leader was then in his prime, enjoying the largesse of his patrons, the Soviet Union and Maoist China, and basking in the growing cult of personality his ambitious son was creating for him. Bureau 39 was tasked with raising funds to pay for the cult’s extravagance—the statues of bronze and gold, the endless portraits, the words carved in granite and marble. But it was also financing the construction of private palaces for Kim Jong-il, and the luxury cars and watches he gave as gifts to keep his inner circle loyal.
Yong-ho tipped his head back to blow smoke through the sunroof.
“When the Great Leader died in ninety-four the world thought we’d go the way of the old communist bloc, the way of history—liberalize, modernize, Westernize—but the Son had no such intention. He took the title Dear Leader and that’s when the madness really started. The deification of his father became more elaborate than the Orthodox Church, and all our country’s meager resources went to the military.” Yong-ho shook his head and a new bitterness came into his voice. “Our farmers plowed fields with oxen and children starved in the streets, but so what? We had nuclear weapons and a space program.” He rubbed his eyes. “The world stopped talking to us. Our country froze in time. We became the most embargoed state on earth. We couldn’t raise money through normal trade. But, somehow, we had to pay for a million-strong army, and buy the components of sophisticated weapons.
“So Bureau 39’s operations expanded, dramatically. We began inviting crime organizations to Pyongyang—the Tokyo yakuza, mafia from Taiwan, Thai heroin specialists—to share their expertise in narcotics and counterfeits. We let them set up factories and labs here. Imagine it. I hosted banquets for these scumbags in the Great Hall of the People.
“Heroin was a big part of our operation in the early days, but poppy crops kept failing in the rainy season. A synthetic drug like crystal methamphetamine—bingdu—proved much more convenient, and lucrative. We supplied the investment and the protection; the gangs produced it to a high purity. They shared their profits with us; we stayed out of their turf wars. Soon, bingdu addicts all over Asia were getting high on stuff made here, and Bureau 39 was running the biggest industry in the country, bringing in billions of dollars each year.”
Cho was dumbfounded. His country’s main industry was crime?
The car’s interior suddenly filled with light. The headlights of a patrol jeep were approaching from the lane behind them. Cho was reeling and barely noticed, but Yong-ho was alert, watching in the side mirror. The jeep dipped its lights as if in apology, reversed, and drove away.
Yong-ho stubbed out his cigarette in the car ashtray.
&nb
sp; “Of course, we learned from the gangs and started making the products ourselves, and not just drugs. We exported fake-brand cigarettes, fake pharmaceuticals, Viagra, you name it. We diversified into money laundering, using shell trading companies in dozens of countries …” A note of satisfaction entered his voice. “Our Leader was proud of us. ‘Why should a pure race be bound by the dictates of an impure world?’ Those were his words. ‘Whatever harms our enemies is justified.’
“But shipping these products undetected wasn’t easy. So our diplomats became key players. They could smuggle the goods in bags that wouldn’t be searched … and for this our Leader wanted a new breed of diplomat—ruthless, like partisans in the mountains, he said. Our embassies were turned into businesses, ordered to make money by selling narcotics and counterfeit brands to local mafias … and, of course, by spending the hundred-dollar supernotes. Ah …” Yong-ho gave a wistful sigh and took another gulp of soju. “I’m actually proud of those. We’ve used them to pay for everything from hookers to rocket parts.”
His laugh was a breathy fume of soju that filled the car, and Cho began laughing too, at the absurdity of it. His embarrassment over the incident outside the diner in Manhattan now struck him as farcical.
“Know how I started in Bureau 39?” Yong-ho was in full flow now. “I ran an operation from a glitzy office in Macao, buying policies from the biggest insurance companies in London, New York, and Tokyo, offering them premiums so high the greedy bastards couldn’t say no. Soon I was collecting millions of dollars on claims for nonexistent factory accidents, helicopter crashes, ferry sinkings, mining explosions—all impossible to verify because we wouldn’t let their investigators into the country.” He smiled ruefully. “They wised up, of course. But when the going was good … Five years ago I was in that office late one night stuffing twenty-five million US dollars in cash into duffel bags. Next morning it was flown to Pyongyang as a gift to our Leader on his birthday.”