Star of the North

by D. B. John

  38

  Pyongyang International House of Culture

  Central District

  Pyongyang, North Korea

  In the marbled splendor of the great hall, the diplomatic corps of the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs were reciprocating the Americans’ goodwill with a banquet on an imperial scale. The host himself was present only in the form of a vast, sweeping oil painting, his pudgy figure improbably depicted standing atop a jeep, leading an army through a snowstorm.

  All present turned as Jenna entered, late, but before she could even mumble a word, two of the Ministry’s junior diplomats were at her side making exaggerated apologies for the “fire drill” at the Yanggakdo Hotel, which had come at such an incommodious moment. Cho had returned her to the hotel, where her frantic minders had been searching every floor for her.

  The North Koreans, uniformed and decorated, presented an immaculate front. The Americans looked like extras from a different movie who had somehow got mixed up in the same studio. Chad Stevens gave her a lascivious smirk. The governor’s executive aide scowled at her dress. Jenna took her seat, feeling her legs shaking. She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, and heard a crumb of windshield glass fall to the floor.

  Three powder-faced women entered holding kayagums, zither-like stringed instruments, and began plucking a gentle melody.

  The First Deputy Minister nodded to Cho, who stood, smiling, glass in hand, to address them in English, and Jenna marveled at his ability to maintain such composure, betraying no outward sign of the near-death experience they’d just been through, but then, she supposed he’d been conditioned since birth to conceal his thoughts and feelings. From among the voices that must have been screaming inside his head he had selected the tone of a genial and magnanimous pirate who had plundered the Americans’ treasure ship, but was happy to treat his victims to a feast and let bygones be bygones. The Americans raised their glasses to the precarious new “understanding,” if not in friendship then at least in the spirit of a temporary truce.

  Jenna’s glass was shaking from her rage.

  When the dining got underway, she could not swallow any food. She was supping with her sister’s captors! How could she? And behind this sham hospitality these extortionists and kidnappers were laughing at the old governor, laughing at all of them. She was meant to be translating for the old man, who was seated next to her, but even keeping her mind in the room took a superhuman effort—all she could see before her eyes was the scene she had witnessed at the villa.

  Soo-min in the flesh, Soo-min alive and real!

  She had come so close, to within speaking distance of her prize. She had no intention of letting her slip back into darkness. Surely now was her chance to fix this, now was her chance to put an end to this outrage.

  She put down her glass and felt her hands sweating. She was sweating all over as if she’d been in a steam sauna. Her fury was empowering. Damn it, yes, she was going to make a scene of her own. Who were they to deny her her own sister! She took a deep breath, then pushed back her chair to stand up.

  In the millisecond that Cho caught her eye he communicated a warning, and her courage was quickly cold-showered by terror.

  Do you want to get her killed … ?

  Was she going to risk that? What if he was right? Then thoughts of Fisk crowded her mind, Fisk who was counting on her, and she was overwhelmed by an agony of hesitation and guilt.

  At some point while these thoughts were roiling and warring in her head she became aware of the First Deputy Minister peering curiously at her through his steel-framed glasses. She wasn’t eating or conversing. She could barely contain the feelings that must be showing in her face, like water boiling behind glass.

  She looked again toward Cho. For what? Reassurance?

  He was deep in conversation with Mats Foyer, the only non-American Westerner at the table. As the United States had no diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, Foyer, the Swedish ambassador, was the protecting power for the American mission. A tall, angular figure with a choirboy face and a charming grin, he found his glass being liberally replenished by Cho. Was he part of Cho’s escape plan? The Swedish ambassador? Cho hadn’t told her how he planned to reach the airport when the plane left at dawn, only, if she did not see him, to try and delay takeoff until the last possible moment.

  Suddenly all heads turned to the windows. Over the plinking zither music the city’s sirens had started rising again, underscored by the crunch of marching feet.

  The governor said, “Hell of a lot of activity out there …”

  “An annual city-wide exercise,” the First Deputy Minister’s interpreter said.

  The tall doors opened and a messenger hurried across the hall to hand the First Deputy Minister a note. He glowered at the messenger and then opened it.

  The Americans watched the man’s face darken. He tried to hide the expression of his mouth by dabbing at it with a napkin, and somehow Jenna knew. The game was over for Cho. His colleagues seemed to catch the change of humor. The mood around the table cooled, like a cold sea fog rolling inland. Cho went very still.

  The First Deputy Minister got to his feet and signaled for the musicians to stop, leaving only the sound of the sirens, which were amplifying eerily in the cavernous hall.

  “We …”

  The man’s mouth opened and closed. He seemed unable to find the words, before urgency compelled him to abandon niceties altogether.

  “Esteemed guests, I regret to inform you of a change to our schedule. Your plane has been summoned and is now awaiting your immediate departure. We have taken the liberty of placing your luggage in the cars that are now outside. They will convey you directly to the airport.”

  Something had gone badly wrong. The fear on the North Koreans’ faces was contagious. Jenna had a sudden image of the Tunisian street vendor, from whose body flames were spreading across a continent.

  The Americans looked at each other, stupefied.

  “What’s going on here?” the governor said.

  The First Deputy Minister’s face froze into a fake smile. One by one the Americans got up. The tall doors opened from the outside.

  Stevens said, “We’re being thrown out? I’m enjoying the chow.” He grabbed a couple of mandu from a dish and put them in his pocket.

  The North Koreans accompanied the party to the top of the landing. The First Deputy Minister, pale with loss of face, attempted a murmured remark to the governor and proffered his hand. The governor gave him a curt nod and led the way down the grand staircase. The others hurried after him.

  Jenna was in the rear. At the foot of the stairs she turned to look up at the hosts seeing them off. Cho smiled faintly in farewell. He looked immeasurably sad, and doomed. He’d taken an enormous personal risk to show her Soo-min, and her heart swelled for him. Perhaps he knew he never had a chance.

  The main doors opened before they had reached them. From the cold outside came a clatter of steel and thump of running boots. Two columns of armed troops entered the building, running past them on either side and mounting the stairs, holding submachine guns with bayonets fixed. In the final split second before she lost sight of Cho behind the scrimmage of uniform and weaponry she thought she heard him cry out her name.

  39

  Maram Secret Guest House

  Yongsung District

  Pyongyang, North Korea

  Guards got in on either side of Cho in the back seat of a military SUV and closed the doors. They took one of his hands each, slipped a handcuff over it, and chained him to two metal loops on either side of his seat.

  His arrest had an air of unreality about it, a scene from a dream. At the top of the landing outside the banqueting hall his entire group had been surrounded—himself, the First Deputy Minister, and his colleagues. The soldiers parted to let through a captain of the Bowibu, who addressed him without title. “Cho Sang-ho, I have an order for your arrest.” He held out the warrant, and Cho heard the intake of breath from his col
leagues. The foot of the document bore the signature of Kim Jong-il. He could not look at their faces, could not bear to witness their expressions of shock and betrayal. In that moment, surrounded by glinting bayonets, he felt like a figure in the center of a history painting. The great unmasking of a traitor.

  The crimes of his ancestors were finally visited upon him. At last he would learn what they were. And after his escapade this evening, he could not say that his arrest was without cause—unless, that was, he had got away with it, which, in the chaos of the city lockdown, was possible.

  A third guard sat in the passenger seat next to the driver. Cho felt no fear, only a strange sense of relief—that an ordeal long dreaded had finally come. He was getting it over with. The strain of maintaining a facade over the last weeks had taken him to the limits of his endurance.

  With a curiosity verging on indifference, he tried to think whether they would shoot him tonight, or wait until dawn. In a cellar, in the back of his neck? Or by firing squad tied to a stake? Or perhaps they were planning something altogether more public, which might take a few days. He did not care, if it meant that his wife and son were not harmed … He clung with all his heart to the hope that he’d done enough to distance them from him. He wished he could explain it all to Books and tell him that he loved him very much. He wished he could comfort Yong-ho and say that none of this was his fault. He was consumed with a need to know where they were, whether they were safe, and a sickening thought came to him: that he would not be told his family’s fate, and not knowing would torment him as he entered his final hours.

  The guard in the passenger seat was signaling with his hand out of the window at each city checkpoint they passed, and Cho saw police on motorbikes stationed at every one. Was this all for him? In case he gave them the slip again? It gave him a vague satisfaction.

  The car entered a district in the east of the city and turned into the courtyard of a complex of gray buildings, two stories high, that was surrounded by pines. It did not look much like a prison, more a type of barracks. The handcuffs were removed and he was ordered out. On the steps of the main entrance, in the wan light of a lamp, stood the man with the silver hair and the plain black tunic.

  “Welcome to the Maram Guest House,” he said, and to Cho’s surprise, shook his hand. “My name is Ryu Kyong. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” He had a strong grip and an avuncular, handsome face, cragged around the eyes and with two deep lines on either side of his mouth, like parentheses. His hair was parted on the side. He dismissed the car with a nod. “Come, please.”

  He had not used an honorific form of address, rather the register used for children, but his voice carried such authority that, far from sounding disrespectful, it made Cho feel like a child in his presence, or a student, and he wondered whether this man, Ryu Kyong, had been a part of his early life in some way.

  With two guards on either side of Cho, the man led the way up a flight of stairs and along two corridors to a small room. It was clean and sparsely furnished with a bed, a lamp, and a wooden table and chair, above which hung the Father-Son portraits. A washbasin occupied one corner. The brick walls were painted a pale green, as in a sanatorium, which caused something in Cho’s memory to connect. Maram Guest House … It was where they held purged members of the elite. The floor was of a dark, polished wood that gave off a pleasing warmth. On the desk were sheets of blank white paper in a neat stack, and a selection of blunt pencils. At the foot of the bed was a folded set of blue overalls, which he was asked to put on. They watched him change. The guards took away his belt, shoelaces, and his uniform and medal. He felt no regret.

  “You’re hungry, perhaps?” Ryu Kyong said.

  Cho had just come from a banquet. “No.”

  “Make yourself comfortable, then. Get some sleep, and when you’re ready, write everything down, from the beginning, in as much detail as you can. Take all the time you need.”

  “Write what down?”

  “Your confession.” Ryu Kyong smiled with understanding. His eyes looked deeply into Cho’s, reading him, and Cho saw empathy and intelligence in them. “Confess the crime that has brought you here.”

  Before Cho could pick one of the questions beginning to swarm in his head, Ryu Kyong left, and locked the door with a click.

  40

  Airspace over the Sea of Japan

  A grim atmosphere pervaded the cabin. The visit had been a major embarrassment for the governor, whose humiliation at the banquet Chad Stevens was even now writing up, tapping away on his laptop in between swigs of bourbon, his face chuckling in the pale light of the screen. Jenna knew they were all wondering how the hell they were going to spin this in Washington tomorrow, and she should be trying to help, but her mind kept replaying the events of the last hours on a loop in fast-forward.

  Her own twin, seeing her, meeting her eyes, piercing her heart with such pain and joy, had left her with a strange afterglow of jubilation and anxiety. She was as restless as if an electric current were passing through her. Eventually she asked Stevens for a shot of his bourbon, an attempt to calm herself.

  Stevens, she knew, would be more than happy to shoot the breeze with her over a drink, but she did not trust herself. One prompt, one nudge, and the whole Soo-min story would come tumbling out of her. She was grappling with her urge to unburden herself on one hand and her fear on the other—fear of the consequences for her sister if this got out. In her whole life she had never come so close to a moment of psychic intuition, a conviction that her future and Soo-min’s had been powerfully relinked. Somehow, how she conducted herself from now on would affect Soo-min, too.

  She turned to the window to see the bright, three-quarter moon in a cloudless sky, and, far below, the dim, snowbound sheep fields of Hokkaido.

  Soo-min had looked healthy and not unhappy, but who knew what mask she wore to survive in that place? The memory of the escape from the villa was a blur.

  A thought came to her that turned the bourbon to bile in her mouth.

  Had those bastards in Pyongyang made the connection between her and their secret prisoner who never left that compound? If they knew, if they gave the smallest indication that they’d figured it out … Jenna closed her eyes. She’d be compromised, a walking security breach. She would have to make a full statement to Fisk and resign her position at once. She could not expose herself to blackmail, or give that vile regime leverage in Washington. Her spirits slid into anxiety again.

  She wished she could change out of her eveningwear into something more comfortable, but her luggage had been thrown into the hold in the haste for takeoff. Rummaging in her handbag for something to wipe the makeup from her face, she suddenly froze.

  Bent in half in her bag was a tight roll of papers, tied with an elastic band.

  She remembered Cho handing her handbag to her as he dropped her off back at the hotel before speeding away to the banquet, probably when he already knew his chances of escaping on the plane were less than zero.

  She pulled off the elastic band and uncurled the paper. It was crinkled slightly, as if it had been concealed around a forearm or a calf, had become damp with sweat and had dried. The paper was such a poor-quality photocopy that its print was almost lost in the black murk of light exposure. At its head was the crest of the Workers’ Party, and a letterhead.

  Organization and Guidance Department

  Progress Report of Section 915 of the Party’s Strategic Command on LOCALIZATION and the SEED-BEARING PROGRAM

  Juche Year 98

  TOP SECRET

  Jenna began to read, puzzled at first, but then turning the pages with mounting astonishment. When she reached the last pages she found some sort of appendix with passport photographs of dozens of children. Even though the reproduction was so dark that she could barely see their faces, she knew—she KNEW—that these were the mixed-race, half-Korean kids she’d seen at the villa. Beneath each photo was a number, a date of birth, and the name of a country. She saw Germany, Russi
a, Iran, Pakistan, but the majority of them, two-thirds at least, were destined for the United States.

  Jenna took a mouthful of bourbon, dropped her head back on the seat, opened her mouth, and breathed.

  Oh my God …

  Her mind was ablaze. She had no idea how she would sustain herself through a nine-hour flight to Anchorage, then another nine to DC.

  She looked at the wispy white hair of the governor, slumped in dejection against the window. She hoped there would be some way of letting him know that that the mission had not been a failure. Quite the opposite. It had struck gold.

  There was one final page in the bundle, almost indecipherable it was so dark. It featured murky passport-type photos of three unsmiling adults in uniform, two men and a woman. Their titles were Director, First Deputy Director, and Second Deputy Director of the Paekhwawon Compound. The Second Deputy Director’s name was given as Ree Mae-ok. Jenna’s heart skipped a beat.

  It was Soo-min.

  41

  Maram Secret Guest House

  Yongsung District

  Pyongyang, North Korea

  Cho awoke before dawn. The barred window of his room looked onto a courtyard, in the middle of which was a juniper tree that might have been magnificent in spring, but now gave the place a forlorn air. A thin covering of snow had fallen overnight, and patches of it glowed yellow in the security lights, but when he looked up the stars shone icily.

  He lay back on his bed, which was soft and warm, listening to the rhythm of his breath, and felt a clarity of mind he had not experienced in years. It was as if he was standing on a mountaintop on a crisp early morning and could view his past in perspective like a long, forested valley. He got up, splashed cold water on his face, and after pacing the room for a while—six steps from door to window, four steps from wall to wall—sat at the desk and began to write. His strokes were cramped and hesitant at first, but soon the words began to flow and gather pace, his sentences becoming a river running through the valley basin. When his stomach started to rumble and a guard entered with a bowl of noodles, a hard-boiled egg, and a cup of hot black tea on a tray, it was a wrench to put the pencil down. He wolfed down the food and continued writing.