Star of the North

by D. B. John

  Fisk stared into space, taking this in, before turning the key in the ignition.

  Eventually he murmured, “I honestly never thought your sister would still be alive.”

  Jenna rested her head against the cool glass, and closed her eyes. She was exhausted and just wanted to drop into bed. The car sped from one pool of overhead lighting to the next along the deserted expressway toward Georgetown.

  He said, “Could any of these spies be active, from this … Seed-Bearing Program?”

  “The oldest are nineteen, according to the dossier.”

  “Perfect. So they could already be here, on our college campuses.”

  “It’s possible.”

  He gave a huff of incredulity. “Jesus Christ Almighty … long-range missile tests, secret weapons labs, indoctrinated children who look foreign …”

  Jet lag, fatigue, and hunger combined in Jenna to produce a flash of anger. What did he expect? Kim Jong-il’s North Korea was a haunted house. Open the door and you’ll find a horror in every room, from the cellar to the attic …

  He turned into O Street. In a gentler voice he said, “What do you want to do about Soo-min?”

  Jenna stared bleakly down the empty street. As with everything about North Korea, there were no good options. “I don’t know.”

  She was getting out when he said, “I’m sorry, but everything about that villa and the program stays classified.”

  Only once she was inside her apartment did she understand why he’d said that—so that she wouldn’t breathe a word to her mother, couldn’t give her the Christmas present she desperately wanted to give her: the knowledge that she, Jenna, had seen Soo-min with her own eyes. The knowledge that Han’s daughter was alive.

  The following day she’d been debriefed at Langley, and sat down to translate the dossier.

  She was packed and ready to set off on the eleven-mile drive to Annandale when she heard her home phone ringing just as she was locking her front door. She usually ignored the home phone, but this time something made her pause. The sheer strangeness of recent events was making even the most mundane occurrences seem loaded with significance. She unlocked the door, dashed back inside, and caught it just before it went to voice mail.

  A soft-spoken female White House staffer was asking her to hold for a long-distance call.

  The White House?

  Jenna heard a click as the connection was transferred, and a long pause. And suddenly she experienced an extraordinary sense of predestination, a momentous aligning of the stars.

  “Ma’am?” Now a male staffer was on the line, and she knew what was coming next: “I have the president of the United States.”

  It was all she could do not to throw the phone onto the sofa in fright.

  The next thing she knew the familiar baritone was talking to her, Jenna Williams, in her own home.

  “Dr. Williams, I just read your report …”

  Her mouth opened. Her mind scrambled, rifling for the memory. Which report? She was sweating rivers, rooted to the spot in her coat and scarf.

  “… I gotta hand it to you. Not many recommendations make me sit up, but yours did.”

  Her voice was a whisper. “Thank you.”

  He’s talking about … Her mind configured and connected. The “fresh ideas” for tackling Kim. The report the CIA director had asked her to write, a month ago.

  “I must ask you—are these ideas your own?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m intrigued by your reasoning. It’s … counterintuitive.”

  Not for the first time she couldn’t help feeling seriously out of her depth. “They are a little … off the wall, I guess.”

  He laughed, and for a moment she caught a riff of that revivalist charisma. “Radical is how I’d call them. Well, listen, maybe nothing will come of it, because I’ll never persuade Congress, but I want to explore them further. I’m sharing your report with the State Department. They’ll be in touch. Are you with your family this Christmas?”

  “With my mother, Han.”

  “You both have a very happy holiday.”

  The conversation had lasted only seconds. She stared at the receiver for a moment in a flushing, heart-racing trance, but already she could feel her mood rising in her chest like soda bubbles, and she let out a sudden scream. She had something to tell her mom after all.

  Later, when she saw him on the TV news at Han’s house in Annandale, she realized that he’d called her from his vacation in Hawaii.

  Three days after Christmas, when she returned to training at the Farm, senior Agency people she didn’t know started acknowledging her in the cafeteria, making eye contact, stepping aside to let her pass, as if she had an aura of light. As she was soon to discover, her ideas were already rippling through Washington circles and beyond, causing disturbances in the settled pond of opinion.

  43

  Maram Secret Guest House

  Yongsung District

  Pyongyang, North Korea

  In the darkened interrogation chamber a new face confronted Cho, an officer younger than himself, sitting bolt upright in a starched uniform. A leather strap from shoulder to revolver belt crackled as he moved. His shiny, smooth head appeared as round and pale as a moon. His eyes watched Cho without expression. His cap, with glossy black visor, was next to him on the desk.

  “How did your American spy grandfather pass on his mission to you? What were his instructions?”

  Cho felt overtaken by weariness and hunger. He shook his head vaguely.

  “I never knew my grandfather or my father …”

  “How did your American spy grandfather pass on his mission to you? What were his instructions?”

  His head dropped to his chest and he said nothing. Someone behind him took a step toward him, and he saw out of the corner of his eye something swing momentarily into the pool of light, like the prehensile tail of a monkey. An uncoiling wire cable.

  Sometimes they beat him with cables, other times with wooden clubs. He writhed on the concrete in pools of his own blood and urine, howling like an animal. If he lost consciousness, water would rouse him. The first time it happened he found his clothes sopping and icy cold, and his mouth full of blood and fragments of chipped teeth. Rough hands hauled him back onto the seat for the questioning to resume. Other times he’d be whipped with a leather strap, but his legs and arms were so tightly belted to the chair he couldn’t move a muscle to shield himself.

  Occasionally, from the darkness behind him he thought he heard Ryu Kyong halt the beatings, but the young officer’s question was relentless and the question never varied. Once or twice he lost patience and slapped Cho’s face with his hands, hitting the raw injury of his ear so it rang with a high metallic chime.

  Gradually Cho’s body numbed, and in those pauses when he was given a moment to absorb and savor the pain, it bewildered him to realize that he was being asked almost nothing about his fugitive forty minutes with Jenna before the banquet: to the interrogators that was simply the proof of his guilt. What was crucial to them, the momentum driving the questioning, was their desire to know how his treasonous bloodline had stayed concealed, allowing him to deceive his way into a position of such trust that he could pass messages to his Yankee paymasters face-to-face, and for his brother to gain access to the personal affairs of the Dear Leader himself.

  Slowly, between blows, Cho began to understand. For a betrayal on this scale, to kill him was not enough. His heart-and-soul confession was required, his begging for forgiveness before he was shot, his protestation of penitence and love for the Leader. Everything hinged upon it. After that, his death was an administrative detail.

  He was not sure how many times he’d been tortured when they taunted him with the fate of his family. “Your son has been exiled to a village in the northern mountains—because of you, Cho. Your wife chose to go with him.” And when he heard that, something inside him died. His family, outcasts in a harsh mountain village? For a few minutes the inte
rrogator watched him sob openly. “Confess now,” the man said softly, “and they can come home to Pyongyang. Your son can return to school.” But Cho understood the system well enough to know that the interrogator was lying. The opposite was the truth. Books would be condemned to a far worse fate—a labor camp, a zone of no return—if he confessed.

  Son to a confessed American spy.

  And the more Cho realized this, and the longer and more vicious these sessions became, the stronger became his will not to confess. It became an almost supernatural determination. It was the pearl he would not yield, the treasure he would never give them. He would die soon enough here anyway. They would not pry it from him before he did.

  This was his only weapon, his only chance of protecting his wife and son.

  The questioning continued day and night. Sometimes it was the young officer with the shaved head. Sometimes others, all of them young. Only occasionally did Ryu Kyong participate, but Cho felt certain he was often present in the back of the room, observing. Twice, four times, six times, he couldn’t be sure, the beatings would suddenly stop and the table was carried toward his chair, where he’d be faced by the sheets of white paper and the pencil. Each time, ever more erratically, Cho wrote the same words he’d written before, or a summary of them. The interrogator would read them, searching for a crack, a fissure through which to break him, then the pages would be torn up in front of his face. Each time, Cho felt hatred, like a blowtorch flaming though his body.

  Soon he became delirious from lack of sleep. Interrogators’ words sounded as if they were spoken underwater. He lost the thread of the questions, mumbling, “Don’t understand,” and would be slapped and beaten all the harder.

  Apart from a vague sense that days were stretching into weeks, he had no idea how long he’d been in the torture chamber of the Maram Guest House. One day he was left in his tiny cell and ordered to sit cross-legged with his head bowed, all day. If a prisoner moved so much as an eyebrow the guards would throw open the door and beat him with birch rods. They walked back and forth in front of the cells, watching for the smallest infraction. Suicide, which he thought of often, was impossible. After ten hours sitting in that position he could not walk.

  Next day he was dragged to the interrogation chamber by his arms. Ryu Kyong awaited him. He sat motionless at the table, regarding Cho with his benign and meditative face, like some venerable scholar.

  He took a deep breath before speaking, his disappointment plain. “Why are you doing this to yourself, Cho? Are you hoping to save yourself?”

  Cho was alert, his heart racing as he listened for sounds of movement behind him, but they seemed to be alone in the room.

  “You are doing this to me.”

  “It can all be over in a minute, if you’d like, and I can help.” The sheets of blank white paper were on the table. Ryu Kyong held up a pencil. “You won’t save yourself, but you’ll save your son, who is innocent of your crime. Now, why don’t we write it together?”

  The words lying bastard clouded Cho’s mind like poisonous gas. After an interminable pause, in which Cho stared resolutely at the floor, Ryu Kyong left.

  That day, he was hung by his hands from the iron rod. His toes barely touched the floor, the manacles cut the flesh of his wrists, and his waist felt as if it were being torn from his torso. Guards beat his legs so many times that they swelled up like tree trunks. Even then, he had not endured the worst. They moved him to a cell so small he had to crouch his body, which was half immersed in cold water. He was left there for two days. When he lost consciousness he was dragged out and awoke again to the white paper and the pencil. The water cell was worse even than when they put bamboo splinters under his fingernails and tore them off one by one, urging him to confess, in between his screams, sometimes coaxingly, other times through abuse yelled in his ears.

  He did not confess.

  One night he was taken outside for the first time in weeks, and breathed cold, clear air. He was ordered to kneel on the compacted snow of the yard and not to move. Snowflakes touched his hair and face. He knelt there for hours like a stone ornament. After an hour or so the violence of his shivering abated and he became numb and strangely serene, as guards came and went in thick rabbit-fur coats. He could not stand when they ordered him up, and had to be dragged back inside.

  Gradually, the torture became irregular. Some days they left him in his cell to starve, or gave him salty soup but nothing to drink, so that his thirst became intolerable, and his tongue gluey. After days without food, his biceps were as thin as his wrists, but his legs were so swollen he could hardly sit. When they next took him from his cell he was amazed to find himself in the warmth of the guards’ mess, seated in a corner to watch them eat white rice and steaming pork and mushroom stew from a large earthenware pot. The pain in his stomach was acute and the guards laughed at the look on his face. The white paper and pencil was brought to him, and a bowl of rice and stew left just out of his reach. A hunk of fresh bread was placed next to it.

  Cho looked away, and tears streaked his cheeks.

  Hours later a man in a dirty white coat entered his cell, felt his pulse and his bones, and rubbed a cool ointment on the injuries that had become infected and were weeping pus. He told Cho to remove his overalls, which were filthy, stinking rags by now, and cleansed his ruined body with antiseptic wipes, gave him fresh clothes, then took out a syringe and injected him with something that sent a feeling of euphoria through him before he fell into an exhausted, opioid sleep.

  When he awoke he was looking up into Ryu Kyong’s face. The man’s arm was around him, holding Cho as if he were a loved and dying child. He spoke gently and with intimacy. They were in a bright, sunlit room with white walls that dazzled Cho. How long had he been in this place? The trees outside the window were budding with bright new leaf. White clouds sailed by like airships.

  “The Dear Leader is the brain of our great movement,” Ryu Kyong said. “His is the mind that keeps us infallibly on history’s rails. He is all knowing and unerring. Would you agree with that, Cho?”

  Cho felt happiness flooding through him. What wisdom, what tolerance shone in Ryu Kyong’s eyes.

  “Yes,” he said, feeling a smile spread over his face.

  “And if the Leader is the brain, then the Party is the movement’s beating heart, and the army is its strength and muscle. Isn’t that right?”

  Cho nodded, a boy being guided through simple arithmetic.

  “The masses—the workers, the farmers, the builders—they are the organs and the nerve system. They are the movement’s cells and its lifeblood. They are freed of the burden of independent thought, because the brain takes that mighty responsibility upon itself.” Pain came into Ryu Kyong’s eyes, and his face filled with empathy. “But if any of the cells in the body are found to be diseased, if a tumor is discovered, even if it’s lain hidden for three generations, it can not be allowed to remain, or to grow. You do see that, don’t you, Cho? Disloyalty must be cut out, removed altogether, so that the body may remain immortal and never perish.”

  Cho closed his eyes, not wanting to spoil the beauty of Ryu Kyong’s logic.

  “If we do not root it out, we commit a crime against our own future. I know you’ll understand that. Do it now, and spare yourself more needless suffering. Do it out of love for our people. Write your confession, and the Leader will forgive. Die in peace, with his gratitude in your heart, and your son safe …” Ryu Kyong gently lowered Cho onto a comfortable mat on the floor. He weighed nothing. His body was skin and bone. A bowl of steaming bean-paste broth was brought in on a tray and Cho devoured it like a ravenous dog, with Ryu Kyong watching. Somehow, without Cho noticing, the white sheets of paper and pencil had reappeared, set out neatly on the floor next to the mat.

  Cho said, “What have you done with Yong-ho?”

  “He confessed quickly and fully. He died with a clear conscience.”

  Ryu Kyong left and locked the door.

  Cho watched
the white clouds pass and listened to a jay chirping in the eaves. He watched the shadows in the yard lengthen as the sun moved into the west. He saw that the juniper tree in the courtyard was beginning to blossom, and there were puffs of gnats around it. The air smelled of spring.

  When Ryu Kyong returned, many hours later, Cho was seated cross-legged, with his back leaning against the wall.

  The white paper remained blank and untouched.

  He looked at his inquisitor’s face, returning that expression of understanding, and was interested to see not anger in those eyes, or frustration … but fear.

  For two days Cho was kept in an ordinary cell with a window and a blanket, and given meals of cabbage soup and corn porridge. The guards left him alone. He fell into a deep stupor and became confused between daydreaming and sleep. He thought often of Books. Once he sat bolt upright, seeing his boy crouched before him on the floor, as clear as daylight, in his red Pioneer’s neckerchief, reading from his school textbook. “In one battle of the Great Fatherland Liberation War, three brave uncles of the Korean People’s Army wiped out thirty American imperialist bastards. What was the ratio of the soldiers who fought?” Books looked up at him, smiling his cute smile. Cho’s tears flowed freely, but when his eyes cleared there was no one there. Other times he thought of the Dear Leader working at his desk until the small hours of the morning, signing arrest warrants, giving orders over the telephone through clouds of cigarette smoke, micromanaging his inner circle’s personal lives. He recalled the few occasions he’d met Kim Jong-il. The manner that was both whimsical and pedantic. The way he peered at you with an odd look of irony.

  On the third day they came for him, and he was ready. He no longer felt anger. He had made peace with himself. Chains were locked onto his wrists and his ankles. But in the yard he saw not a stake and a firing squad, but a covered green Russian truck. He was ordered into the back and the guards climbed in with him. Before he could ask where they were going, he glimpsed the rifle butt coming down. He passed out.