The Spy Across the Table

by Barry Lancet

  “Shoot twice a month. Setting up as we speak. Why?”

  “You’re in-country now?”

  “Do Koreans barbecue?”

  “Seoul?”

  “Yep. Center of the world, south of the DMZ. Where are you?”

  “The DMZ.”

  Simmons paused. “Gotcha.”

  He’d suddenly grown less talkative. He understood there might be ears.

  I made my pitch, keeping it vague. I told him about chasing kidnappers across international lines. I told him Noda and I needed his connections to get to North Korea’s other border—the one it shared with China—before the abductors and their victim.

  Simmons clucked his tongue. “Bad stuff all around. How urgent is this? I’ve got a couple pots set to boil over.”

  “Very.”

  “Scale of one to ten?”

  “Higher.”

  “And you can’t tell me any more?”

  “Hands are tied.”

  I didn’t see so much as hear the wry smile on the other end. “There’s a rumor circulating over the expat grapevine in Tokyo that you were at the Kabuki gig in DC. None of the Japanese news mentioned you, though.”

  “Why would they?”

  “You’re a minor celeb in Japan since the Japantown murders, not to mention the Steam Walker incident a few months ago.”

  “I try to keep a low profile.”

  “Uh-huh. Same grapevine says the second victim after the Tanaka woman was a friend of yours from San Francisco. I don’t pay much attention to rumors, but since you’re based in the City by the Bay I figure that particular tale might have some meat on its bones. Does it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good friend?”

  “The best.”

  Ben Simmons was a six-foot-four Georgian out of Columbus, with cool-hazel eyes, a slow Southern grin, and a sharp visual sense. Apparently he had a talent for reading between headlines as well.

  “So why aren’t you on your friend’s case instead of tooling around K-country?”

  On my end of the line I remained quiet.

  Simmons cleared his throat. “I see. I’m setting up right now for an early morning shoot at the Statue of Brothers. You know it? At the War Memorial? In the old half of the city, north of the river?”

  “I do,” I said.

  I’d been there. There are larger statues at the memorial but none as poignant as the Statue of Brothers. On top of a sixty-foot-wide half dome, two brothers meet on the battlefield and embrace. The larger one is armed and wears the uniform of the South, while the smaller one, unarmed and emaciated from the scarcity of food, wears that of the North. The statue is at once a symbol of the suffering of the Korean people and the unbearable separation of families when the country was split, as well as a beacon of hope for peace and reunification.

  “Can you get here?”

  “Can you talk and shoot at the same time?”

  “I can talk, shoot, juggle, drink, and still catch the image I need. Most times.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I’m going to ring someone who can make things happen.”

  “Stay away from anyone connected to spooks, special-ops guys, or government agencies, American or Korean, okay?”

  “He’s on the edge of some of those circles but he’s discreet. Has to be.”

  “Just tell me he’s not one of them.”

  “He’s from a different mold. Let’s leave it at that.”

  From a different mold. What the hell did that mean?

  “Do you trust him?”

  “With my life. And where you’re going, you’ll be doing the same, like it or not.”

  CHAPTER 66

  DAY 8, SUNDAY, 5 A.M.

  THE JOINT SECURITY AREA, DMZ

  THE Korean authorities tried to detain Noda and me for debriefing, but I pulled rank and KC backed me up. We resisted on two fronts: first, my assignment was ongoing and I couldn’t afford the time; and second, KC’s testimony plus that of the remaining men involved in the shooting should be more than sufficient. KC would conduct me to my next meet, then return for his men and an interview.

  Noda and I headed down Highway 77 to Seoul in a covered jeep with KC at the wheel. His presence was insurance against a follow-up attempt to detain us.

  “Good to leave the barbarians behind,” Noda said in Japanese three miles into the ride, a reference to everything to do with the North.

  “Agreed,” I said.

  An endless stretch of fencing shadowed the highway. On the other side of the wire barrier was a vast expanse of military-controlled no-man’s-land and, beyond that, North Korea. The fence was topped with a V-shaped wedge of barbed wire. Watchtowers flew by every three or four hundred yards. They were either manned or equipped with cameras and sensors and other state-of-the-art surveillance equipment.

  “What he say?” KC asked. I repeated Noda’s sentiment in English and the Marine waved the comment aside. “He’s got it wrong.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “You don’t see it but the Norker shadow is everywhere. Especially in Seoul. Norkers make the Grim Reaper look like the Tooth Fairy. That’s the genius of their dictatorship.”

  Norker was local shorthand for North Korean or a person from the North. It was a neutral, nonbiased term.

  “You’re talking about the saber rattling?”

  “No, much more than that. They never let the South forget them. There’s the nuclear tests and missile launches and the artillery north of the border buried in the hills. The Southers are good people. They’re nice. They work hard. But thirty miles away is a rogue regime with massive guns trained on them. The Norker artillery could turn Seoul into a pile of rubble to rival a Middle Eastern city under siege. Try living with that day and night.”

  KC was talking about the psychological impact of the hostile North. The pressure had to be immense for the faint of heart.

  He went on. “The rants and raves of the Supreme Leader keep the international community on edge. Think what that does to the people living in his shadow. Tonight we saw Norkers up close and personal. They were under orders not to be taken alive and threw their lives away for their country without hesitation. That’s the State’s hard-core ultra-patriotism. Many of the low-level Norkers don’t follow that line in private, but in public, and among the elite, it’s alive and well. Imagine dealing with that level of crazy every single day of the year.”

  I couldn’t, but I might soon be forced to do just that.

  * * *

  We rolled into the center of town, then over the Wonhyu Bridge. High-rise apartment towers gathered like mushroom clusters along the Han River. The waterway was wide and swift and, today, unrelentingly gray. Up ahead, the hills of the old quarter sprouted with a blend of modern houses and hanok, the traditional homes.

  A few minutes later KC pulled up to the curb in front of the War Memorial Museum, behind a wide-bodied taxi with its warning lights flashing.

  Simmons was framing shots in front of the Statue of Brothers, which glowed ruby red in the warm morning light. At the sound of our approach, his head swiveled in our direction. The lensman jabbed a long finger at the cab with the emergency lights, then snatched up a daypack with a tripod anchored to the back and sprinted in our direction.

  Noda and I made our good-byes to KC and followed Simmons into the backseat of the waiting vehicle.

  “Got great light and wrapped up early,” the cameraman said, as our driver eased into traffic.

  “Good. So we can talk.”

  “No, need to dash across the river.” He flipped through the thumbnails of the shoot, then dug around in one of the pockets of his khaki photographer’s vest. “Where we’re going next they have sculpture attached to the buildings, JB. Cool stuff.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  Simmons came up with a new memory card and swapped out the full one in his camera. “My guy’s eager to meet you, because, and I quote, ‘Your friend he hotter than sun. Maybe I can no sa
y yes to him.’ The guy’s English is creative, but he doesn’t miss much.”

  Noda and I exchanged an alarmed glance.

  Word of our visit to the DMZ had already spread. How far had it traveled and whose ears had it reached?

  CHAPTER 67

  SIMMONS wasn’t exaggerating.

  We pulled up to the Hyundai I-Park Tower, a large fifteen-story black-glassed edifice with a mammoth silver ring on the façade. Inside the ring were bright red rectangles and threads plus a trio of silver bars. The effect was a pleasing abstract sculpture suggestive of a giant clockwork or something more symbolic that might have been conceived by Paul Klee if he were alive today.

  “Cool, right?” my photographer friend said, glancing first at the building then across the street.

  “Very,” I said.

  Simmons pointed to the other side of the road. “I can start from there.” Then he was off with long-legged strides, heading for the corner.

  “This place and Bear Hall around the corner blew me away,” he called back over his shoulder. “When I mentioned them to the editor, he proposed I shoot them as a follow-up to a piece on the city’s sculpture he assigned last month.”

  “I can see why.”

  Architecture fascinated Simmons, and his photography of the fluid, ever-changing Tokyo cityscape was stunning, one-of-a-kind images you could hang on your wall. He haunted the streets of the Japanese capital, always looking for a new angle, the decisive moment, the shot. “You want a fresh take on Tokyo, you go to Domon Ben,” a gallery owner once told me, a play on the name of the iconic Japanese lensman Domon Ken. Of late, Simmons had been shooting Kyoto and Zen gardens, serene counterparts to his forays into architecture and city life. His years of work in Japan had spawned a number of books.

  Once across the street, Simmons set down his daypack and began taking pictures. “The light’s just right. I’ll catch the glass of the building as a black sheet and the ring sculpture in hyper-focus. If I get the light I need, the red will give off a kind of Zen-like quality.”

  He was composing sans tripod, both hands gripping the camera. Behind us were a public square and the main entrance to the COEX Mall, a sprawling underground complex with shops, theaters, an aquarium, and more. A deep-throated bell from a nearby Buddhist temple made the air quiver.

  “There’s a copy of the Korea Herald in my pack,” Simmons said, his eye glued to the viewfinder. “Amuse yourself. I’m going to be a few minutes. Plenty of places behind us to sit.”

  Right. I squatted down in front of the daypack, slipped an envelope from my pocket between the pages of the Herald, then freed the newspaper from its roost. Tucking the publication under my arm, I turned to scan the stone-tiled plaza behind us.

  There were benches in the sun and under some shade trees. There were pedestrians rushing through the quad on their way to work. There were people lounging about on the benches.

  On the far end of a long winding cement bench, a young couple was lost in each other’s eyes. On the opposite end twenty feet away, a withered old man with a bad haircut sat reading a Korean news rag. Under one of the trees, two kids in school uniforms tussled with a Game Boy. One tree over, a suited businessman with sharp eyes drank coffee out of a tall paper cup while reading a glossy financial magazine. He glanced twice at Simmons as the American photographer bobbed and weaved on the sidewalk, camera in hand.

  The bad haircut. I strolled over to the cement bench, took a seat a couple feet from the poorly groomed old guy, and opened the Herald. Even bathed in the morning light, the cement bench was cold.

  “You smart man,” Haircut said without lowering his paper. “Pick me first time try. How?”

  “The hair. Unfashionable in Seoul but blends right in parts of China.”

  He nodded. “Okay. Thas good. My name Pak Ji-hyung. You call me Pak.”

  “Brodie,” I said without looking his way.

  We continued reading. My eyes roamed over an op-ed piece about the dire need to preserve the winding alleyways of the traditional neighborhoods and the classic Korean homes that roosted there. After a while Pak set his paper on the bench and began rummaging through a white vinyl bag at his side. He came up with a large, round golden-skinned Asian pear. It resembled an apple. Next he produced a small paring knife. He began rotating the fruit. In no time he had removed the skin in one curling snakelike strip.

  I turned the page of the newspaper and found an article about the suicide of a top executive at one of the Big Five Korean companies in the wake of an embezzlement inquiry.

  Glancing my way, Pak appeared genuinely startled to be sitting near a foreigner.

  “Where you are from?” he asked in a louder voice than before.

  “San Francisco.”

  “America. Thas nice place. You want fruit?” he said, offering a wedge he’d sliced from the peeled pear.

  “That’s very kind of you, thanks.” I scooted closer and set my paper down on the bench between us. I plucked the segment of fruit from between the knife blade and his thumb. I took a bite. “Delicious,” I said.

  To any observer it would look like the man was striking up a conversation with a random foreigner and offering a slice of a local favorite as an icebreaker.

  “You know what is Korean bae?”

  “No,” I said, but I did.

  The fruit was called nashi in Japan and went by that name in specialty shops in the States. It was fragrant, crunchy, succulent, and, at its best, nectarlike in its sweetness.

  “Best bae in world is a here in South Korea.”

  “Good to know,” I said, waving the last mouthful at him in a gesture of thanks before popping it into my mouth.

  “Ben tell about me?” he asked, lowering his voice.

  “No.”

  “Thas good.”

  Pak liked his secrecy. A promising sign.

  “Agreed,” I said.

  Up close, his age unwound before my eyes. The “withered old man” appeared closer to forty. An abundance of wrinkles flocked around the corners of his eyes and mouth. He had the pale papery yellow complexion of someone who led a nocturnal existence or spent large stretches of time indoors.

  “Ben say you are for good friend.”

  “True.”

  “Thas very good to me.”

  I met his gaze. “People you can trust are hard to come by.”

  His murky chestnut-brown eyes roamed over me in a thoughtful manner. “We Koreans afraid just three things in this life. North Korea, bad friends, bad drivers. Seoul street crossing more dangerous than border crossing.”

  A signal.

  “Some risks are acceptable for the right reason,” I said.

  He offered me another piece of fruit, and I accepted.

  “You two people?” he asked.

  “Yes, we need to get to the Chinese–North Korean border before nightfall. To find a woman.”

  “Where friend?”

  “At our hotel, sleeping.”

  “No having visa?”

  “No.”

  We’d braced Habu, the yakuza boss, less than thirty-six hours ago and had been on the go ever since. There’d been no time for niceties like official paperwork then, and there wasn’t now. Japanese nationals could get visas on landing in China. Americans had to apply in advance. Approval could take two weeks or two months.

  “I fix two hours. I need passports.”

  “In the newspaper,” I said without looking down at it.

  “Need woman picture.”

  “Also in the paper.”

  He considered me with an appraising gaze, his eyes digging deep into mine. They were the muddy brown of troubled water, and yet his look was honest and open.

  Eventually he said, “You smart smart, maybe danger to some.”

  “Not to Simmons, not to you.”

  He ate another wedge of the pear. “Share friend, share trust. Thas good. Where you stay?” I told him and he said, “You buy three ticket to Jilin. Thas closest Changbai. Twelve o’
clock, one o’clock, we fly, you know?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “I meet you three hour.”

  “Okay. Where? The hotel?”

  He shook his head. “Hotel no good. Too much seeing place. Starbuck next next next your hotel.”

  “Three doors down?”

  He said yes, then repeated the phrase a couple of times until he’d memorized it. “South Korea small small country but many Starbuck. More Starbuck than Milky Highway star.”

  He pointed at the sky. There was nothing to be seen overhead but a cloudless blue sky, so I didn’t look. He stared at me, thinking.

  “You watch danger point, which is me. Smart smart. Maybe I like you if you no danger point to me. You go now. No forget Starbuck.”

  “Starbucks it is,” I said.

  “Also, you no speak about me, Jilin, nothing to no any person. New danger point start now.”

  CHAPTER 68

  I STOOD, stretched, and meandered back toward Simmons, who stopped working as soon as I approached.

  “About time,” he said. “Need to get to the last location. Mind grabbing the tripod?”

  “Not at all.”

  Simmons let his camera fall and it bounced lightly against his chest, held in place by a strap around his neck. He closed his daypack, snapped a couple of vest pockets shut, then flagged down a taxi.

  “It’s only four blocks, but the good light’s disappearing fast. Sorry for the rush.”

  “No problem. Impressive guy, your friend.”

  “He take you on?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Must have liked what he saw.”

  “He dangerous?”

  Simmons gave me a wry look. “He’s a survivor. Like you.”

  Which I took as a yes. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pak casually sweep up my newspaper with his and push both into his vinyl bag.

  “Tell me about him. There’s got to be a good story there.”

  “There is, but I need to get to the next shoot first.”

  “How about a hint?”

  “You ever see Seoul Train? And I’m not talking about the music show.”