False Flag

by Jack Slater

  He slipped into a dive bar not far from the river, in an area called Linjiang, about twenty minutes ahead of schedule, expelling a thin stream of saliva that had been collecting underneath the prosthetic out of the side of his mouth before he entered. He selected a dark booth, and out of habit chose the section of leather seating that faced the entrance.

  “I’ll have a beer,” he grunted when the waitress visited his table. He was careful to introduce a Canadian lilt to his accent, but judging by the look of sheer bewilderment that crossed the woman’s face, it was spectacularly unnecessary.

  Trapp groaned silently. He held up one finger, and enunciated carefully. “Be-er.”

  Still, no sign of comprehension was displayed on the women’s face.

  Trapp decided to take a different tack. He glanced around the room, eyes itching beneath their contacts, and his gaze settled on an old drunk slumped over the bar, clutching a green bottle of beer. Perfect.

  He pointed at the man and said, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

  If the words didn’t convey his meeting, then the gesture certainly did. The waitress disappeared with an expression of relief on her face, and didn’t linger when she set the beer down on the table in front of him, complete with a small paper receipt detailing the damage.

  He sipped from the bottle slowly as he studied the almost empty bar, wondering if his contact was already here. It’s the way he would’ve played it, had their roles been reversed.

  A shard of light into the gloomy bar at the door opened, from the streetlamps outside, and a man stepped into the bar, dressed in tailored slacks and expensive leather oxfords that hadn’t seen very many miles. As the man’s face came into view, Trapp realized it belonged to the contact he was here to meet.

  Presumably since the dive bar presently only contained three patrons, two of whom were slumped over their drinks, and only one—himself—looked even faintly American, the man strode over confidently and stuck out his hand.

  “Right on time,” he said.

  “You got a name?” Trapp asked, studying the man carefully. He looked fit, in a distance runner kind of way—not muscular, but lean. He wasn’t sure what he made of the man.

  “Call me Jack,” the man said. His English was good, though unmistakably accented. Still, it was leagues better than Trapp’s Mandarin, and the less said about the few words of Korean he’d learned on the plane ride over, the better.

  Trapp kinked his eyebrow. “You don’t look like a Jack.”

  “What am I supposed to look like?” the smuggler replied, a twinkle in his eye. He sat down, clicking his fingers to attract the waitress’ attention, and ordered himself a bottle of the same beer Trapp was drinking.

  “So,” he said. “What brings you to Dandong?”

  “What did the company tell you?” Trapp asked, choosing his words carefully.

  The company meant the Company, complete with a capital C—the Agency, his current employer. But if someone was listening in, there was no sense in making it easy for them.

  Jack shrugged. “Not much. That you were a VIP in town looking to”—he spread his hands wide and smiled—“do a deal.”

  “And that’s your area of expertise, I take it?” Trapp asked. “You’re the dealmaker.”

  “I dabble.”

  “Over the river?”

  Jack nodded. “Especially over the river.”

  “I need you to take me there,” Trapp said simply, deciding to trust Mitchell’s judgment of the man. Every second he lingered this side of the border was another in which his country and China crept ever closer to war—and just as importantly, at least to him—was another second in which he didn’t know whether Eliza Ikeda was alive or dead.

  The man opposite him looked at Trapp appraisingly. He shook his head. “No chance.”

  “Why?”

  “You need me to spell it out for you?” Jack said, tipping the neck of his beer back and drinking freely. Once he was finished, he dabbed the corners of his mouth with a cocktail napkin, then gently smoothed it against the table.

  “Try me,” Trapp growled.

  Not for the first time, he wondered why Mitchell had been so insistent he take this meeting. If he’d done it his own way, he’d be in Pyongyang already, even if he had to cross the DMZ by foot. With his cultured manners and metropolitan taste in fashion, this mysterious Jack didn’t exactly seem the secret agent type.

  “Look around, my friend.” Jack laughed quietly. “You don’t look like us. You think those prosthetics will help you fit in across the border? My people would sell you out for a crust of bread.”

  Trapp’s eyes narrowed. “Your people?”

  Jack laughed. “What, you think I’m Chinese? In my line of work?”

  Trapp paused before replying. He had indeed assumed that the man across the table from him was Chinese—perhaps fed an illusion by Jack’s expensive attire. But now he thought about it, it made more sense for the man to be North Korean. Smuggling was a game where it paid not to stand out.

  “I guess not,” Trapp replied. “So tell me—what’s your story?”

  Jack leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table and looking Trapp directly in the eye. He had an air of fierce intensity about him now that was completely at odds with the relaxed personality he had presented just moments before. “You first. You want me to take you over that border, you have to tell me why.”

  “This is a business transaction,” he said. “You don’t need to know.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Jack replied. “Every time I cross the border, I take a risk. Right now, I pay the right people to look the wrong way, everything works out just fine. Maybe tomorrow my luck runs out.”

  “You will be paid,” Trapp said gruffly, waving away the man’s objections. “Name your price.”

  Jack’s nose wrinkled. “You Americans,” he muttered. “It’s not about the money.”

  He pointed at the unseen river outside the bar. “When I cross that bridge, I’m walking a tight rope. I’ve got good balance, so on my own, I’ll probably make it across just fine…”

  Trapp saw where this was going. “But when you add a two hundred pound American to your back —”

  “Suddenly it’s much easier to fall.” Jack nodded. He paused before speaking. “Do you know why I do what I do?”

  Trapp shook his head.

  “I take goods across the border. Expensive wine. Whiskey, television sets. All of it goes to the elite in Pyongyang. To the very people who are bleeding my country dry.” A look of disgust crossed his face.

  “So why do it?”

  “Because on the other way, my friend, I get people out. Maybe just one or two at a time. Maybe a whole family. They hide in my trucks, knowing that if they make a sound, they’ll be sent to the labor camps in the mountains. And me alongside them. So if I take you, I’m not risking my business. I’m risking the lives of hundreds of people I can’t bring back across the border.”

  Trapp stayed silent, gauging the man’s expression for any sign that he was being played. He knew he had a decision to make. Back at Langley, the choice would have been an easy one—for the suits on the seventh floor, operational security was paramount.

  But Trapp knew from long experience that it wasn’t always so easy in the field.

  His instructions were to tell no one where he was going, or why. But the man opposite him was no snitch, that much was clear. He was a true believer. And he was also Trapp’s only route across the border—or at least, his only route that didn’t involve stripping off and swimming across the river underneath the guns of the border guards, hoping desperately they didn’t notice him. It wasn’t an attractive prospect.

  Trapp made his decision. “You watch the news?”

  “I try not to. But nobody’s perfect.”

  “Then you understand how delicate the present situation is.”

  “I do,” Jack agreed with a slight nod.

  “I don’t believe the Chinese had anyth
ing to do with the attack on my country’s satellites,” Trapp said in a low tone. “And I intend to prove it.”

  Jack steepled his fingers, and a pensive expression played across his face. “If not the Chinese, then….”

  He paused, lost in thought as he considered the import of what Trapp had said. His eyebrow kinked. “You think Pyongyang was responsible for it?”

  Trapp studied his opposite number intently, watching for any sign of reservation. This was a delicate moment, he knew. He believed the smuggler when the man said he had no love for the North Korean regime. But if their mission was a success, and Trapp returned with evidence of the North Koreans’ complicity, then it was entirely possible—likely, even—that many of his countrymen would die as the United States lashed out. “I do.”

  “And if you’re correct, how will your country respond?”

  Trapp shrugged. “That’s up to the President. My job is to get him the proof he needs to stop this entire region going up in flames.”

  Jack took a beat to consider Trapp’s point, nodded decisively, and reached his hand out. Trapp accepted the offer, and they shook firmly. “I understand. My friend, you have yourself a ride.”

  29

  Eliza Ikeda was numb with exhaustion, though sadly for her, not numb enough to ignore the protestations of pain from her contorted body. She was nailed into a tiny wooden crate, hands bound behind her back, without space to turn, with barely enough air to breathe. The temperature outside was in the high 80s, which meant the atmosphere inside the box was hot and fetid, the air more suited to be chewed than breathed.

  Her skin was scored with splinters from the rough wood. She hadn’t been fed in what felt like days, and her parched tongue cried out for moisture. The only positive she was able to draw from her current state of dehydration was that it reminded her that at least she was alive.

  Though perhaps, she thought, she might soon come to regret that was the case. Maybe it would have been better to have died fighting, not broken at a torturer’s hand. Gone out on her own terms, and not another’s.

  Bile from her empty stomach chewed at her throat, and the salt from her tears, long dried, stung the lacerations and bruises on her face. Ikeda didn’t know how long she had been nailed into this semi-darkness, the inside of the crate only lit by whatever light made it through the fissures between the planks.

  The crate jostled as, beneath her, the angry roar of a truck engine coughed and growled. The driver braked sharply, throwing Ikeda against the wall of the crate. She made no sound. Even in the depths of her despair, she remembered her training. She needed to stay alert, to drink in every detail in case it might become useful.

  Still, it was difficult to lift her spirits out of the depths of her despair. During her initial interrogation, the North Korean soldiers had beaten her bloody, to a point at which she was clinging on to consciousness by only her fingernails, and then beyond, as she slid into a blessed darkness. They had locked her in this coffin-like prison without food, without water, without hope.

  And yet Eliza’s spirit was not broken.

  She was a fighter. She had always been a fighter, even from her earliest days, coping first with the loss of her mother, then her father’s descent into alcoholism and despair. Deep inside her, there was a reservoir of strength the likes of which most people would never know. It was that same strength that drove her on as her lithe body cut through the freezing water on yet another seemingly impossible swim.

  So she listened.

  She heard the telltale sound of a body of water somewhere close, the bubbling and gurgling of trapped eddies of water, the high-pitched whine of overtaxed speedboat engines. Was she near the sea?

  Yes. She was in a port. They must have dosed her with something, then transported her unconscious body by boat to…

  Wherever this was.

  And Eliza heard voices. Low, rumbling voices, the sound of men grumbling as they waited in line. She recognized the language, too—Korean, as before. She caught her breath, ears straining, and catching the caw of seagulls squawking angrily overhead.

  Definitely the sea.

  “Papers?”

  “Let us through,” another man growled, also in Korean, his voice laced with equal parts anger and arrogant power. “We’re acting under the authority of the Party.”

  Eliza attempted to make sense of her situation. Heavy machinery thrummed in the background, and the voices of workers and squeals of metal against metal combined with the sound of water crashing against the shore, far away.

  She must be at a port. They must have taken her from China back to North Korea. She had failed. And her situation was now hopeless.

  Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, but she blinked them away angrily. She could not give up. She never had before. She reached for that reserve of inner strength that powered her through those frozen swims. It seemed so far away, shrunken and lost through a potion of fear, exhaustion, hunger and thirst.

  Her situation was hopeless.

  And yet she vowed to survive. She bit down on her lip, finding in the pain that strength, and clung on to it with all her might. No matter where she was, no matter who had taken her and what they planned to do to her, she would survive it. And not just survive.

  But escape.

  Something jolted Eliza’s wooden prison, spinning the crate and smashing her head against its rough-hewn planks. A crane, maybe. Or a forklift truck, picking the crate up and moving it, a gruff electric howl punctuating the action.

  Not for the first time since her ordeal had started, and certainly not for the last, Eliza drifted into the clutches of unconsciousness.

  Eliza woke again, with hot tears streaming down her face, stinging in the cuts and marks on her broken skin, washing her bloodied face clean.

  No, not tears. Rain.

  The raindrops fell in thick, heavy bursts, the water forcing its way with relentless efficiency through the cracks in Eliza’s wooden prison. Her parched tongue cried out, and acting on pure instinct, like a wounded animal dragging itself to lap from the waters of a fast flowing river, she pressed her lips against the wood and greedily sucked droplets of water into her mouth.

  As she drank, the crate vibrated and rocked, the growl of an engine cracking through the otherwise silent landscape. Eliza noticed none of it. She licked the filthy droplets of water until her thirst was, for a time at least, sated, a dull, throbbing hunger rearing its head in its wake.

  She slumped back, once again forcing herself to take stock of her situation.

  The North Koreans must have put her on a ship, and taken her from China to North Korea. Judging by the few cracks of light that punctuated the crate she was being held in, it was daylight outside—if a dark one, with heavy, pregnant storm clouds lurking overhead. The crate was on the back of an open truck, and Eliza was being thrown around with every pothole.

  They were taking her somewhere.

  It wasn’t much.

  But it was knowledge, and knowledge was hope. She would survive whatever they threw at her, wherever they were going. She would survive because she had to survive. And somehow, she knew that as alone as she felt right now, someone was coming to get her. Not just any someone, but a man with the eyes of a wraith, and the hangman’s scar across his neck.

  She whispered his name. “Jason.”

  Perhaps it was a vain hope, one destined to be dashed against the bitter rocks of experience. Few Americans had ever visited the hermit kingdom of North Korea, and certainly none had left the confines of strictly choreographed, guarded tour groups to wander freely around the country, as though searching for a lost pet.

  The idea that Jason Trapp would ride in on the back of a white horse, slaying enemies left and right to rescue her was laughable. Ludicrous. And yet Eliza clung to it nonetheless. She couldn’t do anything but, for the alternative was to give up, to allow despair and hopelessness to claim her, and drag her into the darkness with them.

  Eliza Ikeda wasn’t made that
way. If Jason Trapp was coming, then she had to be ready. And whatever it took, she would be.

  The truck’s engine growled for hours, whining as it climbed a steep mountain road. Eliza had maneuvered her bound hands from behind her to the front, allowing her protesting shoulders some slight relief from the pain. With the newfound freedom, she enlarged a crack in the wooden planks that made up the crate with nothing more than her fingernails, whittling away until thick, fat droplets of blood fell freely from her torn hands.

  She pressed her head against the rough wall of the crate, closing one eye and peering out into the unknown with the other. A barren landscape flashed past, dark brown muddy hillsides, stunted green trees with gnarled boughs, impromptu waterfalls gushing off rocky outcroppings, painting the steel stone white with froth. The truck was following at least one other vehicle, and though Eliza could not see it from her vantage point, she guessed it was smaller, perhaps a Jeep.

  “Where are you taking me?” she whispered.

  At least, she tried to whisper, though even over the sound of the engine and rock chips cracking against the truck’s chassis as the wheels spun on the gravel road, her voice sounded like a fog horn in the cramped confines of her wooden coffin.

  It didn’t take long before she was provided with an answer. The empty mountainsides gave way to a plateau, and for the first time, Eliza saw people. Most were wearing drab green army uniforms and polished black boots, but others looked like prisoners—trudging with their heads collapsed to their gaunt chests, clothed in lifeless gray overalls, and watched by men with guns.

  The truck slowed, occasionally sounding its horn, and Eliza watched as the foot traffic scurried out of its way. To the side of the road was a fenced compound that reminded her of a Nazi concentration camp—low wooden huts, hemmed close in, with ragged prisoners collapsed on the edges, aimlessly searching for something edible on the bare dirt ground.