by David Archer
On the screen, Noah could see two desks with computers sitting on them, but there was no one in the room. He scanned the edges of the door with the viewer, looking for contacts that would indicate the door had an alarm attached to it, but found none. He did, however, discover that the door was dead-bolted from the inside. There was no keyhole on the outside, so he wouldn’t be able to pick the lock.
He turned off the viewer and moved to the next door. This one was apparently the guardroom, because he saw five men sitting on a couple of sofas. Each of them looked like a skeleton wrapped in plastic, and each was holding an assault rifle.
He moved quickly to the third door on that side of the building and turned the viewer on again. This door led into a storage room, and he could see boxes on shelves. There was another door on the far side that he assumed would lead into a hallway. He checked the outer door and found that it was also dead-bolted, as well as alarmed.
Noah turned off the viewer and slipped it back into his pocket, then moved to the end of the building and looked carefully around it. There was no one in sight, so he turned the corner and slipped toward the front side of the building. Another quick glance around that corner showed him two guards standing watch near one of the doors on that side, so he turned around and started back.
He stopped suddenly, when he realized that he had passed a window on the end of the building without even noticing it. He stopped and looked at it, but it was covered on the inside by heavy curtains. The viewer came out of his pocket once more and he turned it on, then looked through the curtains with it.
A ghostly, skeletal figure was pacing around in the middle of the room, holding something up to its ear. Whoever it was seemed to be making a phone call, but Noah couldn’t hear anything. He turned off the viewer and slipped back around the corner, heading back to where he had first approached the building. He had just reached the middle door when it suddenly opened and two of the soldiers stepped outside, looking frantically around.
And the only thing they saw was Noah.
TEN
Noah was too close to avoid being seen, but not close enough to strike before they could react. One of them spotted him instantly and leveled his rifle at Noah’s face, and then the other followed suit, calling to the others inside as he did so. A moment later, Noah was surrounded by five men, all aiming automatic rifles at him.
He put his hands on his head and stepped inside when the man who seemed to be in charge motioned with his rifle. The rest of them followed him in, and then two of them handed off their rifles and wrestled him to the floor. His hands were yanked behind his back and quickly secured with plastic bands. As soon as that was done, he was searched and his pockets gone through. His captors removed the iPhone, and then he was picked up and thrown onto one of the sofas.
The man in charge said something to one of the others, and he took off down the hall. He was back only a moment later, with another man in civilian clothes in tow. This one looked at Noah for a moment, then knelt down in front of him.
“You are American?” he asked in English.
Noah shrugged at him and grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “I was with the tour group yesterday, and we went to look at some farms, but I guess I wandered off and got lost. I found my way back to town, I was just trying to find someplace I could make a phone call. Saw some lights in your building, here, and thought I’d knock on the door, but these guys stuck their guns in my face before I could even try.”
The man grinned at him, but it looked more like a snarl. “You are a spy,” he said. “How many more of you there are?”
Noah shook his head. “No, seriously, man, I’m telling you straight. Let me call my tour guide, he can tell you.”
“Do not attempt to lie to me,” the man said. “Do you think we do not have sources of information? You arrive here with no identification, no passport. If you are tourist, you must keep your passport with you at all times, all tourists know this. You are a spy.”
The English-speaking man stood up and looked at the soldier who had been giving orders. He said something in the local language, and two men suddenly grabbed Noah and hustled him through the door into the hallway. He was taken toward the other end of the building, but then a door was opened and he was suddenly going down some stairs.
At the bottom, his escorts yanked him to the right and into yet another hallway. He was taken several yards, and then shoved through another door that was ordered open by two men who were standing guard. He stumbled into the room as the door was slammed behind him, and then realized that he wasn’t alone.
There were four Americans in the room, three women and a man, all sitting on the floor and leaning against the walls. Noah had found his targets.
“Looks like you made a mess of things,” the man said. “Assuming you’re one of ours, that is.”
Noah held up a finger and looked around carefully. The room was completely bare, nothing but concrete walls, floor and even ceiling. There was no sign of any type of listening devices or cameras, but Noah dropped his voice to a nearly silent whisper as the man got to his feet.
“I am. I was doing recon on the building when I stumbled right into a couple of the soldiers guarding the place.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Hopefully, my partners saw what happened and got away.”
The man stood and Noah saw that he was unbound. “What’s your name?” the fellow asked.
“Noah,” Noah said. “You?”
“I’m Dale, Dale Jackson.” He pointed at the women. “This is Chrissy Smith, Shirley Stubblefield and Liz Tyler.” He looked back at Noah and narrowed his eyes. “Considering the fact that we’re under Protocol 15, I’m guessing you weren’t sent here on a rescue mission, am I right?”
Noah looked him in the eye for a second, then shook his head. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “I’m E & E, and my orders were to terminate all of you before you could be broken.”
Dale nodded. “Yeah, we expected as much. The ironic thing is that nobody has even tried any real interrogation, at least not yet. We’ve been asked a few questions, but no one’s attempted to force any real information out of us.”
Noah’s eyebrows lowered. “Any idea why not? Langley seems to think you would have all been on the rack by now.”
Dale scoffed at that. “Of course they do,” he said. “That’s Protocol 15. Any operative who’s captured is automatically presumed compromised.” He shook his head. “That makes it easy to get rid of inconvenient people.”
Noah looked at him and his left eyebrow went up. “What do you mean by that?”
“It means we were set up,” Shirley said. “Our covers were solid, we were here as advisers on some engineering projects, and there’s been nothing that could have burned us. Somebody sold us out, and Protocol 15 lets them clean up the mess and get away with it.”
Noah looked at her for a long moment, then turned to Dale. “Do you all believe that?”
Dale ran a hand through his hair and exhaled sharply. “Yeah, we’ve talked it over. It’s the only thing that makes any sense. We made contact with our source, got the information we were sent for and gave him data he could use to hamper their missile development, but we weren’t arrested until several days later. Our work was already done, and our liaison was arranging for us to go home. We had what we’d come for, but these clowns, they haven’t even asked us about anything connected to it. The way they’ve been treating us, they seem to think we were only trying to steal agricultural secrets. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of anything this stupid.”
Noah looked at him, then looked at the three women. “None of you have been interrogated about your actual mission?”
“Not unless you count questions about how many tons of potatoes we grow each year,” Shirley said. “It’s like Dale told you, they act like we’ve been trying to learn how to farm over here.”
Noah thought about it for a few moments, then frowned. “Have you answered them?”
“Yeah,” Shirley said, “I said we
grow a hell of a lot of potatoes. What else am I gonna say?”
Noah nodded slowly. “Acclimatization and disorientation,” he said. “I read about this not long ago, it’s a new interrogation technique. Ask a lot of extremely confusing questions that don’t seem important, and keep doing it until you get any kind of answers. Apparently, once you start answering questions, it reduces your resistance to answering more sensitive ones. It’s harder to hold back information you don’t want to give up.”
“That’s not new,” Dale said, “our people have been using that for forty years, but we didn’t ask questions about farming. To get someone loosened up, you just ask them simple questions about themselves. It’s supposed to break down the wall we all put up between us and whoever we perceive to be the enemy. If we feel ourselves becoming familiar with the interrogator, it’s hard to think of him as someone you should oppose.”
Noah nodded again. “Yes, I’m familiar with that, too,” he said. “This is a little bit different, though, because it’s designed to not only get you accustomed to answering, but also to keep you confused. Do some of the questions seem completely ridiculous?”
Chrissy nodded her head. “Yeah, they do,” she said. “They asked me yesterday if I knew the difference between an orange and an orange. Like, what the hell kind of question was that? When I said I didn’t know what they meant, they kept asking it over and over again.”
“Confusion impact,” Noah said. “If you can sufficiently confuse someone, the mind is disoriented and can’t figure out what to do, so it will seize on the very first sensible thought it’s given. I’ve seen demonstrations of it; you can literally walk up to someone on the street, start spewing gibberish at them until they are obviously confused, and then if you tell them to do something they’ll do it without even thinking. I watched a man talk to a woman for a minute and a half and make no sense whatsoever, but then he suddenly told her to give him her purse and she did, without realizing it. He turned around and walked away with it, and she just stood there completely unaware of what happened. Lucky for her, it was just a demonstration and he brought it back a minute later, but she still hadn’t realized that it was gone.”
“I’ve seen that, too,” Liz said. “Some kind of instant hypnosis thing, there’s videos about it on YouTube. It’s really amazing. In one of them, somebody answers a payphone and hears a lot of really confusing things, but then the caller says ‘go to sleep’ and he just slumps down to the ground, out cold.”
Dale was looking at her as she spoke, but then he turned his eyes back to Noah. “Are you telling me we may have already answered the real questions, without even knowing it?”
Noah shrugged. “Highly unlikely,” he said. “From what I’ve read, you might not be able to stop yourself from answering, but you’d ultimately remember it if you had. I’m more concerned about how and why you would have been sold out. Any ideas?”
Dale seemed to hesitate, but Chrissy spoke up. “The Company has something rotten inside it,” she said. “Nobody’s really talking about it, but it seems like China has gotten its hooks into us somehow. An awful lot of classified information is being leaked to them, and since they share a border with North Korea, that makes anything going on here pretty important to them. Our best guess is that whoever’s working with them from inside our offices is feeding them all kinds of stuff about American activities in the peripheral countries.”
“Which means,” Dale added, “that any activities we’re involved in that affect China’s neighbors equals something they’ll pay a lot of money for. One of the top guys I know at Langley thinks the mole is compromising a lot of missions for the sake of money. As for our situation, I get the impression the Ministry of State Security here was told about us by the Chinese. I understand the language fairly well; a couple of the guards were talking about the fact that we might be going to China, but that’s all I’ve heard.”
Noah looked at him for a long moment, then nodded his head. “One of my team members was sold out in Thailand last week, but I’ve been suspecting the people I was working directly with. Now I’m wondering if there might be a connection to your problem.”
“If you are actually E & E,” Liz said, “I’d bet on it. There’s been a lot of buzz and chatter the last year or so that China is trying to identify an E & E primary, code name Camelot. If your guy could possibly know anything about that one, he’d be worth a fortune.”
“But don’t write off your own suspicions, yet,” Shirley said. “Like in our case, the only one who could have passed on the info about where to arrest us was our liaison, a deep cover agent who lives on a small farm outside Pyongyang. The mole might have told China we were here, but no one back at Langley had any information about where we were staying over here. Information isolation; no one but the local liaison knew that, so it couldn’t accidentally be intercepted in phone or computer chatter.”
Noah stared at her for a moment, his mind racing with sudden possibilities. If the Chinese are after me, why didn’t the mole give me up instead of Sarah? Noah wondered, but the logical answer was the same one he and Jenny had come to. It was a moment of opportunity. CIA probably provided the intel on the prison, and would have known we were sending in a female operative, even if they didn’t know why. If the mole somehow learned it was my team, then all he had to do was alert his contacts to snatch American girls. The prison would have told them who the newest one was, and they probably took the Ingersoll girl to make it look more coincidental.
But what about information isolation? That was a standard protocol for top secret missions, so the actual date and time of her insertion into the prison wouldn’t be available back in the States. If the Chinese were behind the abduction, and I’m almost certain now that they were, then there was still someone else involved, someone who was involved with the actual mission.
It was just like these folks. Soo Mi was their liaison; only she could have given the local State Security ops the intel on where to arrest them. She may have also tipped these folks that I was coming, because it seemed they were looking for something when they came out and found me. And then there’s the fact that she knew I was Camelot. Only E&E personnel should know that, not CIA. I should have seen it then.
And Jenny and the others are back there with her, even now!
He turned his back and wiggled his fingers. “Do you have any way to take these zip strips off me?”
Dale leaned over and looked at Noah’s hands, then turned around and picked up what looked like the lid of a tin can. “Yeah, turn around.”
Noah felt Dale working on the plastic with the edge of the lid. It took a couple of minutes, using the edge of the lid like a saw. A moment later his hands were free, though one of the strips was still around his right wrist.
“It suddenly occurs to me,” Dale said, “that cutting you loose might have been a mistake. Are you going to carry out your orders?”
Noah looked him in the eye. “Not yet,” he said. “I was told bluntly not to attempt to rescue any of you, on CIA orders, but my own boss gave me leeway on it and the situation changed the minute I was captured. The rest of the team I was with will be working on how to complete the mission, but now I’m on the inside with you. If I can figure a way to escape and time it for when they come, it might be possible for us all to get out alive.” He flexed his wrists, working the circulation back into them. “Considering what you just told me, I want to bring you back alive if I possibly can. But if I can’t…”
Dale searched his face for any sign that he was lying, and seemed to relax. “If you can’t get us out alive, then you have to do what you have to do.”
“I’m afraid so. Let’s cross that bridge if we come to it, all right? What can you tell me about the security setup here?”
Dale looked around as if he could see through the walls, then turned back to Noah. “There’s usually between fifteen and twenty soldiers around, and I would imagine that half of them are sleeping right now. Then there’s Colonel Song; h
e’s in command here, but he doesn’t wear a uniform. As far as I know, he’s the only one who speaks English properly, though there are a couple of women who come now and then, and they speak some.”
“Okay. I saw the guard room upstairs. Are there more down here?”
Dale pointed back the direction Noah had come from. “Two doors down, that’s their bunk room. How many guards did you see up and about?”
“About nine. There were two standing guard outside, two outside your door and five more in the guard room when I was caught.”
“Then there are probably about that many more catching some Z’s right now. Other than them and the Colonel, there’s occasionally a few other men around, usually only during the day. I doubt there’s anybody else here tonight.”
“Well, Song is probably the man they brought in to speak English to me. He didn’t buy it when I tried to tell him I was a lost tourist.”
Dale simply stared at him, but the three women laughed derisively. “Well, he wouldn’t, would he? Would you?”
“Of course not,” Noah said, “but I would naturally expect someone to try it. Giving him what he expected me to say was the easiest way I could think of to get myself thrown in with you.”
Dale scoffed. “What made you think they’d throw you in here? They could have tossed you in an entirely different room.”
“Possible, but unlikely. A limited number of soldiers to use for guard duty indicates that whoever was in command would probably keep any prisoners together. It was just bad luck that the guards stepped outside while I was snooping around, but once I was captured it made sense to just let them bring me to you.”
“Well, you certainly took a risk,” Dale said. “It was always possible they’d just assume you were trying to find out what happened to us, and shoot you for snooping around. They seem to think this place is pretty important.”