Chapter Twenty-Two
Unlike Martin, someone that was anxious to return to Pyongyang was Jake Carver. The meeting with Leyton Drisdale had completed all of his immediate business in New York, and after assuring himself that his own offices were running perfectly adequately without his day-to-day presence, he made a decision that the thing that he was currently most in need of lay, not in the Big Apple, but in a small bed in an anonymous apartment block in the outskirts the New Korean capital.
A new, connecting air service, flying between Newark and Pyongyang via LAX was advertised as cutting down flight times between the two destinations by ten hours, discounting the need, as has been the case in the past, of flying clockwise from the East Coast and a lengthy stop over in Beijing. Even so, the journey time had seemed interminable. The in-flight route map, which appeared intermittently on the small monitor screen located in the seat back of the chair in front of him, indicated that they were currently flying over the Bonin Islands group, some 600 miles south of Tokyo, and still at least two hours short of their ultimate destination. A final meal of the flight had just been served and cleared away and now there was nothing to break up the ongoing monotony before touchdown. Jake was not someone who could be happy doing nothing; the prospect of the empty time ahead made him feel twitchy and irritable. Much of the earlier portion of the flight Jake had passed lost in cyberspace: each aircraft seat was equipped with its own personal video games consul, with a selection of games CDs available from the cabin steward. The choice, though, had been disappointing and the games available all at least six months old, and Jake could not be bothered to return to a virtual reality which offered such limited opportunities for escapism. Unusually for him, being normally critical of his own powers of imagination, he decided that the realms of his own mind offered greater scope for diversion.
As with Martin Meek, the past few weeks in Jake Carver’s life had been a whirlwind of seemingly out-of-control activity, his mind and body being directed to do other than their own bidding, his very being a puppet coerced to dance to an invisible master’s tune. For a man who had grown used to being in control, it had proved an unnerving experience. Add to that, the fact that he had discovered that there was a faceless assassin with a contract out to kill him and the little matter of having inherited a fortune beyond his wildest dreams: taken all-in-all it would have to be said that it had been a bizarre fortnight. The matter of the billion dollars - conservative estimate - that it appeared he could now call his own had not really sunk in; indeed he had had little opportunity to give the sum any serious thought. It was a lot of money. No doubt about it. Even for someone like Bill Gates, it would not be considered just loose change. His First Class aeroplane seat had been almost the only extravagance he had so far indulged. And even then he had slightly begrudged the sum he had been requested to sign over. It was silly really. He was rich. And not just comfortably off, secure in his retirement rich. He was outrageously rich. Wealthier than anyone else on this plane, more than likely. Jake glanced around at his fellow passengers, each one of them oblivious to his new financial status. He could buy this whole aeroplane if he so chose. Or a fleet of them, he guessed. Should he so wish. It was a nice feeling. And yet also a slightly unsatisfactory one. For most Western people, who were the product of capitalist societies, and under this banner heading he was not so naïve as to not include himself, the goal of financial security, let alone the fantasy dreams associated with celebrity superstar wealth, were a successful end to a lifetime of toil and endeavour; it was the thing you strived towards; the pinnacle of ambition; almost the meaning of life. And yet when that end product is deposited in your lap, neither by your asking or your instigation, the over-riding question that Jake kept on finding himself asking was: so, is that it? Like so many others before him, Jake Carver was discovering that it was often better to travel hopefully than to actually arrive.
The one constant that Jake had managed to hold on to during this turbulent period of his life, was his feelings for the special person he had left behind in Pyongyang, and the individual that he was now so desperate to return to: to experience a warm embrace once more; and relax with the security that only comes with genuine emotions and true feelings. Jake Carver closed his eyes and tried to imagine what Kim Dong-Moon would be doing right now.
Bizarre four weeks? It had been a bizarre nine months in Jake Carver’s life. And no aspect more bizarre than his relationship with Kim Dong-Moon. Back in the early summer of last year, if he had been asked who Kim Dong-Moon was, Jake might just about have made the association between the name and the face of the foreman of one of the several crews of men involved in the cement work on the Wendelson Building. How he had gone from such a distant position, to friend and confidante, and from there ultimately to lover, Jake was still not entirely sure; it had been a strange sequence of events. As for himself, although he might have always secretly recognised that he occasionally had feelings that would not normally be considered appropriate towards members of the same sex, his strict Kansas upbringing, and subsequent macho career, had always enabled him to suppress such strange desires before they manifested themselves in a display of potential vulnerability. With Kim though, it had been different. He still found that he could not explain the various emotions that, through the Korean man, he had finally allowed to be shown, but he knew that, unlike either his two year marriage or his string of other brief relationships - all with women - this time it felt right.
It had all started, he supposed, the day that Kim had come to him, asking - begging would have been a more accurate word - for money. An advance on his wages was what he wanted so he had said. Normally he would have laughed at such a suggestion - he could not be seen to be treating one worker more favourably than any other, it was a sure-fire recipe for mutiny - but there had been something so pitiful and desperate about Kim’s pleading that he had felt inclined to at least hear the man out. The story he had subsequently heard, about an honest man driven to gambling in order to raise money to send to his family who were being confined in a detention camp in the north of the country, both touched and intrigued Carver, more than he was initially prepared to reveal. There had always been rumours of concentration camp style prisons in the old North Korea, where not just enemies of the state, but people convicted of minor offences against the regime, and also the families of such so-called undesirables, were kept in appalling conditions against their will and in some cases subjected to torture, but it had been a proud boast of New Korea that all of these camps had been disbanded and the inmates returned to their old villages and their old lives. Kim’s story seemed to disprove this claim. Admittedly, the rumours of the existence of such camps still persisted, but these rumours were dismissed by New Korea’s authorities as being propaganda spread and proliferated by the South, jealous of their neighbour’s current economic success story. After their first meeting, Carver had sent Kim away, telling him that he would give his request some consideration, but the man’s story had interested him and he wondered if the apparently terrified builder would be prepared to reveal more details of what he knew if the surroundings were more conducive to intimate discourse: he suggested that they should meet again the following evening, at the casino that Kim had mentioned he regularly frequented. For Carver, he had been working hard on the skyscraper project for weeks on end now without a break; an evening off and a few drinks would provide a pleasant interlude, even if his curiosity about the detention camps was not satisfied, and, although he hardly dared admit it to himself at the time, when he had looked into the tearful eyes of the Korean man standing in front of him, he had been aware of some of those peculiar emotions stirring within him again.
The casino outing had been a great success. Although Carver had had to explain to Kim that there was no way that he could officially advance him any of his wages, he did offer to lend Kim a small sum personally, to be repaid over a mutually convenient period.
As events turned out, Kim was able to repay this loan sooner than either of them could ever have imagined: the roulette wheel proved a particularly lucky ally to them both that evening, and by the end of the night both men were feeling companionably drunk and carrying wallets bulging with crisp, newly won bank notes. Jake could no longer clearly remember the sequence of events that had occurred after that, but he seemed to recall that he had suggested that they should go for a final drink somewhere, keen not to allow one of the first friends he had made since his arrival in Pyongyang disappear quite so swiftly, and that it had actually been Kim who had touched him lightly on the arm and suggested that he had a bottle of good American bourbon back at his apartment and that they should go there, it was not too far. For Jake Carver it had proved an emotional journey further than he could have ever imagined. They had not become lovers that night, nor even the next, when they met again: Carver was still embarrassed about his awakening sexuality, and Kim, sensitive to this, had not tried to rush anything, happy to preserve the charade of a shared macho friendship while at the same time realising that there was a more basic attraction between the two of them. When finally it was Jake, of the two, whose emotions betrayed his growing physical needs, his sexual acquiescence still came with conditions attached: their relationship must remain a complete secret, in his profession - with his reputation - he could not afford to display any ‘weakness’, he had to maintain the respect of his workers at all costs; they would only ever meet at Kim’s apartment, he could not be seen to be socialising with an employee. Kim was content to agree to any of Carver’s stipulations.
That had been almost nine months ago now, and during that time Carver’s relationship with Kim Dong-Moon had progressed more along the lines of a typical heterosexual affair rather than a homosexual coupling, and stood out as a single source of pleasure in an otherwise lonely sojourn in a country distant, both in miles and in culture, to the one he considered home; true, his work had been a constant source of satisfaction for him, particularly when it became apparent that the iconoclastic structure that they were building, which had at one time seemed little more than an old man's impossible dream, was steadily transforming into a bricks and mortar reality, but as a balm to his emotional needs the only relief was Kim.
Carver looked at his watch. Still an hour and a half to touchdown, provided that they even ran to time: the headwinds across Japanese airspace were notoriously strong, and flights were habitually subject to short delays. He momentarily wondered if Kim would be there at the airport to meet him, and then realised the foolishness of this thought: the Korean man did not even know which day, let alone which flight, Carver would be returning on. No, he would return to his hotel suite, shower, and then call Kim later that evening when he had had a chance to recover from any initial jet lag; better that way, to meet him when he felt fresh and rested. A glass of champagne might be a nice way to pass a few more minutes: he might as well take advantage of the few additional luxuries that his First Class fare permitted him. Carver was just about to press the relevant button on the consul of his arm rest to summon the cabin steward, when the behaviour of the passenger who was seated in the mirror image seat to his own on the opposite aisle of the plane caught his attention. The passenger was a woman, well dressed and well made up, not someone who immediately appeared out of place in the refined environment of the anterior of the aircraft, indeed she seemed more at ease with her rich surroundings than Carver - ever conscious of the price that such luxury arrived at - ever felt. Carver had first been drawn to the fact that she had pulled from her handbag a small compact and had been studying her reflection, rather more attentively than the norm, for some few minutes, although conscious of accepted decorum Carver had tried not to stare, overly respectful of the needs of privacy in a primarily communal environment. It was only when she had replaced the mirror though, that Carver noticed that the woman’s eyes were actually closed, and that she had appeared to lapse into a state approaching semi-meditation, her lips soundlessly moving, mouthing a silent incantation, both her hands and her fingers crossed in primeval, superstitious configuration, presumably both warding off evil and welcoming good fortune. Across the woman’s lap Jake noticed lay a copy of the In-flight Safety Instructions, and momentarily, when her voice rose above the level of a whisper, Jake thought that he heard her say, “Forgive those who do not fasten their seatbelts, and those who do not return their seats to the upright position.” Jake Carver was vaguely aware of the Church of the Higher We and its particular system of belief - in the same way that most uninterested people have heard of both Anglican and Presbyterian denominations but who would be hard pressed to actually differentiate between the two - but he could not recall ever having witnessed a specific example of their followers’ worship before, let alone ever having met one of their number. Instinctively, he turned away from the scene, trying, instead, to find a point of interest outside the window, amidst the blank expanse of boundless sea, which would maintain his attention, but he found that he could not help but be drawn back to the woman, who, having adopted the ‘brace’ position, continued to commune with her God regardless of his interested attention. Jake looked up and down the small, enclosed cabin, at one end, screened off from the Economy Class passengers by the aid of a thin curtain, at the other, separated from the flight deck, the pilot and his assistants by the proximity of a thick, reinforced, sealed door. There were the backs of a few other heads, most slumped and sleeping in their comfortable, reclining seats, headphones attached, lost to sensation, and there was the row of small windows opening up upon the real world, revealing an orange sun just coming up beyond a skewed horizon, but otherwise there was nothing that Carver could see that merited special attention. He wondered what it was that the woman could see that he was blind to.
Bored and agitated, Carver found himself searching his small, stow-on bag for a source of entertainment. His fingers alighted on several letters: mail that he had picked up from his New York office with the intention of opening and dealing with during his hours of airborne confinement, but which had entirely slipped his mind. He thumbed through the envelopes looking at the date stamps, trying to guess their source. The first envelope in the pile looked the most interesting. It had a colourful New Korea postage stamp - depicting the Ryugyong Hotel surrounded by an artificial blaze of bright fireworks - and had a hand-written address, in a writing that Carver did not recognise - not Kim, at any rate. He slid his finger along the sealed edge and removed the letter.
Jake Carver had never received a blackmail note before, but that did not stop him from instantly recognising one when he saw it. The wording could not have been more concise. The letter was laid out like a traditional invoice with Carver’s name and the address of his New York offices at the top; beneath, in the section normally reserved for the description of the goods sent or the service provided, were the words “The price of silence” and in the total column the sum requested was a handsome twenty-five million dollars. If Jake should have been left in any doubt as to the sincerity of the anonymous sender, under the bland heading of ‘Comments’ the normally empty space had been filled in with the words: “We’ll be in touch again soon, Buddy*.”
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