Blackmail Earth (24 page)

But man, you
got
to get her,
he warns himself.
You can’t wait forever because the minute she starts putting two and two together, two and two is going to add up to you.

*   *   *

Nighttime in North Korea. Satellites from the United States spy on 23 million people, but they capture only darkness blacker than the deepest well. All around the Supreme Leader’s nation, lights burn: in China, Japan, and South Korea. They are visible. They are vulnerable. Their lights burn like stars too weak to stay up in the sky.

But we are blackness. We are invisible. Our enemies shudder,
thinks Jae-hwa as he enters the Supreme Leader’s compound.

Two lines of “pleasure girls” pass him as they exit. They are so young and beautiful, dressed identically in blue jackets and skirts. They lift the burdens of the motherland from the shoulders of the president. And that is for the best, for he is the leader and “We cannot live away from his breast.” Jae-hwa repeats this popular slogan to himself solemnly every time he comes to see the great one.

Guards on both sides of Jae-hwa escort him into a vast hall with a ceiling that arches high above him. This marks the beginning of the Supreme Leader’s private quarters. At the very end, the most revered one sits at a long table eating rice and vegetables and dark red ostrich meat by himself. Jae-hwa knows the ostrich comes from the president’s private farm. So much hunger, but he must eat. He must be strong. Above all others.

The Great One studies Jae-hwa, who wishes that he were shorter so that he could honor the Supreme Leader more by looking up to him with his eyes, as he does with his heart. Then the president smiles and sings. This is a momentous occasion, the highest honor ever accorded Jae-hwa. He beams with pleasure. His son and his son’s sons will forever know of the night when the most revered one sang to
him.

“Our enemies are the American bastards, who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland. With guns that I make with my own hands, I will shoot them, bang-bang-bang.”
His voice is so powerful. When he points his finger and fires an imaginary gun, Jae-hwa applauds, beaming, and nods over and over. This is a song all North Koreans know, but none can sing it with such conviction, for none have shown the Supreme Leader’s heroism against their brutal foes. Jae-hwa’s own son sings this song every day at school, and before he goes to bed. He sleeps soundly because his father works with the Supreme Leader. So much pride in Jae-hwa’s home.

Now the president aims his finger at Jae-hwa and pretends to shoot him. Jae-hwa stops smiling. Stops nodding. His hands fall to his sides.
Have I insulted him?
Jae-hwa doesn’t know what to do. He thinks of his son:
May you always sleep soundly, even when the guns are real.

“We have our guns, bang-bang-bang,”
the Supreme Leader sings again.

The president means the rockets. That’s why Jae-hwa is here. For many years the army has loaded thousands of missiles with sulfates. Overseeing the arming of rockets has been Jae-hwa’s most important duty since the 1990s, when droughts and floods caused a million people to starve to death. Maybe more, but nobody dares say this.

It was a holocaust of hunger. Mothers ate dirt and fed their babies insects. It was not the fault of the great nation or the Supreme Leader. The extreme weather was due to climate change, spurred by the wastrels in North America and Europe and Japan. The Supreme Leader warned the world that he would not let his people suffer alone. The West ignored him and slandered him. Called him crazy.

They won’t ignore the president much longer. The rockets are loaded with enough sulfates to make the whole world share the gnawing hunger of the North.

“The fools in the Maldives know nothing,” the president says.

“You are right, Supreme Leader.”

“The time is coming to instruct the world.…”
This is what the Supreme Leader does so well. He teaches us all,
Jae-hwa thinks.
We are his children.
“The phony election in the United States comes in days. We must act.”

“You have been most patient with them,” Jae-hwa says.

“Do you think I have been too patient?” the president demands.

“No.” Jae-hwa’s toes curl up in his boots; he did not intend to offend the most powerful one. “We have waited for your wisdom.”

“We must be ready. Are we?”

Jae-hwa tells him that every rocket is loaded. “They will turn the sky black.”

The Supreme Leader smiles, and nods at a seat at the long table. A guard rushes to bring Jae-hwa a plate of warm food. Jae-hwa wishes that he could save the ostrich meat for his boy, who has never tasted such a luxury.
Hunger is the burden of heroes.
The Supreme Leader has shared these wise words so many times.

But Jae-hwa would never insult the president by asking to take home food served at his table. To eat with him is a great honor. So Jae-hwa carefully matches the Supreme Leader’s every mouthful. Eat when he eats. Chew when he chews. Swallow only when he swallows. Always follow the Great One.

Jae-hwa begins to perspire, and for the first time, notices the heat in the room. If he could, he would bring the heat home to his boy, too. There is no heat for houses in North Korea.

Only frozen blackness. But it protects them. It protects the rockets. The West worries only about nuclear bombs, and cries every time the North launches missiles. The Supreme Leader has been smart to make them worry, because their fear of nuclear war keeps them from seeing the sulfate rockets that will destroy the planet.

And only we will be ready. Only we will survive. Only we have the hard experience of living without light, heat, and the murderous comforts of the West.

CHAPTER 16

A gentle hand shook Jenna’s shoulder. A voice spoke, distant as a dream. “Jenna? We’ll be landing in about forty minutes, and I want to bring you up to speed so we can hit the ground running.”

Nicci?
Jenna wondered groggily. She slipped off a black sleep mask and squinted at her producer in the bright tropical sunlight that was spilling into the spacious charter jet. She checked her watch: zonked out for almost nine hours.
Great.
She usually didn’t sleep well on planes, but she usually didn’t zap herself with zopiclone. Neither did she generally fly on a luxurious Gulfstream with a buttery leather seat that, at the push of a button, converted into one of the plushest beds that Jenna had ever nestled in. Yes, she felt guilty about the outsized carbon footprint of a private jet, but she could not deny, much as she would have liked to, the pleasure of having this kind of transport in a pinch. Now she understood what network old-timers were waxing nostalgic about when they talked about “back in the day.”
Old-timers like Rick Birk.

Jenna groaned, though she recognized that Birk was the reason that she and the rest of the network team weren’t flying commercial. If they had been, they would have been refueling back in Dubai about now, instead of arriving at their destination, halfway around the world from their starting point at LaGuardia.

“Want some coffee?” Nicci asked.

Jenna nodded, set aside a soft cotton blanket, and turned her “bed” back into a seat. “Back in a sec,” she said.

Returning from the bathroom, she joined Nicci on a full-size couch that was braced against the left side of the jet. The flight attendant, a young man named Anders from the Netherlands, handed Jenna a cup of coffee.

Behind them, Chris Randall, the network’s special terrorism correspondent, was waking. In a neighboring seat, his producer, Alicia Gant, was pecking peevishly at her laptop. She was about ten years his senior, and not nearly as warm toward Jenna and Nicci as the former Army Ranger turned correspondent.

“That woman worries me,” Nicci said, sotto voce. Randall walked past them toward the front of the plane.

Jenna nodded. Who needed air-conditioning with icy Alicia around? After takeoff, they’d all shared a couple of bottles of Australian Riesling. Jenna had found the two-person camera crew and Chris friendly enough, but Alicia had said very little. Despite her few words, Jenna had sensed the news producer’s disapproval of her. She’d thought that maybe Alicia was feeling territorial, so she’d made a point of saying that she and Nicci weren’t going to report, only analyze. This had not raised the friendliness quotient one point.

Nicci opened her MacBook. Jenna, after several sips of coffee, was awake enough to notice that her producer had changed into khaki shorts and top.

“You look like a total safari girl,” Jenna said.

“I know,” Nicci enthused. “I bought this outfit at F. M. Allen two years ago, and I was worried that I’d never get a chance to wear it. I hope I haven’t overdone it. I don’t want to look silly.”

“No, not at all. You look great.” Nicci was one of those rare wonders who thrived on five hours of sleep and always looked spritely and freshly scrubbed. But much as the pixyish producer could pass for an ingénue, she preferred her lovers to have long hair, long legs, ruby-red lips, and towering heels. Jenna had often thought the Barbie Master would have been perfect for her—if only he weren’t a guy.

“Before we land, you should use a mirror,” Nicci said kindly. Part of her role was making sure the “talent”—Jenna—looked her best.

Jenna tugged at her hair, hardly believing that she’d failed to look closely at herself in the bathroom.
I must have really been groggy back there.

“You want the news about GreenSpirit’s murder first, or the Maldives?” Nicci asked. “We’ve got enough time for both.”

“Let’s do New York first.” A killer might be stalking Dafoe’s environs, and that worried her. Jenna realized, uneasily, that her personal and professional lives had become focused not on clouds, rain, or sunshine, but on violence, whose hard hand felt increasingly close. She felt like she’d become the sharp point of an acute triangle—the connection between terrorism in the Maldives and a monstrous murder two hours from home. She wanted to be armed with information on all counts, even if it made her as wary as a Sunday hiker in a forest teeming with dark shadows and the tracks of large carnivores.

“This is a press conference I downloaded a couple of hours ago,” Nicci said. She paused the video on a shot of a young man tugging at his shirt collar, evidently uncomfortable in his jacket and tie. “That’s the ‘person of interest,’ a high school senior and football player named Jason Robb. The one next to him in the gray suit is his lawyer. The other two are his parents. They don’t say anything the whole time.”

Nicci tapped the keyboard, resuming the video. The lawyer was clearing his throat.

“We’re here today because Jason is making himself available for questioning in the investigation of GreenSpirit’s murder. As soon as we leave here, he’ll be talking to police and FBI investigators, but first he wanted to talk to his friends and neighbors through all of you.

“There have been rumors flying around about Jason,” the lawyer continued. “Some of them, in our view, have resulted from leaks from law enforcement officials. Today, we’ll be asking those agencies to make these leaks stop. A responsible young man like Jason should not be tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. I think that after you hear what he has to say, you’ll agree that he’s not linked to this heinous crime in any way.”

“There’s more boilerplate,” Nicci said as she moved the time bar button on the bottom of the screen, “but this is where it gets good. The kid’s just been asked if he threatened GreenSpirit.”

“I didn’t threaten her. I did threaten a girl who dumped my brother before he got killed in Baghdad,” Robb said. “But I only said that I’d get even with her because she accused me, in front of a whole bunch of people, of taking money from guys to lead them to their naked parties, and that wasn’t true.”

“What Jason just said can be confirmed with the CBS News crew that was present during the initiation,” the attorney interjected. “Of course, no harm has come to the young woman in question, and Jason regrets his outburst.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry I said it, but imagine if someone accused you of being a pervert in front of a famous news guy.”

“Did CBS pay you to lead them to the ceremony?” asked a woman.

“Yeah, a fat hundred bucks. I wished I’d never run into them.”

“It was a consultant’s fee,” the attorney jumped back in. “That’s what CBS News called it when I contacted them to confirm the details.”

“So you’re a consultant to CBS News,” the woman followed up archly.

“I guess so,” Robb replied.

“Cronkite must be turning over in his grave,” Nicci said.

“The larger issue here is that my client was not involved in any threat against GreenSpirit, and absolutely denies any role in her killing.”

“Where have you been, then?” another reporter called out.

“He was scared,” the attorney said. “He went to a cabin with his girlfriend. He got in touch with his parents yesterday, and they contacted me.” Jason’s middle-aged parents nodded. They sat right next to him, dressed in what could have been their Sunday best. “Together, we made immediate arrangements to meet with the FBI and New York State Police. There’s no mystery. That’s the story. It’s no more complicated than that.”

“So the girlfriend’s the alibi?” a man bellowed.

“That’s correct,” the attorney said. “I’ve questioned her, and I believe—”

“Will Jason take a polygraph?” two reporters interrupted to ask the same question.

“Sure.” The young man shrugged, like
Why the heck not?

“We’ve told law enforcement that Jason will make himself available for a polygraph exam.”

Nicci hit the pause icon. “That’s pretty much it.”

“I believe that kid,” Jenna said. “He’s too rough around the edges; his attorney would never have let him take questions if there was any doubt about his innocence.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Nicci said. “Sounds like you’re still catching lots of Court TV,” she joked. Jenna’s favorite channel after the Weather Channel.