Dark Zone (4 page)

Mussolini-World War II-Marshall. The connection was logical.

“An important leader,” said Rubens. “FDR seemed to understand his worth.”

“In Moscow, a difficult place to be.”

Rubens waited patiently for more information, but none came. After more than a minute of silence, he prompted with a comment about the KGB—this often got the General going, if only on a tangent. But the old man had fallen completely silent. After another long minute, Rubens began talking about Marshall, asking about the relationship between Marshall and President Truman. But the General no longer acknowledged him.

Rubens stayed for twenty minutes, as he always did. Then he rose to leave. He was almost to the door when the General’s daughter, Rebecca Stein, came in. She feigned surprise at finding Rubens there, though he knew the meeting could not have been by chance.

“William, how are you?” she said, holding out her hand to him.

“I’m very well, Rebecca.”

“What a nice surprise.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry, I have to be on my way. Good-bye, General. I’ll see you later in the week.”

“Would you mind if we visited for a moment?” Rebecca asked Rubens. “I’ll come with you. We can talk while you walk.”

Rubens said nothing. He let her out of the door ahead of him, strolling toward the elevators neither slowly nor quickly.

“The competency proceeding,” said Rebecca. “I’ve started—I mean, we’re preparing papers.”

“Yes, of course.”

“You’re going to, uh, uh,” she said.

“Object? I have to. Your father wanted me appointed guardian.”

“That’s up to the court,” said Rebecca.

Rubens didn’t answer. Technically, she was correct. But the court was bound by state law to take the incapacitated person’s wishes into account. Several years before, the General had specified that Rubens should look after his affairs if he became incapacitated. The document was in order, except for one small possible technicality: it used the term
conservator
rather than
guardian
in naming Rubens to look after the General’s affairs. To a layman, the difference might have seemed insignificant, but under Maryland law the roles were subtly different; the conservator’s powers were slightly more limited. At least technically, an incapacitated person with a conservator retained more rights—and, in Rubens’ view, more dignity. The difference was mostly symbolic, certainly in this case—but the symbolism would have been significant to the General. And therefore it was significant to Rubens.

It was also a door for Rebecca and her lawyer.

“I know that there are, that you have objections,” said Rebecca.

Rubens pushed the elevator button.

“My father merely filled out a form that the government told him to fill out,” said Rebecca.

“Even if the agency had advised him on that matter, which I’m not sure that they did, the fact remains that he was free to do as he pleased.”

“Oh, give me a break.”

Rubens welcomed the sarcastic tone; he felt more comfortable dealing with Rebecca when she wasn’t pretending to be nice. The door to the elevator opened. Rubens stepped inside. Rebecca did so as well.

“Dale Jamison told my father that he had to have someone from the NSA as his guardian,” said Rebecca. “He was ordered to insert you. That’s no more an act of free will than being robbed.”

“Quite a comparison,” said Rubens.

“A hearing will be very embarrassing for your agency, I can guarantee,” said Rebecca.

Rubens took a long, deep breath—a yoga breath—before answering. He could be cruel, but it was not necessary; all he had to do was state the facts. “The General carefully considered the circumstances, and chose to nominate me to handle his affairs. I think that’s significant.”

The elevator opened. Rubens, thankful to be released, strode out.

“Mr. Rubens. Billy.”

Rubens did not break his stride. He hated to be called Billy.

Still, he stopped when she touched his arm.

“We shouldn’t be enemies,” she said. “We want the same thing.”

A lie, but he let it pass.

“I’m not your enemy,” he told her. “But I have my duty.”

“Because the agency wants you to do this.”

“No, because your father asked me,” said Rubens. “I owe it to him.”

“I’m his daughter!”

Of the many possible responses, he prudently chose silence.

“Legally, I should be entitled to be his guardian,” continued Rebecca more calmly.

“Legally, if it is submitted to a court, then the matter will be decided,” said Rubens. It was the mildest thing he could think of to say.

“Bill, please, be reasonable. I thought we were friends.”

She gripped his arm gently, squeezing it like she might squeeze the hand of a baby. He wanted to believe that her motives and emotions were sincere. But he couldn’t; if she had been sincere surely she would have made things right with her father long ago. The General had given her plenty of chances.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think any of this should go to court,” said Rubens honestly. “The informal arrangement was fine with me. You’ve always been able to see whatever records you wanted. There’s no need to do any of this.”

“This isn’t a matter of looking at bank records,” said Rebecca.

And so, she was flushed from her lie. She wanted control—undoubtedly for financial gain. Greed, not concern, motivated her.

“I have to do my duty as I see it,” said Rubens. “You’d ask no less if I were doing it for you.” He resumed his stride toward the car.

4

Lia DeFrancesca got out of the vehicle with her light bag and waited for her escort, feigning considerably more fatigue than she actually felt. Her two-day visit to North Korea had been an utter and complete bore. It was North Korea, of course, and no undercover American operative could afford to take a visit to the world’s most tightly controlled enemy state lightly. But it had been, in a word, dull.

As Deep Black assignments went, her job had been relatively straightforward: visit the North Korean port city of Hūngnam while posing as a Chinese journalist. She was supposedly writing a story about the port, but this was merely intended to be a cover for passing along a business card from the Hong Kong industrialist who owned the newspaper. The high-ranking military people she had met with upon her arrival knew this, of course, and anticipated a successful business relationship in the future.

Which surely would be possible. But that cover was itself a cover for Lia’s real mission—giving the phone number of a dedicated CIA line that could be used to set up a visit to China by one of the men who wanted to defect.

Lia had passed along the card within an hour of arriving. The rest of the time she’d pretended to be a journalist, accompanied by a Korean whose Chinese was rather limited, though if Lia were to complain the woman stood a good chance of being sent to a retraining camp from which she would not emerge alive. Lia’s Korean was also limited; fortunately, the Art Room had round-the-clock translators to help fill the gaps.

Her keeper had taken Lia on a one-hour stroll around the city each day. She had seen a residential area that combined a 1950s-style apartment building (built in the 1970s) and much older traditional homes. She’d also walked through what appeared to be a factory district, though it was completely devoid of people and there was no smoke coming from any of the stacks.

On the way back to the hotel yesterday, Lia had seen a group of musicians with battered brass instruments pass nearby. Lia asked who they were and her minder explained that they were a band recruited to perform for workers in the countryside as they labored on nearby farms. The practice had been very successful after a flood in 1999, and the great leader Kim Jong II had requested it be renewed.

The minder said all of that without taking a breath and then stopped speaking so abruptly that Lia thought she had suffered a seizure. They walked silently the rest of the way to the hotel.

Working in fields after harvest time? Only in North Korea.

The 737 that was due to take Lia back to China was visible beyond the terminal building at the airport. North Korean airports were all under military control, and the only airport that saw much “normal” civilian business was near the capital. The facilities hosted aircraft used for long-range patrols of the oceans to the east, but the base was not considered an important one and even by Korean standards appeared run-down. Flights from China came twice a week. The airline, Hwatao, was owned by a conglomerate that listed Shanghai as its home address, though Lia knew from her brief that its stock was split between a general in southern China and two brothers from Taiwan—an interesting example of the intertwined interests of free and communist China.

“Du bu qi,”
said her minder, using Chinese. The words meant “excuse me” or “pardon” in Putonghua, the official Mandarin dialect of northern China. Lia’s cover called for her to use Putonghua, though she was more comfortable and familiar with Cantonese, which she had first learned as a very young child after her adoption in America. The similarity between the two dialects sometimes got in the way, as her brain tended to blur them.

“What is it?” replied Lia in Chinese. She looked back toward the car, thinking she had left something inside.

“A comrade wishes to speak to you,” said the minder. “Those men will escort you.”

Lia spotted two soldiers walking toward them from the terminal building.

“Why?”

“Oh, routine,” said the minder.

“A fee?” asked Lia.

“Zaijan,”
said the minder without answering the question. “Good-bye.”

“Yes, good-bye, and thank you,” Lia told her.

Fee
was a euphemism for a bribe, which tended to be customary.

Lia gripped the handle of her overnight bag tightly. She had no weapon on her. Her only link with the outside world was her communications system, which was powered by circuits and a battery built into her belt. She clicked it now, making sure it was on. “A fee,” she muttered under her breath, just loud enough for the Art Room to hear.

“We briefed you on that,” answered Jeff Rockman, who had just taken over as her runner. “Pay it and come home.”

The men carried AK-47s that were perhaps twice as old as they were. Several paces behind them was an officer; he was a few years older and shorter than Lia.

“Nu xing shenme?”
asked the man in Korean. He was a lieutenant.

“He’s asking your name,” said the translator in the Art Room as Lia hesitated.

Actually, he was asking her family name, Lia realized, and the implications were very different. She felt her body tense.

“Why?” Lia answered sharply in Chinese.

“Come this way, miss.”

“Wo xing Wang,”
she told him, saying that her family name was Wang. She then asked what was going on, as she was due aboard the flight waiting out on the tarmac.

The officer’s face flushed. He stamped his right foot and pointed in the direction of the building.
“Jepjjok!”
he thundered. “That way.” The two soldiers flinched.

“I am on important private business,” she said.

North Korean officials tended to back off when she spoke firmly and with implied authority. But the young lieutenant was too full of himself—or maybe too worried about losing face in front of his men—to do that. “You will come now or be dragged away,” he told her.

Lia struggled against her instinct to lash out. She probably could deck the lieutenant and wrestle one of the weapons from one of the soldiers. But there would be no escape after that.

I played it wrong,
she realized.
I should have been more submissive, more in character. He needs to feel superior.

Lia bowed her head forward.
“Mianhamnida,”
she said in Korean, giving an apology. “Yes, I am going.”

The officer said something in Korean that she did not understand. The translator back in the Art Room apparently did not hear it or thought it unimportant to relay.

There was a subtle etiquette involved in the bribe exchange. The official would not be merely after money. While China was North Korea’s strong ally, there was a great deal of resentment among most Koreans toward their large northern neighbor. China’s historic domination and long occupation of the Korean peninsula caused deep animosity, which could not be erased over a period of only fifty years. Many Chinese—and this would especially apply to anyone associated with the Westernized and hence “decadent” Hong Kong area, where Lia’s credentials as well as her travel arrangements declared she was from—were viewed by the Koreans as greedy, soft, and worse. The fact that she was a woman, alone, young, and single, didn’t help the situation, as it only lowered her status in the eyes of the official, at least partly canceling any connection she had to the higher-ups in town. Lia and her briefer had played out different scenarios on how to offer the bribe, which of course wasn’t referred to as a bribe but an “official fee for expediting important matters.” Lia had to be the one to suggest it, once the official pointed out a problem.

She followed down the hallway toward a small room at the side of the building. The room smelled of fresh paint. The walls were bright white and there were six overhead incandescents, unusual in a country where power was severely rationed. In the middle of the room sat a large table, the folding sort often used at banquets. The four chairs next to it were heavy metal affairs with vinyl cushions. Lia walked toward the table but waited to sit until instructed to do so—an important point her briefer had emphasized.

Outside, she heard the sound of the 737’s engines being spooled up.

“I hope my papers are in order,” she told the officer in Korean. “My time here has been wonderful and productive. I have met with many important people.”

She continued on with a standard formula about how helpful the local officials had been and how indebted she was to Korea’s great leader, Kim Jong II. She stuck to the official cover that she was a journalist; the officer would know and probably care nothing about the business arrangements.