Robert Ludlum's (TM) the Janson Equation (20 page)

Beijing Capital International Airport
Beijing, China

S
in Bae expertly navigated past the countless duty-free shops and restaurants in Asia's busiest airport, Beijing Capital International, while reading Ping's encrypted email on his phone. Because Sin Bae had needed to avoid crossing paths with Jessica Kincaid at Incheon International, his handler had flown from Shanghai to Beijing to pick up surveillance from the time the trio disembarked the plane until Sin Bae arrived on a later flight from Seoul.

Seeing his head lowered, crowds parted for Sin Bae as though he were an ambulance speeding down a busy freeway with sirens blaring. Little did these people know that his awareness was impeccable, at a level higher than any professional athlete who performed in this city's Summer Olympics several years ago. If Sin Bae crashed into you, it was purposeful on his part, and he'd most likely just relieved you of your wallet or handbag, not for money but for methods of identification or access. Or perhaps he'd planted on your person a phone or a tracking device or something more sinister.

In any case, it was no accident.

Actually, as he breezed through the airport, Sin Bae was not Sin Bae at all, but Song Jin-sung, a South Korean national who worked in research and development at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals' laboratories in Seoul. Song Jin-sung carried a South Korean passport heavily inked with entry stamps from nearly every nation in Asia and several in the European Union, including Tokyo, Singapore, Paris, and Madrid. Song Jin-sung or one of his alternative incarnations had indeed visited each of these cities. Had killed in each of these cities. When he made his exit from each city, he took nothing with him, left nothing behind but the bodies of his victims. And occasionally his calling card: a white-gold cuff link with an onyx gemstone in its center—and a bloodied garrote hidden in its core.

As Sin Bae perused Ping's message, he thought of the teenage girl. He had hoped that Kang Jung would not accompany Kincaid and the man to Beijing.

But she had.

Why did the woman allow the girl to come to Beijing when she knew she was a target? Why make the child a target too? The girl is only thirteen. She should be at her school.

He touched his left temple, where a headache was beginning to form. By the age of fourteen, Sin Bae was no longer in school; he'd been placed on full work duty at Yodok. Because he was large and powerful and possessed incredible stamina, he was given the job of burying bodies on the mountain. In the winter the ground froze and it sometimes took him days to dig a single grave in the frozen earth.

So many bodies.

So many bodies there wasn't room on the mountain to bury them all.

In the winter Sin Bae stripped the corpses of their clothes to give them to members of his family.

In the winter…

In the winter he could find no berries in the hills. No frogs, no salamanders, no earthworms. Corn and rice became short; he and his family edged closer to starvation.

But by then Sin Bae was determined to endure at all costs.

And so he became savage. He began to set secret rat traps all around the camp. Each time he caught one, he immediately cooked it up and devoured it in seclusion. As the food shortages became worse and his family found themselves with even less to eat, he ceased joining them for dinners of rice and corn. For months at a time he consumed only rats.

At the age of fifteen, he became an adult and was warned by his father: “
Be careful, my son. Now that you are a man the guards are permitted to shoot you
.”

Newly appointed guards moved into Yodok with their families. They were separated from the prisoners but still resentful of having been stationed in such a hellish place.

Sin Bae often wondered what the guards thought of him. When he was a child, they'd kicked him around for the slightest infractions. As he grew bigger and stronger, they assigned him the most backbreaking work yet seemed to develop a certain respect for him. Respect, or perhaps it was fear. Fear not of his physical stature but of what they saw forming behind Sin Bae's eyes.

Those eyes were now glued to his phone.

According to Ping's email, the subjects had taken a taxi from the airport directly to Tiananmen Square. Sin Bae agreed wholeheartedly with his handler's assessment; the square seemed to both men a peculiar place for Kincaid and her allies to start their search for Gregory Wyckoff.

Perhaps they possessed even more information than Sin Bae suspected. Perhaps they had a precise location on the boy. If so, Sin Bae's stay in Beijing would be brief. In a few hours he might well be right back here at the airport, boarding a return flight to Seoul.

O
NCE
K
INCAID FINALLY PASSED
through the security checkpoint and entered the world's largest square, the text message intercepted from Gregory Wyckoff's stolen phone by Park Kwan's people an hour earlier finally made sense; this
was
a reasonable spot for a clandestine rendezvous, especially if one of the parties was concerned for his safety.

Despite the freezing temperatures, the crowds in Tiananmen Square were as dense as the smog suspended just overhead. Droves of tourists surrounded China's grand monuments, shooting photos with expensive high-tech cameras with all the intensity of the paparazzi at a red-carpet event.

Gazing up through the thick haze at the hundreds of red lanterns decorating the square in anticipation of Beijing's Spring Festival, Kincaid realized that exhaustion was beginning to set in. Attempting to perform the universal cure for drowsiness, she vigorously shook her head from side to side. But it was futile. What she really craved was another shot of adrenaline, like the one she'd received when Janson's old friend called her at the Grand Hyatt in Seoul. She needed to remember that she and Park Kwan and their thirteen-year-old charge were in danger, and that their mission was literally one of life or death.

“Let's start looking for Wyckoff,” she said.

According to the incoming text message, Wyckoff wasn't supposed to meet with his unidentified acquaintance for another hour and ten minutes. But Wyckoff's dossier revealed that this would only be his second visit to Beijing in the past decade, so she imagined he'd choose to arrive early rather than risk missing his rendezvous. She suggested that she and Park Kwan split up to cover more ground in less time.

“What about
me
?” Kang Jung interjected.

“You can either come with me or go with Park Kwan,” Kincaid said. “Your choice.”

Kang Jung shook her head. “What I mean is, three of us can cover far more ground than two.”

“I realize that,” Kincaid said in a tone she immediately wished she could take back. “But you're not going off on your own. You're too young.”

Mercifully, rather than argue, the girl made a face, turned to Park Kwan, and asserted, “I am coming with you.”

Kincaid pointed to the tall granite monument in the middle of the square and told them that was where they should rendezvous in just under an hour if they had met with no success. She wished them both good luck then motioned toward the endless line of people waiting to enter Mao's Mausoleum.

“I'll begin with the chairman,” she said.

A
FTER PASSING THROUGH CUSTOMS
, Sin Bae exited the airport and went directly to the matte-black Audi A7 that was waiting for him in short-term parking. He was pleased to find the windows darkly tinted as he'd requested.

He opened the driver's-side door and slipped into the soft charcoal leather seat. He started the V-8 engine, closed his eyes, and listened to it purr as his mind wandered back to his time at Yodok.

By the age of sixteen, Sin Bae was far from a model prisoner. He caused trouble throughout the camp. He fought. He stole. He had sex with women, which was strictly forbidden at Yodok.

And he was punished.

At one point during his ninth year at Yodok, it seemed as though every other week Sin Bae was being tossed into the sweatbox for punishment of some transgression or another. Punishment for stealing, for fighting, for fucking, punishment for speaking back to a guard. Punishment for not wearing his ragged uniform properly.

In the sweatbox Sin Bae faced total darkness. He was further deprived of food, even his precious rats. He was given so little to eat that he had to snatch whatever he could get his hands on. Centipedes became his breakfast, cockroaches his lunch.

In such close confinement someone of his size was completely unable to move. He crouched on his knees with his hands on his thighs, his heels digging deep into the flesh of his lower back, causing constant, excruciating pain. If he said a word or made a gesture, the punishment was extended.

When finally let loose, no man had ever previously exited the sweatbox on his own two feet. Yet Sin Bae made it a point to do so every time.

Meanwhile, each turn in the sweatbox added five years to his already indefinite sentence.

To this day, every time he closed his eyes, Sin Bae feared he'd somehow wake in the sweatbox. For it was in the sweatbox that Sin Bae had witnessed the most abhorrent event of his life.

Sin Bae opened his eyes. He threw the transmission into reverse and backed out of the space.

The drive to Tiananmen Square would take him approximately thirty minutes.

When he arrived at the square, he wouldn't have to concern himself with parking. One of Ping's other assets would be awaiting his arrival along Bei Chang Jie. Sin Bae would simply exit the car with the engine still running and head to the easternmost entrance of the square, where a guard had been paid well to pass Sin Bae through the security checkpoint without having to answer any inane questions or undergo an intrusive search of his person.

Sin Bae paid the airport lot the nominal fee then peeled the Audi A7 out of short-term parking.

Once on the freeway, Sin Bae regarded his reflection in the rearview mirror with a rare sense of satisfaction. Since he had boarded the two-hour Asiana Airlines flight from Seoul, Ping had also learned the identity of the man now traveling with Kincaid. His name was Park Kwan and he was employed by the Seoul Metropolitan Police, which explained his carrying a gun into the T-Lound nightclub, something not even Sin Bae had attempted.

Thinking of the man and his interference in the coatroom caused Sin Bae to again consider the girl, Kang Jung. For Sin Bae, her death would constitute a particularly cruel irony. For had he not hesitated, had he not suffered that moment of unwanted introspection at the Sophia Guesthouse in central Seoul, the teenage girl who reminded him so much of his sister would not have become involved, and thus would not have become one of his victims.

Yet it was none other than his sister's face that he had glimpsed in the mirror as he strangled the young female translator, Lynell Yi.

Although the interpreter looked nothing like Su-ra (who would forever in his mind remain twelve years old), it was indeed Su-ra who appeared to him that evening.

It was Su-ra's image that had diverted Sin Bae's attention for those several crucial seconds.

Though he had been able to finish the interpreter, Sin Bae's vacillating had afforded Lynell Yi's boyfriend time to escape.

Now the boy—the US senator's son, Gregory Wyckoff—had apparently fled here to Beijing. And Jessica Kincaid and the South Korean cop (and the young Korean girl named Kang Jung) would finally lead Sin Bae straight to him.

It was a bittersweet feeling, a peculiar blend of relief and regret.

For once they led him to the boy, he would have no choice but to terminate the female teen along with the others.

He flashed on Park Kwan in the coatroom and seethed. Because of the cop's interference, Sin Bae's kill count for this mission was about to increase by four, instead of three.

E
ven in parts of the capital city, the darkness was absolute. Janson had seen numerous satellite photos of the Korean peninsula at night; he'd known that the North remained as black as the seas when viewed from hundreds of miles above. Yet the perfect nothingness of Pyongyang after the sun had fallen still somehow managed to shock him. No streetlamps. No headlights. Not a single window aglow in the towering apartment buildings on either side of the road. It was as though he'd stepped even further back in time. Not just into the early twentieth century but into the Stone Age.

Still, Janson now felt like a soldier on an urban battlefield, no longer just a ghost in the fog. Although the darkness provided consummate cover, the danger of the capital city remained omnipresent. And the situation would only get worse the closer he and Yun Jin-ho came to their destination.

As they pushed through the blackness Janson's heart pounded, his muscles tensed. He was now well rested, even well fed. Working so closely with the regime, Yun explained, had its privileges. Unlike most of North Korea's population, Yun Jin-ho received plenty of food, including expensive imports from South Korea and Japan.

“How did you come to work for the South?” Janson had asked when he woke in the safe house.

Sitting on the cot, Janson could see a map spread out before Yun Jin-ho on the table at which they'd been sitting a few hours earlier.

After several seconds of silence, Yun Jin-ho looked up from his map with a resigned expression. He motioned Janson to the table.

Once Janson was seated across from him, Yun Jin-ho told him his story.

“I had been a defector,” he began.

Before defecting, Yun Jin-ho had served as one of General Kim Jong-il's loyal deputy directors. It was a highly prestigious position, one of the most coveted roles in the country. It had taken years of hard work and education for Yun to rise in the ranks under the Dear Leader's father, Kim Il-sung.

“I had drunken the Kool Whip,” Yun Jin-ho conceded. Janson didn't correct him.

Yun Jin-ho, like all his fellow countrymen, had worshipped Kim Il-sung.
He was our deity
, Yun said. No North Korean, not even the educated, thought of the Great Marshal as a mere mortal, a man made of flesh and blood. According to official state history, Kim Il-sung was one of the world's great warriors, a liberator of the Korean people who had literally fought a hundred thousand battles during the Japanese occupation. State propaganda portrayed Kim Il-sung as more virtuous than Confucius, more benevolent than Buddha, more just than Muhammad, more loving than Christ.

“No one,” Yun Jin-ho said, “including me, knew him for what he was: a figurehead. A puppet handpicked by Soviet intelligence while they temporarily occupied the North following the Second World War.” He closed his eyes as a joyless smile appeared on his face. “You should have witnessed my astonishment after my defection when I learned that our Great Leader had been fluent in Chinese and proficient in Russian, but could not speak Korean well at all when Stalin first placed him in command of our people.”

When in 1994, Kim Il-sung died at the age of eighty-two, all of North Korea was stunned, Yun Jin-ho included.

“It was unthinkable,” he said, looking into his past. “How do
gods
die? And what on earth do you do when yours does?”

Like his countrymen, Yun Jin-ho had never felt so sad and frightened in all his life. He joined the millions who flooded the nation's streets, overcome by panic, overwhelmed with grief. Many committed suicide by jumping from tall buildings. Others incessantly banged their heads against concrete sidewalks and walls, spilling their own blood, right up to the moment they lost consciousness or died. It was as though the entire nation joined in a collective, unending scream. Millions of mourners swarmed around the more than thirty thousand statues already erected in Kim Il-sung's honor. They wept, they passed out from the heat, from their shock. But most of all they prayed.

“We were told that if we prayed hard enough, if we cried and screamed at the top of our lungs, if we pulled our hair from our heads and pounded our chests till they bled, then maybe, just maybe, the Great Marshal would be resurrected, maybe he would return to us, ride down from the sky on a winged horse to once again lead his people.”

Instead the people of North Korea were given his son.

K
IM
J
ONG-IL HAD BEEN
introduced to the North Korean people as his father's successor twenty years before Kim Il-sung's death. A mercurial figure, Kim Jong-il possessed none of the military experience or charisma of his father. Yet, largely because of the regime's iron grip on its people, the transition of power went smoothly. And the cult of personality continued without a hitch.

However, some officials inside the palace, including Yun Jin-ho, were weary of the son. His various voracious appetites were well-known among those in the palace, and though nothing was ever spoken aloud, the son's need for abundance in all things was often viewed with disgust.

Although Kim Jong-il was a recluse, he demanded the constant company of young Norwegian models to entertain him. His significant paunch betrayed his love of food; his spirits cellar gave away his expensive tastes in wines and liquors.

While his people starved, Kim Jong-il went on international spending sprees that made Yun Jin-ho's stomach turn.

“He'd send his personal chef to Japan to buy thousands of pounds of the most expensive sushi and squid,” Yun said with revulsion. “To Thailand for the top papayas and mangoes. To Denmark for the world's best bacon. To Iran and Uzbekistan for pistachio nuts and caviar.” Yun shook his head sadly. “While his people died of malnutrition in the streets, their Dear Leader would purchase cases of Perrier water from France, kegs of Pilsner draft beer from Czechoslovakia. He was the world's single largest customer of Hennessy Paradis cognac.”

Although he maintained appearances, it wasn't long before Yun Jin-ho no longer enjoyed serving the regime. He no longer loved his work. He no longer loved his country because he no longer loved its leader. Even as he ascended in rank within the palace walls, Yun Jin-ho began seeking a way out.

Not just out of the palace, but out of North Korea, forever.

He saved his money. Spent what little free time he had studying maps. Spoke of none of this to anyone, not even his closest and most trusted friends in the palace. Silence, he knew from the very beginning, would be key.

Yun Jin-ho continued to perform his job well. He watched quietly as Kim Jong-il obsessed over obtaining nuclear weapons, even as his own people starved and rotted in North Korea's scattered labor camps.

After years of bearing witness to Kim Jong-il's crimes and atrocities, after years of observing firsthand his utter indifference to and neglect of his people, Yun Jin-ho decided he could wait no longer. It was time to make his move.

And he did. Knowing full well that it could cost him his life.

I
N ORDER TO RECEIVE
substantial time away from his position at the palace, Yun Jin-ho feigned a protracted illness. It was risky. He'd had to bribe his doctor with most of the small fortune he'd saved up in order to be given the desired diagnosis. If the palace ordered a second doctor to corroborate the findings of the first, Yun Jin-ho and his doctor would have both been publicly executed.

He could have simply run, but he badly wanted the opportunity to return to the palace if his escape somehow went awry. Yun Jin-ho knew that if he found life in North Korea intolerable now with his prestigious position and all the perks that came with it, he would not survive a month as an ordinary citizen, let alone as a prisoner in one of Kim Jong-il's labor camps.

Yun Jin-ho paid an old friend to drive him to the mining town of Musan in the central North Hamgyong Province. Of course, Musan's mines and factories had closed down during the economic collapse of the nineties, so it now resembled a ghost town from America's Wild West. Populated with outlaws, Musan had become a launching point for North Koreans desperate to cross the border into China. Some, like Yun, were defectors; others were entrepreneurs who bought and sold everything from rice and corn to virgin brides on North Korea's burgeoning black market.

But the most lucrative business by far was smuggling people: serving as guides; obtaining false papers; bribing soldiers and train conductors in North Korea, and bandits and police on the Chinese side of the border. Because of the town's location (near one of the narrower stretches of the Tumen River), smuggling people from Musan had become a booming industry.

Yun Jin-ho crossed the river at midnight. From there, his guide led him down a dirt road farther into China.

He remained only one day in a village in China's Jilin Province before continuing his journey north. Although his ultimate destination was Seoul, to get there he'd have to make it to Mongolia undetected. If he were to be arrested in China, Chinese authorities would return him to North Korea, where he would be sent to a gulag or executed for his attempt to defect.

Fortunately, the landlocked nation of Mongolia had much different laws. Unlike China, Mongolia permitted the South Korean embassy in Ulaanbaatar to accept defectors from the North. So from the Mongolian capital, Yun Jin-ho was put on a plane to Seoul.

Once he arrived, Yun Jin-ho spent weeks being debriefed by South Korea's National Intelligence Service. Yun quickly came to realize that because of his position with the North Korean regime, he was a high-value defector. He wasn't sure whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.

“It would be a long time,” he conceded, “before I figured it out.”

Immediately following his lengthy debriefing, Yun Jin-ho was introduced to a small man by the name of Nam Sei-hoon.

“Weeks earlier, when I had finally touched down in Seoul following my long arduous journey through China and Mongolia, I never dreamed I would ever return to Pyongyang,” he said. “But Nam Sei-hoon, he had his own designs on my future. Soon he made me an offer I couldn't refuse.”

N
AM
S
EI-HOON PROMISED
Yun Jin-ho riches beyond his wildest dreams.

“Give me just one year of your life,” Nam said, “and I will give you a life that will put Kim Jong-il's to shame.”

“That was nearly five years ago,” Yun Jin-ho told Janson at the table. “After the first year expired, he told me it was too dangerous to attempt an exfiltration just then. He told me to ‘hang in' for another few months, so I hung.”

Nine months later Nam Sei-hoon continued to stall. By then Yun Jin-ho realized he was being played by his handler in Seoul. He began making plans to escape on his own yet again. Only this time, using his unique knowledge, he would cross the demilitarized zone straight into South Korea. Once he made it back to Seoul, he'd sound the alarm about Nam Sei-hoon. Yun Jin-ho would have his revenge against the man who had attempted to shanghai him.

But as Yun Jin-ho planned his second escape from the North, he was approached by one of the Dear Leader's personal guards, a member of the Guard's Command.

“If you attempt to leave Chosun,” the soldier in the mustard-colored uniform warned, “you will be taken to General Kim's residence, where you will be slaughtered like the pig that you are.”

Yun Jin-ho knew immediately that the bodyguard was being run by Nam Sei-hoon. Had he been loyal to the regime, there would have been no threat, there would have been no warning. Yun would have simply been taken to a hard labor camp and subsequently executed.

From that day on, Yun Jin-ho knew he was constantly being watched. He vowed to deliver no more information to Nam Sei-hoon's goons in the South.

But that vow didn't last long.

“This time the message was delivered by a member of North Korea's Ministry of State Security: ‘Continue providing intelligence from the palace,' he told me, ‘or
she
will be carved up and fed to the prisoners at Senhori.'”

Yun Jin-ho need not ask which “
she
” the brute was referring to. Months earlier, Yun had begun a clandestine relationship with a young woman in Pyongyang.

Her name was Han Mi-sook.

O
VER THE NEXT FEW YEARS
, Nam Sei-hoon used a combination of carrots and sticks to keep Yun Jin-ho under his thumb.

He dangled in front of Yun Jin-ho a dazzling life for him and his new bride, a life of leisure and luxury in the most prestigious section of Seoul.

In rare communications, he told Yun Jin-ho how he would be perceived as a hero when he finally returned to South Korea, how he would be given the key to the capital city, how he and Mi-sook would dine with the president at the Blue House as often as they liked.

When Yun Jin-ho saw through Nam's charade and called him on it, the little man became cruel.

He had Yun's entire savings stolen from his home so that he could not afford the bribes necessary to defect.

He threatened to plant evidence that would show Mi-sook to be a spy for the American bastards.

Nam Sei-hoon even went so far as to doctor photos depicting Yun Jin-ho in the embrace of another woman.

“If you stop providing intelligence from the palace,” Yun was told, “Mi-sook will come home one evening to find these photographs waiting for her on her doorstep. Then she will know you for the filthy rat that you are.”

Following a particularly nasty confrontation with one of Nam Sei-hoon's spies in the Guard's Command, Yun Jin-ho finally decided that his only way out of North Korea was to take his own life.

But it was as though Nam Sei-hoon, from nearly two hundred kilometers away in Seoul, managed to read Yun's mind.

For the first time, Mi-sook was threatened directly. She was told by a member of the North's Ministry of State Security: “If Yun Jin-ho takes his own life, you will witness your parents being dealt a death so horrible that your eyes will melt in your skull.”