The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (2 page)

“Your passport, please,” said the immigration official.

“Certainly.” Milton handed the passport to him as he watched the MPSS man open the case and start to remove the contents.

The man thumbed through the pages. “Mr McEwan.”

“That’s right.”

“You are well travelled.”

The passport was stamped with two dozen different destinations: South American banana republics, tinpot African dictatorships, trips to Russia and China. There were a dozen trips to the DPRK, all in the last six months.

“I’m a businessman,” Milton replied, trying to find the easy confidence that he imagined would be McEwan’s stock-in-trade. He pointed at the MPSS man who was rifling through his things. “I don’t understand. What’s he doing? My papers are all in order, aren’t they? I have a visa from the Ministry of Trade.”

The official did not answer him. He handed the passport back to the security officer, who made a similar show of its careful study. Milton smiled again with good-natured patience, but the other passengers had already been cleared to proceed, and the last of them were disappearing towards the exit. He had been in these situations many times before, but there were not many places in the world that were like this. Despite the reassurance of his experience and training, it was difficult not to feel exposed. He felt an empty sensation in his stomach. The remnants of the dream made it worse.

The MPSS man beckoned him to approach. He had the deep pits of acne scars across his face, and he wore a cheap suit that was too big for his slight frame. Milton could tell his type from the way he bore himself: he knew that he wielded a small amount of power, and he was pleased that it gave him the ability to tell arrogant Europeans what to do.

“Mr McEwan.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is the purpose of your visit to the DPRK?”

“I was telling your colleague over there—I’m a businessman.”

“And what is your business?”

“I sell cars.”

He sneered a little. “Why would my country need your Western cars?”

“These are luxury cars.”

“You think we cannot make such cars?”

“You don’t have any like these.”

“I doubt that very much. Why are you here today?”

Milton sighed, a show of the mildest irritation. “A consignment is presently making its way south from China. Eight cars on a trailer. They crossed the border at Sinuiju yesterday. I’m here to make sure that the cars reach the correct customers. What’s this all about, sir? It isn’t as if I’ve never been to Pyongyang before.”

“This is very true,” the man said, his eyes on the passport as he flicked through its pages. “You are a frequent visitor. Very unusual for a European.”

“Yes, I’ve been here several times.”

“And you are English, yes?”

Milton manufactured a little impatience. “Yes, as you can see. What’s your point?”

“You are sweating, Mr McEwan. You look unwell.”

“I’m a bad flyer. I took some pills to help me sleep—I don’t think they agreed with me.”

“No, you are defensive, too. Why is this?”

“Because my business here is important, and this delay will affect my schedule if it goes on much longer.” He paused and then added, “I’m sorry, but my customers do not take kindly to being inconvenienced. Party officials, you understand? The longer I’m wasting my time with you, the less time I have to distribute my cars to the members of the Politburo who have purchased them. And I don’t know about you, sir, but I would rather not keep those men waiting.”

The threat was obvious. The man considered it, and after another lengthy pause obviously designed to make Milton feel uncomfortable, he relented.

“You are free to proceed, Mr McEwan. Please enjoy your visit to our country.”

The passport was returned to him, but his luggage, he noted, was not repacked. Just a petulant reminder that these men had power, he knew, and nothing that need concern him. He folded his clothes and placed them neatly back into the case. He gripped the handle and pulled the case from the desk. He smiled with polite solicitude at the man and wheeled the case away, making his way to the main concourse, where he knew he would be able to pick up a taxi. He did not need to look back to know that the MPSS officials would be watching, and neither did he need to see the additional man with the camera to know that even more pictures were being taken.

A report would be filed and passed up to the relevant department: the Englishman Peter McEwan had entered the country at ten minutes past five in the afternoon; he was in the export business, defying the United Nations’ sanctions to deliver high-performance luxury cars to party officials; he was a frequent visitor; and while that did not mean that he would be allowed to go about his business unchaperoned, it did not warrant the perpetual minder that would have been necessary if he were a tourist or someone of whom there was no official history.

Milton wheeled his suitcase out of the terminal and into the bitter cold. What little warmth he had been able to recover as he had been interrogated was soon a distant memory.

MAJOR KIM Shin-Jo replaced the receiver of the telephone that linked him with the officers in the airport. He double-clicked on the file that had just been emailed to him, and a series of .jpg files were unpacked. He selected one and opened it: a picture of a man filled the screen. He was at the security checkpoint, the X-ray machine visible over his right shoulder. He looked a little over average height for a Westerner—six foot perhaps—and Kim would have estimated his age at somewhere in his late thirties. His hair was black, and his eyes were blue. He was wearing jeans and a turtleneck jumper, a jacket folded over his right arm. European. A patient expression. It was just one of dozens of photographs that had been taken. Kim had privates all across the airport: there was the man who scanned the runway, another two in the concourse, another in the exit lounge. They were his eyes and ears.

Kim was assistant security chief at the Pyongyang Sunan International Airport, responsible for a team of thirty officers. They were placed within the 7
^th
Department of the 2
^nd
Chief Directorate, the section of the Ministry of State Security responsible for operations against tourists.

Kim was not having a good day. Not good at all. He was on edge, a nervousness that it seemed he shared with the entire department. The final preparations to ensure the security of the grand parade were underway, an enormous amount of work that needed to be done and barely enough time to do it all in. The 7
^th
Department was responsible for ensuring that all foreign visitors inside the borders of the DPRK were double and then triple checked. No one thought it was likely that the imperialists or their puppets from the south would attempt an operation on the centenary of the Great Leader’s birthday, but the
dictat
from the top was absolutely clear: no chances were to be taken. The eyes of the world would be watching, and national prestige was at stake. Kim had spoken with the colonel as he came on shift this morning, and the man had been absolutely clear. The consequences for failure—any failure, no matter how seemingly insignificant—had been made starkly obvious: there would be a quick trial and then a lifetime spent in the gulag.

Kim had visited the gulag. He had sent enemies of the state there.

The prospect of a one-way trip was more than enough to focus the mind.

Kim printed the picture out, placed it on his desk and studied it again. He clicked across to the database and pulled the man’s file. Peter McEwan. There was something about him that made him nervous, but he could not decide what it was. The patient expression, perhaps? He had just been detained, the other passengers were already gone, yet he appeared equable. Kim could see that McEwan was a frequent visitor to the DPRK. Six visits, all to Pyongyang. Perhaps he had been stopped before or had come to accept the likelihood that it would happen.

And yet, that did not quite ring true.

Intelligence did not suggest anything was afoot. He should have been able to relax. He had received the current circular from the Directorate, and there was no unusual activity reported. And yet…

And yet.

He picked up the telephone and placed a call to the 7
^th
Department HQ. His deputy, Yun Jong-Su, answered. “Comrade Major,” he said.

“I have a visitor that I would like you to check, Captain,” Kim said. “His name is Peter McEwan. English. I will send you his details now.”

“What am I looking for?”

“I do not know. He arrived in the country this afternoon. His file says he has been here several times before, mostly in the last few months. A businessman. Importing luxury cars for the leadership. Everything appears to be in order, yet there is something about this man that makes me feel nervous. Check his file carefully. If anything is amiss—anything, Yun—then you must contact me at once.”

“Certainly, Comrade Major.”

“Do not let me down.”

Kim replaced the receiver and found that he had gritted his teeth. Today was his final day in the job before the promotion he had been chasing for so many months. No more airport, no more interminable studying of the same blank faces, all those same oafish Westerners arriving into the Fatherland with their wide eyes and open mouths. He was being transferred to the State Security Department with responsibility for monitoring political dissidents.

It was a prestigious posting and one he had been honoured to accept.

He was almost there. He just had to negotiate this one final day.

MILTON HAD to wait five minutes for a taxi. Eventually, one turned up: an old Yugo, battered and dented, probably a hangover from the days when the Russians propped up the North Korean economy. “The Yanggakdo Hotel, please,” he said once his luggage was deposited in the back.

The car pulled away, and as they paused to turn onto the deserted highway that would lead into the heart of the capital, Milton allowed himself a brief backwards glance. Two tail cars were behind them.

That was good. He wanted them to follow him.

The main route into the city was known simply as Road Number 1. It was so broad it could easily have accommodated six lanes of traffic, but the restrictions on private ownership of cars meant that there was never anything in the way of congestion.

The landscape was barren and sparse, wide expanses of dusty flatlands with the occasional ramshackle habitation becoming more frequent as they passed into the outskirts of the city. As the taxi travelled into the capital proper, there came the large plane and acacia trees, the lower part of the trunks painted white. Milton had overheard locals discussing the reason for this during a previous visit: it was, variously, to keep away insects, protect the tree from harsh temperatures or, most likely, to denote that the tree was government property and must not be chopped for firewood.

As they travelled onwards, they came across more and more of the familiar red signposts with propaganda slogans and, behind them, soaring streetlamps that were seldom switched on. The pavements in the central district were as broad as the Champs-Élysées, a grand boulevard that was intended to remind the citizenry of the power of their government. Many of the locals chose to walk in the road since the traffic was so sparse. There were no traffic lights, with uniformed police monitoring the few cars and lorries with the aid of glowing batons. All things considered, downtown Pyongyang provided a reasonably positive first impression. It was only on closer inspection that it became clear that chunks of concrete had fallen off the buildings, that the streetlights all tilted precariously in different directions and that the trams were all cratered with dents.

He still felt off-balance. The dream had passed, leaving tiny gossamer webs of memory that reminded him that he had had it. One thing was for sure: it was bad timing. He would have been nervous without it. This kind of deception was not unusual for a man in his line of work, but there were very few places where the consequences of discovery would be as severe as in the DPRK. There would be no official protest, no consular activity to get him back. As far as the Group was concerned, as soon as he was in the field, he was a totally deniable asset. That rule was rigid; men and women had been lost before, swallowed up into the penal bureaucracies of some of the world’s most inhospitable states, never to be seen or heard from again. The prospect of a life spent in a North Korean gaol was not a pleasant one. Nervousness, even for an operative as experienced as Milton, was not an unreasonable response in the circumstances.

The nerves would return again, but he had passed his first inspection. It was important that he attract attention, and Peter McEwan was precisely the sort of man to do that. Milton had read his file cover-to-cover. He was a wanted man in several countries. Flouting international sanctions was just one of the crimes of which he was guilty. His main income was derived from smuggling, and to that end, he had extensive links with criminal concerns all around the world from the Ndrangheta in Sicily to the Los Zetas cartel in Northern Mexico. Drugs, luxury items, arms, counterfeit currency, even people—McEwan was not burdened by conscience, and there was very little that he was not prepared to trade. The man had been chosen because of his reputation and because he was known to the MPSS officials, but the benefit of his notoriety also carried its own burden: Milton had to play a part already known to his watchers. He had to hit all the minute beats of a man for whom there was already a voluminous file somewhere deep in the secret police’s vast bureaucracy.

There were imperfections in the plan, of course. If they compared the photographs of Milton with that of McEwan, the deception would not hold for long. Milton had altered his appearance as far as was possible in order to mimic McEwan—the expensive glasses, the slicked-back hair, five days’ worth of stubble, the way he walked and held himself—but none of it would hold up under proper scrutiny. It was an approximation, barely more than a sketch, and just as he had made an attempt to capture the man’s oleaginous manner, that overbearing arrogance and the air of seediness that accompanied him like a bad smell, any kind of inquisition would strip the falsehoods away just like sunlight burning through early morning mist.