The Target (12 page)

J
ESSICA REEL PUT DOWN HER
weapon, slipped off her sound mufflers, and hit the button to draw the target toward her.

Twenty shots. Nineteen in the kill zone. One two centimeters outside. She frowned. Not good enough. She had lost her focus on the fourteenth trigger pull.

She looked at Robie next to her as his target sheet sailed toward him.

All of his shots were in the kill zone. He looked at her errant shot mark.

“I know,” she said miserably.

She had easily passed the test on the firing range even by Burner Box standards. This was her first miss in over two thousand fired rounds since they’d been here.

Amanda Marks came to stand next to them.

“I think you’ve proved your marksmanship still holds,” she said.

They left the firing range and walked back to the main facility. Their days here had been long and arduous, and Robie and Reel felt both exhausted and finely tuned.

“Two possible targets,” said Reel suddenly.

Marks and Robie slowed.

Marks looked at her. “Blue Man?”

“His visit was timely,” said Robie.

“It wasn’t at my prompting,” said Marks.

“We know,” replied Reel. “It apparently was your colleague.”

“Viola? Now there’s a surprise.”

“Not if he’s feeling like a fish out of water. Word is he had a one-on-one with Tucker. And came away more than a little nervous.”

“Hence the call to Blue Man,” said Robie.

“If
Viola
is nervous something is off.”

“Two targets,” said Reel again. “Twin possibilities.”

They stopped walking altogether and stood in a tight circle.

“Two heads of state,” said Robie after glancing at Reel. They had talked at length about how to break this to Marks. They had finally concluded that the direct way was best.

Marks stared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The target will be a head of state. And the list of possibilities is pretty short.”

The look of incredulity still in her eyes, Marks swallowed nervously and said, “Is that what Blue Man told you?”

Robie said, “Not directly. But circumstantially, the way this is stacking up, that’s the only thing it could be. And he’s in agreement with that assessment. That’s what Tucker is putting together and it’s apparently eating him alive. That and figuring out what to do with the two of us.”

“But that’s illegal. Tucker would never go out on a limb like that.”

“He would with appropriate alliances.”

“There are very few alliances that would justify that sort of mission,” said Marks sharply.

“And not all presidents are built the same,” noted Reel.

Marks stared at her for a long moment. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Yes, I am.”

“But that’s an im—”

“Impeachable offense,” interjected Robie. “That’s why the need to know is so tight it’s almost nonexistent.”

“So Iran or North Korea,” said Reel. “Place your bets. Our two badass enemies. The remaining two of the old axis of evil. Now that Iraq is all nice and peaceful and full of terrorists.”

Marks looked around. The area was deserted, but she still did not look comfortable discussing this. She said, “Clandestine ops like this are my whole wheelhouse as the DD. They’re mine to direct. Or not. And I know nothing about this.”

“Apparently, Tucker is the only one at CIA to know.”

Reel added, “And the president and Potter, the APNSA.”

“This is crazy,” said Marks in a low voice. “How did Blue Man find this out?”

“By doing what Blue Man does better than anyone else: working his sources and reading the tea leaves and the faces of his superiors in the organization,” said Robie. “Tucker doesn’t have the greatest poker face. And he didn’t come up in the intelligence field. He’s a politician. I’m sure Blue Man has ways to find out things at Langley that Tucker can’t even imagine.”

Reel said, “So Iran’s president or the ayatollah. Or North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Un.”

“This is absolutely insane,” said Marks firmly. “North Korea has nukes. Iran is close to having them. And they have death squads all over the world, including right here. If they’re deployed in force with chemical or biological weapons?”

“Then we retaliate. And the Russians get involved. And then the Chinese. And Israel gets attacked. And we go to bat for them,” said Robie.

“Then it’s all over,” said Reel. “As in apocalyptic over.”

Marks put a shaky hand to her face. “This can’t be happening.”

“If it is one of them, which?” said Reel.

“In some ways it doesn’t matter,” said Robie. “We can get into Iran and North Korea, maybe. But we won’t be able to get out. Syria was hard enough and Syria is not in the same league as those two. North Korea might as well be another planet.”

Marks said, “North Korea
is
another planet. But to get to that target we have to have rock-solid inside people at the very top. How did that happen without my being aware of it? Intel like that doesn’t occur overnight.”

“You haven’t been on the job that long,” said Robie. “It might have happened before you got here. DiCarlo wasn’t on the job long enough to see that through either.”

“That’s true,” said Marks.

“But the DD before her, Jim Gelder, was,” noted Robie, as he glanced at Reel.

Reel looked away. She said, “Gelder could have been involved in something like that. He didn’t just push the edges, he obliterated them. Taking down one of those guys, he would’ve seen it as his crowning glory, even if it did lead to Armageddon.” She paused and added, “He already tried something like that once. Guy’s just full of surprises. Too bad he’s dead. We might want to kill him all over again.”

Robie looked at Marks. “So how exactly does this go down? We’re tasked to commit a hit on a target that is clearly illegal? How do we do that? I’m not going to be left holding the bag on something like that.”

Reel said, “We’ve sat through our psych evals and they keep pounding away at us on one thing: Will we follow orders or will we make up our own? So you tell us, DD, what do we do if that order comes down?”

Marks started to say something but then stopped. Finally, she blurted out, “God help me, Jessica, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

E
VAN TUCKER STARED DOWN AT
the secure email he had read about a dozen times now. And still his mind could not process what it was seeing.

Lloyd Carson found murdered in hotel in Romania. Robbery believed to be motive.

Tucker looked down at his hands, which were shaking. He tried to type a response but couldn’t manage it. He rose from his desk, crossed his office at Langley, poured himself a glass of water, and drank it down. He poured another and accidentally splashed some of it down his shirt and tie.

He sat back down and peered at the screen. Part of him was hoping that the email had somehow disappeared, or had never been there, only a delusional by-product of his overly stressed mind.

But there it was. Lloyd Carson, an envoy from Britain to North Korea, had been found murdered. Robbery suspected because his wallet, jewelry, passport, and cell phone had been taken.

His cell phone.

Tucker made a call and ordered that something be done immediately. It was.

Another email soon fell into his in-box and he clicked it open.

He thought he might be physically sick.

What he was looking at was a list of phone calls made and received by Carson in the hours leading up to his death.

The last one had been placed in the wee hours of the morning in Bucharest. It had been placed to a phone number in North Korea. A very special number that only a handful of people had. The question was, had Carson placed that call? Or had someone else? Like the person who had murdered him?

He sent a secure communication at the very top level of secrecy. He did not expect an answer back immediately, and he tried to focus on other work, but found that impossible. There was no other work that came close to this in terms of importance. He couldn’t wall off his mind to think of other things.

Two hours later a reply came back, and it froze him to the bone.

A call was received at that time but no one spoke on the other end.

No one spoke on the other end.

Tucker played out in his mind what had possibly happened on the ground in Romania. Carson was spooked by something and changed his travel plans on the spot. He made phone calls, all but one to British telephone numbers. One, however, was to North Korea. Whoever had killed him had recognized the country code and simply redialed that number. The person had answered the phone, thinking it was Carson calling again.

Tucker leaned his head back against his chair.

Did that mean what he thought it meant? Did it matter? He couldn’t take that chance. Their ultra-secret operation possibly had just been blown wide open.

He had to inform the president.

His mind knew he had to do this, but his hand did not move to the phone.

He began to rethink things.

That phone number was untraceable. Maybe he was okay. Just maybe.

It might be possible that he need not contact the president. What he needed was to first ensure that the op had not been compromised. And if it hadn’t been he needed to get his team up to speed and into the field so they could execute the op.

They would not get a second chance.

He made a few more calls, setting in motion this process.

Right now he didn’t care if Robie and Reel survived or not. He was not overwhelmed by a sense of injustice that demanded they be punished.

He
simply wanted to survive this. The risk had been huge. Too big, he now lamented, but it was clearly too late for such thinking.

He hurried off to a meeting and sat through a presentation that he neither listened to nor cared about. He rushed through a full day of such events, stopping only to eat a cup of soup that felt like acid dropping into his belly.

He was driven home and walked into the house. Ordering his aides to remain behind, he sidestepped his wife, who was coming out of the living room to greet him, and fled to the back of the house where his home office was. He engaged the room’s SCIF features and checked his emails and voice messages.

Nothing yet. That might be good or that might be bad.

He called Marks at the Burner Box and told her to speed up the process. It would be Robie and Reel, he told her. And they would potentially be deployed very soon. He didn’t wait for her to ask questions but simply hung up.

He poured himself a drink of something far stronger than water and then had another. His nerves were wound so tight the alcohol had no effect at all. It was like he was drinking a soda.

He slumped down in his chair and closed his eyes.

He opened them when an alert went off on his computer.

That was a very special alert that he had set up. And it demanded immediate attention.

His mouth dry and his heart pounding in his chest, Tucker opened the email, which contained the very highest encryption features. The message was brief, but each word was like a bullet fired directly into his skull.

He could only stare in disbelief, because whatever hope he had held just a few moments before was now gone.

Irreversibly gone. In fact, this surpassed the worst scenario he could have imagined after he’d been informed of Carson’s murder. Lloyd Carson was the go-between, the linchpin to this whole thing. And he had been uncovered and targeted. And he had gone down.

Well, now they were all going down. But it was even worse than that. This, in fact, changed everything.

He picked up his phone and punched in a number.

APNSA Potter answered on the second ring.

Tucker said, “We’re dead. And we’re dead beyond belief.”

T
ICK-TICK-TICK
.

The old-fashioned wall clock’s second hand made its way around the timepiece’s face.

The office Chung-Cha sat in was utilitarian, badly maintained, and depressing. Well, it would have been depressing for most people. It had no effect on her. She sat there impassively waiting her turn.

As she stared at the clerk in military uniform who sat at the metal desk next to the door she would at some point pass through, Chung-Cha let her mind wander back, far back, but not that far really, to Yodok, where part of her would always be imprisoned, no matter how far away from it she got.

There were teachers there who taught the children basic grammar, a few numbers, and that was about it. As one got older the instruction became all about the life of labor to come. Chung-Cha had commenced work in the mines at age ten, clawing rock from other rock and being beaten for not making her quotas.

Every student
i
n the class was encouraged to snitch on every other student, and Chung-Cha was no exception to this. The rewards were meager, though back then they seemed like a mountain of gold: fewer beatings, a bit more cabbage and salt, fewer self-censure meetings where students were forced to confess to imaginary sins that they would be beaten for. Chung-Cha had gotten to the point where she came to class every day with invented sins to present to the teacher, because if you had none, the thrashings were twice as painful. It seemed to delight the teachers when students spoke of their weaknesses and the things that made them small, insignificant, less than human. In the camps the teacher was also your guard. But the only things they taught were cruelty, deceit, and pain.

There had been a girl a little older than Chung-Cha who had been accused by her parents of stealing a portion of their food. The parents had turned her in, after beating her.

Chung-Cha had come forward because she had seen that it was the parents who had taken food from their child and then blamed her for the crime.

Chung-Cha’s reward for that was to be led into the prison located underneath the camp and hung upside down in a cage where guards continually poked her hour after hour with sword tips heated by a fire. She could smell her skin burning, yet she did not bleed much because the hot metal cauterized the wounds.

It was never explained to her why she was punished for telling the truth. When she was finally released and sent back to camp, the girl she had helped snitched on her. For that Chung-Cha was beaten by three guards until she could not move but just lay on the floor praying to die.

They bandaged her wounds, and the next day she was sent into the fields to pick her allotment of crops. When she failed to do so, her father was brought in to beat her, and he did so energetically, for he would be beaten even harder by the guards if he did not. And the other workers spit on her, because the way things worked here was that everyone suffered when one person failed to do his or her job.

Every day for a week she was flogged by the guards in the middle of camp for all to see. Prisoners hurled spit and curses at her and added their own beatings when the floggings were done.

When Chung-Cha had staggered off after this latest session she had heard one guard say, “She’s a tough little bitch.”

Chung-Cha absently rubbed the scars on her arms where the flamed sword had punctured her. The girl who had snitched on her had died the next month. Chung-Cha had lured her to a lonely spot with the promise of a handful of corn and had pushed her off a cliff. They had not found her body, what was left of it, until that winter.

From that day forward Chung-Cha, the “tough little bitch,” never told the truth again.

The door opened and the man looked at her. He was also dressed in a military uniform. He was a high-ranking general. To Chung-Cha they all looked the same. Short, wiry, with small, beady eyes and cruel features. They could all be guards at Yodok. Perhaps they all had been.

He motioned her in.

She rose and followed him into the office.

He closed the door and indicated a chair. She took it. He sat behind his metal desk, put his palms together, and studied her.

“This is all quite extraordinary, Dongmu Yie,” he said.

Dongmu.
That meant comrade. She was his comrade, but not really. She was no one’s comrade. Self-reliance. She was her own comrade; that was all. And he clearly did not want her as a comrade.

She said nothing in response. It
was
extraordinary. She could add no more to the statement. And the prison camp had taught her that it was better to say nothing than to say something that you could be beaten for.

“He is a respected man,” said the general. “He is my great friend.”

Again, she remained silent.

But she kept her gaze directly on him. Normally, a North Korean male would not like that, particularly when faced by a female. But her stare did not waver. She had long ago lost the capacity to fear men like this. She had been hurt physically and psychologically every way she could have been. There was nothing left. So there was no reason to fear.

The general pulled out the cell phone that she had taken from Lloyd Carson in Bucharest. When she had called the number last dialed by Carson, General Pak had answered.

General Pak was indeed a greatly respected man here. He was in the very inner circle of the Supreme Leader; some said he was his most trusted advisor.

Yet she had recognized the man’s voice on the other end of the phone. She had heard him speak. She had met with him once in person, though it had been many years ago. But she would never forget that meeting. It had definitely been his voice on the phone.

She was snitching once more, Chung-Cha knew. But that was her job now. The Brit Lloyd Carson had attracted the attention of the North Korean security forces. He had been seen in the company of known American agents. It was well known in North Korea that the Brits and the Americans were joined at the hip. She had been assigned to track him, search his things, and, if necessary, kill him as he traveled on his train journey.

Well, she had tracked him, searched his things, and killed him. And she had the phone. And they had her testimony, that it was General Pak, the respected one. The great friend of the man seated opposite her. It was a delicate situation, she knew. It was a potentially deadly one for her.

“The phone number is not traceable. When we called the number no one answered,” said the general. “So we only have your word, Dongmu Yie. Against that of a revered leader.” He put the phone down and looked quizzically at her.

She finally decided to speak, but chose her words with great care. “I have made my report. I have told you what I know. I have no more than that to offer.”

“And you could not be mistaken about this, about the voice you heard? Are you absolutely certain?”

Chung-Cha knew exactly what he wanted to hear. He was not, however, going to hear it from her. He was going to hear something else.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She hit a few buttons and held it up. She had turned the speaker on.

A voice could be heard clearly speaking in English.

“Hello, hello. Mr. Carson, is that you? Hello? Are you calling back? Is something wrong?”

The general jerked forward in his seat, knocking over a jar of pens sitting on his desk. He looked first at the phone and then at Chung-Cha.

“That is General Pak’s voice.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Where did you get this?”

“I recorded it when I called the North Korean number from Bucharest.”

He banged the desk with his fists. “Why did you not show us this before?”

“I hoped that you would believe the word of a loyal agent of the Supreme Leader over that of a traitor.”

The door opened and two more men came in. They were also generals. It seemed to Chung-Cha that North Korea had far too many generals.

These men were outranked by the one sitting across from her. But things like that could change swiftly in her country. Generals came, generals went. They were executed. She had already visited these two, let them listen to the phone recording, and then she had come here. The men behind her were too cowardly to face their higher-ranking comrade, so they had sent her in first.

The man at the desk rose slowly and stared at them. “What is the meaning of this intrusion?”

“The Supreme Leader must be told,” said one of the other men.

They all well knew that the higher-ranking general was a personal friend of Pak’s. This had all been orchestrated because of that fact. The truth in North Korea did not necessarily set one free or cause one to die. It was merely one factor of many that had to be taken into account if your goal was survival.

“Do you not agree, General?” asked the other man.

The general looked at the phone and then down at Chung-Cha’s unreadable features. He knew he had just been badly outmaneuvered and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

He nodded, took his cap off a hook, and led the two other generals out the door.

They simply left Chung-Cha behind. She was not surprised by this. There was no gender equality here. She was not in the military and was thus a second-class citizen to those who were.

She wondered if they would send her to kill Pak. She thought the odds were against his simply being executed by firing squad, the normal way of dealing with traitors. It was a tricky balance, she knew, much like the street vendors and the Dutch tourist. Publicly executing Pak would require some explanation. They could lie, of course, but savvier folks would know that only an egregious transgression would justify such a high-ranking official’s execution, and the speculation would undoubtedly come to rest on an attempted coup of the Supreme Leader. That such an inner-circle official could have participated in such a scheme would reflect badly on the Supreme Leader. Even though the traitor would have been caught, others might be emboldened to try as well. But traitors had to be dealt with, and execution was usually the only punishment deemed acceptable. So Chung-Cha might be called on to do it, but make it look like an accident, a task she had performed in the past. Thus the traitor would be dead, and any of his confederates would think twice before trying again. But the public and other potential enemies within the country would not necessarily know of the attempted coup at all. That way the Supreme Leader would not appear weakened.

She thought about all of this and then thought no more. The order would either come or it would not.

She slipped her phone back into her pocket, rose, and left.

A few moments later she walked out into the sunshine and looked to the sky, where there were no clouds visible.

At Yodok this was the time of year when prisoners knew the cold was coming. The first set of clothes Chung-Cha had received upon entering the camp had come from a dead child. The clothes were filthy and full of holes. She would not receive a “new” set of rags for three years. She labored in a gold mine, digging out the precious metal, unaware of what it was or that it was valuable. She also worked in a gypsum quarry, in a distillery, and in the fields. Her days started at four in the morning and ended at eleven at night. She had seen clearly insane people forced to dig holes and pull weeds. Dying prisoners were sometimes simply released so their deaths would not be officially reported, thereby making the mortality rates of the camps look better. Chung-Cha had not known this was the reason; she only remembered old and young prisoners dragging themselves through the open gates only to expire meters from the spot, their bodies left to decompose or be eaten by animals.

She had lived with thirty other prisoners in a mud hut not much bigger than her current apartment. The huts were unheated and the blankets threadbare. She had suffered frostbite while inside the hut. She had awoken to find the person next to her dead of the cold. There was one toilet for two hundred prisoners. To the outside world this probably seemed unimaginable. For Chung-Cha it was simply her life.

Ten.

Ten was the number of basic rules at all the camps.

The first and most important was,
You must not escape.

The last and nearly as important was,
If you break any of the above rules you will be shot.

All the rules in between—no stealing, obey all orders, spy on and betray other prisoners—were just filler, she believed. The fact was they could kill you for any reason or no reason at all.

Rule number nine had intrigued her, however. It said that one must truly be remorseful for one’s mistakes. She knew this was an incentive for those who hoped one day to be free of the camps. She had never hoped this. She never believed she would be free. She was not remorseful for her mistakes. She was simply trying to survive. In that regard her life now was no different from her life in the camp.

I am simply trying to survive.