A Corpse in the Koryo

5

Li was waiting on the side of the highway, not far from the spot where I had been staked out with the camera. He waved me over and pointed to a small side road. It was only a wide dirt path that led through the cornfield and up into the hills, but it would hide a car from the highway.

"Back in," he said. "You may want to get on the highway again and into town real quick." He looked into my car and then clucked his tongue.

"You armed? Probably not. We have some old automatic weapons in the security building, but the local commander has the keys to the gun locker. He and I are on pretty good terms." Li paused, thinking over what he'd just said. "I guess not good enough, though, not yet."

"Why would I need to be armed? What's this about?"

"Get the car out of the road first." There was a ripple of urgency in his voice that caught me by surprise. It was not like Li. Even when we were in the army together, he never showed emotion. Older than the rest of us, he never sang or danced or drank. Sometimes he sat by himself, looking off at the horizon. When we went on patrol, he was serious and wouldn't let us joke about anything. If I ever heard him laugh, I don't remember, but I don't think I ever heard him complain, either.

After we got out of the army, we lost touch, but one day, going through reports by local security officers, I spotted his name, and after that we saw each other from time to time. Whenever he came to Pyongyang, which wasn't often, he'd drop by the office.

Li watched the highway while I backed the car into the field. Then he led me along a second narrow path up a hill until we were above where I had sat the morning I watched the black car speed away.

"You want to tell me why I need to be armed? Or why you mentioned your gun locker?"

Li didn't reply. If he'd looked out at the horizon, like he used to do in the army, I'd have figured he was absorbed in his own thoughts. That used to happen: One of us would say something to him, and there'd be no reply, so after a while we'd just go away and leave him alone. Now, though, he was staring down at the ground. He shook his head slightly, but I knew he wasn't replying to my questions. He was having a conversation with himself. He'd called and asked me to come out here, and now he wasn't sure what to say. Finally, he sighed, and that worried me more than anything else he might have said or done at that moment.

"You need to know this. Otherwise I wouldn't be telling you." He looked up but at that instant turned his head slightly, so his eyes never met mine. "The whole time you were watching, you were being watched." Li pointed to the remains of some food, a couple of cigarette butts, and a small pile of rocks. "That's a support for a field dish, holds a little satellite relay system. Someone was up here, watching you and relaying the info to someone else. Must have been quite a distance away.

Otherwise he could have used a regular transmitter."

I remembered the stone coming down the hill, and the bird. "How do you know someone was here when I was down there?" I already knew Li was involved-that's how he got the money to pay the farmers to keep quiet-but I couldn't believe he was working for Military Security.

"There's too much territory for me to cover, even with the two trainees they threw at me last year when the highway started getting more traffic. I decided to do regular patrols but at irregular times. I remembered it from an old book on guerrilla tactics. We log the times and the particular run, so that theoretically we cover everything once a week. The whole point is, there's no regular pattern, which means sometimes we do the same route two days in a row. What we lose in territory, we make up for in luck. This time we were lucky. We did the route that goes by this hillock twice."

I put my boot on the stones and ground them into the dirt. "I thought we were friends, Li. We've known each other a long time.

Maybe friendship doesn't mean anything anymore." Below, a convoy of dump trucks filled with people moved to the next section of fields to harvest. They turned down a road and in a moment were out of sight. "Do you really think I'm a fool? You don't make regular runs through here, and even if you did, you'd never find anything in this corn. Two rows over could be a thousand kilometers away. So what is this about?" I motioned at the hill slightly higher and behind where we stood. "Let's go."

When we reached the top of the hill, Li squatted down peasant style and lit a cigarette. He puffed at it a few times, then pinched off the lit end and put what was left behind his ear. "You're right. Someone told me to be here. From this spot, we were watching that guy watching you.

He was no one from this side of the DMZ-too many gadgets. I'm not supposed to say anything, but I got to thinking about it. You may not believe me, but it's true."

"I didn't even know where I was going to set up that morning. How could anyone else know where I'd be?"

"We didn't, and neither did the other guy as far I can tell. Maybe they just guessed you wouldn't drive too far down the highway. This hill and the next one over are the best surveillance spots for a couple of kilometers. All the other hills are too small or too bare, and there aren't many spots to hide your car."

"They? They guessed? Who are we talking about, Li?"

Li glanced at his watch. "Don't ask me anything else. Won't be but a few minutes. Just keep your eyes down on the road."

"What am I looking for?" I knew the answer.

A car.

"What if I say I'm tired of watching highways?"

Li stood up and moved along the path down the hill. "That child, Inspector. He was my sister's son." He paused and looked up at me. "I know what happened. I think you do, too."

The sound of two cars coming out of the tunnel and moving at high speed made us both turn toward the road. The lead car, half a kilometer away and coming at us like an arrowhead, was deep blue, smaller than the one I'd seen on the first morning but just as clean. The second car was bigger, black, and right behind, so close it seemed attached to the first. I'd never seen two cars going so fast that close together.

The driver of the black car must have taken his foot off the gas. The blue car pulled ahead suddenly, and as it came abreast of us, there was a muffled explosion, the road heaved into the air, and the car careened into the field across the way. The second car braked sharply and stopped just before the crater left by the explosion. The passenger side door opened; a man got out and ran to the driver's side of the blue car. He looked in the window, pulled a small machine pistol from under his jacket, and fired a burst into the car. He looked again, then fired another. As he ran back to the black car, he stopped and looked up the hill. He had short-cropped hair. I couldn't see his eyes, but I knew they were like knives.

The black car drove on the dirt shoulder for a few yards, crushing the wildflowers. Once it eased back onto the highway, the driver accelerated so rapidly he fishtailed across the road, then regained control and moved north again. Just as the car disappeared over a small rise, I heard the horn blare. Li was shaking; I couldn't tell whether it was with fear or with anger. "He wanted you to see that, Inspector. And he wanted me to see it, too. It's a warning: If we get in his way, we're dead men, for sure."