Fallout

38

Pak, juggling a bag of garbage in each hand, leaned back into his apartment, trying to get the door closed.

Fisher glanced up. The camera was pointed directly at Pak. It paused, then started panning in the other direction. Fisher counted One one thousand, two one thousand, then pushed off the wall and sprinted, hunched over, straight at Pak. He covered the distance in less than three seconds, but at the last moment, either sensing Fisher’s presence or hearing his approach, Pak spun to face him.

Fisher’s earlier hunch about the man’s physical condition and training was dead-on. In the blink of an eye, Pak, still holding the garbage bags, lashed out with a front heel kick. It was perfectly aimed and delivered, a strike that could easily snap a neck or crush a skull. But Fisher, having registered Pak’s slight shifting of weight to his back leg, was ready for the kick. Still moving at a sprint, he dropped his shoulder, somersaulted beneath the leg, caught the raised heel with his right hand, then rose up and caught Pak squarely in the chin with a short jab. Pak stumbled backward into the apartment, stunned. Fisher didn’t give him a chance to react but kept driving forward, raising Pak’s leg until he toppled over sideways, sliding back-first down the wall and landing with an “Umph” on the floor. Fisher twisted Pak’s foot, flipping him onto his stomach, then dropped to one knee, grabbed a handful of his hair, and slammed his head against the floor once, twice, three times. Pak went limp.

Fisher grabbed him by the foot again and spun his limp body around and dragged him farther into the apartment, then shut the door. He pulled a pair of plastic flexicuffs from their hiding place in his jacket’s lining and bound Pak’s wrists and ankles, dragged him into the living room, laid him face-first on the floor, then picked up a nearby coffee table and placed it over his body. He found a narrow-based vase and placed it on top of the table. The rudimentary early warning system would give Fisher a few seconds’ notice should Pak regain consciousness and get frisky. Knowing now how dangerous the North Korean was, Fisher wasn’t going to give him even the slightest advantage.

He did a quick search of Pak’s studio apartment and found no one else home. In the bedroom, however, he did find a portrait of Pak sitting with a woman and two young girls. Many North Korean political up-and-comers were given two residences: a working apartment in Pyongyang for use during the week and a private rural home for weekends. This, Fisher suspected, was where Pak’s family was. Also in the bedroom he found a wireless-capable laptop and, in Pak’s nightstand, a Type 69 7.62mm pistol in a leather holster along with two fully loaded magazines. He pocketed the pistol and the magazine and turned his attention to Pak’s closet. He found what he was looking for almost immediately: the thigh-length black leather coat Pak had been wearing at the Site 17 platform. In the coat’s left pocket he found Stewart’s thumbnail beacon. He stared at it a moment. Thanks, Calvin. He stuck it in his pocket, grabbed the laptop, and returned to the living room.

He pulled the iPhone from his pocket, called up the iPod feature, scrolled to the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” and punched a code into the keypad. The screen changed to an amber-on-black compasslike display with the words ENGAGED > SEEKING SIGNAL flashing near the bottom edge of the screen. Fisher spent the next ten minutes sweeping the apartment for audio and video devices. He found none, so he went into the kitchen, found an English-version of Diet Coke, then returned to the living room and sat down in a wing-back club chair a few feet from Pak’s head. He stuck a magazine into the pistol, chambered a round, and waited.

Fisher was almost finished with his Diet Coke when Pak began stirring. He groaned, and his eyelids blinked open, then closed again as he tried to focus. He tried to raise his hands to his face; his knuckles rapped the underside of the coffee table with a dull thud, and the vase teetered, then went still.

“Just lie still,” Fisher said. “It’ll be easier for both of us.”

Pak went still. He rotated his eyes and craned his neck until he could see Fisher. Instead of the typical “Who are you” and “What do you want,” Pak said simply, “You’re an American.” His English was only slightly accented; Fisher noted his use of the contraction. Pak had had extensive language training, which was to be expected from an RDEI agent.

“I am,” Fisher said.

“Don’t you know where you are? You’ll never get out of the city alive. You probably won’t get off this block alive.”

“We,” Fisher replied.

“What?”

“We’ll never get out of the city alive.” He held up Pak’s pistol. “I guarantee you, if that time comes, you’ll go before me.”

“How’d you find me?”

“Western imperialist technology at its best.”

“Why have you come here?”

“Complicated question.” Too complicated, Fisher thought. If not for Omurbai and Manas, Pak would have gotten a bullet a long time ago. But that wasn’t the situation, was it? He needed Pak alive. “I want you to tell me where Carmen Hayes is, and I want you to tell me everything you know about Manas: Where it is, where Omurbai plans to use it, and how to neutralize it.”

Pak offered him a condescending grin. “I’m not going to help you.”

“I thought you’d say that,” Fisher said. “And I’m sure I’d have a hard time changing your mind. Am I right?”

Pak nodded.

Fisher gestured to Pak’s laptop, which sat, powered up, on a side table. An SD/USB card reader jutted from one of the laptop’s side ports. “You’ve got some pretty good encryption on there. Unfortunately, it’s not good enough. Right now, I’m loading a virus onto your hard drive. I won’t pretend to know how it does what it does, but here’s what I do know: Two hours from now, and every two hours after that, if a specially coded e-mail doesn’t land in your in-box, the virus goes active.”

“That’s your plan?” Pak said, smiling smugly. “You’re going to ruin my laptop?”

“No, I’m going to ruin your life. You see, you trusted your encryption a little too much — put too much dicey information on your hard drive. What that virus will do is plant digital tracks in every corner of your life — your e-mail accounts, your finances, your travel logs — and the story it will tell is that of a traitor, a trusted RDEI agent who volunteered to spy for the United States and has been feeding the CIA information for the past three years. You might not be afraid of what I can do to you, but I know you’re afraid of what your bosses at the SSD do with traitors. I’ve seen video of their interrogation methods. It’s not pretty. But, of course I’m sure you know that.”

“I don’t believe you,” Pak said. “They won’t believe it.”

“Bad gamble,” said Fisher.

And it was. This was no bluff. The CIA’s biggest contribution to Fisher’s mission was one of its most prized agents, an executive secretary in the comptroller’s office at the State Security Department. While none of the information she’d passed to Langley had been of strategic value, it had given the CIA’s Intelligence Directorate an invaluable glimpse into the administrative side of North Korea’s security services, allowing it to build from the inside out profiles of more than a dozen RDEI agents: where they went, how they traveled, and through which banks and front companies money was moved. It had been a jigsaw puzzle of daunting complexity, but it had paid off. Fisher’s threat to Pak was a case in point.

What Fisher did not tell Pak was that while he was unconscious another program on another SD card had plucked from the laptop’s hard drive every piece of data within a certain range of file extensions, the passwords and log-ins to a half dozen SSD intranet portals, including Pak’s office e-mail account. Once the program had completed its search, Fisher had loaded the contents onto his iPhone for encrypted burst transmission back to Third Echelon, where Grimsdottir and Redding, working at tandem workstations, were sorting through the data.

“That’s not possible,” Pak said. “You’ll miss something.”

Fisher smiled. “I doubt it. I happen to work with a woman who’s frighteningly good at what she does, and right now you’re her only project. Did I mention she was kind enough to open a private account at Syndikus Treuhandanstalt bank in Liechtenstein? You’ve got a small fortune in there. You’ll never see it, of course, but your bosses will.”

Pak’s eyes shifted, and Fisher saw for the first time a hint of fear.

“Make no mistake,” Fisher continued, “when we’re done with you, you’ll be the greatest traitor your country has ever seen. Or, option two: You agree to help us.” Fisher spread his hands and gave Pak a friendly grin. “It’s your call.”

“How do I know I can trust—”

“You don’t. There’re only two things you can count on right now: one, that we can and will burn you; and two, whatever else happens, the first hint I get that you’re double-dealing us, I’ll put a bullet in your head. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”

Pak closed his eyes, took a deep breath, let it out. “I’ll take it.”