Op-Center

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Gregory Donald walked for a while after leaving the Embassy. He was anxious to get to the base, to look after his wife, and to call her parents with the awful news. But he needed time to compose himself for that. To reflect. Her poor father and younger brother would be devastated.

He also had an idea he needed to mull over.

He made his way slowly down old Chongjin Way, past the markets with their brightly colored lanterns, banners, and awnings, all of them alive under the streetlights. The area was more crowded than usual, packed with the curious who had come to look at the blast site, to take pictures and videos and collect mementoes of scrap metal or shards of brick.

He bought fresh tobacco at an open-air stand, a Korean blend; he wanted a taste and smell to associate with this moment, one that would always bring back the aching love he felt for Soonji.

His poor Soonji. She gave up a college professorship in political science here to marry him, to help expatriate Koreans in the U.S. He had never doubted his wife's affection for him, but he had always wondered how much she was moved to marry him by love and how much because it was easier for her to come to the U.S. in his company. He didn't feel guilty thinking that, even now. If anything, her willingness to sacrifice a career that was important to her, to take a husband she barely knew, just to help others made her seem more precious in his eyes. If he had come to realize anything about people in his sixty-two years, it was that relationships between them shouldn't be defined by society, but by the people involved. And he and Soonji had surely done that.

He lit the pipe as he walked, the glow of the flame playing off his tear-filled eyes. It seemed like he should be able to turn around, pick up the phone at the Embassy, and call her, ask her what she was reading or what she'd eaten as he did every night they weren't together. It was inconceivable to him that he couldn't do that— unnatural. He wept as he waited to cross the street.

Would anything matter again?

Right now, he didn't see how. Whatever the level of love they shared, they were also a genuine mutual admiration society. He and Soonji knew that even when no one else appreciated what they were doing or trying to do, they themselves did. They laughed and wept together, debated and fought and kissed and made up together, and hurt together for the hardworking Koreans who were being brutalized in American cities. He could carry on alone, though he no longer seemed to have the desire. It would be his mind and not his heart that drove him. His heart died at a little past six this evening.

Yet, there was still a part of him that burned, that flamed hotter as he thought about the act itself. The explosion. He had known tragedy and loss in his life, had lost so many friends and colleagues through car accidents, plane crashes, and even assassination. But that was random or it was targeted: it was fate or it was an act aimed at a specific figure for a particular deed or philosophy. He simply couldn't comprehend the shocking impunity that drove someone to commit a blind act like this, to snuff out Soonji's life along with the lives of so many others. What cause was so urgent that the death of innocents was the best way to get attention? Whose ego or ambition or singular world view was so strong that it had to be satisfied in this way?

Donald didn't know, but he cared. He wanted the perpetrators captured and executed. In ancient days, the Koreans decapitated murderers and left their heads on poles for birds to feed on, their souls blind, deaf, and speechless as they wandered through eternity. That was what he wanted for these people. That, and for them not to run into Soonji in the afterlife: in her boundless charity, she was liable to take them by the hand and lead them to a place where it was safe and comfortable.

He stopped walking in front of a movie theater and stood for a minute, thinking again about the footprints and the water bottle. He found himself wishing that he could be a part of Hwan's team, not just to bring the bombers to justice but to give himself something to focus on other than his grief.

Yet maybe there was a job for him, one that could get to the bottom of this quicker than men at the KCIA. He would need General Norbom's help and confidence to succeed, and he would have to know, somehow, that she would have approved, his Soonji.

Thinking about Soonji again brought tears spilling onto his cheeks. Stepping to the curb, Donald hailed a taxi and headed for the U.S. base.