CHAPTER 38
EARLY THURSDAY
South Korea
Jiyeon awoke in a corner of an empty room. She saw a curtain drawn over the window on the far wall. On the opposite corner, a door thoroughly chewed up and scratched was closed. A battered wooden chair sat against the wall nearby. It was dark, but through the crack under the door, a dim light seeped in.
Jiyeon examined herself. Her hands and feet were bound. She did not bother trying to move or shift around. Her muscles still felt that malaise one feels during a fever, where moving seems to make the muscles scream. She wondered if this was real or a dream. In unbelievable situations it is hard to come to terms with reality.
How could this have happened?
She tried to listen for voices past the door. She heard some movement somewhere in the house she was in, but it was irregular. She could not hear anyone speak. She had no idea who the people that snatched her were.
Actually, she did.
She thought back to some of her training courses at the NIS. One section they had spent significant time on was North Korean abductions. In short, North Korea created the largest state-sponsored kidnapping effort in the world. Many people knew the famous case of the South Korean filmmaker and his wife who were abducted by North Korean agents. They were brought into North Korea to make films for the regime, primarily those for propaganda purposes. One film they created was called Pulgasari and was a North Korean version of the Japanese Godzilla. Jiyeon remembers feeling a tingle in her feet while seeing parts of it during the training session. The abducted couple tried to escape unsuccessfully but eventually was able to defect while making a film abroad. But there were an abundance of other abductees. In the 1960’s, there was a Korean Airlines flight that was hijacked by North Korean intelligence officers. It landed in the North and the regime said the crew wanted to defect to the North. They were used in propaganda videos. Jiyeon heard the story while growing up but remembered being shocked to learn in the NIS training session that some of the crew was still in North Korea. Many other South Korean citizens from fishermen to students were kidnapped. What many people did not realize, however, was that North Korea kidnapped people from many other countries as well. Starting in 1977, North Korean officers began kidnapping Japanese citizens. They were forced to serve as Japanese language and culture instructors for North Korean intelligence officers. Jiyeon was shocked to learn that the true number of Japanese kidnapped was still unknown, and could be in the hundreds. During the 2000’s, North Korea allowed some of the families to return to Japan. But the foreign victims were not just from Japan. In training, they were told about the NARKN, which stood for National Association for Rescue of Japanese Citizens Kidnapped by North Korea. NARKN also tracked non-Japanese who were kidnapped by the North. From the evidence they were able to gather, there were also four Lebanese, one Thai, one Romanian, two Chinese, four Malays, one Singaporean, three French, three Italian, two Dutch, and one Jordanian that were kidnapped. When Jiyeon was reading about some of the cases during training, she at one point thought she was reading fiction. The Chinese abductees were young women working in Macau. The Lebanese citizens were abducted by receiving offers from an alleged Japanese company to work in North Korea. The French citizens were women who had met a man they thought was a wealthy Chinese or Japanese executive. This man began courting them with gifts. Eventually these women married the man and left for their honeymoon to Asia. Eventually they flew into Pyongyang where the wealthy man disappeared and North Korean officers took the women into custody. When the women asked for their husbands, they were told to stop inventing stories. As far as anyone knew, those women were either still in North Korea or were dead. Jiyeon remembered thinking that this was all beyond absurd. Then she corrected herself – for any other country in the world, this was absurd but for North Korea this pattern of behavior fit right into their activities. The abductions had slowed since their peak in the 1970’s, but they did not stop. Jiyeon realized she was now on that list. She was now in the hands of a North Korean kidnapping team.
She looked up as she heard footsteps outside her door. A steady beat hit the floor beyond the threshold. She felt it in her spine. The footsteps passed by and her door stayed closed. She felt a sharpness crawl through her stomach and into her chest. She was not in control. There was nothing she could do to get out. She could not run away. She could not even stand up. When a feeling of powerlessness sets in, the mind sinks into terror.
How did they know I work for the NIS? Who set this up?
Her first thought flew to Li, the Chinese attaché at the embassy she saw at the bar with Tom. He could not be a normal diplomatic officer. Jiyeon knew that China and North Korea were allies. Maybe he had set this up, she thought. He was acting quiet and strange at the bar. He did not want to talk. She remembered how unfriendly he looked, as his face never lost its serious expression. She became angry, sitting handcuffed in the corner. Maybe he was in the bar with Hyun-Joo because he was following her, she wondered. Maybe he was tracking her every movement.
Why did I not report him?
She walked through in her mind what happened the earlier. She remembered that she would not have been able to tell anyone in the office, because Mr. Lee was gone and Mr. Kim was too busy to be told anything. Then Jiyeon froze.
Mr. Kim.
Why was he staring at her last night, she wondered? Why did he leave suddenly? Why did his phone ring? Why did he never talk to anyone? Why did he not have any family or friends? It all came together for Jiyeon. Mr. Kim was a North Korean officer. She wanted to scream sitting in the putrid room. How could nobody have put the pieces together? And Mr. Park trusted Mr. Kim. She wanted to hit herself for not realizing it twelve hours ago.
I could have called Mr. Park and fixed everything.
Then Jiyeon took the next step. The logical progression, she thought, was that if Mr. Kim was working with the North Koreans, then the reason the NIS illegals have been getting compromised was sitting right in their office this whole time.
Mr. Kim killed Officer 1414 and tried to kill officers 2135 and 6237.
She shivered at the thought that she had been working so closely with a secret agent for North Korea for all these years. No, she thought. She had not been working with a North Korean agent. She had been working with a North Korean illegal. The NIS’s illegal department had an illegal in it. She had an urge to press a rewind button somewhere and go back and change everything. She wanted to go back and save Officer 1414. Officer 2135 and officer 6237 were probably captured or killed by now too, she imagined. Mr. Kim would have known their routes to China.
Now everything else started to come together in her mind. Mr. Park probably went to Washington DC because he had realized something was wrong. She guessed he probably suspected that an illegal had penetrated their group, but did not know whom. He wanted to take a small team and get away from Seoul, away from the mole. He could figure out who it was without the mole figuring it out. Mr. Park also could pull out some of his illegals before the unknown illegal in their group betrayed them further. That’s why Mr. Park himself had given the orders to pull out the officers from DC.
She wondered if this meant that Tom’s mission was probably compromised. Maybe the worst had happened and he had been captured too by now, she thought. She tried to look out the window and see the moon. Maybe he was sitting in a damp corner somewhere looking up at the moon and thinking of her too. She remembered that her kidnappers looked weak compared to Tom. They would not be able to stop him if he came through the door looking for her. Jiyeon paused for a moment and listened for the possible sound of commotion in the house. Maybe Tom would burst into the house any moment, subdue her kidnappers and walk through the door in the far corner with a smile on his face, his hair maybe disheveled slightly. She wanted to go on that weekend trip and find out the secret behind his quiet eyes. What did he want to tell her? She mainly thought about the comfort of his arms. She remembered that it felt like his arms had more mus
cle than her whole body.
When she had left to go to work at the NIS, she remembered how she wanted to see how the machine worked. She thought about how after a few years the only realization that flowed through her mind was the silliness of it all. The world was that party of schemers. What was the point? Power? Why? Now because of it, she was sitting handcuffed in some corner. She refocused on the moon, one piece of nature that gave light in dark times. She wondered where Tom was.
Devil's Fork Page 47
