The Korean Woman

by John Altman

  The RGB file ended. A marriage certificate followed: the State of New York Department of Health recognizing the union, six years ago, between Mark Abrahams, of Manhattan, and Mi-Hi Pyung, of Seoul.

  Then a slim dossier on Mark Abrahams. Born and raised in Manhattan, graduated from Horace Mann, NYU, and Columbia Law. Degrees in public policy and international law, an internship with the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs, and then a career with the legal section of the US Mission to the United Nations, where he had been instrumental in the levying of sanctions against North Korea by the Security Council.

  A long-lens photograph showed the newly minted Mrs. Abrahams, standing at a magazine kiosk and looking at her phone. Facial recognition software had matched the photo against the picture from the subway platform. Twenty-nine common nodal points had resulted—nine above the threshold deemed actionable.

  “She’s been here for seven years.” A muscle twitched in Bach’s jaw. “Married for six. We’ve been watching for two—ever since we cracked the RGB server. All that time, she’s had no contact with Pyongyang.”

  He swiveled to face Dalia again. “Until six hours ago.”

  Manhattan, NY

  “Monkeys,” Baby Jia observed brightly, pointing to the frolicking creatures on her pink nightgown.

  “Monkeys,” Song agreed. She joggled her daughter on her lap, opened the book, and started reading. “In the great green room there was a telephone. And a red balloon. And a picture of …”

  “Monkeys!”

  “No, honey. A cow jumping over a moon.”

  “Moo.” Jia wriggled around, tiny Cupid’s-bow mouth pursed, to look her mother in the face.

  “Moo, indeed.”

  “Mommy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Monkeys.”

  “Monkeys. And cows and elephants and giraffes and lions and tigers, oh my.”

  Jia giggled. They rubbed noses, finished the book, and read another.

  After three books, Song carried her daughter to the crib. She laid a blanket over her, leaned over, and rubbed the girl’s back. “Sleep well, honey.”

  “Love ’oo, Mommy.”

  “Love you, too, sweetie.”

  “Monkeys,” said Jia gravely, already drifting off.

  Song switched on a Disney princess night-light and flicked off the overhead. Leaving the nursery door ajar, she went into her son’s room. A trace of toothpaste on his cheek attested to at least cursory toothbrushing. She sat on the edge of the bed and stroked the hair back from a smooth temple. “What did Daddy read you?”

  “The robot book.”

  “Sweet dreams, Dex. Love you.”

  “Leave the door open, Mommy.”

  “I will.”

  “Wide open.”

  She kissed him. He hugged for a moment, then let go. “Sweet dreams,” she said again.

  He repeated, “Wide open.”

  In the master bedroom, Mark lay in his boxers, reading the latest Jack Reacher thriller. Song went into the bathroom and closed the door. She showered, lotioned, and brushed her teeth. In the bedroom, she put on a nightgown. When she slid into bed, Mark grunted acknowledgment. He reached over absently and squeezed her hand. She picked up her Kindle.

  Five minutes passed. Her eyes moved across Murakami’s prose without taking the meaning. Mark yawned. “Beat,” he murmured. He rolled over, switched off his lamp. “Night,” he said.

  “Night.”

  She skimmed a few more pages and then switched off her lamp.

  The crooked trapezoid of light on the ceiling changed color rhythmically. Yellow, red … green. Yellow, red … green.

  She considered her options.

  One: follow orders. It would be only business. She understood the difference between sex and love. It would not be a true betrayal.

  Two: run away. Start over somewhere fresh. Abandon everything. Cut the cord.

  The idea held a certain brutal appeal. It was not the first time she had considered it. In fact, she had the necessary equipment ready to go, hidden in a Kate Spade bag in the back of her bedroom closet. The bag also contained just shy of ten thousand dollars in cash. Pyongyang maintained a devoted cadre of counterfeiters. After arriving in America, Song had accessed a safe-deposit box overflowing with crisp new bills. For her first three years here, she had patiently swapped them out for genuine currency. Now she could finance a run, and the start of a new life, without leaving any sort of trail.

  But she had a husband. She had wonderful kids. This was her life.

  And, of course, there was her brother to consider.

  Three: do nothing. Ignore the message. Pretend she had never received it.

  But that only delayed the inevitable. At best, her operators at Kyuch’Aldae would give her the benefit of the doubt and resend the message. At worst, they would fetch Man Soo from whatever gilded cage they kept him in. Bring him to some dank cellar. Beat him until he vomited. Then the stress positions, the hot tongs, the open wounds …

  She must not delay. She must be ready before the next message arrived, detailing delivery of the data.

  She closed her eyes. She saw a dead man by a river. Frozen bloody menstrual rags hanging from a shower rod. She opened her eyes and left them open, watching the changing colors on the ceiling. Shadows stretched out. Treacherous, shifting dark rivers.

  Yellow, red … green.

  Slow, stop …

  Go.

  Langley, VA

  Inside the conference room the close air smelled vaguely of body odor and stress.

  A chime sounded, and six pairs of eyes turned to the wall-mounted monitor.

  On a real-time map, red crosshairs tracked a figure as it stepped from beneath an awning.

  The image came from an encrypted satellite link to a drone parked twenty thousand feet above Manhattan. ARGUS—Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance—let operators scan a thirty-six-square-mile overview. Sixty-five target-acquisition windows, each with a resolution of ten centimeters, could be opened at once.

  Song Sun Young’s face had been scanned into software called Persistics, making her a searchable value. Anytime she presented herself within the drone’s area of control, automatic object-tracking would alert the operators and lock on. Hence the chime, and the crosshairs.

  Shyam Radha turned to his keyboard. The view, tinted night-vision green, moved closer. The “California Dreaming” T-shirt had been exchanged for a belted trench coat. Song wore tasteful makeup, minimalist jewelry, a leather handbag with a double-chain shoulder strap. She displayed a premeditated hint of décolletage. She walked a few steps, turned a corner onto Lexington Avenue, and hailed a passing cab.

  The time code on the screen read 00:04:06+15. June had begun, Dalia realized abruptly, and with it, her eighth decade on earth.

  She sneaked a look at her phone. Her daughter had officially missed her birthday.

  She looked back at Shyam Radha and found herself wondering, where did he go when he left this place? He was intelligent and ambitious, or he wouldn’t be sitting in this particular conference room. Not bad-looking, either. But he wore no wedding band, and his personal hygiene was somewhat lackadaisical. He had no family to miss him, she decided—not even a dog that needed walking. And in ten years or twenty, he would be right where he was today, sitting behind a computer, inside this or another US intelligence agency headquarters, tracking this or another agent, with no one to grieve his absence.

  Her gaze returned to the screen. Persistics had transferred its lock from figure to vehicle. The red crosshairs followed the taxi down Lexington Avenue. Three distinct green crosshairs deployed behind it: three windowless vans, each carrying a four-man FBI team and Stingray antennas with a twenty-mile range.

  Two windows beside the ARGUS feed streamed audio and video. The Stingray antennas had tricke
d the woman’s phone into identifying them as cell towers, giving them access to her microphone and camera. Audio was the muffled whisk of tires against pavement. Video was darkness—probably the inside of the leather handbag. Another window used the phone’s geolocation feature to reflect her progress on a second map.

  In a window beneath the Stingray feeds, lines of code—green against a black background—shifted endlessly. Sam had explained that the message sent to the woman from the RGB used a different encryption from that of the hacked server. The algorithm was new to the CIA. His only recourse was to attack the cipher with brute-force statistical analysis. He had told them not to hold their breath waiting for the plain text.

  Dalia looked back to the ARGUS feed. At a few minutes past midnight, traffic was light. The taxi cruised to Forty-Second Street as fast as it could catch lights, then cut across town.

  At Thirty-Seventh and Sixth, Song left the cab. She disappeared through a door. A new target acquisition window found a better angle on the storefront. schwartz luggage storage, nyc. manhattan’s top-rated luggage storage service since 2004! open 8 a.m.–1 a.m. walk-ins welcome.

  Tense glances were exchanged. Bach gave a slight shake of his head. They could take her anytime, which meant they could afford to play out more rope.

  Stingray’s audio feed channeled canned background music. Three minutes passed. At 00:12:41+31, Song emerged onto the street again. From the way she shouldered her leather handbag, it seemed to have grown heavier. She hailed another taxi and continued downtown.

  In Union Square, traffic thickened abruptly. The cab slowed to a crawl. At Broadway and Eighth, Song left the taxi and continued east on foot.

  One surveillance van discharged two agents to follow. The remaining two vans, guided by DeArmond via encrypted cell phone, assumed a standard floating box formation, trading command and backing roles as they maneuvered through crowded streets, trying to keep up.

  Dalia watched the screen. Her pulse had quickened. Despite her insistence otherwise, something inside her still craved the thrill of the hunt.

  Manhattan, NY

  Belting her white trench coat more tightly, she melted into the throng like water finding its level.

  The crowd was largely bridge-and-tunnel: hipsters, students, junkies, tourists, and maybe even a friend or two from her Upper East Side neighborhood, downtown for a thrill on a Friday night to pick up a sex toy or a new drug.

  She had thought her surveillance detection skills would be rusty. But she had spent so much time looking over her shoulder, once upon a time, that now they came back effortlessly, reflexively. Look without seeming to look. Scan the crowd; take the rhythm; seek anomalies. The city was alive. Streets were veins, pedestrians blood. Look for clots. Look for nonfunctioning brake lights, which avoided attracting the target’s attention when the driver of a surveillance vehicle slowed to keep pace. Quarter the street. Use shop windows, sideview mirrors of parked cars, or any other reflective surface. Use everything. Most of all, use your nunji. Feel the street.

  She found no sign of watchers. But in this crowd, they might easily avoid detection. She quartered the street, firing a glance into the windshield of a passing car. There. A man who didn’t quite fit in. Watchful eyes, sport coat, thick shoulders.

  As soon as she saw him, he was gone.

  She kept walking. A boy urinated without modesty in a doorway. Two girls kissed passionately. A single sandaled foot extended mysteriously from a shadowed alleyway. She looked over her shoulder, found no sign of the man with the watchful eyes.

  When she had first arrived in America she had felt like an actress putting on a show. If she could turn around quickly enough, she might catch the audience watching from beyond the footlights. As the years wore on, the sense of performing had diminished. But now it was back. In spades. All the world’s a stage.

  She reached the address she was seeking, sandwiched between lowered metal shutters. Stenciled red letters on the window read six degrees. The door was propped open, body heat inside outstripping the slight chill of the night. Industrial music throbbed.

  Checking her reflection in her compact, she used the mirror to scan the crowd behind her. No sign of the man she had glimpsed earlier.

  But the feeling was there: she was being watched.

  Nerves. She had been out of the game for too long.

  Clinically she took her own emotional temperature. A shiver of fear wormed down her backbone. But there was also, undeniably, excitement.

  A last moment of hesitation.

  She steeled herself and went inside.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It had been a long time since she stood alone at a bar waiting for a drink. Her lemon drop arrived. She handed the bartender a bill and then scanned the crowd. People were young and very thin. Apparently, heroin chic never went out of style.

  Before coming downtown she had studied the photograph again, memorizing the target’s angular features. But maybe the picture was not recent. Maybe …

  He was standing near the end of the bar, half leaning against a stool. Lucky. First bar, first try.

  He was a few years her elder, wearing a dark blazer over a white T-shirt. He had a long, rawboned face, slightly asymmetrical, with the beginnings of loose skin below the chin. He looked, in that first instant, like an expensive breed of dog.

  He noticed her. She looked away.

  She consulted her phone, then glanced up. He was still watching her. Of course he was. She was very much his type.

  She let the eye contact linger for a moment, then looked down again, touching her hair.

  The music changed to something even louder, more assaultive. He pushed off the stool and closed the distance between them with two long steps. He said something into her ear.

  She leaned closer. “What?”

  “I said, I can’t hear myself think in here!”

  She smiled.

  “I know a better place!” he shouted.

  “I bet you do!”

  “Just on the next block! Quieter! Who are you with?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Come on!” Brazenly he took her hand.

  She pulled the hand away. “I’m meeting my friend!”

  She went back to her phone. He loitered.

  She let two minutes pass, then pretended to read a text. She rolled her eyes. This brought a satisfied smile from her target. “You’ve been ditched!” he shouted. “Right?”

  She sighed, nodded. He took her hand again. “Come on! I know a place!”

  “At least let me finish my drink!”

  He waited, holding her hand loosely, as she sipped. When she had finished, he led her outside, barely giving her time to leave the glass on the bar.

  “Bill,” he said on the street.

  “Edie.”

  He was still holding her hand. She was still letting him. Her left hand. Her wedding ring was back in her night-table drawer.

  They went down the sidewalk, crossing First Avenue. An unmarked door, a coded knock, a mascaraed eye behind a Judas hole. Bolts worked; chains chittered. The door swung inward. They faced an attractive young person of perhaps twenty-one, heavily made-up, wearing a seifuku uniform: navy blouse, sailor-style white collar, short pleated black skirt, tall white knee socks, powder-blue neckerchief, black penny loafers. Big smile, glittering dark eyes, dilated pupils. “Did you have an appointment?”

  “No,” Bill said, “but we’d like to see the blue room.”

  Song followed him into a dim, low-ceilinged hallway. A disquieting aroma—beef marinated in Lysol?—made her nose wrinkle. They passed a rocking horse tucked into a corner. They moved from the dim corridor into a small, crowded room with recessed lighting and a sleek young clientele.

  A host in suspenders and two-tone brogues straight out of the 1920s waved them into a booth.

  “
What did I tell you?” Bill slipped into his seat without releasing her hand. “Quieter.”

  And indeed, it was. There was no music and very little street noise. Conversation murmured secretively. The man in suspenders took their drink order. Bill changed his grip on her hand, entwining fingers. No ring, she noticed.

  “Last month,” he remarked, “this place was in the back of a bookstore in Tribeca. Month before that, you went down a staircase inside an old phone booth.”

  Watching his lips move, she felt a faint, dreamlike sense of distance. She remembered crossing the Tumen River many years before, floating briefly in the current. She was floating again now, toes questing for bottom.

  Their drinks arrived: two old-fashioneds. She sipped. It was quite strong.

  He was studying her. “You okay?”

  “I … should go.”

  “I knew you were going to say that.”

  “I really should.”

  He nodded grimly, then leaned forward and kissed her.

  The kiss extended. She broke away and excused herself, bringing her bag. The bathroom was stainless steel. She hadn’t drunk much, but it made her feel sloppy, not as sharp. Yet her face in the mirror remained impassive.

  The first man she had kissed, besides Mark, in over six years.

  It was a betrayal.

  She had no other choice.

  She went back and slid into the booth. “Hungry?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I live downtown,” he said. “Not far.”

  She nodded.

  * * *

  Quiet, except for the constrained hiss of high-end climate control.

  He pushed into a sitting position, found a watery whiskey on the nightstand, and drained it. Apparently exhausted by the effort, he fell heavily back into the pillow. Song nestled into the hollow of his shoulder, which was slick with perspiration.

  After a minute, he moved again, reaching into the nightstand drawer and withdrawing a battered Sucrets tin. Inside was a wobbly, stale-smelling joint. He lit it with a plastic lighter and inhaled deeply before exploding in deep, dry coughs. When he offered her the joint, she demurred.