The Korean Woman

by John Altman

  He traced an idle finger across her collarbone. “You’re staying?”

  “For a little bit.”

  “And then what?”

  She shrugged.

  “Woman of mystery.” His smile flickered. “I like it.” He drew again and this time managed not to cough. Smoke coiled up beneath the darkened track lighting in the high ceiling.

  She sank into a fugue. She had betrayed her husband, her children. Most of all, herself. The thought held no power. None of this was real.

  She surfaced. He had stabbed out the joint in the Sucrets tin. He had closed his eyes. She examined him. He had a nice face—that expensive-dog look.

  He breathed evenly. She climbed out of bed and dressed quietly. He didn’t stir.

  She wandered around the apartment. The master bath was done in pink and gray marble. A single toothbrush hung beside the sink. Inside the medicine cabinet, she found deodorant and razors and shaving cream. Tylenol PM, baby aspirin, and Pravastatin for high cholesterol. The toilet seat was up.

  In the kitchen, houseplants hung in macramé harnesses. Did that indicate a woman’s touch? Not necessarily. A Mets magnet on the refrigerator, a toaster that looked as if it had never been used. A killer view: glimmering baubles of traffic, a few lighted windows, deserted rooftops and construction sites. His phone sat on the counter beside keys and wallet.

  She shut her eyes and listened to her intuition. A pricey, lonely apartment. No wife, no children. No unusual odor except the stale marijuana, already mostly whisked away by the climate control. More absence than presence. This was the apartment of a man who worked a lot—a man with few personal ties.

  Down a hallway. Past another bathroom, clean and anonymous. Toilet seat up again. Into a study. She felt as if she was trespassing. She was trespassing.

  Diplomas hung on the walls. BA in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. MBA from Harvard Business School. A CODiE Award, a Stevens Award. She saw programming books and business books. In the half-light, she examined framed photographs. Family, friends, fishing trips. A cut-out New Yorker cartoon pictured two business-suited men looking at clouds: “That one, too. They all look like big bags of money.” A small wicker bowl on a bookshelf was empty. What it had contained? She sniffed. Maybe peppermints.

  On the desk, a computer slumbered. She sat in the desk chair and nudged the mouse. The screen brightened, asking for a password.

  She searched drawers and found pens, checkbook, postage stamps, blank envelopes, matchbook, stapler.

  And in a bottom drawer: a plastic pass card on a pocket clip.

  She turned it over in her hands. A smiling photograph. William Walsh. An ID number and a company name: NYMEX.

  She retrieved her handbag from the front hall. In the study again, she spread the equipment retrieved from the storage locker on the desktop. The message had given specific instructions. She checked connections between the high-frequency antenna, the reader-writer, and the cloner. She switched them on and held William Walsh’s RFID over the reader-writer. The hexadecimal string associated with his badge was automatically captured. Now any blank card set atop the device would receive the data. Whoever brandished the new card would be allowed access to the NYMEX offices, and records would indicate that the person entering was Bill Walsh.

  She returned the pass card to the desk, the equipment to her handbag. She let herself out, rode an elevator down, walked through a polished lobby without making eye contact with the doorman. Out on the sidewalk, she checked her phone. 3:35 a.m. Jia would be up in a few hours. And when Jia was up, everybody was up.

  She hailed a cab, giving an address two blocks east of home. The streets were empty. The cab cruised north. It all felt more real now. They sailed through the meatpacking district. By a construction site, they bumped over rough planks, past mounds of upturned earth.

  Just work. Just business. Not a betrayal.

  She closed her eyes and drifted.

  Langley, VA

  “Dalia.”

  She turned away from the voice, deeper into the dream. She was fifteen years old. She and a friend had sneaked off the kibbutz for an afternoon’s mischief. They had met some soldiers on leave and drunk some cheap army wine. Now she lay on the grassy bank of a stream, trailing two fingers in the cool, babbling brook. Her head mizzed pleasant nonsense. Not a care in the world …

  “Dalia.”

  She struggled up from shadowland, from youth into old age. Pain flared in her knee, her back, her shoulder, her neck. “What.”

  “She’s moving,” McConnell said.

  Dalia had fallen asleep in a chair, head propped at a strange angle. Blinking gummily, she straightened. She detected no sign of dawn through the drawn shades.

  She felt like gedemtke fleisch, like overcooked meat. She tried to find the point when she had fallen asleep. She had watched the woman enter a bar, then emerge with a man. After visiting another bar, the couple had taken an Uber to a high-rise in Liberty Plaza. That was around 2 a.m. Sometime shortly thereafter, Dalia had dozed off.

  Now ARGUS was tracking a taxi heading north up Tenth Avenue. The time code read 03:43:12+39. Green crosshairs showed two of DeArmond’s vans following, leaving plenty of room. The third van remained parked by Liberty Plaza.

  McConnell was pressing a cup into her hands. Dalia smiled thanks and sipped. American coffee was dreck. But the caffeine burned away the fog in her mind.

  The taxi reached midtown, then turned east along the bottom of the Park. “Heading home,” Bach mused. “Sam … our mystery man?”

  “Great minds,” Sam said.

  The live feed resized, and an ARGUS-captured image appeared in its place: the man Song had met in the bar. Slim face, hard angles, slightly asymmetrical, nodal points highlighted.

  A New York State driver’s license followed in another window. WALSH, WILLIAM. The Liberty Plaza address they had just watched Song Sun Young leave. Between the license and the ARGUS photo, the computer matched twenty-four nodal points.

  More windows: a Stingray hack of Walsh’s phone, run from the van parked by Liberty Plaza. Both audio and video feeds were blank. In a third window, alphanumerically labeled folders were stacked in columns and rows. “What are we looking at?” Bach asked.

  “Extracted data.” Sam clicked ahead. The phone’s most recently run apps were from the Weather Channel and Stock TickerPicker. The last call, placed at 9:47 the night before, had been to a 212 number and lasted seven minutes. He skimmed pictures, text messages, websites, email. An automatic email signature identified the phone’s owner as one William Walsh, senior systems engineer, New York Mercantile Exchange.

  The keyboard rattled as Sam typed again. “And his geolocation records. Every weekday morning, he goes to the NYMEX offices in the World Financial Center.”

  Dalia caught an apprehensive glance between Bach and McConnell. She understood its meaning. The New York Mercantile Exchange was part of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, trading fundamental commodities such as oil, gold, and wheat—the basis of the world economy.

  Sam nibbled thoughtfully on a callused thumb. “Bureau One-Twenty-One”—Pyongyang’s cyberwarfare unit—“has a section called Hidden Cobra, tasked with hacking American infrastructure. That includes media, aerospace, and finance. Someone in Walsh’s position could do some major damage.”

  “Such as?” Dalia had set her coffee on the conference table, beside a bottle of Poland Spring, and was rolling her chair absently back and forth on its casters, leaving furrows in the nubby carpeting.

  “Ideally, systems like CME are all in isolated pieces. There’s no bleed between the piece that talks to the network to receive orders, the piece responsible for prices, the piece responsible for order routing, et cetera. But in real life, there are always cracks in the architecture. Walsh has access to the network. In theory, he could get anywhere. Everywhere. Picture oil compani
es that can’t price their product, farmers who can’t go to market.”

  “Arrest them.” Nervous excitement baked off McConnell. “Arrest them both. Now.”

  Bach shook his head. “See where she leads us.” He spoke abstractedly, watching the taxi turn north again. “We’ve waited two years. We can wait a little longer.”

  McConnell grimaced but held his tongue.

  The cab pulled over two blocks east of Lexington Avenue.

  The time code read 03:50:11+27.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Manhattan, NY

  She leaned against the front door, and the lock gave a tiny click as it found the hasp. Silently she hung her coat in the hall closet. She hid the leather handbag and its contents behind rain boots and a Thomas the Tank Engine umbrella. After six years in the apartment, the closet still struck her as huge. Everyone in New York complained about lack of closet space. But back home in Chosun, only the richest had closets at all.

  She felt filthy, but a shower would wake her family. So she made do with baby wipes in the hall bathroom, not even running water or flushing the toilet. She buried the dirty wipes deep in the wastebasket, hiding them beneath crusty Kleenex.

  In darkness, she glided into the bedroom. Stripping off her clothes, she mixed them into the hamper, put her jewelry in the box on the dresser, found her wedding ring in the drawer, and slipped it on. She crawled into bed. The red digits on the cable box glowed like wolves’ eyes. Two hours and change before Jia started the day with a bang.

  Every nerve was humming. She would not be able to sleep.

  Beside her, Mark rolled over, burrowing deeper into his pillow.

  She looked at the back of his head. She had gotten lucky with Mark. She married him because she was following orders, but she could have done much worse. He didn’t flaunt a mistress or buy sports cars or get his ear pierced, like Matt Waters down the hall, who turned forty last month and did all three. Mark was steady, kind—a good father.

  Her mind turned fitfully to the day ahead. At 10:30 a.m., Leigh Cohen’s sixth birthday party. A dozen screaming hellions, revved up on cake and juice boxes. And Mark had a tennis game scheduled. Then, in the afternoon, Dex had a piano recital. In between, she had to figure something out for lunch.

  And just that quickly, she realized, she had fallen back into the regular rhythm of life—meals, kids’ activities, Mark’s tennis—as if tonight had never happened.

  She yawned. And then slid, as if down a greased chute, into a thin and haunted slumber. Men not her husband crushed her beneath their weight. At Yodok, a jagubbanjang, a crew manager, had fallen in love with her. Between rapes, he had plied her with gifts: food, clothes, blankets. He had pulled strings to get her easier work details. But he had not loved her enough to stop raping her. Each rape had put Song’s life at risk. Women who gave birth inside the camps were killed along with their newborns.

  The dream face changed. The Chinese farmer now. Her first time crossing the Tumen, en route to Bundang, she had found, as planned, the guide hired to escort her to Changjitu. But the second time, she had found only the border guard. After disposing of him, she had searched in vain for her guide. She had started to panic, then calmed herself. She was prepared for this eventuality. That was why she had the backpack.

  She had traded her beef jerky to a farmer in exchange for a ride in his K01 pickup. But in the middle of the countryside, he had suddenly stopped. She could walk the rest of the way to Changjitu, he said. Or there was another option … She offered the damp cigarettes as a supplementary bribe. He shook his head. She considered killing him. But the Chinese were fed up with the endless flow of defectors across the Sino-Korean border. They set up roadblocks and conducted random identity-card checks. Lacking the guide, her chances were better in the farmer’s company. What was one more man crushing her beneath his weight, holding her still by the nape of her neck? One more indignity, one more degradation …

  She woke to a robust cry. Her eyes felt grainy. Mark muttered something she didn’t catch. She went into the nursery and took her daughter from the crib.

  Breakfast was cold cereal and milk. While Song was in the kitchen measuring out coffee, Jia started screaming from the dining room. Song rushed back to the table. Dexter was looking at her innocently. “Dex,” Song said, “what happened?”

  “Nothing,” the boy said.

  “Spoon, spoon, spoon!” Jia shrieked from her booster.

  “Did you take her spoon?”

  Dexter let her see the pink Elmo spoon in his hand. “She dropped it on the floor.”

  “No drop!” Jia cried. “No drop! Spoon! Dex take!”

  “Give her back the—”

  Mark emerged from the bedroom, blinking owlishly. “What’s all the racket?”

  Song showered. She had first experienced hot water at Heaven Lake. She had fallen instantly in love. One of the few bones of contention between her and Mark concerned her long, frequent showers. She would spend all day beneath the hot spray if she could.

  She took three Advil and drank two cups of coffee. As she stood by the kitchen counter, starting another pot, her phone chimed: Dylan’s mother reporting that they were free for a playdate, morning or afternoon.

  Song replied that they were booked today. She asked about tomorrow. She answered another email from Jackie McNamara about the food drive. After pressing send, she felt a moment’s dissociation. Floating again, as she had when crossing that long-ago river. Toes questing for bottom. That dreamlike sense of distance. Dexter and Jia were playing together in the next room—little angels now, laughing sweetly. Mark was in the bedroom, changing into his tennis clothes. And suddenly, Song was slicked with cold sweat. Her muscles were freezing, and the kitchen was starting to tilt sickeningly, and all at once she realized she was not floating. She was fainting; she was falling.

  She set her phone down and held on to the side of the counter. Darkness puddled around her, lapping like waves. Then slowly receded. The world was clearing again. The morning was still going. She was still here.

  She was okay.

  The kids laughed louder. “The police are pulling you over,” Dexter said, “giving you a ticket,” and Jia knew enough to insist, “No. No ticket. No ticket!”

  “They’re giving you—”

  “no ticket!”

  “Kids.” Mark must have come out of the bedroom. “Take it down a notch. Two notches.”

  The front hall was striped with cheery bars of sunlight. Mark had his racket in one hand, a gym bag in the other. “Back in an hour and a half,” he said. “Two hours, tops.”

  “We’ll be at the birthday party.” She drifted over and kissed his cheek. Was it her imagination, or was his reaction cool? “Thoughts about lunch?”

  “Lunch,” Jia said. “Lunch, lunch, lunch, lunch! Mommy, lunch!”

  “Not yet, honey.”

  “Daddy, lunch! Lunch!”

  “Surprise me.” He slipped away. The door clicked shut behind him.

  “Mommy!” Jia was tugging at the cuff of her jeans. “Lunch, Mommy, lunch!”

  She gave each kid an applesauce squeeze as a postbreakfast snack. The usual rule that all eating was to be done at the dining room table went unenforced.

  More coffee. More Advil. She folded laundry. On her phone, she found the invitation to the birthday party. Ten thirty at Chelsea Piers. She would grab a present on the way down. The Barnes and Noble on Fifth and Forty-Sixth. Pick up something for lunch on the way back. At the same time, do shopping for dinner. When they got home, Jia could go down for a nap before Dexter’s recital.

  It was a plan. Keep moving and she would be okay.

  She did the breakfast dishes, changed Jia’s diaper, packed a go-bag, and filled a travel cup with more coffee.

  Langley, VA

  At the end of the hallway, Bach’s small office overlooked the arched ro
of of the cafeteria and the back side of the old HQ, where senior directors toiled on the fabled seventh floor to protect truth, justice, and the American Way.

  Charlie DeArmond was snoring, curled into the fetal position on a bonded leather couch two heads too short for him. Bach shook the man’s thick shoulder. “Nine a.m. wake-up call.”

  DeArmond blinked groggily, sat up, nodded, stood. As he retreated sleepily from the office he closed the door behind himself without being asked.

  Bach sat at his desk. He checked messages and then composed an intel report to the DDO, the Deputy Director for Operations. The report had a good chance of making the Presidential Daily Brief, known as “the Book.” It was not every day that a sleeping RGB agent in Manhattan was activated. And then the White House would authorize the heavy guns.

  He took DeArmond’s place on the couch. The leather was still warm. He closed his eyes. His throat itched. Every eight hours, he took pholcodine to suppress the coughing. But nothing could suppress that maddening itch. By now, he was almost used to it. As used to it as he would ever get.

  These days, he could not miss a night’s sleep with impunity. But he had kept it together. He had stayed in Do-mode. Nobody suspected his frailty.

  Thud-a thud, his heart went. Thud-a thud, thud-a thud.

  A poor bed. He exhaled raggedly, shifting his cramped legs. He was used to poor beds. He had lived out of suitcases for half his life. He had slept in far worse places than this. And he was beyond exhausted.

  Soon, he slept. And remembered a day from almost two decades before.

  * * *

  “Let’s go live right now and show you a picture of the World Trade Center. Do we have it? We don’t have that ready? What should we …? We have a breaking story. Can we …?”

  Someone changed the channel. Here was a live feed. Dark smoke plumed from a fiery hole in one of the Twin Towers. The crowd gathered in the hallway gasped.

  “… limited information at this point. We don’t know about injuries in the building, or people on the ground right now, but obviously, um, this has potential for, uh, for …” The anchorman trailed off helplessly.