The Korean Woman

by John Altman

  If her ruse had worked, they would drop the roadblocks, concentrating all their manpower to pursue the signal. Or was that wishful thinking?

  Either way, checkpoints would be thickest heading back toward the city. So she turned north. Stay positive, she thought. One way or another, she would get through. To Connecticut. Then Massachusetts. Or maybe Maine. Or maybe New Hampshire. Don’t tread on me. Or maybe west. Into the wild blue yonder. She would go whichever way the wind took her, so long as it was far away from here.

  She kept to the speed limit.

  Whether Mark believed her was beyond her control. At least, she had tried.

  The town receded in the mirror. She met a rattling old farm truck in the other lane, one headlight dead. Beyond the soft shoulder to her right, a pond sparkled. The stars glinted like crushed glass.

  She had tried. She had gotten to apologize, to acknowledge, however lamely. He had heard the words directly from her. What he would do with them, she didn’t know. But she had spoken them. It was something.

  The road worsened. The Jetta rattled and banged through potholes. She crested a wooded ridge, passed a farmhouse, a pale smudge against darkness. A doghouse in a dirt yard. The sweet smell of alfalfa hanging in the air.

  When she first heard the percussive whut-whut, she thought it came from the Jetta. Maybe a pothole knocked the exhaust pipe loose above the muffler. But the beat didn’t speed up when she gunned the engine. Frowning, she craned her neck to look through the sunroof. Stars, a thin rind of moon …

  There: a sharp glint. The angle changed, and the searchlight dazzled her eyes. Then it moved on, heading back the way she had come—toward the house, if she judged the angle correctly.

  She had hoped for more time. But no. Within minutes, they would find her.

  She had to change cars.

  No. First she had to gain more distance.

  She was screwed either way.

  On some level, it would be a relief. Her guilt would be expiated. She had carried too many secrets for too many years. Time to pay the piper.

  It is the beating of his hideous heart!

  She thought of the cloner and high-frequency antenna she had hidden in the hall closet back home. Incriminating as hell, should Mark have found them. For that matter, she had tempted fate for a full year by keeping the Kate Spade bag, filled with disguises and passports and cash, in the bedroom closet. Tempting fate. On some level, she must have wanted to be caught. Only then could she begin to atone. Only after having acknowledged sins and reflected deeply upon them can a prisoner begin anew.

  She opened the bag and moved the gun onto the passenger seat.

  She killed the headlights and drove through darkness.

  Another ridge. And beyond it, barely half a mile out, a checkpoint. She knew it subconsciously even before her eyes assembled the pieces: police prowlers, orange-and-yellow barriers, glaring floodlights, and the familiar anonymous vans.

  She could still hear the helicopter behind her. She could not turn back.

  Circling the drain again. Finished. For real this time.

  It had been worth a shot.

  Her hands tightened on the wheel. Not done yet, goddamn it.

  * * *

  Dalia watched the monitor. The helicopter wheeled, broadcasting a vertiginous bird’s-eye view as the searchlight found a copse of pines. Twelve men wearing helmets and gas masks, camo, and tactical body armor formed a tight circle and converged.

  Team leaders exchanged signals, and silver tubes fired in unison. CS grenades billowed gas through pine boughs. Snipers posted on neighboring rooftops shouldered rifles equipped with infrared scopes.

  Flashbang grenades followed the CS into the trees. Muffled concussions blew needles and branches into a funnel. Team members brandishing M4 rifles advanced smoothly across backyards. Dalia’s anticipation was so intense it verged on nausea.

  The circle closed. Men entered the stand of pines … and came out, not with Song Sun Young, but pulling a yelping brindle-coated dog by the collar.

  Dalia blinked.

  By the time the all clear was given, spreading hazes of tear gas had dissipated into the night. A report was relayed to DeArmond. The phone had been recovered from a fanny pack affixed to the dog’s collar. The animal was no doubt smarting from the tear gas, but otherwise none the worse for the wear.

  Another report came from a quarter mile away, where another incursion team had simultaneously entered the address the phone was registered to. They had also led with CS and flashbang grenades. The locked front door had been battered down with a ram. Inside, they had found one old woman, recently deceased, multiple ligature marks at the level of the hyoid bone, stuffed unceremoniously into a hall closet.

  * * *

  The floodlit roadblock was bright as day. She saw reflective traffic barriers, local prowl cars, unmarked SUVs, turtle-shell helmets, Kevlar vests, and at least eight M4 carbines trained on the Jetta.

  Song shifted to a lower gear. The engine revved as it caught. The Jetta slowed.

  On the left side of the roadblock, spike strips extended onto the soft shoulder, but not all the way to the tree line.

  She accelerated again, leaning down as low as possible. Shifting up again. For a moment, she sailed toward the checkpoint unimpeded. Then a spotlight found her, beaming directly into her eyes. She flinched, looking away. Tracers of light smeared her vision.

  She had just scrunched lower when the windshield starred, one-two-three. A beat later, she heard the distant pop-pop-pop of gunfire. It sounded nowhere nearby, not even in this same reality.

  With her view compromised by the dashboard and the smeary glaring spotlight, she plowed into an orange-and-yellow barrier.

  The world rocked. A wall of white slammed into her face. Blood poured from her nose. The engine screamed in a high, climbing whine. The car was caught on something. She felt the wheels spinning, crunching, but not tearing free. Holes opened in the passenger door, and light poured through.

  She hit the gas. Again. Her stomach rolled as, with a great heaving sway, the Jetta tried to clamber over something. To no avail. She risked a peek above the deflating airbag. She couldn’t see what she had hung up on. But she saw a man in tactical gear standing five feet away, taking careful aim. She grabbed for the gun on the passenger seat. But it was gone, somewhere on the floor, beneath the seat.

  She blinked furiously. Her eyelids were sticky. The substance sticking them together, she realized, was blood. Her blood.

  She swiped a forearm across her eyes, then slammed the transmission into reverse. With a grinding wrench, the Jetta reared backward. A bright flower unfolded somewhere to her right, puncturing the night. She felt the shock wave, then heard the sound in delay.

  Slewing backward, finding drive again, then plowing forward. This time, she hit a police cruiser low and hard, nosing it out of the way and gaining the road beyond as a miasma of smoke or gas or both spread behind her.

  She glanced in the sideview mirror. Cracked glass, hanging by a thread, her crooked reflection looking right back at her. For some reason, she was grinning.

  She aimed down the potholed road, flooring it.

  She spat blood onto the floor. The car was riding lopsided, grinding along on rims, sparks flying behind her. But she was through the roadblock.

  Two smoking holes in the dashboard. Two matching holes in the passenger’s door. Three more holes starred the windshield. She realized dreamily that each hole corresponded to a bullet that had entered the interior of the car. And each bullet corresponded to someone holding a gun, who had tried to kill her.

  She forced her eyes back to the road. Dark farmland rocketed past. The wheel vibrated crazily. Sparks danced in the rearview mirror. The engine whined, straining.

  And then the searchlight: the helicopter giving chase, falling into place behind her like a gian
t, lumbering insect.

  Langley, VA

  On-screen, the searchlight illuminated the roadblock—a crumple-hooded police cruiser and a crushed construction barricade. It swept on, quickly finding the racing Jetta, pinning it and keeping it pinned.

  A gout of sparks poured from the right side. An orange glow might have indicated a fire starting inside the car. DeArmond was barking orders. Extend the perimeter; set up another roadblock; get boots and dogs into the woods in case she fled on foot; get backup air support.

  Bach leaned against the table, trembling again. What was taking Luna so long? For the love of—

  Ping.

  “Fort Meade,” Sam observed.

  Bach’s hands closed into fists. His thoughts must be written all over his face. But happily, no one was looking at him. They were watching the monitor. The helicopter kept the Jetta pinned. The vehicle was losing speed now as the exposed rims ground flat. Any moment now, Song would ditch the car and run for it. She would not get far.

  Sam opened a new window and put the decrypted data up on the screen. Scanning the algorithm, he grunted softly. “Not sure what we’re looking at here …”

  Bach paused long enough to make it look good. Don’t cringe. But he could feel his mouth pulling. Don’t let your voice shake. Five seconds more and it’s done. It’s done. Done. He tried to steel himself by picturing his father. And the fat little Bond villain, the cartoon megalomaniac. And the melted badges, the ruined ambulances, the blood-soaked children. But what he pictured, strangely, was a small flower that had grown from a crack in the sidewalk near his childhood home. He had been three, maybe four years old. He had found the flower while riding his Big Wheel. A pretty yellow flower. So tender, so fragile, in the face of so much city filth and traffic. That it had grown at all was a miracle.

  Dalia Artzi had sensed something. She had turned from the screen. She was watching him. He lowered the steel door in his mind. Negative air pressure. Do-mode.

  He felt as if he had somehow stepped through a movie screen or onto a stage. Like when the doctor had given him his diagnosis. Except that now he was the one preparing to deliver the scripted line. Taking the dramatic pause. Biting his lower lip thoughtfully: the theatrical gesture.

  His head pulsed with hot blood. Do it! Now, before his face betrayed him …

  Affecting mild introspection, he said, “Send it to Shelby. See what she makes of it.”

  Shelby Choo was part of their team in Seoul. She knew Bureau 121 as well as anyone—it made perfect sense to request her input on this mysterious burst of code.

  But the address Shelby Choo had always used now funneled the data not to Seoul, but back to Minot.

  Sam nodded and clicked send.

  Bach sagged as if poleaxed. He reached out a hand to steady himself against the conference table, but his fingertips slipped from the black beveled edge. The fluorescents in the ceiling seemed to buzz louder. He heard Dalia calling out, the quality of alarm in her voice, but the words unintelligible.

  He collapsed into a sweet, humming semiconscious blur, soft and welcoming as a womb.

  At last.

  It was done.

  Razzle Dazzle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Minot, ND

  Seventy-five feet underground, behind twelve tons of reinforced steel-and-concrete blast doors, Deputy Commander Todd Li poked halfheartedly at his grilled chicken and mixed vegetables. He shot an envious look at the Lima Flight commander, who had brought his own meal. Some kind of rice bowl with avocados and black beans. Li kept meaning to pack a cooler himself. But this month, he was 7-0. Back on base, he barely had time to give his pecker two shakes after taking a piss. How on earth did the flight commander find time to make rice and prepare a bowl?

  Li gave his rubbery chicken a final poke, then set down his fork and pushed the tray away. After signaling the commander, he unstrapped and left his seat. Inside the tiny head, he relieved himself. Then he gave it a good shake. In the bunker, unlike on base, there was nothing but time, waiting endlessly for an emergency that never came.

  He washed his hands, working up a good lather, and dried off with paper towels. He went back to his chair—mounted on tracks so it could slide smoothly back and forth between shelved binders and knee-level lockboxes and eye-level consoles featuring phones, keyboards, sensors, monitors, and keypads.

  He buckled himself back in: standard procedure in case the bunker took a direct hit. After a moment, with a sigh, he pulled the tray to him again.

  As he lifted the fork, Lima Flight commander said in a subdued voice, “I have calibration alarms.”

  Indicator after indicator, alpha zero-two through alpha one-one, was turning red.

  Li stared in disbelief. “Did we have DLC message transmit?”

  “Negative. We …” Lima Flight commander paused to moisten his lips. “We have positive launch indications throughout the flight.”

  The flight consisted of ten Minuteman-III LGM-30Gs. Each missile stood sixty feet tall, weighed eighty thousand pounds, and packed twenty times the explosive power of the warhead dropped on Hiroshima. Five flights, aggregating to fifty missiles, made up a squadron.

  If the sensors were to be believed, their entire flight had just launched.

  “It’s a drill?” Li asked.

  Lima Flight commander shook his head.

  For an instant more, Deputy Commander Li stared at the indicators. Then he grabbed the secure line, overturning the tray and scattering mixed vegetables across the console.

  North of Lake Togue, NY

  A burst of automatic-weapon fire from the helicopter punched new holes in the roof. She swerved off the road, bumping over the shoulder, through a ditch, into forest. The car was done, anyway. Smoke rose from the mangled remains of the two right tires, from the undercarriage, from beneath the hood.

  She threw open the door. A canopy of branches and leaves momentarily blocked her from the copter’s line of sight. It was the best chance she would get.

  But she paused. She needed the gun. She searched through broken glass in the well beneath her seat. Then the passenger seat. The acrid, sour smell of burnt rubber filled her nostrils. The world seemed to spin around her. From the distance came the sound of sirens, rising and falling. And closer in, the rotors, pounding the night, thrashing it.

  She found the gun. Her fingers closed around the grip.

  She left the car. In the strange light trickling through the canopy, she saw the forest floor slicked with something wet, which might be gasoline or might be blood.

  She took a few aimless, staggering steps. Her free hand went to her face, searching for a wound. Was she dying?

  No. Her legs still carried her. She was hurt. The airbag had broken her nose, but she wasn’t dying.

  The sirens grew louder. She moved away from the Jetta. Now what?

  Another burst of gunfire. Leaves stirred, shushed, puffed. An intercom crackled. The voice was calm and measured. “Freeze. Put your hands on your head. You are under arrest.”

  Through the shushing leaves, she saw a glowing light. A lit window. Surprisingly close. Between her and it was a backyard: a swing set, a sprinkler, a Nerf football, a back porch.

  She moved toward it as the sirens drew closer and her head whirled like a centrifuge.

  Cheyenne Mountain, CO

  The signals traveled from SBIRS, the Space-Based Infrared System, to NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, six hundred feet inside the granite heart of the mountain.

  “Ten heat plumes registering at Minot Air Force Base.” The captain’s voice was steady. “We’ve got ten launches from Minot AFB.”

  The four-star general who served as CINC-NORAD commander-in-chief crossed to the display in two long strides. “Valid launch?”

  “Yes, sir. Jesus wept, valid launch.”

  “Incoming cal
l from Minot,” the warrant officer reported.

  The general’s facial muscles tightened. He paused for two seconds, then said, “Confirm with PAVE PAWS and SBX.” PAVE was a military identification code. PAWS stood for Phased Array Warning System. SBX was Sea-Based X-band radar, mounted on floating rigs off the Alaskan coast. “Get C2BMC”—Command, Control, Battle Management and Communications—“and NMCC. Get First Heli in the air.” The Hueys of USAF First Helicopter Squadron, based at Andrews, were tasked with carrying key members of the US government to the National Emergency Command Post at Mount Weather, to Site R at Raven Rock, to the airborne command centers of Night Watch and Looking Glass.

  He rubbed his hands together, as if trying to wipe away an invisible stain. “And get the Gold Phone.”

  Langley, VA

  Benjamin Bach had never felt so tired. Over the past few days, of course, he had built up one hell of a sleep debt. But this fatigue went deeper.

  He had finished what he had to finish. Now he could let go. Like those old married couples who died within an hour of each other.

  His sleep would be long, he thought. And, God willing, peaceful.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw Esther Yong, his last lover. Despite the awkwardness of the affair, he had taken pleasure in it. The touch of skin on skin. He wondered where she was now. He hoped not Seoul.

  He thought of his first lover, Mary Elizabeth Bianchi. She had walked around the Bronx barefoot. Fearless. And stupid. Every time they kissed, her mouth had tasted of warm beer and Juicy Fruit.

  He thought of Dad, beaming with pride, giving him the tour of Windows on the World. Shoulders thrown back, trying to stop himself from smiling too much. The best view in the history of great views.

  He thought of the pretty yellow flower growing in the sidewalk. Tar bunched up on either end. Broken glass and glinting quartz inside the tar. The flower struggling up anyway. Fragile yet tough.

  Tough. Fearless. Determined. Stupid.

  The run of his thoughts bounced against the present—the missiles would be in the air now—and then banked back into the past. He remembered Grandma’s funeral. Dad helping him with his tie beforehand. That had been pre–Windows on the World. Back then, Dad hadn’t had much experience with ties. He had tried again and again, and again. The tie had ended up too short, too long, too short again. Benjamin Bach had braced himself. When Dad got frustrated, he yelled. But something had been different that day. Something had been missing. Dad had stayed calm.