Star of the North

by D. B. John

  “What is bingdu?” she said, without hiding her revulsion.

  “You’ll find out.”

  At that moment a whistle blew high and shrill, and the market fell silent. Mrs. Moon thought it heralded the arrival of a train, until she saw the last remaining customers begin to scatter in every direction like rabbits. Suddenly from all around came the hiss of urgent voices as the women cussed and groaned.

  “I wouldn’t move if I were you,” said Grandma Whiskey.

  “All traders remain where you are!” The iron voice issued from the loudspeakers. “Stay where we can see you.”

  About a dozen uniformed men carrying powerful flashlights were spreading out through the market.

  Goods and money were being stashed away in a frenzy. Takings were being slipped to accomplices and helpers who darted away into the shadows beneath the bridge and along the tracks.

  The police were moving through the market, shining their lights into the traders’ faces. The two she’d met earlier—Sergeant Jang and Shovel-face—were among them. They appeared to be escorting an official, a bald man with cheeks so bony they cast half his face in shadow. He wore the brown tunic of the Party. One of the policemen helped him up onto a wooden crate. His eyes swept across the aisles. Every trader was facing him.

  “By order of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party, he shouted, “no woman under the age of fifty years is permitted to trade in any marketplace. This rule takes immediate effect.”

  The women turned to look at each other.

  “The rules are changing again?” Grandma Whiskey muttered.

  “What’s the crackpot reason for this one?” another said.

  Mrs. Moon put her hand up to shield her eyes from the beams of the flashlights. She heard Sergeant Jang murmur to the official that no one at this market was affected by the new rule, and then the official noticed Curly. He raised his arm to point at her. The police directed their flashlights at her in a single bright ray. Focused in the glare, she appeared very small and fragile, a doe caught in a hunter’s snare.

  “Citizen, stand up.”

  One of the policemen approached her and took her ID passbook.

  “Name is Ong Sol-joo,” he said. “Age twenty-eight.”

  “Where is your official workplace, Ong Sol-joo?” the official said.

  Curly’s lovely smile had fallen. She searched for the official’s face, as if hoping to reason with him, but the lights were blinding her.

  In a wan voice she said, “The April 15th Vinylon Factory.”

  “You’re a textile worker?”

  “Sir.”

  “And why is a state textile worker selling food for private gain on a train platform?”

  Behind her, Curly’s daughter was staring at her mother with glassy, horrified eyes. Curly had turned very pale and her head was angled to one side, as if she’d been slapped.

  “I asked you a simple question,” he said.

  The air tensed. No one moved.

  Mrs. Moon felt her blood rising. She’d seen this happen on the farm. Some poor wife accused of deserting socialism, when all she was trying to do was put food on the table. Before she knew it she was in a people’s trial with a noose round her neck.

  “Citizen, if you don’t answer …”

  The official became distracted by the sight of an old lady rising slowly to her feet, her knees unbending agonizingly after a day sitting on the concrete. Then all eyes were upon her. Fear and alarm passed across the women’s faces.

  “I wish to save the respected comrade’s valuable time,” Mrs. Moon said. “Mrs. Ong is a family friend who has selflessly given her time to help me—an old woman who can’t fetch and carry and who does not feel safe on her own. The business she helps out is mine, sir. Mrs. Ong does no trading.”

  With the bright lights upon her she could only glimpse the official out of the corner of her eye. His head was as bald as a buttock. Before he could speak Sergeant Jang said, “Comrade Secretary, we must get you to the other markets before they close …”

  For several seconds no one made a sound. But then the official got down from the crate with an exasperated grunt, and the women were in shadow again as the police lowered their flashlights and left. A moment later, everyone exhaled in unison.

  The silence was broken by the sound of a slap. Mrs. Moon looked around. The noise sounded again. One of the women at the back was clapping. Slowly at first. Then she was joined by another. Then by Grandma Whiskey. Suddenly every woman was applauding, giving her an ovation. Someone cried, “Man-sae!” and the women cheered. Curly came over and clasped her hands, but her face was serious. “Oh, what fine words, ajumma,” she said. “How can I thank you?”

  Now all of them were gathered about Mrs. Moon, bowing to her repeatedly and introducing themselves. “I am Mrs. Yi, ajumma. If you need sugar or rice flour, you know who to ask …” “Mrs. Lee, ajumma. I can change that old coat for you whenever you like …” “Mrs. Kim, ajumma …” “Mrs. Kwon …” “Mrs. Park …” “I’m Mrs. Oh,” said Grandma Whiskey. “I’ve got good Chinese contacts on the other side of the river …”

  It was as if a switch had been thrown and warmth and friendliness were suddenly beaming from their faces. Only Curly was gazing at her oddly, with an expression that seemed to pierce right through her, as if she were searching Mrs. Moon’s heart for something. It had the most unsettling effect on her.

  One of the women was pouring her a plastic cup of beer from a bottle, but Mrs. Moon smiled and declined, saying that their friendship was all that she valued; another offered her a pair of new gloves. Mrs. Moon began to refuse those, too, but then seized them in her hand. They were Chinese made and of the coarsest nylon. They had given her an idea. “Who sells these?” she said.

  *

  When she returned exhausted to the village the comet was still in the west, its blue-green glow casting enough light to see the track. Above her the sky was pierced by millions of tiny stars. The stiffness in her joints was flaring very painfully now as she dragged the two voluminous travel bags she’d purchased. The door to her house was in deep shadow as she approached. She was reaching for the doorknob when something uncoiled on the step, making her cry out. The small figure of a boy leapt up and darted away between the houses.

  When she saw Tae-hyon’s face all her fears came sharply alive. He was waiting up for her, smoking at the table. The lantern next to him cast cadaverous hollows onto his face.

  “Comrade Pak was here,” he said. The rolled-up cigarette trembled in his fingers. “What’s in those bags?”

  “One of Pak’s informers was on the doorstep,” she said.

  She dropped the bags to the floor and began to unzip them. She had to explain her plan to Tae-hyon before—

  They turned to the window. Footsteps were approaching along the alley between the rows of houses, and through the glass she saw the moving yellow glow of lamplight on the wall opposite.

  The hammering was so violent she thought it was going to split the door.

  She stood up quickly and opened it.

  “Come in, please,” she said, as if she’d been expecting guests for tea, and gave a deep, ninety-degree bow. Three uniformed men stepped heavily into the room without removing their boots or caps. Comrade Pak slipped in behind them and hovered at the door. One of the men checked a list in his hand.

  “Moon Song-ae, you’re coming with us. Husband, too.”

  “Are we under arrest?” Mrs. Moon said.

  The man said nothing, but Comrade Pak, whose mouth was working hard to contain a look of righteous glee, couldn’t stop herself. “Of course you’re under arrest, you old bitch. You found an enemy balloon and didn’t report it. You deserted the farm in violation of your sentence.”

  Then she noticed the two large bags next to the wall, and her eyes widened.

  Mrs. Moon’s voice was calm as she addressed the men. “It’s true I did not report for work on the farm today. I was trading in Hyesan …”


  “Hoh,” Comrade Pak snapped her fingers, disappointed that the confession had come so soon.

  “… and the profit I made is in these bags for your commanding officer.”

  Mrs. Moon gave another deep bow.

  The men turned their heads toward the bags, puzzled and annoyed, but their interest was snagged. The smile died on Comrade Pak’s face.

  Mrs. Moon bent down to complete the unzipping and threw them open. One was filled full with hundreds of pairs of Chinese-made nylon gloves; the other with as many pairs of nylon socks.

  “Please present these to your superior, for him to distribute freely to the people of Baekam County, as gifts from our Dear Leader.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw the astonishment on Tae-hyon’s face.

  11

  Camp Peary

  CIA Training Facility

  Williamsburg, Virginia

  Third Week of October 2010

  A few days after her return from Geneva, Jenna drove her car up to the security barrier of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley. Georgetown University, Fisk had told her, had agreed to release her from her employment, but not before lodging a small protest about its being the middle of the semester, and expressing wonder that a junior member of staff could have knowledge pertaining to the security of the nation. That was Professor Runyon all over. It bolstered her feeling that she was doing the right thing.

  On her first morning she was wired to a polygraph in a windowless, soundproofed room and gave yes-no answers to inquiries about her past; in the afternoon she took a psychometric evaluation that asked peculiar multichoice questions on themes of personal integrity and honesty, with points allotted according to a secret scoring system. In the following days she was photographed and fingerprinted, her irises were scanned, her DNA swabbed from her saliva, her urine tested for drugs. The background checks, she learned, had already been conducted. Everything happened quickly and without delay, her candidacy fast-tracked. Fisk had bent the rules to exempt her from the deskbound preparatory stints at Headquarters. Ten days after her first visit to Langley she took the oath to protect and defend the constitution of the United States and was handed a short list of the clothes and toiletries she was permitted to take to Camp Peary, known to insiders as the Farm, the secret CIA training facility in Williamsburg.

  Not until she boarded the bus with tinted windows and saw her eleven fellow Clandestine Service trainees—three women and eight men—did she become nervous. All of them seemed to project a similar image: confidence, watchfulness, a brutal fitness. A few eyes regarded her with suspicion, the newbie being pitched straight into clandestine training, and she felt her anxiety stirred by an undercurrent of dread. Only the guy seated across the aisle from her cast her an interested glance. He was tall and olive skinned with full lips and heavy, muscular arms. Latino or Middle Eastern. She looked away.

  A low autumn mist was rolling off the York River when the party alighted in front of an old saltbox farmhouse. Across the vast surrounding estate, the silos and barns that concealed an extensive facility were fading to gray as dusk fell. The recruits had passed through two levels of security at the perimeter. Relieved of phones and personal items, there was a sense, as they stood before Fisk, who was waiting for them on the farmhouse steps, that they were entering a closed order, and had left all worldly ties behind. Fisk’s large, haggard face was partly in shadow. He raised his hand to them in a greeting, or it might have been a type of benediction.

  A sudden whine of propeller engines made them look up. The angled foils of a Reaper drone emerged from the clouds and descended toward a hidden airstrip.

  Fisk ushered them inside, away from the noise. The farmhouse, it seemed, was little more than a prop, a sentry box that hid what lay beneath. A large freight elevator took them to a lower level, where a pad scanned Fisk’s palm and a laser read his eye. A door opened with a pressurized hiss and they were in a subterranean corridor of humming databanks, purified air, and massive tungsten security doors that opened without a sound.

  The recruits followed him in silence. Jenna’s eyes were everywhere, taking this in. They reached an area that looked like some type of situation room. Six other recruits wearing headphones were seated in front of screens of what looked like grainy security-camera feed, until Jenna realized it was moving drone footage seen in night vision.

  Fisk sat on the edge of a desk and faced them with his arms folded. He was dressed in a black casual jacket and jeans, which had the effect of making him seem older, a grandfather ready to go bowling. He gazed at them for a moment, his face calm, protecting.

  “What made you join?” He spoke softly, but his every word was audible, as if he were alone in private with each of them. The sweep of his eyes took in all of them. “You joined because you believe in freedom. You believe in the ideals that founded our nation—ideals which, for a while, seemed to be spreading across the world like the dawn. Today, those ideals are everywhere in retreat. You may think our liberty makes us strong. Do not be naive. It is only our vigilance that makes us strong. In five thousand years of civilization, it is mostly tyranny, not democracy, that has been the lot of humankind. In those brief eras when democracy flourished, it was a rare animal with many predators, short in its life as it was violent in its death. Once again, the forces of intolerance have gathered, and draw their plans against us. They are emboldened, believing that our freedom makes us decadent, full of contradictions, exposed. We happy few, we are freedom’s guardians. We are the good guys. It is us who stand in the front line. That’s why you joined. You chose light over darkness.” His eyes shone as if he were speaking a profound and tragic truth. “But it is in the darkness that this fight is fought, often without scruple or conscience. If our enemies win, their tyranny will be made stronger and more terrible by technology. But if we win, our glory will never be sung, our victory will never be written. We hope only for honor, not fame.”

  He nodded at them, and stood up.

  “Over the next ten months you’ll be tested to within an inch of your lives. Some tests you’ll know about; others you won’t, unless you fail them and find yourself being removed from here. Not all of you will make it to graduation as operations officers. Those who do will be the Agency’s elite. Welcome to the Farm. Do your best.”

  Jenna and the three other women of her class were shown to a cramped barrack dorm lined with bunks. One of them, an American Iranian woman with a GI buzz cut said, “Hey,” and jutted her chin out. “I’m Aisha.”

  Jenna knew it wasn’t her real name, because yesterday she had been given her own new identity to memorize, together with a driver’s license. She was Marianne Lee, a freelance reporter from the Mission Hill district of Boston. A ten-page typed biography was included, outlining her education, the names and birth dates of her parents, her social security number, and work résumé, complete with links to articles she’d written for the Boston Globe.

  Jenna smiled and extended her hand. “I’m Marianne.”

  At dawn the next day the women assembled for a seven-mile endurance run and introduced themselves to the men.

  “Menendez,” said the tall Latino who’d eyed her up on the bus. He grinned.

  Their mornings began at 6:00 a.m. Combat training and field exercises took up most of the days. Evenings were spent in classes learning the basics of tradecraft, starting with encryption. Tradecraft appealed to Jenna’s sense of discipline and method, even though its main purpose made her uneasy. An operations officer’s most important role was the secret recruitment of assets—targeted individuals who were blackmailed, bribed, or persuaded into betraying their country’s secrets to the CIA. She spent much of her first week pondering this, trying to picture herself doing it—in a hotel room, perhaps, watching some hapless foreign diplomat’s face turn gray as she confronted him with evidence of his corrupt kickbacks, his gambling debts, his weakness for male hookers, which his embassy knew nothing about. She would wait for the full horror of his situation to sink
in, and when the moment was right, she might dangle the lure of money—lots of it—or the offer of asylum in the United States, or expensive treatment for his sick child, paid for by the CIA. She might never see him again, but he was hers. She would be running him, collecting his intelligence with an agreed system of signals and dead drops.

  It felt sordid; it went against her nature, but her qualms vanished every time she thought of Soo-min. She was being trained to target a criminal rogue state, a prison that held her sister. To that end she wanted every black art the Farm could teach her. And that meant stepping up to the punishment of the field training, because she was finding that pure hell.

  Each time her instructors pushed her to the limit of her endurance, abandoning her in a distant swamp with only a compass, making her drop and do push-ups each time she missed her firing-range target no matter what she was firing, Beretta, Glock, AK-47; then they pushed her even harder, and the old limit became normal. By the afternoons she was bruised, exhausted, humiliated. She reckoned her performance would rank close to the bottom of the class—some of whose members were ex-marines—if not for the one skill in which she outmatched them all. In the classes that taught them gun-and knife-disarming techniques she knew how to direct the energy of the pointing arm away from her, flip the attacker’s wrist so that the weapon was pointing back at him, and even throw him over her shoulder. Class H watched in amazement. “Where the hell d’you learn that?” Aisha said. Jenna shrugged. She mentioned nothing of her taekwondo. Her past was her own business.

  The instructors had not discouraged socializing—the recruits were free to meet for beers and shoot pool in the Farm’s bar—but all of them sensed that they should trust no one and say little. Anything could be a test. One evening she was reading alone in the canteen, a Chekov story she’d enjoyed many times, when Menendez placed his tray in front of her and sat down.

  “Where’ve you been, Marianne Lee?”