by D. B. John
Everything about her body language was saying go away. “Nineteenth-century Russia.”
“Been hoping to see you in the bar.”
She closed her book. He seemed faintly amused by the restrictions they were under. Unable to talk openly, their conversation lapsed into a silence in which his physical qualities became impossible for her to ignore. Thick, shiny black hair, a straight nose that ended in a fine point. Enormous hands.
She wished he hadn’t sat with her. Later all she could think of was sex.
Slowly, gradually, she numbed herself to the mornings, and channeled her frustration into better control. She stilled her mind and focused. And as the month went by, she began to get it. Her shooting improved until she could hit multiple moving targets and rack the slide of her Beretta with one hand. She won the class’s respect as the only trainee commended in the tests for evasive high-speed driving. A loose camaraderie was forming between her and her classmates, and it surprised her to realize how little she was missing Georgetown, or the world outside the Farm. But just as she felt she was fitting in, reality bit her again.
On a surveillance exercise in Williamsburg, Class H formed into two teams. The operation was to tail a quarry wherever he went, replacing the tails at intervals so that the quarry would not be able to detect them or flush them.
When it was Jenna’s turn, dusk had fallen. The tail she was relieving was Menendez. He was sitting on a park bench watching the quarry—a man with a prominent Saddam moustache—sipping coffee in a Starbucks about a hundred yards across the street. “The guy’s been there for half an hour,” he said.
To Jenna’s surprise Menendez produced a small bottle of Scotch from his pocket, uncapped it, and took a swig. Then he dropped his face into his hands. “The Farm’s driving me crazy,” he said. “Feel like I’m turning into a fucking cyborg.” He looked at her blearily and smiled. “I just gotta do something human, you know?”
She could not have explained how it happened, but suddenly they were kissing, tongues twining, his hot whisky breath in her face, stubble burning her skin. Her hand was up inside his shirt. She parted from him, catching her breath, and she saw that his eyes were no longer bleary but sharply focused on her.
Some intuition made her turn her head toward the Starbucks. The quarry had gone.
Menendez wasn’t smiling. “My orders were to stop you fulfilling yours.”
He walked away, signaling with his hand to someone she couldn’t see.
Jenna drew her knees up to her chin and sat on the bench for a long time, nursing the familiar loneliness.
Am I really cut out for this?
Three weeks after arriving at the Farm, the trainees of Class H were told they could go home for the weekend. Jenna wanted to visit her mother. A bus was organized to take them to DC. They were only two minutes past the perimeter barrier when a fast-moving white minivan overtook the bus and braked to a halt in front of it, blocking the narrow road. Its door slid open before it had stopped and three masked men in black jumped out, shouting. A screech of tires sounded to the rear and the recruits turned in alarm to see another identical vehicle stopping behind them, trapping the bus. One of the masked men climbed on board, brandishing a Glock. “Hands behind your heads. Everyone out!”
They filed out of the bus like hostages.
Jenna was pulled roughly inside one of the minivans, along with four others. Within seconds their hands were handcuffed behind their backs, hoods were over their heads, and they were being driven away fast on the vehicle’s hard slatted floor, guarded by one of the men. “No talking!” he yelled, when one of them ventured a question.
She could guess what was coming. Class H had just taken the course on interrogation and techniques for resisting interrogation. This was going to be the stamina test from hell.
When the hood was removed she was alone in a dim basement with moldy walls and a smell of bad drains. Her hands were still cuffed behind her back; the chair was screwed to the floor. Next to her was a large, bare wooden table.
A door opened and a pale man with thinning blond hair entered. His shirt was undone at the collar. “You are a CIA spy.” The accent was Central European or Russian. “This is not a test.”
Very good, she thought. “I’m a reporter.”
“What is your name?”
“Marianne Lee.”
“So it says on your driver’s license. You are an American spy. What is your real name?”
Jenna gave him a level look. “I said my name is Marianne Lee. I’m a freelance reporter, from Boston.”
He tilted his head slightly and said in a neutral voice, “Your choice.”
The door opened again and two men in black T-shirts entered. They uncuffed her hands and lifted her onto the wooden table. Then both got onto the table with her. One of them clamped her head between his knees; the other sat on her legs and held down her arms so that she couldn’t move. A towel was thrown over her face. This she had not expected. Suddenly she was unhinged with panic. She heard the sound of water being poured into a metal bucket.
“Let’s begin.” The blond man said. “What is your real name?”
She struggled and cried out but it was impossible to move. The water started splashing onto her face. Seconds later her gag reflex kicked in, and they stopped. Her lungs were coughing, heaving as she caught her breath. So, not a proper water boarding, but … Jesus Christ! Another moment and she’d have started drowning. When they pulled off the towel she was shaking. The pale man’s face was looking over her, waiting.
Jenna stared at him, her lungs working. “Marianne Lee.”
The next day she was isolated in a cell with bright lights. The day after that she was locked in a tiny room that was pitch dark and cold, as if by refrigeration, and given only a meal of bread and water. Cameras watched her night and day. Jenna reacted in the only way she knew how. She retreated to the solitary realm deep inside herself, engaging in long, imagined conversations with Soo-min, and in them she found solace. She drew strength. Though she had long been self-sufficient in isolation, she could cherish this living link to her twin. Occasionally she heard a cry and guessed that her classmates were all sequestered in cells in the same building.
Each time she was interrogated the layers of Marianne Lee’s false identity were stripped from her one by one, like onion peel, until only the name was left. As time passed, the line between reality and simulation became blurred, to the point where she was no longer certain that this was a test.
On the fourth or fifth day she was seated in the interrogation room with her hands cuffed in front of her when the blond man called her a whore and slapped her across the face. The two goons in black T-shirts were standing behind her watching, for no other reason, she presumed, than to add an air of menace and humiliation. It wasn’t a hard slap, but she was at her wits’ end and it touched something deep and raw inside her. The effect was instant. She didn’t even think. She leapt out of her seat, pivoted ninety degrees on one foot and extended her right leg in a massive kick to the blond man’s upper chest. He went flying backward off his seat, legs in the air, and hit his head on the radiator. In one jump toward the man behind her to the right she gained the momentum to front-kick him under the chin. In a lightning turn she spin-kicked the man to the left, hitting him like a mule in the solar plexus, that delicate strip of the torso that the abdominal muscles didn’t quite cover. Three basic taekwondo moves.
One of the goons was clutching his jaw; the other was bent over double, groaning. Jenna stood over the blond man, holding out her hands. “Take the cuffs off.”
“Crazy bitch.” The man’s eyes were clenched shut and he was touching the back of his head. “The point was to see how long you held out, not to put us in the fucking hospital.” He’d lost the Russian accent. “We’re done here,” he shouted at the camera.
Moments later Fisk entered the room. His face was frowning, thoughtful. Jenna’s shoulders slumped when she saw him.
“Take me ho
me, please,” she said. “I’m through.”
“We’re going back to the Farm.”
“Why?” Her throat thickened and she felt tears coming. “I screwed up again. I’m out of here.”
Fisk put his hands in his pockets and looked at her with an odd smile. “Everyone gives their name in the end. But you didn’t. In fact … you’re the first trainee I’ve ever known to fight your way out of the interrogation.”
She stopped crying.
“You just rewrote the manual,” he said. Suddenly his face reddened and he was laughing helplessly. “I’ve got to get hold of that video.”
“The hell you are,” the blond man said. “I’m wiping it now.”
*
That night she lay on her bunk. She was deadened with fatigue but her mind was buzzing, wired. For some reason she was thinking of her father. The highest-ranking African American in the garrison. That legend about him had cast the rest of his biography into a shade she’d never fully examined. Her father, Captain Douglas Williams, so private and gentle, had been someone she’d never truly got to know. And yet he, Han, Soo-min, and Jee-min had been a close-knit, loving family for the time they’d had together—the most precious thing she’d had in her life. Nothing would bring that back.
This was about more than Soo-min, she realized. The reason she was here. What was it? Vengeance?
Some valve in her heart opened and she felt an iciness flood her veins to the tips of her fingers and toes, making her skin rise in goose bumps and her breathing slow. Her eyes widened in the dark. Yes, this was vengeance. She was ready to deal implacably with those who’d destroyed her family. She was ready to put all scruples aside and make those responsible account for Soo-min.
She was changing; she could feel it. After twelve lost years she was becoming … grounded, focused. She was being steeled by a clear, cold singularity of purpose. She shivered, pulled the bedspread over her shoulders, and turned onto her side, staring at the wall in the dark.
Fisk had been right. She did have a powerful motivation to serve.
The girl was studying a screen of news footage. Now and then she’d put a checkmark next to a name on a list. Watching over her shoulder, Jenna recognized last month’s mass parade in Kim Il-sung Square. The news camera paused on Kim Jong-il’s rotund young son, the anointed heir, clapping delightedly at a passing rocket-launcher. The girl’s hair was tied in manga schoolgirl braids, making her look about fourteen. “I’m trying to figure out who’s in favor, who’s out … ?” she said, glancing up at Jenna. “Depending on how close they’re standing to Kim. After a while you kinda get a feel for who’s important.”
The North Korea analysts at Langley—all of them young Asian Americans out of Ivy League colleges—occupied one pen of a vast cube-farm, a bright, circular open-plan area shared with hundreds of other analysts. Jenna and her group were on a day visit to meet them. Class H had started the course on analytic tradecraft. Across the vast space she could see Aisha introducing herself to the team that handled Iran, and the hulking figure of Menendez talking to the Cuba analysts.
A young guy with spiky hair sat in the next cubicle, leafing through editions of the Rodong Sinmun, North Korea’s national daily.
“I’m looking for shifts in Party rhetoric,” he said, compressing his lips together to stifle a yawn. “Changes of emphasis in the propaganda, that kind of stuff …”
Jenna was puzzled. This is intelligence analysis?
Their manager was the only non-Asian in the team. He was a drab, large-bottomed man called Simms, who gave Jenna a clammy handshake and peered at her myopically through a pair of rimless glasses. His tie matched his eyes, which were the color of canal water.
He showed her into one of Langley’s secure, bug-swept conference rooms, and surprised her by speaking in fluent Korean. He dropped his bombshell the moment they sat down.
“The Agency has no assets on the ground inside North Korea.”
His voice was a patient monotone.
“Really? I …” Jenna pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “… guess I’m surprised that the world’s largest intelligence organization has no one—”
“Perhaps you’ve watched too many thrillers,” he said with an unhappy laugh. “We have no sources there. No highly placed officer in the Korean People’s Army. No disenchanted scientist leaking nuclear secrets. No honey-trap beauty in Kim Jong-il’s pleasure brigade. Nothing.” He took the glasses off, wiped them, and held them up to the light. Without them his face was devoid of any interesting topography. “That’s not to say we haven’t tried to recruit. But I don’t need to tell you that the regime’s surveillance of its own people is total. Calls and letters are monitored. Radios and televisions are fixed to receive only government channels, travel is tightly controlled, people’s thoughts are molded and monitored. One step out of line and a person falls under suspicion. Informer networks infiltrate every level of society, from the politburo to the prison gulag.”
Jenna sat back. “Defectors bring intelligence—”
“Sure they do, but their escape routes are often long ones. By the time it reaches us their information is, what, months, years out of date?”
“You’ve got some of the smartest kids in the country out there doing Cold War guesswork,” she said. “Studying line-ups at parades? Kremlinology? Isn’t that as useless now as when we had the Soviet Union?”
Simms sighed. “North Korea is sealed shut from the world. Signals intelligence yields little. The people make no sound. There is no online traffic; very few cell phone calls; few radio signals, no chatter. The country is silent. And it is dark.” He leaned back in his chair and laced his hands behind his head, revealing the damp patches under his arms. “They’ve given you mission impossible, Marianne Lee. I’d say your chances of successfully running your own asset inside the North are—less—than—zero.” He smiled at her unpleasantly. “All you can do is interpret signs … and watch from above.”
“From above? You mean, like, Google Earth?”
“No, Miss Lee. Not like Google Earth.”
In a glowing control room deep beneath the New Headquarters Building, streams of satellite images were displaying, one after the other, on enormous computer screens. “We got a lot of hardware up there,” Simms said with an upward sweep of his hand. “Terrestrial-facing space telescopes … Lockheed U-2s flying at seventy thousand feet … radar imaging spysats—those bad-guys can see through clouds …”
Seated at the screens were the squints, the spysat analysts, about twenty of them, all men. Over the shoulder of one of them Jenna saw a satellite panorama of some location in Asia—brown mountain ranges dotted with tiny cotton balls of clouds; a patchwork of lime-green rice paddies. Simms said to him, “May I?” and leaned over to put his finger to a touchpad. Slowly the image expanded. With mounting amazement Jenna watched as field and mountain resolved into clumps of individual acacia trees and a long dirt road, and finally to a military jeep with an officer riding in the back. She could see the stars on his epaulettes, the phone in his hand. Simms stood back and folded his arms. “Taken from low earth orbit just now. About two hundred kilometers up. The lens adjusts for distortions caused by heat and air currents.” He turned to her with a thin smile. “Classified military technology.”
Jenna continued to stare at the screen. North Korea was a walled fortress … but its roof was open to the sky.
That evening at the Farm Jenna submitted a request to spend the analytic tradecraft course focusing on GEOINT, satellite geospatial intelligence, as the field most relevant to her training. The next day she was sent an encrypted link to access the squints’ secure server at Langley.
She had never seen detail like it. It was as if she’d been endowed with a superpower, and she played with it a while, learning to wield it. The spectral imaging resolution was formidable. Zooming in, the picture stayed pin sharp to within a square meter. At a missile silo under construction, arrowed and captioned by the squints, she could see
the welders on their cigarette break. She could read a red-lettered slogan carved into the slope of Mount Tonghung: WHAT THE PARTY COMMANDS—WE DO! A fox was running along a trail dotted with pinecones. An old woman served stew from a pan on a train platform. Scrolling southward to the Demilitarized Zone, the weaponized wasteland that formed the border with South Korea, Jenna saw the tented encampments for vast numbers of troops. Eastward toward the coast, she found an ghost-city, rusted and soot deadened, and zoomed in again to find packs of ragged children roaming its streets.
She felt omniscient, all seeing, an avenging angel sweeping over this dark land. In a shot taken on a chill, sunny morning thousands of prisoners stood in lines at a roll call, their emaciated bodies casting long shadows on the ground. This was Camp 15, the Yodok Concentration Camp, where the condemned were sent with three generations of their family to toil in quarries and cornfields. I’m seeing you, she thought, studying the ant-like figures pulling carts of rocks. You are not forgotten. She looked for Camp 22 near Chongjin, but the imaging was not complete. That camp was so vast that it encompassed farms, coal mines, and factories, all worked by slaves and the children of slaves, born in that place, for whom the camp was the universe entire.
The squints almost never analyzed or captioned this evidence of the regime’s crimes, she noticed. “Military targets are their priority,” Simms had told her.
This gave her an idea.
She e-mailed a request for spysat analysis of the Mayangdo Naval Base on the northeast coast. Within minutes she received a secure link to hi-res annotated images, with arrows pointing out dry docks, maintenance sheds, and submarine pens concealed beneath bomb-proof concrete. Some of the vessels were even visible in the water as they entered and departed. “Submarine: Romeo class (1,800 tons),” “midget submarine: Yono class (130 tons),” and—the one that sent a chill through her— “Submarine: Sango class (180 tons).”
It looked like some predatory fish returning to its lair. A Sango-class submarine, Mrs. Ishido had said. On a mission from the Mayangdo Naval Base. If it weren’t for the water making white breakers around the prow, its blackish-green hull would be almost invisible.
