False Flag

by Jack Slater

  Although the cold had kickstarted her mind, pouring fuel on the pyre and lighting a match, sparking her gray matter into action, she still had no idea where she was, or what was happening to her. She struggled to comprehend what was going on.

  Open your eyes.

  She did as the insistent voice inside her head commanded, prising her eyelids open. They were sticky with sleep and resisted her efforts, like a long-stuck door groaning in protest. But although her vision returned, it wasn’t very revealing. The room she was in was cloaked in darkness. Eliza moved her head from side to side, searching for a frame of reference, or any clue as to how she had ended up in this predicament.

  She was in a warehouse. Crates loomed out of the darkness like Soviet statues, big and blocky, stretching twenty feet upward on their racks. The only light emanated from small windows cut high overhead, into the walls of the structure. Far off, in the distance, she heard the dull whirring of machinery.

  A wave of nausea grew in Eliza’s gut, and gave her no time to prepare. A hot puddle of vomit coursed up her throat, the stomach acid burning its tender flesh, and she shifted her mouth to the side just in time for it to spray out onto the floor, and not her own body. Her stomach heaved, as though physically trying to expel the last remnants of whatever chemical the North Koreans had dosed her with to put her to sleep, the muscles in her gut writhing. Tears stung her eyes and fell freely onto her bare skin, hot then cold.

  Exhausted, Eliza collapsed, her chin slumping against her chest. The nausea faded, not disappearing entirely, but prowling in the background like a monster in the darkness. She accepted the momentary respite gratefully, regaining control of her breath.

  In, one, two; out, three, four.

  In, one, two; out, three, four.

  The trick worked. The panic hiding out in the far recesses of Eliza’s mind subsided, allowing her brain to refocus on the situation at hand. She was naked, in a freezing cold room, imprisoned in a darkness that barely allowed her to make out her own frame. But she was alive, and she could think. Puzzle out what had happened to her and settle on a plan that would get her out of this mess.

  Experimentally, Eliza attempted to move her fingers. She wiggled them and felt the digits respond in the darkness. Next, she tried to move her right hand, lifting it–but was unsuccessful. The movement started, then almost instantly stopped dead, with the force of an iron door slamming shut.

  The fear that Eliza had been biting down on returned in full force. She was bound by the wrists, and she realized, by her ankles. Someone had stripped her naked and tied her to a chair. Overhead, an HVAC unit rumbled, pumping out a cold that bit at her exposed skin, causing goosebumps to rise like mountains in the darkness.

  Was she hurt?

  Ikeda considered the question, her mind probing her body to arrive at an answer. She attempted to move, limb by limb, and found no pain other than that dull throbbing emanating from her skull, where she had been hit. So she was okay. Or at least as okay as anyone knocked out by the butt of a pistol has any right to feel.

  She puzzled over her options.

  Like a captured soldier, Eliza knew that she only had one duty: to escape. But right now, she did not see how that was possible. Her wrists and ankles were bound tightly to what felt like a chair beneath her. And though her eyes were beginning to acclimatize to the gloom, she could make out no tools that she could use to break free of her binds.

  She cast her senses further into the inky gloom. Her eyes were useless: capable only of picking out objects in her immediate vicinity and tricking her into seeing threats where there were none. Instead, she stilled her own breath and listened.

  At first, Eliza heard nothing useful. The world was confined to a cone comprised of little more than her own body: the groaning of her stomach, the thundering of her heart, the rushing blood in her eardrums. But she waited, calming her awareness of her body’s instinctive processes, forcing the consciousness to recede.

  Presently, the cone of her awareness grew. By painstaking inches, at first, then yards, then expanding at pace, like a bat soaring through the night sky. She took in the whir of the HVAC unit, the rustling of scurrying rodents, the dull thundering of her own heartbeat. She listened, and her mind created a mental map of her surroundings.

  Though her eyes deceived her into believing the darkness might stretch out forever, her ears told Eliza the truth. The warehouse was small, probably no larger than a couple of thousand square feet. Her nose fought the acrid tag of vomit, and picked out musky undertones: sweet scents and savory ones; the telltale sign of food.

  Ikeda’s stomach writhed as she realized that not only was she starving, but she was like a man dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean. There was food all around her, but she had no way of accessing it. It was the cruelest form of torture.

  You hope, she reminded herself caustically. Whoever the Koreans were, they almost certainly hadn’t forgotten about her. She had no doubt that they would be back, searching for answers. And with Alstyne most certainly dead, the only person left to answer them was her.

  A sound penetrated the darkness, deep and sonorous, and all-encompassing. Eliza flinched, her restraints biting into her wrists as she pulled against them. Reassured that it didn’t pose an immediate threat, she puzzled over what the hell it was – and of any clue it might provide.

  A train? Was she near the tracks?

  No.

  A ship’s horn.

  Having grown up on the seafaring island nation of Japan, and then finished her schooling on Hawaii’s Big Island, Eliza Ikeda was no stranger to the sounds of the ocean. And without a doubt, she knew, that was where she was. Not on a ship, but a warehouse near the waterfront.

  And that could mean only two things: either the Koreans intended to kill her, then dispose of her body at sea.

  Or…

  A chill ran down Ikeda’s spine, standing out even against the cool of the air-conditioning, which had caused the temperature in the warehouse to plummet to what felt like no more than ten degrees.

  If they were hiding out in a warehouse by the sea, and if her assumption about their country of origin was correct, the logical conclusion was that they intended to take her back to North Korea with them.

  Ikeda’s teeth began to chatter. She closed her eyes and offered up a silent prayer, hoping that someone up there was listening. This wasn’t just a nightmare, this was her nightmare. She had been raised an only child, not because her parents hadn’t wanted siblings for her, but because of the disappearance of her mother when Eliza was just a young girl. And like any child struggling to understand why her family wasn’t like all the others, Eliza had asked her father why she didn’t have a mommy.

  “Go to bed,” he’d replied, fingers clutched around the mouth of a dark brown bottle.

  That bottle, and thousands like it, were a fixture of Eliza’s childhood. They contained beer, at first. Then whiskey–initially expensive, then cheaper by the year, as the taste ceased to matter, forgotten in favor of the fiery liquid’s numbing embrace.

  “Where’s Mommy?” Eliza had insisted, hands on her hips, face contorted not with sadness, but anger. Even back then, she was a headstrong child.

  “She’s gone,” her dad had growled. “And she ain’t never coming back.”

  Eliza crossed her arms. “What do you mean gone? Gone where?”

  The bottle sailed through the air, another victim of a drunk’s irrepressible rage. Frothy liquid danced from its lips as it cartwheeled, then collided with the kitchen wall. Her father sprang to his feet, his expression black as the memories he was drowning assailed him once more.

  His arm shot out, finger pointing almost in accusation. “Bed, now!”

  “No! Not until you tell me.”

  Eliza didn’t stomp her foot, but she may as well have. Her father blinked, then crumpled as a wave of guilt overcame him. He was barely holding it together, she knew that even then. He collapsed into the chair, fingers searching automatically fo
r the bottle, now lying in shards against the wall. “They took her,” he whispered.

  “Who?”

  “The North Koreans.”

  Now Eliza blinked. She hadn’t dared to ask her father about what happened to her mom again, not after that night. But even growing up on a US army base in Japan, surrounded by American children and taught in American schools, Eliza had heard the rumors, the tales told by children on the playground.

  Tales of Japanese women stolen in the night and spirited across the sea, never to be seen again. Taken to North Korea for God knows what purpose. Perhaps that was why Ikeda had learned Korean in the first place. Even in Japan, a close neighbor – and for centuries the fiercest rival of the Korean people—few spoke the language.

  But she did.

  And Eliza learned the truth, too. About the hundreds of Japanese women, just like her mother, stolen to order by the North Korean state. Taken to serve as wives for their elite, to teach Japanese in their espionage schools, and perhaps merely as a twisted act of revenge for the centuries of Japanese pillage of the Korean Peninsula.

  Whether that was truly her mother’s fate, neither Eliza nor her father would ever know. Like hundreds of others, plucked from the beaches and towns that dotted Japan’s western shore, she became a ghost–never to be heard from again.

  And although Eliza had no clear memories of her mom, just a composite, constructed from fragments of her father’s insensible ramblings as he gazed into the depths of the bottle, and the photo books hidden away so that her face couldn’t trouble him, Akira Ikeda had left her daughter with the gift of the Korean language.

  A language whose sibilant tones now drifted into the warehouse…

  Eliza froze in the darkness, holding her breath–more out of instinct than any other reason. The words were indistinct, but they were getting closer, accompanied by the scraping of boots against concrete, and the screech of a poorly oiled hinge being wrenched open. It was difficult to make out which direction the voices were coming from, but as the door opened, Eliza realized it was from behind her. She silently cursed her restraints as she attempted to crane her neck left, then right. It was as though her body was locked into a straitjacket.

  “– the colonel will never know. Why not have some fun?”

  There was a crash, as though someone was being slammed up against a wall, and a second voice spoke, its tone low and harsh. “He knows everything, you fool. If you think one fuck is worth risking your life for, be my guest.”

  A wave of nausea rose in Eliza’s stomach once more, but this time she knew it wasn’t a result of the knock her head had sustained. The men were talking about her. Talking about abusing her.

  Eliza Ikeda had never felt so alone – or so vulnerable. Secured to the chair beneath her, she knew she had no prospect of escape, no way to fight back. Whatever these men planned for her, she would be no more than an unwilling passenger. She had no way of evening the odds.

  At least, not physically.

  The first voice spoke again. “What makes this bitch so different? She’s just some Chinese whore. Or…” His tone changed, and Eliza painted a picture in her head of a sly expression crawling across his face. “Is it that you want her for yourself?”

  “Jung, I have a wife,” the second voice replied with disgust. “And you know why. We let the American die –”

  “So what?” the first voice interjected. “We have the drive. Let’s put a bullet through the girl’s skull and get the hell out of here. The longer we wait, the more likely the Chinese find us. And if they do, we’re dead men.”

  “We have the drive,” the second man conceded. “But it’s encrypted. Without the American, it’s useless to us. Are you volunteering to tell the colonel we failed him?”

  There was a pause. “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. The bitch is our only hope of surviving this. So we had better get some answers from her, hadn’t we?”

  “What if she doesn’t know anything?”

  The first man was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was low and angry, with such malevolent menace that Eliza couldn’t help but fear for her life. “Then we’re fucked.”

  There was another pause, and Eliza pictured the two men staring each other down. And then the scraping of boots against concrete resumed, and they closed on with every step. She gripped the arms of the chair beneath her tightly, her entire body shivering, no longer from the cold. A flashlight clicked on, and its beam played out across the scraped, oil-stained concrete floor. It kicked up for a second, revealing crate after crate of foodstuffs, packaged and ready for export.

  Eliza realized she was right. She was near the docks. If she managed to free herself, there would be a thousand routes she could take without getting caught.

  If she managed to free herself…

  Her head snapped left, and it was only a second later she realized that she had been slapped–hard.

  She groaned in pain, her ears ringing, tears stinging her eyes. The action physically rocked the chair off its legs as Eliza was forced to one side, and the movement wrenched her wrists in their restraints, burning the tender skin underneath.

  The flashlight jumped upward, its beam pointed directly at Eliza’s eyes.

  “Tell me your name,” the man said.

  Her brain groaned from the repeated assaults it had sustained over the past few hours. Adrenaline flooded into her system, but as her mind recovered, it was like attempting to run through quicksand. The harder she worked, the further she sank.

  She opened her mouth to reply, but her lips moved wordlessly.

  Another hit, and her face screamed with pain. Even through it, Eliza knew that something was wrong; her subconscious screamed a warning. What was it?

  English, she realized. He’s speaking in English.

  It was a trap. The man was attempting to bait her into revealing her true identity. He clearly suspected she was more than the escort she’d presented herself as.

  “Who are you?” she replied in flawless Mandarin, purposefully sagging forward against her restraints. “I don’t speak English.”

  Tears and saliva and snot streamed down Eliza’s face. Though she could not see herself, she knew she must look a pitiful sight. It was perfectly fine with her. She didn’t expect it would slow this psychopath down but maybe, just maybe, it would give him pause for thought.

  “Tell me the truth,” her interrogator growled, still speaking heavily accented English. “We know who you are.”

  “Please,” she whimpered in reply, “please don’t do this to me. I promise, if you let me go I won’t say anything. To anyone, I swear it…”

  Eliza allowed herself to cry. Cunning mixed with gut-clenching fear, and the tears that fell from her eyes were more real than she dared admit. The beam of the flashlight still hovered over her eyes, blinding her.

  The interrogator paused, allowing the silence to stretch out. “Who are you?”

  Eliza realized that this time, he had spoken in Mandarin. She counted it as a victory.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” she cried. “I don’t know who that man is, I promise.”

  Another slap. Eliza’s head rocked back once more, and this time the ringing in her ears did not stop so quickly. Nausea cramped her stomach, and it took all of her resolve to bite back on a wave of vomit.

  “You’re lying.”

  “I swear it, I’m not. Please, just let me go.”

  As her lips moved, Eliza’s mind worked furiously. She didn’t expect her deception to convince these men. Whoever they were, they were hardened killers, that much was clear, and would be as relentless as hunting hounds. It would take more than a woman crying to throw them off the scent.

  No, Ikeda knew that even if they decided she was innocent, that she was a bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time, they would not let her go. Either they would put a bullet in her brain and dump her in the sea, or torture her to death and leave her right here.

  She didn’t
allow herself to consider the third option: that these men might use her before they killed her.

  There was only one way she was getting out of this. She needed to buy herself enough time and space to survive, so that when an opportunity to escape presented itself, she was both strong enough–and alive enough–to seize it.

  And the only way to ensure both of those outcomes was to allow her interrogators to believe that she might just know something.

  Another hit, fast and powerful, impacted her stomach. It drove the wind from her lungs, made her retch with pain, saliva flying from her mouth and sliding down her chin. Eliza gasped desperately for air, but it was no use.

  “OK,” she whimpered, false tears mixing with real ones in her desire to convince her captors she was telling the truth. “The American, he paid me, that’s all. To steal a USB drive.”

  A chair scraped against the concrete floor, and the leader of the men, the man known as Jung, settled across from her, a gleam in his eyes. “Who are you?”

  “An escort.”

  Jung sneered. “A whore.”

  Eliza set her chin with determination, as though insulted, as though she had to live with that kind of insult every day.

  There was a kernel of truth to it.

  Though she was no prostitute, the world of espionage was a man’s game—or so they liked to insist. Many operatives, particularly from the old school, believed that a man could do any job better. They looked down on the ‘skirts’ as evidence of political correctness gone mad. Ikeda knew better, of course. Her assassination of Emmanuel Alstyne just that evening had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were places that a woman could go that her male counterparts could not.

  She could do things that the men simply couldn’t.

  And so her performance wasn’t merely an act. Ikeda’s voice came out low and hard. “An escort,” she spat, eyes flashing red.

  “I don’t believe you,” Jung replied. He snapped his fingers, and barked a command, and the second North Korean commando left the room. He returned a second later dragging the body of Alstyne himself—stiff and cold, and quite obviously dead.