False Flag

by Jack Slater

  It would be genocide, on a scale never before contemplated.

  Kim held his arms out. “How rude of me,” he said. “I interrupted. Boris, do carry on. Tell the young lady the true extent of your genius.”

  Boris was trembling now. Ikeda had wondered why, unlike the man’s research assistants, he had never entered the ward, nor even the observation deck that overlooked the horrific room. Now she had her answer.

  Guilt.

  “I —” he croaked. “At the Institute, at Vektor, my speciality was the genetic targeting of viruses. Isolating DNA markers carried only by specific subsets of the population, and modifying viruses to target only those carriers. It was just proof of concept, mostly. We used the common cold. But —”

  Kim cut in. “But it works just as well with Marburg.” He smiled. “And Mr. Savrasov was kind enough to steal a sample from his former employers. He really is extraordinarily conscientious. I couldn’t have done this without him.”

  The pieces slowly began to fall into place in Ikeda’s mind. Why the Chinese prisoners were dying, and the Americans still alive. It was a test, to see whether Savrasov’s tinkering had worked.

  Patently, it had.

  “But why?” she whispered. “What possible purpose could it serve?”

  She stared, wide-eyed, at the manic expression that had appeared on Kim’s face. Was he crazy? Did he simply want to watch the world burn—or was there a method to his madness, an underlying reason for his genocidal mania?

  “Millions will die,” the Russian moaned. “Tens of millions. You can’t release it, Colonel.”

  Kim clicked his fingers, beckoning a guard over. “Do not test my patience, Savrasov,” he growled. “And do not presume to tell me what I can and cannot do.”

  Boris cringed, as though waiting for a blow to rain down on his head. It didn’t come. Instead, Kim directed the guard to lead the Russian out of the room. Once the door had clicked closed behind them, the North Korean turned to Eliza.

  “A cowardly man.” He smiled, as though they were friends, and she hadn’t just witnessed his insanity. “And one whose usefulness is quickly drawing to an end, I fear.”

  Ikeda could barely comprehend the callous way that the man could dismiss a human life. But with the four American captives still lined up against the far wall, trembling with fear as they faced what looked for all the world like a firing squad, she did not dare anger him.

  “What I need to know,” Kim continued, “is whether you know the access codes to the flash drive that was in Mr. Alstyne’s care when he died.”

  He fixed Ikeda with a piercing stare, as though probing her expression for an answer.

  When it did not come—at least not instantly—Kim unbuttoned his leather holster, and withdrew the sleek black pistol contained inside it. He stared at it absently for a few seconds, and then, in one swift movement, raised it and fired.

  The sound buffeted Ikeda’s eardrums, almost deafening her in the cramped confines of the interrogation room. She jerked backwards, the chair falling away from behind her, only to be stopped by the cold metal of her cuffs digging into her wrists.

  Next, a scream split the air.

  Ikeda watched as a body slumped against the ground. The body of Andy, husband to a beautiful woman now crouching over his body, hands caressing her dead lover’s face, smearing blood across his cheeks as tears fell freely from her eyes.

  “What did you do?” Ikeda spat, attempting to pull her wrists free of the cops that bound them in place. “Why did you kill him?”

  Kim replaced his pistol in its holster, completely unaffected by the death he had just caused. The guards had flinched at the unexpected sound, but they too seemed impassive, unmoved by the man’s sudden death.

  Not death, murder.

  “My men will return you to the laboratory. You have twenty-four hours to supply me with the information I require. If you fail to do so by that point, I will give you the choice of executing your compatriots yourself, or forcing my men to do it.”

  He leered at Ikeda, true happiness seeming to cross his face for the first time since they had met. “And I assure you, if you choose the latter option, their deaths will be slow indeed.”

  Kim clicked his fingers one last time, summoning a guard. Ikeda was led out of the room, the colonel’s macabre offer replaying over and over again inside her head. One question reared its ugly head.

  If that was what he was willing to do when he thought she knew something, what would he do when he found out the flash drive was fake?

  41

  Trapp was equipped only with a suppressed pistol, a fighting knife, a slim night vision scope, and just shy of two decades of experience fighting in every conceivable environment.

  In truth, few of his missions had ever worried him like this one. For the second time in under a year, he found himself fighting a war which he was woefully unprepared to win—except this time, he wasn’t just faced with an implacable enemy, but an entire country of them. This side of the DMZ, he had to consider everyone an adversary.

  Ordinarily, on an operation like this one, Trapp’s primary role would simply be surveillance. He would have crawled to his observation spot high up in the mountains on his belly days before, built an undetectable hide, and kept watch.

  Ordinarily, the fighting would have been someone else’s job. A strike team would be sitting on stealth helicopters operated by the army’s elite Nightstalker regiment, waiting for Trapp to give the order. And then all hell would break loose.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight, Trapp would have to go it alone. Ikeda’s life—if she was still alive, that is—hung in the balance. As did so many others, cruelly and unwittingly caught up in a convoluted conspiracy beyond their ability to understand. One whose full breadth even Trapp did not yet grasp.

  Though he was beginning to paint a picture.

  For another man, the thought that so many lives hung on his next move might have been crippling. But not Trapp. For him, it was just another Sunday.

  Moving with excruciating slowness, Trapp stood. Whatever moon might at that very moment have been crossing the heavens was obscured by thick cloud that now cloaked the mountainside. It was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the thick fog meant that unless an enemy patrol quite literally walked into him, Trapp would remain perfectly concealed by the weather.

  On the other, that same fog meant that he was operating blind, and since the thick blanket seemed to absorb all sound as well, he was also deaf.

  Trapp took the time to dispose of all visible evidence of his presence. In the darkness, it was impossible to say whether he’d succeeded completely, but he did the best he could. By the time anyone discovered this spot, he hoped he would be long gone, with Eliza Ikeda in his arms and in possession of the information he’d been sent to acquire.

  But the Hangman was a diligent professional.

  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, hell—nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand—sloppiness on a matter like this would have no negative repercussions. But Trapp was a percentages guy. And when the bet was his own life, he preferred not to test the odds. They wouldn’t always be in his favor.

  Once the job was done, he began to pick his way down the mountainside, following an old goat track carved into the rock. The air was cooler now, the heat of the day long since dissipated this high in the mountains.

  In a little less than an hour, Trapp made it most of the way down the mountain. He paused several times to ensure he wasn’t being followed, and used the time to study the army camp. Through the night vision scope, the world was lit up a ghostly green.

  Not for the first time, Trapp marveled at how dark the world was north of the demilitarized zone. Unlike the rest of the Western world, North Korea was plunged into darkness the moment the sun disappeared below the horizon. Only the cities—and that mainly meant Pyongyang—received a consistent supply of electricity through the night.

  Even the military installati
on below him did not entirely escape the curse of darkness. Most of the barracks buildings were unlit—especially those in the adjoining prison camp. The major administration buildings glowed with electric light, as did a searchlight that—very occasionally—danced across the perimeter fence.

  The first time he spied the beam of light dancing across the scrubby patch of cleared land that surrounded both the prison camp and the military base, Trapp froze. It wasn’t long after night had fallen, and he briefly wondered whether his best laid plans had already met their untimely demise.

  Briefly.

  Whoever was in charge of monitoring the camp’s perimeter defense was either lazy, incompetent—or both. A two-man patrol circled the entire camp on the hour, every hour, and always traveling in a counter-clockwise direction. Other than that, and the searchlight occasionally firing up, briefly scanning the base’s surroundings, there was little obvious security.

  Trapp wondered whether he was missing something. Perhaps the lack of guards and guns and dogs was a trick. But his gut told him not. The simplest explanation was often the best one, and in this case, the simplest explanation was that up here, in the mountains, in the depths of North Korea, they simply did not expect to be attacked.

  After all, since the end of the Korean War in the ʹ50s, through all the fiery rhetoric, the nuclear tests, the missile launches and the sanctions, no one had come close to invading North Korea. Neither was the population a threat—starving and browbeaten, they were no more likely to rise up against their oppressors than animals rebel against farmers.

  Trapp cleared his mind and concentrated, scanning the perimeter fence one last time.

  The main entrance to the camp was lit up like the Hollywood sign, and even in the distance Trapp could make out enough bristling weaponry to take on an entire battalion. But he had no intention of knocking on the front door.

  No, as he stopped for the final time, crouching low and bringing the scope to his eye, a mirthless smile stretched across his face. At the rear of the camp lay an enormous, open garbage pit. The noxious smell assaulted Trapp’s nostrils even at this distance, and he hated to think how bad it would be when he got closer.

  As he watched, a man exited a small gate that was watched by a single guard, sitting on a stool, with his rifle resting against the base’s chain-link fence. He swayed a little—visibly drunk, then strode into the filth and undid his pants. Trapp couldn’t see the stream of urine that emerged, but he knew exactly what the man was doing. He’d watched as a procession of half a dozen like-minded individuals—or perhaps the same guy, half a dozen times—had left the encampment to relieve themselves.

  As the man returned, the guard at the gate barely registered his presence. Another notch in the plus column.

  Trapp smiled in the darkness, the mirthless expression stretching across his face like a warning. He’d found his way in.

  Trapp hid amidst the filth, smearing his body with thick mud and covering himself. He removed his fighting knife from its sheath and settled in to wait for a target to present itself.

  It did not take long.

  Within twenty minutes, a door swung open on the nearest barracks building to the camp’s fence, and a uniformed soldier staggered out, followed by a blast of unfamiliar karaoke before the door thudded home once again. Trapp’s wraithlike eyes studied him every step of the way.

  The soldier walked in an uneven S-pattern, swaying as he walked and clutching a bottle of beer. Scenes like this one played out in every army the world over. Trapp knew too well that if there was one thing soldiers were good at, it was drinking themselves stupid.

  He followed the man’s progress as he exited the camp by the same route his predecessors had followed, undoing his fly before he was even out of the gate, one hand pressed against the rifle slung over his shoulder. Once again, the gate guard did not look up. In fact, Trapp suspected he was asleep. He certainly wasn’t moving.

  The drunk soldier staggered into the garbage dump on the edge of the North Korean military base. He spread his legs wide, allowed his pants to drop fully around his ankles, and began to empty his bladder.

  The second the urine began to fall, Trapp surged into action, exploding out of the darkness too quickly for the man to even register his presence. The knife’s carbon-tempered steel entered the base of the soldier’s neck, severing his brainstem immediately.

  Trapp cushioned the man’s fall, wincing as the bottle of beer closed in his hand smashed against the ground. The sound that ensued carried into the stillness of the night, and he froze, stilling even his own heartbeat as he waited to find out if anyone had heard it.

  He waited sixty seconds, and then another minute just to be certain. Only then did he lay the man’s corpse against the ground, leaving the knife in place to stem the flow of blood until his work was done. He took no pride in killing this man, who was no doubt a mere conscript, snatched from his family and forced to serve a murderous, evil regime.

  It was men like this whose lives stained his conscience. It was deaths like this one that kept Jason Trapp up at night. He saw the faces of all those he had killed before he slipped into unconsciousness. He knew he would see them until the day he died.

  But right now, he forced himself to squash his conscience. On a night like this, it would only get him killed.

  Efficiently, Trapp stripped the dead guard naked. A small trickle of blood had leaked from the man’s open wound, soaking the collar of his uniform, but unlike its former owner, Trapp could live with it. He took off his own clothes and shrugged on the uniform. It was tight around the chest—thankfully absurdly oversized for the starving conscript—and the pants rode up above his ankle, but from a distance it would do.

  If they get close enough to see me, Trapp thought wryly, I’m already dead.

  The disguise didn’t need to be perfect. In truth, the CIA operative’s enormous size would set him apart from most, if not all, of the North Koreans he’d watched operating inside the base’s fences the second someone set eyes on him.

  But for just an instant, it might give Trapp the advantage he needed to survive. He would take it.

  He slung the man’s weapon across his chest, leaving the strap over his shoulder. The rifle was dirty, probably hadn’t been cleaned in months, but Trapp knew that it would fire. The Russians knew a few things about war, and they knew a few more about how to equip a poorly trained conscript army.

  The AK-47 was a masterful piece of engineering. It would fire wet, dry, with mud in the breach or sand in the barrel. The one in his hands was a North Korean version, the Type 58, and produced locally, but it would get the job done.

  Then again, it would also wake the living dead. Trapp kept it, just in case, but knew that if he was forced to fire it, then all hope of making it out of the North Korean army camp without being detected had just gone up in smoke.

  He hid the man’s body as best he could, disguising it among a pile of garbage. In the cold light of day, the trick would be quickly discovered. Trapp hoped that by then, he would be long gone. He quickly surveyed his work and decided that it would do. Then he turned and began to stagger toward the camp’s side entrance, matching the gait of the previous owner—whose uniform he was currently wearing.

  In his right hand, held reversed, was his fighting knife, blade now wiped clean of the dead soldier’s blood. He didn’t want to kill the guard, too. But if it came to it, Trapp knew that he would not flinch.

  He thanked the fact that the darkness was almost all-consuming on this side of the North Korean military base. He kept the helmet so that it hung low over his face, disguising the color of his skin—even his weathered complexion was lighter than that of the man he had just killed.

  But in the end, it was unnecessary. As he closed on the gate, Trapp heard the guard’s light snoring and breathed a sigh of relief. The man would never know how close he had come to a brush with destiny.

  Casting one last look at the man’s closed eyelids, Trapp slipped into the milit
ary base, cushioning the action of the gate closing behind him.

  He was in.

  42

  Mike Mitchell paced the sub-basement beneath the CIA’s New Headquarters Building in Langley, Virginia. It was an action with which he was becoming uncomfortably familiar. At this very moment, he knew, Jason Trapp would have begun his insertion into the North Korean military encampment.

  “How long?” he growled.

  Dr. Timothy Greaves tapped his keyboard and briefly glanced down at his screen. “Five minutes until the keyhole satellite begins its pass. We’ll have about forty minutes time over target, and then we’re blind again until ten this evening.”

  “Will that be enough?”

  The two analysts—Kyle Partey and Timothy Greaves—looked at each other with discomfort before Greaves replied, shrugging, “It’s a big, mountainous country. Plenty of places to hide.”

  Mitchell briefly closed his eyes, but found no peace in the darkness. Instead, images of a biological weapon loose in the streets of America flashed on the back of his eyelids. Pictures of sick and dying children, of mothers, fathers, grandparents weeping over what they had lost. Images of riots at grocery stores, fighting breaking out at the fuel pumps.

  It was everything he had spent his entire career trying to prevent.

  But in all those years, at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the real threat had come from terrorists, not nation states. After 9/11, the United States military and intelligence communities became extremely proficient at identifying terrorist networks and hunting them down before they could commit atrocities in the homeland.

  That new skill had come at a cost.

  Analysts had been taken away from their traditional desks and forced to watch over Middle Eastern goat herders, causing once finely-honed proficiencies and prized local knowledge to wither away. And now the consequences of those decisions were coming home to roost. Once again, America faced mortal peril at the hands of an old enemy—an enemy, in fact, with which it was still technically at war.