The shooter up in the rafters stifled a laugh, watching through his scope as Naya exploded in anger at the foreigner they both hated so much but for different reasons. Patrick Featherstone.
“Shouldn’t be involved?” Naya shouted. “How dare you talk to me that way! You’re not even Japanese, how could you possibly understand the way things are done in this country? It’s completely beyond me why Director Hayashida insisted on having you play even a small role in security, let alone be the main adviser!”
Patrick smiled as Naya raged, which made Naya even angrier, but the little despot had been a thorn in Patrick’s side for weeks, and Patrick enjoyed being his superior in the chain of command. Naya was about to continue his tirade when an authoritative voice from behind made them both turn. It was Kazuo Hayashida, the new director of the JIA.
“Gentlemen, it’s time we begin the day’s planned drills. The Opening Ceremony begins in exactly two weeks. Mister Featherstone, you may begin your presentation.” Now it was Hayashida’s turn to feel Naya’s wrath.
“Mister Director, having a foreign chief security consultant would never have happened under your predecessor who understood the Japanese way!” Naya turned and glared at Patrick as he stalked away. Hayashida sighed in exasperation. Naya was a lifer and couldn’t be fired.
As this was going on, a young woman in a navy blue suit came up to Hayashida’s side. The contrast between the suit and her light-colored hair was striking. Her facial features were somehow both particular and archetypal. Hayashida said something to her in English. She smiled sympathetically and nodded in response.
Patrick allowed himself a parting smirk at Naya, then glanced briefly at the young woman as he ascended the riser and turned to face the men in blue jumpsuits. The shooter up in his hide squinted through his scope in deep concentration on the scene unfolding on the field below. It was almost time…
“First of all,” Patrick Featherstone began, “I want to thank all of you for being part of the most highly trained Olympic security force ever assembled. I’d now like to begin with a review of the potential hostile actors we could be facing. And starting today, two weeks out from the Opening Ceremony, we are on heightened alert.” He proceeded to go through a checklist of the groups and individuals he considered the main threats. Deputy Assistant Watari, who also despised Seiji Naya, had taken his place by Patrick’s side in a show of international solidarity.
High up in the canopy of the stadium, the shooter keyed a text into the single-use phone he had brought. Patrick felt his phone vibrate but decided to leave it until later. The start of the briefing was already late as it was. He began to run through the usual suspects of terror groups and detailing each of their strengths and weaknesses when JIA Director Kazuo Hayashida was called out of the stadium. As soon as Naya saw him exit, he walked quickly back to the riser where Patrick was making his presentation. He had not finished with this gaijin.
Patrick was turning a page on his clipboard when two shots rang out in quick succession, their combined sound waves caroming around the oval structure and out the huge oculus above the track. Naya and Watari lay flat on their backs, gaping holes where their hearts had been. Everyone in the security detail froze in shock. And then chaos broke out, doubling down on Sun Tzu’s adage: “Kill one, terrify a thousand.”
High up in the rafters of the stadium, the mother tombi was alone again with her hatchlings.
CHAPTER 2
Later that day
The incongruity of meal, presentation, and setting was intentionally designed to throw the diners off their bearings and remind them who held the power in this room on the third floor of Toyama Storage, a business in the dockland section of Yokohama. And what a room it was. The real purpose of Toyama Storage was revealed when a black-suited, middle-aged man ceremoniously raised a red velvet curtain and unveiled a coffin which the man’s two sons wheeled into the middle of the viewing room. For this was a corpse hotel, one of Japan’s most recent and bizarrely ingenious methods of reconciling its mounting elderly death rate with the scarcity of crematoria in a country eternally beset by the NIMBY mentality.
The host of the day’s festivities was a man known to all simply as Mr. Lee. He had been a close confidante and successor of the occupant of the coffin, Comrade Moon, one of the most notorious criminals North Korea ever produced and the patron martyr of the people assembled in the viewing room. The expression on his face in the photo atop the coffin was a repellent-to-the-point-of-fascinating mix of charm and wickedness that went far in explaining how he had risen close to the pinnacle of power in the DPRK…
A shy but friendly boy, on his eleventh birthday Comrade Moon witnessed his mother being obliterated by an American bomb during the Korean War. Not a trace of her remained. From that day forward a new person was born, one who would never allow himself to trust another human being, one who would sell his soul for power, if he had one to sell. But it had been obliterated along with his mother by the American bomb.
Attending the prestigious Mangyongdae Revolutionary School in Pyongyang, he was two years younger than the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, a priggish know-it-all who enjoyed lording it over other students and even faculty and administrators, or as much as someone of Kim’s runty stature was able to lord it over anyone. Moon, however, knowing a meal ticket when he saw one, cultivated a friendship with the son of Great Leader Kim Il-sung. Unlike Kim Jong-il, Moon was tall and athletic, which caused no end of jealousy for Kim fils, who in later years would describe his appearance as that of a “rat turd.” Moon persisted, however, since he could tell even at that age that Jong-il, through his incessant toadying up to his father, was destined for the highest reaches of the regime. And so, in order to curry favor with Jong-il, Moon immersed himself in kimilsungsa, or Kim Il-sung Thought, and came to Kim the younger with request after request for elucidation on some arcane point in the many volumes that had allegedly flowed from the Great Leader’s pen.
Years later, Moon’s encyclopedic mastery of Kim Il-sung Thought led to an audience with the Great Leader himself that Kim Jong-il arranged. But the meeting backfired on Kim Jong-il, as the father saw in Moon the role of regent for his son, a role that Jong-il deeply resented, especially since Moon was younger than he. Thus, after the Great Leader died, Kim Jong-il purged Moon from his lofty position, cognizant of his potential as an adversary.Eventually Moon wheedled his way back into Jong-il’s good graces by pledging his undying fealty and guaranteeing it with his life—and that of his family. Kim Jong-il, never one to take the high-sounding words of underlings at face value, demanded literal proof. At one of Kim’s legendary drinking parties not long thereafter, Comrade Moon signaled for everyone’s attention and once again pledged his loyalty in effusive terms. At the end of his bathos-sodden speech, he drew a pistol from his jacket and shot his wife in the head. A shocked silence fell over the other members of the party, who then hurried away. Kim embraced Moon, pledged his own loyalty in return, and the two of them proceeded to drink their way through three days of mourning for Moon’s wife. A dozen concubines from Kim’s personal stable were brought in to help comfort the grief-stricken widower, and at the end of the three days, Kim awarded Moon the post of deputy director of the People’s Office of Services.
Moon’s next rung in the ladder of power was to marry Kim’s sister. She died of acute alcoholism within a year, but he was now part of The Family. Overnight, he was admitted into the Dear Leader’s inner circle and made head of State Security, the secret police.
He took to dressing flamboyantly, flaunting his access to the Dear Leader with the extravagances that such proximity entailed. His closeness to Kim also enabled him to act with impunity toward underlings, with more than a few of them meeting untimely deaths by his own hand. Thus, in his hand-crafted shoes of the finest Italian leather, he stood splendidly astride a sinful nexus of elegance and criminality.
Moon’s next act was to create Bureau 39, a
massively tentacled conglomerate of wickedness shrouded in mystery and bringing in billions a year for the senior Pyongyang leadership through drug smuggling, slave labor in the North Korean gulag system, and the counterfeiting of American one-hundred-dollar bills, known as Super Ks. But now Comrade Moon lay in a coffin at Toyama Storage, slain four years earlier during the overthrow of the Kim Jong-un regime by a Japan-born foreigner who went by the name of Patrick Featherstone.
Comrade Moon’s successor, Mr. Lee, offered no information about himself, not even a first name or background, although some said he was of North Korean ancestry but had been raised in the Chinese city of Dandong, right across the Yalu River from North Korea. He spoke the languages of both countries with native fluency, along with English and Japanese. Mr. Lee’s coyness about all aspects of his identity stemmed not from any sense of modesty or shame, but rather from the tangled web that was his personal history. In fact, “Mr. Lee” was a pseudonym that he and Comrade Moon had decided on to conceal his double identity, one of them legitimate, the other viciously corrupt.
After the red velvet curtain was raised and the corpse hotel’s manager’s two sons had wheeled Comrade Moon’s coffin into the middle of the viewing room, the main door of the room was then opened for the dozen young men who waited outside. All twelve were impeccably groomed and dressed to the nines in ultra-lightweight woolen suits by Armani and Brioni. They were members of the Bonghwajo, or Torch Club, children of the DPRK power structure who had been unceremoniously booted out of their luxurious homes in what was known as the “Pyonghattan” section of the North Korean capital after the Rising Tide revolution that toppled the Kim regime. The revolution had taken place four years earlier on the day of the Glorious Triumvirate Celebration, a festival marking the radiant brilliance of the dynasty of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un. After the fall of that dynasty, which their nomenklatura parents had helped prop up for so many years, these pampered one-percenters were down to their last few billion North Korean won and searching for a way to regain their former lifestyle. Mr. Lee offered salvation in the form of the insurgency he created in the DPRK known as Chosun Restoration, with Chosun being the former name of Korea before Japan colonized it in 1910. Its stated goal was the restoration to power of Kim Jong-un. The twelve youths assembled today were the insurgency’s best and brightest.
In accordance with an initiation rite derived from that of the Mafia, Mr. Lee’s twelve young apostles of mammon would be served sake from ceremonial flat sakazuki cups of solid gold, which they would first hold up in offering to Comrade Moon’s coffin. After drinking the sake, they each would present a finger to Mr. Lee, who would prick it with a pin and squeeze so that their blood dripped onto a wad of cotton they each held in their other hand. Mr. Lee would then take a taper, light it from one of the candles surrounding Comrade Moon’s coffin, and set the cotton on fire in their hands. They had been instructed to hold it for three seconds before dropping it into a bowl of water that had been placed on the table for the purpose.
“We remember Comrade Moon today and include him in our ritual and feast.” As he said the name, Lee’s eyes went to the coffin in the middle of the room. “And we ask him in spirit to give his blessing to Chosun Restoration, our army of liberation.” Mr. Lee then nodded to the twelve young North Korean men who proceeded to hold the cotton balls in their hands as he pricked their fingers, dripped the blood onto the cotton, and set the balls on fire. After all of them had dropped the cotton into the bowl of water, Mr. Lee led the closing of the ritual, the final words of which were repeated by the inductees: “We dedicate ourselves to Chosun Restoration, and we bind our fates to that of our fellow members.”
Mr. Lee then raised his wineglass to the coffin, and the young men followed suit. “We salute Comrade Moon!” they toasted three times in unison. As the ceremony drew to an end, the unearthly aroma of flesh and fat roasting in butter, punctuated with after-notes of vaporized Armagnac brandy, drifted enticingly into the room from the floor below. To Mr. Lee, it seemed only fitting that a meeting to discuss violence and mayhem should be held in this place of death and have ortolan as the featured item of the menu.
After the final toast ended the initiation ceremony, a long table was set in front of Comrade Moon’s coffin and the appetizers were brought in. One of the young men likened the lobster bisque and spider crab in sweet-savory foam to inhaling sea spray. Then it was time for the main, highly illegal course. No larger than a baby’s fist and weighing less than an ounce, the delicate ortolan songbird is a French delicacy of yore. The birds are encouraged to gorge themselves, and when they are two to three times their normal size, (that is to say, the size of a typical American, Mr. Lee jokingly told his new acolytes) they are drowned in Armagnac, plucked, and roasted.
As the roasted birds, speckled with an autumn-leaf-fall of truffle shavings, were being carried into the room, their aroma becoming more and more maddeningly tantalizing, everyone murmured in fevered expectation as their individual cocottes were set in front of them. They all then placed oversized linen dinner napkins over their heads as French tradition dictated, hiding their faces from God at the impending sin of eating such a rare and delicate creature.
After the meal, largely silent except for the crunching of bird bones and primal grunts of gustatory passion, Mr. Lee addressed the group.
“Gentlemen. The twelve of you have been chosen carefully from the most elite members of the Bonghwajo Torch Club as Chosun Restoration’s advance guard. I have purposely limited your numbers to avoid arousing suspicion until our reinforcements arrive for the latter part of our mission. But you make up for your small numbers by the fact that you are all highly adept at martial arts, gunmanship, and the use of high explosives. We meet today in common cause. As you are all well aware, the interests of Bureau 39 were admirably advanced for many years by Comrade Moon. Now our dear Comrade is no longer with us, and the DPRK is in the midst of great turmoil, following the Rising Tide revolution of four years ago. We are now at a crossroads.”
Mr. Lee was a master orator and paused to let the tension build before continuing in a lower-pitched voice.
“When Rising Tide deposed our Brilliant Commander Kim Jong-un on the very day of the Glorious Triumvirate Celebration, it also robbed you of your rightful claim to aristocracy, and greatly diminished Bureau 39’s traditional sources of income. However, Rising Tide and its puppet leader Nahm Myung-dae have made the lives of the people far worse, with widespread hunger and the breakdown of order.
“Now, with the upcoming Olympic Games, we have an unprecedented opportunity to take revenge, and for you to regain your former status. Gentlemen, we seek nothing less than the return of the Kim family to the seat of power in the DPRK, with the twelve of you as military regents paving the way for his return. The one hundred or so reinforcements who will arrive later will be our second wave. Let me begin with the details of the first wave for which you will be responsible. My overall plan has five phases, each of which represents one of our enemy’s centers of gravity, which we will systematically destroy. In so doing we will bring the enemies of our nation to their knees. Would you now please gather around this map of Tokyo. Mister Pung, who was Comrade Moon’s right-hand man, will help me explain.”
A thickset, middle-aged Korean man with gunshot residue on his fingers stood. He explained that each of them had a particular mission of destruction meant to sow chaos and terror during the upcoming Olympic Games to demonstrate to the world that Chosun Restoration would avenge the overthrow of Kim Jong-un four years earlier, and would now stop at nothing to restore the Brilliant Commander to power. Pung had begun Phase One of the plan that very morning with the double assassination at the Olympic stadium.
After Pung had finished, Mr. Lee rose from the table and departed. He promised to come back from time to time to check on their progress.
CHAPTER 3
Tokyo
The American embassy
July 10, 11:47 a.m.
A Marine guard placed the rifle that had been recovered from the stadium on the round mahogany table in the middle of CIA Station Chief Norm Hooper’s office at the American embassy. Three Agency men immediately took seats around the table, peering intently at the rifle as if expecting it to start moving of its own accord. Hooper’s former jock physique had gone flabby in the middle, and he began tapping a soft, slow paradiddle on his belly while lost in thought. His senior CIA case officer, fifty-four-year-old Harmon Phibbs, ran a hand through his thick shock of fiber-optic white hair. Jack Fitzroy, CIA Asia head of clandestine activities, sat next to Hooper with his ever-present cup of coffee. All three were officially cultural attachés, part of the diplomatic minuet danced in every embassy in the world.
“Hot damn, an AK-47,” Phibbs muttered under his breath as he leaned forward for a closer look.
As Phibbs made his comment, the three CIA men were joined by Patrick Featherstone, the man who had been conducting the briefing at the Olympic stadium when the two men were shot. Hooper turned to him with his head at an angle and scratched his ear as he spoke. “So, Featherstone, two guys get sniped right after one of them questioned why you were hired.”
Patrick’s eyes narrowed as he took a seat. “And? What are you implying, I was somehow involved?”
“No, of course not,” Hooper said, straightening his head. “I’m just saying…well, shit, I’m going to come out and say it. I think the guy had a point about you being head of security for the Olympics after what happened in Pyongyang.” Patrick’s posture stiffened, but he said nothing.
Hooper’s face tightened into a grimace as he continued. “I just saw a report this morning on what might happen if things go totally to shit in North Korea. It would be catastrophic for the entire region, do you know that?”
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