Rings of Fire

by Gregory Shepherd

  Back in the DPRK, the Bong Boys had been allowed to watch all the South Korean TV they could stomach, and they were particular fans of the boy bands who appeared nightly on shows like Superstar K. They knew all the words to the songs, and they would ape the dance moves and exaggerated expressions of romantic ardor as they sang along with the interchangeably androgynous lads onscreen. They furthered their image by dyeing their hair blonde and giving themselves the American-style monikers used by three of their favorite K-pop idols.

  The good-looking boy with the rascally twinkle in his eye and a reputation as a charming ladies’ man took the name “Casanova.” The quiet, brooding one who wrote love poetry dubbed himself “Dreamboy.” And the tough guy with the scar in the middle of his eyebrow, who practiced taekwondo by punching and kicking metal utility poles was “Tyson.”

  The son of the Pyongyang’s chief prosecutor, Tyson (born Yun Tae-sen) was raised in a luxurious home on the desirable north bank of the Taedong River. He and his friends all attended Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, and as a boy of thirteen, he was chosen for the honor of executing his middle school teacher. The teacher had been found guilty of treason for collaborating with the Rising Tide movement that eventually toppled the Kim regime.

  Tyson hated the teacher both for his disgusting dandruff and for the way he never deferred to the Bonghwajo rich kids the way their other teachers did. The teacher didn’t seem to realize the nature of privilege, at times going out of his way to make disparaging comments about their laziness. And so Tyson accepted with relish his patriotic duty to rid the nation of a traitor. On the day of the execution, after the teacher was tied to a gibbet in Kim Il-sung Stadium with all of the school’s student body there to witness his end, Tyson took aim and shot the teacher in the gut, which is a famously excruciating way to die. He had been instructed to make it a shot to the chest. An officer in the Korean People’s Army, who could tell immediately that the gut shot was intentional, came up to him and commended him for his marksmanship as the teacher writhed in agony on the gibbet in front of them. When the regime fell during the Rising Tide revolution, the boy was spirited out of the country to Japan where his father was an adviser to the Rengo-kai, a Japan-based organization with ties to the Kim regime.

  After agreeing to the Bong Boys’ proposal of using surrogates for their attacks until the reinforcements arrived on the scene, Mr. Lee listened to Tyson’s idea for a cutout based on the latter’s research into recent Japanese history. Of all the Bonghwajo, he was the most fluent in Japanese, and Mr. Lee gave his blessing to his idea, especially since it would ideally result in a huge number of casualties. To get his plan rolling, Tyson would first visit a madman.

  CHAPTER 14

  July 22

  With Tyler squared away at the SDF headquarters, Patrick’s mind turned to South Korea. He had one more space on his roster to fill. He logged in to a Yahoo email account used by only two people and wrote a short message that he saved to the “drafts” file. The sent-mail and inbox files for this account had never held a single message. His draft message read, “Under the stones?” He then sent a text message on his phone to a South Korean number. It read, “Got my nails done today.”

  Having lived all his life in the dark labyrinth that was the Kim Jong-un regime, it seemed only natural that after he was granted defector status, forty-eight-year-old Choy Jung-hee should gravitate to a job as a cave guide. And having spent far too many winters in an unheated police car in Pyongyang, the former Inspector Choy chose sunny Cheju Island off South Korea’s southern coast as his new home. Even now in mid-July, when the temperature and humidity were rising daily, he could instantly cool off while leading tourists down into the Manjanggul system, or relax at the beach with his thirty-one-year-old girlfriend, who was from the area.

  He had given the girlfriend firm instructions never to divulge to anyone that he had been part of the Inmin Boanseong, North Korea’s People’s Security, or state police. When he crossed the border after the fall of the Kim regime, he told the immigration officer who processed him that he had been employed in a movie theater that showed films directed by Kim Jong-il. Technically, this was not a lie, since he had worked just such a job while a student at Pyongyang’s elite Film Institute, where he studied acting and English. He was then recruited into the People’s Security state police, but he wanted to expunge the latter completely from his personal history. He still carried guilt at some of the things he had been forced to do, such as arresting a man on the day of his daughter’s wedding after a neighbor who had not been invited to the wedding turned him in for possessing a Bible.

  But the main detail of his employment with the Inmin Boanseong that he wanted to hide was that he had been chief technical adviser to none other than Comrade Moon himself, founder and head of the infamous Bureau 39. Moon was an idiot when it came to computers, and Choy inveigled his way into Moon’s good graces, eventually looting a staggering sum of money from Bureau 39. The source of the theft had never been discovered because Choy had funneled it to Patrick Featherstone, who in turn kept it in five secret accounts in Dubai, Panama, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, and Switzerland, all of them under a shell investment corporation. Patrick promised Choy that he would only use the money for the people of North Korea. Choy had kept a much smaller portion of the money and had it stashed away at the back of Manjanggul. He still accepted a monthly defector stipend from the South Korean government so as not to draw attention to his independent means.

  On this sunny day in late July, he relaxed on the beach with his girlfriend’s son while the boy’s mother, who was a haenyeo, or free diver, surfaced off the beach from time to time with an abalone or octopus which she deposited in her small skiff. A wave to her son and boyfriend and she was under the waves again. As Choy sat reading a history of Go, or Baduk as the classic board game is known in Korea, his cell phone vibrated. He let out a long and joyful laugh when he saw the text with the words “Got my nails done today.” He excitedly switched over to his email account on a VPN (virtual private network) of his own creation and went to the drafts file. It was the only file with anything in it. He opened the new draft that was in the file. It read, “Under the stones?” Only one person in the world would use those words from Go, the “stones” of which referred to the disc-like pebbles that are arranged on the grid of the playing board.

  Ten minutes later, Patrick noticed that a new draft had appeared in the mailbox. He opened it.

  “Security question: Open with black to 4-4…”

  Patrick typed back: “White to 1-1…”

  He and Choy went back and forth in the same vein several more times. Finally, Choy declared, “Capture! You’re rusty!”

  Patrick laughed out loud. If he was going to be beaten at Go/Baduk by anyone, he really didn’t mind being crushed by Inspector Choy, his old friend from his mission to North Korea four years before.

  Choy switched to his satphone with 256-bitkey encryption and called the number from which the original text had been sent.

  “Inspector Choy, how nice of you to call,” Patrick said. “By the way, this is a secure line.”

  “Please, Patrick,” Choy said. “Never call me ‘Inspector’ again. I’ve left that life behind.”

  “Oh, sorry. Well, what should I call you, then? Mister Choy? Seems a bit formal. Your first name? Wasn’t it Jung-hee?”

  “I need something more clandestine. Let me think…How about ‘Vito’?”

  Patrick laughed. “Perfect! Vito Corleone from your favorite film!”

  Choy laughed with him. “You remembered! I was just kidding, go ahead and call me Jung-hee.”

  They caught up with each other’s personal lives from the four years since they had seen each other last, and then Patrick’s voice turned serious.

  “I’ve been hired as the chief security consultant for the Tokyo Olympics, and I was wondering if you might want to come and give me a hand.�
��

  “Actually, I’m quite fine here on Cheju Island, thanks very much. The weather is perfect, my young girlfriend is very pretty, and her young boy thinks the world of me. I feel like I’m twenty-five again. But it’s nice to be in touch with you anyway.”

  “Would it help if I told you that some of your old friends from the DPRK might be up to their usual nonsense?”

  There was silence on the other end. Then, “I would have thought that the uprising had at least slowed those bastards down.”

  Patrick said nothing. He wanted Choy to come to his own decision.

  Finally, Choy cleared his throat. “If you have an enemy, that enemy becomes my enemy.

  But you have to give me free rein over the cyber stuff. I don’t want either the Japanese or American governments telling me what I can and can’t do.”

  “It’s fine on my end. And I know you’d be able to detect if they were monitoring you, anyway.”

  The next day Patrick took a taxi to Haneda Airport to meet Choy, his computer whiz friend formerly of North Korea’s Bureau 39. As Choy exited customs and immigration, he looked around for anyone familiar but saw only people holding up cardboard placards with names on them. He did a double-take when he saw one of the placards that was marked “Michael Corleone” and laughed when he realized that the man in the sunglasses and baseball cap holding it was Patrick. They embraced and looked at each other the way friends do after a long absence from each other’s lives.

  “You let your hair grow out,” Patrick said, beaming at his friend who used to sport a buzz cut. “And the glasses make you look even smarter, if that’s possible.”

  “And look at you!” Choy said. “Very distinguished,” he said as he brushed his hand against the shock of white hair that now covered mostly just the right side of Patrick’s head.

  After a cab ride back to Patrick’s office at the JIA and Choy having a chance to freshen up, he accepted Patrick’s challenge of a game of Go over some Chinese takeout. Patrick had played only a handful of times with Yasuhara Roshi since his adventures in North Korea, and he missed the specific type of discipline the game imposed on his mind. He was convinced that there was an actual center of the brain that was stimulated by the game in a way he had only experienced in combat situations, where the slightest wrong move can lead to death. The stakes were much lower in the game, of course, but the important thing to Patrick was reengaging his brain in Go mode.

  He loved the ritual of war that lay beneath the game’s apparent simplicity of placing black and white stone discs on a board, with the stones advancing in slow motion across the cross-hatched wooden board as on a battlefield. The object of the game is to control a larger portion of the board than your opponent. Stones are captured and removed if a player is unable to prevent the opponent from surrounding a grouping. Placing the stones close to each other is a cautious defensive strategy that can aid in preventing them from being surrounded. Placing them far apart, on the other hand, is a more aggressive but potentially risky approach. Thus, the skilled player strikes a balance between strategic planning and tactical expedience, much as in combat.

  He found the symmetry of the stone disc arrangements appealing to his artistic sense, and he also appreciated the way the game’s multiplicity of strategies imposed a discipline on his mind, forcing him to fully consider the placement of each stone.

  A mere fifteen minutes later, all of that went out the window as he conceded a quick defeat at Choy’s hands.

  “Out of practice,” Choy said dismissively while lighting a cigarette. Patrick wasn’t sure if Choy was referring to Patrick or to himself at needing a full fifteen minutes to kick Patrick’s ass. Choy’s meaning became clear in his next sentence.

  “You gave yourself no hwallo [escape route]. You used to try that same strategy when we played in Pyongyang. Every time you attack right away like that, you give away your position. You have to lure your opponent into attacking you first.”

  Patrick asked for a rematch, but Choy reminded him why he had come all the way from Cheju Island and insisted on getting right to work in a small room off of Patrick’s office in the JIA. Patrick had him set up with a computer on a desk, but Choy took one look at the desktop and snorted. He opened his briefcase and took out the thinnest laptop Patrick had ever seen.

  “Is that what you’re going to use?” Patrick asked in what he hoped wasn’t too skeptical a tone.

  “I’ll have you know I made this myself. I bet you a bottle of the best sake in Tokyo that there’s not a computer in this building that can even come close. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to see if I can find any evidence of this North Korean connection you mentioned.”

  Patrick left him alone. But part of Choy’s desire to get right to work was so that he could keep himself occupied and also, hopefully, to finish up early and get home to his girlfriend and her son. At the Cheju Island airport, his girlfriend had squeezed her eyes shut in an effort to stanch a flow of tears, and her young son, who had grown attached to Choy as a father figure, began bawling openly. Before that, Choy hadn’t realized how deeply they felt about him and he for them.

  After Patrick closed the door behind him, Choy found his spirits darkening further from the desktop wallpaper that appeared on his screen when the computer booted up. He’d seen the image hundreds of times before, but somehow being in an unfamiliar place caused them to cut into his soul. He lit a cigarette and gazed at the image…

  Over twenty-five years earlier, Choy had graduated from the prestigious Pyongyang Film School where, along with film history, he also studied acting and became fluent in English, although as a result of his passion for American action films, his English had an unmistakably colloquial cast. After he graduated, he decided that it was high time to settle down and find a wife. Shy around women at that age, he could never quite bring himself to even start up a simple conversation with any of his female coworkers at the film school. So he sought help from a chungmae, or go-between, who had an almost infallible instinct for match-ups. After only two mutual rejections on the basis of photos, she found Choy a young woman who proved to be the ideal companion for someone like him. Jae-mi’s father had been a war hero as had Choy’s, and she loved movies almost as much as he did. Their dates nearly always consisted of watching one of the first two Godfather movies in the screening room of the film school. He laughed until he cried when she tried to sound tough while saying, “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse,” or “They got Sonny on the causeway.”

  A year into their marriage, Jae-mi gave birth to a young boy they named Kwang-sun, or “wide goodness,” and aside from the chronic food shortages, their lives were a picture of domestic contentment. Choy’s expertise with computer technology at the film school had been noticed, and he was offered a job with the Ministry of People’s Security, or the national police force, a significant step up in the world. His main duty would be transferring the Ministry’s massive number of criminal files to electronic form. If he accepted the appointment, he would have to spend the initial six months of his training down by the DMZ, a requirement of all new recruits. In the interest of state security, family members could not accompany recruits, nor was any communication allowed. Choy would be assigned to track down thieves who had stolen from the State’s granaries in the Kaesong area not far from the Demilitarized Zone where theft had been rampant.

  This was during the Arduous March, the great famine of the late 1990s, and even otherwise honest people were reduced to food theft. Jae-mi begged Choy not to go so soon after the birth of their child, but Choy gently explained to her that at the end of six months they would be given a modest apartment of their own in Pyongyang as a reward. They would also have plenty to eat as he rose through the ranks. On the day he left for duty, he rocked his wife and child in his arms. “My body will be a hundred miles from my soul,” he whispered to Jae-mi as their tears mingled.

  But the famine grew w
orse over the coming months, with even residents of Pyongyang resorting to stripping bark from trees and boiling weeds for something to put into their stomachs. At the end of his six-month training tour, Choy came back to discover that his infant son had died of malnutrition, since Jae-mi was unable to lactate owing to the food shortage. Jae-mi, the neighbors said, simply gave up after young Kwang-sun died, and she lay on her bed listless and unresponsive when Choy returned. He tried as best as he was able to nurse her back to health, but she blamed herself for the death of her son and was dead within a week of Choy’s return.

  Choy never forgave himself. But most of all, he never forgave the system that was directly responsible for their deaths, a system aided and abetted above all others by the very man he worked for: Comrade Moon and his Bureau 39. He vowed then and there to do all he could to eradicate the organization from his native country, along with all the Comrade Moons who had made it possible. Now, years later in Tokyo, he could throw himself into his work for Patrick, investigating the probable North Korean connection to the recent attacks. He saved the image of his dead wife and child as a .gif file and got to work with the Olympic rings as his new screen background.