Rings of Fire

by Gregory Shepherd

  “Some of it is,” said Patrick, “but this is top of the line. It’s called junmai, which is pure sake without any additives. It’s brewed naturally, and they don’t add any alcohol like they do with the cheap stuff.”

  “So delicious,” Kirsten said, holding her cup out. Patrick refilled it, then held out his own.

  “The custom is never to pour your own,” he said with a smile.

  “I like that,” she said, filling his cup. She looked around the bar.

  “All the signs in this area are in English except for this place,” she said.

  “That’s why I like it. I come here to get away from the Foreign Service types from all over the world. Foreigners attached to the embassies around here can spend their entire assignments learning just a few words of very basic Japanese.”

  “I find that really arrogant. Plus, you deprive yourself of learning about the culture when you don’t even make a stab at the language.”

  “Exactly,” Patrick said. “What’s the point of being in a different country if you’re not going to expose yourself to some different ways of looking at things. I knew a guy in Kamakura who refused to learn the language at all. He said that it sounded like they have fifty words in the whole language, and when they run out, they just start over from the beginning.”

  Kirsten groaned and shook her head in amused disbelief. “That sounds like something that Phibbs guy at the embassy would say. What’s his story, anyway?”

  Patrick rolled his eyes. “Believe it or not, Senior Case Officer Harmon Phibbs is supposedly great at recruiting talent. Or ‘supposably’ as he would say. Somehow, he’s got as great a knack for turning spies as he does for insulting people. According to Hooper, he can be a real charmer when he’s in the field. He latches on to these lonely sad sacks from Russia or wherever who are far from home and befriends them, hard as that is to believe.”

  “That’s definitely hard to believe. How about you? You said something about being an artist.”

  “That’s right. Traditional Japanese calligraphy and ink painting was my major in college. Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music, just outside of Ueno Park—not far from the zoo.”

  “And yet you were a sniper, right? I don’t get it.” They poured each other more sake and Patrick signaled the owner for a reload which he delivered right away.

  “These little jugs are tiny. I’m not even feeling a buzz. Anyway, the art of calligraphy and the art of the sniper have a lot in common,” he said taking another sip. “There’s the relaxation of the fingers so as not to get in the way of yourself, and you have to see things in a particular way in both. You empty your mind, and you become one with the target or the sheet of paper. I call it ‘the flash’—the moment when rational thought ends and pure intuition takes over. I think one of the reasons I gravitated to both arts was for that sense of seeing things. It has a certain pleasure to it, like immersing yourself to the point that everything else disappears. Plus, in both arts you have to keep emotion out of it, otherwise the stroke or the shot will suffer.”

  “I don’t know much at all about the whole sniper thing, but I’ve always been fascinated by calligraphy. There’s something starkly beautiful about it.”

  “You have a good sense of its underlying aesthetic if you can say that. A lot of people think it’s boring compared to, say, oil paintings.”

  “I like them too, but I hate modern art. So much of it seems to depend on novelty, like that guy who used to get wasted and splatter paint all over canvases that are now worth millions.”

  Patrick smiled. “Jackson Pollock. Yeah, I can’t say I’m much of a fan myself. It’s like they’ll do anything to not make sense impressively. But I can respect some of it. Like the way Picasso’s cubist works show how the eye takes in reality before the brain creates the illusion of seeing it whole. I would imagine that’s something like the reverse of what you do as an FBI analyst.”

  “Right, we break it down to see how it works. By the way, are we getting drunk? Any more of this sake, which is great by the way, and we should start splattering paint.”

  Patrick laughed. “Not drunk drunk, just a bit relaxed. We can make this little flask our last before we head back to the embassy.” They both sipped the remainder of their sake in companionable silence for a few minutes.

  “And your wife? Is she also an artist?” Kirsten asked, bringing the cup to her lips.

  “Actually, we’re not married. Yet. But I’m sure that will happen eventually. You?”

  “I’m a widow,” Kirsten said without emotion, but Patrick noticed that as she spoke, she instinctively touched the ring finger of her left hand with her left thumb for a brief moment, what interrogators would term displacement activity.

  Patrick’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Yeah, I know. How does someone as young as me become a widow? Well, he was also an agent. Undercover, if that helps clear things up a little. Sorry to be so evasive. It’s just not something I’m ready to talk about yet. It’s too recent.” Patrick nodded. An awkward silence ensued.

  “Anyway, we were talking about you. Kids?” she asked him.

  “One adopted. Well, we’re in the process of making it official,” Patrick answered without elaborating any further. His deep-set eyes turned into caves in the downlight of the bar. Like Kirsten, he also wasn’t one to open up too quickly, and had developed an allergy to the American custom of grilling near strangers with personal questions. He changed the topic to the items on the blackboard menu above them and gave her a quick lesson in Japanese culinary vocabulary. As they left the izakaya a while later, Patrick invited her to stop off at his office at the Japan Intelligence Agency to meet Choy. Patrick had told him he’d be back at 2 p.m.

  CHAPTER 21

  July 28

  Choy came out of his little room off Patrick’s office with a cigarette between his fingers when he heard Patrick and Kirsten coming in the main entrance after their lunch. Patrick began the introductions.

  “Kirsten, this is my old friend from North Korea, Jung-hee Choy. He’s my cyber consultant for Olympic security. He’ll deny it, but he’s a genius. He once counted to infinity and then turned right around and did it backwards.” They all laughed. Choy smiled at Kirsten and turned to Patrick expectantly.

  “Jung-hee, this is Kirsten Beck from the FBI. She’s liaising with the JIA for the Olympics.”

  “Jung-hee,” Choy said, walking over to her with his hand extended.

  “A pleasure,” said Kirsten, but then her smile weakened. Choy was looking at her as if he’d seen her before.

  “By any chance, are you a fan of the Godfather movies?” Choy asked. Patrick rolled his eyes and groaned.

  “I’ve heard of them, but they were a little before my time,” Kirsten replied.

  “They’re timeless!” Choy said with mock indignation. “The reason I ask is that you look a lot like Sofia Coppola when she starred in Lost in Translation. She’s Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter and played Michael Corleone’s daughter in Godfather Part III. Lousy movie, but she’s got a great face. Like you.”

  “Well, thanks,” Kirsten said with an embarrassed smile. “I’ll try not to make any lousy movies of my own.”

  They all laughed and went into Choy’s little back office. Choy lit another cigarette from the one he’d been smoking as if passing a baton in a relay race and sat down in front of his computer. Kirsten batted the smoke from her face. Seeing her consternation, Patrick said to Choy, “Those things are slow-motion suicide, you know. They’re going to take ten years off your life.”

  “Maybe so, but they’re the worst ten years,” Choy said absently. As he clicked on the documents he’d been looking at, he mumbled offhandedly, “I quit smoking once. It was the most horrible four hours of my life.”

  While Choy was cueing up the documents on screen, Patrick turned to Kirsten, who had taken a step away
from the cigarette smoke. “Jung-hee thinks the attacks might have something to do with Bureau 39.”

  “Remind me what Bureau 39 is,” Kirsten said.

  “It’s the criminal wing of the former North Korean regime. Not that the whole country wasn’t one big organized crime syndicate. Bureau 39, though, went above and beyond. ‘Diabolical’ doesn’t come close.”

  Choy spoke. “I posed as the person in 39 who got congratulated for the Budokan attack and sent a return email to the original sender, thanking them for it. It had the backdoor virus I wrote embedded in it.”

  “So who is it?” Patrick asked.

  “I can’t tell.”

  “But I thought you said that once they opened the email, the backdoor virus would infect their system and you’d be able to get in.”

  “It looks like they didn’t actually open the one I sent. They just sent a new email to the person at Bureau 39 with a fragment of code in it.”

  “You opened it? How do you know they’re not trying to infect you?”

  “What alternative did I have?”

  “I suppose you’re right. So what about this fragment of code? I assume you mean computer code.”

  “Right. There’s no way of knowing what it means. Unless…” Choy looked at Kirsten. “Patrick said you’re in the FBI?”

  “Right.”

  “You might be able to help me figure this out.”

  “Me? How?”

  “The FBI has a system called Naris 3.0, does it not?” said Choy.

  Kirsten’s face fell. “How on earth would you know about that?” she said in a tone that was almost aggressive.

  “It’s what I do, Kirsten. May I call you ‘Kirsten’?”

  Kirsten nodded. “Please answer my question. How did you know about Naris 3.0?”

  “‘Don’t ask me about my business, Kay,’” Choy said with a chuckle, using the Godfather quote to try to defuse the sudden tension. It didn’t work. She glared at him with her arms folded.

  “Alright, how about letting me into the loop, you two? What’s Naris 3.0?” said Patrick.

  Kirsten took a long inhalation through her nose and let it out slowly. “Basically, Naris 3.0 is a data management system,” she said.

  “To say the least!” laughed Choy while Kirsten shot him daggers.

  Choy took over the explanation as Kirsten’s face hardened into stone and she tightened her arms in front of her. “The original Naris 1.0 allowed the FBI to get every email that everyone in the world has written for the past ten years. It can process zettabytes of emails, and a zettabyte is a trillion gigs. Naris is how the FBI got that guy Petraeus out at the CIA. You have to wonder what that was all about. Anyway, they store all this data, and when they’re curious about someone, they’ve got all sorts of info on them.

  “This new 3.0 version also gives them the ability to analyze fragments of code associated with email, like the strings of cookie code you sometimes see in the address bar of your computer. Not that the FBI routinely looks at all this data, but they have it. When they’re looking at someone of interest, they just have to process the info through Naris 3.0 and pull out their metadata. What’s really interesting is the program they use, which…”

  Kirsten Beck smoldered. “Please stop. That’s highly classified information. And you still haven’t answered my question. How did you even know about it, let alone how it works?”

  Choy smiled. “Actually, I did answer your question. It’s what I do. And finding out about what the FBI is up to is what Lazarus does.”

  “This is like getting into some kind of alternate reality,” said Patrick, flustered that he was so far out of the cyber loop. “Alright, I give up. Who or what is Lazarus?”

  “Lazarus is the computer system developed by North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau. When I worked in Bureau 39, we used Lazarus for that 2014 attack on the Sony Hollywood studio,” Choy said.

  Kirsten Beck shook her head. “You are good,” she said. “Okay, you have all this inside information, so why do you need me?”

  “I need you to access Naris 3.0 for me,” Choy replied as if the answer was obvious. He pointed to the line of code on his computer screen.

  qd7wr-6669re34+57sto+49rat737+ion082638##sg

  “Hey look, there’s the word ‘restoration’ in there,” said Patrick.

  “That’s right,” said Choy. “It looks pretty encrypted except for that word, right? But the problem is, it doesn’t have any of the fingerprints of the encryption systems we used at Bureau 39. I think it’s just the digital remains of something bigger. I need to see if I can take it to the next level, and that’s where Naris 3.0 comes in.”

  Kirsten still had her arms folded in front of her and a look of resistance on her face. She didn’t move.

  Patrick spoke in a voice that was low and stern. “Kirsten, I’m hoping to adopt a North Korean orphan who may or may not make it. That’s how malnourished he was. And it was all because of Bureau 39 and people like them. That’s who we’re dealing with here.”

  Kirsten looked him in the eye as he spoke, then broke eye contact, sighed, and waved Choy off of his seat in front of the computer. “Both of you turn away from the screen, please,” she said, and Patrick and Choy turned their backs to her.

  A minute of typing and clicking later, Kirsten had them turn around.

  “This fragment of code leads to a Tokyo craigslist ad for a used wedding gown,” she said.

  “What? Who the hell is going to want a used wedding gown, especially in Japan?” Patrick said. “No one here would even think of buying something like that secondhand.”

  Choy had an impish smile on his face. “And no one goes on craigslist anymore, not since they got rid of the personals. It’s a great place to send the code. But you’re right,” he said, “the only person who would go to an ad like this is someone who was looking for it and knows about pixel embedding. Kirsten, may I sit down again, please?”

  Kirsten stood and Choy took her place in front of the computer. He opened a program on his desktop and copied and pasted the image of the wedding gown onto a template. Immediately, two Korean hangul characters appeared on the screen. One read “sky” and the other read “heart.”

  “‘Sky Heart.’ Isn’t that a toy?” asked Kirsten. Her manner had softened slightly but her arms were still crossed in front of her. “My little niece was playing with something called Sky Heart back in Honolulu.”

  “I doubt anyone’s going to be emailing Bureau 39 about toys,” Choy said. He looked out the window absently and thought for a minute. Patrick and Kirsten said nothing. After a minute, with his eyes shifting back and forth at some unseen object, Choy spoke again.

  “I’m thinking the best thing might be for me to pose as the person who sent the Sky Heart email. I can cover my tracks using a virtual private network I created. Then I could send the recipient at Bureau 39 another embedded message along with a new backdoor virus I wrote and see if they’ll reply directly to me. It’s kind of a desperation move that might blow my cover if they get suspicious, but we don’t know when the next attack will be. If we get lucky, they’ll inadvertently give me some clues as to who sent the ‘Sky Heart’ thing.”

  “I agree,” said Patrick. “At this point we’ve got to try all the angles. Who knows, maybe like you say, whoever this is at 39 will give up some useful information without realizing it.”

  Choy opened the program he had used to decode the original pixel-embedded message. He then typed an email and embedded something in the pixels of the same craigslist image of the used wedding gown, along with the new backdoor virus he had written. He pressed Send. “Now we wait to see if they take the bait,” he said.

  “What did you tell them?” Patrick asked.

  “I embedded the Korean characters for ‘heart’ and ‘sky.’ Just a reversal of the original they got from the pe
rson on the other end, but I’m guessing they’ll be puzzled enough to open it to find out why it’s reversed.”

  The three of them sat staring silently at the computer with their arms folded. After half an hour, Choy said, “No sense the two of you waiting around here. I’ll let you know if anything comes in.”

  Patrick and Kirsten agreed and left Choy alone in his office. After they left, Choy opened the .gif file of his dead wife and child and put his hand on the screen. “Igeon neol-wihangeoya,” he said to them. “This is for you.”

  CHAPTER 22

  That same day

  Kirsten returned to her office at the American embassy and decided to lay down for a nap on a small couch that looked designed for a child. Her head ached from the lunchtime sake as well as from culture shock that seemed to be getting worse by the day. Even the miniature couch seemed as if from a dreamlike parallel universe where things were just a touch too bizarre for reality. The miniaturization of so many things in Japan, Patrick had told her, was part of a phenomenon called kawaii, or cuteness for its own sake. On their walk back from the izakaya, they had seen gaggles of high school girls dressed all alike in short, pink skirts and carrying plush backpacks out of which poked the heads of oversized teddy bears. At one point, she found herself face-to-face with Minnie Mouse as another girl pulled a small piece of rolling luggage from which a plastic applique of the cartoon character grinned vapidly. Further on, two prepubescent girls sported white frilly dresses and carried parasols, which Patrick told her was the latest in what was known as Lolita fashion. How do their parents even let them out of the house dressed like that? Kirsten thought, especially when she noticed a pair of obviously tipsy middle-aged “salarymen” ogling the girls. There was much about Japan that she had taken an instant liking to, but this cuteness thing was not one of them.

  When she woke from her nap an hour later, she went over to her desk and decided to have a look at some of the documents that had been coming in regarding the situation in North Korea. One of them in particular piqued her interest: a graph of the economic health of the country before and after the Rising Tide revolution. It illustrated the reason for the fears of a massive refugee crisis. The economy had actually been performing slightly better during the Kim regime, although an inordinate amount of the food supply had been making its way to the army and the black market rather than to the starving masses. Still, it pointed to a Rising Tide regime in crisis, one that had promised far-reaching improvements before the overthrow but that was simply not delivering once it assumed power. A huge factor was that China had cut off all aid to the country the day after the overthrow, and this had included oil subsidies that had powered the factories. But the fact remained that in terms of agricultural productivity and bringing food to the table, the Rising Tide Party was woefully inefficient to say the least. As Kirsten was taking notes, she heard a knock on the half-open door.