“In his dreams.”
Patrick laughed.
“He’s a classic. The whole time he was in my office, he was bad-mouthing everything about this country. I’ll definitely be keeping him at arm’s length. How did he ever make senior case officer? He must have a rabbi in the Agency.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s got the goods on someone high up in the Agency, an affair or something, otherwise he’d have been posted to Djibouti ten years ago. Definitely a strange bird. Divorced, no surprise. But like I said last time, he’s got a real knack for turning people. Apparently, he has some kind of raw genuineness that makes turncoats trust him a lot more than our usual spooks, especially when he’s drinking, which is every night. According to Hooper, he was a disaster at the CIA Farm when it came to tradecraft like shaking surveillance and making brush contacts. But he was top of his class in MICE, which I’m sure you know all about.”
Kirsten nodded. “‘Money, ideology, compromise, ego.’ The main motivators for someone to turn.”
“Right. But in Phibbs’s case, believe it or not, there was also something that spooks found charming, for lack of a better term. I know, sounds ridiculous, right? But he once turned someone who was actually surveilling him just by going up to the guy and offering to buy him a drink. The guy was so taken aback that he accepted, and from there he became one of Phibbs’s Agency conquests.”
“And here I pictured him trawling the dark underbelly of the spy world.”
“Oh, he does that too. There was another guy he found out had a weakness for junior high school girls, and he was prepared to turn him in to the cops for the images he had stored on his phone. Phibbs had gotten a friend of his in the No Such Agency to hack the phone. The perv was more than willing to accept a drink from Phibbs to find out what else he knew. I guess we have to give the devil his due. I wouldn’t take him up on that offer of lunch, though.”
“Believe me, there’s no danger of that.”
“Actually, I think he still holds the Rising Tide thing against me,” Patrick said. “‘Spooky kabuki,’ he calls it. But it’s not as if I actually set out to bring down Kim Jong-un, it’s just that things have a way of spiraling out of control. Most of what I did was out of self-preservation.” He felt a pang of guilt as he said the words. He had just conveniently omitted the fact that his main motivation had been saving Yumi from Senghori Prison. Kirsten nodded sympathetically. He noticed for the first time the tiny flecks of gold buried in her hazel eyes.
Kirsten said, “Oh, I almost forgot. He said something interesting about China when he came to my office.” The owner’s wife came up and gave them their menus. The woman bowed and rushed off to another table. Patrick turned back to Kirsten and found himself studying her eyes more intently, finding an allure in their faint spiderwork of tiny wrinkles at the corners.
“China, huh? He didn’t call it ‘Commie-land’ I hope,” Patrick asked, hoping to draw attention away from his obvious attraction. “He’s used that one before.”
“He came close. Plus, he didn’t seem to think that I knew that the Zhongnanhai is the Chinese Politburo. He said he met a guy at some bar he goes to who works at the Chinese embassy. The guy got drunk and told him that there’s more to this China Solution than just a desire to keep out North Korean refugees.”
Patrick squinted. “Hm. He didn’t say what?”
“Apparently his new drinking buddy passed out before he gave up anything else. Phibbs said he’s going to see if the guy shows at the bar again tonight.”
“Well, let’s see what he finds out, if anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if he made the whole thing up as an excuse to come see you. I know I would.” He cursed himself at first for taking such a major step forward with that last comment, but then he felt a sense bordering on triumph when her cheeks pooled with color as she smiled and lowered her eyes to one side, classic body language for sexual attraction. She quickly recovered her sense of feminine restraint and looked more intently than was necessary at the menu.
“So what does this restaurant have?”
“Something called ‘Japanese food.’”
“Very funny. Hey, by the way, I got a phrase book. What do you want for lunch?”
He studied the menu. “I think I’ll have the tempura soba. How about you?”
She pointed to a picture of one of the dishes and asked him how to pronounce the Japanese words beneath it. He told her, and she lifted up her hand to get the busy woman’s attention.
“Watch this,” she said to Patrick. “Sumimasen,” she called out, and the woman rushed over. “Tempura soba kudasai,” Kirsten said, pointing to Patrick, “Zaru soba kudasai,” she said, pointing to herself.
The woman smiled indulgently and said, “Kashikomarimashita!” (Certainly!)
“Very impressive,” Patrick said. “And your pronunciation was perfect.”
She thanked him. When the woman set their bowls in front of them a few minutes later, they started right in. Noting her initially dainty approach, Patrick told her that slurping was considered a sign of appreciation.
“This is fabulous!” Kirsten said between slurps. To the owner she called out, “Oishii desu!” (“It’s delicious!”)
“Arigato gozaimasu,” the owner bowed and thanked her with a smile. Patrick watched the look of schoolgirlish delight on Kirsten’s face and felt a warmth in his belly that had nothing to do with the hot noodles. After the meal as they made their way back to their respective offices, they made plans to meet the next day at the same place for dinner, ostensibly to talk over any information that Phibbs may have gleaned from his new Chinese booze buddy.
Patrick rationalized that since they both were required to be on call near the embassy, it made sense to have some company for at least some of their meals. And he was calling Yumi every day, after all. After a few days, though, still without any more sign of Chosun Restoration, he and Kirsten were having all of their meals together. Except breakfast.
After getting off the phone to Yumi one afternoon, he was wracked with guilt over the thought of her being alone at home with the boy while he was savoring his little seduction fandango with a much younger woman. The time had come to dial things back with Kirsten. That night after dinner at a new place, as he and Kirsten settled into their seats with tea, Patrick immediately steered the conversation in the direction of their need to stay vigilant. The Games were only halfway finished, he said, and there was no guarantee that all the members of Chosun Restoration had been arrested in the huge JIA dragnet. Kirsten looked at him strangely, as if he were breaking some unspoken rule of etiquette, and as Patrick was going on about how the terror group might just be keeping its powder dry for something big, Kirsten held up her hand and smiled.
“No shop talk, okay? Besides, I have a surprise for you,” she said and reached into a bag on the rack behind their seats. She took out a small package.
“It’s for you,” she said. He opened the package and saw that it was a professionally mounted print of a selfie he had nonchalantly taken of the two of them a few days earlier. The frame was a stylized heart.
He felt his face flush. “Kirsten, I really appreciate this,” he said in a serious tone, sighing. The smile on her face faded. “But I really want to emphasize that this can only be a friendship. Nothing more.”
Kirsten’s lips and eyes slowly tightened. “Of course. I completely understand,” she said. The silence became intolerably awkward.
“Uhh, hmm,” Patrick began. He sighed again. “I’m sorry if I led you to think it was anything more than…”
“Actually, you did,” Kirsten said, hard fibers of grievance in her voice. “I’m not letting myself completely off the hook here, but when I saw how much you were enjoying our time together, I guess I jumped the gun. You really did put out some pretty strong signals.”
“I know, and I’m sorry, Kirsten, I really am. If I were unattached,
I would be…”
“Please. Don’t. Let’s just leave it at that.” She gathered her things and stood.
“I’ll see you at the embassy,” she said with an unconvincingly cheery tone. Patrick stood but accepted the rebuke in penitent silence. Then he raised his hand to the bartender for a round of sake. Just as quickly, he canceled it. If what he had just told Kirsten was true, there was no telling when another attack would happen and how big it would be. The situation was too unpredictable to risk anything more than the light buzz he had going from the predinner sake mixed with a stiff shot of self-loathing. When a man decides to make an ass of himself, he thought, there’s very little that can stop him. He paid the bill and left. The heart remained on the table.
CHAPTER 25
July 31
With Patrick in Tokyo for several weeks, Yumi tried to keep busy in order to quell the memories of her time as a captive in North Korea’s notorious Senghori Prison. The house she shared with Patrick was simple but spacious, with several extra rooms that inevitably had filled with boxes of their possessions. One afternoon after feeding Dae-ho his lunch, getting him to take his supplements, and putting him to bed for his nap, she decided to make use of the Marie Kondo book she’d ordered online by bringing order to at least one of the extra rooms. She began arranging items into three stacks: definitely keep, maybe keep, and definitely toss. Two hours later, she felt herself fading, and she lay down on the tatami to rest her eyes. Before long she was sound asleep with fragmented images flitting through her mind.
The first image was of Pung kidnapping her off a beach in northwest Japan, and the next was of being driven to Senghori Prison. She was sent to Senghori by order of Comrade Moon after her father stole a backpack nuke from Moon, who planned to use it to instigate a coup and proclaim himself the new Great Leader of North Korea.
As she languished in the prison camp, despondently waiting in vain for Patrick, Yumi’s heart plummeted to the depths of despair. In her dream she was seized by memories of the torture chamber the size of a basketball court where prisoners were trussed up like hogs, hung upside down, and lashed with a steel-tipped bullwhip, with Bastard Cho, the head guard, presiding. Once, she watched as the lifeless body of one young man was dragged from the torture room by his fellow prisoners. She asked someone she had befriended what had happened to him.
“Suffocation,” one of them whispered.
“Strangled?” Yumi whispered back, knowing that suffocation was a euphemism for garroting.
“No,” came the reply. “He screamed to death.”
Her dream was haunted by an image of herself lying night after night on a thin, rotting mattress, consumed by the scraped-out pain of abandonment and thinking, Patrick, where are you? I feel so alone. So alone, so alone, so alone…
Even now, almost four years after her imprisonment, the nightmarish images and sensations woke her several times a week. One of the most frequent of them, and the one that consumed her now, was of being repeatedly gang raped by the guards. After she returned to Japan, she was told that she would probably never be able to bear children as a result. As she descended deeper into the hell of that memory, she awoke with a muffled scream in her throat, the fragments of her disjointed dream falling apart like pieces of a broken kaleidoscope. But then she sensed that something was wrong in the house, and she jumped up from the tatami floor and ran to Dae-ho’s room. His breathing was labored and wheezing, and he had a look of panic on his face as he turned to her. She gathered him up, raced to Patrick’s truck, and drove as fast as she could to Kamakura General Hospital.
Patrick’s phone rang. Yumi was calling, and she hated talking on the phone.
“I’m at the hospital. It’s Dae-ho,” she said in a frantic voice as soon as Patrick answered. “His breathing suddenly got all wheezy.”
“I’m on my way,” Patrick said.
On the way down to Kamakura from Tokyo, Patrick pulled his motorcycle over and called Yumi. The doctor had released Dae-ho, and they were now at home. Half an hour later, he pulled his Harley up to his house. When he went inside, Yumi was holding a sleeping Dae-ho. She looked emotionally and physically exhausted, and Patrick was overwhelmed anew with guilt from his close call with Kirsten Beck. On the ride down from Tokyo, he recalled something he had read in a college philosophy class where Plato claimed that human shame arises solely from the threat of being discovered. He didn’t believe it. He knew he would feel shame about his behavior even if no one ever found out.
“The doctor gave him an antihistamine for his breathing, and it made him drowsy,” Yumi said. “He did a thorough exam and said that Dae-ho’s breathing would be okay. It was probably from the awful humidity along with malnutrition.”
She smiled, and her eyes began to tear. “I’m so, so glad that you’re here,” she said, barely controlling the sob she felt forming behind her eyes. Dae-ho woke up in her arms and as always, held out his hand for Patrick. Patrick smiled, placed his fingers into his hand, and stayed with him until he fell back asleep. He carried him to his room and lay him down on his futon.
“You need to go back to Tokyo for your job, Patrick, you’ll get in trouble if you’re not there.”
“It’s alright, I told them I needed to check up on the sailing preliminaries this evening at Enoshima Yacht Harbor down the road. God, I missed you so much.”
Then it was his and Yumi’s private time together. Their intimacy was that of two hearts, souls, and bodies that became absolutely one, neither of them knowing where one began and the other left off. They then lay in each other’s arms for a late afternoon of indescribable bliss that went beyond mere happiness. It was like being in the midst of the place where all phenomena issue out of the universe, and he knew he would never feel this way with anyone else. But after an hour, he awoke with a start and found himself immersed in dread, as if waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. He rose and kissed them both. Then he was back on the road.
But instead of returning immediately to Tokyo, Patrick made a snap decision and turned his motorcycle down a familiar road. Another secret he had buried deep inside had become intolerable to carry anymore. There was only one person he could ever talk to in this kind of situation.
“You’re back so soon,” Yasuhara Roshi said when Patrick knocked on the door of Eiwa-ji Temple. The roshi’s voice became wary when he saw the look in Patrick’s eyes.
“I want to kill them all,” Patrick said in a scary voice, as he stood in the doorway of the temple with unblinking eyes.
“Come in,” Yasuhara Roshi said. He had seen Patrick like this before. Once they were seated in the teacher’s study, he asked Patrick who exactly he wanted to kill.
“Everyone who made that system in North Korea possible. Everyone who had a hand in kids like Dae-ho dying from malnutrition. And not just them. Everyone who’s ever hurt a kid. The people who abused the orphans at Yukinoshita Orphanage. I want them dead.”
“And the one who accidentally shot a young boy in Serbia?”
Patrick’s chin went to his chest. His teacher had seen right through him. “Yes. Him too.”
“But he deserves to live, I think. I also think he needs to stop carrying around the children who are dead and do something about the children who are living. Which he is doing.”
Patrick didn’t look up. The roshi continued.
“You asked about killing before. I told you it was sometimes justified in self-defense or to prevent a worse evil than the killing itself.”
“But what about killing out of vengeance?” Patrick asked. “And what if someone commits an even worse evil than he’s avenging?” His shouted words echoed through the temple. For the first time to anyone, Patrick then unburdened himself of a deed he had committed in North Korea after the fall of Kim Jong-un, when he and Yumi were working at the children’s shelter near the DMZ….
In their first days at the shelter Yumi
mentioned a rumor that the commandant of Senghori Prison, a sadistic thug known to the prisoners as the Rat Catcher after his practice of depriving them of their only source of protein, was still living alone in the prison. He had executed scores of prisoners on the flimsiest of pretexts, including an eleven-year-old girl whom he shot in the head for attempting to escape. As Yumi told him of the girl, Patrick felt a familiar rumbling in a dark part of his heart. After lunch that day he picked up an axe and told her he was going into the forest for firewood. But as soon as he rounded the corner leading away from the shelter, he made a beeline for the prison four miles away.
Senghori is an enormous compound and appeared to be deserted when he got there, but he wanted to make sure there were no guards still holed up inside after the overthrow. He moved stealthily among the shabbily maintained wooden barracks where the prisoners had been held and saw the one where Yumi had been imprisoned for months. He went up to it and laid a hand on it, as if conjuring the evil that had been perpetrated upon those held there for so long. If he ever encountered any of those guards, he would direct that evil back upon them.
He moved on to what he remembered as the “interrogation” building and stood transfixed. He was smelling once again the appalling stench that had hovered like a toxic cloud over this building back when he was captured. His gut contracted involuntarily, bringing up a throat-searing surge of bile and acid. He remembered being dragged into the building from the barbed wire fence he had cut in order to gain access to where Yumi was being held.
One of the guards, nicknamed Bastard Cho by the prisoners, wielded a wooden club, and Patrick felt again the repeated jabs to his ribs as they dragged him to the building he now stood in front of, where the stench of death and disinfectant competed for dominance, with death the hands-down winner. They then bound him hand and foot with barbed wire to a thick wooden pillar the size of a small tree. And he heard as if today the metal cleats on the Rat Catcher’s heels tap-tapping a slow tattoo on the rough-hewn porch planks before he landed an uppercut on Patrick’s chin where a guard’s rifle butt had opened up a gaping wound.
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