Fisher was almost finished with his Diet Coke when Pak began stirring. He groaned, and his eyelids blinked open, then closed again as he tried to focus. He tried to raise his hands to his face; his knuckles rapped the underside of the coffee table with a dull thud, and the vase teetered, then went still.
“Just lie still,” Fisher said. “It’ll be easier for both of us.”
Pak went still. He rotated his eyes and craned his neck until he could see Fisher. Instead of the typical “Who are you” and “What do you want,” Pak said simply, “You’re an American.” His English was only slightly accented; Fisher noted his use of the contraction. Pak had had extensive language training, which was to be expected from an RDEI agent.
“I am,” Fisher said.
“Don’t you know where you are? You’ll never get out of the city alive. You probably won’t get off this block alive.”
“We,” Fisher replied.
“What?”
“We’ll never get out of the city alive.” He held up Pak’s pistol. “I guarantee you, if that time comes, you’ll go before me.”
“How’d you find me?”
“Western imperialist technology at its best.”
“Why have you come here?”
“Complicated question.” Too complicated, Fisher thought. If not for Omurbai and Manas, Pak would have gotten a bullet a long time ago. But that wasn’t the situation, was it? He needed Pak alive. “I want you to tell me where Carmen Hayes is, and I want you to tell me everything you know about Manas: Where it is, where Omurbai plans to use it, and how to neutralize it.”
Pak offered him a condescending grin. “I’m not going to help you.”
“I thought you’d say that,” Fisher said. “And I’m sure I’d have a hard time changing your mind. Am I right?”
Pak nodded.
Fisher gestured to Pak’s laptop, which sat, powered up, on a side table. An SD/USB card reader jutted from one of the laptop’s side ports. “You’ve got some pretty good encryption on there. Unfortunately, it’s not good enough. Right now, I’m loading a virus onto your hard drive. I won’t pretend to know how it does what it does, but here’s what I do know: Two hours from now, and every two hours after that, if a specially coded e-mail doesn’t land in your in-box, the virus goes active.”
“That’s your plan?” Pak said, smiling smugly. “You’re going to ruin my laptop?”
“No, I’m going to ruin your life. You see, you trusted your encryption a little too much — put too much dicey information on your hard drive. What that virus will do is plant digital tracks in every corner of your life — your e-mail accounts, your finances, your travel logs — and the story it will tell is that of a traitor, a trusted RDEI agent who volunteered to spy for the United States and has been feeding the CIA information for the past three years. You might not be afraid of what I can do to you, but I know you’re afraid of what your bosses at the SSD do with traitors. I’ve seen video of their interrogation methods. It’s not pretty. But, of course I’m sure you know that.”
“I don’t believe you,” Pak said. “They won’t believe it.”
“Bad gamble,” said Fisher.
And it was. This was no bluff. The CIA’s biggest contribution to Fisher’s mission was one of its most prized agents, an executive secretary in the comptroller’s office at the State Security Department. While none of the information she’d passed to Langley had been of strategic value, it had given the CIA’s Intelligence Directorate an invaluable glimpse into the administrative side of North Korea’s security services, allowing it to build from the inside out profiles of more than a dozen RDEI agents: where they went, how they traveled, and through which banks and front companies money was moved. It had been a jigsaw puzzle of daunting complexity, but it had paid off. Fisher’s threat to Pak was a case in point.
What Fisher did not tell Pak was that while he was unconscious another program on another SD card had plucked from the laptop’s hard drive every piece of data within a certain range of file extensions, the passwords and log-ins to a half dozen SSD intranet portals, including Pak’s office e-mail account. Once the program had completed its search, Fisher had loaded the contents onto his iPhone for encrypted burst transmission back to Third Echelon, where Grimsdottir and Redding, working at tandem workstations, were sorting through the data.
“That’s not possible,” Pak said. “You’ll miss something.”
Fisher smiled. “I doubt it. I happen to work with a woman who’s frighteningly good at what she does, and right now you’re her only project. Did I mention she was kind enough to open a private account at Syndikus Treuhandanstalt bank in Liechtenstein? You’ve got a small fortune in there. You’ll never see it, of course, but your bosses will.”
Pak’s eyes shifted, and Fisher saw for the first time a hint of fear.
“Make no mistake,” Fisher continued, “when we’re done with you, you’ll be the greatest traitor your country has ever seen. Or, option two: You agree to help us.” Fisher spread his hands and gave Pak a friendly grin. “It’s your call.”
“How do I know I can trust—”
“You don’t. There’re only two things you can count on right now: one, that we can and will burn you; and two, whatever else happens, the first hint I get that you’re double-dealing us, I’ll put a bullet in your head. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
Pak closed his eyes, took a deep breath, let it out. “I’ll take it.”
39
“Slow down,” Fisher ordered Pak. “You don’t want to get a speeding ticket.”
Pak eased up on the gas pedal, and the car — a 1990 Mercedes 300 Diesel that Fisher assumed was another RDEI perk — slowed to below 50 kph. The tires beat out a steady rhythm on the highway’s expansion joints, lulling Fisher toward drowsiness. He shook it off and focused.
Knowing he was losing ground to exhaustion, Fisher had taken out some insurance against the inevitability of Pak trying to make a move: Tightened around the base of each of Pak’s ring fingers was a wire-thin flexicuff. The other ends were secured around the steering wheel’s lower half. He had enough length to operate the Mercedes but nothing else.
They’d been traveling for forty minutes. In the side mirror Fisher could see the lights of Pyongyang in the distance, but out here, just six miles outside the city, it was pitch-dark, save what little moonlight filtered through the low cloud cover. It was as though they’d passed through a curtain on the capital’s eastern outskirts, from lighted skyscrapers and streetlamps to blackness.
With one eye trained on the iPhone’s screen, which currently displayed a hybrid satellite/road map of North Korea, and one eye tuned toward Pak, Fisher ordered him to turn left off the two-lane highway onto a narrow gravel road that took them into a stretch of rolling hills covered by evergreen trees. Fisher watched the latitude and longitude coordinates at the edge of the iPhone’s screen scroll until finally they stopped and started flashing.
“Stop here,” Fisher ordered.
Pak pulled to the side of the road and shut off the engine. Fisher took the car keys.
“I’m taking a little walk,” he told Pak. “If you can manage to gnaw your fingers off before I get back, you’re free to go.”
“You’re a funny man,” Pak grumbled.