Fisher crept up the steps, turned the knob with his left hand, and stepped through the door, the SC-20 already to his shoulder. He swung the door shut with his boot. In unison, both men spun in their chairs. The one farthest from Fisher started to rise.
“Sit,” Fisher barked in Korean.
The man hesitated.
Fisher shook his head and gestured with the SC-20.
The man sat down.
“Raise your hand if you speak English,” Fisher asked in English.
Both men raised his hand. One man — a senior sergeant, judging by the patch on his sleeve — was in his forties; the other man was no older than twenty. Fisher studied them for a few moments and decided he didn’t like the glint of anger in the younger one’s eyes.
He fired a Cottonball in his chest. There was a pfft sound. The man staggered, then his eyes rolled back into his head, and he collapsed.
Fisher pointed the SC-20 at the sergeant, who already had his hands raised. “Please… no shoot,” he said in stilted English.
“You’ve got a family, don’t you?” Fisher asked.
“Yes. A family.”
“And you’re close to retirement.”
“Yes. Uh… six… uh…”
“Months.”
“Yes.”
“You cooperate, and you’ll live to see your family and your retirement. You don’t cooperate, you’re going to die in this trailer. Do you understand?”
The sergeant’s bulging eyes told Fisher he understood perfectly.
“Yes, yes, please…”
Fisher stalked forward and knelt down before the sink. He opened the cabinet door, looked inside, then stood up and tossed the sergeant a pair of flexicuffs. “See that pipe bracket in there?”
The sergeant bent over and looked. “Yes.”
“Tie him to that. Not the pipe, the bracket.”
As the sergeant dragged his partner to the sink, Fisher walked to the floor lamp and unplugged it. He clicked on the SC-20’s barrel light, then checked the sergeant’s work and found it satisfactory.
“Empty your pockets on the table.”
The sergeant did so. Fisher sorted through the contents. He found no keys, but on the back of the man’s ID card he spotted a magnetic dot about half the diameter of a penny. Fisher pocketed the card. He gestured for the sergeant to sit down.
“What’s your name?”
“Kim. I am Kim.”
“Kim, there’s a facility beneath this goat farm. How do I get into it?”
Kim hesitated. His eyes darted left, then right.
Fisher thumbed the SC-20’s selector to SINGLE and fired a bullet into the wall beside his head. Kim started, nearly toppling sideways out of his chair.
“Next bullet goes between your eyes,” Fisher said, tapping his index finger on his own forehead, then pointing at Kim’s. “Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the entrance?”
Kim pointed vaguely. “There.”
“Take me.”
Once outside the trailer, Kim didn’t turn right toward the outbuildings but walked straight into the goat pen, turned left, and stopped before a storage closet built into the wall. The doors were covered in peeling white paint, one latch hanging precariously by a rusted screw.
At Fisher’s prompting, Kim opened the cabinet doors. He reached down and brushed away some hay from the floor, revealing a hinged O-ring. He pulled on it. The closet’s entire floor lifted up on hinges and locked into the open position. A set of wood stairs dropped away into darkness.
Kim nodded and pointed. “There. Yes?”
Fisher nodded, then gestured with the SC-20. “Back to the trailer. It’s nap time.”
After giving Kim a dose of Cottonball and securing him next to his partner, he locked the trailer door from the inside and returned to the hidden stairway.
At the bottom he found a long, dark corridor with white linoleum floor tiles and white cinder-block walls. With the SC-20 held at ready low he started down the corridor. He passed eight rooms, five to one side, three to the other. All were empty and dark. Not a piece of furniture, not a scrap of paper, not even the barest trace of dust on the floor.
He came to a T-intersection. To the left and right, more white walls, more white doors, more empty rooms. At the end of the right-hand corridor he found a freight elevator, gate wide open. To his right, the last door stood open. Inside, Fisher found an industrial-sized paper shredder plugged into the wall outlet and, lying on the floor beside it, an empty trash bag. He returned to the corridor. The door on the opposite side bore a white placard with Korean Hangul characters in red. Fisher opened the door. On the other side was a stairwell. He followed it down two flights to a landing and another door. Through it was a short corridor ending at yet another door. While this one was unlocked like all the rest, it had been secured by a hasp and a padlock, both of which hung open.
He opened the door.
The room was eight feet by eight feet and contained a narrow trundle bed with an inch-thick mattress, a tattered green wool blanket, a sink and a toilet, both bolted to the wall, and a hard-backed steel chair sitting in the corner.
A prison cell, Fisher thought.
With nothing else to search, Fisher used his Sykes to split the mattress and dump the foam batting onto the floor. Amid the fluff he found a thin rubber shoe insert. On its back, pressed into the foam with what Fisher guessed was a fingernail, was a block letter message:
IF YOU FIND THIS AND CARE MY NAME IS CARMEN HAYES
AMERICAN
MY PARENTS PRICE AND LORETTA
HOUSTON TEXAS
TELL THEM I LOVE THEM
TELL THEM WHAT HAPPENED TO ME
— CH
44
On the screen, Lambert sat alone at the conference room table. Grimsdottir and Redding sat behind him at the periphery of the room, partially in the shadows. Fisher’s own screen, a nineteen-inch computer monitor, sat on the desk before him. The room he’d been given was one of the base’s tanks, an isolated, soundproof space in the commander’s anteroom. Tanks were constantly monitored and scrubbed for listening devices.
Lambert took a moment to digest the brief Fisher had just given him, then nodded. “That poor girl,” he said. “So there was nothing? Cleaned out completely?”
“A few trash bags,” Fisher said. “And her message. Nothing more.”
How long ago had that been? Fisher thought. It felt much longer than it was.
Four hours after clearing North Korean airspace, Fisher had landed in an NSA-owned Gulfstream jet at Misawa.
After searching the remainder of the facility beneath the goat farm and finding it also empty, Fisher had backed out the same way he’d come, paused briefly to update Lambert, then headed north, deeper into the countryside and away from the main roads until just before dawn when he found another bolt-hole — this time an overhang of rock choked with scrub brush — and waited out the day. At dusk he started moving again, following his OPSAT map until he came across a set of north-south railroad tracks. Two hours after he settled in at the edge of the track embankment, the coal train Grimsdottir had told him to expect chugged around the bend and passed by him. He hopped aboard, burrowed himself a dugout in one of the coal cars, and covered himself.
The train wound its way north and west through the countryside until, twelve miles later and two miles outside Pyongsong, Fisher hopped off and headed northwest, across the evergreen-covered slopes to the south of the city until he reached a dirt road, which he followed south until he reached a T-turn. He checked his coordinates to make sure he was on target, then hunkered down to wait.