Clark said, “I meant to call you before you came in, but we had an in extremis situation come up last week.”
“Yeah, I heard. No details yet, but Jack was getting around to it. He doesn’t seem to be aware of what I’ve been up to.”
“Gerry and I have decided to keep some of the work we do here compartmentalized. You were working your last job as a singleton. When an operator is in the field as a singleton, there is no need to know among the other operators.”
Dom said, “I understand that.”
“Good.” The matter was settled, Caruso wouldn’t talk about his operation to the rest of the team. “How do you feel? Ready to get back to work?”
“Absolutely. I’m good to go.”
Clark said, “I need to fill you in on what went down in Vietnam. We have a nine a.m. meeting where we might get further marching orders on the subject.”
Dom pulled up a chair. “Let’s hear it.”
10
A motorcade of five armored luxury vehicles rolled up to the same outer perimeter checkpoint that mining director Hwang passed an hour earlier. The lead car handed over some credentials to the uniformed guard and soon all five vehicles were moving again along the virtually empty blacktop road, much faster than the entourage from the Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation. They sailed through the other checkpoints without even slowing down, rising through the wooded hills toward their destination.
The motorcade stopped at the entrance to Residence No. 55, and eighteen men in total disgorged from it, all wearing gray military uniforms signifying them as officers of the Korean People’s Army. Their credos were checked here again by a large unit of armed guards, but only briefly, and soon the entourage had passed through the doors of the palace.
At the nucleus of this group was Lieutenant General Ri Tae-jin, a fit fifty-two-year-old who wore a chest full of medals and walked pridefully, chin first and shoulders back. His face was blank, void of emotion, though in the stony gaze a perceptive person might well notice an air of sadness.
Six of his staff remained in the entry hall; they were just along as escort, but they were not needed for today’s meeting. And six more stopped off in an inner chamber for consultation with politburo members in concurrent talks at the residence. Five men followed Ri through another guarded doorway, heading for the personal residence of the Supreme Leader.
They ascended a flight of stairs and entered the long main gallery hall, and here Ri glanced at a clock on the wall and saw he was right on time for his meeting with the Dae Wonsu, which meant to him he would probably have to sit and wait for only an hour or so. Ji-hoon’s father hadn’t been punctual himself, really, but Ji-hoon seemed to take exceptional pleasure in making people wait for him.
Halfway down the main gallery hall Ri and his entourage encountered a smaller group of men in civilian dress approaching from the living quarters of the Supreme Leader. There were five men in this group, and they were led by one of the residence’s beautiful young attendants. The lieutenant general identified one man in the group as the senior member because the attendant spoke to him, and the others walked behind. As he passed the man their eyes met, and Ri saw he was a small man with a bald head, a few years older than himself.
It bothered General Ri greatly that he did not recognize the man, because he’d obviously just left an audience with the Supreme Leader. If this bald-headed fellow had the ear of the Dae Wonsu and he wasn’t, at least, a general, then he was most definitely an important person. And if he wasn’t even in the military, Ri felt he had no excuse for not knowing the man’s file backward and forward.
Ri was the nation’s newly installed foreign intelligence chief, which meant there was no reason he would necessarily know every visitor to Residence No. 55—that would be a job for the Ministry of State Security, the domestic arm of North Korean intelligence — but with every generalship in the Korean People’s Army came the responsibility of deft political relationship-making. Ri knew the important people in this town, in this government.
But he didn’t know this little man.
As he walked he tilted his head toward an aide, who spoke without being spoken to, because he knew what his general wanted.
Softly he said, “Hwang Min-ho. Installed last week as the new director of Korea Natural Resources Trading.”
Ri nodded, as though he already knew this. He had heard the name, and he knew of the appointment. Ri had also heard of the order to have Hwang’s boss snatched from his house in his bedclothes and helicoptered up to a reeducation camp, and he imagined that bastard would be dead inside six weeks.
Reeducation complete, he thought to himself as he walked on.
The general wondered about this Hwang. “I want his file. Contact MSS. Generate a reason.” His voice echoed off the wooden flooring, and Hwang might have heard him had the footfalls of a dozen men and women not echoed along with it.
A few minutes later Ri had left the last vestiges of his entourage behind, and now he sat alone in a gilded office. He knew Choi had a dozen of these offices at a dozen palaces in the country, and he’d been to many meetings in this and other similar rooms, but never had he been left by himself in one.
This was strange.
He did not know why he had been summoned here today and then sequestered from his aides. Perhaps it was a formality, a way to welcome him into his new position at the Reconnaissance General Bureau, although that didn’t seem plausible. If that had been the case, surely there would be attendants and transcriptionists and photographers galore ready to witness the event.
So this was something else. But what? Ri had served in the military intelligence field for more than a quarter-century already, and he was a brilliant man, but at the moment he couldn’t come up with a scenario that made sense.
Although the man he would soon have an audience with held the power of life and death over every civilian in the nation, he wasn’t worried about himself in the least. He knew that if Choi wanted him dead, he wouldn’t be meeting with him personally.
Those things happened by proxy, as Ri Tae-jin was painfully well aware.
Lieutenant General Ri had received exactly two orders from the office of the Supreme Leader in the one week he had been in charge of the RGB. The first order was that Ri carry out the arrest of his predecessor. This he did reluctantly; he had worked with General Gang for more than a decade and quite liked the old man.
Gang’s “crime” was the recent failure of a long-range ballistic missile test. ICBMs like the one that had exploded over the ocean were the responsibility of the Korean People’s Army Missile Guidance Bureau, and General Gang’s Reconnaissance General Bureau wasn’t directly involved in making missiles fly. Several directors at MGB were arrested, but RGB was implicated as well, because a long-standing RGB plan to steal guidance software from a French aerospace company via a hacking operation had recently failed. Choi lumped that failure together with the unsuccessful missile test, and he ordered the directors of both the MGB and the RGB hauled out of their offices in disgrace.
The second message from Choi came down to Ri later that same day. It was a short, direct missive ordering Ri to put General Gang to death within twenty-four hours to pay for his disgrace.
At the bottom of the page, one additional word had been added to the order.
The word specified the manner of the execution.
Dogs.
Ri had sat alone in his office for fifteen minutes, stunned and sickened, with the order held loosely in his fingertips, until a ringing phone brought him back to life. It was a senior minister from Choi’s office — his words carried the weight of the Dae Wonsu — asking if the order had been understood.