“Crocker, I want you to meet Terry.”
“Konnichiwa,” Terry said in Japanese, bowing from the waist.
“Nice to meet you, too.”
He still wore the plaid hat, which clashed with his shorts.
“Terry is Japanese,” Anders explained, “but he’s spent a lot of time in Pyongyang and developed a close relationship with Kim Jong-il and his son Kim Jung-un.”
“Eighteen years altogether,” Terry said, nodding and removing his hat. His head was as smooth as a cue ball.
“Terry here served as the Supreme Leader’s fitness and karate instructor. He taught his son as well.”
“I first meet Jong-un…twelve years old. No shit.”
“You must have stories,” said Crocker.
“Oh yes. Many stories. Stories to curl the hair on your head.”
Without prompting, he described his first trip to Pyongyang for a karate competition back in the ’90s, how he had been approached by an aide to Kim Jong-il, and how the Supreme Leader himself enticed him with money and gifts to become his personal fitness instructor. He spent six years in North Korea, returned to the town he grew up in Japan, and was later lured back. He eventually became part of the Supreme Leader’s inner circle and participated in wild karaoke parties, orgies with teenage sex slaves, and feasts with delicacies flown in from all over the world.
“Off-the-hook shit,” he commented. “You can’t make this stuff up.”
Terry explained that while the majority of the twenty million residents of North Korea lived in abject poverty and others starved to death, the Supreme Leader surrounded himself with a carefully selected coterie of military and party officials who lived in extreme luxury. He basically bought their loyalty with apartments, houses, cars, special privileges, and gifts. Terry himself had been given hundreds of thousands of dollars, gold watches, fine clothes and shoes, jewelry, any pretty girl he wanted, and the wife of his choice.
In return, those allowed close to power first had to pledge absolute loyalty to the Supreme Leader. He was deified by state media and treated like a god. The slightest hint of disloyalty would result in one being tossed into a reeducation camp or one of the country’s 180 political prisons, or having to face some form of execution.
In December 2013 Kim Jong-hu’s uncle and top economic advisor Jang Song-thaek was abruptly removed from all official posts and dubbed “despicable human scum” by state media. A week later he and his top aides were stripped naked and fed to over a hundred dogs that had been starved for three days. Hundreds of top Kim Jong-un aides were forced to watch as the men’s bodies were ripped apart and eaten in a process that is reported to have taken over an hour.
North Korean citizens were routinely executed for routine offenses, including the possession of a Bible or watching South Korean-produced videos.
Crocker shook his head in disgust, despite that fact that he had heard much of this before.
Turning to Terry, Anders asked, “Tell us where Kim Jong-un gets the money to support his nuclear program, his million-soldier-strong military, and also to support his inner circle in luxury when the economy is dismal, most people are starving, and the country lives under a strict UN economic embargo that blocks practically all international currency from flowing into the country.”
“Illegal activities.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“The government has a branch that is a criminal enterprise to make money and accrue power to the regime by any means possible.”
“For example?” Anders asked.
“Killing people, torture, kidnapping for ransom, selling drugs, hacking into bank accounts, spying. All the things criminal organizations do.”
“How do you know about this?”
“I became friendly with the general who runs it. We call him the Dragon.”
As he lay on the bed Dawkins’s mind roiled with ghastly scenes of postnuclear Nagasaki and Hiroshima-buildings vaporized, people reduced to dust, mothers and children covered with oozing radiation sores and burns, wandering through rubble like zombies. Dawkins hovered over them like a giant bird. Hot, ionized air burned his feathers and skin. Ashes clogged his throat, causing him to choke.
The coughing pulled him into a level of semiconsciousness. He opened his eyes into darkness-just a glowing ribbon from under the door to his right and the hum of a ventilation system.
Something rustled nearby.
“Sung?”
He had trouble breathing and grabbed at his throat. Then felt warm hands on his chest.
“Sung, is that you?”
“Breathe, Mr. Dawkin. You have bad dream. Relax.”
He turned and saw her sitting beside him, her shiny black hair falling over her eyes, her neck long and arched like a swan’s.
It all came back to him-his kidnapping, his family, the missile program he was being forced to work on, and his terrible moral conundrum. For the second time in his life, he thought of killing himself. Junior year in high school he had swallowed a bottle of aspirin after his girlfriend dumped him for his best friend.
He told himself that this time he would do it right, and considered the means at his disposal, the cord of the space heater in the corner, the sharp edge of the metal bathroom sink.
But even as he did, Sung’s hands and words soothed him. “You need…relax, Mr. Dawkin. Go to sleep. Clear you head. You work in the morning.”
“Sung, I can’t sleep.”
“You miss family. Family okay?”
“I don’t know.”
She leaned in until their faces almost touched. “I stay with you, Mr. Dawkin. You want pill for sleep? I give you pill.”
“No pill, please.”
“You good man, Mr. Dawkin. You love family.”
He pictured Nan and Karen in his head and sighed. “Yes, I do.”
“You sick in you heart.”
“I am.”
“I know, Mr. Dawkin. I know.”
It was reassuring to hear her say so. His week of captivity had caused him to partially shed his sense of self because his very existence had become a problem. Dangerous men wanted his mind and the knowledge it contained. He had gone to Geneva with a plan to help save the planet and had been lured away by an offer to put the plan into operation. Now he was being asked to help destroy it.
The irony crushed him.
He blamed himself and the choices he had made. And then he argued that this current situation wasn’t his fault. He was a scientist and an engineer with no desire to hurt others. Could he help it if his expertise was used for sinister purposes? Yes, he had trained to become an expert in missile guidance systems. Yes, he had benefited from the money he earned from working for the U.S. government. It’s true that he could have gone into another field of endeavor.
“Sung, is there light at the end of the tunnel?” he asked out loud.
“I no understand,” she whispered back.
“Will I ever see my family again? Will I be able to face them when I do?”
He felt lost in a gray, formless muddle with nothing to hold on to. Death waited and watched. In many ways it seemed preferable to the dying ghostlike creatures that stumbled through the shadows of his consciousness at night.
“Mr. Dawkin…You family need you.”
This woman he knew almost nothing about had become his only real human contact. His nurse and angel of sorts. She sang him songs and told him stories, and massaged his legs, back, and shoulders to try to get him to relax.
In the far, far distance, over continents and oceans and beyond the moral quagmire he currently faced, waited his wife and daughter. He had no way of reaching them, or explaining why it might be better if he never came home.
His North Korean captors had cut him off completely from the outside world. No Internet, no phones, no newspapers, magazines, books, gossip. Nothing. Only Sung and the VCR, the TV monitor and a box of porno videos sitting in the corner.