As soon as the waiter took their orders, Lorie launched into the story of her meeting with Margit Szabo. Will listened in fascination. It was unusual for him to remain silent this long, Burke thought. He was a talker, never at a loss for words.
"That's unbelievable," Will said when Lori finished. "Maggie told me you were coming over here on some kind of genealogical kick, but I had no idea it was anything like that. A famous actress? I figured one of these days I'd be able to boast that I hobnobbed around with celebrities. You going to bring her back to the States?"
"I'd like to," Lori said. "That dark old house gives me the creeps. But she didn't want to even talk about going to America. I guess if I were almost ninety, I'd be reluctant to start all over somewhere else, too."
"At least she's got her freedom now. Things must be a lot different since they lifted the Curtain."
"Some things are better, for sure," Lori said. "No more Big Brother looking over your shoulder. But things were fairly liberal here before, compared to most other communist countries. The Hungarians are a pretty resilient people."
Will glanced across at Burke. "What have you discovered in Hungary, neighbor?"
As she listened to the men chat, Lori looked around and spotted the curious young man she had seen watching Burke at the airport the day they arrived. He sat a few tables away. At the moment, his head was turned so she caught only a profile view, but she was positive of the identification. After her intelligence career, she no longer believed in coincidences. With Will at the table, though, she said nothing.
Chapter 4
Most of the somber crowd was already in their seats when the short, stocky man with graying hair showed his party credentials and stepped through the metal detector into the cavernous hall of Pyongyang's Presidential Palace. He was late for a very good reason. Earlier arrivals would have been forced to take the closest available seats to the stage. He wanted to be assured of a place at the rear of the audience.
He had calculated correctly. As he strolled into the room filled with uniformed and drab-looking men, the styling of their clothes giving them the appearance of sullen clones, he noted that seating was available only in the back two rows. He also saw a stage up front furnished with a standing lectern and two large, well-stuffed chairs. In a different setting, they would have been called thrones. The ever-present, larger-than-life portraits of President Kim and his son flanked the stage.
"So, over here," a hoarse voice whispered.
He saw his friend Suh Po-hee in the next to the last row to his right. He almost smiled, then thought better of it. Levity was not looked upon favorably at functions such as this. Anyway, the tension that had been mounting inside him all day was now reaching its peak. He would find his amusement in a macabre way soon enough. He moved over to take an empty seat next to Suh.
"I waited outside as long as I dared," Suh said. "I was afraid you weren't going to make it. That would've earned you a big black mark."
Suh was an opportunistic functionary in the Defense Ministry who owed his good fortune to So Song-ku, who held a key position in the Central Committee of the Korean Workers' Party.
The ability to laugh at life in this bleak land, even if reserved for times when he was alone or with only the closest of friends, had helped bring a sanitizing balance to So's otherwise schizophrenic existence. He had spent virtually his entire adult life carrying out an audacious deception. While a young South Korean soldier during the war of the fifties, real name Chun, he had been chosen for special training and a unique mission, code named DRAGON. As the war ground to a sputtering halt, he had been thrown in with prisoners from the North who would one day be repatriated. He took the identity of a soldier whose entire unit had been wiped out. A soldier whose hometown had been obliterated in a B-29 raid on a munitions dump. In the prison camp, he made a name for himself as a staunch communist who seized every opportunity to frustrate his imperialist captors. On his "return" to the North, he was hailed as a revolutionary hero and welcomed by the Party brass. He possessed a knack for political intrigue, and it had helped propel him up through the ranks to his present position.
Rather than feeling any great apprehension at his secret existence as the DRAGON, So saw his code name more as a protective shield. He had been reared in a rural Korean home where shamanism influenced daily life the way the Great Spirit affected life in American Indian culture. A major shamanist influence was in art, where its various symbols appeared all around in bold, colorful splendor. One of the Five Symbols which Repel Evil was the dragon. And So, the DRAGON, had his work cut out for him.
Less than a handful of people in Seoul knew of his existence, chief among them his handler in the NSP, the Agency for National Security Planning, formerly known as KCIA. The DRAGON had provided invaluable intelligence over the years, but he was called on sparingly to protect his cover. It was So who had communicated details of today's ceremony, and he was the one who had received the secret instructions, the most shocking of his career. They came with a supposed gift, a shiny new wristwatch.
The sound of music from a military band echoed off the marble walls of the stately hall, and the assembled crowd rose to its feet as one. A thunderous round of applause began as Kim Jong-il escorted his father to the stage. The old communist war-horse, gray-haired and hesitant, appeared to resemble more a churlish grandfather than the fiery tyrant of the past. But decades of manipulation through counterbalancing threats and favors had kept him in absolute control. He had insidiously encouraged those in positions of power to inform on one another, so that no one was certain of whom he could trust other than Kim and his son.
The music faded as the elder statesman leaned against the lectern and favored his followers with a thin smile. He raised his arms, then made a downward gesture. The audience followed his motion, taking their seats as if obeying a hypnotic command. When he spoke, his voice had a measured cadence, as though it had slowed along with his other bodily functions.
"Comrades, you do me great honor by your presence here today. For many years, we have been involved in a great and historic mission. While others have grown weak and faltered in their commitment to socialist principle, we have remained steadfast and true to our cause. The focus of our crusade remains the same, liberation of the South from its imperialistic path."
He sipped at a glass of water and, appearing somewhat revived, launched into a vicious tirade against those in Europe and the former Soviet Union who had capitulated to the capitalists, mainly the evil Americans. Lastly, he thanked his stalwart friends from China and Cuba. Then, obviously tiring, he moved back to the large chair in the center of the stage as the crowd again rose as one to roar its unanimous approval, a throng of robots activated as if by the press of a button.
Kim Jong-il strode to the lectern and called on Vice Premier Yip to come forward and make his presentation.
The representative of the Peoples Republic of China, a short, heavy-set man with a benign look, marched to the stage accompanied by two Chinese security men. Exhibiting the exaggerated moves of mimes, but with great care, they transported the large, peach-colored Ming vase on a laquered wooden carrier mounted across two poles like a sedan chair. With their slow, almost reverent pace, they might have been a pair of high priests carrying the ark of the covenant to the Temple Mount. They placed the carrier at Kim's feet.
As the Chinese entourage was approaching the stage, So, whose position in the audience put him about forty-five meters away, carefully removed the new watch from his wrist and cast a furtive glance at its face. A battery-operated quartz watch, it had a somewhat bulky molded plastic case with small buttons on the sides to set functions such as time and date. The watch was an inexpensive stock production model not uncommon in Pyongyang, with a Made in China label. However, the mechanism inside the case was like nothing to be found anywhere else. It had been hand-crafted in Seoul by a young electronics genious who had formerly designed subminiature components for aircraft weapons systems at a California defense contractor's laboratory. The time mechanism of the watch worked perfectly and would not have raised the slightest suspicion had one of Kim's paranoid security men examined it. But, in addition, the case had been crowded with other components. There was a separate button battery that powered a tiny radio transmitter, which operated on a frequency in the 600 megahertz range. It required only a small antenna that was nothing more than a short length of wire curled around beneath the face of the watch. Wired into the circuit was a tiny silicon memory chip containing a coded signal that would activate the detonator planted at the bottom of the Ming vase.