Park coughed and shook his head.
Kim smacked his lips and ran his hand through Park’s sweat-matted hair. Kim gripped the hair and jerked Park’s head into the air.
“Look at me, you piece of shit. Do you know what the penalty for listening to capitalist propaganda is? Religious songs are forbidden by the party leadership and is a direct insult to our Dear Leader.”
Kim slammed Park’s head into the dirt and pulled him back into the air.
“You’re a good worker. The state needs your skills, which is why I think this reeducation period will be enough. But I can’t have you, or anyone else, infecting the camp with lies from the puppet regime in Seoul. Where did you get the music?”
“Jesus… will save my soul,” Park croaked.
Kim growled and pulled a pill bottle from his back pocket. He held it in front of Park’s face and shook the bottle. A single large, yellow pill rattled within. Seeing the pill brought life back into Park’s body; he squirmed against Kim’s grasp.
“Tell me where you got the music, and you can martyr yourself quickly. Keep pissing me off, and you can have this. The last traitor lasted three minutes before he begged me to cut him open and take it out. How long do you think you’ll last?” Kim said.
“Byeon Un, from Wonsan. Got it from one of the Kenyans in the marketplace,” Park said, his eyes glued to the pill bottle.
“So that’s all it takes to get past your faith? Worthless.” Kim dropped Park and motioned to one of his thugs, who handed him a pistol.
Kim put two rounds in Park’s chest and handed the gun back.
“Go get Byeon Un and the two workers standing next to him. Throw them all in the box until they confess,” Kim instructed one of his men.
Kim stalked off, muttering to himself. Park had been his best electrical engineer, and his loss would have to be explained. The truth would make Kim look weak and unable to control his workers. The report of a load of rebar rods falling onto a group of workers would cover everything. A convenient accident to take the life of Park and others would be suitably tragic.
He stalked through the work site back to his office. Hundreds of North Koreans worked with renewed fervor to build the Kenyan government’s newest building. Amazing how a summary execution could motivate laborers who had been paid in little more than food and slave wages the regime taxed at 80 percent.
“Supervisors” stood over work crews, members of North Korea’s Special Forces selected for their loyalty and experience as guards at the Kaechon prison camp for dissidents. The supervisors were as easy to spot by their swagger as by the fact that they looked well fed and healthy. Laborers were kept on a diet of rice and collard greens, which was an upgrade from the boiled grass and ground tree bark soup these peasants would eat in North Korea.
One of his supervisors opened the door to Kim’s foreman’s trailer as Kim approached. Kim hurled his construction helmet into the opening and stomped into his office. This project was a week behind and there was only so many more corners he could cut before the Kenyans complained.
The sound of a long snort welcomed him. A dark-haired and impeccably dressed man sat at his desk, hunched over a mirror covered in rails of light-blue powder.
“Ambassador, you’re taking profit from our Dear Leader,” Kim said. The ambassador had a sealed one-kilogram bag of crystal methamphetamine next to the mirror; the plastic had been ripped open, and kernels of meth had spilled out across the table.
Ambassador Jung-nam squeezed his sinuses and looked at Kim through dilated pupils.
“We’re dead men, Kim — all dead — and we didn’t do anything wrong.” Jung-nam’s words came out of his mouth in a rapid-fire manner; the meth in his system had him wired like a harp.
“We make our payments to Pyongyang on time. This contract is sound, and our distribution network — if you don’t use it all first — is intact.” Kim grabbed a tuft of Jung-nam’s hair as he bent for another hit. He twisted his hand and used the pain to bring Jung-nam to his feet.
“They killed everyone in Room Fourteen! Lined them up in the center of Kim Il-sung Square and shot them in the back of the head. They’re going to do that to us too!” Jung-nam thrashed against Kim’s grip on his hair, his voice shrill.
Kim shoved Jung-nam against the sheet metal wall and pressed his forearm against the ambassador’s throat, cutting off his protest.
“I will bury you in concrete if you scream like that one more time. We don’t report to Room Thirty Nine, not Room Fourteen, you idiot. What is your problem?” Room Thirty Nine, the state sponsored criminal organization specializing in counterfeit currency, drug trafficking, and smuggling laborers and female “entertainers” around the world, coordinated all hard currency-generating activities for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Kim wasn’t entirely sure what Room Fourteen was. Showing an interest in matters of state that didn’t directly involve him was a sure way to get denounced as a spy.
Jung-nam made a hacking noise and slapped the forearm crushing his windpipe. Kim eased the pressure.
“Fourteen 14 was supposed to make a delivery, but it got hijacked. Pirates! They didn’t tell the party because they thought they could ransom it out before anyone noticed. The buyer went berserk when the package wasn’t delivered, which came as an unpleasant surprise to the party,… and it all got worse from there,” Jung-nam said.
“What package?”
Jung-nam cackled and squirmed like a kitten held in its mother’s jaws. Jung-nam lowered his voice to a whisper.
“A nuke.”
Kim let Jung-nam go and stepped back.
“A little bit of meth, a little money laundering — no big deal. The world doesn’t care so long as the right palms are greased. But if word gets out that we’ve sold a nuke to — to anyone, even the Chinese won’t stand with us. Sixty years of brotherhood or not.” Jung-nam flopped back into Kim’s chair and swiveled from side to side.
“Why do you know about this?” Kim asked.
Jung-nam sprang forward and snorted another rail of powdered meth.
“You have to get it back. The — the head of the Workers’ Party called me an hour ago. If you don’t get it back, then you, me… ” Jung-nam put a forefinger to his temple and cocked his thumb.
Kim looked at the package of meth on his desk. He had five more kilos squirreled away in the work site and almost one hundred thousand euros in a safe; he had enough to survive on if he ran now. He also had a wife and a dozen close relatives still in North Korea, all of whom would never escape the reach of the party if he failed or fled.
“Where is the shipment?”
“The boat is sitting off the coast of Somalia. We have one of our special cargo ships in Mombasa. It’s all yours.”
His team of Special Forces “supervisors” had enough weapons and explosives hidden inside construction supplies to carry out attacks against South Korean and American interests for the next act of the Korean War. They could handle a few skinny pirates with ease.
“We’ll board the ship tonight. Make sure the Dear Leader knows we won’t fail him, the country, or the party,” Kim said.
Natalie and Shannon waiting in an elevator. This one featured actual buttons to choose one’s destination and the best in classic chamber music for background noise. The Hotel Hapsburg had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, and according to Shannon, it featured a staff that would keep to their own affairs and alert them to any Bundespolizei, the Austrian police, snooping for the right price. Natalie was a step behind Shannon, her role as an executive assistant very clear to her. She was there to pay close attention and take notes, not interact.