The Target Page 9

  each guard. And every minute you are here alive will feel like death.”

  He looked at his men. “Kaechon,” he said, and laughed. “For shit coddlers.”

  They all laughed too, grinning at each other and slapping their thighs.

  He stood. “Twenty thousand euros.”

  “When?”

  “Five days.”

  “But that is impossible.”

  “Then I am sorry.” He motioned to his guards, who moved forward.

  “Wait, wait!” she screamed.

  The men stopped and looked at her expectantly.

  She rose on quivering legs. “I will get it. But I need to get a message out.”

  “Perhaps that can be arranged.” He looked over her naked body. “You are not so scrawny. When you are cleaned up, you will be pretty, I think. Or at least not so disgusting.”

  He reached out and touched her hair. She flinched and he slapped her so violently he drew blood.

  “You will never do that again,” he ordered. “You will welcome my touch.”

  She nodded and rubbed the skin where he had struck her and tasted the blood on her lips.

  “You will be cleaned up. And then you will be brought to me.”

  She looked at him and knew what that meant. “But the euros? I thought that was the payment.”

  “In addition to the euros. While we wait the five days. Or do you prefer the filthy, dangerous mines to my bed?”

  She shook her head and looked down, defeated. “I…I do not want to go to the mines.”

  He smiled and cupped her trembling chin, lifting her gaze to his.

  “You see, not so difficult. Food, clean water, warm bed. And I will have you as often as I want.” He turned to his men. “As will they. Anytime we want. You understand? Anything we want, I don’t care what it is. You are nothing but a dog, do you understand?”

  She nodded tearfully. “I understand. But you will not hurt me? I…I have been hurt enough.”

  He slapped her again. “You make no demands, filth. You do not speak unless I ask you a question.” He put his hands around her throat and slammed her against the wall. “Do you understand?”

  She nodded and said in a defeated voice, “I understand.”

  “You will call me seu seung,” he added, using the Korean word for master. “You will call me this even after you leave here. If you leave here. I make no promises, even if you get me the euros. You may not safely escape. It is up to me and me only. Do you understand?”

  She nodded. “I understand.”

  He shook her violently. “Say it. Give me my proper respect.”

  “Seu seung,” she said in a tremulous voice.

  He smiled and let her go. “See, that was not so bad.”

  A moment later he clutched at his throat where she had struck him. He staggered backward, colliding with one of his men.

  She moved so fast it seemed that everyone else had slowed by comparison. She catapulted across the room, slipped one guard’s gun from his holster, and shot him in the face with it. Another guard came at her. She turned and kicked so high her foot caught him in the eye. Her jagged toenails ripped his pupil, blinding him. He screamed and fell back as the third guard fired his gun. But she was no longer there. She had pushed backward off the wall and cartwheeled over him, taking the knife off his belt holder as she sailed past, landing a foot behind him. She slashed four times so fast no eye could follow. The guard clutched at his neck where his veins and arteries had been severed.

  She never stopped moving. Using his falling body as a launch pad she leapt over him and caught the blinded guard in a leg lock around his head. She twisted her body in midair and hurled him forward, where his head struck the stone wall with such force that his skull cracked.

  She picked up the pistol she had dropped, stood over each guard, and fired into their heads until they were all dead.

  She had always loathed the camp guards. She had lived for years with them. They had left scars inside and outside of her that would never heal. She would never be a mother because of them. Because of them she had never even contemplated being a mother because that would mean she had come to accept herself as a human being, which she never could. Her name in the camp had been “Bitch.” Every woman in the camp had had that name. “Bitch. Bitch.” That was all she had ever heard from light to night for years on end. “Come, Bitch. Go, Bitch. Die, Bitch.”

  She turned to the administrator, who lay on the floor near the door. He was not yet dead. He was still clutching his throat and gasping for air, his eyes unfocused but panicked. She had planned it this way, hitting him just hard enough to incapacitate but not kill. She knew exactly what the difference was.

  She knelt down next to him. He stared up with bulging eyes, his hands at his throat. She did not smile in triumph. She did not look sad. Her features were expressionless.

  She knelt down closer.

  “Say it,” she said in a whisper.

  He whimpered and clutched at his ruptured throat.

  “Say it,” she said again. “Seu seung.”

  She cupped a hand under his neck and squeezed. “Say it.”

  He whimpered.

  She placed her bony knee against his crotch and pressed. “Say it.”

  He screamed as she jammed her knee down harder against his privates.

  “Say it. Seu seung. Say it and no more pain.” She rammed her knee against him. He screamed louder. “Say it.”

  “S…seu…”

  “Say it. Say it all.” She ferociously ground her knee into him.

  He screamed as loud as his damaged windpipe would allow. “Seu seung.”

  She straightened. She did not smile in triumph. She did not look sad. She was expressionless. “See, that was not so bad,” she said, parroting his earlier words.

  As he stared helplessly up at her she leapt into the air and came down on top of him. Her elbow slammed into the man’s nose with such force that she pushed the cartilage there right into his brain, like a fired bullet. This killed him instantly, whereas his crushed windpipe would have taken more time to finish him off.

  She rose and looked around at the four dead men.

  “Seu seung,” she said. “Me, not you.”

  She searched the guards’ pockets and found a walkie-talkie. She pulled it out, turned it to a different frequency, and said simply, “It is done.”

  She dropped the walkie-talkie, stepped over the dead men, and walked out of the room, still naked, covered in the men’s blood.

  Her name was Chung-Cha, and she and her family had been labor camp prisoners many years ago at Camp 15, also known as Yodok. She had been only one year old when the Bowibu had come for them in the night. They always came at night. Predators did not come during the light. She had survived Yodok. Her family had not.

  Other guards passed her in the hall and rushed onward to the room where the dead men were.

  They said nothing to her. They didn’t look at her.

  When they got there two of the guards vomited onto the stones after seeing the carnage.

  When Chung-Cha reached the prearranged spot two men who wore the markings of generals in the North Korean military greeted her with respect. One handed her a wet towel and soap with which to clean off. The other held fresh clothes for her. She cleaned and then dressed in front of them without a shade of embarrassment for her nudity. Both generals averted their gazes while she did so, although it did not matter to her. She had been naked and brutalized in front of many men. She had never had privacy and thus had no expectation of it. It simply meant nothing to her. Dogs did not require clothes.

  She glanced at them only once. To her, they did not look like soldiers; with their broad-rimmed puffy caps they looked more like members of a band, ready to pick up musical instruments rather than weapons. They looked funny, weak, and incompetent, when she knew them to be cagey and paranoid and dangerous to everyone, including themselves.

  One said, “Yie Chung-Cha, you are to be com
mended. His Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un has been informed and sends his personal thanks. You will be rewarded appropriately.”

  She handed back the soiled towel and soap.

  “How appropriately?”

  The generals glanced at each other, their features showing their amazement at this comment.

  “The Supreme Leader will determine that,” said the other. “And you will be grateful for whatever he decides.”

  His companion added, “There is no greater honor than to serve one’s country.”

  She stared up at them both, her features unreadable. Then she turned and walked down the corridor and made her way out of the camp. As she passed, many watched her. None attempted to make eye contact. Not even the most brutal of all the guards there. Word of what she had done had already made its way through the camp. Thus none wanted to look Yie Chung-Cha in the eye because it might be the last thing they ever saw.

  Her gaze never wavered. It pointed straight ahead.

  Outside the four-meter fence a truck awaited. A door opened and she climbed in.

  The truck immediately drove off, heading to the south, to Pyongyang, the capital. She had an apartment there. And a car. And food. And clean water. And some wons in a local bank. That was all she needed. It was far more than she had ever had. Far more than she had ever expected to have. She was grateful for this. Grateful to be alive.

  Corruption could not be tolerated.

  She knew that better than most.

  Four men dead today by her hand.

  The truck drove on.

  Chung-Cha forgot about the corrupt administrator who had demanded euros and sex in payment for her escape. He was not worth any more of her thoughts.

  She would return to her apartment. And she would await the next call.

  It would come soon, she thought. It always did.

  And she would be ready. It was the only life she had.

  And for that too she was grateful.

  No greater honor than to serve one’s country?

  She formed spit in her mouth and then swallowed it.

  Chung-Cha looked out the window, seeing nothing as they drew nearer to Pyongyang. She spoke to none of the others in the vehicle.

  She always kept her thoughts to herself. That was the only thing they couldn’t take from her. And they had tried. They had tried mightily. They had taken everything else. But they had not taken that.

  And they never would.

  Chapter

  14

  HER APARTMENT. UNTIL THEY TOOK it away. It had a bedroom, a miniscule kitchen, a bathroom with a shower, and three small windows. About two hundred square feet total. To her, it was a magnificent castle.

  Her car. Until they took it away. It was a two-door model made by the Sungri Motor Plant. It had four tires and a steering wheel and an engine and brakes that usually worked. Her possession of the vehicle made her a rare person in her country.

  The vast majority of her fellow citizens traveled on bicycles, took the metro or the bus, or simply walked. For longer commutes there was the rail. But it could take up to six hours to go barely a hundred miles because the infrastructure and equipment were so poor. For the very elite there were commercial aircraft. Like with the rail service, there was only one airline—Air Koryo. And it flew mostly old, Russian-made aircraft. She did not like to ride on Russian wings. She did not like anything Russian.

  But Chung-Cha had her own car and her own apartment. For now. That was stark proof of her worth to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

  She walked into the kitchen and ran her hand over one of her most prized possessions. An electric rice cooker. This had been her reward from the Supreme Leader for her killing of the four men at Bukchang. That and an iPod loaded with country-and-western music. As she held the iPod she well knew that it was a device that most of her fellow North Koreans didn’t even know existed. And she had also been given one thousand wons. That might not seem like much to some, but when you have nothing, anything seems like a fortune.

  There were three classes of people in North Korea. There was the core, made up of loyalists to the country’s leadership and, for lack of a better term, purebloods. There was the wavering class, whose total loyalty to the leadership was in doubt. It was this class that represented the majority of the country, and for whom many lucrative jobs and government positions were out of reach. And, lastly, there was the hostile class, made up of enemies of the leadership and their descendants. Only the most elite of the core group had rice cookers. And the elite numbered perhaps one hundred and fifty thousand in a country of twenty-three million. There were more people in the prison camps.

  It was quite a feat for Chung-Cha to have attained what she had, because her family was of the hostile class. Rice in one’s belly was a mark of wealthy, elite status. However, exclusive of the ruling Kim family—which lived like kings, with mansions and water parks and even their own train station—even the most elite of North Koreans existed at a level that would be looked upon as very near poverty in developed nations. There was no hot water; the electricity was totally unreliable, with only a few hours of it a day at best; and travel outside the country was nearly impossible. And a rice cooker and some songs was the reward given by one’s enormously rich leadership for enduring torture and suffering and for killing four men and uncovering corruption and treason.

  But still, for Chung-Cha, it was far more than she had ever expected to have. A roof over her head, a car to drive, a rice cooker; it was like all the wealth in the world was hers.

  She moved to a window of her apartment and looked out. Her place overlooked the center of Pyongyang, with a nice view of the Taedong River. A city of nearly three and a half million souls, the capital was by far the largest metropolis in the country. Hamhung, the next most populous city, had barely a fifth of Pyongyang’s people.

  She liked to look out the window. She had spent a good part of her earlier life dearly wishing for a window that looked out onto anything. For over a decade at the labor camp her wish had not come true. Then things had changed. Dramatically.

  And now look at me, she thought.

  She put on her coat and boots with the four-inch heels that made her taller. She would never wear such footwear on a mission, but the women in Pyongyang were very much into their thin high heels. Even women in the military, working construction, and in the traffic police wore them. It was one of the few ways to feel, well, liberated, if that was even possible here.

  The monsoon season, running from June to August, had passed. The cold, dry winter would begin in about a month. Yet now the air was mild, the breeze invigorating, and the skies clear. These were the days on which Chung-Cha liked to walk through her city. They were rare times, for her work carried her to many other parts of her country and the world. And there never was occasion for a leisurely walk during any of those times.

  On the left breast of her jacket rode her Kim pin. All North Koreans wore this decoration, depicting either or both Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il, both dead, but both never to be forgotten. Chung-Cha did not want to always wear the pin, but if she did not her arrest would be imminent. Even she was not so important to the state that she could ever forgo this sign of respect.

  As she walked she took in observations she had made long ago. In many ways the capital city was a twelve-hundred-square-mile tribute to the ruling Kim family on the banks of the Taedong that flowed southward into Korea Bay. Pyongyang translated into “flat land” in Korean, and it was well named. It was only ninety feet above sea level and stretched outward smooth as a bindaetteok, or Korean pancake. The main boulevards were broad and largely devoid of cars. What passed by on the roads were mostly trolleys or buses.

  The city did not seem like it had millions of residents. While the sidewalks were fairly full with pedestrians, in her work Chung-Cha had visited cities of comparable size in other countries where far more people were out and about. Perhaps it was all the surveillance cameras and police watching that made
the citizens want to hide from view.

  She walked down the steps to the metro. Pyongyang had the deepest subway system in the world, over a hundred meters in the ground. It ran only on the west side of the Taedong, while all foreign residents lived on the east side. Whether this was intentional or not she didn’t know. But being North Korean, she assumed it was. Central planning combined with paranoia had been elevated to a high art here.

  Citizens queuing up for the next train did so in precise straight lines. North Koreans were drilled from an early age to form pristine lines in under a minute. There were straight lines of humanity all over the capital city. It was part of the “single-hearted unity” for which the country was known.

  Chung-Cha did not join the queue. She purposely waited apart from it until the train entered the station. She rode the train to another section of town and came back to the surface. The green spaces in Pyongyang were immense and many in number, but not as immense as the monuments.

  There was the Arch of Triumph, a copy of the one in Paris, but far bigger. It commemorated the Korean resistance to Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s. There was the Washington Monument lookalike Juche Tower, which was one hundred and seventy meters tall and stood for the Korean philosophy of self-reliance.