Robert Ludlum's (TM) the Janson Equation, page 21
Still, Janson now felt like a soldier on an urban battlefield, no longer just a ghost in the fog. Although the darkness provided consummate cover, the danger of the capital city remained omnipresent. And the situation would only get worse the closer he and Yun Jin-ho came to their destination.
As they pushed through the blackness Janson’s heart pounded, his muscles tensed. He was now well rested, even well fed. Working so closely with the regime, Yun explained, had its privileges. Unlike most of North Korea’s population, Yun Jin-ho received plenty of food, including expensive imports from South Korea and Japan.
“How did you come to work for the South?” Janson had asked when he woke in the safe house.
Sitting on the cot, Janson could see a map spread out before Yun Jin-ho on the table at which they’d been sitting a few hours earlier.
After several seconds of silence, Yun Jin-ho looked up from his map with a resigned expression. He motioned Janson to the table.
Once Janson was seated across from him, Yun Jin-ho told him his story.
“I had been a defector,” he began.
Before defecting, Yun Jin-ho had served as one of General Kim Jong-il’s loyal deputy directors. It was a highly prestigious position, one of the most coveted roles in the country. It had taken years of hard work and education for Yun to rise in the ranks under the Dear Leader’s father, Kim Il-sung.
“I had drunken the Kool Whip,” Yun Jin-ho conceded. Janson didn’t correct him.
Yun Jin-ho, like all his fellow countrymen, had worshipped Kim Il-sung. He was our deity, Yun said. No North Korean, not even the educated, thought of the Great Marshal as a mere mortal, a man made of flesh and blood. According to official state history, Kim Il-sung was one of the world’s great warriors, a liberator of the Korean people who had literally fought a hundred thousand battles during the Japanese occupation. State propaganda portrayed Kim Il-sung as more virtuous than Confucius, more benevolent than Buddha, more just than Muhammad, more loving than Christ.
“No one,” Yun Jin-ho said, “including me, knew him for what he was: a figurehead. A puppet handpicked by Soviet intelligence while they temporarily occupied the North following the Second World War.” He closed his eyes as a joyless smile appeared on his face. “You should have witnessed my astonishment after my defection when I learned that our Great Leader had been fluent in Chinese and proficient in Russian, but could not speak Korean well at all when Stalin first placed him in command of our people.”
When in 1994, Kim Il-sung died at the age of eighty-two, all of North Korea was stunned, Yun Jin-ho included.
“It was unthinkable,” he said, looking into his past. “How do gods die? And what on earth do you do when yours does?”
Like his countrymen, Yun Jin-ho had never felt so sad and frightened in all his life. He joined the millions who flooded the nation’s streets, overcome by panic, overwhelmed with grief. Many committed suicide by jumping from tall buildings. Others incessantly banged their heads against concrete sidewalks and walls, spilling their own blood, right up to the moment they lost consciousness or died. It was as though the entire nation joined in a collective, unending scream. Millions of mourners swarmed around the more than thirty thousand statues already erected in Kim Il-sung’s honor. They wept, they passed out from the heat, from their shock. But most of all they prayed.
“We were told that if we prayed hard enough, if we cried and screamed at the top of our lungs, if we pulled our hair from our heads and pounded our chests till they bled, then maybe, just maybe, the Great Marshal would be resurrected, maybe he would return to us, ride down from the sky on a winged horse to once again lead his people.”
Instead the people of North Korea were given his son.
* * *
KIM JONG-IL HAD BEEN introduced to the North Korean people as his father’s successor twenty years before Kim Il-sung’s death. A mercurial figure, Kim Jong-il possessed none of the military experience or charisma of his father. Yet, largely because of the regime’s iron grip on its people, the transition of power went smoothly. And the cult of personality continued without a hitch.
However, some officials inside the palace, including Yun Jin-ho, were weary of the son. His various voracious appetites were well-known among those in the palace, and though nothing was ever spoken aloud, the son’s need for abundance in all things was often viewed with disgust.
Although Kim Jong-il was a recluse, he demanded the constant company of young Norwegian models to entertain him. His significant paunch betrayed his love of food; his spirits cellar gave away his expensive tastes in wines and liquors.
While his people starved, Kim Jong-il went on international spending sprees that made Yun Jin-ho’s stomach turn.
“He’d send his personal chef to Japan to buy thousands of pounds of the most expensive sushi and squid,” Yun said with revulsion. “To Thailand for the top papayas and mangoes. To Denmark for the world’s best bacon. To Iran and Uzbekistan for pistachio nuts and caviar.” Yun shook his head sadly. “While his people died of malnutrition in the streets, their Dear Leader would purchase cases of Perrier water from France, kegs of Pilsner draft beer from Czechoslovakia. He was the world’s single largest customer of Hennessy Paradis cognac.”
Although he maintained appearances, it wasn’t long before Yun Jin-ho no longer enjoyed serving the regime. He no longer loved his work. He no longer loved his country because he no longer loved its leader. Even as he ascended in rank within the palace walls, Yun Jin-ho began seeking a way out.
Not just out of the palace, but out of North Korea, forever.
He saved his money. Spent what little free time he had studying maps. Spoke of none of this to anyone, not even his closest and most trusted friends in the palace. Silence, he knew from the very beginning, would be key.
Yun Jin-ho continued to perform his job well. He watched quietly as Kim Jong-il obsessed over obtaining nuclear weapons, even as his own people starved and rotted in North Korea’s scattered labor camps.
After years of bearing witness to Kim Jong-il’s crimes and atrocities, after years of observing firsthand his utter indifference to and neglect of his people, Yun Jin-ho decided he could wait no longer. It was time to make his move.
And he did. Knowing full well that it could cost him his life.
* * *
IN ORDER TO RECEIVE substantial time away from his position at the palace, Yun Jin-ho feigned a protracted illness. It was risky. He’d had to bribe his doctor with most of the small fortune he’d saved up in order to be given the desired diagnosis. If the palace ordered a second doctor to corroborate the findings of the first, Yun Jin-ho and his doctor would have both been publicly executed.
He could have simply run, but he badly wanted the opportunity to return to the palace if his escape somehow went awry. Yun Jin-ho knew that if he found life in North Korea intolerable now with his prestigious position and all the perks that came with it, he would not survive a month as an ordinary citizen, let alone as a prisoner in one of Kim Jong-il’s labor camps.
Yun Jin-ho paid an old friend to drive him to the mining town of Musan in the central North Hamgyong Province. Of course, Musan’s mines and factories had closed down during the economic collapse of the nineties, so it now resembled a ghost town from America’s Wild West. Populated with outlaws, Musan had become a launching point for North Koreans desperate to cross the border into China. Some, like Yun, were defectors; others were entrepreneurs who bought and sold everything from rice and corn to virgin brides on North Korea’s burgeoning black market.
But the most lucrative business by far was smuggling people: serving as guides; obtaining false papers; bribing soldiers and train conductors in North Korea, and bandits and police on the Chinese side of the border. Because of the town’s location (near one of the narrower stretches of the Tumen River), smuggling people from Musan had become a booming industry.
Yun Jin-ho crossed the river at midnight. From there, his guide led him down a dirt road farther into China.
He remained only one day in a village in China’s Jilin Province before continuing his journey north. Although his ultimate destination was Seoul, to get there he’d have to make it to Mongolia undetected. If he were to be arrested in China, Chinese authorities would return him to North Korea, where he would be sent to a gulag or executed for his attempt to defect.
Fortunately, the landlocked nation of Mongolia had much different laws. Unlike China, Mongolia permitted the South Korean embassy in Ulaanbaatar to accept defectors from the North. So from the Mongolian capital, Yun Jin-ho was put on a plane to Seoul.
Once he arrived, Yun Jin-ho spent weeks being debriefed by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. Yun quickly came to realize that because of his position with the North Korean regime, he was a high-value defector. He wasn’t sure whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.
“It would be a long time,” he conceded, “before I figured it out.”
Immediately following his lengthy debriefing, Yun Jin-ho was introduced to a small man by the name of Nam Sei-hoon.
“Weeks earlier, when I had finally touched down in Seoul following my long arduous journey through China and Mongolia, I never dreamed I would ever return to Pyongyang,” he said. “But Nam Sei-hoon, he had his own designs on my future. Soon he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
* * *
NAM SEI-HOON PROMISED Yun Jin-ho riches beyond his wildest dreams.
“Give me just one year of your life,” Nam said, “and I will give you a life that will put Kim Jong-il’s to shame.”
“That was nearly five years ago,” Yun Jin-ho told Janson at the table. “After the first year expired, he told me it was too dangerous to attempt an exfiltration just then. He told me to ‘hang in’ for another few months, so I hung.”
Nine months later Nam Sei-hoon continued to stall. By then Yun Jin-ho realized he was being played by his handler in Seoul. He began making plans to escape on his own yet again. Only this time, using his unique knowledge, he would cross the demilitarized zone straight into South Korea. Once he made it back to Seoul, he’d sound the alarm about Nam Sei-hoon. Yun Jin-ho would have his revenge against the man who had attempted to shanghai him.
But as Yun Jin-ho planned his second escape from the North, he was approached by one of the Dear Leader’s personal guards, a member of the Guard’s Command.
“If you attempt to leave Chosun,” the soldier in the mustard-colored uniform warned, “you will be taken to General Kim’s residence, where you will be slaughtered like the pig that you are.”
Yun Jin-ho knew immediately that the bodyguard was being run by Nam Sei-hoon. Had he been loyal to the regime, there would have been no threat, there would have been no warning. Yun would have simply been taken to a hard labor camp and subsequently executed.
From that day on, Yun Jin-ho knew he was constantly being watched. He vowed to deliver no more information to Nam Sei-hoon’s goons in the South.
But that vow didn’t last long.
“This time the message was delivered by a member of North Korea’s Ministry of State Security: ‘Continue providing intelligence from the palace,’ he told me, ‘or she will be carved up and fed to the prisoners at Senhori.’”
Yun Jin-ho need not ask which “she” the brute was referring to. Months earlier, Yun had begun a clandestine relationship with a young woman in Pyongyang.
Her name was Han Mi-sook.
* * *
OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS, Nam Sei-hoon used a combination of carrots and sticks to keep Yun Jin-ho under his thumb.
He dangled in front of Yun Jin-ho a dazzling life for him and his new bride, a life of leisure and luxury in the most prestigious section of Seoul.
In rare communications, he told Yun Jin-ho how he would be perceived as a hero when he finally returned to South Korea, how he would be given the key to the capital city, how he and Mi-sook would dine with the president at the Blue House as often as they liked.
When Yun Jin-ho saw through Nam’s charade and called him on it, the little man became cruel.
He had Yun’s entire savings stolen from his home so that he could not afford the bribes necessary to defect.
He threatened to plant evidence that would show Mi-sook to be a spy for the American bastards.
Nam Sei-hoon even went so far as to doctor photos depicting Yun Jin-ho in the embrace of another woman.
“If you stop providing intelligence from the palace,” Yun was told, “Mi-sook will come home one evening to find these photographs waiting for her on her doorstep. Then she will know you for the filthy rat that you are.”
Following a particularly nasty confrontation with one of Nam Sei-hoon’s spies in the Guard’s Command, Yun Jin-ho finally decided that his only way out of North Korea was to take his own life.
But it was as though Nam Sei-hoon, from nearly two hundred kilometers away in Seoul, managed to read Yun’s mind.
For the first time, Mi-sook was threatened directly. She was told by a member of the North’s Ministry of State Security: “If Yun Jin-ho takes his own life, you will witness your parents being dealt a death so horrible that your eyes will melt in your skull.”
When Mi-sook told him, Yun Jin-ho had no choice but to come clean. He confessed everything. From his initial defection to the constant surveillance and threats.
Mi-sook took the news better than Yun Jin-ho ever expected. In the end it was her decision that the couple stay strong and plan against all odds to defect—so that one day Yun would be afforded the opportunity to take his revenge against the little man in Seoul.
* * *
IN THE DARKNESS Janson felt Yun Jin-ho’s presence at his side. They were linked in more ways than Janson had initially imagined. He now felt affection for the man.
They had both lived the double life of a spy.
They had both selflessly served their nations.
They had both been used as pawns.
But what really mattered to Paul Janson, as he and Yun Jin-ho made their way silently through the blackened streets of Pyongyang, was that they shared a common enemy.
They had both been betrayed by Nam Sei-hoon.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Tiananmen Square
Dongcheng District, Beijing
Kincaid wished Janson were here with her. His ability to see through mobs of people for the one face he was looking for nearly matched his proficiency at blending in. Kincaid, though skilled in other ways, wasn’t nearly as adroit at either.
She’d burned Gregory Wyckoff’s image into her memory days ago. She’d placed a hat on him, given him sunglasses. Even colored his hair a jet black. Still, she had to examine each individual feature on each individual face she surveyed before moving on to the next. She just couldn’t quite grasp the complete picture the way Paul Janson had tried to teach her.
As she continued to work her way down the infinite line of people waiting to gain entrance to Mao’s Mausoleum, Kincaid became acutely aware of the clock. Wyckoff’s meeting was scheduled to take place less than forty minutes from now.
The clock is always ticking, she reminded herself.
The faces she examined turned their gazes back on her. Since visitors couldn’t enter the exhibit carrying anything, they’d had to lock their cameras and handbags and smartphones—even their coats—in a group of lockers a few hundred feet away. So the people Kincaid studied were incredibly bored. Bored and cold and frustrated and annoyed. Particularly annoyed, it seemed, at this American woman who scrutinized their expressions as though she were preparing to paint a mass portrait without their consent.
Nevertheless, Kincaid maintained her intense focus. She dismissed Asians without hats and sunglasses but had to examine those who she thought could have been Caucasians in disguise. A surprisingly high percentage, she soon realized.
She experienced a strange sensation, felt the slightest tickle at the back of her mind.
Something about her thinking was decidedly off.
Something.
But what?
She peered into a young Korean man’s eyes and finally realized where she’d gone wrong. She shouldn’t have just been searching for Gregory Wyckoff. There continued to be a threat not just to her and Park Kwan and Kang Jung, but to Wyckoff as well.
She should have been watching for someone like herself.
She should have been watching for a Cons Ops agent.
She should have been watching for Sin Bae.
A high-pitched shout suddenly spun her around. Her eyes immediately fell on a young woman who’d just been knocked to the ground.
Looking past the woman, Kincaid spotted the back of a young man in a brown leather jacket, running for all he was worth. Sprinting toward the security checkpoint at the closest entrance.
The crowd near the entrance instinctively began to disperse. Kincaid could no longer see the runner, but she became acutely aware of two distinct sets of footfalls over the surprised cries of dozens of bystanders.
She locked on a second man obviously chasing the first.
Cursing herself under her breath, she bolted after them both.
* * *
SIN BAE MOVED LIKE LIGHTNING. Where had his impeccable awareness been just now?
He had screwed up yet again. After a career boasting five dozen flawless kills, he suddenly seemed to be falling apart at the seams.
He had no choice but to make things right. This time there would be no second chances. With Ping nearby in the city, he knew he would pay the ultimate price for his failure. If the American boy lived, Sin Bae would pay with his life.
He pushed himself harder. Knocked over an old man then a child but did not dare slow down.
