They landed at seven in the evening and deplaned within minutes. Adam had the feeling this was the only aircraft flying into the airport at the moment, because the terminal was empty except for two long rows of young soldiers in green parade dress uniforms, who virtually lined the walkway from the gate to the immigration control area.
Adam walked between the soldiers, following in the middle of the pack of tired Chinese, doing his best to keep his head down. He stole a couple of furtive glances, though, and he saw the soldiers were both male and female, they seemed to have programmed scowls on their faces, and they held their locally made Kalashnikov-style rifles across their chests at the ready. Adam could plainly see the weapons’ fire selectors were switched off the standard safe setting and set to fire semiautomatically at the press of the trigger.
Christ, the American thought.
His trip through immigration control was like none he’d ever experienced in his life. The Chinese technicians were each sent to their own table in a large open area in the middle of the terminal. Here, five armed and scowling immigration officers stood at the ready. Adam was led to his table, and in the poor Mandarin spoken by a female soldier standing behind him he was told to put his bag up on the table and unzip it. He did so, and two officers began taking everything out and going through it. He then was ordered to hand over his wallet, his employment contract, and his passport to a white-haired man. While this man looked through every page of his documents, a fourth official began frisking Adam from head to toe. He was ordered to strip down to his underwear — this he did in the view of not only the female North Korean officers but also the female Chinese technicians, who were stripping down themselves.
Every shred of their clothing was inspected, and then each person was wanded with a handheld metal detector.
All in all, Adam spent more than twenty minutes in his underwear. He was a fit and confident young man, but standing in front of two young females with guns in their hands and “Fuck you” stares on their faces was as uncomfortable an experience as he’d ever felt.
Right in the middle of the lengthy process Yao heard a disturbance at another table. A man raised his voice, speaking in Korean.
“What is this? What did I find here? What do you have to say for yourself?”
Adam turned to the action. A thirtyish female Chinese woman Adam had met on the flight over stood in her bra and panties, looking at what an immigration officer held out in his hand. She didn’t understand his words, so she waited for a translation. A North Korean minder who spoke Chinese came over and looked at the alleged contraband, then turned to the woman. “This is a Korean dictionary. Why do you have this?”
In Chinese the woman replied with genuine confusion. “Why? Are you kidding? I don’t speak Korean. I bought it in the airport. I thought it would be helpful to know a few words.”
“Helpful to your espionage?”
“What? Of course not.”
The woman was led away by the arm, still in her underwear and openly weeping. Her luggage remained open and unattended on the table, with her clothes scattered across the table and the floor.
Adam did not say a word. He hoped like hell she’d be expelled for this; he couldn’t imagine a better outcome for the lady. In fact, he didn’t know if he should feel sorry for her or envy her.
North Korea sucked already.
He chastised himself for this thought. Silently, he said, What the hell did you expect, Adam?
After the lengthy immigration process and the loss of one of their number, Adam and the forty-two remaining Chinese technicians were put on a bus and taken through the dark and nearly empty streets of Pyongyang to the Yanggakdo International Hotel.
Adam knew all about this place. The rumors were there was only one floor in operation: the twenty-sixth. The rest of the place was closed and shuttered because, despite the impression the North Koreans wanted to make with the massive business-class hotel, there were so few foreign businessmen in the city they needed only a couple dozen rooms at any one time.
Of course, with the arrival of the technicians, Adam assumed he’d be going to some previously mothballed floor.
In the lobby they were told to line up, and one of the impeccably dressed minders said, “I will pass out your keys. Four people to a room. Everyone will be staying on the twenty-sixth floor.”
Wow, Adam thought. He and his cohorts were probably the only people in the hotel, and virtually the only foreign travelers in the huge city.
A small reception for the Chinese technicians began at nine p.m. in a banquet room in the basement. To get there, Adam had to line up with the others on the twenty-sixth floor and wait for a group of minders to come up and then ferry everyone down in groups in the elevator.
Adam knew he should have been made uneasy by the tight control; it was probably like being in a maximum-security prison, after all. But to Adam it felt more like his memories of grammar school. Grown-ups making the children line up and wait, and constantly checking their every move.
The banquet room was almost comically ornate, and five times too large for the quantity of Chinese technicians. A dozen waitresses worked the room, none of whom spoke a word of Chinese. Adam chatted with his new colleagues, but most of them were too nervous to enjoy themselves, so the conversation was stilted. One of the waitresses turned a radio on and held a PA microphone up to the little speaker, broadcasting thin and scratchy revolutionary music throughout the banquet hall. Adam would have enjoyed the spectacle of the scene, and he could have stayed for hours, but he stopped drinking after two beers. He figured he would need fifty to calm his nerves, considering his predicament, and he was very aware of the fact good intelligence officers did not become better intelligence officers the drunker they got, so he just held his mostly empty bottle, grinned stupidly, and bobbed his head with the music.
He tipped well, but not enough to draw attention to himself, and then he went to the door, where a minder met him to escort him back to his room.
On his way back up to the twenty-sixth floor, he remembered something else about this hotel. To confirm the rumor, he leaned around his minder at the front of the car and looked at the floor numbers.
Yes. Just like he’d been told, Adam saw that the fifth floor did not exist. He assumed that was where the watchers and listeners associated with North Korean counterintelligence all worked. He knew that here in the Yanggakdo International Hotel, every last thing he did and said would be recorded and videoed. Yao wasn’t terribly concerned by this. He’d lived in China, after all, so he was accustomed to draconian intelligence measures.
But when it came to paranoid security protocols, the DPRK was starting to make the Chinese look like rank amateurs.
45
Things were going according to plan for Veronika Martel. Her goal of getting close to Jack Ryan, Jr., was moving along even quicker and more easily than she’d anticipated, and she caught herself already thinking about her life back in Paris once she returned to French intelligence with him as a recruited asset.
He had come into her department just after nine this morning and spent most of an hour making notes about the equipment and the processes. Then he returned to her temporary office and talked to her a little more about solvent extraction. He’d thanked her for her time and exchanged business cards, and then, after allowing herself a reasonable time so as not to show a level of interest that had the tendency to drive confident men away, she’d brought up the evening soiree that her colleagues were putting on and, in as offhand a way as possible, she suggested Ryan might drop by. Ryan took the bait easily, and said he would love to attend. Luckily for Veronika, the woman in QC in charge of arranging the after-work event had yet to settle on a meeting place, so Veronika had gotten Ryan’s mobile number, with plans to text him when all was decided upon.