“Agreed.” Choi folded his hands, thinking.
The anonymous man in the rear of the room fought back a smile. The chairman was putting on quite a theatrical performance.
The room sat in silence. No one dared speak until prompted by the dictator.
“This is quite perplexing, isn’t it?” Choi finally said. “The capitalists aren’t stupid. They must surely have gone through a similar exercise as we are going through right now. Thanks to our valiant armed forces, they are deterred from significant military action. And another economic embargo won’t amount to much in the long run. They must know these things. So why have the summit? A failed summit is terrible propaganda. They must have a plan to destroy us. But how? What do they know that we don’t?”
The room waited for his answer.
“Do I have to do all the thinking? Our enemies are set to strangle us. Speak up!”
Shocked by the rare display of emotion, the officers and ministers immediately conferred among one another briefly, then silenced again, confounded.
The anonymous young man stood up, his chair scraping on the concrete floor. Every head turned in unison.
“Chairman, gentlemen, I have a slightly different view of the situation,” he began.
The heads around the table turned back toward Choi. Their quizzical faces all asked the same question: Who is this interloper?
“Gentlemen, this is Deputy Ri from the General Administrative Services Directorate.”
This answered nobody’s question. No one had heard of the obscure department. The only way anyone in the room could have known about it was to have memorized the organizational chart of the State Commission for Railroad Construction. They would have needed a photographic memory to recall that near the very bottom of that extensive document was a row of organizational boxes stemming beneath the machine tools division. Further beneath that division was the lubricants and petroleum distillates department, administered by a subunit simply abbreviated as GASD.
In reality, GASD was one of the most important agencies in the vast North Korean intelligence apparatus. GASD was so obscure that its existence was unknown even to the head of the Ministry of State Security. This is why Western intelligence agencies had no idea of its existence. It reported directly to Choi.
Choi watched the room’s unresolved confusion turn to frustration. “I trust Deputy Ri’s opinions completely.”
That was all everyone else needed to hear. The officers and technocrats turned back around and listened in rapt attention to the arrogant young GASD official.
“The enemies of our republic are many and powerful, and they are constantly plotting our destruction.” Ri spoke with command authority. The military men recognized it at once even if they didn’t recognize him. Ri wasn’t his real name, of course. In a previous life Ri had been a noncommissioned officer in one of the nation’s elite combat units, but he was plucked from his platoon when his particular genius was discovered.
“Fortunately, their great strengths are matched by a singularly cataclysmic weakness. A weakness my department is prepared to exploit. But it must be done so quickly. A window is rapidly closing.”
The chairman sat up. “With what result?”
“Two results, sir. First, the peace, safety, and security of our republic. And second, the end of China as we know it, and the West along with it.”
The stone-faced chairman smiled.
9
Paul Brown sat behind his desk studying an Excel spreadsheet dense with numbers, the glow of the computer screen reflecting on his bifocal lenses. The figures danced in his brain the way sheet music played in the ear of a symphony conductor. He loved accounting and forensic auditing in particular, and, in his humble opinion, he was pretty good at it. But working at Hendley Associates, a private equity management firm, was the icing on the cake. The company had grown exponentially in the five years since he’d been hired, and both his salary and responsibilities had grown with it.
In fact, the job probably saved his life.
Paul was so focused on the task at hand he forgot to finish his morning tea, now tepid in his favorite Iowa State ceramic mug. His leather chair squeaked as he shifted around to alleviate the sciatica pain shooting down his leg — sitting too much was a professional hazard. His executive assistant urged him to get a stand-up desk (“Sitting is the new smoking,” she claimed), but he couldn’t ever pull the trigger. Probably just a fad, he kept telling himself. Besides, he really liked his desk. It was just the right size. Held everything he needed, right where he needed it. The framed photo of his beloved Carmen stood on the right-hand corner, her plain, gentle smile a constant comfort to him.
God, how he missed her still.
His doctor urged him to lose weight to help with the bad left knee and creaking lower back, but Paul found it a struggle to even mount the stairs at work, let alone attack a gym. Even he had to admit he was beginning to look like Wilford Brimley without the mustache. He couldn’t grow one to save his life.
His mother called him “big-boned” when he was a kid, but he was an ace on the wrestling mat in high school, placing third in the state championship in his weight class in his senior year and earning him a college scholarship. Those were his glory days, at least physically. But that was nearly forty years ago. A lot of water — and chocolate glazed doughnuts — had passed under the bridge since then. His only concession to physical fitness was a set of Zenith hand grippers that he worked at his desk every day.
“There you are,” he muttered to himself, his bleary eyes finally landing on a data cell he’d been searching for. He highlighted it, then pushed his mouse aside. He pulled off his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes. It was only eight in the morning, but he’d come in three hours earlier in order to get a running start on today’s work. Technically he was three days ahead of schedule on his end and the project wasn’t due for another week. But he liked to get his work done ahead of time. His father, a beat cop in Chicago in the fifties and later in Des Moines, where he was killed, taught him as a kid: “Ten minutes early is on time.”
He was thinking about the salami-and-cheddar sandwich in his lunchbox when his intercom buzzed.
“It’s Mr. Hendley, for you,” his assistant said. “Line two.”
Paul hesitated. Why was the director of the firm calling him? He picked up. “Paul Brown here.”
“Paul, it’s Gerry Hendley. How are you?”
Paul smiled. The soft-spoken South Carolina accent sounded quaint in Paul’s midwestern ear. He and Hendley didn’t speak often, but Paul liked the man immensely. He hoped it was mutual.
“Fine, sir. And you?”
“I could use a favor, Paul. I don’t suppose you have a minute to come up to my office?”
Paul glanced at the unblinking computer screen, beckoning. Hours of work lay ahead of him. “Maybe later this afternoon? Say around two?”
“If it’s not too much of an imposition, how about right now?”
The gentility of the former senator’s voice didn’t fool Paul. That was a summons, pleasant as it was.
“I’m on my way.”
“I’m grateful. See you in a bit.” He rang off.
Paul cradled the receiver, saved his document, and shut his computer down as per the privacy and security protocols his department required. Protocols that he had written himself.