Randi’s cab drew up in the long line of vehicles feeding through the tollbooth access to the airport expressway. Perhaps a dozen cars ahead, she spotted the taxi carrying Sun Chok and his security escort. All was still on track.
Sun Chok had been placed under intensive covert surveillance. He was tailed, his apartment was searched and bugged, and his telephone and Internet traffic was closely monitored. In short order it was confirmed that he was indeed spying for the North Korean government.
The evidence was adequate for an arrest warrant, but an alternative had been decided upon. Franklin Sun Chok’s betrayal would be put to good use.
Randi glanced at her wristwatch and frowned. If this traffic didn’t break soon, both she and the Koreans would be in trouble. Then she told herself not to be silly. The next flight to Pyongyang wouldn’t be going anywhere until its VIP passengers were aboard.
No doubt to the delight of his North Korean controllers, Franklin Sun Chok was given a promotion at the Lawrence Livermore facility, complete with a handsome pay raise, a private office, an executive assistant, and a deeper access to the laboratories’ secrets. In reality, he was being encapsulated in a technological fantasyland of the Central Intelligence Agency’s creation.
For over a year, Sun Chok was fed a carefully metered diet of solid, valid, low-grade information: research breakthroughs that were destined to be openly published in science journals in months to come, and minor military secrets that would be secret only until the next round of congressional budgetary hearings.
As eager and as innocent as a baby bird gobbling an offered worm, he had relayed this information to his contacts, building their confidence in him as a valid resource.
When U.S. intelligence assets monitoring North Korea’s internal R amp; D programs began to see this fed information being put to use, they knew that the Sun Chok line was being trusted. It was time to drive home the dagger.
Beijing Capital Airport looked little different from any other modernistic airline terminal anywhere else in the world. Drawing up at the departure entries, Randi caught only a glimpse of the Koreans as they entered the terminal, but that was as she wished it. If she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her.
Barring the usual large number of assault rifle-carrying People’s Armed Police, airport security was actually lighter than at an American airport. Randi was permitted access to the concourses after only a single pass of her shoulder bag through an X-ray machine. She had nothing to be concerned about here. She carried neither weapons nor any James Bondian gadgetry. None were needed for this tasking.
With the hook solidly set in the North Korean jaw, Franklin Sun Chok was “cleared” to an even higher security level and assigned work on a major new project involving the national antiballistic missile defense network. Information began to cross Sun Chok’s desk that hinted tantalizingly at possible countermeasures to the system.
On the evening before Sun Chok left on his annual vacation from the laboratory, he remained late in his office, “cleaning up his desk.” As CIA observers looked on cybernetically, Sun Chok accessed and downloaded a long series of secure data files on the antiballistic missile network.
Unknown to him, each of his illicit computer accesses was diverted to a carefully doctored alternate file set, prepared just for this moment. Then, instead of heading for Las Vegas as he had told his coworkers, Sun Chok had driven north, for the Canadian border.
Clearing security, Randi strode through the luggage-burdened crowds. She was less apparent here, for Capital Airport handled all the international traffic for Beijing, and many of the tourists and business travelers bustling around her now were American or European.
Cathay Pacific had been chosen as the preferred carrier for the mythical Mr. Bellerman because its boarding gates were located immediately adjacent to those of Air Koryo. Crossing to the Cathay Pacific waiting area, she took a seat that gave her a peripheral view of the North Korean gate. Once more she removed the false file from her shoulder bag and focused her false attention upon it.
Sun Chok’s flight across the Pacific had been a long and tortuous one: from Vancouver to the Philippines, from the Philippines to Singapore, from Singapore to Hong Kong, and from Hong Kong to Beijing. Pyongyang was not an easy place to get to from anywhere. Twice during the journey, Franklin Sun Chok had been contacted by North Korean agents, who had passed him falsified passports, visas, and identification, and in Hong Kong he’d picked up his escort from the People’s Security Force.
At each stop Sun Chok had also acquired a CIA shadow. A network of American agents had been deployed to cover the primary Pacific travel nodes, monitoring the traitor’s transit. In Singapore, the local station chief had even been forced to hastily intervene with the local authorities when a sloppily forged document had almost led to Sun Chok’s arrest.
Randi Russell would be the last link in this chain. She would oversee Franklin Sun Chok’s final passage into darkness.
Covertly she studied the youthful traitor. He kept glancing back down the concourse. Did he still fear some last-minute pursuit? Or could he be thinking back to San Francisco Bay and the apartment, life, and family he would never see again? Emoting to some idealized political principal was all well and good, but it was quite another thing to live out its reality.
Randi Russell knew full well what this reality was. She had been on the ground inside the last “workers’ paradise.” The experience still occasionally made her wake up bathed in a chill sweat.
She wondered if the young man was having second thoughts about his decision. Could it be that his fashionable intellectualist’s disdain for the United States was starting to wear thin? Could he now be sensing a ghost of what had made his parents flee to the Western world?
If so, such considerations were coming too late. Another delegation of black-suited North Koreans had been standing by at the Air Koryo Jetway, a security team from North Korea’s Beijing embassy. They closed around Sun Chok, a few curt words were exchanged, and the American was hustled down the extendable Jetway to the waiting airliner, past the Chinese People’s Police officer, who was careful to not see him or his escorts.
Randi caught his eyes as he looked back one last time, and then he was gone.
She closed her eyes and sat unmoving for a long moment. Mission accomplished.
She knew what would happen next. The information contained within Franklin Sun Chok’s laptop computer and within Sun Chok himself would be poured into the North Korean ballistic missile program. The information would promise leads in the direction of a foolproof countermeasures system that could defeat the U.S. antimissiles and leave the cities of the American West Coast open to attack.
But one after another, each promising lead would reach a technological dead end after devouring a precious percentage of the North Korean military budget and thousands of equally precious research and development man hours.
Eventually it would become apparent to the North Koreans that they had been duped, that their intelligence coup had, in fact, been a time bomb planted within their armaments program by the United States.
North Korea’s “Dear Leaders” would be displeased. Specifically, they would be displeased with Franklin Sun Chok. The displeasure of the “Dear Leaders” would not be trifling.
Randi snapped her eyes open. If she were not careful with her memories, the cold-sweat nights would return.
From the concourse windows, she watched as the elderly Ilyushin jetliner climbed away from the airport on the final leg of Sun Chok’s last journey. Returning to her seat, she waited for the next Cathay Pacific flight to come in and unload before making her call.