Devil's Fork (13 page)

“
That’s great. Where are
you going?”

“
Japan. It should be
fun.”

“
Are you going with your
sidekick?”

Sung-Ho laughed. “No. I’m going alone. I
have some friends there I’ll meet up with.”

“
That sounds fun. Tell me
how it is.”

After a pause, he continued “Well I’d better
get back to work. See you later.”

“
See you,
Sung-Ho.”

Jiyeon kept going through her emails. She
gave out a big sigh as she had finally felt some of the nervous
energy from the morning leave.

CHAPTER 15

WEDNESDAY

Chongjin, North Korea

Officer 2135 reached for the door to leave
his apartment for work. Suddenly he heard a beep. It sounded like a
ping that was just barely audible. 2135 had been trained to listen
for it. His phone released this sound when something was not
right.

He turned around and walked into his
bedroom. He moved the small table and opened the cubby door in the
floor. His phone sat in its usual spot, in the plastic bag. He took
it out.

Before deployment, Command had given a
special set of instructions on how to use the phone. He was
required to check it once per day for either new instructions or
information. He was required to send a message once per month to
confirm that he has not been arrested. He could send mission
updates as he deemed necessary. But if his phone made one beep, it
meant that Command had a message for him that he needed to look at
immediately. It was supposed to warn of danger. The ping was set to
a barely audible level so it would not be heard by anyone else in
the cramped apartment building.

He opened his phone and looked at his
messages. One marked urgent had been sent by Command.

2135: Urgent. We believe you have been
compromised. Leave country immediately. Once in China, proceed to
Shanghai.

Officer 2135 did not hesitate. A knock could
start on his door any moment. He pocketed his phone. He moved
swiftly to his kitchen. He opened a cabinet on the bottom which
contained a small backpack. He kept several thousand dollars in
cash in it. He took the backpack and walked into his living room
where he threw in several documents, cartons of cigarettes, and
food rations.

After his hasty packing, he stood by his
front door and looked around at his small apartment. He had spent
many years here, planning how to accomplish his tasks. He never
thought it would end so suddenly.

He quickly moved to his windows and looked
outside. The street below was desolate. He walked back to the door
to his apartment. As he turned the knob, he prepared himself for
the possibility that secret police would be right there. He opened
the door suddenly and looked into the hallway. It was empty.

I might just be able to get out of here.

He marched down the hall without looking
back. When he came to the stairs he stopped and looked down the
stairwell for any movement. He listened for any sounds but heard
nothing.

2135 started descending, skipping a few
steps on each flight down. Today the stairs seemed to take the form
of a never-ending spiral. He listened intently as he came down
flight after flight. He was waiting to hear the sound of loud
voices or running coming from the first floor. But none came.

After reaching the bottom of what seemed
like the Penrose Stairs, 2135 marched to the building’s entrance.
He looked through the small window. The street was still empty. He
turned around and walked to a door under the staircase. It led to
the utility room where he kept his bicycle. He went inside and
emerged with his bicycle within a minute. He walked to the entrance
to take a look outside again. When your life was on the line, there
was no such thing as checking too many times.

When he stepped outside, he got on his bike
and started riding it in the shortest route to the edge of the
city. Now that he was moving away from his apartment, he would be
more difficult to find. If he were stopped by any regular soldiers,
he could always pay them off. It did not take much. One of the
advantages of living in such a famished country was that if you
offered someone only ten US dollars, you could corrupt even the
most determined soldier. 2135 sometimes thought about the strange
situation. The regime wanted to keep tight control over the country
by making outside goods difficult to get. There was no trade and
the country could not grow enough food for itself because the right
farming equipment could not be imported. This led to widespread
hunger, which made people more corruptible by bribes. This resulted
in the regime having a weaker grip on the country, as people were
now willing to do anything for food or money to buy food, including
potentially betraying the regime. So the regime took action to make
itself more powerful resulting in it becoming less powerful. That’s
such a strange contradiction, he sometimes thought.

2135 pedaled at a swift
pace and after a few turns, was now out of sight of his block. He
thought about his plan. The border to either China or Russia was
about 100 kilometers away. If his bicycle could last at least a
third of the way, that would mean he could be at the border within
a few days. Once in China, it would not take him long to get to
Shanghai. Then he thought about the message again. Up until now he
only had time to react to it, not to process it properly. Command
for some reason believed that he was compromised. At this point, it
did not matter whether he
actually
was compromised or not, because by this afternoon
his colleagues at work would report that he had not showed up. The
police would start investigating. So now, he was finished here, he
thought. But why did Command think he was compromised? He had
always followed protocol carefully. He did not think any of his
contacts suspected anything.

He realized that leaving behind his network
of assets disgruntled him the most. He had carefully constructed
what he thought was a work of art. His assets came from all walks
of life and had access to all types of information. He had spent
years planning and developing his network. He had sent quite a bit
of vital information to Command, most recently that information
about the men at port.

Was that what got me compromised?

He still remembered how he had learned in
training to recruit assets. It all built upon that first lesson.
Most human behavior stemmed from an urge to feel important. That
was the foundation for recruiting, but how to target each needed to
be determined on a case by case basis. There was one classroom
session with a senior NIS instructor at the compound that
elucidated this process:

“
I will now walk you
through the basic ways to recruit people,”
the instructor had said.
“These
methods are used by most intelligence agencies around the world. So
you will not need to do anything new or untested. The only
difference is you will be using these methods as an illegal. You
will be working alone and will have to decide how to implement
these methods. Intelligence officers with official cover work in
teams and usually have oversight. That’s the main challenge you
will have. Are you with me so far?”

“
Yes.”

“
Great. Now you remember
your first lesson, right? What is the strongest urge human beings
have?”

“
To feel
important.”

“
And someone feels
important when he is doing something for himself. In other words
someone only wants to do something because he wants to. We never
feel important when we are doing something because someone else
ordered us, right? So to make someone feel that he is doing
something that will benefit him, you have to always ask what are
this person’s interests and what drives him. Does this make
sense?”

“
Yes. I’m with
you.”

“
Ideology is the strongest
motivator and is the most reliable way to recruit someone. If you
find someone in North Korea who secretly hates the regime, he could
be a powerful asset. This can come from a variety of things. Maybe
his family was killed or maybe he has learned something about the
outside word. Whatever the reason is, people are usually willing to
risk their lives for strong ideological views. Someone bringing you
information who feels he is doing it for a cause he really believes
in is acting out of that urge to feel that he is doing something
important. So when you find these people, tell them you are a
leader of a secret underground organization that is trying to stir
up dissent. Tell them that the information they bring you is vital
to the organization’s cause. You can use any ideology. If someone
believes that the regime has failed to establish true communism,
tell him you are from an underground communist group trying to
reestablish true Marxism. You can use any ideology that someone is
attached to. Never stop thinking about what makes that person feel
important, or what his interests are. Got it?”

“
Yes.”

“
Great. Now another
motivation is money. If someone is in financial distress, he would
probably be willing to help you in exchange for being able to put
food on the table. Money can also be used to recruit people not in
financial distress. But this is harder to do in North Korea. Many
people love to buy expensive things and show them off to their
friends and colleagues. This gives them that sense of importance.
In North Korea there are no luxuries available so you will be
looking for people in financial distress.”

“
Got it.”

“
Good. Now comes the most
challenging, but safest, way to get information. If a recruited
asset gets caught, he could reveal who you are. If you ‘recruit’
someone who thinks you are just a close friend, you can get
information without the person knowing he is your asset. And again,
use the same theme. Make the person feel important. Talk to him
about – him. Shower him with complements about his family and his
intellect. Share cigarettes and drinks with him. If he thinks you
are a close friend, you could get information out of him that he
would not even realize he’s volunteering.”

Using these basic methods 2135 had learned
in that classroom session over fifteen years ago, he had created a
web of contacts in North Korean society. He was disappointed to
leave it behind. He wanted to keep using his techniques to make
that web wider.

He remembered that as he
was learning about recruiting assets, he had a revelation about
espionage terms used in popular culture. During one weekend at the
compound he watched several spy films. He noticed that they all
used the terms backwards. Intelligence officers were being
called
agents
. At
one point he started to laugh as he watched one movie by himself.
He had learned in training that people trained by a home country
that were sent into a target country to recruit contacts and gather
information were
officers
. He was training to be an
intelligence officer. The contacts, or assets, officers recruited
typically would not know who they were working for. They had no
contact with Command. If the asset needed to learn a skill – such
as taking a document properly, eavesdropping without being noticed,
or dropping a package, the
officer
would teach them. These contacts, or assets, were
also sometimes called
agents
. Somehow popular culture had
confused it completely. Maybe “agent” had a better ring, 2135
sometimes wondered.

By now, 2135 was at the outskirts of the
city and on his way to China. Somehow he had not been careful.
Somehow his opponents had figured him out, according to Command. He
thought about each of his assets and the information he had
gathered over the last fifteen years. He tried to find a hole, or
somewhere where he had made a mistake.

How was I compromised?

CHAPTER 16

WEDNESDAY

Wuhan, China

NATPAC sat at his desk, eating lunch. He ate
lightly. His attention was on his computer and on the events that
he expected to unfold the following evening. If they caught this
operative, he thought, they could figure out the full extent of
what the CIA and NIS knew. There was a small chance the CIA knew
where the facility was. But there was no way they understood what
was in there, or that Chinese interests were involved.

They probably just think they discovered a
secret nuclear weapons research facility.

That’s good, he thought, let them think
that. That would give them a nice scare. If we catch this person,
whoever he is, we can check that they don’t know what that place
really is. We can see if they suspect the global extent of what we
were doing, he thought. But then he reminded himself that the CIA
might not even know about the base at all. He stood up slowly,
walked over to his window, and tightened his shades more.

This was just one more piece in the machine,
NATPAC thought. It was one more step that would help China and its
leaders as it climbed back towards superpower status. His friends
across the border were facilitators or helpers. This was as much
China’s project as theirs.

NATPAC sat back and thought
how brilliant China’s rise had been. Everyone thought he had the
best team of hackers, but he thought the best hackers were China’s
leaders. They had successfully hacked the
world economy.
That impressed him
more than even SLOTHMAN’s successes at hacking various parts of the
US Government. What the leaders had done was so simple and
brilliant and it happened right under the nose of the world. It was
a glitch only China saw.