The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (7 page)

The prospect of failure and disgrace was very real now. The parade was about to start, and whatever Kun said, it had to be the target. A bomb? A sniper? Perhaps there were more of them than just the Englishman. And what could he do? There were already tens of thousands of people there, a crowd so dense that it would be perfect for one man to hide within. Kim certainly couldn’t ask for the parade to be stopped. He had nothing to suggest that was necessary, nothing except the dull, sickening ache in the pit of his gut.

The doctor’s drugs had ruined the man’s mind now, flipping him into a deep unconsciousness from which he emerged only now and again, generally babbling incoherently. Yet they persevered, Yun asking the same questions over and over and over again.

Who is the agent?

What was smuggled into the country?

What is his target?

And still nothing! Kim felt the bitter, selfish anger of a man who sees a bounty turn to ashes in his hands. His promotion, his position in the ministry, in the Party, his whole life—his foolishness had put everything at stake. He had chided himself for allowing the man to pass into the country in the first place, but until now, he had never failed to believe that he would be able to find him and end the threat that he posed. Each answer, each potential source of knowledge, had crumbled between his fingers. He felt trapped.

Yun suddenly shot to his feet and dashed to the intercom. He thumbed the channel open. “Comrade Major, I have it.”

“What is it?” he practically yelped, his heart catching.

“He does not know the man’s name, nor does he know what was brought into the country, but he says that he knows what it is that they intend to attack.”

“What is it, man? Speak!”

“Not the parade. There’s a meeting of the Reconnaissance General Bureau. It is that.”

MIDDAY. Milton was in his fifth hour of lying in wait. He had watched the city come alive, watched the crowds file into the huge square half a mile away. Now, it was packed. Thousands of spectators, people who had been bussed into the capital from the surrounding towns and cities, many of them travelling overnight. They were arranged into neat squares, each square holding hundreds of people, and they were dressed in colourful clothes, bright reds and yellows. The members of each square had been given a colourful banner to wave; some had red, others blue or white. When viewed from above, the national flag was depicted.

The sound of marching bands filled the air, loud even at this distance. Tens of thousands of troops marched alongside the palace, some carrying colourful standards, others armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. They stepped in formation, their legs held straight and lifted high, their arms synchronised in perfect time. Fifty Russian tanks followed the troops and then came the launchers: FROG-7 artillery rockets, Scuds, Hwasong short-range missiles, then Rodong and Taepodong medium-range missiles. Finally, Milton saw the largest missile of all, borne on a six-wheel launcher. It had been painted in camouflage greens and browns, and bannered with messages threatening to destroy the United States and its military. It was the Musudan BM-25, the untested missile that they boasted could reach Alaska.

Large bleachers had been built on the tiered steps of the palace. They were packed with dignitaries: officials from the Workers’ Party, members of the intelligence services, high-ranking members of the military. Milton adjusted the rifle’s range to ten plus two: one thousand yards plus two minutes of angle. He moved the gun in tiny increments, left to right, staring down the scope at general after general after general.

Then he stopped.

A short, rather chubby figure was suspended between the crosshairs. He wore the usual black Mao suit with a small red pin on the lapel. The pin was the emblem of the North Korean Workers’ Party. His face was soft, almost malformed, with small black eyes, fat cheeks and thin, bloodless lips. His skin was unnaturally pallid and his hair was jet black, almost certainly coloured, the sides shorn very close to the scalp. He looked out of place, a spoilt boy in a man’s body. He was looking out over the marching soldiers, his right hand brought up just above the level of his eyebrows in an awkward salute. He nodded every once in a while, but he did not smile.

He looked a little like his father.

Milton slipped the index finger of his right hand through the guard and felt the trigger nestle between the second and third joints. He applied a tiny amount of pressure and felt it depress against its oiled springs; just a tiny amount more would be enough to send one of the ten big projectiles in the magazine on its way.

The shot was there for him to take, but his orders were clear.

Milton was just the cleaner.

He was the operative who put the orders of others into practice, and it was not his place to doubt them.

He moved the sniper scope up so that it was aimed at the army building five hundred yards beyond the palace. One thousand yards from his position. He moved it across, methodically, left to right, until he found the room he wanted. A large conference space, a lectern set up at the front before a dozen rows of folding chairs. A projector hung from the ceiling, shining the flag of the DPRK against the white wall that faced it. A table against the furthest wall held pots of tea and coffee. People were slowly assembling. Milton estimated forty, although there were chairs for twice that many and they were still coming.

Today was a banner day for the Technical Bureau of the RGB. Three weeks ago, a cyberbomb created by its talented programmers had been unleashed onto the Internet. The conference had been arranged to discuss why and how the operation had been such a success. They wanted to learn from it so that future attacks could be made even more effective. It had been so successful that great prestige had attached to the RGB, and now officials from across the National Defence Commission wanted to be associated with it. Some would no doubt seek to claim credit after the event.

The list of officials attending was impressive.

Two of the four vice-chairmen of the NDC.

The director of the RGB.

The assistant directors of each of the RGB bureaus.

No doubt the plan was to take them down to the palace for the conclusion of the parade.

Some of them would not be able to keep that appointment.

He waited, keeping still, breathing low, clearing his mind. He tuned out every possible distraction: the night from the morning, the dust in his lungs, his surroundings. He was aware that Su-Yung was waiting behind him, but she, too, soon faded away into nothing.

It was just him, his rifle, his targets.

He concentrated on that.

Him, his rifle, his targets.

Nothing else mattered.

Time.

The attendees started to take their seats.

Milton nudged the rifle half an inch to the left and acquired his first target.

He flipped the kill switch, making the rifle live.

Breathe in, hold it.

Wait.

Wait.

Wait.

Now.

He pulled the trigger.

KIM RUSHED between the opening doors of the elevator car and, shouldering aside the attendants who were guarding the door, tumbled into the offices of the Reconnaissance General Bureau. Yun had telephoned ahead with news of the threat, but, as he had breathlessly relayed to Kim as the major sped across the city, the security officers had dismissed his fears with supercilious disdain. There was, they said, nothing that a single man could do to threaten the leadership of the People’s Army. To suggest otherwise was ridiculous. The building’s security had never been breached and was considered to be impregnable, but to humour him, it would be checked. In the absence of better evidence of the threat—the narcotic ramblings of a man whose mind had been broken were not sufficient—the meeting could not possibly be cancelled. Kim knew why: no one would want to admit to the generals that there was the possibility that they might be fallible.

He ran to the conference room where the meeting was to be held, angrily presented his credentials for inspection and went inside. Proceedings had already commenced. The opening address was being given by Lieutenant General Kim Yong-chol, one of the vice-chairmen. He was praising the computer programmers who had executed such an audacious attack on the Imperialists and their southern lackeys. They were, he opined, in the vanguard of a new kind of war, the kind of war that would send the enemies of the Fatherland back to the dark ages. The usual nonsense, but this audience was primed for it. The room was large, and Kim had entered at the rear, the disturbance kept to a minimum. He took it all in quickly: there was no sign of the Englishman, not that he expected to find any. It was a bomb, surely. He had smuggled a bomb into the country, hidden it here and rigged it to explode. He was going to take out as many of the generals as he could.

“Excuse me!” he shouted. “Comrades! My name is Kim Shin-Jo. I am a major in the Ministry of State Security. I must ask you—”

His eye caught something out of the window, and the words caught in his throat: he didn’t know what it was. A flash of light? The quickest glint of something? A reflection? He glanced across the cityscape to the half-finished Ryugyong Hotel, the only building in the city that was taller than this one. It was half a mile away. Time slowed down. He saw it again, definitely coming from the hotel, that huge tapered arrow pointing straight up into the lowering sky.

People had turned to look at him.

He saw another tiny bloom of light, a different kind of flash against the dark concrete of the hotel’s bare skeleton, and then heard a strange sound, a pop that was similar and yet dissimilar to the sound that the seal on a jar of coffee makes as it is pierced. His warning went unsaid as the general toppled backwards, breaking his fall on the edge of the lectern for a moment, but then sliding to the right as his body lost purchase and completed its journey with a graceless thud to the stage. The disbelief came first—the whole room experienced it—and then the thought that the general must have fainted before Kim realised, with shocking and awful clarity, that the odd noise he had heard before was the sound of something shearing through glass, a noise announcing that a spiderweb of fracture, delicate strands radiating from a central point, had suddenly been flung across the large window a dozen feet from the general at his lectern, and that at its centre a small, round hole had been drilled in the glass, which, though badly damaged, held. It took a second more for the pulverised remains of the man’s head to start leaking blood, the dark bloom spreading from his body, a crimson corona, at which point the human fear of blood—primal, automatic—asserted itself. Screams and panic and rushing for the exits and diving for cover but, by that time, two more bullets were already on their way downrange.

The weakened window bulged once, twice, and collapsed in a million pieces of broken glass that shone like diamonds.

The Englishman was disastrously, cataclysmically accurate. He was aiming for headshots and hit both perfectly, blowing each one all over the insides of the conference room. He hit the director of the RGB an inch above the right temple, the bullet pulverising his skull into fragments that sprayed across the room (those nearby would be tweezering fragments from their flesh for days afterwards). The man slumped forward until his chest fell between his knees and, thereby unbalanced, his body rolled forward off the chair and to the ground. His comrade, yet another general, swivelled his head at the sudden commotion and experienced a moment’s worth of complete horror to see his colleague without a head before the third bullet hit him between the eyes, dead centre above the line of his nose. The fifty-calibre projectile ploughed straight through skull and brain matter, exiting with horrendous gushers of blood, brain, and bone fragments. Both bullets slammed into the thin partition walls, passed through the next two offices and, eventually, their momentum sufficiently impeded, exploded in a shower of zirconium sparks that immediately started hungry fires.

Kim found that he was on the floor. People were rushing around him, jostling him, treading on his hands. He clambered upright. The chief of the General Staff collided with him.

The man flung him aside. “Get out of the way, you fool!”

The fourth bullet struck the general on the right side of his face, digging its way through flesh and bone and teeth enamel, ploughing through the rear of the throat and into the bone of his shoulder, atomizing it into thin pink mist on the exit. His knees locked, even against the sudden and awful collapse of his weight, so instead of tumbling he pivoted and was almost lowered downwards, dropping into a chair as if it was his favourite armchair at the end of a difficult day.

The bullets flew with delayed supersonic bangs that rang out only as the audience was beginning to realise what was happening to them.

The fifth shot was already on its way by then.

It struck a general who had been sitting in the first row, also in the head.

The result was identical.

The conference room erupted in panic—pure pandemonium—but there was nowhere for any of them to go. Every seat had been filled, and as the attendees tried to make for the passages at the end of the rows, they tripped over the chairs and each other. A scrum developed at the door. Kim dropped to the ground and wrapped his arms over his head. There was nothing he could do until the Englishman grew tired of his sport, shooting fish in a barrel.

SOMEONE HAD overturned the table with the urns of coffee and tea. Milton watched through the scope as his fifth and final target sheltered behind it. He fired. An inch of plywood was like a skin of tissue to a fifty-calibre bullet travelling at 27,000 feet per second. Another huge bloom of blood splashed out onto the beige-coloured wall.

Milton stopped shooting.

His ears were ringing.

“Is it done?” Su-Yung said.

The next sound he heard, unmistakeably, even at this distance, was the muffled sound of screaming.