The Korean Woman Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by John Altman

  E-book published in 2019 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by K. Jones

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-2699-4

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-2698-7

  Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  For Danny

  Only after having acknowledged sins and reflected deeply upon them can a prisoner begin anew.

  —Ninth law of the kwan-li-so,

  North Korean prison camp system

  PROLOGUE

  Tumen River,

  Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

  The river was a smooth black mirror. She gathered her courage and stepped off the bank, rippling the surface. Icy water filled her sneakers. She moved forward. The water soaked the cuffs of her dungarees and rose up her calves. She paused to look back. She could just make out the low white retaining wall on the embankment. Beyond it lay a cornfield, a dirt road, a mountain.

  She advanced again. Each step sent undulating circles through the faint reflections of stars. Freezing water climbed to her knees, her thighs, her sex. Her waist, her solar plexus. For a moment, halfway across, she felt herself floating. Her toes quested, found the bottom again.

  She pushed ahead. Water reached her breastbone. She drew a deep breath and kept going.

  Abruptly, the water level began to drop. To waist, knees, ankles …

  And she was across.

  She slogged onto the bank, hugging her elbows, shivering violently.

  After a few seconds she shucked off the backpack. Inside, the yukpo, the beef jerky, tightly wrapped in plastic film, was fine. The phone and documents were safe and dry in their cases. But the carton of Jangbaeksan cigarettes had gotten damp. She could only hope the tobacco …

  Her ears registered a soft sound in the long grass, not far away.

  In a heartbeat, she was crouched. Flooded with bad nunji, bad intuition.

  Something whisked closer. She could not distinguish where the sound was coming from. Silently she drew the knife. Her eyes raked the night. No moon—only stars. Tall grass bowing in a weak breeze. A guard tower rose in stark silhouette a hundred yards up the bank. Another rose a hundred yards down. She had chosen the point midway between to cross.

  Her entire body was tingling. She had killed before, but never with a knife. Never like butchering an animal. She breathed. Cha-ma. Calm down. Lose her nerve now, and she would lose everything.

  The man appeared from nowhere. He seemed five feet wide and ten feet tall. She sensed more than saw the automatic rifle in his hands.

  But he had not yet found her in the darkness. He was looking past her, toward the sound of moving water, his chin slightly raised.

  She rose smoothly out of the crouch, closing the distance between them in a single loping step, and angled the blade into the costal cartilage of the second rib—perfect.

  She twisted the knife.

  A suspended moment; then he fell heavily, jerking the haft from her grip.

  She knelt beside him. He was about her age. He had a broad forehead and a thick jaw. He smelled of soju, rice liquor. His eyes were half open, mottled with broken blood vessels. Somebody’s son. Maybe a husband, a father.

  Though he was already dead, she held two fingers against the hollow of his throat to make sure.

  It had not been so bad. No worse, really, than killing with VX.

  For a moment more, she regarded the man dully. Then she stood, and her knees gave two flat pops. She found the backpack.

  She moved away swiftly, without looking back, deeper into the moonless night.

  SEVEN YEARS LATER

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Princeton, NJ

  Dalia Artzi gripped the lectern with both hands, scanning the faces inside the amphitheater.

  Last day of May, last minutes of the last lecture of the semester. The shayffellah, little sheep, looked dreamy and distant. Mellow sunshine fell across laptops and smartphones and, spread open before one die-hard Luddite, an old-fashioned college-ruled paper notebook.

  “If you take just one thing from my class, let it be this.” Her accented English rang decisively off the hall’s coffered ceiling. “We study war only to better enable ourselves to prevent it. As the incomparable Margaret Atwood said, ‘War is what happens when language fails.’”

  A young woman in the front row—curly dark hair, sleepy brown eyes—yawned.

  Dalia rapped the lectern hard enough to make the gooseneck microphone whine. “Hear what I say. After today, we part ways. But it is people like you—young, American, educated, connected—who will determine the future. Not only your own futures, but those of your children and grandchildren. And of mine in Tel Aviv. And of others yet to be born, in Berlin and Beijing, in Seoul and São Paulo and Saint Petersburg. All our fates are entwined. But looking across this auditorium today, I must report, I do not feel optimistic.”

  Blank stares. Their complacency was impenetrable. After an entire semester, she was still just an old lady with a funny accent and a cane.

  She uncapped a bottle of water, sipped, and tried again. “During the past months, we’ve discussed the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. All involved British soldiers. All took place on roughly the same patch of land. But in 1415 at Agincourt, ten thousand men perished. Four centuries later at Waterloo, casualties numbered sixty-five thousand. And at the Somme, just a century after that, over a million were killed or wounded. Since then, Oppenheimer has invented his deadly toy, and Teller and Ulam have perfected it. What might the next war bring?”

  Outside, a distant church bell clanged the hour. Students spilled from nearby lecture halls, laughing and chatting. But for a last moment, Dalia held the students with her gaze, loath to relinquish them.

  Abruptly, the tension left her stance and she sagged over the podium. Mit shnei ken men nit makhn gomolkhes, her mother had said. You can’t make cheesecakes out of snow.

  “Exams next week. Contact your precept leader with any questions.” She dismissed them with a wave, then added as an afterthought, “Enjoy your summers.”

  Amid the shuffling of backpacks and clearing of throats she pushed her notes into her shoulder bag and grabbed the cane she had propped against the lectern. Making a fast escape through the side door took some doing, but she managed, even with the bad knee.

  A few heartbeats later, she was circling behind the ivied walls of the lecture hall. Moving with a staccato rhythm, cane and bad leg in unison, she hastened toward her teatime appointment. Past ramparts and Gothic towers, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses, all lit by soft gilt sun. Sparrows chirped and squabbled alongside chattering undergrads. The good green beauty of the campus surrounded her; nevertheless, Dalia thought wistfully of home, of sweetly mingled desert sage and za’atar, honeysuckle and terebinth and flowering campion.

  Nearing FitzRandolph Gate, she turned onto a wooded byway. A Tudor arch sheltered an oak door. Inside, wall sconces lit a cool, dim stone passage. A dozen cane thumps later she stood in a parlor featuring mounted heads of kudu and elk and aoudad, a faded Anatolian carpet, and a half circle of burgundy club chairs before a fireplace.

  Jim McConnell was rea
ding something on his phone. At Dalia’s entrance he held up one index finger. She took a seat opposite him, leaning her cane against an armrest. Somewhere outside, two students snickered. Through a mullioned window she glimpsed a Frisbee arcing above a stone rampart.

  McConnell took his time reading the message then slipped the phone deliberately into a pocket. At last he looked up, offering a mild half smile. He wore smudged bifocals and a sweater vest—a Beltway insider’s idea of academic attire. “Tea?” he asked.

  “Actually,” she said, “I’m in a bit of a rush.”

  His brow lifted. “Last day of classes, isn’t it?”

  “Which means the real work can begin. I’m writing a monograph this summer on the Battle of Issus.”

  Opening her bag, she burrowed past crumpled lecture notes and took out a lined tablet. “Don’t shoot the messenger.” On an inlaid loo table between them, she riffled through to the map she had worked up last night. “We knew our Russian forces would reach Estonia and Latvia quickly, but I didn’t realize how quickly. In my reckoning, the drive to the NATO capitals takes just thirty-six hours. We’ve got five hundred T-14 Armatas fighting against essentially unarmored foot soldiers with peashooters. We’re looking at more fatalities in one and a half days than in nearly two decades of Iraq and Afghanistan engagements combined. More aircraft lost than in every US engagement since Vietnam put together. But there’s good news. Such a rapid advance leaves the Kremlin fatally overextended. A mobile force roaming the front, coupled with surgical strikes on supply lines, will quickly drive this point home.”

  McConnell leaned close over the map, scowling through his bifocals. Dalia could guess his thoughts. Bharadwaj, looking at the same scenario, had no doubt advised frontal resistance. As a rule, Bharadwaj preferred brute force. The man would play a dulcimer with a sledgehammer. Yet CENTCOM loved him, because he justified their juicy budget.

  McConnell stroked his second chin pensively. “I’ll send it up the chain.” He leaned back. She knew that brooding look. “Something else I’d like you to take a look at, Dalia. Not a simulation. A developing situation. Of course, I appreciate how busy you are, but once you see what’s going on, I have a feeling you’ll want to help out.”

  “I hate to disappoint you. But Issus awaits.”

  “Issus has waited two millennia. Surely it can wait another day or two while you help us put out some sparks in the greatest geopolitical tinderbox of our time.”

  Finding the cane, she stood. “Enjoy your summer, Jim.”

  “Think it over, Dalia.” Behind the smudged lenses, his green eyes flashed. “You know how you’re always talking about all our fates being entwined? Well, it’s true. You know how to reach me.”

  Manhattan, NY

  Song was rereading the message when the baby cried.

  Shaken, she started back at the beginning. The message was in Munhwaŏ, the DPRK standard version of the Korean language. It identified a man named William Walsh, and his wont to seek female company on weekend nights in downtown Manhattan. Also, his type: pretty young Asian women. And his usual haunts: a downtown bar called Six Degrees and another called Attaboy. Then the address of a storage facility on Thirty-Seventh Street, the number and combination of a locker, and detailed directions on how to use the equipment inside. She was to gain access to Walsh’s Liberty Plaza apartment, find his NYMEX pass card, and clone the data thereon. Then await further instructions, which would detail delivery to a yet-unnamed contact.

  A photograph was attached. She opened it. Her brow crimped as she absorbed William Walsh’s angular face. Judging from the graininess, the image had been captured with a telephoto lens.

  The baby cried again. Song’s lips pressed into a line. She turned off the phone and took out the battery. She returned both to the drawer, burying them beneath miscellaneous clutter—paper clips, lip balm, ibuprofen, travel lotion, sticky notes.

  A framed photograph atop the desk caught her eye. The picture was from three summers ago, at Martha’s Vineyard. She looked young and fresh and innocent, her yellow sundress belling in a breeze. Mark stood beside her, tall and suntanned and grinning, one arm hooked proprietarily around her shoulders. Shards of hard sunlight glinted off the water behind them.

  The baby’s cry took on an edge. Song turned away from the picture and left the study.

  Baby Jia was standing in her crib, ringlets of dark hair in a wild pouf. “Hel-lo ba-by,” Song chanted as she entered the nursery. “Good dreams?”

  “Good dreams,” the little girl echoed.

  Song sniffed. “Poopy diaper?”

  “Poopy,” Baby Jia affirmed.

  In the kitchen, Jia, freshly changed and strapped into her high chair, tracked her mother’s movements with a philosophical gaze. She had Song’s big, dark eyes, Mark’s aristocratic nose, and a tiny Cupid’s-bow mouth uniquely her own. Their son, Dexter, had it reversed: Mark’s small bright eyes, Song’s pert nose, and his own wide, expressive lips.

  Song put grapes, crackers, and string cheese on a plastic plate. “Cheese,” Jia said approvingly and had at it.

  Song watched with her forearms crossed, hands cupping elbows. Her eyes closed. A buried memory stirred for the first time in years. The man she had killed by the river: broad forehead, mottled red eyes. Her twisting the blade. The suspended moment before he fell.

  “Mommy sad,” Jia observed around a mouthful of cheese.

  Song opened her eyes. She found a smile. “Mommy’s fine.”

  * * *

  Dishes, another diaper change, a load of laundry started, straps on the car seat, crosstown traffic, and she reached the pickup line at her son’s kindergarten only five minutes late.

  Dexter piled in, throwing his backpack onto the Volvo’s floor. “Can Dylan come over for a playdate?”

  “I’ll ask his mom.”

  “Dexter,” Jia said happily.

  Dexter ignored his sister and put on his seat belt. Song waved to a teacher she recognized, glanced in the rearview, and pulled out from the line. “How was school, Dex?”

  “We had cupcakes,” he said absently. “It was Ethan’s birthday.”

  “Yummy?”

  “Super yummy. Can Dylan come over for a playdate?”

  “I said I’ll ask his mom.”

  “When?”

  “How about when I’m not driving?”

  “When can I have a phone?” The question came at least once a day.

  “When you’re fourteen, we’ll discuss it.”—the standard answer.

  She looped around the block, heading back toward the park. Jia babbled contentedly: “Dexter, Hexter, Bexter, Lexter, Fexter, Dexter. Good!”

  Back home, Song set Jia on the living room floor in front of a screen, then ran water and got her son settled in his bath. She answered two emails from Jackie McNamara, head of the PTA, about a food drive she had agreed to help organize. She texted Dylan’s mother about a playdate, transferred laundry to the dryer, cubed three chicken breasts and started them marinating in organic teriyaki sauce.

  She toweled Dexter off and helped him dress. She filled a diaper bag with water, wipes, and snacks. She went into the master bathroom. Her period was almost over. She unwrapped a new Tampax Radiant, just to be safe. As she did, she found another buried memory. Evidently, the message from home had dislodged them. During her girlhood in Chongjin, there had been no sanitary napkins and no heat. She had known when her mother was menstruating, because bloody frozen rags hung from the shower rod in the bathroom.

  In the front hall she put the diaper bag in one end of a plastic wagon and strapped baby Jia in the other. She slathered sunscreen onto both kids, using the extra on her own forearms. She took Dexter’s hand, and they trundled to the elevator. They rode down with Mrs. Jackson and her toy poodle, Murray. “Doggy!” Jia said breathlessly. “Doggy! Doggy! Doggy! Doggy!”

  At the
playground, Dexter and Jia made for the swings at a full run. Song spied Nina Brooks sitting on a bench, doing something on her phone, and fell down heavily beside her.

  “Fucking Jackie McNamara,” Nina said by way of greeting, and pressed send.

  “Food drive?”

  “Penny social next fall.” Nina wore a vintage powder-blue top and a silk scarf tied over her light-blond hair. In a former life, she had studied fashion at Pratt. “I’m going to Southampton on Monday, but Jackie’s got me running all over town to look at venues this weekend. How are you, sunshine?”

  “Lollipops and rainbows. Every day and every night.”

  Dexter and Jia were screaming.

  “mommy! jia’s not letting me play with my rock!”

  “then find a different rock!” Song shouted back.

  “but it was my rock!”

  “there are rocks everywhere, dexter!”

  “but it was my rock!”

  Jia, rock in hand, moved off toward a different bench. Dexter started crying. When his mother didn’t react he sniffled, wiped his eyes, and went back to the swings.

  The breeze was soft and fragrant with flowers. Jia climbed up a slide the wrong way. Nina’s daughter skinned a knee and accepted a kiss from her mother. Louise Antrobas, who looked after Barb Goldman’s kids, joined them and told a story about a local real estate agent who poached clients by crashing showings and claiming she smelled mold. Song gave her kids a five-minute warning.

  Back home, she started preheating the broiler. Both kids went before the TV screen. The PAW Patrol helped a nest of baby sea turtles reach the ocean. Chase was on the case.

  Song removed marinated chicken from the fridge. Threading the chunks of meat onto skewers, she found yet another unearthed memory. An old woman in Chongjin had proclaimed, with a certain dark glee, that the gray chunks of meat sold behind the railroad station were, in fact, the flesh of kochebi, orphaned children. You would never know, the woman insisted, that you were eating human flesh. It tasted just like pork. That glided into a memory of the yukpo, the beef jerky that Song had carried across the Tumen River. Two days after crossing, she had traded it to a farmer for a ride in his rickety K01 pickup truck.