Kim pointed vaguely. “There.”
“Take me.”
Once outside the trailer, Kim didn’t turn right toward the outbuildings but walked straight into the goat pen, turned left, and stopped before a storage closet built into the wall. The doors were covered in peeling white paint, one latch hanging precariously by a rusted screw.
At Fisher’s prompting, Kim opened the cabinet doors. He reached down and brushed away some hay from the floor, revealing a hinged O-ring. He pulled on it. The closet’s entire floor lifted up on hinges and locked into the open position. A set of wood stairs dropped away into darkness.
Kim nodded and pointed. “There. Yes?”
Fisher nodded, then gestured with the SC-20. “Back to the trailer. It’s nap time.”
After giving Kim a dose of Cottonball and securing him next to his partner, he locked the trailer door from the inside and returned to the hidden stairway.
At the bottom he found a long, dark corridor with white linoleum floor tiles and white cinder-block walls. With the SC-20 held at ready low he started down the corridor. He passed eight rooms, five to one side, three to the other. All were empty and dark. Not a piece of furniture, not a scrap of paper, not even the barest trace of dust on the floor.
He came to a T-intersection. To the left and right, more white walls, more white doors, more empty rooms. At the end of the right-hand corridor he found a freight elevator, gate wide open. To his right, the last door stood open. Inside, Fisher found an industrial-sized paper shredder plugged into the wall outlet and, lying on the floor beside it, an empty trash bag. He returned to the corridor. The door on the opposite side bore a white placard with Korean
He opened the door.
The room was eight feet by eight feet and contained a narrow trundle bed with an inch-thick mattress, a tattered green wool blanket, a sink and a toilet, both bolted to the wall, and a hard-backed steel chair sitting in the corner.
A prison cell, Fisher thought.
With nothing else to search, Fisher used his Sykes to split the mattress and dump the foam batting onto the floor. Amid the fluff he found a thin rubber shoe insert. On its back, pressed into the foam with what Fisher guessed was a fingernail, was a block letter message:
IF YOU FIND THIS AND CARE MY NAME IS CARMEN HAYES
AMERICAN
MY PARENTS PRICE AND LORETTA
HOUSTON TEXAS
TELL THEM I LOVE THEM
TELL THEM WHAT HAPPENED TO ME
— CH
44
On the screen, Lambert sat alone at the conference room table. Grimsdottir and Redding sat behind him at the periphery of the room, partially in the shadows. Fisher’s own screen, a nineteen-inch computer monitor, sat on the desk before him. The room he’d been given was one of the base’s tanks, an isolated, soundproof space in the commander’s anteroom. Tanks were constantly monitored and scrubbed for listening devices.
Lambert took a moment to digest the brief Fisher had just given him, then nodded. “That poor girl,” he said. “So there was nothing? Cleaned out completely?”
“A few trash bags,” Fisher said. “And her message. Nothing more.”
Four hours after clearing North Korean airspace, Fisher had landed in an NSA-owned Gulfstream jet at Misawa.
After searching the remainder of the facility beneath the goat farm and finding it also empty, Fisher had backed out the same way he’d come, paused briefly to update Lambert, then headed north, deeper into the countryside and away from the main roads until just before dawn when he found another bolt-hole — this time an overhang of rock choked with scrub brush — and waited out the day. At dusk he started moving again, following his OPSAT map until he came across a set of north-south railroad tracks. Two hours after he settled in at the edge of the track embankment, the coal train Grimsdottir had told him to expect chugged around the bend and passed by him. He hopped aboard, burrowed himself a dugout in one of the coal cars, and covered himself.
The train wound its way north and west through the countryside until, twelve miles later and two miles outside Pyongsong, Fisher hopped off and headed northwest, across the evergreen-covered slopes to the south of the city until he reached a dirt road, which he followed south until he reached a T-turn. He checked his coordinates to make sure he was on target, then hunkered down to wait.
An hour later, at three a.m., a lone car chugged its way up the road and stopped at the T-turn. The car was an older Renault. Fisher zoomed in on the license plate; the number matched. The driver, a woman with bright blond hair got out, walked to the front of the car, and popped the hood. Fisher stood up and walked to the side of the road.
The woman simply stared at him for a moment, then offered him a curt nod. She closed the hood, then walked around to the trunk, where Fisher joined her. In the trunk was a black duffel bag. Inside Fisher found worn black loafers, wrinkled brown corduroy pants, a white T-shirt, and a blue polyester suit coat. The bottom of the duffel bag was lined with dumbbell weights.
While the woman watched the road, Fisher stripped down to his underwear and socks, put his tac suit and all of his gear into the duffel, then donned the other outfit. The woman looked him over, nodded again, and gestured for him to get in the car.
She climbed into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition.
“Rules,” she said.
“Okay.”
“If I tell you to get out of the car, you are to get out immediately and without question. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll come back to this spot at the same time tomorrow night.”
Fisher nodded.
She nodded back. “Good.”
They drove in silence for fifteen minutes until they reached a single-lane bridge that crossed over a lake. She pulled onto the shoulder. “Here.”
“How deep?” Fisher asked.
“Fifty, sixty meters. Mud bottom.”
Fisher climbed out, opened the trunk, carried the duffel to the railing, and heaved it over the side.
Two hours later, back in Pyongyang, the woman pulled over to the curb. “Two blocks to the east there is a park. Sit on the bench directly in front of the fountain. Someone will come for you in twenty-five minutes. His name
