Point of Contact

Shocked by the rare display of emotion, the officers and ministers immediately conferred among one another briefly, then silenced again, confounded.

The anonymous young man stood up, his chair scraping on the concrete floor. Every head turned in unison.

“Chairman, gentlemen, I have a slightly different view of the situation,” he began.

The heads around the table turned back toward Choi. Their quizzical faces all asked the same question: Who is this interloper?

“Gentlemen, this is Deputy Ri from the General Administrative Services Directorate.”

This answered nobody’s question. No one had heard of the obscure department. The only way anyone in the room could have known about it was to have memorized the organizational chart of the State Commission for Railroad Construction. They would have needed a photographic memory to recall that near the very bottom of that extensive document was a row of organizational boxes stemming beneath the machine tools division. Further beneath that division was the lubricants and petroleum distillates department, administered by a subunit simply abbreviated as GASD.

In reality, GASD was one of the most important agencies in the vast North Korean intelligence apparatus. GASD was so obscure that its existence was unknown even to the head of the Ministry of State Security. This is why Western intelligence agencies had no idea of its existence. It reported directly to Choi.

Choi watched the room’s unresolved confusion turn to frustration. “I trust Deputy Ri’s opinions completely.”

That was all everyone else needed to hear. The officers and technocrats turned back around and listened in rapt attention to the arrogant young GASD official.

“The enemies of our republic are many and powerful, and they are constantly plotting our destruction.” Ri spoke with command authority. The military men recognized it at once even if they didn’t recognize him. Ri wasn’t his real name, of course. In a previous life Ri had been a noncommissioned officer in one of the nation’s elite combat units, but he was plucked from his platoon when his particular genius was discovered.

“Fortunately, their great strengths are matched by a singularly cataclysmic weakness. A weakness my department is prepared to exploit. But it must be done so quickly. A window is rapidly closing.”

The chairman sat up. “With what result?”

“Two results, sir. First, the peace, safety, and security of our republic. And second, the end of China as we know it, and the West along with it.”

The stone-faced chairman smiled.

9

HENDLEY ASSOCIATES

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

Paul Brown sat behind his desk studying an Excel spreadsheet dense with numbers, the glow of the computer screen reflecting on his bifocal lenses. The figures danced in his brain the way sheet music played in the ear of a symphony conductor. He loved accounting and forensic auditing in particular, and, in his humble opinion, he was pretty good at it. But working at Hendley Associates, a private equity management firm, was the icing on the cake. The company had grown exponentially in the five years since he’d been hired, and both his salary and responsibilities had grown with it.

In fact, the job probably saved his life.

Paul was so focused on the task at hand he forgot to finish his morning tea, now tepid in his favorite Iowa State ceramic mug. His leather chair squeaked as he shifted around to alleviate the sciatica pain shooting down his leg — sitting too much was a professional hazard. His executive assistant urged him to get a stand-up desk (“Sitting is the new smoking,” she claimed), but he couldn’t ever pull the trigger. Probably just a fad, he kept telling himself. Besides, he really liked his desk. It was just the right size. Held everything he needed, right where he needed it. The framed photo of his beloved Carmen stood on the right-hand corner, her plain, gentle smile a constant comfort to him.

God, how he missed her still.

His doctor urged him to lose weight to help with the bad left knee and creaking lower back, but Paul found it a struggle to even mount the stairs at work, let alone attack a gym. Even he had to admit he was beginning to look like Wilford Brimley without the mustache. He couldn’t grow one to save his life.

His mother called him “big-boned” when he was a kid, but he was an ace on the wrestling mat in high school, placing third in the state championship in his weight class in his senior year and earning him a college scholarship. Those were his glory days, at least physically. But that was nearly forty years ago. A lot of water — and chocolate glazed doughnuts — had passed under the bridge since then. His only concession to physical fitness was a set of Zenith hand grippers that he worked at his desk every day.