Robert Ludlum's (TM) the Janson Equation (11 page)

Daeseong-dong, aka Freedom Village
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), South Korea

I
need to cross into the North.”

Janson's words froze Jina Jeon at her kitchen table. She said nothing, didn't so much as blink. Janson attempted to read her but as close as they'd once been, Jina Jeon was one woman whose head Paul Janson had never been able to enter. Even now he couldn't tell whether she was frozen in surprise or fear, or something else entirely. Jina Jeon remained as impenetrable as the border on which she lived.

Janson snapped his fingers in front of her eyes, hoping to make light of their conversation. “Janson to Jeon,” he said. “You there?”

Finally, she shook her head. Jina Jeon was every bit as beautiful as the first time he'd ever seen her. Somehow she'd maintained every scintilla of youth, her skin smooth, her jet-black hair long and shiny.

“You're not
seriously
considering infiltrating the North, are you?” she said.

Janson leaned back in his chair in the modern kitchen. Gazed out the window onto the acres of farmland that made this contemporary home feel so anachronistic.

“After all these years,” he said without the hint of a smile, “do you really need to ask me that?”

Although she didn't say anything, Janson knew from her expression that she did. And he understood. How could he not have anticipated her reaction? She'd changed her life in immeasurable ways; he
knew
that when he decided to come to her for help. Hell, he'd been the one responsible for those changes, even if she'd never know it herself. The Phoenix Foundation had remade her, from a cold-blooded covert agent to a warmhearted farmer living a peaceful existence with her mother in a quiet village. Albeit a village less than a mile from one of the most dangerous places on earth.

“Why?” she said. “Why in the world would you want to cross into the North?”

“I have to find someone,” he said.

Once Kang Jung texted him with Gregory Wyckoff's message to Cy—
Contact Yun Jin-ho, DPRK
—Janson thought he'd need to start from scratch again.

“Christ,” he'd said to the thirteen-year-old through his Bluetooth. “That's going to be impossible. Like finding a particular grain of sand on a seven-mile stretch of beach.”

His thoughts fleetingly returned to Kincaid and her two-piece on the white sands of Waikiki.

“Not necessarily,” the teenager said. “Think about it. The citizenry in the North aren't allowed to contact anyone outside their country. If they were to get caught, they'd spend the next decade of their life in a gulag—
and
they'd be condemning their family to the same fate.”

“In other words, we can surmise that this Yun Jin-ho must have safe access to a telephone or a computer that can reach outside North Korea's borders.”

“Exactly,” Kang Jung said. “And the only people who have such access work directly for the regime in Pyongyang.”

“Great,” Janson said. “And Pyongyang only has a population of what? Three million?”

“More like three and a half. But I might be able to get you even closer. I can hack into the North's system.”

“Isn't that dangerous?”

“I do it all the time,” she said. “Let me try to find this guy for you. I'll call you back in one hour. Sooner if I get lucky.”

Before he could thank her the line went dead in his ear.

“Who?” Jina Jeon said, rising from her chair and drifting over to the refrigerator. She opened the door and pulled out a bottle of Pulmuwon Spring water. Twisted the cap and put the mouth of the plastic bottle to her lips as though she was suddenly parched. “Who do you need to find in the North?”

“A man named Yun Jin-ho. He works at the palace in Pyongyang.”

Jina Jeon stared at him in disbelief. “You have no idea what you're asking. It's almost impossible to cross into the North. And even if you could, you'd never make it to the capital city, let alone the palace itself. Paul, it's a
suicide
mission.”

“I have to try.”

“Why? This Yun Jin-ho, what can he tell you? The people loyal to the regime would die before they gave you information. Especially those who work directly for that madman in the palace. Did you not hear? Kim Jong-un had his own uncle killed. The Great Successor ordered that his uncle—his own flesh and blood—be stripped naked and thrown into a cage to be eaten alive by a pack of ravenous dogs that had been intentionally starved for days!”

Janson smiled. “He had his uncle executed, yes, I'll give you that. But the Hong Kong paper that originally printed the story about the dogs is a rag. Even the US State Department, which is apt to believe anything, thinks that the part about Jang Song-thaek being eaten alive is dubious.”

She shook her head wildly and sat across from him again. “You are splitting hairs. The manner of execution does not matter.”

“I'm sure it mattered to Kim's uncle.”

“This is not a time for jokes, Paul. You don't understand; the fact that we don't know the true story is at least partly the point I'm making. We know
nothing
about the palace. Pyongyang is an intelligence black hole.”

Janson was sure he'd heard the expression used in reference to North Korea before. Possibly from Nam Sei-hoon himself. But more likely from the former director of Consular Operations, Derek Collins.

“Not quite a black hole,” he said, debating how much to tell her.

After forty-five minutes Janson had received a callback from Kang Jung. She'd continued searching for intel on Yun Jin-ho. And she'd found some information from an unlikely source, namely the database of South Korea's National Intelligence Service.

Yun Jin-ho was actually an NIS asset being run by Nam Sei-hoon. But Janson couldn't risk asking Nam because he'd ultimately have to tell his old friend where he'd received the information. And he couldn't do that, or Kang Jung could wind up in a juvenile detention center, or worse.

Janson looked into Jina Jeon's eyes and decided he could trust her with the information, that it would never go any farther than this room. “Yun Jin-ho is a spy,” he told her. “He's selling secrets to South Korea. I need to find him without exposing him to Pyongyang.
And
without alerting his handlers in Seoul.”

Jina Jeon gazed deeply into Janson's eyes, as though she were looking directly into his soul. “Paul, you have to tell me everything. If I'm going to help you, you can't leave me in the dark. What are the stakes here? Because what you're about to attempt could have lethal consequences. I need to know that this is worth the risk before I offer my help.”

“All right,” Janson said, leaning forward, setting his elbows down on the table in front of him. “Here's what I know…”

“W
E'LL NEED EQUIPMENT,
” Janson said as he and Jina Jeon labored north against the freezing wall of wind on the open field.

“Remember our friend Cal Auster?”

“The weapons dealer?”

Jina Jeon smiled mirthlessly. “None other.”

“Last I heard he was working in Turkmenistan.”

“Not anymore. He screwed over some radicalized Pakis and went into hiding.”

“Where is he located now?”

“Not far from here, actually. Several miles south between my village and Seoul.”

Janson lowered his head, hoping to hide how heavily the cold was affecting him, how he could feel it in the marrow of his bones. Jina Jeon, for the most part, appeared immune to the frigid temperatures, nearly as impervious to the arctic winds as she had initially been to Janson's arguments for crossing into the North. There was a time, Janson recalled, not so long ago, when mundane conditions such as inclement weather weren't an operational factor for him either. But that was clearly no longer the case, and to Janson this subtle detraction drilled into him the fact that he was no longer young, that his days of feeling invincible were long over, that his constitution—his health, his strength, his resilience to the elements—would only roll downhill from here.

He wasn't old, at least in terms of his numerical age. Sure, Jessie was much younger, and while sometimes (in private) she made
him
feel younger, more and more often her presence (in public) made him feel like a fossil. Although she didn't look it, Jina Jeon was much closer to Janson in age, and for the first time he wondered if his unwillingness to settle down with Kincaid stemmed from more than simply his petrifying fear that he would lose her to violence just as he'd lost his wife, Helene, and their unborn child.

Our child would have been how old now?

Janson winced. For a man who didn't believe in torture, he could certainly do a number on himself every so often. He couldn't help it. Even after all this time, the irony continued to eat at him. That Helene, a free spirit, a virtual pacifist, had been taken by violence instead of him. That
she
—someone sympathetic to the Kagama cause—was murdered by the KLF, a group that purported to fight for the freedom and safety of their people. But the Kagama Liberation Front were terrorists, nothing more, nothing less. It was often said that one man's terrorist was another man's freedom fighter, but that was bullshit as far as Janson was concerned. Sure, there was a fine line between the two, but a line nonetheless, a line any genuine soldier would recognize. Freedom fighters didn't target civilians, didn't torture, didn't kill those who weren't trying to kill them. Stepping over that line turned any soldier into a terrorist. Which was why he and everyone who worked with him were required to follow the rules, the Janson Rules, the rules that drew a clear and unambiguous line in the sand. The rules were what made Janson and his people soldiers rather than mindless killing machines.

Jina Jeon pointed toward the horizon. “We're coming up on the Bridge of No Return. You've probably seen it portrayed in movies. James Bond is swapped for another prisoner on the bridge in the beginning of
Die Another Day
.”

“The name of the bridge sounds more than a little ominous.”

“Actually, it earned the name at the end of the Korean War. At the time, the bridge was being used solely for prisoner exchanges. Many of the North Korean soldiers held captive by the States refused to return home. The Americans gave them a choice: remain in the South or cross back over into the North. If the prisoner chose to cross the bridge, he would never be permitted to return.”

Janson had always been a student of history, and he knew more about Korea's sordid past than most. But this was his first sojourn into the demilitarized zone, more commonly known as the DMZ.

There was more than a little irony associated with the DMZ. For one, the border was anything
but
demilitarized. In fact, the DMZ was the most heavily militarized border in the world.

The DMZ was also widely considered the most
dangerous
border in the world. And for good cause. Officially, the North and the South remained at war. The Korean Armistice Agreement, signed in 1953 at the “end” of the Korean War, effectively concluded hostilities between the two sides by creating a mutual cease-fire. But the cease-fire was, by definition, temporary, designed to last only until a final peace settlement could be agreed upon. Of course, such a settlement had never been achieved. To this day, tensions between the governments of the North and the South not only persist but often rise to a level that places the countries—and their chief allies—on the brink of another full-scale war. During Janson's tenure with the Department of State, escalation frequently seemed inevitable. And nothing had transpired since that made him feel any differently about the issue today.

On the contrary, the death of Kim Jong-il and transition of power to Kim Jong-un introduced myriad unknown and potentially volatile components into the equation.

Janson stared into the distance, where a thick mist rose from the ground, blotting out the first signs of life he'd noticed since leaving Jina Jeon's village. The outline of a large bus was now all that remained visible.

Which made Janson briefly contemplate the second irony connected with the DMZ. The second irony was, in his mind, even more absurd. Despite the fact that the DMZ remained the world's most dangerous border, the area was also a wildly popular tourist attraction among visitors to South Korea.

The most celebrated spot among guests was the Joint Security Area, or JSA. Inside the JSA tourists could visit the truce village of Panmunjom. Nowhere else in South Korea could a common Joe get so close to North Korea (and North Korean soldiers) without getting himself riddled with bullets.

As if the driver had read his thoughts, the tour bus Janson was focused on roared to life, emitting a gray cloud of carbon monoxide that instantly blended with the fog.

“The Joint Security Area,” Jina Jeon said, handing Janson a pair of field glasses, “is where the current talks are being held.”

Through the small field glasses, Janson could just make out the main attraction of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, a scattering of short, stout buildings. Three South Korean soldiers stood perfectly still in the shadows of the structures, facing their North Korean counterparts, from a distance of maybe twenty or thirty yards. Both sides wore dark aviator glasses despite the incessant gray sky. All six men were armed. All twelve of their fists were tightly clenched as though hand-to-hand combat could break out at any given moment.

Janson removed the field glasses from his eyes. “I assume you didn't bring me here to suggest that I attempt a one-man assault on the Joint Security Area.”

Jina Jeon shrugged. “You might as well, considering your overall odds of success. But, no, I brought you here to show you the tunnel.”