hope he doesn’t cause us any problems,” Ok-Hwa murmured.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Hong told him. “We’ll be finished with our business and out of here before he realizes he’s not getting any service today.”
“And when that happens he’ll call the cable company,” the younger man countered. “They’ll figure out we were impostors.”
“We have no control over that,” Hong said. “Besides, by then we’ll be halfway to Nevada.”
“If nothing goes wrong,” Ok-Hwa said.
“Nothing will go wrong,” Hong assured him. “Now put the gun away and stop worrying.”
The younger man fell silent. Hong turned his attention back to Dr. Yong-Im’s house. They were in an older neighborhood on the western fringe of the San Fernando Valley, an hour’s drive north of the Killboys’ Koreatown headquarters. Large shade trees lined the parkways and over the years their roots had buckled the sidewalks, requiring asphalt patches to keep people from tripping over the raised edges. A few of the yards were well-kept, but most had balding lawns riddled with weeds and surrounded by scraggly, overgrown plants. Hong knew that by U.S. standards this was a lower middle-class neighborhood, but compared to conditions back in North Korea, these people were living in the lap of luxury. And yet they were still concerned about such frivolous things as cable reception. Back home, Hong’s people were lucky if they even had a television capable of picking up state-sponsored broadcasts on the only available channel. Ball game? Back home the only thing to watch was propaganda speeches and reruns of the previous year’s victory parades down the streets of Pyongyang.
Hong’s envy was surpassed only by his hatred for Americans, which had intensified during his surveillance of the neighborhood the past few days. He’d had his fill of the self-satisfied way these people went about their business, oblivious to hardships endured by the rest of the world. If he had his way, instead of a panel van he’d be here in a tank, blasting rounds into these homes and then picking off the residents with a machine gun when they rushed outside in fear. That would show them.
At half-past eight, Dr. Yong-Im, a short, balding man in his early fifties, emerged from his house and picked up the copy of the morning paper lying in the driveway. He took the paper with him as he got into his Camry sedan and backed out into the street, then headed away from Hong’s van toward the far end of the block. If he stayed true to his routine, Yong-Im would soon be at the local Starbucks coffee shop, where he’d spend the next hour nursing a latte as he worked his way through the paper. Hong figured that would be all the time he and Ok-Hwa would need.
“Let’s go,” Hong told his colleague.
Hong grabbed the clipboard and a tool kit, then the two men got out of the van. An unseen dog yapped a few times at them from one of the neighboring backyards, but they reached Yong-Im’s house without any further run-ins. On the remote chance that anyone might be watching from inside one of the nearby homes, Hong and Ok-Hwa lingered a few moments in the driveway, dividing their attention between the clipboard and the roofline of the house. Hong made it appear that he was trying to track down the cable junction box, then led Ok-Hwa through a side gate to the backyard. There, tall cinder-block walls covered with creeping fig blocked their view of the adjacent yards and, by the same token, insured that no one could see them as they carried out their assignment.
Ok-Hwa had been tapped for the mission because of his experience as a electrician’s assistant, and he put that experience to quick work, pinpointing the home’s security system and then tracking the wiring to an outside circuit box. Once he’d shut down the system, he signaled Hong, who proceeded to use a locksmith’s pick on the sliding-glass door that led to Dr. Yong-Im’s family room. It took him all of thirty seconds to trip the lock and slide the door open.
Yong-Im lived alone, and inside Hong was relieved to see that the place was sparsely furnished. That would make things easier.
“I’ll start in here and work my way to the kitchen,” Hong told Ok-Hwa. “You take the den and the bedrooms. You know what to look for.”
Ok-Hwa nodded. “If he’s lucky, we’ll find it. Otherwise…” The younger Korean grinned malevolently and dragged an index finger across his throat.
Hong corrected Ok-Hwa. “If we don’t find what we’re looking for, the good doctor will only wish he were dead.”
CHAPTER FOUR
South Kangwon-do Province, North Korea
General Oh Chol of the Korean People’s Army grumbled under his breath as the military jeep carrying him through the mountains bounded over yet another deep rut in the narrow dirt road. His lower back was aching, and he’d forgotten to bring along his pain medication. There was a part of him that wished he’d forgone security considerations and taken a helicopter from Kaesong. It would have been faster and a hell of a lot more comfortable, but he understood the need for caution.
After all these years and all the setbacks, things were finally falling to place for Kim Jong-il’s regime, and there was no sense in taking unnecessary risks. Oh knew the U.S. and her allies had spy satellites combing the entire country for signs of suspicious activity, and the sight of a chopper setting down on this supposedly uninhabited side of the Changchon Mountains would be sure to raise a red flag. Traveling by ground was by far the safer course, and Oh figured he could endure a little discomfort for the cause. Besides, once he reached the installation, he figured he’d be able to get his hands on something for the pain.
While the other side of the mountain range overlooked the demilitarized zone and was overrun with heavily armed military posts, here on the north face there was little sign of civilization other than the dirt road, one of several that threaded its way through the rolling terrain. A few bald escarpments and promontories poked up through surrounding vegetation, but otherwise the mountains were so pristinely verdant that global conservation groups were lobbying to have the area declared a wildlife sanctuary. Oh knew there was little chance of that ever happening. After all, why should Kim Jong-il give a damn about a handful of endangered species when the hillsides could be converted to poppy fields?
After another twenty minutes on the road, Oh came upon an area that had already undergone such a transformation. Under the vigilant eye of several dozen armed soldiers, more than a hundred laborers were busy at work on a twenty-acre parcel that just this past spring had been clear-cut and replanted with poppies. The crop was well along and the workers were going from plant to plant, cutting into the podlike bulbs and then scraping the resinous ooze into small containers. Once accumulated into cargo vats, the raw opium would be transported cross-country to government-run pharmaceutical plants in Chongjin and processed into heroin for distribution abroad. Changchon presently contributed only a fraction of the opium grown in the northern provinces, but if things went well here in the trial area, more tracts would be carved out of the local mountainside. The way Oh had heard it, inside of three years, Changchon could be matching the output of all the collective farms combined, doubling the country’s heroin trade and helping to further subsidize Kim Jong-il’s military ambitions.
There were two obstacles to the Changchon enterprise. The first, climatic conditions, was beyond the regime’s control. Poppies thrived best in a warmer terrain with better soil than what the mountains here provided. But the feeling was that by cultivating more and more land, quantity could offset the inferior quality of North Korean heroin compared to that harvested in more favorable environments such as Afghanistan and Myanmar.
The second problem involved the work force, and as Oh’s jeep carried
