Chung-Cha sat in her room in the same hotel as the Brit. She sipped her hot tea and smacked her lips appreciatively. At Yodok her gums had turned black and all her teeth had fallen out. What she had there now was the work of an orthodontist in the employ of the government. The worst of her scars had been hidden with plastic surgery, but the doctor had been unable to correct all of them. She didn’t have enough undamaged skin left with which to do so. The burns had been the most painful. Being hung over a fire and made to confess something, anything to make the pain stop, was not good for one’s complexion.
So she sipped her tea, then touched her bed with the fat pillows and thick blanket. They felt nice to the touch, far better than what she had back in Pyongyang.
She wondered whom he had called.
Midnight passed to one.
She heard a clock strike somewhere in the center of this ancient city.
The sound of revelers died away a half hour later.
That was when she was on the move.
She did not walk down the hall. She went out the window.
His room was three floors above hers. Room 607, fourth over from the right. She had observed this through the hotel window when the key had been removed from its numbered cubby at the front desk. Finding small handholds, Chung-Cha climbed swiftly.
She opened the window to his room noiselessly and slipped inside. As soon as her foot hit the carpet he was on her.
Chung-Cha felt the muzzle of the gun against her head. But before he could fire, she had spun away, placing her finger behind the trigger so he couldn’t pull it. While he struggled with this, she used him as a fulcrum, leapt off her feet, spun her body around his, and slammed her knee into his right kidney. He screamed and dropped to his knees, his grip on the gun lessening, and she ripped it free. He tried to rise but she whirled in front of him, rammed her foot into his crotch, and at the same time made a V with her elbow and crushed it against his temple.
And then as he was toppling she stabbed him in the shoulder with the knife she held in her left hand, his gun in her right.
He lay on the floor holding his bleeding shoulder and gasping for air, his knees tucked involuntarily upward as the pain shot through his privates. He started to cry out, but she pounced and the rag was in his mouth, his shout stifled.
He was a large man and she was a small woman. Though badly injured, he tried to rise. She struck him on the wound and he fell back, sobbing and holding his injured shoulder.
She put his gun to his temple and told him what he must do or he would die now.
He slowly rolled onto his belly. She tied him up securely, hands lashed to the ankles via a zip tie she had brought with her. She put him on his side and faced him, shining a light in his eyes. She spoke to him again in English. He nodded.
She took the gag out and studied him.
She asked him a question. He answered. She asked four more questions. He answered only three.
She put the gag back in his mouth and pushed her knife blade deeply into his wound.
Without the gag he would have woken the entire hotel with his cries of pain. She withdrew the blade and waited for him to calm.
He looked at her, tears clustered in his eyes.
She took out the gag and asked him the last question again. He shook his head. He snapped at her hand when she started to put the gag back in.
He screamed.
Or tried to.
She had already knocked him unconscious with the paperweight key she had spied on a nearby table. Blood poured down his face.
She hurried to his nightstand and retrieved the phone there.
She held it in her hand and looked down at the screen. She knew it was protected not by a password but by a fingerprint scanner. She had seen him access his phone on the train once by doing this. She also reckoned that it would be sophisticated enough to recognize a living man’s print versus a dead man’s print.
That was why she had not simply killed him.
She pressed his pulsing thumb to the screen and unlocked the phone. She went into the phone’s settings and disabled the auto lock and turned on the airplane mode. Now it was both open for good and also untraceable.
She stooped down.
The blade cut cleanly across his neck. She avoided the arterial spray when it came. She had become practiced at that. Back at Bukchang she had not avoided it. She had wanted their blood literally on her hands.
She waited for a few moments, listening for sounds outside the room. She heard nothing. The walls in the ancient hotel must be very thick, she thought.
She wiped the blood off her blade, rose, and hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. After that she went through the various emails and contacts in the man’s phone.
She had been taught by captured South Koreans how to find ways into computer files, and she made ample use of this training. However, she didn’t find much. She looked at the list of most recent phone calls. He had made two more from his room in addition to the one she had seen him making. Two she recognized by the country code as calls to England.
The third was far more interesting.