“I recorded it when I called the North Korean number from Bucharest.”
He banged the desk with his fists. “Why did you not show us this before?”
“I hoped that you would believe the word of a loyal agent of the Supreme Leader over that of a traitor.”
The door opened and two more men came in. They were also generals. It seemed to Chung-Cha that North Korea had far too many generals.
These men were outranked by the one sitting across from her. But things like that could change swiftly in her country. Generals came, generals went. They were executed. She had already visited these two, let them listen to the phone recording, and then she had come here. The men behind her were too cowardly to face their higher-ranking comrade, so they had sent her in first.
The man at the desk rose slowly and stared at them. “What is the meaning of this intrusion?”
“The Supreme Leader must be told,” said one of the other men.
They all well knew that the higher-ranking general was a personal friend of Pak’s. This had all been orchestrated because of that fact. The truth in North Korea did not necessarily set one free or cause one to die. It was merely one factor of many that had to be taken into account if your goal was survival.
“Do you not agree, General?” asked the other man.
The general looked at the phone and then down at Chung-Cha’s unreadable features. He knew he had just been badly outmaneuvered and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
He nodded, took his cap off a hook, and led the two other generals out the door.
They simply left Chung-Cha behind. She was not surprised by this. There was no gender equality here. She was not in the military and was thus a second-class citizen to those who were.
She wondered if they would send her to kill Pak. She thought the odds were against his simply being executed by firing squad, the normal way of dealing with traitors. It was a tricky balance, she knew, much like the street vendors and the Dutch tourist. Publicly executing Pak would require some explanation. They could lie, of course, but savvier folks would know that only an egregious transgression would justify such a high-ranking official’s execution, and the speculation would undoubtedly come to rest on an attempted coup of the Supreme Leader. That such an inner-circle official could have participated in such a scheme would reflect badly on the Supreme Leader. Even though the traitor would have been caught, others might be emboldened to try as well. But traitors had to be dealt with, and execution was usually the only punishment deemed acceptable. So Chung-Cha might be called on to do it, but make it look like an accident, a task she had performed in the past. Thus the traitor would be dead, and any of his confederates would think twice before trying again. But the public and other potential enemies within the country would not necessarily know of the attempted coup at all. That way the Supreme Leader would not appear weakened.
She thought about all of this and then thought no more. The order would either come or it would not.
She slipped her phone back into her pocket, rose, and left.
A few moments later she walked out into the sunshine and looked to the sky, where there were no clouds visible.
At Yodok this was the time of year when prisoners knew the cold was coming. The first set of clothes Chung-Cha had received upon entering the camp had come from a dead child. The clothes were filthy and full of holes. She would not receive a “new” set of rags for three years. She labored in a gold mine, digging out the precious metal, unaware of what it was or that it was valuable. She also worked in a gypsum quarry, in a distillery, and in the fields. Her days started at four in the morning and ended at eleven at night. She had seen clearly insane people forced to dig holes and pull weeds. Dying prisoners were sometimes simply released so their deaths would not be officially reported, thereby making the mortality rates of the camps look better. Chung-Cha had not known this was the reason; she only remembered old and young prisoners dragging themselves through the open gates only to expire meters from the spot, their bodies left to decompose or be eaten by animals.
She had lived with thirty other prisoners in a mud hut not much bigger than her current apartment. The huts were unheated and the blankets threadbare. She had suffered frostbite while inside the hut. She had awoken to find the person next to her dead of the cold. There was one toilet for two hundred prisoners. To the outside world this probably seemed unimaginable. For Chung-Cha it was simply her life.
Ten.
Ten was the number of basic rules at all the camps.
The first and most important was, You must not escape.
The last and nearly as important was, If you break any of the above rules you will be shot.
All the rules in between—no stealing, obey all orders, spy on and betray other prisoners—were just filler, she believed. The fact was they could kill you for any reason or no reason at all.
Rule number nine had intrigued her, however. It said that one must truly be remorseful for one’s mistakes. She knew this was an incentive for those who hoped one day to be free of the camps. She had never hoped this. She never believed she would be free. She was not remorseful for her mistakes. She was simply trying to survive. In that regard her life now was no different from her life in the camp.
I am simply trying to survive.