openly published in science journals in months to come, and minor military secrets that would be secret only until the next round of congressional budgetary hearings.
As eager and as innocent as a baby bird gobbling an offered worm, he had relayed this information to his contacts, building their confidence in him as a valid resource.
When U.S. intelligence assets monitoring North Korea's internal R amp; D programs began to see this fed information being put to use, they knew that the Sun Chok line was being trusted. It was time to drive home the dagger.
Beijing Capital Airport looked little different from any other modernistic airline terminal anywhere else in the world. Drawing up at the departure entries, Randi caught only a glimpse of the Koreans as they entered the terminal, but that was as she wished it. If she couldn't see them, they couldn't see her.
Barring the usual large number of assault rifle-carrying People's Armed Police, airport security was actually lighter than at an American airport. Randi was permitted access to the concourses after only a single pass of her shoulder bag through an X-ray machine. She had nothing to be concerned about here. She carried neither weapons nor any James Bondian gadgetry. None were needed for this tasking.
With the hook solidly set in the North Korean jaw, Franklin Sun Chok was "cleared" to an even higher security level and assigned work on a major new project involving the national antiballistic missile defense network. Information began to cross Sun Chok's desk that hinted tantalizingly at possible countermeasures to the system.
On the evening before Sun Chok left on his annual vacation from the laboratory, he remained late in his office, "cleaning up his desk." As CIA observers looked on cybernetically, Sun Chok accessed and downloaded a long series of secure data files on the antiballistic missile network.
Unknown to him, each of his illicit computer accesses was diverted to a carefully doctored alternate file set, prepared just for this moment. Then, instead of heading for Las Vegas as he had told his coworkers, Sun Chok had driven north, for the Canadian border.
Clearing security, Randi strode through the luggage-burdened crowds. She was less apparent here, for Capital Airport handled all the international traffic for Beijing, and many of the tourists and business travelers bustling around her now were American or European.
Cathay Pacific had been chosen as the preferred carrier for the mythical Mr. Bellerman because its boarding gates were located immediately adjacent to those of Air Koryo. Crossing to the Cathay Pacific waiting area, she took a seat that gave her a peripheral view of the North Korean gate. Once more she removed the false file from her shoulder bag and focused her false attention upon it.
Sun Chok's flight across the Pacific had been a long and tortuous one: from Vancouver to the Philippines, from the Philippines to Singapore, from Singapore to Hong Kong, and from Hong Kong to Beijing. Pyongyang was not an easy place to get to from anywhere. Twice during the journey, Franklin Sun Chok had been contacted by North Korean agents, who had passed him falsified passports, visas, and identification, and in Hong Kong he'd picked up his escort from the People's Security Force.
At each stop Sun Chok had also acquired a CIA shadow. A network of American agents had been deployed to cover the primary Pacific travel nodes, monitoring the traitor's transit. In Singapore, the local station chief had even been forced to hastily intervene with the local authorities when a sloppily forged document had almost led to Sun Chok's arrest.
Randi Russell would be the last link in this chain. She would oversee Franklin Sun Chok's final passage into darkness.
Covertly she studied the youthful traitor. He kept glancing back down the concourse. Did he still fear some last-minute pursuit? Or could he be thinking back to San Francisco Bay and the apartment, life, and family he would never see again? Emoting to some idealized political principal was all well and good, but it was quite another thing to live out its reality.
Randi Russell knew full well what this reality was. She had been on the ground inside the last "workers' paradise." The experience still occasionally made her wake up bathed in a chill sweat.
She wondered if the young man was having second thoughts about his decision. Could it be that his fashionable intellectualist's disdain for the United States was starting to wear thin? Could he now be sensing a ghost of what had made his parents flee to the