the very highest encryption features. The message was brief, but each word was like a bullet fired directly into his skull.
He could only stare in disbelief, because whatever hope he had held just a few moments before was now gone.
Irreversibly gone. In fact, this surpassed the worst scenario he could have imagined after he’d been informed of Carson’s murder. Lloyd Carson was the go-between, the linchpin to this whole thing. And he had been uncovered and targeted. And he had gone down.
Well, now they were all going down. But it was even worse than that. This, in fact, changed everything.
He picked up his phone and punched in a number.
APNSA Potter answered on the second ring.
Tucker said, “We’re dead. And we’re dead beyond belief.”
Chapter
24
TICK-TICK-TICK.
The old-fashioned wall clock’s second hand made its way around the timepiece’s face.
The office Chung-Cha sat in was utilitarian, badly maintained, and depressing. Well, it would have been depressing for most people. It had no effect on her. She sat there impassively waiting her turn.
As she stared at the clerk in military uniform who sat at the metal desk next to the door she would at some point pass through, Chung-Cha let her mind wander back, far back, but not that far really, to Yodok, where part of her would always be imprisoned, no matter how far away from it she got.
There were teachers there who taught the children basic grammar, a few numbers, and that was about it. As one got older the instruction became all about the life of labor to come. Chung-Cha had commenced work in the mines at age ten, clawing rock from other rock and being beaten for not making her quotas.
Every student in the class was encouraged to snitch on every other student, and Chung-Cha was no exception to this. The rewards were meager, though back then they seemed like a mountain of gold: fewer beatings, a bit more cabbage and salt, fewer self-censure meetings where students were forced to confess to imaginary sins that they would be beaten for. Chung-Cha had gotten to the point where she came to class every day with invented sins to present to the teacher, because if you had none, the thrashings were twice as painful. It seemed to delight the teachers when students spoke of their weaknesses and the things that made them small, insignificant, less than human. In the camps the teacher was also your guard. But the only things they taught were cruelty, deceit, and pain.
There had been a girl a little older than Chung-Cha who had been accused by her parents of stealing a portion of their food. The parents had turned her in, after beating her.
Chung-Cha had come forward because she had seen that it was the parents who had taken food from their child and then blamed her for the crime.
Chung-Cha’s reward for that was to be led into the prison located underneath the camp and hung upside down in a cage where guards continually poked her hour after hour with sword tips heated by a fire. She could smell her skin burning, yet she did not bleed much because the hot metal cauterized the wounds.
It was never explained to her why she was punished for telling the truth. When she was finally released and sent back to camp, the girl she had helped snitched on her. For that Chung-Cha was beaten by three guards until she could not move but just lay on the floor praying to die.
They bandaged her wounds, and the next day she was sent into the fields to pick her allotment of crops. When she failed to do so, her father was brought in to beat her, and he did so energetically, for he would be beaten even harder by the guards if he did not. And the other workers spit on her, because the way things worked here was that everyone suffered when one person failed to do his or her job.
Every day for a week she was flogged by the guards in the middle of camp for all to see. Prisoners hurled spit and curses at her and added their own beatings when the floggings were done.
When Chung-Cha had staggered off after this latest session she had heard one guard say, “She’s a tough little bitch.”
Chung-Cha absently rubbed the scars on her arms where the flamed sword had punctured her. The girl who had snitched on her had died the next month. Chung-Cha had lured her to a lonely spot with the promise