such a big player that he drew the attention of the larger syndicates—only enough to make him reliant on Tang and hungry for more.
The kid wasn’t some country bumpkin, but he wasn’t a criminal mastermind either. Not yet. That might come at some point in the future. For now, he had just the right combination of guts and smarts to make him both useful and dangerous. Tang had made up his mind to fully exploit both qualities.
There were only two types of people who could afford the prices Tang’s American products would fetch in the North Korean marketplace—organized crime figures and DPRK officials. The young smuggler, named Hyun Su, didn’t have those kinds of contacts. He would sell the goods to the next person up the criminal ladder from him. From there, they might pass through two more rungs, their prices doubling and tripling, until they were sold to the final customer.
Knowing the electronics were destined to end up in influential hands, the CIA and NSA had made sure that all of them contained the most advanced spyware available. Thanks to Tang and his young smuggler, U.S. intelligence had been welcomed into the homes of some of the DPRK’s most powerful families and none of them had a clue.
It was a brilliant operation and one the Agency began replicating in other parts of the world. But there was an additional benefit that Tang didn’t uncover until two years into their relationship. While all North Koreans hated the DPRK government, Hyun Su’s hatred of it was very personal.
Highly distrustful of everyone, the smuggler had kept Tang at arm’s length. Over time, though, remarks had begun to slip. Finally, after Tang had spent the better part of an evening getting him drunk, Hyun Su’s walls had come all the way down and the truth had poured out.
Six years prior, his family’s village had been near an army barracks—a particularly unsafe place for North Korean citizens to live. One evening, there had been pounding on their door. Hungry soldiers were out looking for food. When his father told them that the family didn’t have any extra food, the soldiers beat him with the butts of their rifles. His mother and older sister begged them to stop. The soldiers did, but only long enough to brutally rape them both before moving on to the next house.
The attack left his father paralyzed—a death sentence for a family forced to physically eke out its daily existence. After a string of indignities that followed, his sister committed suicide. Shortly thereafter, his mother stopped eating. Then she stopped getting out of bed. Soon she began having fevers. When she died, it was blamed on pneumonia. Hyun Su knew better. A broken heart could not be expected to pump life-giving blood through the body.
He had only been thirteen and his world had completely crumbled. The final straw was when his father begged the boy to kill him. It was a request no parent should ever make of a child. Hyun Su couldn’t do it. As hard as it was to find food and take care of his father, he couldn’t kill him. He loved him. His father was all he had left in the world.
Then one day, he, too, was gone. Someone, Hyun Su never knew who, had done what he couldn’t do. What he wouldn’t do. Someone in the village had waited for the boy to go out and had then smothered the father, putting him out of his misery.
Others in the village told Hyun Su to take it as a blessing. His father had begged to die. He was now released and so, too, was Hyun Su. He would not have to “suffer” the burden of taking care of his father any longer. He was free.
That life could be seen as so cheap disturbed him beyond words. He couldn’t live in the village any longer, especially not knowing who the murderer was.
Hyun Su gathered what few possessions were of value to him and disappeared. He left behind his innocence, his childhood, and any grudging respect he might have had for authority. The military, and the country at large, had become his enemy.
Back in the United States, Billy Tang had two small children of his own. He couldn’t begin to fathom the pain Hyun Su had been through. It did, though, explain a lot about his personality. It also meant that Tang could bring him deeper into his operations and use him for more than just feeding NSA-rigged