somewhere along the way. If it will do any good, I can repeat myself. This facility is off-limits. Very, strictly, completely, totally off-limits.”

“That’s why it was selected, one presumes.”

“I’d be jeopardizing my men, not to mention myself, if I let someone visit here for purposes I didn’t understand and that were never adequately explained. I’m not interested in what you presume. What do you know?”

“The contents of that note weren’t enough?” I thought I felt one of the winds Pak had warned me about starting to blow across the open ground.

“That note isn’t your business.”

I didn’t have any instructions or explanations on how to keep this going any further than I’d taken it. All I could say was what popped into my head. “Maybe no one need know about the visitor or the visit.”

He shook his head. “Don’t be a fool, Inspector. My men are loyal, but only up to a point. People can’t simply materialize inside this compound. You and your visitor will have to go through the gate, past the guards. Even if they let you in, word will leak out quickly. Do you think the guard with the dull eyes doesn’t see everything around him? People check and double-check. The political officers come through and ask questions. On occasion, the field telephones even work all the way out here.” If there was a straight “no” in there, I didn’t hear it.

“What if we came up with a story?”

“We?”

“General, this is important. Think of it as a hinge. A door won’t open without a hinge.” It wasn’t a bad image, considering I had no idea what we were talking about.

“You’re one of O Chang-yun’s grandsons, aren’t you?” If he had hit me on the back of the head, I wouldn’t have been more surprised. It didn’t come out of nowhere, though. We’d never met, he didn’t know I was coming to visit, but somehow he had that piece of information, and he must have been waiting the whole time for the right moment to slip it in.

“Yes,” I said simply. It wouldn’t have done any good to ask him how he knew.

Now it was his turn to remain silent. He stared at me, but I wouldn’t have called it a dumb stare.

It was now or never. “Show me around; we can talk.”

“You inherited his guts, but not his brains. Alright, we’ll walk. You talk, I’ll listen.” He straightened his tunic and patted his pistol. “And I’d better like what I hear.”

We passed through an inner fence line. There wasn’t any guard at the gate, but a soldier stood a few meters away with his back to us, looking out across the fields with binoculars. He didn’t turn around to salute, though he must have heard the crack as I broke the ice that had formed over the puddles on the path. I saw him twist the focus wheel; it was obvious he couldn’t see a thing.

“This is where the simpler components were assembled.” The general had decided that he would do the talking after all. Maybe he’d had time to digest what was in the note. “Most of the important work was done underground, inside those hills”—he waved in the direction of the first line of mountains that rose a few hundred meters away—“but some of it was done above ground, in these buildings. Don’t ask me why. I don’t plan these things. I don’t construct them, either.”

We walked another fifty or sixty meters over broken ground, littered with debris. The general pointed at a building several stories high, with all but a few windows broken. It was hard to imagine how that could happen. Who would break windows on such a secure site? “The place is unseated, and the roof leaks,” he said. “In summer, the humidity drips from the walls. Anything copper has been stripped out; everything metal is rusting; all the wood has already rotted.” We stepped through a door hanging from one hinge into a huge, dark room. He knocked on the wood. “Is this the sort of door you meant?”

I could smell acid and mold. A control panel sat against one wall—the covers on the gauges were cracked and water had seeped in, though it didn’t much matter because the dials had fallen off. “They’re frozen, as you can see, but there is nothing to worry about. The gauges have nothing to record.” He led the way into a narrow, low-roofed, U-shaped passageway that led into another room, probably fifteen meters high and