She stared up at them both, her features unreadable. Then she turned and walked down the corridor and made her way out of the camp. As she passed, many watched her. None attempted to make eye contact. Not even the most brutal of all the guards there. Word of what she had done had already made its way through the camp. Thus none wanted to look Yie Chung-Cha in the eye because it might be the last thing they ever saw.
Her gaze never wavered. It pointed straight ahead.
Outside the four-meter fence a truck awaited. A door opened and she climbed in.
The truck immediately drove off, heading to the south, to Pyongyang, the capital. She had an apartment there. And a car. And food. And clean water. And some wons in a local bank. That was all she needed. It was far more than she had ever had. Far more than she had ever expected to have. She was grateful for this. Grateful to be alive.
Corruption could not be tolerated.
She knew that better than most.
Four men dead today by her hand.
The truck drove on.
Chung-Cha forgot about the corrupt administrator who had demanded euros and sex in payment for her escape. He was not worth any more of her thoughts.
She would return to her apartment. And she would await the next call.
It would come soon, she thought. It always did.
And she would be ready. It was the only life she had.
And for that too she was grateful.
No greater honor than to serve one’s country?
She formed spit in her mouth and then swallowed it.
Chung-Cha looked out the window, seeing nothing as they drew nearer to Pyongyang. She spoke to none of the others in the vehicle.
She always kept her thoughts to herself. That was the only thing they couldn’t take from her. And they had tried. They had tried mightily. They had taken everything else. But they had not taken that.
And they never would.
Chapter
14
HER APARTMENT. UNTIL THEY TOOK it away. It had a bedroom, a miniscule kitchen, a bathroom with a shower, and three small windows. About two hundred square feet total. To her, it was a magnificent castle.
Her car. Until they took it away. It was a two-door model made by the Sungri Motor Plant. It had four tires and a steering wheel and an engine and brakes that usually worked. Her possession of the vehicle made her a rare person in her country.
The vast majority of her fellow citizens traveled on bicycles, took the metro or the bus, or simply walked. For longer commutes there was the rail. But it could take up to six hours to go barely a hundred miles because the infrastructure and equipment were so poor. For the very elite there were commercial aircraft. Like with the rail service, there was only one airline—Air Koryo. And it flew mostly old, Russian-made aircraft. She did not like to ride on Russian wings. She did not like anything Russian.
But Chung-Cha had her own car and her own apartment. For now. That was stark proof of her worth to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
She walked into the kitchen and ran her hand over one of her most prized possessions. An electric rice cooker. This had been her reward from the Supreme Leader for her killing of the four men at Bukchang. That and an iPod loaded with country-and-western music. As she held the iPod she well knew that it was a device that most of her fellow North Koreans didn’t even know existed. And she had also been given one thousand wons. That might not seem like much to some, but when you have nothing, anything seems like a fortune.
the citizens want to hide from view.
She walked down the steps to the metro. Pyongyang had the deepest subway system in the world, over a hundred meters in the ground. It ran only on the west side of the Taedong, while all foreign residents lived on the east side. Whether this was intentional or not she didn’t know. But being North Korean, she assumed it was. Central planning combined with paranoia had been elevated to a high art here.
Citizens queuing up for the next train did so in precise straight lines. North Koreans were drilled from an early age to form pristine lines in under a minute. There were straight lines of humanity all over the capital city. It was part of the “single-hearted unity” for which the country was known.
Chung-Cha did not join the queue. She purposely waited apart from it until the train entered the station. She rode the train to another section of town and came back to the surface. The green spaces in Pyongyang were immense and many in number, but not as immense as the monuments.
There was the Arch of Triumph, a copy of the one in Paris, but far bigger. It commemorated the Korean resistance to Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s. There was the Washington Monument lookalike Juche Tower, which was one hundred and seventy meters tall and stood for the Korean philosophy of self-reliance.