The Deepest Prison (3)
A safe house that stank of mold. A rookie who would not live long.
I spent my years as an intelligence officer meeting people, and then leaving them. The harder the mission, the more the line between living and dying blurred, and in our world that was simply the way of things.
The day I first met Lee Jong-hyuk was nothing special to me. The place was a safe house somewhere in Liaoning Province, China, the air thick with the stink of mold.
"The new pigeon?"
"Yes, sir. Please call me Seven."
"Falcon 3."
His eyes were clear, the way a fresh deploy's always are, and his voice was louder than it had any business being in the middle of enemy ground. I didn't return the salute. I put a cigarette in my mouth.
Shenyang was a city where you couldn't take a step without tripping over agents and operatives from North Korea's Ministry of State Security. A mistake there meant death. The rookie in front of me, though, wore the look of a man who hadn't even registered where he was standing.
He won't last.
That was the first thought I had, looking at him. Clear eyes were no virtue in a place like this. They meant he still didn't know how to hide, and that anyone across from him could read his insides whenever they liked.
I thought of the pigeons who had come through before him—men who arrived bursting with drive and went home as cold corpses before a month was out, or who couldn't stomach the fear of dying and simply vanished. Lee Jong-hyuk didn't look much different from the rest of them.
"Seven. What did they tell you you were here for?"
At the question he straightened his back again before he answered. This time, at least, he was trying to keep his voice down.
"......Field support and intelligence collection, sir. That's what I was told."
The work he'd been given was simple: watch a North Korean front post based in Shenyang, and record who they met, what cargo they moved, and where it went. The target was the Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation, under the Second Economic Committee—the outfit everyone called KOMID.
Filthy bastards. They mint their bullets out of human lives.
As his handler and the officer in charge on the ground, I was the one who interpreted headquarters' orders and passed them down. Beating the rules of this world into a Pigeon 7 with no field experience at all was my job too.
We split the work. Seven dogged their trail in the field and brought the intelligence back; I used it to remove targets or wreck their deals. The pigeon found them. The falcon finished them. We ran that way for a little over two years.
Pigeon 7 held out better than I'd expected. Those clear eyes of his had gone cloudy in less than six months. Tailing men, digging through trash, holding his breath while he planted a bug—he sank quickly into that tedious, blood-tinged routine. It was less talent than venom. A savage insistence that he would survive, and so would make it home alive, no matter what. That venom was the engine that kept him from dying and carried him through two years.
He's starting to smell like this life, too.
The loneliness of a foreign posting, and the pressure of never knowing when we might die, bound us tighter than either of us had meant. In the end we shared the occasional drink, and learned each other's names, and a little about each other's families. When the liquor got into him he would ramble through small, old things—the name of the dog tied in the yard back home, the memory of a first love. I never bothered to shut him up. Those trivial stories were the only way I still managed to remember the world I had left behind.
It was around then, when the names Go Tae-min and Lee Jong-hyuk had grown a little familiar on our tongues in place of Falcon and Pigeon, that he did it.
"This is my will."
One night he drew an envelope out of his coat.
"I told you not to write that kind of thing."
"You never know. I might not make it, but you will, hyung. So please hold on to it for me."
"Jong-hyuk."
"We're...... people no one will even know about if we die. I just wanted to leave some trace that I was here. Even like this."
"......All right."
I answered short and pushed the envelope deep into the inner pocket of my coat. It was the only thing I could do for him.
Not long after, headquarters issued the operation codenamed Fallen Flower. KOMID meant to hand nerve-gas precursors to Hezbollah. The deal was set for an unnamed landing in northern Laos, along a channel of the Mekong—where the borders of Thailand and Myanmar met, beyond the reach of any real authority, and as good a place as existed to trade weapons out from under watching eyes.
The order we were given was simple.
Recover the goods to be traded, and kill every person on site.
The matter was grave enough that headquarters rushed a support team out, and my senior, Chae Geon-wook, was among them.
"Let's get started."
We smoked together, then slipped into the darkness lying over the jungle.
And I carried the mission out cleanly. Seventeen on the North Korean side. Twenty-five on the Hezbollah side. Forty-two corpses in all went down into the muddy water of the Mekong.
One of them, it seemed, still had breath in him.
A man half-buried in the mud leveled a pistol at me, and in the instant a red trajectory line was about to bloom across my chest, Jong-hyuk threw himself in. The gunshot cracked, and his body folded over mine. I put a round through the remaining man's head on reflex and caught Jong-hyuk as he collapsed.
It was the worst. The bullet had gone through in the worst possible place.
"H-hyung......"
"Don't talk."
Hot, thick liquid poured over my palm. Blood surged up between his lips. Pain knotted his brow, but his trembling hand clutched at my clothes as if he could hold himself there by force.
"For becoming...... my family......"
"I said don't talk!"
"Th-thank you......"
"I'll save you somehow, so please......"
"You have to...... be hap......"
The hand that had been gripping me fell, strengthless, to the ground.
And then—
"......Ah."
He left my side, too.
Around the time Go Tae-min was cutting across the maze of the grand corridor, hunting for a hidden passage, the inside of Tartaros had become pure hell.
Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!
Alarm bells tore at the ears and rolled out across the night sky over Rasgrid.
"There he is!"
"The bastard's running with the demon's servant!"
"Catch them!"
Soldiers of the Tessara Empire moved as one to deal with the intruders. The first confusion had been put down long ago. Reinforcements out of the nearby barracks had plugged the main corridors in layers and thrown up a cordon, and once the commanders appeared, the response began to take on real shape. Because of that, the warriors who had managed to reach their own targets were bound to hit a wall the moment they tried to leave.
The warriors could neither break out nor dig in and hold their ground. All they could do was keep circling the maze of Tartaros, and Go Tae-min was no exception.
Shunk!
Waldstein punched through the throat of the jailer charging him, then drove into the chests of the two guards pressing in from behind. Blood sprayed in every direction. Warm, sticky fluid ran over the back of his hand and seeped, foul, up into his sleeve. When the raw stench of blood filled the sealed corridor, nausea twisted in his gut and climbed. Every rough breath pulled airborne droplets into his mouth and left the taste of iron on his tongue.
"Hah—huh—hah."
Go Tae-min bit down on his lip. He was running into soldiers noticeably more often. That meant they were driving him. The one mercy was that he had taken his target deeper into Tartaros, so the pressure on him was lighter than on the others. The price was that the two of them had nowhere left to go but a dead end.
Damn it. Where is it?
He swept the wall with a blood-slick hand, frantic. Shouts and screams bursting from the central stairs grew louder by degrees. The next suppression team had already arrived. He hurled aside the furniture blocking the wall and searched behind it inch by inch, but no matter how wide he opened his eyes, no hidden space would show itself.
"Should we look for another way, even now?"
The young man asked it in an anxious voice. Go Tae-min didn't answer. He only pressed harder as his hands searched the stone.
Roughly thirty minutes left. Past that, the mission would fail, and the odds of it were high. His hands grew more urgent as he hunted for a way out.
"The pursuit team's coming again!"
The young man turned and shouted, his face gone white. Go Tae-min paid him no mind and kept searching what remained of the section. A structure this massive had to have an emergency way out. That was his judgment.
Structurally it ought to be somewhere I've already passed...... huh?
One corridor farther, and a space lined with long tables opened up. A mess hall, where the jailers gathered to eat.
If I do it this way—!
He ran into the mess hall without hesitating and made for the cooking station. With a suppression team nearly on their heels, the sight of him diving into a kitchen of all places dragged a dumbfounded shout out of the young man behind him.
"You can't seriously think there's an emergency route in a place like this? A noble who cares about his dignity would never set foot here!"
"I know."
Go Tae-min answered short as he lit the brazier. From the shelf where the dishes were stacked he took a glass bottle about the size of a pint, then pulled a canister of white granules from among the scattered cooking tools.
Thud. Thud. A large pot went up over the rising flame. He brought his sword hilt down hard on the kitchen wall; the facing shattered, and plaster and cement dust pattered to the floor. He scraped the powder into the pot, added a handful of the white granules and the oil used for washing dishes, and stirred.
After about thirty seconds the powder and oil clumped into a viscous gray paste.
Crude. But this is enough.
He packed the improvised mixture down into the bottle, then immediately shoved aside the heavy ingredient shelf blocking a corner of the kitchen. A pack of rats that had been hiding underneath scattered in every direction with eerie squeals.
"Why are we even here......? And what are you doing now......? Urk!"
The young man dry-heaved at the carpet of rat droppings covering the floor. Whether he did or not, Go Tae-min roughly gathered the filth and packed it tight into the bottle until the glass was full of gray paste and waste.
"You know what? Set fire to sugar, oil, and cement powder, and you get thick smoke."
"......?"
"Add rat droppings full of nitrates and light it, and crude as it is, you've got a fine smoke grenade."
"A smoke...... grenade? Why would you need that right now......?"
Instead of answering, Go Tae-min ripped his collar with a harsh tear and stuffed the cloth into the mouth of the bottle. He held the end to the brazier's flame. Fire caught along the cloth and burned toward the glass like a fuse. He rolled the bottle hard down the corridor outside the mess hall.
A moment later, smoke blasted from the bottle's mouth with explosive force, swallowing the flame.
Fwoooosh—!
So much of it poured out that it filled the corridor in an instant.
"......!"
Billows of gray smoke crawled toward the central stairs and the far end of the passage as if they had grown legs.
And—
There.
There was one more. A direction the smoke was leaving.
One stream of the smoke laid down like dense fog bent strangely toward a hairline seam in the wall of the grand corridor and was being sucked in.
"Watch nothing but my shadow, and follow. The moment you lose me, I leave you."
Go Tae-min drew a breath deep into his lungs, then threw himself without hesitation into the darkness the smoke was leading him toward.