The Patriot Threat (30 page)

“I know what this is,” Isabella said.

He was curious to hear what she had to say.

“It reminds me of the Beale cipher? Ever heard of it?”

He shook his head.

“There’s a story that around 1820, a man named Thomas Beale and twenty-nine other men found a treasure in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. For whatever reason, they reburied it and hid its location behind three pages of numbers, just like this. One of the ciphers has been solved. The other two remain a mystery.”

“And you know this, how?” Luke asked.

“I do have interests outside of work. Codes fascinate me.” She motioned to one of the other computers. “May I?”

Malone nodded. “By all means.”

She sat and typed, working the keyboard and finding an online image of the Beale cipher sheets. And she was right. The pages were similar. Random numbers, one line after the other.

“The second of the three ciphers was solved using the Declaration of Independence,” she said. “It explains all that here. You assign a number to every word in the Declaration, then match that to the code. The first number in the Beale cipher is 115. The 115th word in the Declaration of Independence is
instituted
. That starts with
i
. So the first letter of the code is
i
.”

A classic substitution cipher. Simple and easy, provided you knew which document had been used as the key. Without that knowledge the cipher became next to impossible to solve.

“Looks like you just earned your keep,” Luke said to her. “Pappy, I think she might be on to somethin’.”

He agreed. It seemed possible.

“All we have to do is find out what document Mellon used,” Howell said.

Malone’s mind was already working on that, but first, “You told me that Kim contacted you using an alias. Peter From Europe. Do you still have that email?”

Howell nodded. “I keep everything.”

Kim had to be pleased with himself, managing to obtain the stolen documents then escaping the ferry. Malone had made a mistake allowing that opportunity, but he now saw a way to regain the upper hand.

“Kim still has the original cipher,” Isabella pointed out.

“Which I’m assuming Treasury has no copy of,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Which explains,” Luke said, “why they’re all fired-up anxious to get it back.”

“We can’t allow Kim to keep it,” she said.

“Believe me, it’ll do him no good,” he said. “There’s too much he doesn’t know.”

Luke smiled. “And that will usually hurt you.”

Exactly.

FORTY-FOUR

Hana stood under the shower, her skin alive from the steamy flow. Bathing still remained, for her, a luxury. Every time she turned on a faucet and allowed clean, fresh water to engulf her she thought of the camp. No one bathed there, unless allowed, and only then when it rained or in the cold river. She never knew just how awful her life had been until she was free. Insiders simply knew no better. The camp
was
their world. There she’d been a short thin child, her hair just a brush of fuzz, her scalp always covered with a filthy white cloth tied at the neck. By the age of six beatings from her mother became a regular occurrence. And always over food. Until the age of seven, each day her mother had gone to work in the fields, leaving her alone. The morsels left for her to eat never made it to midday. As soon as her mother was gone she’d devour not only her portion but her mother’s, too, never considering the fact that her mother may starve. Why would she care? Your own belly was all that mattered. The guards encouraged such conflicts and never objected if prisoners hurt one another. That violence simply saved them the trouble, as they’d all die soon enough anyway.

She wondered if there would come a time when she did not think of the camp. Probably not. Fourteen years had passed, yet the memories had not faded. She thought back to the day after Sun Hi was murdered, when she approached her mother for the last time. By then they barely spoke, her world evolved to nearly total silence.

“Why am I here?” she asked again.

Her mother did not answer. As always.

They were not all that dissimilar in size and weight. She’d grown and her mother had shrunk. No affection at all existed inside her for this person who’d given her life. In fact, she hated that such a thing had ever happened. And not because of what she might be missing outside the fence, but solely because of what was happening within. Sun Hi was gone. And she’d only now realized what that loss meant to her. A strange feeling of fear had swelled inside her since yesterday, watching Sun Hi die on the floor, and for the first time in her life she felt entirely alone.

A shovel stood propped against the block wall. Her mother carried it to and from the fields each day. She gripped its wooden handle and swung the blade in a wide arc, catching her mother square in the stomach. Intentionally, she’d made sure the rounded flat side made first contact. Her mother slumped forward, grabbing her midsection. A second crashing blow with the rounded end sent her mother to the floor.

She tossed the shovel aside and pounced, yanking back her mother’s head. “You will never beat me again.” And she meant it. “I asked why am I here? Answer me.”

Violence seemed the only thing that worked inside the camp. The guards routinely meted it out. Teacher seemed to have enjoyed killing Sun Hi. The older children abused the younger. And once, not all that long ago, she’d been forced to watch as her mother pleasured one of the guards, not an ounce of emotion seeping from either of them. After he finished, the guard had slapped and kicked until his conquest managed to crawl away.

Her mother’s gasping breathes eased. The eyes were alight, not with fear, but with something else. Something new.

“You … are a … Kim.”

“What is that?”

“It is what … you are.”

“Explain or I’ll beat you again.”

Her mother smiled.

“That … is a Kim.”

She hadn’t understood any of that at the time.

Then everything changed.

Unlike her mother she’d only spent a short time in the fields and had never been sent to the mines. Instead she’d worked in one of the factories, making glassware. Other sites produced cement, pottery, and uniforms. Her life should have been as meaningless as her mother’s. But a week after Sun Hi died, as she walked home from the factory, the guards cuffed her hands behind her back and blindfolded her. She was tossed into a jeep and driven a long way on a bumpy road. Then she was led inside a building, where the blindfold was removed. The room was windowless and empty, except for a chair where she sat. She’d heard stories of places like this and wondered if today the guards would finally have their way with her. The door opened and a short, stout man with a pudgy face wearing plain, dark, uniform-like clothing entered. His hair was cut short, like the guards, with no sideburns. But instead of the emotionless features she’d seen on those around her all her life, this man smiled.

“I am your father,” he said.

She stared at him, unsure how to reply. Was this a trick?

“Your mother and I once knew each other. We were in love. But my father sent her here. I never knew that, until recently. I never knew you existed, either.”

She was confused.

“I asked that you be brought to me,” he said. “What is your name?”

“Hana Sung.”

He smiled. “Did your mother name you?”

“Someone else chose it. But I like it.”

“Than you shall be Hana Sung.”

“You knew my mother?”

He nodded. “She and I were close. But that was many years ago.”

“I was born here.”

“I know that. But you will live here no longer.”

“Who are you?”

“Kim Yong Jin.”

And she knew then what her mother had meant.

She truly
was
a Kim.

That day her father saved her from the camp, but any concept of gratefulness remained foreign to her, both then and now. At that first encounter all that had raced through her mind was that maybe, just maybe, she would eat no more spoiled cabbage or rotten corn. No more grasshoppers, locusts, or dragonflies. Even worse, no more regurgitating what had been eaten, then eating it again, as a way to fool her hunger. The grapes, gooseberries, and raspberries found sometimes in the forest she would miss, but not the rats, frogs, and snakes that she’d also hunted down.

“What of my mother?” she asked him.

“I cannot help her.”

Which had actually pleased her. After the shovel attack they hadn’t spoken a word, though they continued to live together. Each went her own way and, surely, if the opportunity presented itself, one would turn on the other to the guards, so they both stayed wary.

“I am an important man,” her father said.

“Can you give orders?” she asked. “Like the guards?”

He nodded. “No one here will question a thing I say.”

“Then I want you to do something for me.”

He seemed pleased that she’d made a request.

“I want someone punished for hurting my friend.”

“What did he do?”

She told him about Sun Hi, then said, “I want him punished for that. If you are important, then you can do that.”

Two hours later she was led into another windowless room. Teacher hung upside down, his ankles in shackles, the body just high enough from the floor that his outstretched arms could not touch. His head was flushed with blood, his clothes stank of urine.

“What would you have me to do with him?” her father asked her.

“Kill him, as he did Sun Hi.”

“I thought that might be what you’d say, so I had this brought with him.”

A guard appeared with a pointer in hand.

The shower water rained down on her and she allowed the lubricated sensation of the soap to soothe her rattled nerves. Religion had been forbidden in the camp, and her father believed in nothing. Neither did she, really. Insiders only believed in themselves. She’d stood that day and watched as Teacher’s skull was pounded with the pointer, each smack sharp and clear. Unlike Sun Hi, who took her beating in silence, he screamed in pain like a puppy. Welts appeared that burst open, blood dripping from them to the floor.

He struggled at first, then eventually gave up and died.

“You are an important man,” she told her father.

“I will be the next leader of this country.”

During the past fourteen years she’d watched her father’s rise, then fall. He’d taken her from the camp, then eventually with him when he fled the country to Macao. She’d been educated first in North Korea, then in Chinese private schools, where she became familiar with world history beyond the camp fences.

Some of which had astounded her.

Long ago, nearly 2.5 out of 10 million people died in what the world called the Korean War. The north had actually invaded the south, with no clear victor from the fight. Millions of North Koreans were starving, the country so isolated and corrupt that no nation wanted anything to do with it. Her father had been born a communist prince, raised in luxury and educated abroad, all while people by the tens of thousands died every year from malnutrition. She’d come to learn that breeding and bloodlines defined everything in North Korea.

As did power.

Her father was once a four-star general in the Korean People’s Army, though he possessed no experience for the job. While inside the camp she’d been taught no notion of the country, the world, or its leaders. Only after being removed, during the short time she attended state schools, had she been told that America was evil, South Korea even worse, and North Korea was supposedly the envy of the world. Unlike every other schoolchild outside the fences, in the camp she’d never carried and praised a photo of Dear Leader, nor one of his father or the father before. Prisoners were not even important enough to brainwash. Her life had been nothing but a constant reminder of genetic sins. Then to be told that she was actually part of the national leadership, part of the fabric that condemned so many people to exist behind the fences—that had been too much.

She’d would never forget the prisoners.

Not ever.

She’d watched her father kill a defenseless old man, then toss a drugged woman out to drown. He placed no significance on other people’s lives. Kims were just like the guards and Teacher. Her great-grandfather created the camps, her grandfather expanded them, and her half uncle kept them going. Hundreds of thousands remained prisoners, more added by the day. The Kims killed Sun Hi, as surely as if they’d personally beat her with that pointer. And she had no doubt that her father, once installed as supreme leader, would continue that legacy. He said otherwise, but she knew better.