Oversight (22 page)

“Very little. I don’t think it was going well recently, though.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He said he might be moving.”

“I don’t suppose you have your log from that evening?”

Saba shakes his head. “No, but I have the log from when the men came to intimidate me. I will send it to you.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Sam says. “In any event, I appreciate your candor. I don’t expect any of this will get back to the licensing board.”

Following a few more questions about Amy’s and Mako’s history, Sam thanks Saba and departs.

When Sam emerges, he sees Nial Fox in his trench coat leaning against his air car across the street. Behind him, the trees in the park bend in the breeze. Agents Gibbon and Indri stand close by, semi-transparent. They’re looking at Nial but he takes no notice of them. Sam realizes they’re hiding behind a masking layer. Mako’s eyes see through it. Perhaps a hundred yards further west on the street, there’s an FBI air car. Otherwise the street is empty.

Sam approaches, walking slowly across the street without even checking for oncoming traffic. Nial shifts about. Something isn’t right.

“What brings you out this way?” Sam asks.

“I heard the FBI picked you up earlier today,” Nial answers.

“Word gets around.” Sam notices the two concealed agents glance at one another. “Why do you care?”

“Did they ask about me?”

“Are you logging?”

Nial shakes his head. “This is off the record.”

Sam waits before replying, watching the effect of the delay on Nial. He looks uneasy. Then again, his reflex implant would make it hard to stand still at the best of times. “You weren’t mentioned,” Sam says finally.

Nial suppresses a smile. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

“You could’ve just messaged me.”

“Good policing is personal.”

Sam doesn’t buy it. He’s thinking of Jacob’s funeral, about the fact that Nial showed up at all. He’s trying to remember the call he made to Nial from the freeway. What was it he said? “You’re popping up on dispatch screens all over.” It was as if Nial had been monitoring the dispatch feeds directly, with an attentiveness above and beyond the call of duty. And, on the night of Jacob’s murder, Nial seemed certain no glasses had been found, but he showed no curiosity until Sam questioned him further. And what was the FBI looking for when it downloaded Nial’s files?

“You know, I have a question for you,” Sam says in monotone. “Why did you kill George Gannet?”

Nial barely reacts. “What’re you’re talking about?”

“That’s what the Solve-O-Matic says,” Sam continues, figuring that the Demendicil he took at the FBI office will hide his lie. “I asked Luis to give the box a crack at Gannet’s case, just as a lark. And it came up with your name. It just seems like the sort of thing you might want to explain.”

The silence is uncomfortable.

“You used Gannet to kill Jacob because Gannet had the sight,” Sam says. “In his eyes, Jacob was someone else, someone he hated.”

Nial sweeps his coat back and reaches for his gun.

It happens so fast Sam barely has time to react. He lunges forward, knocking Nial back onto the hood of his air car. The gun falls to the pavement.

Left arm holding Nial, Sam swings with his right.

Nial blocks Sams’s blows with eerie speed. He rolls to the side, pulling Sam to the ground and knocking the air from his lungs.

Sam gasps as Nial stands.

Both men look for the gun. Sam sees two. The real gun, now camouflaged with graphics, looks ghostly; a projection of the gun lies nearby.

Aching, Sam rises. Gibbon and Indri draw their weapons.

Nial scrambles toward his weapon. He grabs for the pistol, but his hand passes through it. He grabs a second, then a third time. It’s not there. He turns toward Sam.

Both men glare like gunfighters. But only one is armed.

Sam points at Nial and says, “Fire.” A targeting reticle forms around the detective. It closes about him and he collapses, wracked by spasms.

Sam can’t help but smile.

Agents Gibbon and Indri lose their translucency. “Well done,” Gibbon says with a flourish. “Did we startle you?”

Feigning surprise, Sam steps back. “Were you here the whole time?”

“We’ve been following you since you left,” Gibbon answers. He pulls a restraint cord from his pocket and proceeds to bind Nial. “Command, terminate network access for Nial Fox.”

“You were just using me for bait,” Sam says.

“After your disappearing act in the BART station, I figure it’s the least I could do.”

“I guess you all are getting the hang of Oversight.”

Neither agent recognizes the term.

“Cayman’s overlay system,” Sam adds. “That’s why the gun appeared where it wasn’t, right?”

“You mean the government’s overlay system,” Gibbon corrects. “We call it AVE. Augmented Vision Environment.”

Sam looks surprised. “Only the military would propose such a neutered name,” he says.

“No, only the Roman Empire.”

“The what?”

“Sorry, ancient history.” Gibbon says. “Let’s go. I have orders to get you to the airport.”

Nose pressed against hardened plastic, Sam admires the view from his window seat on Flight 761 to Seoul. Clouds emerge from concealment beneath the starboard wing, crawling as if on a conveyor belt. Below lies a gunmetal ocean. Standing in for the sound of waves, the air-conditioning system supplies a dull roar. Sam sees mile-wide letters floating atop the sea: “Ask your cabin attendant for a Sea Breeze made with genuine Oblivion Vodka.”

The cabin reeks of chicken or pasta.

Sitting next to Sam are agents Indri and Gibbon. The former is snoring; the latter is enthralled by Sky Mall Magazine.

Sam passes a couple of hours watching The President Goes Hunting, in which the Commander-in-Chief’s flight-simulator experience enables him to take to the skies in an F-22 and personally conduct air strikes against terrorists posing as atheist civil-rights attorneys.

Following the film, Sam declines an invitation from the two FBI agents to join a game of canasta. Instead, he logs into the network to review his notes and to see if he can get any further information on Nial Fox, now in federal custody. But his queries to Dr. Ursa and to Luis remain unanswered.

Upon landing at Incheon International Airport shortly after midnight on Sunday, Sam and the two agents endure several hours in a bio-containment area. When they’re finally cleared, they find six men in similar suits waiting for them just beyond border control. Handshakes are exchanged; the group heads for a black SUV parked in a no-parking zone outside.

With heavy traffic around Seoul, the drive to the Joint Security Area Hilton at Panmunjom takes almost three hours; civilian air cars are not permitted within fifty miles of the DMZ or the airport.

The JSA has been the site of rapid development since the sixtieth birthday celebration for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in February 2043. Without addressing persistent rumors that Kim died from excessive consumption of cheese in 2014 and was replaced by a double, the Korean Central News Agency marked the occasion by announcing the publication of the Great Leader’s latest statement of policy, “Implementing Juche Revolutionary Themes During My Sixth Decade.” Though incomprehensible from a literary viewpoint, the attractively bound document did at least succeed as marketing: It carried an endorsement from Telomeritis, a leading maker of homeopathic anti-aging products. It was the first such official publication from the North Korean government to sport such sponsorship, an auspicious change in the eyes of the West. The new hundred-year plan called for “a revitalization of self-reliant socialism in the face of Western anti-humanism”—which North Korean government officials interpreted as a mandate to develop the country’s tourist trade around the ransom industry.

Having never divined the fine line between kidnapping and tourism, North Korean tour operators have been seizing travelers around the globe with impunity for the past seven years. Following payment for meals (gluten-free, for a surcharge), accommodations, and deportation, DPRK guides escort their captives by train to the JSA, stopping along the way at staged villages for guided shopping breaks. Few can resist picking up memorabilia of their ordeal. At the conclusion of the journey, the guides show their charges to the tunnels dug under the JSA in the 1970s—recently renovated with rest rooms for those with insufficient bladder strength to make the two-mile trek—and turn the other way to allow an “escape.”

Despite the ostensible outrage of the international community, the practice continues due to the intervention of China, forever menacing the West by proxy while simultaneously posing as peacemaker. And both the U.S. and the UK have long recognized the value of North Korea as justification for otherwise-unsustainable security spending. Moreover, the international community has come to find institutionalized kidnapping useful as a kind of handshake. Under the oversight of Pyongyang, and with the cooperation of South Korea and the international insurance industry, a stable, well-regulated market for the exchange of people has emerged.

Sam spends the next few hours in briefings with members of various U.S. government intelligence and security agencies, along with their South Korean counterparts, and a hostage-insurance claims adjustor from International Hostage Brokers, Ltd. Sam’s part is quite straightforward: Approach the exchange point, hand over the glasses, and return with Amy to the safe zone. It’s the contractual details about media rights, commissions, and residual fees that prove difficult to negotiate. Jet-lagged, Sam dozes through much of the discussion and the concurrent meal of soup, kimchi, and assorted side dishes.

At the appointed hour, Sam follows Agents Indri and Gibbon and the others to the staging area, an attractively manicured garden on the north side of the hotel. Flowers frame inspirational posters that offer slogans like “No price is too dear for freedom” and “Your wallet is your hope.” A gravel path meanders toward the military checkpoint run by the Republic of Korea. The transition is abrupt, shifting at the hotel’s property line from sentimental signage and topiary animals to guard dogs and razor wire.

Agent Gibbon produces a sealed white envelope from his pocket. “Dr. Ursa said you were to have this,” he explains. Opening the envelope, he removes what looks like a breath mint and some dental wax. “He said to affix this to the roof of your mouth, someplace comfortable.”

There are no evident markings. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. Dr. Ursa said you should bite it if you need to reach us.”

“Is it toxic?”

“He didn’t say. But he stressed that you must spit it out as soon as you bite it. Is that understood?”

“Understood.” Shaking his head, Sam applies the wax beside his left top molar and embeds the tiny pill within it.

Sam and the two agents descend into the tunnel that leads to the north, beneath the border and beyond. Pale green paint is peeling off the walls, revealing concrete beneath. Bare bulbs blare. In the absence of distractions, the asynchronous footfalls of the three men beg to be ordered into something more rhythmic. Sam shifts his gait to fall into time.

The absence of input while advancing through the tunnel prompts the mind to manufacture sights and sounds. It’s not that Sam can’t handle being disconnected; he’s bought silence many times. Rather, there’s a sense of something unfinished about this place without ads, like music that fails to resolve to the tonic.

“Are we there yet?” Sam asks, to break the silence.

Indri looks to Gibbon for guidance.

“It’s a trick question,” Gibbon deadpans.

And then they’re there. There are two doors, side by side, glass framed by metal, leading into identical chambers. At the far side of those rooms, duplicate doors offer an exit to the North Korean side. On the tunnel wall, there’s a video display, intercom, hand scanner, and lens.

With no one visible on the far side, the three men wait. Ventilation fans hum the tune of eternity, a note forever sustained.

Finally, a light appears on the far side, refracted through the glass in the doors. Amy is there, flanked by two men in fatigues. She looks well-kept.

After a moment of discussion, a voice sounds over the intercom: “Shall we proceed?”

Gibbon presses the talk button on the input panel. “We’re ready,” he says, and nods to Indri.

When Indri opens the right-hand door, a green panel over the doorframe illuminates. Over the left-hand door, a red light comes on.

The two agents look at Sam. “You’re on,” Gibbon says.

Sam withdraws the rose-colored glasses from his pocket. “Just put them on the ground?” he asks.

“Unless you see somewhere else to put them,” Gibbon says.

Sam steps into the chamber and carefully places the spectacles on the concrete floor.

Amy Ibis, meanwhile, has stepped into the adjacent chamber. She lifts a hand in a half-hearted wave.

Behind Sam, the door slams shut. He turns to see Indri through the glass, standing with arms folded, smiling a stupid smile.

One of Amy’s captors shuts the door through which she entered. Metal bolts clack and the lights in each chamber brighten to provide a better view of the goods being exchanged.

Gibbon moves to the south-side input terminal and begins the authentication process. His counterpart on the North Korean side does the same.

Looking for options, Sam finds only walls.

Amy places her hand on the glass between the two chambers. Condensation clouds the space between her fingers and around her palm. Her face furrows, perhaps in concern.

Sam reciprocates, pressing his hand against hers. He feels nothing but mistrust.

“I know you killed him,” he says, knowing she cannot hear him.

Amy’s response, as near as Sam can tell, is “Thank you.” He wonders what she thought he said.

The northern door in Sam’s chamber and the southern door in Amy’s open simultaneously. The air from the northern side smells of mildew and decay.

One of the men on the far side beckons, pulling a gun from his jacket. “Give me the glasses,” he says.