21 THE WAREHOUSE
The minutes ticked past as Shinsou knelt beside Kaneshiro's body. He was aware that Yeonha was next to him, and presently he managed to compose himself. He knew that she must be feeling even more devastated than him, for she had just lost practically everyone in the world whom she cared for – not only her parents but Watanabe as well, who had been like an uncle to her since childhood.
He stood up and looked around at the bodies lying on the floor. How could this have happened, he asked himself. Could the blame fall on Nakajima, who had become involved in his personal affairs during the assignment? But whether or not Nakajima had come to Wonsan, Choe Yong-gon would still have been the one running the smuggling operation. If Imamura had been the one tasked with this mission instead, would he have been able to detect the smuggled goods and find the warehouse? Wouldn't he have encountered Choe here tonight, as well? Might not Choe, who had a gun and little restraint in using it, have killed off Imamura's entire team as well?
Could we have been more vigilant, Shinsou asked himself, glancing at the gunman he had killed. They had let their guard down for just a few seconds, and it had cost them Kaneshiro and Watanabe's lives. Why hadn't they overcome and bound that sentry up instead of bypassing him? But it was easy to ask such questions, in hindsight. Besides, they had left the sentry untouched because if he had been missing, any of the smuggling team coming to the building would have become suspicious immediately.
I should have brainwashed Choe at the beginning, Shinsou said to himself, and made him call his men off. Perhaps Imamura might not have chosen to blow up the warehouse. Was Nakajima wrong to have wanted to do that? And yet Shinsou could hardly blame him for wanting to prevent the North Koreans from using any more of Japan's technology.
As he looked at Nakajima lying on the ground, he thought of Park Soojin, and felt a great sadness for her. She must have found life in North Korea intolerable because, unlike the locals, she had come from Japan and knew how life could be better, elsewhere. She had looked happy that morning when she and Nakajima had returned to the apartment, just after Titus had married them. How short-lived that happiness had been! And now there was no more hope of redemption for her.
In the dim light, Shinsou could see Yeonha looking at him.
"I'll help you, Youngjae," she said resolutely, "whatever you have to do, now. I can make you invisible. This was my father's mission too, and I'll help you complete it for him."
Shinsou didn't speak, but put a hand on her shoulder and nodded soberly. He felt as if a great load was weighing on him, and he was grateful that she was there.
He saw the infra red goggles that Kaneshiro had been using lying on the floor, and picked them up. He then looked at Yeonha.
"How did you end up with Choe Yong-gon?" he asked.
"He placed a surveillance camera in our apartment so that he would know if I returned," she answered, "He warped in shortly after I came back, and told me that lie about Appa and Eomma. Then he warped me to a room in Wonsan Hotel, where he was staying. He said I couldn't stay at the apartment, the inminban leader might find out and report me because I had been missing for too long already."
"Did you know about our mission here?" asked Shinsou abruptly, "what we were supposed to do, tonight?"
"No," said Yeonha, wide-eyed.
Shinsou felt a sense of relief. So Choe had been lying, and Yeonha hadn't betrayed them after all.
"Your father wanted to blow up the smuggled goods, to prevent the North Koreans from using any more of our technology," he explained, "The goods are in this building. We'll have to bring the pipe bombs on the stairs landing up to the thirty-third floor. But there are guards up there whom we'll have to get rid of, first."
After wandering around the perimeter of the foyer, they located the second staircase, and continued up to the thirty-third floor. Nakajima had been using a length of rope to make the group invisible, and Yeonha now took it and looped it around Shinsou's waist. She would have liked to have held his hand instead to make him invisible, but they would probably need the use of both their hands for the task ahead.
The smuggled goods were in a vast hall which was in almost pitch blackness. Shinsou, entering the hall invisibly with Yeonha, managed to pick out the guards with the infrared goggles. As Kaneshiro had mentioned to them earlier, there were twenty of them, skulking silently in the darkness, keeping watch over the stash.
He and Yeonha waited invisibly and patiently until one of the guards wandered out of the hall, perhaps for a brief rest break. They then crept up behind him, and Shinsou knocked him unconscious.
They dragged him to the stairs landing and bound him, and blindfolded him as well. Shinsou then tried to revive him, and brainwashed him when he woke up.
"Who are those other guards with you in the hall?" he asked, "Who employed all of you?"
"We are mostly in the drug smuggling business," said the man, "Choe Yong-gon is paying us a generous sum to guard the goods here."
"Is there a leader among all of you in this group?" asked Shinsou.
"Yes," said the man.
"Go in and call him out," ordered Shinsou, "tell him that a messenger has arrived with important instructions from Choe."
He unbound the man and allowed him to return to the hall. Presently, the man returned with the leader, a tall, hulking individual.
Shinsou brainwashed the leader too, and then said, "Order all your men to come out here."
When all the men had come out, he looked at them and said, "I will need you to tell me your names one by one, so that I know I'm giving the instructions to the correct people."
After he had brainwashed all the men, he made them walk down to the ground floor in small groups, so that Yeonha would find it easier to make them invisible. Nakajima and Kaneshiro had prepared a holding room for them in a deserted building down the road, and they closeted the men in there.
Shinsou then went back up to the tenth floor and brainwashed the men that Kaneshiro and Watanabe had defeated and bound, and led them down to the holding room as well, with Yeonha's help.
He wondered how Ryoko was faring. It was taking him a while to manage these drug dealers, and he would then have to somehow carry the bodies in the foyer up to the warehouse, and then set the timers for the bombs. After that he had to bring Yeonha to Wonsan Hotel to meet Titus. He would never make it back to the Kirogi on time, and it was going to have to set sail without him. He realised that he would not be going back to Japan in any case, for he had to somehow fulfil Kaneshiro's request to make the bombing of the warehouse appear as if the North Koreans themselves had done it, and he couldn't leave Wonsan without trying to figure out how to do that.
The thought occurred to him that his chances of surviving this whole episode were slim. Would he fail, and end up a Japanese spy caught on North Korean soil, and eventually be executed? He remembered Kanako Hoshide's fears of dying alone in a foreign land. But all these thoughts didn't alter anything, Shinsou told himself. He couldn't change things now, couldn't back out on his promise to Kaneshiro. He resolutely pushed all his doubts away.
He hoped that Ryoko, at least, would make it back to Niigata. Nakajima had received word from the Directorate that the issue of the abductees was becoming big news in Japan. The Directorate itself had kept quiet about the fact that it knew where the abductees were, so as not to jeopardise their rescue; but speculation was rife and because such abductions had taken place in the past, many of the newspapers in Japan were suggesting that the North Koreans had done it again.
Having settled the drug dealers, Shinsou and Yeonha now carried the lamps that Choe's men had brought up to the warehouse, so that they could have a look at the stash there.
Examination of the smuggled stash revealed all the items that Kaneshiro had mentioned earlier, including a large number of explosives. Shinsou and Yeonha now returned to the tenth floor and brought the pipe bombs up to the warehouse. There were six bombs in all; Watanabe had made extra, in case some didn't detonate, although Kaneshiro had been of the opinion that there were so many explosives in the warehouse that it wouldn't take much to ignite the entire place.
They were on the stair landing about to enter the warehouse, when Shinsou thought he saw something move in the darkness. Taking a flashlight out, he pointed it at the wall, to reveal a rather battered-looking garbage bin located in a corner.
The bin looked familiar. Shinsou could have sworn that he'd seen a similar one on the tenth floor landing, earlier. He hadn't taken much notice of it, for the building they were in was half-completed and there was a lot of debris lying around, including bins and empty containers.
He now marched up to the bin and directed the flashlight into its depths. It illuminated a terrified and cowering individual – none other than Lee the assistant cook, blinking in the bright light and trying to block the beam with his hands!
Yeonha gave a small gasp of fright on seeing that someone was concealed inside the bin. Shinsou furiously grabbed Lee by the shirt, and pulled him out.
"You interfering bastard!" he snarled, "What are you doing here?!"
"Don't hurt me!" squeaked Lee, and then his face went blank.
Shinsou was livid. Yeonha was looking astonished.
"Who is he?" she asked.
"He's Lee Sang-hun, a cook who works on board the Kirogi!" snapped Shinsou, glaring at Lee, his eyes blazing with anger. "Explain to me what you're doing here! You had better have a good explanation!"
"I've been suspecting that Jiyeon likes Han Youngjae more than me," Lee said, staring blankly into space. "Although she keeps denying it. I wanted to enjoy the Air Festival activities with her, but she kept putting me off, saying she wasn't interested, and that she planned to stay on the ship. I felt sure that it was because she was going to sneak out and enjoy the Festival with Han Youngjae instead, so I placed a tracking device on her, to follow her and see if it was true. But I didn't see her leave the ship, and she must have gotten into a car, because by the time I noticed she wasn't around, she was already some distance away, travelling at a moderate speed.
"By the time I managed to find a taxi, the tracking device monitor showed that she had stopped moving. I couldn't speak Korean, so I just showed the taxi driver the location of the place where she was, and he brought me there. But on the way there, Jiyeon suddenly vanished."
Shinsou guessed that Ryoko must have transformed into the Supreme Leader at this point, which had somehow stopped the tracking device from working.
"I couldn't tell exactly where she was any more, but I let the taxi driver drop me somewhere around that place, which turned out to be an industrial area, with factories," continued Lee, "and then I wandered around for hours, but couldn't find her."
"Well," said Shinsou, now feeling a bit sorry for Lee but also becoming impatient, "how did you end up here?"
"I'd given up and managed to find my way out of the industrial area, and started going back to the ship," said Lee, "Night had fallen by then. I was going through the city centre when your car went past.
"By chance, I had put on some infrared glasses that I'd brought along, at the time. I bought a pair because I'd heard a rumour that some of the secret police here like spying invisibly on the people, and I wanted to see if there were any in the crowd that's now in Wonsan. I took the glasses off just as your car went by, and realised that except for the driver all the people in it had disappeared.
"I realised that the people in your car were invisible, and so out of curiosity I hurried after the car. Luckily I went in the correct direction, because you'd parked the car in a corner and were disappearing down the road when I caught up and spotted it."
"So, you followed us here," said Shinsou grimly, "how did you do it without us noticing you? One of us had infrared goggles on and kept turning back to make sure we weren't being followed."
"I kept to the shadows and moved telekinetically inside this garbage bin," explained Lee, indicating the bin next to him, "I brought it with me, it's a collapsible bin. I bought it so that I could use it to spy on Jiyeon and find out if she was really with Youngjae."
To demonstrate, he pressed a button, and the garbage bin automatically folded itself up into a small compact cube.
"Where did you get that from?" demanded Shinsou.
"I bought it online, together with the tracking device," said Lee, "I don't know who the seller was, but he or she called himself Magnet."
Shinsou groaned inwardly. He suspected that the garbage bin and tracking device were Magnetron's creations. Magnetron had obviously found out that there was a market outside for some of the junk that he kept inventing.
"It's very clever," said Yeonha admiringly, "because the bin shielded him, Kaneshiro-san's infrared goggles didn't pick him out, and the night was dark, so he was able to hide in the shadows."
"So, you followed us all the way into the building?" said Shinsou.
"Yes," said Lee, "and when all of you became visible again, I recognised you as the man I saw outside Koryo Bar. When those other men appeared, I couldn't hear the conversation very well, but I was on your side, because their ringleader looked like scum, and ten men against four wasn't fair. And I also owed you one because I suspected that you must have brought me back to the ship after I saw you outside Koryo Bar … I don't know what happened, but just after I spoke to you I found myself back on the ship. I felt you must have done me a favour, because I realised later I could have been arrested if I had been caught wandering around, as a foreigner.
"Anyway … I tried my best to telekinetically deflect the bullet when the ringleader shot your compatriot. But I'm sorry … he still died."
Shinsou and Yeonha looked at each other.
"Appa might have died immediately if this man Lee hadn't deflected the bullet," said Yeonha softly, "he bought us some time, so that I had a chance to talk a little to my father."
"We'd have to thank him for that," admitted Shinsou, relenting a bit. He wondered if Lee could really have deflected something as fast-moving as a bullet, but at least he had tried. And it had indeed seemed a miracle that Nakajima hadn't died immediately, since Choe had shot him at fairly close range.
"I tried to warn you, when I saw the gunman coming upstairs from below," added Lee, "there was some debris on the ground, so I lifted it and then dropped it, to make some sound."
"That clinking noise," said Shinsou, "that was made by you?"
"Yes," agreed Lee, "and I tried to deflect the bullets again, but I'm sorry, I didn't deflect them enough, again I failed."
Shinsou was silent. Perhaps Lee hadn't managed to deflect the bullets completely, but he might have deflected them enough so that Kaneshiro had been badly wounded but not enough to have died immediately. Otherwise, he might never have had a chance to speak those final words to Shinsou.
"If it's true, we owe him a debt, Youngjae," said Yeonha, looking at Lee, "please forgive him for following us."
"All right," said Shinsou, rather reluctantly, "and he can do one more thing for us. We can't leave the bodies on the tenth floor, or the North Korean authorities might find them. We'll have to bring them up to the warehouse so that they can be destroyed when the bombs are detonated, and the resulting blaze should make a suitable funeral pyre for them. Lee can telekinetically carry the bodies up to the warehouse for us. It will make moving them much easier."
Shinsou made Lee move Kaneshiro first, for he knew that Lee would become fatigued after a while and might drop the bodies, and he wanted his colleagues to have as dignified an exit as possible. He ordered Lee to move Nakajima and Watanabe next without dropping them, as well; but he could see that the little man was becoming extremely tired by this time, so he allowed him to take rest breaks while moving Choe Yong-gon's body, and he also allowed him to slide the body along the floor.
Yeonha had an odd expression on her face as she watched Choe's body being dragged along.
"I guess I've gone and done murder," she murmured.
"You would probably be carrying out many more murders if you became a spy, like Choe wanted you to be," Shinsou said.
Yeonha looked at him.
"I know," she said solemnly, "Appa let me use the internet, while I was in Tokyo. I searched up 'North Korean spies' … they blew up a jet airliner once …" Her voice trailed off.
Once Choe's body had been placed in the warehouse, Shinsou allowed Lee to rest a bit; but eventually he ordered him to move the dead sentry's body as well.
"I've done murder as well, too," he said quietly, looking at the sentry's body as they followed along behind.
"No, you were saving the rest of us," Yeonha disagreed, also looking at the body, "What choice did you have? He would have shot us next. And you were avenging your colleague." She meant Kaneshiro.
"You were avenging your parents too, then, when you shot Choe," returned Shinsou.
She gave him a wan smile.
"So … this is the first time that you've killed someone?" she ventured to ask, after a pause.
"I'm a new spy," said Shinsou drily, "and we're taught to kill, but we don't intentionally do it. I went through hero school. You don't kill, as a hero. When you fight a villain, you don't mete out justice. It's for the police to do that …"
"Hero school?" said Yeonha, blankly.
Shinsou looked at her. Of course, there were no heroes in North Korea; Yeonha didn't know what a hero was. She must have seen heroes on patrol in Tokyo, of course; but no one had explained who they were to her, and they had become lost in the larger confusion of new and unfamiliar things surrounding her.
"It takes a while to explain," he said, seeing that they had reached the warehouse, "and there's no time now. There are heroes in America too. You'll find out all about them, there …"
Once all the bodies had been placed in the warehouse, Shinsou looked at Lee. He would have to get back to the port quickly, for the Kirogi would be leaving soon.
"We'll have to get this fellow back to the ship," he told Yeonha, "I suppose it's harmless enough that he saw us tonight, since he didn't really overhear our conversation and couldn't have figured out what we were doing. Make us invisible once we exit the building, will you?"
They made Lee put the collapsible bin (which was now a small cube) into his bag, and brought him downstairs and out of the building.
"Do you know how to drive?" Shinsou asked Lee.
"Yes," said Lee.
They reached the place where Watanabe's car was parked. Shinsou had taken the car key from Watanabe's pocket.
"Yeonha," said Shinsou, "give him directions to the port." To Lee he said, "You're going to drive this car back to the Kirogi. Listen carefully to the directions we give you. And if you get lost, just stop a passerby and show him or her the piece of paper that I'm going to give you."
While Yeonha was talking to Lee, Shinsou scribbled "Please give me directions to the port" in Korean on a piece of paper, and then handed it to the cook.
"Hopefully he'll reach there before the ship leaves," he commented, as they watched Watanabe's car disappear.
"He should reach there quite quickly," Yeonha assured him, "The port isn't far from the city centre." Then she realised what Shinsou had said.
"The ship's leaving?" She looked at him in disbelief, "What about you?"
"I can't go back," said Shinsou, avoiding her gaze, "I've got to set the timers for those bombs now and then bring you to meet Titus. And I promised Kaneshiro I'd figure out a way to fool the North Koreans …"
He turned abruptly.
"Come on," he said briefly, "There's no time to lose. After we're done here, we're going to Wonsan Hotel. Titus is getting some American missionaries out of the country to America tonight, and you'll be going with them."
"America?" said Yeonha, looking amazed.
Shinsou explained Titus' plan to her as they went back up the stairs. Once they reached the warehouse, he looked at the bodies of the three agents, which had been laid in a row. Choe's body and that of the sentry had been placed at the other end of the room.
Shinsou felt that he should say something in tribute to his colleagues, but he found himself at a loss for words. Yeonha, however, surprised him by taking a pile of small paper cranes out of her pocket.
"My grandmother taught me how to make origami cranes when I was in Iwate," she explained shyly, "she said that cranes are for good fortune and happiness, and long life. I was making them in Choe's hotel room just now because I was feeling down. They're not much, and it's too late for them to bring long life, but at least it's something."
She laid a few cranes on the body of Nakajima. "For Appa, whom I knew and loved too late, may he rest well and find joy in reuniting with Eomma," she said, her voice shaking slightly, trying to fight back tears.
She then moved on to Watanabe.
"For Samchon, who was like an uncle to me, and whom I loved like a father, may he rest in peace," she murmured, placing a few more cranes on his chest.
Finally, she came to Kaneshiro.
"For Kaneshiro-san, who saved my life and gave his own life for mine, I have no words to thank enough," she said softly. She arranged the remaining paper cranes on his body.
Shinsou did not say anything, but he placed the gun that he had used to shoot the sentry next to Kaneshiro.
"I avenged you, Kaneshiro," he thought sombrely, "rest in peace."
He then set the timers on the pipe bombs, to go off an hour later. They then hurried out of the building.
"Farewell, to some of the people I loved best in the world," Yeonha said softly, as they left the warehouse.
Shinsou said nothing, but squeezed her hand. They had left the rope behind, and went hand in hand down the stairs. They were silent as they descended, and he could not see her in the darkness, but he could tell that she was crying again. She had been too busy helping him earlier to think, but it was now slowly sinking in, everything that she had lost. Shinsou realised that he was now all she had left in the world, and in a few hours she would lose even that, as well.
They reached the bottom of the stairs and left the building, making their way invisibly through the streets of the city centre, to Wonsan Hotel.