You Belong to Us
Chapter Text
They drove him to a small, fenced-in parking lot off the West Side Highway, which opened into a low, brick building unobservable from the street. When the SUV pulled inside, a heavy steel door slid shut behind them, effectively locking them in the cold, concrete box. Bond looked around for electronics, computers, anything that might give him a sense of this place being an active workspace, but there was nothing but an occasional tool scattered on the oil-stained floor.
"Don't worry, we're not staying here. We're going inside where it's warm."
"Inside where, Peart?" Bond asked testily. "This doesn't strike me as a satellite office, unless your fortunes have come down a bit lately."
"It's just a temporary workspace," the man said, climbing easily out of the SUV. He wore 5.11-brand tactical pants and a Gore-Tex winter coat along with heavy gloves with articulated fingers and reinforced knuckles. He could have stepped into the mountains of Afghanistan dressed as he was and been fully operational. "Right this way."
He led Bond through a small mantrap—two bulletproof doors on a buzzer system, with a point-tilt-zoom camera in a bubble in the center of ceiling feeding back information to a security center someplace. It might not be in the same building, Bond thought, or block, or city.
They were buzzed through into a dim, cramped hallway. The walls were plain white and scuffed from heavy traffic. Whatever this place was, it was quickly assembled, hard-used, and would soon be disassembled and all trace of its use vanished. Peart led him into a dark, medium-sized room decked out as something like an office. A generic, oval table devoured the space in the center of the room, and Peart gestured to Bond to take a seat. There were no decorations on the wall, nothing of any type of personality at all. A flat-panel monitor dominated one wall, shedding cables that fed into two chunky laptops on a cheap stand below it, where a burly man with a heavy beard aggressively tapped at the keys. He looked up as they entered.
"Star of the show's here," he said with an offhand nod of his head.
"Too shitty an evening to be walking the streets," Peart said with forced jocularity. "Andy, this is James. James, Andy."
The man grunted an acknowledgement. He was dressed similarly to Peart, but his jacket hung open, and Bond could see an overbuilt automatic pistol holstered at his hip, its hammer cocked back. Peart noticed Bond noticing and pointed to Bond's pocket. "You mind handing over your piece? Just while we talk is all. You'll get it back."
"I suppose if I'm not safe around the CIA I'm not safe anywhere," Bond said and handed over the gun.
"Nice…a Walther," Peart said, looking it over, then setting on the table. "You see this?" he asked Andy.
"Fancy-pants gun," Andy said with undisguised contempt. "Should get a 1911. That's a warrior's gun."
"I'll talk to my quartermaster about it," Bond said dryly.
"Quartermaster," Andy spat. "Fancy."
Bond just gave Peart a quizzical look to convey his general confusion about the situation: why he'd been abducted off the streets of New York just to be driven to a nondescript location and insulted by someone he'd never met before.
"Hey, so we have a little info you might be interested in," Peart said with false avuncularity. His friendly expression was waxy and seeming to barely conceal whatever malevolence he held in check on a daily basis.
"Clearly you have my attention."
"So, we got some intel from a couple of credible sources that the South Korean film delegation might be penetrated by some DPRK operatives. Specifically, some deep-cover Reconnaissance General Bureau agents might have entered the country under cover as guests of the festival."
"You're serious?" Bond asked with feigned surprise.
"They walk among us, like the saying goes," Peart nodded. "This is a serious situation we have here."
"It is indeed."
"Wouldn't be hard for one of them to compromise someone working on this defection, and then what would we have?"
"I haven't a clue," Bond said honestly.
"Here, I want to show you something." Peart gestured to the other man. "Andy, you wanna cue it up?"
The thuggish man stabbed at the laptop some more, and a moment later the great plasma TV flickered to life and showed a night-vision image of a hotel room. Bond's hotel room.
"I figured we'd skip to the good parts. Avoid all the dialogue and setup and boring shit," Peart said. Bond inhaled through his nose as the evening with Judy played out on the high-definition screen in ghostly shades of pale blue.
"Man, she's a little pile-driver, isn't she?" Peart observed.
"Me love you long time…" Andy sniggered in a mocking falsetto.
Suddenly, Bond was back in the torture room, his knees scraped and bleeding on the freezing concrete, while guards above him laughed uproariously. Bond immediately understood the message his subconscious was broadcasting: this was no different than the humiliations he'd endured there, and only as meaningful as he chose to allow it to be.
"Are we going to watch the whole thing, because I'm afraid I know how this film ends," he said, feigning boredom.
Peart scowled slightly in disappointment. "Nah, you get the point." He waved a remote vaguely at the TV and it shut off. "You were tagging an RGB operative, and we got it on tape. She's a deep-cover agent who infiltrated the film institute, and she made you and flipped you as a source." Peart gestured to Bond with the remote. "You got a big problem, bunky. She's right there on tape asking you to help her hand Jechul over to the RGB. Now, you know the CIA can't just sit back and let an operation like this get blown all to hell, right? Smart thing to do would be roll the both of you up until this thing is done."
"But you're not going to do that, are you?" Bond said, a picture forming in his mind. "Because you want the girl, too. You didn't assist the consulate so they could get the girl to England. You want to grab her for yourself. That's why my room just happened to be under surveillance. You knew all along that Judy Kim was RGB, and you decided to watch and see what happened."
Peart shrugged. "Her room is wired, too. We figured we'd get something we could use. What we got is you." He looked at Bond, and for a moment all the meanness that lurked beneath his easygoing veneer bubbled to the surface. Bond imagined it was the face seen by countless nameless, disappeared people throughout the Middle East just before the waterboarding began. "We can rendition your ass right now and there's not a goddamned thing you can do about it. And when we show your government this tape of you banging a North Korean spy, there's nothing they can do about, either."
"I sense we're coming to an ask," Bond said, and suddenly the mask reformed and Peart smiled gamely.
"You snag the girl for us."
"Naturally."
"We have bigger plans for her than just getting some intel and letting her live in the countryside somewhere. What the fuck's she gonna tell you? That North Korea's fucked? That the economy's in the shitter? That the population's brainwashed? Tell us something we don't know. They're all a bunch of retards. The only reason we haven't taken them off the board is because they have nukes. But, you know, it's not like we need the schematics toRed Octoberor some shit."
"So, what are you going to do with her?" Bond asked.
"She knows some things she can teach us," Peart said cagily.
"I thought they didn't have anything you needed."
"They have some skills. When it comes to breaking people, they're really good. And our techniques have pretty much hit the wall. Congress would go apeshit if they thought the intelligence community was spending money on researching enhanced interrogation techniques, so we need a ringer. Someone who can teach us how it's done."
Bond felt ice water run down his back. "You want her to teach you how totorturepeople?"
"Don't use that word, asshole!" Andy snarled from beside the AV setup.
"Yeah, we don't say that." Peart smiled jocularly. "Enhanced interrogationorenhanced questioning. Looks better in a spot report to the Hill. But to answer your question, yeah. She's got knowledge to help us refine our techniques. Especially when it comes to mixing chemicals and stress position techniques. We don't have a lot of research on that combo. Hasn't really been tried since the Cold War, so what we got's all pretty outdated."
"And if I don't? What happens to the defection attempt?"
"It won't go well, that's for sure," Peart said smugly. "Can't say whether Jechul makes it out alive or not, but I can guarantee there will be an international incident you Brits will end up holding the bag on, and you'll find your ass renditioned to a black site somewhere."
Bond felt a muscle twitch in his cheek. "You really think you can do that to an MI6 agent?"
"There's a war on, case you missed it," Peart scowled. "Two, to be exact. Your government's got bigger fish to fry than what might have happened to one of its spies in the wake of an operation he fucked up. Besides, when this tape gets out, they're gonna assume you got flipped by the RGB anyway and that you torpedoed the op at the request of the little Asian chippie that hauled your ashes all night. Bottom line: you're too compromised for anyone to give a damn about."
"So, what do you need me to do?" Bond asked.
"That's the spirit!" Peart leaned over and clapped Bond hard on the shoulders. Bond looked longingly at his Walther laying on the table as Peart gestured to Andy. "Cue up the next bit, amigo."
The big screen flickered and then showed a sharp blueprint recognized as being the theater. "Okay, so this is the Loews cinema where the film festival is going to be," Peart said, then positioned the red dot of a laser-pointer over one area. "See this? This is a service elevator. Runs down the length of the building."
"So far I'm following."
The laser dot slid down the vertical trench of the elevator shaft to an indistinct box at the bottom of the screen. "Well, here's where it gets interesting. So, this elevator shaft is leftover from when this place was a swanky hotel from the twenties through about the seventies or eighties, I guess. At the time the elevator went straight down to an entrance to Times Square subway station. Only that's totally been redone, so it ends on an empty platform."
"Ain't empty no more," Andy said.
"We ran power to that platform," Peart explained. "And we have a service train on standby down there. You grab the girl and jump in the elevator. You take it all the way down and hand her off to us. We'll put in her in the train and ride that baby to the end of the line."
"Which is?"
"Not your business," Andy snapped.
Peart looked apologetic. "It's outside Manhattan. Far from the action. We'll have an extraction team there ready to take her to Teterboro and a CIA bird. Then she starts her new life in the U.S. of A."
"Just an elevator ride," Bond mulled.
"Oughta be easy for you," Peart said. "You'll have to mix it up with the RGB goons they got in the delegation a little. But we can help on that score."
"How gracious of you."
"Well, this thing goes to shit if you start a gunfight in the movie theater," Peart said. "This is Times Square. Tourist central of the world. Not the Bronx."
Andy uncoiled his bulk and moved to set a small, plastic box in front of Bond. It resembled the cheap, hinged box for an index for drill bits or hex wrenches. He popped the small plastic latch and opened it on the table before him. Inside of it were two neat rows of small metal darts. Each of them had a barbed tip on one end and a squarish base at the other out of which protruded three tiny and tapered fins. "Darts," Bond said dully. "Is it league night at one of the local pubs?"
Peart smiled tightly, while Andy just scowled. "The latest Non-Lethal Incapacitation Equipment or NLIE, as we like to call it at the Company. Real handy when you need somebody out of your way fast and inconspicuously. You can probably guess that these come in handy for us when we need to roll someone up overseas in some of the less permissive countries."
"Less permissive being…"
"You know, like Europe, Russia, places like that."
"Of course," Bond said. How do they work? Do I wear it or…"
"Nope," Peart shook his head with barely-suppressed pride. "They attach to your PDA—you're carrying what? A Sony Clie, right? You just take one of the racks and clip it on the back. Want me to demonstrate?"
"By all means," Bond said neutrally and pulled out his small PDA and handed it to Peart.
"See you just clip it like so…" he withdrew one of the racks of darts from the plastic case, and Bond could see that the rack was not plastic, but some kind of metal with two heavy tabs on either side. "Now, the darts use a combination of a fast-acting paralytic and an electrical current. The current shorts out the body's nervous system and essentially paralyses the target and gives the paralytic time to work."
"Clever," Bond admitted. "So, that's why the end is so fat? It contains the charge?"
"Exactly," Peart said and plugged a small jack into the PDA's earphone input. "Draws from the PDA itself, but loads before firing, so it's not draining the battery too quickly."
"How does it fire?"
Peart flipped the Clie over and showed him a small, red stud on the side of the rack. "Right here. Press and slide. That's the safety. Keeps it from getting snagged and firing off accidentally."
"That would indeed be unfortunate."
"Just hold it flat, parallel to the ground," Peart demonstrated. "Pretend you're checking your calendar or something, and then zap."
"Shocking," Bond said. "Simply shocking."
"Ain't funny, asshole," Andy barked. "RGB's got muscle in that film group. They're gonna twist your skinny neck, you try and get that bitch out of there while they're watching. And they're gonna be watching. It's what they're there for."
Peart nodded. "He's right. They're waiting for you Limey's to make your move, so you gotta expect they'll be on high-alert for anything sideways."
"Right," Bond said, feeling ground grow solid beneath his feet once again. This he could handle. "I assume you have photos of who I need to avoid?"
"Yeah," Peart said and snapped his fingers a few times. "Andy wanna…yeah, pull them up." Andy looked resentfully at Peart, as if he'd been denied the chance to engage in some violence, then slumped back to the laptop. A moment later the screen changed to show a matronly woman, perhaps in her mid-50s, with a large shell of lacquered, jet-black hair.
Peart consulted a small notebook. "Okay this is—fuck these names—Pak Gyung Shim?" He looked over the notebook at Bond and then Andy. "I guess? She probably has a Westernized name. She's posing as a treasurer or finance person for the film committee. Been spying for North Korea since 1979, near as we can tell."
"I think I'll be able to hold my own against her," Bond deadpanned.
"You're funny. No, she's the lookout. Try and keep an eye out for her, otherwise she'll blow the whistle on your little plan but good. Next slide, Andy."
The screen changed again, and Bond saw a familiar face-round, fleshy, with small piggy eyes—above a swell of shoulders that disappeared beyond the border of the screen. Bond remembered the body though. It went with the face. "I saw him at the reception," Bond said. "It was clear he was RGB. I'm surprised he fooled anyone from the delegation."
Peart shrugged. "They grow 'em big in Korea. Anyway his name is Han-Lee Lim—Oh, that's easy to say—basically a leg-breaker for the North Korean military for years now. My thinking is they slipped him in to send a clear message to Jechul:try it and we'll kill you." Peart dropped the notebook. "You're gonna want to use two darts on this fat sack."
"Fortunately, you've given me an ample supply."
"Yeah, well, we need you to deliver," Peart said. "Get the girl on the elevator. You don't even have to ride along with her. We have it rigged so that it only goes one way one direction."
"What if one of the service staff try and use it?" Bond asked.
"They've been told it's out of commission. Thing hasn't worked for years anyway. We inserted a team in the middle of the night, after closing, to get the thing running again. Took a solid week."
So, a team of technicians slipped into a closed movie theater every night for a week to get an elevator running again. Bond marveled at the expenditure of time and resources. All so that they could intercept a defector who could teach them better ways to torture people. Not for the first time he considered that the American intelligence machine was a very different beast than the master he served. "And you'll be standing by, I take it," Bond asked.
"We'll have an extraction team waiting on the platform. We'll get on the train and be in the air before the North Koreans even know what's happening."
"You seem to have thought of everything," Bond remarked.
"We're the CIA," Peart shrugged, "we always do."
They hustled him back into the SUV and carved their way through the snowfall to an intersection at Tenth Avenue and 33rdstreet. It was comparatively heavily travelled, so they elicited a cacophony of horns when they stopped and let him out. "You can hoof it back to the hotel. It's only a half-mile or so," Peart said. "And Bond? Remember, you belong to us now." With that he closed the door, and the big, sinister-looking vehicle blended into traffic and disappeared in a sea of blood-red lights.
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