Upon entering they saw luggage left for all three of them, and inside the roll-aboards, the briefcases, and the large purse, they found all the clothing, accessories, papers, computers, and phones they would need to turn themselves into three innocuous-looking South Korean business executives. Three sets of passports, driver’s licenses, and credit cards lay on a bed, alongside three more sets of clothing, one for each of the infiltrators.
The IDs and other documentation belonged to the three who just climbed aboard the dinghy. These were sleeper agents who’d been planted years ago in South Korea to establish their legends, and each possessed a passable resemblance to Won, Nam, and Kim.
There were three envelopes on the table in the kitchenette. Inside each one was a plane ticket from Osaka to Athens, along with a visa to allow entrance to Greece.
Won, Kim, and Nam changed, then packed their own clothes in a laundry bag left for them, and within twenty minutes of their arrival they headed back outside.
Parked next to the cabin was a Kia Rio, a four-door South Korean car with a hatchback. The keys were behind the fuel door cover, left there, like all the other items at the cabin, by the three North Korean sleeper agents who were now on their way home. They put their luggage and the laundry bag in the vehicle, Nam took the wheel, and Kim climbed into the front passenger seat after making sure Won Jang-Mi was comfortable in the back.
At five forty-five in the morning they began driving south towards Osaka. Along the way they tossed the laundry bag over a bridge and into a swiftly moving river.
* * *
• • •
They parked the car at Itami International Airport, just north of the city center, brought their luggage through security, had their documents thoroughly checked by customs and immigration, and by eleven a.m. were slipping into their seats in the main cabin.
Greece was not their destination but rather a way station; from here they made their way to Tehran, Iran. Won spent the next six months working in the biological warfare research field, exchanging her expertise with the top scientists in the Islamic Republic and in turn learning from them. She concentrated her research on coming up with new and potent ways to alter plague spores to increase their lethality, and to weaponize the diseases via aerosol to maximize their impact.
From there she and her protectors moved to Syria, again studying the aerosol distribution of bacteria and viruses, although the Syrians themselves concentrated their efforts on the chemical agent sarin. Still, the Syrians had become experts at spreading the chemicals quickly and efficiently via bombs and rockets for use in their brutal civil war, and Won received “on the ground” training in the techniques and technology.
After Syria she was ordered by her control officer in North Korea to go to Russia. Pyongyang and Moscow had worked out a joint deal that saw her taking a position at the 33rd Central Research and Testing Institute, a closed military research laboratory in southwestern Russia near the Volga River.
Here she worked perfecting her craft and honing her skills in maximizing the effect of various nerve, blister, choking, and blood agents. The Russian doctors, scientists, and technical experts knew what they were doing, and she learned a lot in a short time.
Another focus of her work was on counterbiosecurity. It was her job to learn what detection and prevention means the nations of the West had in place to stop or lessen the effects of a bioterror weapon. The Russians had studied the same thing since the Cold War, and although they didn’t have the infrastructure in place any longer to develop and produce large quantities of bioweapons, they did have some knowledge about how the West would, and would not, be able to combat an attack.
The Russians also had the strains of all the bacteria stored for testing, and their safety measures were far superior to what Won had worked with in North Korea.
She made valuable contacts in this secret industry both in Russia and in other nations. There were international treaties against biological weapons, of course, but Russia, Iran, Syria, and, to a lesser extent, Cuba all had programs, and they all had scientists willing to work with a North Korean expert of Won’s caliber.
She saw nothing wrong with her work from any moral standpoint. The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and many other Western nations all did research on bioweapons of different types, so why shouldn’t North Korea be allowed the same rights?
Plus, she had grown up hearing stories of the Korean War, American soldiers eating North Korean children, and the constant imminent threat of American nuclear attack.
The West was evil, pure and simple. Every fiber of her being believed this.
She had been sent by her nation on this mission to learn everything she could to make weapons of mass destruction out of the biological strains, and she had been indoctrinated for her entire lifetime in the task to ensure that she would not falter on her trip to the West.
Won had been given no operational mission by Pyongyang beyond studying her field of expertise abroad, so that she could return with this knowledge to North Korea. But with each passing year of her training she had become more and more convinced that the work she was doing would never be implemented in the field, and she felt it was utterly crucial that North Korea attack the West with a first-strike bio attack, both to damage her nation’s enemies and to show the world her own personal skill in her work.
Her greatest fear was that someday she would be recalled, and then she would go home and return to her life at the laboratory, never given the chance to act against her enemies.
The Russians benefited from her knowledge as much as she benefited from theirs, and they recognized in her, after months of subtle vetting, a potential that they could put to use. Their foreign intelligence service, the SVR, was notified about the potential foreign asset and her skill set, and though they had no plans on the horizon to infect anyone with a biological weapon, they kept tabs on her.
CHAPTER 8
PRESENT DAY
Court flew high and far behind the two-vehicle caravan, following it to the east into the sunrise along the A50, staying well out of sight to avoid any detection.
The vehicles passed to the south of Nottingham just after eight a.m., and around eight thirty they pulled off the highway and onto a two-lane road that headed due south. After a few minutes they entered a dense wood in the center of flat farmland, and Court circled high above, certain he’d see them exit soon after.
But the van and the sedan did not reappear.
There was a large collection of redbrick buildings at the southern edge of the forest, and at first he saw no evidence that anyone was around at all. The complex appeared abandoned, but it was impossible to know for sure from one thousand feet.
Shortly before banking back to the north, though, he noticed two vehicles parked next to the main building on the dilapidated property. He couldn’t make them out other than the fact that they were sedans, but he wondered if whoever had arrived in those cars could be part of all this.