6. Presenting Credentials
PRESENTING CREDENTIALS
The following morning she got Miss Park and Miss Wu, her minders, worried as she insisted that she would check out of the Hotel Yanggakdo.
She said she needed to stay at the actual embassy housing, and set her bags at her feet at the checkout desk, waiting to settle her bill.
The lobby was cavernous in the way only a hotel built for a delegation that never fully materialized could be — a soaring diamond-paneled ceiling throwing angled light down onto a floor of pale stone, the whole space swallowing sound before it could travel far.
Somewhere off to the left, a coffee grinder whirred and cut out.
A cluster of tourists stood near the far wall studying a lit display case, their voices pitched low the way voices tended to go in rooms this large, as if the architecture itself asked for quiet.
Miss Park's protest, when it came, was pitched just a fraction too loud for the room — "This is not necessary, this is not how it is done," — and two heads turned near the concierge desk, a flicker of attention snagging on the word not repeated twice.
Miss Park seemed to hear it too. She glanced toward the tourists, toward the man behind the desk who was very carefully not looking up, and dropped her voice back down into something more like negotiation than objection. Miss Wu said nothing at all, which Marina decided was a statement of its own.
There was a cubbyhole that stored guest passports behind the front desk—she verified hers was still in her passport lanyard around her neck.
She had an official passport, and had refused to hand it over last night when she’d checked in, saying she’d have to make a phone call to the Swedish Ambassador if they needed clarification, which was her diplomatic term for help understanding that she would create an international incident if they insisted she surrender her passport.
A man had been sitting in the corner, reading the Rodong Sinmun state-issued newspaper, folded it carefully under his arm. He spoke quietly to the concierge. Miss Park and Miss Wu stood woodenly with frozen smiles on their faces.
The concierge smiled and said she could keep her passport, and the man retreated back to the corner with his newspaper.
Ah. This man was from the National Intelligence Agency—a member of the secret police.
The man looked at her like he knew she was going to memorize his face, and he was going to do the same for hers.
She had spent the night sleeping next to the “radio” and “telephone” bolted to a nightstand next to her bed, that had built-in surveillance equipment.
After that, there was absolutely no way that she was going to stay one more night in this hotel, or any hotel, for that matter.
So this morning, Miss Park and Miss Wu seemed resigned to Marina getting what she wanted. Giovanni, Esmee, and Aya had joined them downstairs by this time, and checked out too over meek objections.
A sedan pulled up.
“Same place as yesterday?”
She stopped. It wasn’t the driver from yesterday. He was a Swedish man. He popped the trunk and got out.
“Sorry, I’m Sven, from the embassy. I have an errand in town, thought I’d give you a lift at the same time.”
“Oh. Nice. You can go out without—?” A minder, she didn’t say.
He winked. “When I stay in the car, I can.” He set the Pelican case in the trunk.
He wasn’t in the car, she thought to herself. Maybe there were more opportunities here than she thought.
“Come sit up front?” Sven asked.
She nodded, getting in the front seat.
“Are you staying with us, now?”
“Yes,” she said.
He looked in the rearview, the hotel looming behind them. “It’s better to stay in a home than in any hotel,” he agreed.
Giovanni and Aya got in the back seat, Giovanni holding the door open for Aya, his eyes lingering on her. Aya blushed as she got in, and pushed back a strand of hair back from her eyes.
Esmee threw her rucksack onto her lap as she got in. She looked out the window and scowled.
Marina lifted an eyebrow. Did the EU have to send their grouchiest spy on mission to the DPRK? Had they never heard of honey catches more flies than vinegar?
She looked around suddenly, but he wasn’t there. Ri.
Good. She didn’t want to see him.
Sven looked back at them and nodded in greeting. He headed towards the Yanggak Bridge, which crossed over the Taedong River back into Pyongyang proper. He chatted about the weather, showing her the sights, talking about nothing in particular.
She gave him a shrewd look, and he nodded.
Yeah. He too thought that the car might be bugged.
She shook her head and he shrugged, letting the steering wheel slide through his fingers as he turned onto the bridge.
The railway bridge announced itself before they reached it — a lattice of green steel girders rising up out of the flat approach road, old riveted trusswork that looked like it had been standing since before the war that never technically ended.
The vehicle bridge was flat, made of some kind of light-colored concrete with small slabs of concrete dividing the lanes of traffic.
Uniformed soldiers with red traffic flags watched them pull up.
Marina was not reassured whens he saw they were allowing only one truck or two cars at a time to pass the bridge in either direction.
They didn’t wait long though. Despite it being morning rush hour, there was hardly any vehicle traffic.
Sven eased the car onto the bridge as the sedan's tires found the concrete, and the road noise changed under them, a low hollow drum instead of asphalt hiss.
Through the windshield, Pyongyang's skyline sat waiting on the far bank: a cluster of high-rises in the distance, one candy-striped in red and white, another catching the low morning sun in a long vertical sheet of glass.
Between here and there, nothing but the wide gray plate of the Taedong, its pale edges lapping the shoreline.
She looked out her window. A walkway ran the length of the bridge, separated from the roadway by a waist-high blue railing, and it was already busy — men in dark coats walking with their hands jammed in their pockets, a few pushing bicycles rather than riding them, moving at the unhurried pace of people for whom this crossing was simply Tuesday.
One man stood still at the railing, phone held up, doing nothing she could identify as anything at all.
Watching the water, maybe. Or watching the cars.
Nobody on the walkway looked at the sedan. She'd learned that much already — not-looking was its own kind of looking, she’d learned how to observe without appearing to in security training. The unsettling part was seeing that every single person on the road here had internalized the same thing.
She rested one elbow on the window ledge and watched the city slide by.
Twenty-four hours ago Pyongyang had felt like a carefully constructed stage set, every building positioned for effect.
Today it was becoming a workplace. She was already cataloguing landmarks the way she would exits in a conference venue: the railway bridge, the parade route, Embassy Row, the river.
A security officer's first instinct was always the same—to build a mental map.
Sven kept talking, something about the ice over winter that reminded him of home. How the river froze solid enough to walk on by January most winters. She made the right sounds in the right places. In the rearview mirror, Esmee was looking out at the man by the railway.
At least Esmee knew that much.