17. Coffee Machine
COFFEE MACHINE
MARINA
She was back at work the following day. Expected. Usual. But Ri wasn’t there, and it felt like she was living in black and white instead of living color.
The coffee machine hissed, spat, then dribbled out something the color of weak tea. Giovanni told her that they were not going to fix it. Nobody trusted a vendor enough to let them near the equipment closet.
"So..." Esmee said casually.
Marina stirred her coffee.
"So?"
"I thought you got rid of the North Korean snoops following us everywhere."
"I did."
Esmee nodded.
"Then who's the handsome one that's always wandering upstairs around lunch?"
Marina looked up.
"What handsome one?"
"The liaison." Esmee’s smile was coy. “Second Secretary. The handsome, French-speaking one. What’s his name? Ri?”
"Oh. Handsome? Is he now?"
She took a sip. She was changing the subject and she knew it.
Marina had learned to answer questions with questions of her own, low-stakes ones, the kind that cost nothing to ask and revealed nothing to answer.
It was a rhythm now. Ask, deflect, ask again.
She wondered if Esmee recognized the pattern. Esmee should.
“So why are you with that guy, every day?”
"He has questions."
"Every day?"
"The DPRK has many questions." She put her coffee cup down. “You of all people must realize that.”
Esmee laughed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Marina smiled back. “I would imagine you know they are both curious and methodical.”
Sung-cheol was curious and methodical. Every day around lunchtime.
Later, walking upstairs, she wondered how many people had already noticed. She checked her phone, and saw a missed call from Didier.
She sighed. She didn’t want to talk to Didier Vanhouten any more than she wanted a root canal.
She turned on her computer for the day, and saw an email had arrived overnight from Tobias: he wanted to move up their touch base from three to two o'clock, which was seven in the morning in Brussels.
She rubbed her jaw. Esmee walked in.
Esmee, the spook.
“Morning,” Marina said.
Esmee lifted her head. “Morning.” She walked past Marina’s cube.
Marina didn’t move, didn’t want Esmee to think that she was trying to cover up her screen. The first rule of covering something up was not looking like you had anything to cover.
Esmee sat down two cubes behind her. Marina heard her power on her laptop.
Marina pulled up the security logs. Her eyes moved down the page.
10:59 p.m. — Tobias Werner — Badge Access Log.
Tobias had looked at the access log just before four o’clock Brussels time. She looked back at the meeting invitation timestamp:
11:04 p.m.
He’d moved up their meeting five minutes later.
She pressed CTRL and the L key, instantly locking her computer. She pushed away from her desk. She needed to walk outside, clear her head before that meeting.
She walked down to the ground floor. The security guard stood up and smiled at her.
She smiled back, and then realized: if she walked out, the CCTV cameras would be trained on her.
The directional microphones would pick up everything she had to say.
Huffing, she took the stairs down to the basement archives.
The archive smelled like every basement archive she'd ever worked out of: dust, cold concrete, and the ozone tang of servers running too hot in a room never designed to cool them. A single fluorescent tube buzzed overhead, flickering on a half-second delay every time the building's power dipped.
She popped her earbuds in and pressed dial.
“This is Marina,” she said. Her awkwardness a confession of its own.
“Marina…” the phone was silent for several seconds. “Can you talk?”
“I’m in the chancery basement,” she said.
“Same for me. I rather like it here at your desk.”
“Don’t get too comfortable, Didier,” she replied back crisply.
“I feel like you’re getting comfortable,” he blurted out.
She let it sit. She put the phone on mute so he wouldn’t hear her sharp inhale and know he’d hit his mark, then unmuted.
“What do you want, Vanhouten?”
“Wow. We’re back to last names.”
She pressed her back against a shelf of banker's boxes, their labels faded past legibility. Somewhere above her, footsteps crossed the ground floor. She counted them out of habit — two sets, unhurried, gone.
“Covering for you has been going well, thanks for asking me.”
What was he playing at, like she had time off her job as diplomatic security for the EU in the DPRK to coddle him emotionally?
“I was seeing someone, but it’s over now, so I’m single again.”
She looked at the time on her phone. “Didier, I have work to do here.”
“Fine. I’ll get to the point.”
“Stop. You know where I am. I can’t speak openly on an unsecured phone.”
“Can you get on a secured phone?”
She barked out a laugh. “I’m in the DPRK for a security accreditation check, Didier.”
“Oh. Right.”
Well, now she knew why they hadn’t sent him. She’d have to overhaul security when she got back to Brussels to make sure he hadn’t done any permanent damage?—
Her heart sank. When she got back alone to Brussels, and left Sung-cheol here.
“Is there anything that I should know about Brussels?” she asked, trying to change the subject.
“No. I’m calling about you.”
She sniffed. She forgot to mute the phone, and embargo any emotion around him. This was Sung-cheol. She felt free to have emotions again, and free from worry that Didier would hurt her again.
“Okay,” she said softly.
“Do you have an upcoming meeting with Tobias?” he asked.
“You know my calendar. You know that I do,” she answered, her voice thick.
“Soyez sage,” he said. Be wise, the French version of “be careful.”
“Okay. Look, I gotta go.”
“Me too.”
She hung up the call. She stood there a moment longer than she needed to, phone still warm against her palm, listening to the server hum fill the silence.
On impulse, she held up her phone and put it in selfie mode. Her face stared back at her: mottled pink. She wanted to cry, but this was neither the time nor place.
She took one deep, ragged breath. What had she been thinking to do this with Seung-chol? It wasn’t just her job, anymore, either. She cared about this man, and she was going to leave him behind in a dictatorship.
If Tobias wanted a conversation about her relationship with Seung-chol, it could not be a frank conversation, not over a questionably secured line. Because if anyone was listening in, Seung-chol would be…
She looked back at her phone, her bloodshot eyes staring back at her.
Tobias didn’t shout at her. He never shouted. He merely looked between her and the EEAS PYONGYANG DEPLOYMENT tag under her image onscreen and frowned.
“We will have to talk about this when you get back.”
Tobias was not sitting in a SCIF, because they had not yet affirmed that Pyongyang could assure a secure, unbugged call. Instead, Tobias was at his desk in the EEAS Building. Behind him, she saw Roundpoint Schuman and the European Council building.
She sat up straight. “I have a few things to talk to you about, too, when I get back.”
He scrubbed his jaw. “I imagine that you do. Now, is there anything that I should know?”
She exhaled. There was a lot that he should know. “There’s nothing that I can say.”
He nodded. “Same here. Be careful out there, and—come home if you think there’s danger.”
She sighed, and waved her hand around the room. “Aren’t we all getting danger pay? Of course there’s… risk.”
He shouldn’t have sent any of them out there if he wanted them to avoid danger.
Tobias leaned forward. “Danger pay is authorized. But some things are not.”
She put her face in her hands and then looked up. “That tells me nothing. With respect, is there anything that you can talk about on this call?”
Tobias sat back and was silent for so long, she was about to speak when he finally did so himself: “During the war, my great-great uncle worked secretly with the British.”
“Did he?”
Tobias cleared his throat, looking thoughtful. “He did. Do you know what he did? No? He smuggled something like a hundred people out of the country, onward to Britain and safety.”
It was her turn to sit back stunned. All of the air rushed out of her. “Wow. I didn’t know.”
Tobias took off his glasses, huffing over them and cleaning them with a cloth he’d taken out from his desk drawer. He didn’t meet her eyes. “It was incredibly risky. But he always knew that it was the right thing.”
Marina put her hand over her mouth and swallowed.
“That was… brave.”
Tobias put his glasses back on. “It was then. It still is now. He used to say that doing the right thing can be an easy decision to make but a hard thing to do.”
Marina nodded. “Easy, but hard. I agree.”
“So, you’re leaving on a country tour tomorrow, to assess travel safety in-country.”
Marina blinked. “Yes. We leave at zero-eight-hundred.”
“Soyez sage,” Tobias said, and she had to wonder if he and Didier had talked about this in advance.