37. Airport Customs
AIRPORT CUSTOMS
MARINA
Marina's return flight had been booked for weeks. Esmee, she'd learned only that morning, wasn't on it. I have some work left to do here, she'd said, with that infuriating little smile of hers. Au revoir.
The crate sat on the loading dock under a corrugated awning that did nothing against the wind coming off the tarmac,
EU DIPLOMATIC — SEALED — DO NOT OPEN
stenciled in three languages across its face, the blue-and-gold seal fixed over the latch with a strip of tamper tape she'd applied herself, initialed, and photographed for the file.
She held her breath, since th EU didn’t have an official diplomatic mission here. Which meant they couldn’t use pouch. But she didn’t think she’s convince the Swedes to use their diplomatic pouch system in time before everyone realized that she was pregnant.
Primary. Lifeline. Parapet beam.
She'd point-and-called her way through tough mornings before. Hell, she’d had sniper rifles trained on her while she was suspended outside a building. She told herself that, and didn't believe it.
The customs officer who approached the crate wore his uniform pressed to a crease sharp enough to cut, a laminated badge clipped square to his breast pocket:
CHOE IL-NAM, SENIOR INSPECTOR, PYONGYANG INTERNATIONAL
He was a small, precise man, somewhere past fifty, with the kind of reading glasses that lived on a cord around his neck and the kind of handwriting — she caught a glimpse of his clipboard — that filled every line to the margin.
He was not unkind. That was almost worse. Unkind she could have anticipated.
He circled the crate once, unhurried, the way she circled a building before she trusted its perimeter.
"Diplomatic pouch," he said, in English, though his eyes stayed on the crate. "Sealed."
"Yes."
"Contents?"
She came prepared for this, with the answer ready.
"Protected under the Vienna Convention, Article Twenty-Seven. I'm not required to declare contents, and you're not authorized to inspect them."
He made a small sound, not quite agreement. He wrote something on his clipboard, the pen scratching loudly in the empty hangar space. He frowned, shaking the pen in a universally-understood manner that people did when the ink was running out.
“Here,” she said, pulling a pen out from her jacket. She’d come prepared for this too, with a blue pen with the European Union stars motif on it. A little bit of swag often greased a squeaky wheel.
Inspector Choe just stared at it.
Marina belatedly remembered that if someone found the pen—on him—it could be interpreted as connecting him to illegal foreign influence.
She nodded, putting it back into her pocket and drawing out a plain black pen. “Ah, this one is in black ink, if that is better.” She bowed.
He grunted his thanks, not quite meeting her eyes, and accepted the pen.
He started clicking it right away.
"Weight seems unusual for a pouch this size." He tapped the black pen on the container.
Don't look at the crate. Don't look at the crate. She looked at him instead, at the middle button of his uniform jacket, a fixed point the way she'd trained herself to find one.
"Thank you for your concern, Inspector, but the pouch is correct. I wasn’t aware that you weighed parcels for diplomatic pouch."
"We don't." He said it mildly. "I noticed it myself, when your driver set it down.
" He nodded toward the forklift operator, who had already backed away to lean against the far wall, uninterested, or performing disinterest the way everyone here had learned to.
"Four men usually manage a crate this size. It took two, and they didn't strain."
He's not accusing. He's cataloguing. Same as you would.
"Perhaps some men are stronger than we give them credit for."
The faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, more the ghost of professional appreciation, one methodical person recognizing another.
He circled again. Stopped at the airholes drilled along the crate's upper seam, four of them, small, spaced with a precision that would look, to an untrained eye, like ventilation for electronics.
He touched one with a gloved finger.
"Sensitive equipment," he said. "Requires airflow."
"That's correct."
"What kind of equipment breathes, Miss Lambert?"
She heard something inside the crate go very still — a held breath answering a held breath — and she made herself not react to the sound of nothing.
She chuckled, and bowed again. “Inspector Choe, I thank you, but—you aren’t inspecting a diplomatic pouch, right?”
"The kind that overheats without proper airflow, like every piece of electronics your country has ever refused to let us import through normal channels." She let her voice climb, just enough, into the register of someone who'd had this argument a hundred times and was tired of having it again.
"I am concerned that I will miss my flight, which will require me to file a formal complaint about the delay. I'm sure Vice Minister Jung would be interested to hear that customs held up EU cargo on its way out, given how eager the ministry has been to demonstrate its cooperation."
He considered her for a long moment, pen tapping against the clipboard.
"You're very protective of this pouch."
"I'm the Regional Security Officer. Protection is my job."
"You initialed this personally?"
"I did."
"Unusual."
"Begging your pardon, Inspector, but the RSO should initial a diplomatic pouch item. I’m just doing my job." Look him in the eye. Breathe. Don't look at the crate.
Somewhere behind her, a departure announcement crackled over a loudspeaker in Korean, then English, flattened by distance and bad wiring into something almost gentle.
She used it as an excuse to check her watch, an ordinary gesture, the kind any traveler running late would make, and was grateful her hand didn't shake doing it.
"No inspection," she repeated in Korean.
The customs officer grunted, not meeting her eyes but looking at the seal as if to see around it, what was inside.
She folded her arms in front of her. "I don't have all day. I'm going to miss my flight."
He waved her through, looking unhappy about the fact.
She didn't let herself exhale until the crate had cleared the X-ray bypass lane — diplomatic pouches were never scanned, that was the entire architecture of the law she was standing inside of, the one piece of Joseon's own bureaucracy she'd learned to trust completely — and rolled toward the cargo hold on a handcart pushed by a baggage handler who hummed tunelessly to himself, oblivious.
Inspector Choe watched it go. He didn't stop it. But he stood a beat too long, clipboard against his chest, and she felt his eyes on her back all the way to the gate, cataloguing her, the way she'd have cataloged anyone who left a building with something they weren't supposed to have.
He knows something is wrong. He just doesn't know what shape it takes.
She boarded when they called her row. She didn't look back at the tarmac. She'd learned, if nothing else in Joseon, the discipline of not looking at the thing you were most afraid to lose.