25. What If
WHAT IF
RI
The vice minister had questioned him, but he’d denied everything with Marina. Finally, Vice Minister Jung had suggested that Marina might like him. Ri had shrugged: maybe she did.
Vice Minister Jung had nodded. “Keep the delegation happy. I will instruct the team.”
The following morning he was reassigned, back to being her liaison.
He’d driven her to the chancery, and she told him to wait inside the chancery. The security guard looked at him—the guard was supplied by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He would report on Ri.
He waited in a government waiting room, no leadership portraits, but hemmed in on all sides anyway by the government. A wall calendar was posted above the guard’s desk, with a date circled–the day the delegation was leaving.
He scrubbed his jaw. She was slipping away from him. He should never have expected anything else. He stared off into the distance. Outside the window, Pyongyang’s pastel cityscape was soft, cheerful. Fake.
He waited. It would all be over soon, one way or another.
By noon she came down to ask for his help taking down the diplomatic pouch—it was heavy this time, she said.
He almost smiled as he rose. “Of course, ma’am.”
And so they returned very quickly to what they had already established—lunch hour together in the SCIF. She now had the look of regret too, but after they made love, and not before.
He smiled at her. “Why do you look that way?”
They were doing what they did: dressing after making soul-baring love on an office floor in the middle of an embassy chancery.
She stopped fastening her belt, and looked up. Her face crumpled instantly with tears.
“No, darling, please don’t cry,” he said, taking her in his arms. Stroking her hair and shushing her.
“I love you, don’t cry.”
A sob wrenched.
“Shhh, please, someone will hear, even with the noise machine,” he whispered, holding her close.
“I can’t leave you here,” she said, her face buried in his arm. “I feel like…” she trailed off.
“Tell me.”
“I feel like I’m leaving you to die. I’m in love with you too and this is too much!”
“Of course it is,” he agreed. She had not grown up here, and had a lifetime to understand the situation.
He thought that he couldn’t be injured any more, but hearing the woman he loved suffer because of him—no, because of Joseon—was too much.
An unthinkable idea came to mind, unbidden.
But the more he thought of it, the more it made sense.
He turned it over the way he'd been trained to turn over any risk — angles, exposure, what could be traced back — and hated that the training was useful even now, even for this.
There was a strange relief in it, too: for once the calculation was working for her instead of only ever protecting the regime from him.
He pulled back and waited until she looked up.
“What if I’m already dead when you leave?”
She looked like she’d been slapped—like he’d slapped her. Her mouth worked soundlessly, until finally one strangled syllable escaped:
“No!” Her voice a stage whisper.
“Yes.” He was never more sure of anything than he was of this. “What if I’m already dead when you leave? Officially. Administratively. The government issues my death certificate.”
“What are you saying?”
“People die here all the time. They don’t verify. They don’t dig around. They don’t even require a burial.”
Her arms slowly dropped off him, her face drained of blood.
“You take me back by diplomatic pouch. It’s own kind of SCIF. The one place that they can’t look.”
She took a step back. “Oh my God…” she breathed.
He swallowed. Perhaps he’d gone too far.
“They can’t look into anything sealed under dip pouch, but it doesn’t mean that they won’t.”
He put his fingertips on her face and drew her to him again, kissing away her tears. “There’s always a risk in life.”
“C’est la vie,” she said, sniffing.
“C’est la vie,” he agreed.
“C’est la vie unless you’re already dead.” A half-choke, half-sob, and she blinked rapidly to stop the tears. “That is so crazy that it might actually work.”