And North Korea was China’s great weakness.
It was the soft underbelly, the Achilles heel, the kryptonite, and all the other images for a fatal weakness in a strong body. The North Koreans were key allies, and they were desperately unreliable. Kai met Ham regularly, and between scheduled meetings they could contact one another to request an emergency assignation. Today’s meeting was routine, but still important.
Ting put on a bright blue sweatshirt and stepped into a pair of cowboy boots. Kai looked at the clock beside the bed and got up.
He washed quickly and put on his office suit. While he was dressing, Ting kissed him goodbye and left.
There was smog over Beijing, and Kai took a mask in case he needed to walk anywhere. His overnight bag was packed ready for the trip. He took out his heavy winter coat and carried it over his arm: Yanji was a cold city.
He left the apartment.
*
There were four hundred thousand people in Yanji, and almost half of them were Korean.
The city had expanded fast after the Second World War, and as Kai’s plane descended he gazed at the ranks of modern buildings packed closely together both sides of the wide Buerhatong River. China was North Korea’s main trading partner, so thousands of people crossed the border every day in both directions to do business, and Yanji was an important entrep?t for such trade.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of Koreans – perhaps millions – lived and worked in China. Many were registered immigrants; some were prostitutes; not a few were unpaid agricultural workers or purchased wives – never actually called slaves. Life in North Korea was so bad that to be a well-fed slave in China might not have seemed a terrible fate, Kai thought.
Yanji had the largest Korean population of any Chinese city. It had two Korean-language TV stations. One of the Korean residents of Yanji was Ham Hee-young, a bright and capable young woman who was the illegitimate daughter of General Ham, a fact not known to anyone in North Korea and very few people in China. As manager of a department store she earned a high salary plus commission on sales.
Kai landed at the domestic airport, Chaoyangchuan, and took a cab to the city centre. All road signs were bilingual, with Korean above Chinese. Some of the young women on the city streets wore the chic, sexy styles of South Korean fashion, he noticed. He checked in to a large chain hotel, then immediately went out again, wearing his heavy coat against Yanji’s bitter cold. He ignored the taxis at the hotel entrance then walked a few blocks and hailed a cab on the street. He gave the driver the address of a Wumart supermarket in the suburbs.
General Ham was stationed at a nuclear base called Yeongjeo-dong, in the north of North Korea, near the border with China. He was a member of the Joint Border Oversight Committee, which met regularly in Yanji, so he travelled across the border at least once a month.
Many years ago, he had become disillusioned with the regime in Pyongyang, the capital, and had begun to spy for China. Kai paid him well, channelling the money to Hee-young, Ham’s daughter.
Kai’s cab took him to a developing suburb and dropped him at the Wumart, two streets away from his actual destination. He walked to a building site where a large house was going up. This was where Ham spent the money he made from the Guoanbu. The land and the house were in Hee-young’s name and she paid the builders out of the money Kai sent her. General Ham was close to retirement, and he planned to disappear from North Korea, adopt a new identity furnished by Kai, and spend his golden years with his daughter and grandchildren in their lovely new home.
Approaching the site, Kai did not see Ham, who took care never to be visible from the street. He was in the half-built garage, talking in effortlessly fluent Mandarin to a builder, probably the foreman. He broke off immediately, saying: ‘I must talk to my accountant,’ and shook Kai’s hand.
Ham was a spry man in his sixties who had a doctorate in physics. ‘Let me show you around,’ he said enthusiastically.
All the plumbing had been installed and now carpenters were putting in doors, windows, closets and kitchen cabinets. Kai found himself envying Ham as they toured the building: it was more spacious than any home Kai had lived in. Ham proudly pointed out a bedroom suite for Hee-young and her husband, two small bedrooms for their children, and a self-contained apartment for Ham himself. We gave him the money for all this, Kai thought. But he had been worth it.
When they had looked around they stepped outside, despite the cold, and stood at the back of the house, where they were hidden from anyone on the street and could not be overheard by the builders. There was a cold wind and Kai was glad of his coat. He said: ‘So how are things in North Korea?’