“Pretty bizarre, eh?” Michaels said, noting the befuddled look on Tokaido’s face as they past the curio shops.
“To say the least.”
The men were interrupted by the shrill toot of a locomotive and turned to watch a freight train thunder into view a few hundred yards to their left. The train was headed toward a heavily guarded gap in the barbed-wire fence extending westward past the concrete barrier where the men were standing. It had been less than two years since the rails between the north and south had been connected, allowing rail transport between the two countries.
“That’s where your cousin will be dropped off,” Michaels told Tokaido. “And you can bet it’ll be crawling with even more guards when the exchange goes down. Provided Lim’s people get the money together in time, that is.”
“They have all day to make the arrangements,” Tokaido said. “I don’t think it will be a problem.”
“Let’s hope not.” Michaels checked his watch, then told Tokaido, “You can go ahead and take a closer look if you want, but I need to meet with the undersecretary.”
“No, that’s okay,” Tokaido said. “I’ll tag along, if that’s okay.”
“Not a problem.”
The two men backtracked toward the blue buildings. According to Michaels, negotiations in Panmunjom started each day at nine o’clock sharp, with a recess two hours later. It was just past eleven, and Tokaido saw negotiators from both sides filing out of one of the buildings. From the looks on their faces, it didn’t appear that any progress had been made in the talks between the two sides. One member of the Allied team, a hardened-looking woman in her early sixties, broke away from the others when she spotted Michaels.
“Another fun day in the trenches?” Michaels said as he shook the woman’s hand.
“Fun isn’t quite the word I would use,” responded Undersecretary of State Brooke Hilldecker as she raided her purse for some aspirin.
On the way to Panmunjom, Michaels had told Tokaido that he was Hilldecker’s liaison to the intelligence community and routinely conferred with the undersecretary on matters that might have an impact on her negotiations with the North. This morning he wanted to discuss the situation of the Kanggye nuclear team defectors with her. After handling introductions, Michaels assured Hilldecker that Tokaido had adequate security clearance to listen in on their conversation. The undersecretary balked, however.
“Nothing personal,” she assured Tokaido, “but we already have more people in the loop than I’d like.”
“I understand,” Tokaido told her.
He excused himself and wandered over to the surrounding walkway, where armed guards from the DRNK faced off like chess pawns with their counterparts to the south.
As he made his way to one of several observation posts situated along the walkway, Tokaido was once again amazed by the nonchalance of the tourists mingling around him. Some were taking photos of the guards while others had their cameras trained on a sprawling cityscape located two miles past rolling hills of North Korean farmland. One of the visitors, a middle-aged woman with a New England accent, was commenting on how much of a boomtown the city appeared to be.
“I mean, look at all the new building going on,” the woman marvelled. “I don’t get it. I thought North Korea was bankrupt.”
“It is,” the woman’s husband countered as he snapped a picture. “Didn’t you read the brochure, Martha? That’s not a real city. It’s all fake. Nobody lives there. They’re just trying to convince the folks here that life is good across the border.”
“You’re joking, right?” the woman responded.
But Tokaido knew Martha’s husband was right. From a distance, Kijongdong might have looked like a booming metropolis, but Tokaido’s understanding was that the buildings were nothing but empty facades, erected by North Korea as a propaganda ploy. In fact, for years everyone in the know had taken to calling the city Propaganda Village. Tokaido figured that by now North Korea would have realized they weren’t fooling anyone but a handful of uninformed tourists, and yet, here they were, pouring a fortune into expanding its bogus ghost town.
The newest structure going up, located directly behind what was supposedly the world’s largest flag pole, was a four-story building intended to look like a commerce-thriving shopping mall. But Tokaido knew damn well that there would be no shops inside the mall, just as there were would be no consumers. Once the building was finished, it would just stand there, its only tenants an ever-growing population of rats and other vermin. Watching the construction, Tokaido shared the sentiments of the man whose wife had just been duped by the illusion of a prosperous Kijongdong. Under his breath he muttered, “Who do they think they’re kidding?”