Lim was wrestling with his dilemma when he happened to glance down at his daughter’s wrist. For the first time, he noticed that Na-Li was wearing her charm bracelet.
“How did you get that?” he asked her.
Na-Li’s face reddened. “I always wear it,” she told him. “You know that.”
“No,” Lim said. “You weren’t wearing it on the boat.”
“You’re mistaken, Father.”
“No,” Lim insisted. “You took it off because you said it would give you a tan line. I remember distinctly.”
“Please,” Na-Li pleaded. “Can we not discuss this?”
Now it was Lim whose face flushed red. He recalled his rendezvous the previous night with the commandant, and how Yulim had been wearing clothes taken from his luggage. If the man had gotten his hands on Lim’s things, it only stood to reason that he’d had access to his daughter’s belongings, as well. The implication was impossible to ignore.
“You saw him yesterday, while I was in the mines,” Lim said to his daughter, “didn’t you?”
Lim’s wife intervened. “We don’t need to get into this.”
Lim ignored his wife and stared hard at Na-Li. “What did he do to you?”
Before Na-Li could answer, the guard came over, pointing a rifle at Lim.
“Keep moving!” he ordered. “There is work to be done!”
Once they were outside the barracks, other guards stood in front of the doorway, gesturing for the men to split off into a separate line from the women. Lim exchanged a glance with his wife and daughter, then moved off, falling in line behind his friend, Ji Pho-Hwa. He was consumed by rage at the idea of the commandant taking advantage of his daughter, and the more he thought about the matter, the more incensed he became, and in no time his fury had outweighed any reservations he’d had about aiding Prync and the other prisoners with their planned revolt. There was no way he could stand by and let Yulim get away with what he’d undoubtedly done to his daughter. No way.
“He’ll pay,” Lim seethed under his breath, his hands trembling with rage as he took his meager rations and followed the other men out of the mess tent. He looked around until he spotted Prync. The head of the planned revolt had just finished shoveling down his rations and was wiping his fingers on the loose fabric of his work clothes. Lim stared at Prync until he had the man’s attention, then nodded.
To hell with the consequences, Lim thought to himself. He would back the revolt and, when it took place, there was no way he would cower beneath the barrack floorboards. He would take up whatever arms Prync and the others could make available, and then he would personally track down Yulim and kill the man or die trying.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
“Isn’t it nice to be back in the thick of things?” Aaron Kurtzman asked Huntington Wethers.
“Definitely,” replied the third member of Kurtzman’s cybernetic team. “You can only spend so much time in a think tank before you find yourself wanting to spend a little less time thinking and more time doing.”
The one-time university professor had been back at the Farm for a little over an hour and was up to date on the various North Korean situations being monitored by Stony Man personnel. Now, seated at his meticulously organized cubicle, Wethers had immersed himself in the foremost task at hand: trying to figure out which avenue of escape the REDI operatives in Arizona would take now that they’d succeeded in capturing two of the three Kanggye nuclear team defectors they’d been assigned to bring back to Kim Jong-il.
“I’m setting up an autosearch of every LE database west of the Rockies,” the gray-templed African-American told Kurtzman as he worked his keyboard. “‘REDI,’ ‘North Korea,’ ‘Asian Killboys’…As many search words as the systems can handle. I know it’s a fishing expedition, but once I have things in motion, I can run the search in background mode and switch over to something else.”
“Sounds like you’re on top of things,” Kurtzman said. “Keep at it. I’ll keep you posted if we turn up any leads on some other front.”
“I’ll be right here,” Wethers said.
Kurtzman backed up his wheelchair and motored his way over to Carmen Delahunt’s station. The redhead was wrapping up a phone call.
“Well, let’s hope things go through without a hitch,” she said. She finished the call and hung up, then turned to Kurtzman. “That was Akira. It looks like all-systems-go as far as making the deal to get his cousin released. They money’s been rounded up and they’ve set up a time for the exchange. First thing tomorrow morning.”