The Target(25)

Spitzer slowly nodded. “I would like to know.”

“It makes me feel great. The agency does the heavy lifting. They decide who bites the bullet. I just carry out the order. What could be better?”

“So how did it make you feel to play all three roles?”

The smile that had emerged on Reel’s face slowly disappeared. She covered her eyes with her hands for a moment. “I didn’t care for it as much.”

“So not a role you can see yourself playing in the future?” asked Spitzer.

Reel glanced up. “Why don’t we cut the bullshit and just face reality, shall we? It’s not a role. This is not play-acting. The guy on the floor with the bullet in his head doesn’t get back up when the curtain drops. My bullet. My kill. He stays quite dead.”

“I take it you don’t enjoy killing.”

“I enjoy a job well done. But it’s not like I’m a serial killer. Serial killers love it. They’re obsessed with the opportunity for domination of another human being. The rituals, the details. The hunt. The strike. I’m not obsessed with any of it. It’s my job. It’s what I do as a profession. For me it’s a means to an end. I build a wall around it, do it, and then move on. I don’t care who the target is. I only care that it’s the target. It’s not a human to me. It is a mission. That’s all. I don’t read any more into it than that. If I did, I couldn’t do it.”

A minute of silence passed, punctuated only by Reel’s accelerated breathing.

Finally Spitzer said, “You were recruited into the agency at a young age, with no college behind you. That is highly unusual.”

“So they tell me. But I guess you don’t need a degree to pull a trigger.”

“Why did you choose to do so? You were a very young woman, barely at the age of majority. You could have done many other things in your life.”

“Well, I didn’t see many other options, actually.”

“That is hard to believe,” countered Spitzer.

“Well, you didn’t have to believe it, did you? It was my choice,” Reel said harshly.

Spitzer closed her notebook and capped her pen.

Reel noted this. “I don’t think our hour is up.”

“I think that’s enough for today, Agent Reel.”

Reel rose. “I think it’s enough for the rest of my life.”

She slammed the door on her way out.





Chapter

13



THE PLACE HAD SEVERAL DIFFERENT names: Bukchang, Pukchang, Pukch’ang.

It was officially known as Kwan-li-so Number 18. That meant Penal Labor Colony in Korean. It was a concentration camp. It was a gulag. It actually was hell, near the Taedong River in North Korea’s P’yongan-namdo province.

The oldest of North Korean labor camps, Bukchang had been hosting dissidents and alleged enemies of the state since the fifties. Unlike the other labor camps, all of which were run by the Bowibu—also known as the State Security Department or the secret police—Bukchang was operated by the inmin pohan seong, the Interior Ministry. There were two parts to the camp. One zone was for reeducation. Inmates here would learn the teachings of the country’s two great dead leaders and might be released, though they would be monitored for the rest of their lives. The other zone was for lifers who would never see outside the camp. The majority here were lifers.

Nearly the physical size of Los Angeles, Bukchang housed fifty thousand prisoners who were kept in by, among many other things, a four-meter-high fence. If you were sent here, so was your entire family—the classic definition of guilt by association, which extended to infants, toddlers, teenagers, siblings, spouses, and grandparents. Babies born here shared the same guilt as their families. Unauthorized babies born here, because intercourse and pregnancies were strictly regulated, were killed. Age and personal culpability meant nothing, and a toddler and an ancient grandmother were treated the same—brutally.

At Bukchang everyone worked nearly all the time, in the coal mines, in the cement factories, and at other vocations. All of the work was dangerous. All of the workers were left totally unprotected. Many died from work accidents. Black lung disease alone had felled legions of forced coal miners. Food was largely unavailable. You were expected to scavenge for yourself, and families feasted on garbage, insects, weeds, and sometimes each other. Water came from the rain or the ground. It was dirty, and dysentery, among many other diseases, was rampant. These living conditions were used at Bukchang as highly effective population control.

It was not known precisely how many labor camps there were in North Korea, although the international consensus was six. The fact that they were numbered and those numbers reached at least as high as twenty-two was an indicator of their pervasiveness. At least two hundred thousand North Koreans, or nearly one percent of the entire population, called these labor camps home.