There were signs of construction all about, most of it stalled after the foreign money that had been funding it had all dried up. Ahead of them, the road terminated at the huge plaza that surrounded the Palace where the Parade was to be held. On their right was the Grand People’s Study House, the building that passed for the city’s main library. On the left, the Ryugyong, the unfinished hotel that was to have been the world’s tallest. Ahead of that, across the broad space of the Square and perhaps a thousand yards distant, the concrete tower occupied by the military and the secret police.

The Ryugyong was enormous, a giant skeleton of a building that towered over the glittery squalor of Pyongyang like a wireframe spaceship. Su-Yung turned off the road and descended a ramp into the vast maw of its underground car park. The garage was deserted.

“Here we are,” she said. “The Chinese were paying for this, but then they decided that they did not need it, after all. Then the Germans were interested until Kim frightened them away. It will never be finished now. You have a word for it in English.” She paused, searching her vocabulary. “Hubris — that is it. It is a monument to the hubris of the Kims. No-one comes here any longer. We will not be disturbed.”

Su-Yung headed for the rear corner of the car park and reversed next to an open doorway where a rough service staircase headed up. She killed the engine. Milton pulled the handle on the sliding side door and pulled it back on its rusty runners. He leaned inside and collected the rifle. He left the other weapons that he had taken from the car — the gas-operated M-4 carbine, the 9mm, the grenades — in the back to be collected on the way out. The M82 was wrapped in an oily blanket.

Su-Yung went over to check the staircase. She signalled that the way was clear.

Milton followed. The stairwell had not yet been finished with a handrail and it was unguarded on the left-hand side, the drop lengthening as they ascended further and further until it was hundreds of feet deep. Open walls offered views into the guts of the building: they passed through what was intended to be the cavernous reception, then the dining floor, huge open spaces with their expanses of aging concrete and rusting iron railings presenting something of the post-apocalyptic. Scaffolding wound its way up the inside of the vast heart of the pyramid, hundreds of feet of it. They climbed for five minutes, eventually reaching the eighteenth floor. Su-Yung stepped onto the landing. A corridor led in both directions, left and right. Everything was unfinished: the concrete had been trowelled smooth but there were no carpets, no panelling on the walls; there were empty piles of canvas cement sacks; doors were just open spaces; wiring spilled out of the walls; a line of bare light bulbs stretched away down the corridor with no power to light them; a wheelbarrow was turned onto its side and a cement mixer stood silently. It was ghostly. Their footsteps disturbed a grey cement dust, so fine that Milton could feel it tickling the back of his throat with every breath.

Su-Yung led the way to a series of rooms that were intended to be an executive suite. There was a large bathroom with plumbing for a toilet, shower and bath, a bedroom and a huge sitting room on two levels. None of the finishes had been applied and there was no furniture of any sort. It was just a large concrete box, ugly and unloved. The windows had not been glazed, the big floor-to-ceiling apertures spread with plastic sheeting. The sunlight was muted, stained blue as it passed through the translucent material.

Milton unwrapped the rifle and carried it with him to the window. It had no sill, a thin groove all the way around the aperture where the pane of glass would eventually be fitted. The two plastic sheets met in the middle, like makeshift curtains. Milton dropped to one knee and carefully loosened the ties that held the sheets together. He lowered himself until he was prone, relaxing the muscles of his legs and torso so that he was completely flat to the surface. He rested his left elbow on the concrete and carefully brought the rifle around. He unfolded a bipod and screwed it into its housing, pushing it forwards so that the forestock just dipped out of the window. He breathed in, a good, long breath. He held it for five seconds and then breathed out. He waited for the moment of calm to descend, that familiar moment where he almost felt out of his own body. It was a gift, and it had always served him well. It came from deep inside him, a place where stress — and the dream — had never been able to reach. They had made jokes about it in the sandpit, the way he would just zone out, reducing everything to a simple trinity: target, sniper, gun.

He breathed in, held it again, and then breathed out.

He opened the sheeting a little, put the binoculars to his eyes and peered out. He was facing due north. He estimated that he was four hundred feet above street level. This was the tallest building in Pyongyang and his line of sight was clear and unobstructed. Spread out ahead of him was the broad plaza that fronted the Kumsusan Palace. The Palace was a sprawling complex of buildings, decorated in the oriental style and of immense scale. A gigantic fifty-foot banner depicting a stylised version of the North Korean flag was fixed to the roof of the Palace and, below that, two huge portraits of Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung had been hung. A thousand yards away, across the Square and behind the Palace, was the new office block that he had seen from the street. It had been built ten years ago when Chinese money was still flowing into the country and there were plans for businesses to move in. Times had changed and it had still not been rented. In an attempt to preserve some kind of dignity, the North had filled it with government offices.

The National Defence Commission.

The Ministry of People’s Armed Forces.

The State Security Department.

He guessed it was three hundred feet tall. Tall enough, anyway, from his position.

Milton focussed the binoculars and examined the building. The interior was honeycombed with cubicles, individual monitors glowing at every desk. For a country with such an unreliable electricity supply, an exception had clearly been made for this particular building. Milton knew the reason why: this was also the Headquarters of the Reconnaissance General Bureau. The organisation was divided into six bureaus: Operations; Reconnaissance; Foreign Intelligence; Inter-Korean Dialogue; Technical; and Rear Services. Technical was the organisation responsible for signals intelligence, electronic warfare and informations warfare.

Western analysts described its work as cyber-terrorism.

It was beginning to make a serious nuisance of itself.

Milton checked his watch: thirteen minutes to seven. He settled, relaxing his muscles against the cold solidity of the concrete floor. In moments, the cold had passed through his clothes and had begun to seep into his body. He concentrated on ignoring it. His pelvis began to ache, a reminder of a wounding from his first tour in Iraq, but he instructed his brain to set it aside. It was a ghost wound, years old, irrelevant.

MI5 only knew that the meeting was scheduled for today, not when it was due to start.

He could be waiting here all day.

15

Kim looked at his watch: nearly half past eleven. He paced the observation room, the large two-way mirror looking into the interrogation suite where Yun was continuing to supervise their efforts with the traitor. There was nothing else he could do, except what he was engaged in at the moment: futile recriminations, coupled with the more practical step of contacting his deputies at Kumsusan Palace and ordering them to redouble their efforts to find the Englishman.