“I do not know. He arrived in the country this afternoon. His file says he has been here several times before, mostly in the last few months. A businessman. Importing luxury cars for the leadership. Everything appears to be in order and yet there is something about this man that makes me feel nervous. Check his file carefully. If anything is amiss — anything, Yun — then you must contact me at once.”

“Certainly, Comrade-Major.”

“Do not let me down.”

Kim replaced the receiver and found that he had gritted his teeth. Today was his final day in the job before the promotion he had been chasing for so many months. No more airport, no more interminable studying of the same blank faces, all those same oafish Westerners arriving into the Fatherland with their wide eyes and open mouths. He was being transferred to the State Security Department with responsibility for monitoring political dissidents.

It was a prestigious posting and one he had been honoured to accept.

He was almost there. He just had to negotiate this one final day.

4

Milton had to wait five minutes for a taxi. Eventually, one turned up: an old Yugo, battered and dented, probably a hangover from the days when the Russians propped up the North Korean economy. “The Yanggakdo Hotel, please,” he said once his luggage was deposited in the back. The car pulled away and, as they paused to turn onto the deserted highway that would lead into the heart of the capital, Milton allowed himself a brief backwards glance. Two tail cars were behind them.

That was good. He wanted them to follow him.

The main route into the city was known simply as Road Number 1. It was so broad it could easily have accommodated six lanes of traffic, but the restrictions on private ownership of cars meant that there was never anything in the way of congestion. The landscape was barren and sparse, wide expanses of dusty flatlands with the occasional ramshackle habitation becoming more frequent as they passed into the outskirts of the city. As the taxi travelled into the capital proper there came the large plane and acacia trees, the lower part of the trunks painted white. Milton had overheard locals discussing the reason for this during a previous visit: it was, variously, to keep away insects, protect the tree from harsh temperatures or, most likely, to denote that the tree was government property and must not be chopped for firewood. As they travelled onwards they came across more and more of the familiar red signposts with propaganda slogans and, behind them, soaring streetlamps that were seldom switched on. The pavements in the central district were as broad as the Champs-Élysées, a grand boulevard that was intended to remind the citizenry of the power of their government. Many of the locals chose to walk in the road since the traffic was so spare. There were no traffic lights, with uniformed police monitoring the few cars and lorries with the aid of glowing batons. All things considered, downtown Pyongyang provided a reasonably positive first impression. It was only on closer inspection that it became clear that chunks of concrete had fallen off the buildings, that the streetlights all tilted precariously in different directions and that the trams were all cratered with dents.

He still felt off-balance. The dream had passed, leaving tiny gossamer webs of memory that reminded him that he had had it. One thing was for sure: it was bad timing. He would have been nervous without it. This kind of deception was not unusual for a man in his line of work but there were very few places were the consequences of discovery would be as severe as in the DPRK. There would be no official protest, no consular activity to get him back. As far as the Group was concerned, as soon as he was in the field he was a totally deniable asset. That rule was rigid; men and women had been lost before, swallowed up into the penal bureaucracies of some of the world’s most inhospitable states, never to be seen or heard from again. The prospect of a life spent in a North Korean gaol was not a pleasant one. Nervousness, even for an operative as experienced as Milton, was not an unreasonable response in the circumstances.

The nerves would return again, but he had passed his first inspection. It was important that he had attracted attention and Peter McEwan was precisely the sort of man to do that. Milton had read his file cover-to-cover. He was a wanted man in several countries. Flouting international sanctions was just one of the crimes of which he was guilty. His main income was derived from smuggling and, to that end, he had extensive links with criminal concerns all around the world from the Ndrangheta in Sicily to the Los Zetas cartel in Northern Mexico. Drugs, luxury items, arms, counterfeit currency, even people; McEwan was not burdened by conscience and there was very little that he was not prepared to trade. The man had been chosen because of his reputation and because he was known to the MPSS officials, but the benefit of his notoriety also carried its own burden: Milton had to play a part already known to his watchers. He had to hit all the minute beats of a man for whom there was already a voluminous file somewhere deep in the secret police’s vast bureaucracy.

There were imperfections in the plan, of course. If they compared the photographs of Milton with that of McEwan, the deception would not hold for long. Milton had altered his appearance as far as was possible in order to mimic McEwan — the expensive glasses, the slicked back hair, five days’ worth of stubble, the way he walked and held himself — but none of it would hold up under proper scrutiny. It was an approximation, barely more than a sketch, and, just as he had made an attempt to capture the man’s oleaginous manner, that overbearing arrogance and the air of seediness that accompanied him like a bad smell, any kind of inquisition would strip the falsehoods away just like sunlight burning through early morning mist.

British intelligence had its eye on plenty of men and women like McEwan, individual operators who plied their trade in some of the world’s most unpleasant places. Whenever unobtrusive access for a cleaner was required — as now — then the Group would lay its finger on the person who would best allow an agent a means of ingress. The mark would be removed from circulation and replaced. It was a simple ruse and the moral turpitude of those who made it possible meant that the human cost was more easily ignored. Milton’s conscience was not troubled by the cost of his deception.

Outside the window, Pyongyang rolled by. Parts of it were even pretty, with all the blossom and the flowers. They passed the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery and the Schoolchildren’s Palace. They followed the road as it bisected a large public square where hundreds of Young Pioneers, soldiers and paramilitaries were practicing for the Parade, a spectacle of robotic choreography perfected by hundreds of hours of drill. From the sides of buildings and on enormous billboards were the faces of the Great and Dear Leaders: Generalissimo Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il, both of them dead and gone but impossible to forget.

The newest pictures were of the young and untested Kim Jong-un, the scion of the line.

Milton had read all of the ridiculous rhetoric that had flowed from the DPRK since Kim had succeeded his father. “Seas of fire.” “Merciless vengeance.” It was bluster and braggadocio for the most part, but the Koreans had nuclear weapons to back up their threats and now the country was developing other, more insidious, ways to hurt the West. Milton did not know, nor did he need to know, the political calculus that had led to his being there, sitting in a taxi as it delivered him to the heart of Pyongyang. But, as he looked at a row of fresh portraits of Kim Jong-un, Milton knew that the games of brinksmanship that the North had perfected had been played out for too long.