“What happened to him?”

“They put him to work in an iron-ore mine. He was a quiet man, who never spoke out of turn. He did not drink for fear that the alcohol would lower his guard and he would say something that he would regret. If your songbun is low, you are not given the benefit of the doubt if someone makes an accusation against you. One day, while he was in the mine, he had a disagreement with his foreman. The area in which they were working was unsafe — miners die all the time here — and he refused to lead his men any further until it was properly reinforced. The foreman reported this to the Party. He said that he was disobedient and insubordinate and that he had spoken sarcastically of the Great Leader. I do not believe that this could possibly have been true, but in matters such as these, truth is not important. Two nights later, an army truck appeared outside our little home and my father was taken away. We think they took him to one of the work camps in the north of the country but we cannot be sure. It is possible that they shot him. We never saw him again.” The line of Su-Yung’s jaw set hard as she clenched her teeth and, for a moment, a fire that Milton had not seen before flashed in her eyes. “That, Mr Milton, is why I am doing what I am doing. Someone has to take a stand against these people and, as I say, it might as well be me.” She finished the cup of tea and, as she replaced the cup in the saucer, her cheery demeanour had returned. “Now,” she said, pointing at the bowl of soup. “You must eat. It is unlikely you will have another opportunity to fill your stomach until much later.”

Milton ate. The soup was delicious, substantial and spiced with just the right amount of chilli. He finished the plate quickly and did not object when Su-Yung offered him a second helping. When he was finished with that, and the plates had been cleared away, Su-Yung sat down again and handed him another new set of papers. This passport was English, with a sheaf of documents wedged between the covers.

“You are now Mr Michael Callow. You are forty-two years old and a successful businessman. You deal in the buying and selling of crude petroleum and you have been in the DPRK for a week negotiating the terms of a contract to supply ten thousand barrels to the Unggi refinery. You have decided to stay an additional few days to watch the Parade.”

“And you?”

“Tourists are not allowed outside their hotels without a minder. If necessary, I will be yours.”

Milton opened the passport and studied the photograph. Callow had blond hair.

“Ah yes,” Su-Yung said with a smile. “I am sorry about that. You will need this.” She handed Milton a bottle of hair dye and pointed to the back of the room. “There is a small bathroom over there.”

12

The transporter was a big eighteen-wheeler, with a fully hydraulic trailer that could accommodate eight cars. The driver, a taciturn Chinese from the border town of Dandong City, had no idea that the expensive load he had driven into the North was not solely for the enjoyment of the country’s elite. The cars had been give a cursory search by the customs officials as he waited to cross into the country, and if — in the admittedly unlikely event — they had discovered the real purpose of the consignment then it would have been very unlikely that he would ever have left the country again.

He had driven on, ten hours straight. Commercial satellite navigation was pointless in North Korea and so he had relied upon a dated road atlas to navigate the route to Pyongyang. His destination was a goods yard to the west of the city and he had arrived, more or less on time, on the day of Milton’s own arrival. A man at the yard had signed the paperwork to acknowledge that the delivery had been made and then, with extravagant care, the cars had been unloaded one after the other. It was approaching midnight when the driver was finished, the task made more difficult by the brownout that extinguished the overhead floodlights halfway through the task. The driver had got back into his cab and set back off towards the border. Like most of his friends, he hated the North. They all thought that it was a backwards country, a little hole governed by the latest madman in a family full of madmen, altogether more trouble than it was worth. The sooner he set off, the sooner he would be home. He planned to get halfway to the border where he would sleep in his cab at the side of the road.

Kun picked up Su-Yung and Milton at five in the morning and drove them to the yard. He unlocked the wire mesh gate for them and then disappeared; Su-Yung explained that he was going to arrange new transport for them for when the operation had been completed.

They found the cars parked neatly inside a closed warehouse. They were a very fine collection: a Lexus, two Bentleys, two Mercedes, an Audi, a Ferrari and a Porsche. He found himself nodding his approval: Peter McEwan certainly knew his business. He had arranged the better part of two million pounds’ worth of high-performance automotive engineering. He did not know that British intelligence had been monitoring his communications for weeks and, once they realised he was transporting cargo that suited their particular purposes, the operation had been given the green light to proceed.

A consequence of that had been his murder.

“Which car is it?” Su-Yung said.

“The Enzo, I’m afraid,” Milton said.

“The Enzo?”

“The red one,” he said. The Ferrari was a beautiful, gorgeous machine; it was a shame to have to defile it. He opened the door and ran the palm of his hand across the smoothly carpeted floor behind the front seats. He took a knife and positioned it carefully, pushing the tip until it pierced the fabric and then slicing it open. He reached inside and tore the carpet away, revealing a compartment that had been fitted beneath the cabin. It was ten inches wide and reached from the back to the front, extending all the way beneath the seats.

“Here,” he said to Su-Yung. “Give me a hand.”

He reached down and withdrew the items that had been hidden inside the compartment: the rifle, an M-4 carbine, a Sig Sauer 9mm, half a dozen fragmentation grenades, a pair of high-powered Zeiss Classic 60mm binoculars and a miniature tracking device.

The rifle was the most important; he picked it up and examined it carefully. A Barrett M82, recoil-operated, semi-automatic, finished with American walnut stock and a heavy premium barrel. The weapon system that the American snipers preferred; Milton had become accustomed to it during his time with them in the sandpit. The gun had been broken down into pieces and Milton quickly reassembled it, checking that it had not been damaged in transit. It had not. The Group’s quartermaster had arranged the weapon for him to his specific order and he had reacquainted himself with it on the long ranges on Salisbury Plain. It was an impressive piece of machinery, every bit well-crafted as the car in which it had been hidden.

“Is it satisfactory?” Su-Yung asked anxiously.

“Yes.”

Milton opened the magazine and checked the big bullets. Its ten-shot box magazine was chambered for .50 calibre ammunition and it was loaded with Raufoss Mk 211 anti-materiél projectiles, his favourite cartridge for this purpose. Each bullet was almost as long as his hand, jacketed in copper with an armour-piercing tungsten core that carried explosive and incendiary components. The ammunition was designed to take out light armour at distance. There had been some suggestion that it should be banned against human targets, but Milton had no view about that; all he knew was that it was excellent at long range and that it made an almighty mess when it hit something soft.

Su-Yung watched him slot the magazine into the breach. “This operation,” she said, “we would do it ourselves but it would be too difficult. The task you have set yourself is not an easy thing, Mr Milton. The distance will be very great. Perhaps half a mile.”