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of chances.
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t think any of this should go to court,” said Rubens honestly. “The informal arrangement was fine with me. You’ve always been able to see whatever records you wanted. There’s no need to do any of this.”
    “This isn’t a matter of looking at bank records,” said Rebecca.
    And so, she was flushed from her lie. She wanted control—undoubtedly for financial gain. Greed, not concern, motivated her.
    “I have to do my duty as I see it,” said Rubens. “You’d ask no less if I were doing it for you.” He resumed his stride toward the car.

4

    Lia DeFrancesca got out of the vehicle with her light bag and waited for her escort, feigning considerably more fatigue than she actually felt. Her two-day visit to North Korea had been an utter and complete bore. It was North Korea, of course, and no undercover American operative could afford to take a visit to the world’s most tightly controlled enemy state lightly. But it had been, in a word, dull.
    As Deep Black assignments went, her job had been relatively straightforward: visit the North Korean port city of Hūngnam while posing as a Chinese journalist. She was supposedly writing a story about the port, but this was merely intended to be a cover for passing along a business card from the Hong Kong industrialist who owned the newspaper. The high-ranking military people she had met with upon her arrival knew this, of course, and anticipated a successful business relationship in the future.
    Which surely would be possible. But that cover was itself a cover for Lia’s real mission—giving the phone number of a dedicated CIA line that could be used to set up a visit to China by one of the men who wanted to defect.
    Lia had passed along the card within an hour of arriving. The rest of the time she’d pretended to be a journalist, accompanied by a Korean whose Chinese was rather limited, though if Lia were to complain the woman stood a good chance of being sent to a retraining camp from which she would not emerge alive. Lia’s Korean was also limited; fortunately, the Art Room had round-the-clock translators to help fill the gaps.
    Her keeper had taken Lia on a one-hour stroll around the city each day. She had seen a residential area that combined a 1950s-style apartment building (built in the 1970s) and much older traditional homes. She’d also walked through what appeared to be a factory district, though it was completely devoid of people and there was no smoke coming from any of the stacks.
    On the way back to the hotel yesterday, Lia had seen a group of musicians with battered brass instruments pass nearby. Lia asked who they were and her minder explained that they were a band recruited to perform for workers in the countryside as they labored on nearby farms. The practice had been very successful after a flood in 1999, and the great leader Kim Jong II had requested it be renewed.
    The minder said all of that without taking a breath and then stopped speaking so abruptly that Lia thought she had suffered a seizure. They walked silently the rest of the way to the hotel.
    Working in fields after harvest time? Only in North Korea.
    The 737 that was due to take Lia back to China was visible beyond the terminal building at the airport. North Korean airports were all under military control, and the only airport that saw much “normal” civilian business was near the capital. The facilities hosted aircraft used for long-range patrols of the oceans to the east, but the base was not considered an important one and even by Korean standards appeared run-down. Flights from China came twice a week. The airline, Hwatao, was owned by a conglomerate that listed Shanghai as its home address, though Lia knew from her brief that its stock was split between a general in southern China and two brothers from Taiwan—an interesting example of the intertwined interests of free and communist China.
    “Du bu qi,” said her minder, using Chinese. The