Free Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) by Frank Gardner

still did not know what they had done wrong.
    For a few seconds nothing happened, their pleas being mouthed silently on the other side of the thick glass. And then, from a venthigh up on the wall, came a pale yellow vapour, heavier than the air. Coiling and twisting like a living creature, it spread along the walls and sank slowly to the floor, where it unfolded like a carpet. The officers and scientists leaned further forward still, some making notes. When the gas reached those in the pit, their bodies were racked with spasms. A derivative of phosgene, a choking agent dating back to the trenches of the First World War, this was Agent MX, the latest addition to the arsenal of massed batteries of artillery units ranged along the border with South Korea, all aimed at its capital, Seoul. The People’s Assembly had been adamant: it must be tested extensively on live human subjects.
    Dr Mun tried hard to remain impassive as the ‘experiment’ drew to its inevitable and grisly conclusion. He fiddled with his pen and pretended to write notes as the condemned family writhed and vomited on the other side of the glass, the parents trying in vain to save their two children even as their own lives ebbed away. When their twitching ceased, he joined in the chorus of obligatory applause and stood beaming as the colonel general came up to congratulate him and the other white coats. Then he made a dash for the toilets.
    Mun barely had time to check there was no one else in the room before he threw up his lunch of rice balls in the stained lavatory bowl and yanked the ancient flush. He turned the rusting tap and splashed his face with water. He would probably be decorated for this but right now he wished he had never been born. When he raised his face from the sink a man was staring back at him. The insignia on his epaulettes marked him out as a
taejwa,
a senior colonel in the Korean People’s Army. Two thin red stripes and four silver stars. A powerful, influential man. ‘Comrade Colonel!’ exclaimed Dr Mun, pulling himself up to attention. ‘An honour!’ He stood stock still, wondering if he had washed away the evidence of his disgust. But the officer who faced him looked far from stern. In fact, he seemed equally sickened. The colonel moved slowly to the sink and turned the tap full on. They spoke in low whispers, their exchange masked by the spluttering of the running water.
    By the time they went their separate ways Mun felt his heart would burst with the enormity of what they had just discussed. Yes, he could deliver what the Comrade Colonel was asking for. He had the authority – no one would question it – and access to the material, but surely this was treason of the highest order. Should he report the colonel? Was this a trap, a test of his loyalty? What the colonel had asked him to do was almost unbelievable. And yet . . . And yet he could not go on working for this vile regime. If he could play some small part in its downfall he could live with his conscience.
    Dr Mun wasted no time. The next morning, at eleven o’clock precisely, he broke off from his work in the lab to go for his customary glass of watery ginseng tea, slipped into a side office and gave an order over the phone. Fifteen hundred grams of highly radioactive caesium chloride were to be diverted from the adjacent waste unit to the Pang Sang Un People’s Defence Unit on the outskirts of Pyongyang. There the colonel would take charge of it. Dr Mun knew what this material could do to those exposed to it. Even in news-starved North Korea, word had reached the scientific community of the infamous Goiânia incident in 1987. He had read of how the curious townspeople in the Brazilian city had found an abandoned container glowing blue at an old hospital and decided to prise it open. Four had died from radiation poisoning. Many others had survived with burns, nausea and a lifetime’s likelihood of developing cancer. Whatever the colonel had in mind, Mun knew it was