CHAPTER FIVE:
THE LAST SUPPER
Hugging his punctured ribs, grinning like an idiot, Dr. Fred Isaacson stumbled across moonless sands toward the East Sea. Except for where his hand cupped the hot blood oozing from his side, he was cold to the bone.
“Wimps,” he wheezed through bloody gritted teeth. “Oh yeah—the wimps shall inherit the Earth. You can bet your bottom dollar.”
The beach was not completely deserted: a number of incandescent tents glowed like paper lanterns across the long strand, their sides flapping in the wind. From a distance they reminded Isaacson of the luminarias he had seen during Navidad in Los Alamos. He made his way to the nearest one, catching a whiff of cooking oil and charcoal.
It was a little outdoor buffet like the ones he had passed on the street in Itaewon: Seoul food, al fresco. Lots of deep-fried goodies on sticks, which customers washed down with beer or soju—Korean white lightning. Isaacson found such places picturesque, but he would usually never set foot in one, not with his triglycerides. Also, he had forsworn alcohol as part of his recent covenant with Yahweh. It was too bad; he could have used a stiff drink.
He threw open the plastic canopy and babbled, “Help—American—need help, please!” but the quaint Asian faces he was expecting were nowhere to be seen—the tent was empty. A string of bare light bulbs bobbed above an abandoned banquet table covered with pans of batter-fried peppers and squid and yams, vegetable fritters, fresh and cooked shellfish, an enormous red spider-crab. Braziers and steaming pots sat untended. Gusts of wind made the walls shudder and the light sway, as if the fragile refuge could come uprooted any second. Swooning from the pungent kitchen warmth, Isaacson collapsed on the bench.
“Please God, please God,” he prayed, face down on the table. “I hope I have done Thy bidding.” He heard someone come through the flap behind him, bringing in a gust of cold air.
A shrill, grating voice said, “Excuse me. I see you are practicing your custom of ‘saying grace’. Do not let me interrupt.”
“It’s too late,” Isaacson groaned, not looking at her. “You’re too late; I got rid of it, praise Jesus.”
“Jesus is a fairytale, a nursery rhyme to put children to sleep. We don’t believe in fairytales, Professor, unless they are about our Great Leader. Otherwise they are a corrupt Western invention. But if you like nursery rhymes I will tell you one. I learned this at Pyongyang Information Ministry; you may know it: Little Jack Horner? I believe it goes, Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, eating a Christmas pie. He stuck in his thumb—”
A horny, powerful hand suddenly pinned Isaacson’s head to the table while a long-nailed thumb jammed deep into his wound. Isaacson screamed, writhing.
“—and pulled out a plum, and cried, ‘What a good boy am I.’” Grunting with the effort of holding him still, the voice rasped, “Be a good boy, Professor, and tell me what you have done with our…plums?”
Dr. Isaacson’s consciousness came unplugged—he was swept up in a vivid dream that it was still morning, before all of this had begun.
≥≠≤
That morning, Fred Isaacson had anxiously huddled in his suite at the hotel, waiting for his ride to the airport. He had just wanted to get out of Korea, get far away and wait for the Rapture. In spite of some misgivings, he had accomplished what he set out to do, as mandated by Yahweh. And God was well pleased: “NOAH HIMSELF COULDN’T HAVE DONE IT BETTER,” He had told Isaacson in the shower. “YOU CAN TELL HIM I SAID SO.”
Isaacson was sitting on the end of the bed watching stilted Armed Forces TV commercials (“Say, Betty, did you hear about the Colonel’s new plan to test those nuclear artillery shells on the golf course?” “Shhh! Be careful, Bob. You never know if the terrorists might be listening.” “Gee, you’re right! It’s everybody’s responsibility to practice good OPSEC.”) when there was a loud knock at the door. It made him jump.
Through the fish-eye lens of the peephole, Isaacson saw what looked like a hydrocephalic fetus bulging out of a shiny brown suit. It was actually a gaunt, grave-faced Korean man—his official, and unofficial, liaison.
He opened the door, saying, “Good morning, Mr. Wang. You’re just in time—I’ll die if I have to sit through Guiding Light again.”
“Good morning, Dr. Isaacson.” Mr. Wang bowed stiffly. “Annyo’hashimnikka. You are ready to go?”
“Quite ready—bags all packed.”
“Very good. I hope you have enjoyed your stay in Korea.”
“I always do.”
It was the fifth time Fred Isaacson had been to Korea—and the last. His church sponsored a mission there, and he had visited twice in just the past year, taking part in organizing food aid shipments to the North. This dovetailed conveniently with his recent duties as a nuclear scientist appointed to oversee the transfer of reactor technology as part of a non-proliferation agreement with Pyongyang—not to mention as a holy agent of the Apocalypse.
Ever since his salvation Korea held a special fascination for Isaacson, its perpetual struggle—North against South—so much a macrocosm of the individual human soul. Visiting the Demilitarized Zone as a tourist, the professor had felt the living presence of the Eternal Serpent a hair’s breadth away. Yet he had been surprised at what a vale of green the DMZ was: not a denuded minefield as he would have expected, but a veritable nature preserve, thriving forbidden in the shadow of death. Animals long extinct in other parts of the country still existed there, rare as the happy accident of war that sheltered them.
He had been told the story of a tree standing in this garden, a tree like the one in Genesis, which had appeared so innocent and yet had harbored evil fruit. Isaacson had recurrent dreams about that tree, terrible dreams in which he played the role of Captain Bonifas, idly standing guard as local nationals went to prune branches which were blocking the view of a lookout post. Lulled by the peace and stillness, Bonifas heard a sound and glanced up…glanced up to see something that defied explanation. An optical illusion? A trick of light and shadow? Anything but what it appeared to be—that’s why serpents hide in the leaves. Bonifas and another guard were slow to move, disbelieving: how could there be men up there? And then as the North Koreans dropped down there was no time. No time to unlimber a weapon, no time to do anything but run. Run from that inconceivable vision of axes raised against you in the clear light of day, amid birdsong and new-mown grass. And then to feel the bite of that first steel blade. To fall. Isaacson always awoke drenched in sweat, heart pounding.
Proximity to such evil always gave Isaacson a sense of real urgency—of opportunity. He felt needed in Korea…but he could never stay long. He was not a professional missionary, or a diplomat. He was a scientist—a senior researcher at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, divining the nature of matter. Just as Panmunjom gave him insights into the nature of Satan, quantum physics revealed to him the face of God. In the play of mesons and bosons, quarks and leptons, muons and gluons he counted angels dancing on the head of a pin. And as his burgeoning religious fervor distanced him more and more from his unsaved colleagues (and even his own family), it was little wonder that Fred Isaacson became convinced that he had a key role to play in the inevitable showdown…a conviction that was dry tinder for that fateful night, alone on the couch, when a loud, disembodied voice had first boomed, “FRED.” When God spoke his name.
≥≠≤
They had been driving for a while when Isaacson became concerned—they should have been at the airport by now. Instead they were skirting the industrial sprawl of the container port, headed for Pohang. Catching a glimpse of the ocean, he said warily, “Nice day for the beach.”
Mr. Wang’s voice revealed nothing: “Too cold for swimming.”
“Were we going swimming?”
“No.”
They passed a bleak little yard in which a single dusty persimmon tree stood, its fruit startlingly orange.
“Do you like to swim, Mr. Wang?” He couldn’t imagine this stolid-faced man in a bathing suit.
“No.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what do you do for fun?”
“Fun.”
“Fun? Recreation?”
“Fun is a decadent American vice.”
Isaacson was amused in spite of himself at the characteristic Korean bluntness; they weren’t shy. “Oh come on,” he said. “Koreans know how to have fun.” As he said this they were passed by a motor coach full of boogying travelers. It swayed to the beat of the music like a rolling disco.
“You’ve seen Americanized Koreans brainwashed by bourgeois concepts of pleasure. These are not healthy traditional pursuits; they have no ideology, no higher purpose except to reduce people to the level of animals so that they may be more effectively exploited.” Mr. Wang said this not in an angry way, but as a rote statement of fact.
Nodding thoughtfully, Isaacson felt his stomach flutter: The jig is up. He surprised himself with his own cool—perhaps he had been expecting this all along.
They left the city proper, passing through an outlying area of rice fields surrounded by shimmering strips of reflective tape. Solar scarecrows. Drying rice was spread along the breakdown lane, and Isaacson wondered if it was flavored with lead or other toxic emissions. But he had always admired Korean utilitarianism. He closed his eyes to wait, putting his faith in Yahweh.
Arriving at a semi-industrial seaside town, Mr. Wang parked before a row of shuttered businesses. Weather-beaten banners and signs lent a sad carny air to the place, as of better days. Everything appeared to be closed for the season. No, not everything—at the far end stood an outdoor cafe with several small tables under a canvas awning. One of the tables was covered with an array of freshly severed pig heads, each one resting on a stand made from a bleached jawbone. The heads all faced the same way, sleepily grinning. A huge fish tank full of eels cast a Coke-bottle-green shadow on the concrete patio. Following Mr. Wang’s lead, Isaacson pulled up a chair and sat down. He checked his watch: It was now definitely too late to make his connection.
“So, am I under arrest?”
Mr. Wang ignored the question, calling orders to a stooped old woman in the doorway. She brought them pickled yellow radish and some sort of raw seafood with a dish of hot sauce. Then she dipped a net in the tank and scooped out a large eel. The eel was a live wire, muscular and slippery, with a dark gray top and a pearly belly. It looked unreal. With practiced deftness, the woman transferred the eel to a pink plastic shopping bag, twisted the top into a rope, and beat the creature against the ground until it stopped writhing. Then she took it inside.
“Phew,” Isaacson said, grinning nervously.
“Very fresh,” said Mr. Wang, who took up a pair of metal chopsticks and ate one of the seafood polyps.
Isaacson tried one and found it bitter. “What is this?” he asked, chewing.
“Sea squirt. Good for potency.”
“Ah.” He put his chopsticks down. “Mr. Wang, let’s not drag this out.”
The Korean nodded blandly. Clearing his throat and spitting, he said, “We at the North Korea Friendship Society question the motive behind your interesting gift, Doctor. Our friends have expressed…concern.”
“I’ve already told you how dangerous it is. That’s the whole point.”
“Dangerous, yes. But to whom?”
“What do you mean?”
“We suspect that this is some manner of trap. The only reasonable explanation is you are acting in accordance with your government to test our security apparatus.”
“That’s baloney. I represent one person, and that’s my Lord and Savior. I’m His advance man on this Earth, and it is my sacred mandate to pave the way for His return. In representing Him I represent the cleansing wrath of Yahweh, who has chosen your people to be the instruments of Armageddon. I thought we’d been through this already.”
“Of course, of course…then perhaps you can tell me once more what this peculiar object is supposed to be. My superiors are not convinced of its value.”
“It was an accident.”
Mr. Wang’s lip curled with undisguised contempt.
“WIMPS,” Isaacson said. “We were studying WIMPS—Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, also known as Dark Matter. Higgs bosons. The hidden fabric of the Universe.”
“Which you say has never been directly observed.”
“Except by us. Only by us. We not only observed it, we made it.”
“How?”
“As I said—by tsunami. We detonated a very small amount of antimatter in the Japan Trench, which had the unfortunate side effect of triggering a major earthquake. Whoops. What we were really trying to create was a magic carpet. It’s a wonderful idea, isn’t it? A magic carpet! Take you anywhere you want to go, no emissions, no fuel, no moving parts to wear out. That was the notion that started all this; that was where the funding came from. An honest-to-goodness magic carpet…who wouldn’t want one?”
Mr. Wang grunted, less than delighted.
Isaacson continued, “Of course, it’s not easy to get people excited about something so airy-fairy—you have to break it down to basic principles, such as isolating the elusive graviton. It sounds like something out of science fiction, but it’s no more outlandish than anything else in quantum physics. It’s like catching butterflies: You take your net and go a-huntin’. If you catch something, you pin it down and take a good look at it. Figure it out. If you’re lucky, they’ll name it after you and award you the Nobel Prize. But antigravity—there’s a word that’ll get you labeled a kook real fast. Talk about pie in the sky! We heard it so much we made it our project logo: a flying pie. To come up with antigravity you have to find gravity, which is no mean feat. Funny when you consider that it’s the flypaper that holds the Universe together, that it’s literally everywhere, connecting everything to everything else. But try getting it under a microscope.
“We did the next best thing, though: We learned how to poke a pinhole in it, to create a graviton-free zone in the center of a terbium-based superconducting ceramic flask. The way we did this was by exposing a small amount of antimatter to conditions of extreme pressure—conditions which exist at the bottom of the sea. The antimatter was encased in a special alloy that liquefied during the reaction, forming perfectly spherical vacuum bubbles. We then captured some of the larger bubbles for study. By attaching electrodes to their poles, we turned them into mini cyclotrons, using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to generate a Fermion superfluid which we injected into them, creating a high-velocity vortex of degenerate Fermion gas. As the plasma expanded and spun away from the center, baryons and antibaryons annihilated each other within a shell of perpetually orbiting Cooper pairs that amplified the magnetic repulsion effect at the core, creating a negative spot like the eye of a hurricane—a perfect void. Not like the dirty void of deep space, mind you, which is a soup of waves and particles acted upon by gravity and time, but pure nullity such as hasn’t existed since before the Big Bang. Nothing. We had literally bottled pure Nothing! And that’s what I’ve given you: a whole lotta Nothing!”
“Most generous, I’m sure.”
“Oh, Nothing is funny. You might think Nothing is nothing, but we found it’s actually the mother of Something; it’s the incubator. Create Nothing and you create conditions suitable for a baby universe to be born—a Little Big Bang. What’s interesting is that it happens relatively slowly, perhaps due to the damping effect of our existing universe—more a Big Ooze than a Big Bang, and what’s interesting is what it oozes.”
“What?”
“Pure, Grade-A Dark Matter.”
“And this is lethal?”
“Well, not per se. Remember what Dark Matter is: It has mass and volume, but no other detectable properties—that means it’s invisible, but reveals itself in the way it influences visible matter. The danger of hatching a new Universe is that it’s like a cuckoo’s egg—a cuckoo’s egg universe crowding into ours. We can stop the singularity at the quantum level by flooding it with a quark-gluon plasma, but left alone it must eventually get too big to control.”
“What would that mean?”
“Our observations at the subatomic level suggest that WIMPS infiltrate ordinary matter, increasing its volume exponentially and forming a kind of chromodynamic scaffold between disassociated particles, multiplying or otherwise altering their properties. Think of it as a cancer on reality…or a hellish Jiffy Pop. Since tremendous mass is introduced, it could theoretically create a gravity well that would destroy…well, everything. Create a Black Hole right here on Earth that would consume the planet, and eventually the whole Universe. Much ado about Nothing, indeed.”
“Hmm. How would such a reaction be triggered?”
“Now that’s what caused the project to be shut down—hypothetically, it’s very simple: disrupt the stasis field. Breach the containment. Believe it or not, destroying the Universe may be as easy as cracking a walnut. We made hundreds of those terbium vessels for Nullity studies before we realized the risk and had to neutralize them…or most of them. It was an incredible boondoggle, really, considering the danger was purely theoretical—there could easily be limiting factors we don’t understand. But I’m sure your people will find a way to put them to good use.”
“I see. Yes, I think I understand, Mr. Isaacson.” Mr. Wang pushed back his chair and stood up. “And I’m afraid we must decline your most generous offer.”
Isaacson watched, astonished, as the old lady wheeled out a huge clay jar on a hand truck. It was a crude earthenware jug identical to every other kimchi pot in Korea, but Isaacson knew at once that it was the very one in which he had last week placed his strange and terrible stolen cargo, concealing it among a thousand others in a vast shipment of food-aid to the North.
Blinking stupidly, he said, “What? What are you talking about?”
“We are returning your gift.”
“You’re giving it back?”
“Yes. Very embarrassing—there will be an internal investigation to determine why this mistake was not recognized at once. Clearly we were deceived by your credentials.”
“But I didn’t deceive you! This is crazy!”
“Crazy, yes. You are crazy—cuckoo, like you say. Ppokkugi. We give you back your eggs.”
Suddenly Isaacson understood. They thought he was some kind of crackpot! A garden-variety loony. Well, wasn’t that the fate of every prophet? He should be flattered! “You silly, stupid—” he said in wonderment. “You’re the crazy ones, and I can prove it.”
Isaacson jumped up and went to the jar. They didn’t bother to stop him. The heavy lid was secured with rough twine; he cut his hands trying to wrench it off, then finally accepted a knife. All the work he had put into sealing this up! Opening the lid, he was struck with the pungent cabbage smell of fermenting kimchi. He pried out the bag that contained the spicy vegetable mixture and plunged his hands into the straw beneath.
“Here it is, here it is,” he crooned, eyes watering. “Come to papa.”
Deep within the red clay jar, buried in straw, were three pale gray balls. Isaacson cautiously scooped them out, holding them up to the sunlight. “Handle with care,” he chortled. They resembled antique enameled ornaments—beautiful paperweights. Close up they had the silvery organic translucence of small moons, webbed with an intricate arrangement of hairline cracks. Scorched-looking metal terminals gleamed like meteor strikes at their poles.
“Pretty, aren’t they?” Isaacson said. “Who could imagine?” He looked triumphantly from the balls in his hand to Mr. Wang and the woman. “Crazy, huh? Get me a superfluid of fermionic hadrons and a nutcracker and we’ll see how crazy I am.”
Mr. Wang did not seem to be paying attention. His disbelieving stare was focused somewhere past Isaacson, as if he hadn’t heard a word. There was a muffled plop! and suddenly a neat little hole appeared in the center of his forehead. The Korean staggered backward, steadied himself and then abruptly collapsed, spouting a delayed jet of blood.
Isaacson shouted in terror and dropped to the floor.
“When you’ve got Nothing,” squawked a harsh baby-doll voice, piercing as a rusty spring, “you’ve got Nothing to lose.”
It was a woman. The old stooped woman. Only she had shed her hunchback and her hanbok and her dirty rat’s nest of hair and half her years; now she was standing tall in an albino alligator jacket and miniskirt, with black-and-white striped leggings and stiff, fuchsia-tipped platinum braids that encased her waxy skull like a crown of thorns. She was a hard-bodied go-go doll with the head of Medusa, her murderous dead stare freezing Isaacson like a bird in the thrall of a snake. He knew what he was looking at, or what was looking at him: a human weapon tempered and made razor-sharp by God-knew-what depths of poverty and abuse and state-sponsored depravity, sent South to murder and spy and shelter murderers and spies under the guise of a simple old peasant woman bent double from an innocent lifetime of planting rice—it was all written in those black-smudged eyes, that blank-brutal face, and the collapsed veins in her arms.
Whatever her superiors felt, she believed him. And now she was going solo. After a lifetime of harsh obedience she finally saw her chance to practice in its purest form the uncompromising North Korean philosophy of Juche: self-reliance.
“Give me your balls, Mr. Isaacson,” she said.
Just as certainly as Isaacson knew the flavors of leptons and quarks, he knew this woman was going to kill him…no matter what he did. He was about to die. This should not have scared him—he had spent quite some time now on familiar terms with the Almighty and looked forward to expedited admission to Elysium—yet it did. All at once he most desperately did not want to die.
Isaacson didn’t think, he just threw her one of the spheres. “Here!” he cried, lobbing the ball high and wide, so that she had to run for it. And as she ran one way, he ran the other. She could not watch him and the ball both; she certainly could not aim and shoot—Isaacson ran in a frenzy of wild hope. Having once been a respectable starting forward on the CalTech team, he thought there was every chance he had sunk the ball in that eel tank, where she’d have to fish for it. “Home free,” he gasped. “Please, dear Jesus…”
He was so flush with adrenaline that he didn’t know at first that it was a Teflon-coated 9mm North Korean-made bullet that punched him in the ribs; he didn’t hear the gun at all. He thought perhaps he had been hit with something else, anything, and kept running. Then he thought it was a cramp. Then he found the blood and knew: She was coming.
Trying to staunch the bleeding as he ran, searching for a place to hide, Isaacson ducked into a low-tech industrial complex: a maze of small workshops making knock-offs of Gucci and Chanel leather products, as well as quantities of “eel-skin” goods (he fleetingly, empathetically thought of the eel in the bag). They were obviously not operating at peak—there was only a handful of people around; mostly women doing vinyl piecework. It occurred to him that anyone engaged in these shady enterprises would probably be reluctant to get involved. Chances were that if he made a big commotion they would give him away to his pursuer, intentionally or not.
He passed a loading dock for one of the larger manufacturers. Several delivery trucks stood waiting at the platform, loaded with express-mail packages bound for America. There was no one in sight. Protecting both his wound and the two remaining terbium flasks, Isaacson heaved himself up into a partially loaded truck, making a cave out of boxes before sinking into exhausted limbo. The stench of epoxy masked the smell of his blood and sweat. As he was passing out, he read and reread the labels all around him, comforted somehow by the fact that they were printed in English. It made him feel less alone.
They read:
MADE EXCLUSIVELY FOR HERCULES ENHANCEMENT PRODUCTS, USA, BY SANG-DONG MFG LTD, ROK. HANDLE WITH CARE.
≥≠≤
The streak of blood down his side turned ice-cold when the tent flap opened, waking him to misery. At first Isaacson thought he was still in the truck, but then he remembered that he had fled the truck hours ago, when he heard people being shot in the warehouse. Questioned and shot, one after another. After that, everything was a blur of running and running in the dark until at last he collapsed in this soju stand.
He couldn’t see with his face mashed against the table, but he remembered who was doing the mashing: Her. So who was entering the tent now? Not daring to hope, Isaacson felt his attacker tense as the intruder demanded, “Hello? Hey, what are you doing to him? Oh my God!” An American!
“What is it?” cried someone else in English—an American woman.
“I don’t know, stay back! Run to the hotel and have them call the police! Just do it, Karen!”
Seizing the distraction, Isaacson’s fumbling hands found the neck of a big brown bottle of OB beer. He had been on a courtesy tour of the OB brewery only a few days before, along with the rest of the nuclear delegation (most of whom had embarrassed him by availing themselves a little too freely of the free samples), and suddenly he felt that this was significant—a portent. Since finding Yahweh, Isaacson’s world was rife with omens and other manifestations of the Almighty…of which this slim chance was clearly one. He swung the bottle as hard as he could against his assailant’s head. The glass didn’t break as in the movies, but it seemed to do the trick: for an instant her claws let up and he spun clear, wildly swinging.
“Yeaaaagh!” he screamed.
The bottle connected with something hard—a glasslike object in his attacker’s clothing—and both of them gasped, frozen in terror as if perched on a landmine. When nothing happened, Isaacson broke first, scrambling across the table while the other calmly raised her small black pistol, aimed, and shot him twice in the back. Mortally wounded, he still didn’t stop, but squirmed hideously away and out of the tent like a maimed animal.
The assassin was prevented from shooting again by Manny Lopes, who finally found the presence of mind to do something: He grabbed for her gun and inadvertently took a tiger by the tail—in a blur of motion he found himself slammed breathlessly across the table, skull clanging like a bell as he stared cross-eyed down the smoldering barrel. His bladder let go.
“Damn Yankees,” squealed the fierce woman, sounding like an unholy Betty Boop. In throwing Manny down, she had torn off his coat sleeve, and now she shook it in his face. “All the time sticking your nose in where it don’t belong!”
Then something happened. Manny would never be able to satisfactorily describe it later—it had the qualities of a hallucination, as when he spiked fevers as a child and could barely drag himself to the bathroom, slogging as through waist-deep wet cement: clammy pajamas, baking breath, feet of lead anchoring his gigantic, queasily floating head.
First there was a clunk as something heavy fell out of the scary woman’s jacket and onto the table. It bounced once and there was a crisp pop! like an exploding flashbulb. Manny flinched, assuming he was shot. Time stopped for a millisecond, shuddering on its sprockets, then instead of a bullet he felt himself struck by what seemed to be a wave of invisible slush; a dense, wet avalanche that swept over and through him as though his body were a sieve, soaking him to the back of his soul and drowning him in its harsh metallic roar.
At the same time he had the strange, violent sensation of speed; that he was rising in the air—floating right up and out of the tent into the night sky and gratefully leaving the gun and the killer behind. Perhaps life itself. His senses blurred: the very Earth seemed to contract beneath him like a blanket being drawn down a hole, and strobing forks of electricity flashed all around, briefly illuminating rolling combers of smoke that slowly spread outward like the rings of a tremendous bulls-eye. The punishing strain and noise reached an awful crescendo and then abruptly ceased, leaving low ripples of thunder and a settling mist. At the center of it all, Manny lay still.