To get beyond the crisis, Slott knew he had to put his personal feelings aside, but it was difficult, very difficult.
He took a deep breath, then used the secure line to call Corrine Alston.
“This is Corrine.”
“The e-mail you sent over, we’ve translated it,” he told her. “It has flight coordinates, not an actual base. But we have a reasonable idea where it would have had to start from.”
“It appears so. The course here would take the aircraft to Japan. As it happens, it’s almost precisely the course a North Korean defector took a decade ago, bringing his MiG-27 west.”
“Did the message come from North Korea?” Corrine asked.
“Ultimately? It’s possible. We’re not sure.”
The National Security Agency had intercepted a similar e-mail to someone in the Japanese consulate in Seoul a few hours ago. Tracing the e-mails’ origin was not as easy as people thought, however, since someone who knew what he or she was doing could employ a number of tricks to disguise the true path. There were enough arguments for and against authenticity in this case that the NSA had held off on an official verdict. At the very least, it was an elaborate fake—so elaborate that it had to be taken seriously.
“Can I ask where this came from?” said Slott, trying his best to keep his voice level.
“Gordon Tewilliger got it from a constituent. He called me over to his office about a half hour ago.”
“Why you?”
“I don’t know. He wanted me to give it to you—to the Agency—and to alert the president. He’s opposed to the treaty, though. So I don’t know his angle precisely. It’s political, obviously.”
Slott wasn’t convinced that the e-mail had simply dropped into her lap. But there was no point in pursuing it. If Corrine Alston—if the president—was running some sort of backdoor clandestine service, he wasn’t in a position to stop it.
“We should share this with the South Koreans and the Japanese.”
“By all means.”
“Who is it who’s defecting?” asked Corrine. “Does it say?”
“It’s not just that they’re going to defect,” explained Slott. “This mentions financial records of the leader. Presumably, those are foreign bank accounts belonging to Kim Jong-Il. That’s immensely valuable information. Far more valuable than any aircraft the pilot will take with him.”
“That’s good.”
She didn’t sound like someone making an end run around him, thought Slott. That was what was so damn annoying about her. She seemed so . . . not naive but up-front. Honest.
The best liars were like that.
“I’m going to attend the National Security Council meeting this evening,” said Slott. “There may be more information by then.”
“I’ll see you there.”
“Yup,” he said, hanging up.