Arthur Livingston could not have told you exactly how many women died while in his employ, it wasn’t the sort of thing a man like him kept records on. And honestly, nobody ever asked. A client looking to enjoy an evening at the club with a beautiful escort doesn’t want to know how she got there, any more than he wants to go tour the slaughterhouse where his steak was made. The twenty-first-century consumer doesn’t particularly care how ugly things get on the back end, as long as a beautiful piece of meat winds up on the plate.
But it was this ugly back end of the process that resulted in Arthur Livingston meeting Will Blackwater, Andre Knox, and Budd Billingsley. This was fifteen years prior to Zoey’s tumble off the roof in Tabula Ra$a, right around when she was entering elementary school and, for the first time, hearing the rich kids tell her she smelled bad. Arthur had been at a bar, watching a news report about the impending war in Korea and saw a tragic story about the poor souls trying to escape the country, and the unscrupulous human traffickers who were scooping up terrified female refugees and selling them into sex slavery abroad. Tragic, that is, because Arthur wasn’t the one doing it.
Fortunately, Arthur had friends in South Korea. And also North Korea. And China. And Russia. He very quickly slapped together the Arthur Livingston Foundation, a supposed international aid organization dedicated to handing out food, water, and emergency medical care to the desperate North Korean refugees. Grateful people were fed, clothed, and healed while Arthur’s people wove through the camps, secretly offering the most attractive of the female refugees safe passage to the United States, complete with very authentic-looking documents.
That wasn’t as simple as it sounds, of course—most jobs aren’t. The entire Korean Peninsula at the time was in that proverbial moment in which you realize your nausea is going to turn into a puke and that there is nothing to be done about it. A brutal insurgency was gnawing away at the foundations of the North Korean regime and the mad dictator in charge swore that before he ever relinquished power, he would launch his cache of nuclear warheads and turn the south into a radioactive wasteland. So Arthur didn’t like to visit the area himself, he’d just do a quick round trip every few months in order to get himself photographed in front of some starving children.
To be clear, Arthur’s promises of safe passage and freedom for the girls were absolutely true. It’s just that the type of work he had in mind for them once they reached the Land of the Free was probably not what they imagined. Or maybe it was—just because they came from an isolated police state didn’t mean they were naïve. As far as Livingston was concerned, everybody won. The girls got safely away from a country that was about to turn into a meat grinder, and Livingston’s wealthy clients back in America got the stunning “Japanese” girls who were constantly in demand among a certain crowd (namely, those who had made their money in the tech industry). The only downsides to this extremely lucrative trade, as far as Arthur was concerned, was that the long plane rides were very tiring and the process of negotiating bribes with three countries’ worth of bureaucrats was very tedious. Well, that and the fact that if he was caught in-country, he would immediately be executed for the crime of human trafficking, and the news would trigger an international incident that could very likely result in nuclear war and a subsequent chain reaction that would render all human life extinct from the universe forever. But of course no investment is completely free of risk.
A few months in, the Chinese clamped down on North Korea’s northern border, resulting in a rather ugly incident in which six of Livingston’s girls were burned to death inside a truck as it crossed North Korea’s hilariously named Sino-Korea Friendship Bridge. Arthur didn’t skip a beat—he tracked down a friend in Nagasaki, Japan, who ran an underwater tourism business on the island of Tsushima, and asked him if he could buy his submarine. Within a week he was back in business, transporting the girls under the Yellow Sea, puttering toward South Korea past schools of exotic fish and underwater mines. He figured if the government ever seized the sub, he’d buy some big weather balloons and just float the girls across the DMZ. Or find a way across the other northern border, into Russia. Arthur Livingston, you see, lived by a very simple slogan: “There is always a way.”
It’s not like the authorities never caught wind of what was happening. Livingston was useful to the regime, because it liked making a big show of how it was working with international aid groups to assist the poor refugees who were suffering under the senseless rebellion. And he was useful to every official who relied on his bribes to stay afloat. For example, at one point an ambitious young officer from the regime’s Ministry of Public Security started asking after two dozen females who had vanished from one of the camps overnight. A week later, the man was found in a parking lot having tragically committed suicide by shooting himself in the head four times. Arthur didn’t shoot the man, or order the man shot—at the time he was in Utah, pitching investors on the idea of a luxury hotel with an all-nude female staff. Arthur had never personally killed any man, in fact. But as far as he was concerned, if you stood in his way, you made your own choice. The market is a machine, if any man is so foolish as to try to stop the works from turning, he should not be surprised when he gets ground up in its gears.
So, it was with great alarm that, on his last ever trip to North Korea, Arthur was snatched out of his hotel in Kaesong and stuffed into the back of a waiting sedan. Three gruff soldiers drove him out of the city, none giving even the slightest reaction to Arthur’s lavish offers of a lifetime of wealth in exchange for simply telling their superiors that he had not been home. Arthur was driven to an airfield that had been blasted into a cratered Hellscape by insurgents, the sedan passing between the twisted and charred carcasses of fighter aircraft that never made it off the ground. The car stopped outside a hangar so riddled with bullet holes that it looked like it was coated with poppy seeds, and Arthur was roughly escorted inside.
Waiting there, to Arthur’s surprise, had been an American man in his fifties. He was not in uniform, but could be tagged as military from half a mile away—his posture, haircut, and jawline would have made him look one hundred percent marine even if he’d been wearing a dainty sundress. Arthur’s Korean escorts shoved him forward and the marine asked them to wait at the entrance while he and Arthur took a walk. Together they strode into the building, pausing to step over a blackened object that it took Arthur a moment to realize was a charred skeleton, frozen in the position in which the victim had been trying to crawl away from the fire. There was a greasy pool under the skeleton—a dried puddle of melted fat.
The marine said, “Mr. Livingston, it is my understanding that if I need someone moved across the border, you’re the man to talk to.”
“You know my name. What do I call you?”
“Call me Randy. I’ve always liked that name.”
“Okay, Randy. Am I off base here or are you not supposed to be in this country?”
“That depends on who you ask, doesn’t it? There are three Americans being held in Kaesong. We need to get them out.”
“Soldiers?”
“Not officially, no.”
“CIA?”
“Civilian contractors. Doing work on behalf of our government.”
The man handed Arthur a tablet displaying three photos and a list of names, along with their height and weight. There was no other information.
Arthur glanced at it. “On behalf of what branch?” The man didn’t answer. Arthur asked, “Well, can I ask what they were doing, at least?”
“Preserving freedom and looking out for American interests abroad.”
Arthur grunted and said, “‘Will Blackwater’? That’s about the fakest name I’ve heard. You can’t let operatives pick their own aliases, Randy. You wind up with a bunch of guys named ‘Max Strong’ and ‘Nathan Steel.’”
“The three are scheduled to be transported to Pyongyang at oh five hundred hours tomorrow, and then will be publicly executed. We intend to get them out of there before that happens. And that of course is what brings you here.”
“Why do you need me? Just call in an air strike.”
“The United States of America is not officially involved in the Korean insurgency in any way, and will not officially get involved until the moment a North Korean soldier, aircraft, or artillery shell crosses the demilitarized zone.”
“Ah. Of course.”
They had reached the other end of the hangar. Out back, a pillar of black smoke was still billowing from a crater in the pavement, underground fuel tanks that had probably been burning for months.
Arthur said, “Well, I have a vessel.”
“I know. At Ongjin. A glass-bottom submarine you’ve dressed up like a fishing boat. Very cute.”
“Bring your people to the docks and, for a reasonable fee, we’ll ferry them down to Incheon or wherever you want them.”
“I’m afraid it won’t be that easy. We have negotiated an exchange, under the table, with the officer in charge of transporting the prisoners. The three of them will be ‘killed’ in an escape attempt, but the bodies he presents to his superiors will be substitutes. His fee is that he wants his daughter back.”
“You’re saying that like I know who his daughter is. Do I?”
“Sixteen-year-old girl named Choi, you transported her out of the country six months ago.”
“Oh. Well, then, at this very moment she’s probably currently in a club in Utah, pretending to be a geisha and laughing at some American salesman’s terrible jokes.”
“So you know where she is, then. We have less than twenty-four hours. You need to get her on a plane, bring her back here, get her across the border, and back into the hands of her father.”
“That would be the very father she just risked her life to escape, in the country that’s about to be torn apart by war.”
“It is unfortunate for her, to be certain. One of a million unfortunate fates that are going to be met within the borders of this godforsaken patch of land, no doubt.” The man glanced around at the carnage of the ruined airfield. “You know, my great-grandfather died here. Truman should have let MacArthur drop the nukes, like he wanted. Do we have an arrangement?”
“What happens if I say no?”
“If you say yes, you will have the gratitude of the United States government. Something a man in your position is bound to need between now and the day he is laid to rest.”
“Interesting how you turned that question around.”
“These three operatives are close colleagues and friends of mine. They’ve been doing extremely high-risk work in-country for the last year. If I have to stand by and watch them be executed on state-run television because you didn’t want to give up one of the pieces of meat you buy and sell like a street vendor doling out kebabs…” he shrugged. “I’m not officially here. You’re not officially here. And people disappear from this place on an hourly basis. Your fate will go unrecorded by history.”
Arthur glanced around at the cavernous, ruined building, thin shafts of light slicing down through the bullet wounds above them.
“Do I even want to know where you’re going to get three substitute bodies to stand in for your dead prisoners?”
“I forgot to mention. We’ll also need you to find us three bodies roughly matching the build of the three operatives.”
“Jesus.”
“Freedom isn’t free, Mr. Livingston.”
In the end, the choice was no choice at all. Arthur made his phone calls. A lie had gotten the officer’s daughter, Choi, onto a private plane at Salt Lake. When she realized where she was going, she started screaming. It took three men to restrain her. She tried to get off the plane when it landed to refuel in Los Angeles. She tried again in Tokyo. She talked about what her father had done to her, and what he had promised he would do to her if she ever tried to leave. None of that mattered, of course. The market is a machine, and these are just the noises the gears make when they turn.
Meanwhile, Arthur paid a local man to provide him with the three stand-in bodies, and he delivered in less than twelve hours. Arthur didn’t ask where they came from, or whether or not they were alive when the man found them. It was a war zone, and the price of life had dipped into negative territory—many of the citizens were simply worth more dead. The market is what it is.
The “attack” on the convoy transporting the American hostages occurred right on schedule, though maybe “attack” shouldn’t be in sarcasm quotes considering that, as far as Arthur could tell, thirteen real people had been killed in the assault, and ten more had been maimed. One guy got his legs blown off. Arthur assumed that none of the victims knew that their deaths were intended to be a form of very convincing method acting to carry out a CIA ruse.
After all of that, when the deadline for him to set sail arrived, no one showed up at the docks. It would be nearly five hours before the three American captives showed up to be hustled onto Arthur’s submersible “fishing” vessel, two of them with serious wounds that he did not have the equipment on board to tend to. And so as they sailed away, a gruff Texan named Budd tried to put pressure on a spurting artery that had drenched his left leg, while the blue-eyed “Will Blackwater” was wearing a shirt doused in his own blood. As the vessel sank under the waves, a strapping young black man with a goatee and big brown eyes watched nervously as the water covered the windows and said, “It’s supposed to do that, right?”
Will sat next to Arthur at the controls, holding a compress against a freely bleeding head wound, and shook Arthur’s hand with fingers that were slick with fresh blood.
Arthur stared down at his blood-smeared palm and said, “Pleased to meet you.”
The man said, “When we get a free moment, I want to know how you managed to pull this off.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do.”
Arthur thought for a moment, and tried to tally up the dead bodies and ruined lives that had pried this group loose from the People’s Republic of North Korea, and lost count. He surely didn’t know about all of them anyway. And it didn’t matter. He had a job, that job was going to get done, and that was that. You get sentimental and you might as well walk away. Go sit in a cubicle and run out the clock until you die.
Arthur stared into the murky waters churning outside the portal window, wiped off blood onto his three-hundred-dollar slacks and muttered, “There is always a way.”
So anyway, no, Arthur couldn’t tell you how many of the girls he squirreled away from the Korean peninsula and other parts of the world either never made it to America, or if they did, never made it to old age. Statistically, the moment a woman accepts money for sex, her chances of being murdered shoot up five thousand percent—a woman who stays in that line of work has a life expectancy of thirty-four. But, he would say, would any of them have been better off where they were? Whether they were born in Pyongyang or Pennsylvania, they didn’t wind up in that life unless they were out of prospects, and Arthur kept them clean and comfortable right up until the day they stopped being profitable. The market is the market, and it’s not his fault the market says young women are cheap and plentiful and spoil faster than green bananas.
And as for Zoey Ashe, well, it simply wasn’t all that unusual to find a twenty-two-year-old female dead on the pavement outside some Livingston property. It just didn’t happen on this particular day.