If you're going to play a part, you must play it completely.

Tonight, the woman she'd nicknamed Little Eva was back. The lithe woman watered her drinks with a lot of ice; obviously a health nut, obviously not accustomed to drinking, obviously not drowning her sorrows alone but nursing her scotch while she kept a close eye and ear on the piano player.

Kim decided to give her something to chew on.

She rolled from "The Worst That Could Happen" into "Nobody Does It Better"; Kim always used songs from movies to send her messages. She played the first note of the second measure, a "C," an octave lower than it was written. She trilled the "A" below middle "C" in the third measure, then played the entire twentieth measure without the pedal.

Anyone who knew the music well would recognize the discrepancies. The "C" and "A" were wrong, and a pedal measure corresponded to a letter of the alphabet: in this case twenty, or "T."

She'd spelled CAT for the KCIA, and wondered if they'd get it; there was no letter frequency ratio, nothing a cryptanalyst could hook onto in the way of a regular substitution or transposition cipher. Kim watched as her man Nam left, his departure noted by Little Eva. The counterintelligence agent didn't go after him; maybe someone else did. Nam said he never saw anyone following him home, but he was old and half blind and when he came here he drank most of what she paid him. She could just imagine the contortions the KCIA went through trying to figure out how Nam and her other letter boxes sent their messages.

It was almost a shame to take money for this-money from the North as well as a salary to play here. If she were back in her hometown of Anju, north of Pyongyang, she'd be living like an empress.

If I were back home- Who knew when that would be? After what she had done, she was lucky to be alive. But she would go back one day, when she had enough money or had her fill of the self-righteous South or learned something of the whereabouts of Han.

She finished playing the James Bond song and segued into a honky-tonk version of "Java." The Al Hirt song was her favorite, the first one she remembered hearing as a child, and she played it every night. She often wondered if the KCIA thought it had something to do with her code: the next song after it was the one with the message, or maybe information was hidden in the little improv she did with the right hand in the second section. She couldn't even begin to imagine what the intelligence minds on Chonggyechonno were coming up with. And at the moment, she couldn't care less.

Ba-da da-da da-da