Choi waved a dismissive hand. “Yes, of course. But that doesn’t help us now, does it?”

The man shook his head sheepishly. “No, sir.”

“Do we have any other options available to us? Something that would at least disrupt their planned summit?”

“Did you have something in mind, sir?” one of the generals asked.

Choi suggested, “Another nuclear test, perhaps.”

A civilian technocrat from the nuclear directorate answered. “We might be able to rush one forward, but we risk a failure by doing so, and that would damage our technical credibility in the international community. But if we succeeded it would only reinforce the concerns of the Americans and their lackeys.”

“Agreed.” Choi folded his hands, thinking.

The anonymous man in the rear of the room fought back a smile. The chairman was putting on quite a theatrical performance.

The room sat in silence. No one dared speak until prompted by the dictator.

“This is quite perplexing, isn’t it?” Choi finally said. “The capitalists aren’t stupid. They must surely have gone through a similar exercise as we are going through right now. Thanks to our valiant armed forces, they are deterred from significant military action. And another economic embargo won’t amount to much in the long run. They must know these things. So why have the summit? A failed summit is terrible propaganda. They must have a plan to destroy us. But how? What do they know that we don’t?”

The room waited for his answer.

“Do I have to do all the thinking? Our enemies are set to strangle us. Speak up!”

Shocked by the rare display of emotion, the officers and ministers immediately conferred among one another briefly, then silenced again, confounded.

The anonymous young man stood up, his chair scraping on the concrete floor. Every head turned in unison.

“Chairman, gentlemen, I have a slightly different view of the situation,” he began.

The heads around the table turned back toward Choi. Their quizzical faces all asked the same question: Who is this interloper?

“Gentlemen, this is Deputy Ri from the General Administrative Services Directorate.”

This answered nobody’s question. No one had heard of the obscure department. The only way anyone in the room could have known about it was to have memorized the organizational chart of the State Commission for Railroad Construction. They would have needed a photographic memory to recall that near the very bottom of that extensive document was a row of organizational boxes stemming beneath the machine tools division. Further beneath that division was the lubricants and petroleum distillates department, administered by a subunit simply abbreviated as GASD.

In reality, GASD was one of the most important agencies in the vast North Korean intelligence apparatus. GASD was so obscure that its existence was unknown even to the head of the Ministry of State Security. This is why Western intelligence agencies had no idea of its existence. It reported directly to Choi.