Pak was still chewing things over. I could see his jaws working. The prolonged silence only intensified the cold.

"It could have been a Swiss gene that impelled our guest up that mountain like a goat in this weather," I said, trying to keep some words aloft. Maybe they would push the air around, keep it from freezing solid. Maybe a touch of anger would help. Anger was heat in another form, after all. Pak didn't join in. Normally, he would follow up my opening, keep things moving. Fine, I thought, let him come up with something better to get us out of this mess.

Or was it not a mess? Did someone else know exactly who this fellow was? It wouldn't be the first time someone higher up left us hanging out to dry. I looked at the foreigner. Now there was no choice. Bad place for an interrogation or not, we had to find out something more about him. We needed answers before we got back to Pyongyang.

There is no sense questioning a man when you are wearing a hat, however, especially a hat with earflaps. It undermines all sense of authority. I took off my hat, and regretted it instantly. "Why do you wander around all the time? I've never seen anything like it. When it rains, you go for a walk. When it's freezing, you go for a drive. Now it's storming, it's miserable, it's getting worse by the minute, and what do you do? You go mountain climbing? What the hell did you think you'd find up there?" The wind screamed at the door, pulled it open and banged it shut again.

The temperature was still dropping. I didn't want to be in this storm another minute. We might die, literally where we stood. They'd discover us months later, a threesome frozen in place, a perfect revolutionary tableau to be labeled "Interrogation of an Enemy Spy" and then visited by lines of schoolchildren ever after.