The Expediter (14 page)

“Good flight?” the pilot asked.

“A short flight,” McGarvey replied. “Thanks for the lift.”

A tech sergeant in flight-line coveralls helped McGarvey out of the aircraft and down the ladder where a brigadier general was waiting at the bottom. He didn’t look happy, nor did the young, slightly built Korean woman dressed casually in blue jeans, white blouse, and Nikes, standing next to him.

“Tom Handleman—division commander,” the general said. He
didn’t bother to shake hands. “I hope you’re here to help straighten out the situation, I’d just as soon not go to war.”

“Let’s hope not,” McGarvey said. He turned to the woman. “Captain Ok-Lee?”

“Yes,” she said, shaking hands. “Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Director.” Her English was only slightly accented.

“Former director,” McGarvey said. “I’m here as a civilian.”

“Right.”

The tech sergeant got McGarvey’s bag from a compartment in the belly of the fuselage and brought it over, then helped him remove the flight suit, boots, and bladder bag.

“Will you be needing anything else on base?” Handleman asked.

“I don’t think so,” McGarvey said.

Ok-Lee drove a C-class Mercedes very fast and expertly in heavy traffic into the big city. The morning was bright and warm, but a haze of smoke hung over the industrial complexes, and curled along the Hangang River busy with commercial traffic. Every second vehicle on the highway seemed to be a van or truck of some sort. Seoul was a prosperous place, everything happening at a breakneck pace.

“I’ve booked you at the Westin Chosun downtown in Gwanghwamun,” the NIS agent told him.

“I’m not going to do much sightseeing,” McGarvey said.

Ok-Lee gave him an odd look. “Why exactly have you come here, Mr. McGarvey?”

“To help stop World War III, if it’s not already too late.”

“CIA hasn’t given us anything worth a damn,” Ok-Lee said. “And I’m not afraid to share with you that we’re at a complete loss what to do next, although the suggestion has been made to try to get someone up there and eliminate Kim Jong Il.”

“The NIS has tried that before.”

“More than once,” Ok-Lee said bitterly. “Maybe we’ll get lucky this time.”

They drove for a while in silence, the industrial parks in the outskirts giving way to apartment buildings and occasionally American-style shopping centers.

“What’s the mood here?” McGarvey asked. “Anybody running for the hills?”

“Just a trickle. But we’ve been resigned to the fact that the crazy bastards have nuclear weapons and rockets, and there’s not a lot we can do about it.” She glanced over at McGarvey. “I hope you brought something we can use.”

“A name.”

Ok-Lee’s eyes narrowed. “Are you telling me it’s true that one of our own people made the hit?”

“Probably two of them, a man and a woman,” McGarvey said. “The guy is still in Pyongyang, but the woman presumably made it out.”

“Give me her name and we’ll have her in custody by lunch,” Ok-Lee said, but then she frowned. “Unless you’re telling me that they were actually working for your people.”

“No, but there’s more to it than that,” McGarvey said. “I want to find her with as little fuss as possible.”

“And then what?”

“Then we’ll have a little chat about who they were really working for.”

The Westin, built in 1914, was Seoul’s first Western hotel, and had been kept up-to-date through the years. McGarvey had been debriefed there a few years ago after an assignment in Japan, and then had spent a couple of days lounging around until it was time to go home.

Ok-Lee flashed her credentials to the bellman and ordered him to hold her car. She directed McGarvey across the broad, old-fashioned lobby to the bank of elevators. “You’re already checked in,” she told him.

“Under my own name?”

“Any reason why not?”

“Not yet,” McGarvey said.

His top-floor suite looked to the west toward city hall and the broad, traffic-choked boulevards that cut through the modern skyscrapers. It could have been just about any large city anywhere in the world, a place in which to lead an anonymous life below anyone’s radar.

McGarvey checked out the rooms including the palatial bathroom, as well as the phones and table lamps, but so far as he could tell the suite had not been bugged.

Ok-Lee watched him until he was done. “No one knows you’re here.”

McGarvey smiled. “You do, and so does your boss.”

“We want you to succeed,” she said.

“Their names are Huk Soon and Huk Kim, former NIS snipers, or at least they went through the training and had commissions before they resigned,” McGarvey said.

He opened his bag on the bed and took out a small leather satchel about the size of a dopp kit as Ok-Lee made a call on her cell phone and said something in rapid-fire Korean, only the Huks’ names understandable to him.

Her eyes widened slightly when McGarvey pulled his 9 mm Tactical SG Compact Wilson pistol and Slimline quick-draw holster from the satchel and attached it to his belt at the small of his back, but she went to the desk where she quickly wrote something on a piece of hotel stationery, then hung up, and pocketed the phone.

“If you fire your weapon anywhere in South Korea you will be in some serious shit, Mr. McGarvey, no matter why you came here.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” McGarvey promised. “Did you find out where she lives?”

Ok-Lee wanted to pursue the issue, but she nodded tightly. “Where did you get these names?”

“I can’t tell you that now, you wouldn’t believe me anyway, Captain,” McGarvey said. “Shall we go find her?”

She said something in Korean half under her breath.

“That didn’t sound nice,” McGarvey said.

“It wasn’t,” she replied.

Kim had never used the emergency number to contact Alexandar so she had no idea how long it would take for him to get back to her. But it seemed like hours since she had made the call, and the confines of the third-floor apartment were getting to her. She felt as if she were just as much a prisoner here as Soon was up north.

For the tenth time in the last hour she went to the window and looked down at the street. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary to her. This was a small, old-fashioned neighborhood straight north of downtown, and just a few blocks from the Sungsin Women’s University where she’d gotten her degree in political science. She almost wished she were back there now, her life had been simpler then.

The streets here were narrow and lined with ground-floor shops on both sides, and apartments in the second and third stories above.

It was hard to imagine that Alexandar wouldn’t contact her. She’d gone online and checked their Swiss account. The final payment of $750,000 had already been deposited, which meant that he wasn’t dissatisfied.

But there was no telling how he was going to react when she told him that Soon had been taken off the plane in Pyongyang.

Once on a Saturday morning in bed, after they had made love, she’d asked Soon what would happen if one of them were ever to be arrested.

“All depends who arrested us and for what,” he’d told her. “Maybe it would be a good-looking meter maid in Paris, because I forgot to pay a parking fine. We’d go back to her place so I could bargain for my freedom.”

He was laughing at her, and she slapped his chest. “I’m serious.”

“Let’s deal with that if and when it ever comes up,” he’d said. “Now I’m hungry.”

Soon joked about almost everything, but now it had come up, and she didn’t know what to do.

She’d refused to turn on the radio or television, and everything outside seemed normal. But she and Soon had been certain that the assassination of a Chinese general in Pyongyang, apparently by a pair of local cops, would create an international stir.

She got dressed in a pair of jeans, a light sweatshirt, and flip-flops and let herself out of the apartment. The old woman who managed the building was sweeping the vestibule and she looked up and grinned when Kim came down the stairs.

“Mr. Huk not back with you?” she asked. “I not see him.”

“No, he had some more business in Nagasaki,” Kim said, her heart in her throat. She wanted to cry.

“Maybe best we all get out of here,” the old woman said, but she shook her head and went back to her sweeping.

Kim wanted to ask the old woman what she meant, but she was afraid she already knew.

Outside she started down the street toward the market a half block away to buy a packet of cigarettes, maybe a bottle of wine, and something to eat for supper. And a newspaper. The tiny store run by an old man with a long mustache and a tiny black hat was on the corner, newspapers and magazines displayed on racks in front.

From across the street she could read the blaring headlines:
WAR IMMINENT
in Seoul’s largest newspaper, the
Hankyoreh Shimbun.
ALERT
! the
Gook-Min Ilbo
warned,
CHINA RATTLES HER SABERS
! The headlines were also plastered across the front page of the English-language
Seoul Times.

A small three-wheeled mini-truck, belching smoke, rattled past and Kim crossed to the market, where she stopped in front of the newspaper rack, unable to help herself from staring.

“Very bad news, Mrs.,” the old man said from the doorway. “You want newspaper?”

Kim looked up, startled. She hastily picked one of the papers randomly then went inside the shop where she bought a pack of Marlboros, a bottle of Australian Merlot, and one of the rice bowls with noodle soup and fish that the old man’s wife made fresh each morning.

“Where’s Mister, haven’t seen him for more than two weeks?”

“He’s still away on business,” Kim said absently, paying for the things.

“Too bad.”

Outside she recrossed the street and headed back to her apartment. She wanted to get home so that she could read the newspaper stories to find out if anyone suspected the shooters had been anyone other than North Korean cops.

It was perfectly clear to her now what Alexandar wanted to accomplish by the assassination of General Ho. But why? It made no sense that the Russians would want to foment trouble between China and North Korea. Only the U.S. could possibly benefit by the hit.

She was momentarily stopped in her tracks. Soon believed that Alexandar was only a middleman, an expediter, who did nothing more than hire shooters. A freelancer. And the CIA was notorious for hiring foreign talent to do some of its dirty work.

A C-class Mercedes passed and Kim wouldn’t have paid much attention except that it pulled up and parked in front of her apartment building.

Her heart skipped a beat and her knees went weak. She crossed to the other side of the street where she sat down at the one small table in front of the neighborhood kimchi shop, as a slightly built Korean woman in jeans got out from the driver’s side. A moment later a tall, somewhat husky man wearing a sport coat and khaki slacks got out
from the other side. It was obvious to her, even at this distance, that he was an American.

They went inside as the owner’s daughter came out of the shop. “May I help you?”

“I’d like some tea, please,” Kim said.

The girl went back into the shop, leaving Kim to stare at the car’s license plate. She couldn’t quite make out the numbers and letters, but the plate was slate-gray, federal government.

The woman was NIS and the man was CIA. She was convinced of it. And now she had no idea what she was going to do.

On the strength of Ok-Lee’s NIS credentials, the old woman who managed the building let them into the Huks’ apartment, although she didn’t like it and she wasn’t shy about letting them know how she felt with a steady stream of Korean.

“What was she saying?” McGarvey asked when they got inside. He’d drawn his pistol and stood in the entryway.

“That they’re her favorite tenants,” Ok-Lee said. “That they’ve been away, and if the government was paying attention to business as it should be, we wouldn’t find ourselves in the mess we’re in.”

“Somebody came home,” McGarvey said pointing to the hanging bag lying on the floor.