Just before the corridor passed through to the domestic G terminal, Pak opened a door that led down a short corridor and out to the BART terminal. No one was in sight, and hefting his piece of stolen luggage he stepped out and walked down to the terminal. Only a half-dozen passengers were waiting for the next train into the city, and no one paid Pak the slightest attention as he bought a ticket from one of the kiosks using a credit card under his work name of Joseph Yee, a businessman from San Francisco.
The train arrived a few minutes later and Pak got on with the others for the twenty-minute ride into the city. Looking out the window as they left the terminal, he was struck by the notion that he could simply get off the train downtown, and lose himself in the city. Or, perhaps he could telephone the FBI or CIA and ask for political asylum in exchange for what he knew about the assassination of General Ho. He would certainly get their attention because he would be considered a high-value intelligence asset.
But no one would believe him. Kim Jong Il was insane and Pak Hae was part of the scheme. He was here in the States to spread disinformation. It’s what Washington wanted to believe. The West had blinders on when it came to North Korea. Dear Leader was certifiably insane, but he was not stupid as most everyone over here believed, even though he had played the U.S. and her allies as fools for years. He was a master of the game. From time to time he would back off the nuclear issue, allowing inspectors into the country to see what he wanted them to see, but only long enough to get some much-needed fuel oil, medical supplies, and grain, before he would kick them out again until it was time to reopen the negotiations.
This had been going on for a very long time, and yet no one over here got it. Nor did he think anyone here would get it this time. Except for the man he had come to see.
He had reached the conclusion that the only help North Korea was going to get—help that would be believed by Beijing—would have to come from her chief enemy, the United States. Even as the thought had first come to mind, he’d wanted to dismiss it as utterly foolish, with absolutely no chance of success.
Pak got off at San Bruno, the first stop, and went directly over to a kiosk where he got a ticket for the train back to the airport, due to leave in five minutes.
The American would have to be influential, someone of the stature of a Jimmy Carter, with the on-the-ground experience of a Colin Powell, the legendary intelligence skills of an Allen Dulles, and the ruthlessness and brains to see both sides of an issue. He would have to be a risk-taker. Someone who’d always thought out of the box.
When Pak had returned home from college in the U.S., he’d earned his masters and Ph.D. at Kim Il Sung University in the history, philosophy, structure, and notable personages of the Western intelligence apparatuses. Especially in the United States.
Four men, beginning with Allen Dulles, America’s first true spymaster, had the most influence on how the U.S. looked at and dealt with the world from the standpoint of intelligence-gathering activities. In Pak’s estimation, besides Dulles, the others included William Colby and Donald Suthland Powers. All three of those men were dead.
He had come to the United States to ask the fourth man to help avert a nuclear war.
It was a few minutes past nine thirty by the time he was back at terminal G, and made his way to the U.S. Airways counter. He was booked on flight 784, which left at 10:45, and would arrive in Tampa, Florida, first thing in the morning where he had reserved a rental car for the short drive down to Sarasota.
Now that he had come this far, he wasn’t at all sure what sort of a reception he would get, except that he could very well be shot on sight.
SIXTEEN
Kirk McGarvey and his wife Kathleen were finishing a late breakfast, early lunch by the pool behind their house on Casey Key a few miles south of Sarasota when the telephone rang. It was nine in the morning of what promised to be a lovely early fall Florida day, after a long, hot, humid summer.
They had decided to sail their forty-two-foot Island Packet south to Key West, and then up the East Coast and off to the Bahamas once the hurricane season was officially over next month. It seemed like years since they’d been anywhere together. Between McGarvey’s “projects” as Katy called them and his work at USF’s New College teaching Voltaire, plus Katy’s fund-raising efforts for three major charities plus the Ringling Museum of Art, there never seemed to be much time.
Katy answered the phone. It was their daughter Elizabeth, who was calling from the CIA’s field operations training base, known as the Farm, near Williamsburg that she and her husband Todd Van Buren directed. She wanted to talk to her father, and she sounded a little breathless.
“Have you been watching the news the last couple of days?” she asked. She was in her late twenties and the spitting image of her mother at that age; slender with a good build, an oval face, beautiful large eyes, short blond hair, and just a hint of an attitude that to invade her space might be risky.
“You mean the North Korean thing?” McGarvey asked. He’d retired as director of the CIA a couple years ago, at the age of fifty, after a career as a black operations specialist in which he had killed people. Often he wasn’t proud of what he had done for his government, but his targets had all been truly bad people.
He was a tall man with a solid build, a pleasant face, and gray-green eyes. Not so long ago he’d come out of retirement to take on a freelance assignment for the Agency in which he’d killed Osama bin Laden, and he still kept himself in top condition with a daily regimen of hard exercise.
“What’s your take on it?” Liz asked. Whenever anything came up on the international scene, she always called her father to get his read, which would in turn be passed along to the officer candidates at the Farm.
“Kim Jong Il is crazy enough to do something like that, if he had a reason. But it’d have to be big. As it is he’s practically cut his own throat.”
“If China crosses his border will he go nuclear?”
“I expect he would, and I expect the Chinese know it. If I were giving advice I’d go for a surgical strike. Find out where he’s hunkered down and take just him out. I don’t think anyone else over there would have the stomach to launch.”
Elizabeth was silent for a moment or two. “How’s Mom?” she asked.
“Just fine. Do you want to talk to her again?”
“No, I’ve got to get back to work,” she said. “Has anyone from the Building called you?” The Building was what employees called CIA headquarters.
McGarvey glanced at his wife, who was staring down at their dock on the Intracoastal Waterway, a pensive expression on her face.
“No, should Dick have called?” McGarvey asked. Dick Adkins was the current DCI.
“There’re some rumors floating around,” Liz said tentatively.
“Like?”
“Could have been a South Korean hit.”
“NIS has got the people for it, but unless they know something that we don’t, I wouldn’t think that they’d be that stupid. If Kim Jong Il goes nuclear he’s bound to do it up right. He’d take out Seoul and probably Tokyo.”
Again Elizabeth hesitated. “That’s about what Todd and I came up with,” she said. “But that’s not all. If it comes to that China wouldn’t hesitate to level Pyongyang, and while the region is going up in flames we think they’d probably hit Taipei, and we’d be sucked into it.”
McGarvey had come to the same conclusion when he’d seen the first bulletin on CNN that a high-ranking Chinese diplomat had been assassinated in Pyongyang. “I assume that the president is trying to calm down the Chinese,” he said, though nothing had been mentioned on the news.
“He’s called in the ambassador, but Daddy, I don’t think anyone up there really knows what’s going on or what to do,” Liz said. “Totally off the record, I don’t think Dick can handle the intel. And without that the White House and State are blind.”
“Dick’s a good man.”
“No question about it. But he’s never been in the field. He’s nev
er—” She paused.
“Killed a man, like I have,” McGarvey finished it for her.
“Daddy, we’re frightened up here.”
“You have every right to be,” McGarvey said. “Have you heard anything from Otto?” Otto Rencke was the CIA’s resident genius. He and McGarvey were close friends and had a lot of mutual respect for each other. Their history together went back for more than ten years, and in that time Otto had practically become family. A few years ago he had even saved the lives of Mac’s wife and daughter in an operation that had begun to unravel. It was a debt of friendship impossible to repay and even harder to forget.
“No,” Liz said. “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”
“I’ll call him right now, and see if he’s turning up anything. In the meantime the Chinese haven’t mobilized on the border, so there’s still time.”
“I don’t think it’ll be a land war,” Liz said.
“You’re probably right,” McGarvey told his daughter. “Let me call Otto and then Dick and I’ll get back to you.”
“Okay,” she said in a small voice. She was a tough, well-experienced CIA field officer, but sometimes she was still a little girl who needed a father to assure her that everything would turn out all right.
“That didn’t sound promising,” Katy said after McGarvey hung up.
“She’s nervous,” McGarvey admitted.
“Should I be?”
“I don’t know yet, but we could be headed for trouble.”
She was studying his face, her gaze penetrating. “Personal trouble, or U.S. of A trouble?”
McGarvey was about to answer her when the motion alarm for the front of the house tripped and a light on the eaves behind them flashed. He entered a code on his cell phone, bringing up the closed circuit television image of the driveway.
A dark blue Ford Focus had pulled up in the driveway and a slightly built Oriental man, dressed in gray slacks, blue blazer, and a white shirt got out. He was carrying a thick manila envelope.
“Company,” McGarvey said, getting up.
“Anyone we know?” Katy asked.
“Nope,” McGarvey said. “Stay here.”
“Get rid of them, Kirk,” she said, but he had started up to the house and didn’t hear her.
SEVENTEEN
He got to the entry vestibule and took his pistol from a drawer in the hall table as the doorbell rang. Putting the gun in his pocket, he opened the door.
“Mr. McGarvey,” the man said, his English very good. “I’m very glad to catch you at home. I’ve just come from Pyongyang. My name is Pak Hae and I’m a North Korean Intelligence officer here to ask for your help.”
McGarvey stared at him for just a beat, then glanced out at the car. “Are you alone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Officially?”
“With Dear Leader’s sanction,” Pak said. “May I come in and explain why I’m here? I think time is not on our side.”
McGarvey stepped aside to let the North Korean in, and when the door was closed, he forced the man up against the wall, and took the manila envelope and set it aside. “Spread your arms and legs.”
Pak did as he was told, and McGarvey quickly frisked him, coming up with his California driver’s license in another name, several credit cards, and photographs of a family he probably didn’t have.
“I’m not armed.”
“It’s good for you that you’re not,” McGarvey said. He glanced inside the thick envelope, which contained some files, in English, and a series of crime scene photographs, as well as two shots of a man in prison garb.
“Those are for you.”
“How did you know who I was and where to find me?”
“My doctoral thesis was about important U.S. intelligence officers past and present. And I do my homework well.”
Over the years Mac had thought he’d lost his capacity for surprise. But this now was something else. “If this is about the Chinese general who was hit in Pyongyang, you’ve come to the wrong place for help. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t get the FBI out here.”
“We didn’t do it, and of course no one believes us, so I’m here to ask you to help prevent a nuclear war.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re a man of honor, whose word the Chinese respect, especially after the incident in Mexico City last year. If you were to prove that we didn’t carry out the assassination, you would be believed.”
“Your premier is crazy enough to have ordered it, especially if General Ho was there to try to talk him out of his nuclear program.”
“Yes, he is just that crazy, but it wasn’t us.”
“The South Koreans wouldn’t have done it either,” McGarvey said. “They know damn well that if the situation ever got out of hand the first nuke would hit downtown Seoul before they could do anything about it.”
Pak hesitated for a moment. “You’ve heard something.”
“Just a rumor that it could have involved a South Korean shooter.”
“A pair of them, freelancing for an ex-KGB agent with deep pockets living in Tokyo.”
“No reason for the Russians to get involved,” McGarvey said.
“Not officially, we agree with that much,” Pak said. “But they were South Koreans, ex-NIS, husband and wife. We managed to arrest the husband intact, but the wife is back in Seoul.”
“Ask for the South’s help.”
Pak managed a slight smile. “Dear Leader believes that South Korea is behind the hit, at the direction of the CIA. He’s ordered me to find the proof.”
“So you came here,” McGarvey said, intrigued despite his natural skepticism. “You’ve got balls, Colonel, I’ll give you that much.”
“Will you help?”
“I’ll hear you out,” McGarvey said. He picked up the files then led the North Korean back to his study, which looked out across the backyard. Katy was still seated at the table waiting for him.
He drew the blinds and motioned for Pak to have a seat across from him as he spread the files and photographs out on the desk.
“That’s outside the Chinese Embassy,” Pak said. “A car came to take General Ho to a meeting with Dear Leader, and the assassins knew the precise time it would be arriving.”
“Someone in your government must have leaked the schedule.”
“That’s possible,” Pak conceded, “but not likely.”
“They got the intel from somewhere.”
“That’s only part of our problem. We’ve had the South Korean in our custody long enough for the Chinese to distrust anything he might tell them if we handed him over.”
“This him?” McGarvey asked, studying the photos of the man in prison garb.
“His name is Huk Soon, his wife Kim. But that’s all we know about them. They don’t show up on any of our databases. And neither does the Russian Soon says hired them. All he knows is the name Alexandar and an old e-mail address, which when we checked didn’t exist.”
“How’d they get past your security?”
“They flew in as tourists, and on the last night they snuck out of the hotel, killed two policemen, dressed in their uniforms, and used their weapons to kill not only General Ho, but the chauffeur and two Chinese Embassy employees.”
McGarvey put the last photo down. “There’s no reason for the kill except to destabilize your relationship with China. And the only countries who might benefit are South Korea and us.”
“Exactly,” Pak said. “Mr. McGarvey, I went to U.C. Berkeley, and I think I know the U.S. well enough to believe that no one in your government is stupid enough to engineer something like this. Nobody would win.”
“Obviously someone thinks so.”
“Only a madman.”
“Kim Jong Il,” McGarvey said.
“We’ve tried to assassinate him, but he’s surrounded himself with impregnable security. Sooner or later he’ll die, like his father, only there will be no replacement. When he’s gone we can begi
n rebuilding our country, and someday reunite with the South.”
“You’ll have to survive until then.”
“We need your help.”
McGarvey turned away. The North Koreans had every reason to lie, and it was not unlikely that Kim Jong Il was crazy enough to pull off a stunt like killing a Chinese intelligence officer and blaming it on the South Koreans and the CIA. The only motive that made any sense was if the Chinese had tried to pressure North Korea to drop its nuclear program once and for all. It was possible that General Ho had threatened Kim Jong Il and the madman had ordered the assassination.
The one loose straw that didn’t fit was an ex-KGB officer by the name of Alexandar living in Toyko who had hired the killers. It was so fringe that it had the ring of truth.
He turned back. “Go home, Colonel.”
Pak got up, took a pen from his pocket, and wrote a New York telephone number on the back of the manila envelope. “You can contact me in Pyongyang through this number. It connects us with our U.N. delegation’s secured communication section.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to do anything about this,” McGarvey said, and yet he didn’t know how he could possibly stay out of it. If China attacked North Korea the U.S. would almost certainly be sucked into the mess, and a great many people, maybe millions, would be incinerated.
“We can pay you—”
“This isn’t about money,” McGarvey shot back. “But if it were you wouldn’t be able to afford me.”
“I understand,” Pak said.
“I would have to come to Pyongyang.”
“That could be arranged.”
“And I would need the freedom of access to any place or any person, including Kim Jong Il.”
Pak hesitated. “You can’t know how dangerous that would be.”
“More dangerous than a nuclear war?”
Pak shrugged. “Please hurry,” he said, and he went back to the vestibule and let himself out.
McGarvey watched the security camera image in his cell phone as the North Korean got in his car and left, never once looking back.
The Expediter Page 7
