The Expediter

by David Hagberg

  One of the boxes contained an assortment of South Korean passports in a number of different names, all with photographs of Huk Soon or Huk Kim, in various light disguises, along with several envelopes that contained as much as $10,000 in cash in various currencies.

  “What have you found?” Ok-Lee asked from the doorway.

  “Passports, money, and files on what were probably their targets,” McGarvey said. “We’ve got the right people.”

  He moved next to the aluminum suitcases, none of which was locked, which he found astounding, considering what they held. In addition to various styles of men’s and women’s clothing, along with wigs and makeup, three of the suitcases were filled with weapons; one of them with the Russian 7.62 mm Dragunov sniper rifle with a high-power scope; one with the very hard to find American-made .50 caliber Barrett rifle that had an effective kill range of one thousand meters. Shaped cutouts in the thick foam lining held a Steiner night vision scope, the ten power Leupold & Stevens day scope, two box magazines, a tripod, and a silencer. The third aluminum case held a variety of pistols, among them a small Beretta and a couple of German-made 9 mm SIG-Sauer P226s, along with ammunition, spare magazines, silencers, and cleaning and repair kits.

  Ok-Lee stepped inside and looked over McGarvey’s shoulder. “Shit, those are sniper rifles,” she said. “I’ve got to get my people down here to go through this stuff.”

  “No,” McGarvey said, looking up at here. “That’s exactly what we’re not going to do.”

  Ok-Lee tried to argue but McGarvey held her off.

  “We know who she is, we know where she lives, and we know she’s probably desperate to get her husband out of Pyongyang. She’s probably already turned to the one person in the world she thinks can help her.”

  “Alexandar Turov.”

  “That’s right,” McGarvey agreed. “But this guy’s a pro. If we take this place apart, or put it under surveillance he’ll spot what’s going on and back off.”

  “If we get the woman, and Pyongyang has her husband, we can convince the Chinese—”

  “Convince them of what?” McGarvey demanded. “Beijing’s not going to believe Kim Jong Il, and they’re certainly not going to believe your people. At this point they’re convinced that the North Koreans made the hit.”

  Ok-Lee nodded to the file boxes. “We have this stuff.”

  “Doesn’t prove a thing.”

  “What then?” Ok-Lee asked. She was desperate now, and McGarvey almost felt sorry for her.

  “We need the Russian, and if we back off the woman will lead us to him.”

  “If we lose her, we’re faced with a nuclear war here.”

  “Don’t I know it,” McGarvey agreed.

  TWENTY–NINE

  Kim had stuffed what clean clothes she had left into the hanging bag by the front door, and replaced her makeup and a few other toiletries. The fear that had been eating at her gut since Pyongyang was still with her, but now it was tempered by Alexandar’s promise to help rescue Soon.

  She took the four potted plants off the stepladder by the living-room window and carried it out into the corridor where she stopped a moment to listen at the rail for any sign that the old woman was snooping around on the landing below. Everyone else in the building was still at work, and the stair hall was quiet.

  Taking the stairs silently, in her bare feet, Kim raced to the top floor where she placed the ladder beneath the opening to the attic crawl space, climbed up, pushed the cover aside, and hauled herself through.

  Careful not to slip off the joists, she scrambled to the far corner, where she retrieved a small plastic bundle, about the size of a loaf of bread, returned to the opening, and lowered herself to the top rung of the ladder where she pulled the cover back in place.

  Her heart was hammering now. She had no idea how long it might take for them to find the storage locker and discover what it contained, but she didn’t think she had much time left here.

  She hurried downstairs to the apartment, where she placed the pots back on the ladder, and went into the kitchen where she cut open the bundle from the attic. Inside was their emergency kit in case something went drastically wrong. Passports in work names they’d never used, driver’s licenses, credit cards, family photographs, even an overdue parking ticket for a car they didn’t own, along with a few thousand dollars in cash, and two Walther PPK pistols, with silencers and one magazine of 7.65 ammunition each.

  The kit was never meant to support them for much longer than a few days, but if they ever had to get out of the country in a hurry, and this was all they could take, it would be enough.

  She stuffed the empty bag into the trash can then put everything except for her passport and papers into the hanging bag. Her things went into her purse, along with a camera cell phone, and she changed into a dress and decent shoes, her heart hammering even harder by the time she was finished.

  For a few seconds she hesitated at the door, gazing at the apartment where for the past few years she and Soon had been deliriously in love and happy. They had planned on finding a small villa or house somewhere along the Mediterranean coast either in France or perhaps northern Italy once they had enough money in their Swiss account. Soon had figured ten million euros would do for a modest retirement. With the money from their latest hit they were more than a third of the way there.

  But all of that was finished, or at least it was on hold until they could get Soon out of Pyongyang, and even with Alexandar’s help she didn’t know how it was possible.

  Downstairs the old landlady came out of her apartment. “Are you running away?”

  “Soon wants me to come back to Nagasaki,” Kim said, trying to keep her voice neutral.

  “Government people come one minute and next minute Mrs. clears out. Something is plenty fishy here.”

  “Nothing’s fishy,” Kim said. She patted the old woman’s arm. “I’ll be gone for just a few days. Be a dear and water my plants, would you?”

  The landlady’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe Seoul is not such a good place to be right now. But maybe Nagasaki isn’t so good either.” She nodded toward the door. “What do I tell them if they come back?”

  “The truth,” Kim said. “That I’ve gone to Nagasaki to be with my husband.”

  “Come back if you can. You and Mr. are good people.”

  Kim managed a smile, and went out and walked to the end of the block where she hailed a taxi.

  “The Westin Chosun,” she told the driver.

  THIRTY

  McGarvey and Ok-Lee sat in the car across from the storage building, the engine idling. No one on the bustling street had paid them much attention, though McGarvey figured he had to stand out as a foreigner, so somebody was watching.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “If she’s on the run she’ll have to come back here for her papers and money and a weapon,” Ok-Lee said. “This is the one place in Seoul where she’s bound to show up sooner or later.”

  “Unless Turov gets here first and kills her,” McGarvey replied. The woman was a loose cannon that the Russian couldn’t afford to ignore. If she had made contact with him, which he was sure she had, he would have to show up here.

  “All the more reason to put a watch on the place,” Ok-Lee argued. “We’ve got some pretty good people who know how to blend in.”

  “One person, and they’re not to make a move without contacting you first. She won’t do us any good if she gets in a shoot-out. With her husband under arrest in Pyongyang she’s desperate enough try something like that rather then let herself be taken.”

  “Done,” Ok-Lee said. She pulled away from the curb and around the corner at the end of the block she made a call on her cell phone and talked in rapid-fire Korean for several minutes.

  McGarvey figured that no matter how hard the president was trying to convince Beijing that hitting North Korea was not the answer, the situation here was spiraling out of control. He figured they only had a few days, maybe one week at the mos
t, before Chinese missiles launched from mobile platforms near the border rained down on Pyongyang. Kim Jong Il would only have minutes to respond, which meant that he would be preparing his missiles right now, which in turn would convince the Chinese that their only option was to make a first strike.

  But the part that puzzled him the most was who had hired Turov to find shooters willing to get inside North Korea and make the hit. Again and again he came back to the same question: Who had the most to gain by destabilizing the relationship between North Korea and China? And each time he came back to the same troubling answer: The U.S. had the most to gain.

  “Do you want to go back to the hotel now?” Ok-Lee asked.

  McGarvey looked up out of his thoughts. “How soon will somebody be in place down here?”

  “Within the hour.”

  “Good,” McGarvey said. “What did you tell them?”

  Ok-Lee was troubled. “I lied, Mr. Director,” she said. “And I didn’t like it very much, because I’ve put my career on the line for you, possibly even my freedom.”

  “In that case you’d better start calling me Mac. Mr. Director is too formal.”

  Ok-Lee turned away to concentrate on her driving. She shook her head and said something half under her breath in Korean. “My name is Lin,” she said. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Back to the woman’s apartment,” McGarvey said. “I want to take another look and have a word with the landlady.”

  “I don’t think she’ll tell us much.”

  “I’ll ask the questions this time, and you can translate.”

  The old woman came out of her apartment the moment McGarvey and Ok-Lee walked through the front door. She was still dressed in old faded baggy gray slacks and a flowered top mostly covered by a worn cotton jacket. She held a broom in both hands as if she was ready to defend herself and she looked angry.

  She said something in Korean.

  “She wants to know why we’ve come back to bother an innocent old woman,” Ok-Lee translated for McGarvey.

  “Because we know that she lied the first time, and liars go to prison,” McGarvey said harshly.

  Ok-Lee wasn’t happy. “She’s just an old woman protecting her tenants.”

  “Tell her.”

  Ok-Lee translated, and the landlady backed up a half step.

  McGarvey took out his pistol and transferred it to his jacket pocket. “The truth now, where are the Huks?”

  The old woman’s eyes widened in fear, and she mumbled something.

  “They’re both gone. To Nagaski,” Ok-Lee said.

  “But the wife came back,” McGarvey pressed. “Her suitcase is upstairs on the floor.”

  “Yes, but she left again, to go back to Nagasaki. She asked me to take care of her plants for just a few days.”

  “When did she leave?” McGarvey demanded. “No lies now,” he said menacingly.

  Ok-Lee translated, and the woman replied. “Maybe less than two hours ago. She came in just after you left, and went out fifteen minutes later.”

  “Shit,” McGarvey swore. He turned and headed up the stairs in a dead run.

  “She knew someone was coming,” Ok-Lee said right behind him. “She was watching the apartment.”

  “Call your surveillance people and tell them to get someone over to the storage locker right now.”

  At the top McGarvey slammed his shoulder into the apartment door, popping the lock and half tearing the wooden frame away. The hanging bag was gone, the dirty clothes still lying in a heap where Ok-Lee had dumped them.

  He stopped for just a moment to see if anything else seemed out of the ordinary, something that was different from a couple of hours ago.

  A small wooden stepladder that held the potted plants the old lady was supposed to water while Huk Kim was away caught his attention. Something wasn’t quite right. He walked across the room and stared at it, but nothing caught his eye.

  In the bedroom the chest of drawers was still open, but now most of the clothes were gone, and in the bathroom the makeup and other things that had been laid out next to the sink were also missing.

  The woman had waited outside until he and Ok-Lee were gone, then had come up here, repacked her bag, and took off. But not to Nagasaki. Somewhere else.

  McGarvey left the bedroom and went into the kitchen as Ok-Lee was finishing her telephone call.

  “Someone will be in place within fifteen minutes,” she said. “Have you found anything?”

  “She packed in a hurry,” McGarvey said.

  Nothing seemed out of place in the tiny kitchen, and McGarvey was about to turn away when he spotted a bundle of plastic with some duct tape and something else stuck to it stuffed in the trash can between the tiny fridge and the two-burner gas cooktop. He walked over and pulled it out. The package smelled faintly of gun oil, and a small clump of what looked like spun fiberglass.

  Back in the living room he stared at the stepladder for just a moment, until he had it. “Go upstairs, Lin, and see if there’s a way to get into the attic. A covered opening in the ceiling. Something like that.”

  Ok-Lee turned and went out leaving McGarvey to stare at the stepladder. She was back in under a minute.

  “It’s there just down the hall from the head of the stairs,” she said.

  McGarvey nodded to the stepladder. “She took the pots off the ladder, took it up the stairs and got into the attic. When she brought it back she didn’t put the pots in exactly the same places. You can see it in the dust rings.” He held up the plastic package. “This is what she was after up there. Her escape kit.”

  Ok-Lee understood immediately. “She’s armed now.”

  McGarvey nodded. He’d always maintained the same sort of easily accessible escape kit for the day he had to go on the run. “Not only that, she has a new set of IDs and money.”

  “Shit,” Ok-Lee said.

  “Let’s go back to the hotel and see if a friend of mine can find out what’s on the woman’s laptop,” McGarvey told her.

  THIRTY–ONE

  As soon as Kim had checked into the Westin and brought her bag up to her eighth-floor room, she went downstairs, crossed the lobby, and one of the doormen hailed her a cab. She’d directed the driver to take her to a shopping arcade a block and a half from her apartment, and walked the rest of the way where she got a sidewalk table at the kimchi shop.

  The same Mercedes C-class with government plates was parked at the curb, and her heart skipped a beat as the same man and woman came out the front door. She’d almost missed them.

  The waiter came out and she ordered tea. He left as the American came around to the passenger side of the car, giving Kim just seconds to take out her cell phone and get off a few shots, one of them a three-quarters profile.

  She hastily lowered the phone to her lap and turned away as the man looked directly at her. She held her breath, hoping that they had no recent photographs of her, and girded herself for the necessity of killing them both if she had to.

  Nothing was going to stop her from trying to rescue Soon, not the NIS and certainly not some suit from the CIA.

  The waiter came back with her tea and she reached for the pistol in her purse as she glanced across the street, but the American had gotten into the car and was closing the door.

  Kim took some money out instead and paid for her tea. The waiter politely thanked her and went back inside as the government car pulled away and turned the corner at the end of the block.

  She closed her eyes for several long seconds, the tightness in her gut slowly easing.

  Obviously the NIS knew enough about her and Soon to come here, though they’d had no contact with anyone at the agency since they’d resigned their commissions several years ago. More troubling than that was the presence of the American. The NIS might be routinely checking all of its retired snipers, which was something they would not ask for help with from the CIA. So what was the man doing here?

  She called Alexandar’s contact number, and when th
e connection was made downloaded the four photographs she’d managed to take of the American.

  “I’ve checked into the Westin Chosun, like you asked, and I’m heading back over there now until you show up.” She looked across the street as her landlady opened the front door and began to sweep the sidewalk as if she wanted to get rid of any trace the woman and the American might have left behind.

  “Please hurry,” Kim said. “There’s no telling what the bastards are doing to Soon. We have it get him out of there right now.”

  She waited several long seconds in the hope that Alexandar would pick up, but the connection remained silent and she finally closed the phone and put it in her purse.

  It was turning out to be a lovely fall afternoon, but Kim felt a chill thinking about her husband, and she shivered.

  THIRTY–TWO

  McGarvey ordered a couple of beers from room service then used his sat phone to reach Rencke at Langley. It was 3:00 A.M. in Washington but his friend answered on the first ring.

  “Oh wow, what’ve you got, Mac?”

  “A laptop from the Huks’ apartment, and it’s probably bugged,” McGarvey said.

  “If they’re the right ones.”

  “She took a runner right after we showed up the first time. Told her landlady that she was going back to Nagasaki to be with her husband.”

  “Do you think she’s going to somehow get back to Pyongyang and try to rescue her husband?” Otto asked. He was excited.

  “That’s what she probably wants to do, and I think she’s probably called Turov to ask for his help.”

  The connection was silent for a moment and McGarvey could see Rencke in the chaos of his office, staring up at the monitors hanging from the ceiling.