The Expediter

by David Hagberg

  Now that the excitement was over most of the people who’d gathered in front of the hotel entrance went back inside. One man, however, headed down the driveway, and McGarvey recognized him as the one who’d been at the doorway, the one who had grabbed the woman’s arm for just a moment, before he’d stepped back and let her go.

  He appeared to be solidly built, with longish white hair, a large mustache, and when his face was momentarily illuminated by the headlights of a limo coming up the driveway, McGarvey could see that he wore glasses.

  Turov?

  McGarvey stepped out of the shadows so that he was in plain sight. At the bottom of the driveway the man glanced across the street directly at McGarvey, hesitated for only a split second, then headed to the left, in the direction Ok-Lee had gone.

  In seconds he was lost in the crowd on the busy sidewalk.

  McGarvey speed dialed Rencke’s number, and his friend answered on the first ring.

  “Did you get the message to Turov?”

  “It took about ten tries until I found a remailer that accepted my query,” Rencke said. “And if he’s our man he’s damned good. Or whoever set up his system is. Are you telling me that he’s there?”

  “I think so,” McGarvey said. He made his way past the fountain in front of the bank and headed in the same direction as Lin had gone, trying to pick out the taller man in the midst of the much shorter Koreans. “Has he replied yet?”

  “No, and I don’t think he will. That address was closed down within a few minutes after I got through.”

  “That’s okay, because if we’re right I think it flushed him out into the open.”

  “He’s there to kill you.”

  “That’s what I figured,” McGarvey said, and he caught a brief glimpse of the man. “Got to go, Otto,” he said, and he broke the connection, pocketed the phone, and looked for a break in traffic.

  FORTY

  From just inside the doorway of the electronics store Kim watched McGarvey pocket his cell phone and head down the block in a big hurry in the direction the NIS woman had gone. But he’d waited until the man she’d bumped into in the lobby had come out of the hotel and disappeared in the crowd.

  For a moment when McGarvey had crossed the street, Kim had been horrified that he’d somehow spotted her, and she had reached in her purse for her gun. But he’d disappeared behind a fountain two buildings away.

  When the bus had moved out of the way she’d spotted the man with the white hair look across the street and then start after Ok-Lee, and because of McGarvey’s reaction it had dawned on her that the old man was Alexandar.

  McGarvey was looking for a break in the heavy traffic so that he could cross the street, but everything was moving at breakneck speed, practically bumper-to-bumper as was the norm in downtown Seoul, especially at this hour. Just about everyone in this city went full tilt all the time, as if they were trying to catch up with something or someone.

  “The Americans,” Soon would have suggested. She could hear his voice, and clearly see his face. They were torturing him up there, giving him mind-altering drugs that could fry his brain. If they didn’t stand him in front of a firing squad, he would probably come out of the ordeal as little more than a vegetable.

  What surprised her was the lack of sirens. According to Alexandar the woman’s name was Ok-Lee Lin and she worked as a field officer for the NIS. She should have called for backup. By now sirens should have been converging from all over the city. An ex-military shooter was on the loose, possibly the shooter at Pyongyang. She would be top priority. Important enough to bring the former director of the CIA all the way from the States to find her.

  Unless McGarvey knew about Alexandar and the real reason he’d come to Seoul was to find the Russian, possibly using Kim as bait. It would explain what had just happened. McGarvey and Ok-Lee had separated, and as soon as Alexandar had headed after the woman, Mc-Garvey had moved out. Suddenly the NIS officer had become the bait.

  Kim hesitated a little longer in the electronics store until McGarvey made it across the street and she was certain that he wouldn’t be able to spot her if he looked back.

  Her first plan had been to lure Turov to some place public, like the hotel lobby where she could have her face-to-face talk in relative safety. But the presence of McGarvey and Ok-Lee had made that impossible. Then standing here, watching McGarvey, she’d thought about going to Tokyo and somehow finding out where he lived. But something like that would take too much precious time, and if she did make it that far it would be a dead end. Even if she had Alexandar at gunpoint, there was no guarantee that he would cooperate in getting Soon out of North Korea.

  She’d also thought that if she could find Alexandar and put her pistol to his head she could make him tell her who had ordered the hit. She could use the information not only to stop the insanity between China and North Korea, but to gain Soon’s release.

  She was naïve and she knew it. But something else occurred to her. Something Soon had always insisted on, that they never were to rely on anyone else. They had to do everything for themselves; make their own preparations, get their own weapons and papers, arrange their own travel plans, and do their own research.

  It had worked flawlessly for them until this last time. And now it was up to her.

  Making sure that McGarvey was finally lost in the crowd across the street, Kim slipped out of the electronics store and headed to the corner in the opposite direction where she found a cab, and ordered the driver to take her to the Yeongdeung-po gu district.

  She would not be able to return to the hotel or to her apartment to get her things, so for now all she had were the clothes on her back and the pistol, some money, and most of the escape kit from the attic in her purse. It was enough to get her out of the country, possibly to Switzerland where she could access their money and from there, go anywhere on the planet.

  She and Soon had discussed the Caribbean, or perhaps South America. Venezuela’s relationship with the U.S. right now was not good. If she disappeared in Caracas, it was unlikely that McGarvey or someone like him would be allowed to look for her. And Chavez certainly wouldn’t cooperate.

  But that left Soon in the hands of the North Koreans.

  Standing in the doorway across from the hotel watching the situation unfold, the glimmerings of another plan had begun to crystallize in her head. One that had almost no chance of success, except that their storage locker in Yeongdeung-po gu held all the papers, uniforms, and weapons she would need, and she would not be going north without a powerful bargaining chip.

  Her only hope at this point was that the locker hadn’t been cleaned out, and that it wasn’t staked out. Beyond that she didn’t want to dwell on the details of her crazy plan.

  FORTY–ONE

  Across the street McGarvey bullied his way through the crowds, trying to catch up with the white-haired man from the lobby, cursing himself for his stupidity. He’d counted on Turov coming after him, not Ok-Lee and Huk Kim.

  He called Ok-Lee’s cell phone and it rang three times before she answered. She was out of breath.

  “Mu-eot?” What?

  “The guy with the white hair and glasses at the hotel. It’s Turov and he’s on your back.”

  “Shit, are you sure?” Ok-Lee demanded. “I can’t find the woman.”

  “Forget her. I’m right behind you.”

  McGarvey could hear the same sounds of the crowds and traffic in the phone as he was hearing on the street. “Lin?”

  “I don’t see him yet, but I’m coming around a corner into the courtyard of an apartment tower. It’s just across the entrance to the underground arcade, about a block from the hotel. Do you know where this is?”

  “No, but I’ll find you,” McGarvey said, redoubling his efforts. “Stay loose.”

  “Watch yourself, Kirk. He might suspect that this was a setup and you’re on his back.”

  “I hope so,” McGarvey said. “I sincerely hope so.”

  At the corner he
was against the light. He pulled out his pistol and held it up as he pushed his way through the knot of people backed up at the curb and raced across the street, cars, taxis, three-wheelers, and mopeds screeching brakes and swerving trying to avoid hitting him.

  On the other side he was in time to see a tall, bald-headed man cross the street with the light, and duck down some broad stairs into the underground arcade, and he was suddenly very concerned.

  A modernistic glass-and-stainless-steel skyscraper at least thirty stories tall rose from the corner, the main entryway opening at an angle into a broad courtyard planted with greenswards and small trees that led across to an expanse of glass and automatic doors.

  The edges along the rise of the building were mostly in shadow and at first McGarvey didn’t see Ok-Lee lying on the pavement. He raced past her, pulling up short, and turning back only when he heard her call his name.

  She was crumpled in an awkward heap, her pistol lying next to her head, her hands clutching her stomach, blood welling out from between her fingers, soaking her blouse, and already pooling up on the pavement.

  McGarvey dropped down beside her.

  “One-one-nine,” she whispered to him. “Ambulance.”

  “Hang on,” McGarvey told her. He entered the number into his cell phone.

  “We’re across from the Lotte Arcade,” she whispered. “In English, they’ll understand.”

  The emergency operator came on in Korean. “You have a police officer down across from the Lotte Arcade,” McGarvey said calmly, scanning the darker shadows for any sign that Turov was still here waiting to take another shot. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, of course,” the operator said.

  “She’s been shot, and she’s losing blood,” McGarvey explained. “Hurry!” He broke the connection.

  “No white hair,” Ok-Lee said, her voice weak. “Bald.”

  Christ, he’d been the guy crossing the street and going down into the arcade. “Take it easy, Lin, the ambulance is on its way. You’ll be all right.”

  “I wasn’t expecting it. I was looking for white hair.”

  “I’m sorry. It was my fault.”

  “No,” Ok-Lee said, trying to rise, but McGarvey gently held her back.

  He took off his jacket, bundled it up and eased it under her head as a pillow, and she managed a smile.

  “We need to get our stories straight,” she said. “They’ll want to hold you until they can figure out what happened. In-Suk is going to be all over this.” She groaned. “He’s still in love with me, I think.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  In the distance they could hear sirens.

  “It was a random shooting,” she said breathlessly. “We were supposed to meet at the arcade, but you were late. I came over here because I thought I saw something, and a couple of kids shot me. Stupid.”

  “No,” McGarvey started to tell her.

  “They’ll hold you until it’s too late,” she said. “Listen to me, I know what I’m talking about. You need to get the bastard before everything goes to hell. You’re the only one who can do it.”

  “I won’t leave you like this.”

  “Don’t be a hero.”

  The sirens were much closer now.

  “Don’t be a martyr,” McGarvey said. “We won’t be able to stop him from leaving Korea, not without making such a big fuss he’d be able to sidestep everyone. He’ll go back to Tokyo, and I’ll find him there.”

  Ok-Lee suddenly grabbed his arm with a bloody hand. “Find him, Kirk. Stop this before it blows up. A lot of people are depending on you. Including me.”

  “Count on it,” McGarvey said, his jaw tightening. He was thinking about some other women who had gotten too close to him and had paid the price. He wasn’t going to let this one down.

  He eased her grip from his arm and placed her hand back on her stomach wound, then reholstered his pistol, took out his handkerchief, and wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth.

  She was passing out, her eyelids fluttering, when a pair of uniformed cops, their pistols drawn, came into the courtyard, and McGarvey raised his hands above his head.

  “Ambulance,” he said. “Hurry.”

  FORTY–TWO

  Turov made his leisurely way across the Lotte Underground Arcade to the Metro station at Euljiro and took a busy number two train back one stop where he got off at city hall. Up on the street he stopped a moment to listen to all the sirens a few blocks to the south.

  It amused him to think that the woman NIS officer would probably bleed to death before she got to the hospital. He had gut shot her so as not to kill her immediately. In that way McGarvey, who’d taken up the chase, would stay with the woman, probably all the way to the hospital. The Americans he’d worked with were all romantics, though most of them would fiercely deny it. And McGarvey was no different.

  He waited for the light and crossed with a knot of people to the Radisson Seoul Plaza where he’d been staying since he’d gotten word that the assassination in Pyongang had been a success.

  He was a man who liked his minor luxuries, and each of the last five times he’d come to Seoul to monitor the Huks’ homecomings, he’d stayed at this hotel under a different name and disguise. He tipped very well so that his treatment would be first-class, even though no one on the hotel’s staff recognized him from the previous visits.

  And that amused him, as did the fact that the Radisson was less than two hundred and fifty meters as the crow flies from the Westin.

  He made his way around the large fountain gushing a brightly lit plume of water from a pair of concentric pools and across the driveway past the bellmen into the vast, bustling lobby.

  A Japanese woman in a man’s tuxedo was playing a baby grand piano at the lobby bar, and a bunch of Western businessman, most of them drunk already, had filled her tip jar to overflowing. The mood of the crowd was the same as it had been at the Westin, fear and excitement mixed with a sense that something momentous, some big historical event, was about to happen and they were the lucky ones to be here to witness it firsthand.

  As he waited for an elevator he glanced at the reflection of the lobby entrance in the gilt-edged mirror above the hall table on the remote chance that he was wrong and McGarvey had followed him here.

  Ok-Lee would describe the man who’d shot her as a Westerner, but bald. Maybe McGarvey had spotted him crossing the street, and instead of waiting for the ambulance had taken up the chase.

  It was not likely, but Turov had built a life on considering every possibility, even the most unlikely, especially when it involved a professional. Men of McGarvey’s experience very often did the unexpected.

  But the elevator came and Turov rode up to his suite on the eighteenth floor, careful not to enter until the corridor was empty of staff, none of whom knew him as a bald man in his forties and would wonder what he was doing with a key to another man’s room.

  He took off his jacket and tossed it on the arm of an easy chair, then crossed to the wet bar where he opened a bottle of Krug, poured a glass, and drank it down. He took the champagne and the glass back to the bedroom where he kicked off his shoes, propped himself up on the bed, poured another glass, and then telephoned the concierge desk.

  “I’ll be going to Tokyo first thing in the morning, be a dear and book me a seat, would you?” It wasn’t necessary for him to specify first-class.

  “Sometime after breakfast, Mr. Levin?” she asked.

  “Naturally,” Turov said. This time he was traveling on an Israeli passport as Dov Levin, a sixty-five-year-old importer of Oriental art, who had an eye for young pretty women, and who, in the few days he’d been here, had established himself as a nice man who was free with his money.

  “Will you be returning soon?”

  Turov chuckled. “You can never tell when somebody like me will show up.”

  “Yes, sir. Your e-ticket will be delivered to your room within a few minutes.”

  “That’s no
t necessary, my dear,” Turov said. “I’ll collect it at the desk when I check out in the morning.”

  “No trouble.”

  “I insist,” Turov said. He could see himself snapping her neck. She was a young woman with the flat face that Koreans found attractive, but that he as a Russian Jew found repulsive. “In the morning.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Turov broke the connection, finished his second glass of champagne, then got up and went into the bathroom where he peeled off the flesh-toned latex skullcap that covered his short-cropped dark hair and flushed it down the toilet.

  The police would eventually find the wig and mustache where he had discarded them in the storm drain in front of the apartment tower where Ok-Lee had been lurking, but it would tell them nothing more than the man they were looking for had worn a wig.

  At forty-three, Turov was in excellent condition. At the KGB’s School One he had been an outstanding soccer player, because he had no fear of hurting anyone from the opposing team or any of his own teammates for that matter. He had absolutely no loyalty to anyone but himself, not to his team, not to the school or the KGB, and certainly not to the Soviet Union, which by then was already disintegrating.

  At slightly under two meters and ninety kilograms he was within a centimeter and a kilo or two of his college height and weight, and a daily regimen of hard exercise under Minoru Hirobumi, his chief of staff back at the compound in Tokyo, kept him in top form. The exercises, both mental and physical, were not a hobby, they were basic survival, and both men treated them that way.

  Turov had no fear of any man, and his major fault was that he also had no respect for anyone. It was the only point of contention between him and his training master, who was a samurai and followed the ancient practice of Bushido that prided honor above all else.