The Expediter

by David Hagberg

  “Only if there are any witnesses.”

  Lavrov started to object, but then he realized that Minoru meant to eliminate everyone.

  “And if it actually comes to a shooting war between China and North Korea, which at this point seems likely, the U.S. intelligence apparatus will have its hands full. You can return to your office and you’ll never be a suspect. This war will not be about Russians.”

  Lavrov shook his head in amazement. “The four guys I want are up in New York. I can get them down here by this afternoon, or early evening.”

  “Are they reliable?”

  “To the highest bidder, which at the moment is me. Two of them were in Chechnya with me and the colonel, and we got out together. The other two were tough guy Moscow mafia. Militia was on their asses when the colonel asked if I could use them for the occasional op over here. I said sure, and he pulled a couple of strings and they showed up in New York.”

  “Get them here as soon as possible,” Minoru said. “In the meantime I want to drive up to the safe house and take a look at the situation.”

  “We’ll fly first to take a look at the setup. I have a friend who runs a small charter aviation service down at Manassas, about twenty miles from here.”

  “Does he know how to keep his mouth shut?” Minoru asked.

  “That’s the only kind of friends I have.”

  At the airport, Sergei Sulitsky, another of Lavrov’s friends from the old days, agreed without hesitation to take them on a quick sight-seeing flight, no introductions necessary. He walked off to ready the single engine Cessna Skyhawk TD tied down on the ramp and Lavrov explained the situation to Minoru. Solitsky had been a young KGB pilot when the Soviet Union disintegrated. But he was a Jew and he and his wife and son were stuck in Moscow, penniless and friendless without any prospects. Lavrov pulled a few strings and got the man and his family out and set him up with this business, because from time to time it was handy to have a pilot willing to fly somewhere no questions asked.

  They flew at three thousand feet almost due west until they were well outside the terminal control area around Dulles International before they could turn north, reaching the Potomac River just below Whites Ferry a few minutes before four.

  Lavrov, seated up front, directed Sulitsky to follow the river toward Washington.

  “We’re only fifteen miles from the city, and that’s restricted airspace,” the pilot told him. “I could lose my license if I cross the line.”

  “It won’t be necessary, Sergei, we’ll turn back just before the CIA.”

  Sulitsky gave him a sharp look. “They’ll send a chase plane up if we get too close, if that’s what you have in mind.”

  “Not at all. In fact we’re looking at a piece of property across the river in Maryland that we might want to buy. I just wanted to see it from the air first.”

  Minoru in the backseat behind the pilot watched out the window, getting his bearings until they approached a divided highway that crossed the river, Washington looming large in the near distance.

  “Is that the Beltway below?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Lavrov said. “The small town just beyond is Cabin John.”

  The land here was heavily wooded rolling hills that rose up from the river. Minoru spotted the place almost immediately, the large house and several outbuildings at the center of a clearing. He took a dozen pictures with a digital camera. A long driveway looped up from the Parkway, but across the clearing behind the house the woods were very thick. As they passed over the property he could see no signs of any activity.

  If McGarvey and the woman were down there they were probably alone, and vulnerable.

  “Thank you,” he said. “We may return to the airport now.”

  SEVENTY–TWO

  The house was sprawling, a large stone fireplace in the great room, and wide windows looking out across the clearing, the horse barn and paddock off to the left. The previous owner, now in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, had bred Arabian horses as part of his old-money gentleman-farmer cover. The woods on the property were crisscrossed with bridle paths, the only road the one from the Parkway.

  Kim was drinking a glass of white wine and she watched from one of the bay windows as the light plane turned and disappeared back to the northwest. “Are they looking for us already?”

  “I think so, unless I’ve missed my guess,” McGarvey said from behind her. Coming this soon meant that Turov had someone inside the CIA who was feeding him information. No one outside the Company knew where Huk Kim had gone to ground.

  His daughter Elizabeth had called from her cell phone a couple of hours ago to make sure that they’d not run into any trouble yet, and to tell him that they were en route. Before he could could object she’d broken the connection. He started to turn away from the window when her gunmetal-gray Hummer came up the driveway out of the woods, her husband Todd behind the wheel.

  “Are these the people you were expecting?” Kim asked, stepping back. She’d been jumpy ever since Rencke had dropped them off. The house had been fully serviced recently, and Otto had picked up a couple of hundred dollars worth of groceries that he had brought out earlier. But the place seemed deserted, dry and dusty as a museum or mausoleum.

  “Yes,” McGarvey said, vexed. He went out to the stair hall and opened the door as they pulled up.

  “Hi, Mac,” Todd said, getting out of the Hummer, and going around back to get his and Elizabeth’s things. He was a tall man, about McGarvey’s height, and solidly built with a square pleasant face. He could have passed for McGarvey’s son, which was one of the reasons Liz had fallen for him when they’d trained together at the Farm.

  Elizabeth was tall and slender with a pretty oval face and short blond hair, the spitting image of her mother at twenty-eight. She and Todd were the youngest agents who’d ever directed the Company’s training base, and they were very good at their jobs. Both of them were dressed in khaki slacks and CIA light blue T-shirts, pistols holstered high on their right hips.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said coming up to him and kissing his cheek. She looked past him. “Who’d you bring with you this time?”

  Kim stood in the middle of the stair hall watching them.

  “You were sending me some help,” McGarvey said crossly.

  “We’re not letting you face this alone,” Elizabeth said. “And you sure as hell can’t trust anyone else.” She glanced at Kim. “Who is she?”

  “Huk Kim. She and her husband were snipers for the South Korean Army until they decided to get out and turn freelance. They were the shooters in Pyongyang.”

  “Holy shit,” Liz said. She turned back to her father. “You were there, you got her out?”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that, but yes I went up there,” McGarvey said.

  Todd had pulled a couple of nylon duffle bags out of the Hummer. “Went up where?” he asked, coming up on the porch.

  “Pyongyang,” Liz said. “And this is one of the shooters.”

  “Holy shit,” Todd said. He glanced over his shoulder toward the northwest. “We saw a light plane doing a one-eighty just a few minutes ago. Checking out the place?”

  McGarvey nodded. “I expect we’ll be having company, probably tonight.”

  “Maybe we should call for more backup.”

  “It’s too late for that,” McGarvey said heavily.

  They all went inside where Todd dumped the bags in the hall.

  “Why?” Liz asked Kim.

  “For money,” Kim replied evenly.

  Elizabeth was instantly angry. “Do you have any comprehension of what you started, you stupid little bitch?”

  “Yes, I do,” Kim said, meeting Elizabeth’s harsh gaze. “We put into motion exactly what your country wants to happen; the end of North Korea under Kim Jong Il.”

  “But at what cost? If this goes nuclear millions of people will die, maybe tens of millions. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “Only my husband mean
s anything to me.”

  “You’re saying that it wasn’t the North Koreans who made the hit?” Todd asked his father-in-law. “But then who hired her and how’d you get involved?”

  McGarvey told them everything from the moment Colonel Pak had showed up in Casey Key until his run with Kim to the Chinese Embassy in Pyongyang, including the business with Turov in Tokyo.

  Kim hadn’t known about the North Koreans coming to him for help. “But why you, if they suspected the CIA was behind it?” she asked.

  “Because the Chinese respect my father, and North Korean intelligence obviously knows it,” Liz said sharply.

  “Do you think it’s this Russian from Tokyo who’s come here after you?” Todd asked.

  “Either him or some of his people,” McGarvey said, watching the realization of what that meant dawn on all of them.

  “It means that I was right,” Kim said. “It was the CIA who hired Alexandar.”

  “Dad?” Liz asked.

  McGarvey shook his head. “We’re talking a great deal of money, but Otto hasn’t found a trace of it from inside.”

  “Black sources?” Todd suggested.

  “That’s the first direction he looked, and the money’s just not there.”

  “But the small plane was no coincidence. No one else other than Otto and us knew that you would be here, except for housekeeping who’ve kept a watch out here.”

  “It’s not the Company,” Elizabeth said. “If that kind of an operation had been in the works we would have heard something. Even if the training had taken place offshore, someone would have let a word slip.”

  “We’ve got a mole,” Todd said.

  “A megalomaniac,” Elizabeth said. “But you have to ask who is he working for and why? What’s their agenda? Certainly not just a war between China and North Korea.”

  “That’s why I brought her here. My first question has been answered, it is someone inside the Company.”

  “I told you,” Kim blurted.

  “Otto’s looking for the money stream outside,” McGarvey said. “And I’m going to find out just that, who hired him and why.”

  “If they’re coming to kill us, I’ll need a gun,” Kim said, but Elizabeth just stared at the woman as if she’d crawled out from under a rock.

  “We’ll check around outside to see what we’re up against,” Todd said.

  “Park your car in the garage, and keep out of sight as much as you can,” McGarvey told them. “I’d like to keep you two as a surprise.”

  “There’s still time to call for more help out here,” Liz suggested.

  “We’ll do this on our own.”

  Something suddenly dawned on her. “You’re expecting someone else to come out here. The one from the Building.”

  “It’s a thought,” he said. “You and Todd make your rounds and then get back here undercover.”

  SEVENTY–THREE

  Minoru moved from the Hay-Adams downtown to a Holiday Inn Express just off the interstate outside of Rockville. It was about five miles from the CIA’s safe house, and making it out to Dulles afterward would be simple. Lavrov showed up with a small duffle bag, and some equipment in a panel van just before seven in the evening.

  “My operators will be here in a couple of hours,” he said. “Have you spoken to the colonel about my request for more money?”

  “He’s agreed to pay whatever you want, provided you and your people do the job and get out clean.”

  “What guarantee do I have that you even called him?”

  “None,” Minoru replied. “Now come look at the images I took from the air, and tell me about your men so that we can devise a plan that will work.”

  The camera was a good one with a large LCD screen, and the ability to pan left or right and up or down and to zoom in for more detail.

  The four men coming from New York worked for the Russian mafia out of Brighton Beach and Newark as enforcers. Whenever Lavrov needed some muscle to convince a business client to see things his way he called on one or more of them.

  “They’re reliable and damned good,” he said.

  “Do they trust you?”

  “Completely.”

  “Too bad for them,” Minoru said. He had spotted a narrow dirt track about two hundred meters from the driveway and had taken several pictures of it and the terrain above the house. He brought the images up on the screen one at a time. “We’ll get off the highway here, and come by foot from the hills behind the house once it gets dark.”

  “Why not wait until just before dawn, they might be sleeping by then?”

  “Because that’s what they’ll be expecting,” Minoru told him patiently. “If we hit them in the early evening, chances are no one will suspect that anything has happened until the next morning.

  “Fair enough,” Lavrov said.

  “What equipment did you bring?”

  “AK-47s. It’s old stuff, plus night vision oculars, and encrypted earpieces. My people will be carrying their own pistols.”

  “What did you bring for you and me?” Minuro asked.

  Lavrov opened the duffle bag and pulled out a 9 mm Beretta 92F, two extra fifteen-round box magazines, and a Kevlar silencer. He laid all of it on the desk. “I have the same. For afterward. I figure that the house is far enough off the road that no one will hear the AKs. But when the job is done and we start the second phase it wouldn’t do to make too much noise.”

  “You’ve thought of everything,” Minoru said, handling the reliable Italian-made pistol.

  “I always try to be thorough.”

  Minoru looked up and smiled. “Alexandar said as much.” He picked up the camera and studied the image of the hillside above the house. “Your four operators will take the house from the rear once you and I have made our way around to the front. They’ll go in first with a lot of noise—”

  “While we wait in ambush to see what develops,” Lavrov finished it. “But won’t they call for help?”

  “Not until it’s too late. Alexandar thinks that they know someone’s coming. It’s why McGarvey’s alone out there with the woman. He’s hoping to spring his own trap. But like I said earlier, there’s a possibility we’ll have help from inside.”

  Lavrov was worried. “The bastard’s got a hell of a reputation.”

  “Not against six of us,” Minoru said. “And we’ll have another advantage. He’ll want to keep at least one of us alive, while we won’t have the same consideration.”

  Lavrov grinned for the first time. “It’s you who’s thought of everything.”

  Minoru shook his head. “All but one.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Whatever it is that might go wrong and turn the advantage to McGarvey. If there’s a way out of his predicament, he’s probably thought of it.”

  “We’ll have to be careful.”

  “Yes, and lucky.”

  SEVENTY–FOUR

  At the safe house Todd came in the front door after making a quick look around the grounds. It was just after dark and he was dressed in black camos.

  McGarvey came out of the study from where he’d been watching the road. “Any sign of the opposition?”

  “Not yet,” Todd said. “Maybe they’ll wait until morning.”

  “If they’re coming it’ll be before midnight. It’s when I’d make my move.”

  Todd saw the logic. “Nobody would miss us until tomorrow. Give them plenty of time to clear out of Dodge. But do you still think whoever it is in the Company will come out here?”

  “I think so,” McGarvey said. “He knows I have the woman with me, and he’s got to be worried that sooner or later I’ll figure out that it’s someone inside who hired Turov. He’ll want to find out if I’m suspicious.”

  “Liz and I are going to come as a nasty surprise. But won’t he be running the risk of getting in the middle of an attack?”

  “He won’t think so,” McGarvey said. “But that’s exactly what’s going to happen, because now that it’s gone
this far Turov will want him eliminated.”

  Elizabeth appeared at the head of the stairs and came down to them. “He’d be stupid to come out here.”

  “Only if he thinks I suspect something,” McGarvey said. He glanced toward the head of the stairs. Kim had gone up to one of the bedrooms after dinner to get some rest. She was mentally and physically exhausted from the events of the past several days. “What about her?”

  “Still asleep,” Elizabeth said. She was angry again. “Why don’t we take the bitch downtown and drop her in front of the Chinese Embassy? We could pin a note to her chest. Why risk our lives protecting her?”

  “I don’t care about her,” McGarvey said, though in a way he actually did. From what he’d learned listening to her and seeing the material Otto had found in the laptop he’d come to the conclusion that everything she’d done was out of love for her husband. It didn’t make her any the less guilty, it just made her situation tragic.

  “We’ll turn her over to the Chinese tomorrow and let them deal with her,” McGarvey said.

  “What about my husband?” Kim demanded from the head of the stairs, her voice shrill. She’d been listening.

  “He’ll be sent to Beijing,” McGarvey told her. “What’d you expect?”

  “I don’t have to take this shit,” she said, coming down the stairs.

  “There’s the door,” McGarvey told her. “If you want to get out of here before your pals show up, be my guest.”

  “I made my way to Pyongyang without your help, and I can make my way back again.”

  “If Alexandar and his people don’t kill you, and you actually do make it back to North Korea, which from what I’ve learned about you is possible, you’ll still end up in Beijing,” Elizabeth said. “You assassinated a Chinese general, what makes you think you and your husband shouldn’t be turned over?”

  “Someone in the CIA hired Alexandar to hire us, but you’re not going to turn him over to the Chinese,” she said defiantly.