The Expediter (18 page)

Operations was running full tilt because of the crisis and yet the only sounds were a few muffled telephone conversations and the plastic clatter of dozens of computer keyboards. Bak looked down the corridor between the cubicles to see if anyone who could overhear them was coming.

“Doesn’t matter who took the bastard down, Beijing is blaming it on Dear Leader, and nobody knows what the fuck to do,” Bak said, keeping his voice low. “They’re hoping that sooner or later the crazy son of a bitch will come to his senses and apologize. The Chinese will make some more threats for a few weeks, but everything will start to calm down and this time next year it’ll be business as usual.”

“Is that what you think?”

Bak shrugged his narrow shoulders.

“Anybody heading for the hills yet?”

“We’ve had a couple of sick calls, not many,” Bak said, and he smiled. “Thanks for sticking with me on this one. You got a crappy
assignment, but at least it looks like we’re doing something constructive.”

Ok-Lee felt rotten about lying to him, but if the agency’s director and his staff had no idea what was going on, or what to do about the situation, she had to at least give McGarvey a fighting chance. “He wants some phone records on a couple people who used to work for us.”

“Anyone important?”

“No.”

“Well, get him his phone records, and whatever else he wants,” Bak said. “Who knows, maybe you’re wrong and the CIA does have something we can use.”

He turned and went back to his office leaving Ok-Lee to sit down at her desk and power up her computer.

Coming up with the Huks’ service records was easy, but beyond that she ran into an almost total blank, except for the address of their apartment. They had apparently met shortly after graduation from Sniper School and according to a Military Investigation Unit report they’d begun sleeping together almost immediately, which was strictly forbidden by Sniper Service regulations.

They’d been reprimanded twice, the first time verbally by their commanding officer, and the second in the form of a letter placed in their files, warning them to either quit the affair or face disciplinary action.

Two days after the written warning, they’d both resigned their commissions and disappeared into civilian life.

The record stopped there. Beyond that it was as if they had dropped off the planet. No records existed for them in the Driver’s License Bureau, they’d not applied for passports or federal identification cards, they apparently had no jobs because they never filed income tax forms, nor had they ever been injured, because their names did not show up on the registries of any hospital in the country, and neither had they violated any law, not even something so minor as a parking ticket because their names were not in any police or court databases she searched.

If either of them had a telephone, land line or cell, no records existed so it was impossible to learn if they’d ever made calls to Tokyo.

Ok-Lee printed out their service records, and sat back for a minute or so staring at their photographs. They were a handsome couple, the woman, Huk Kim, much smaller than her husband Soon. But the biggest difference between them, apparent even in the military ID photographs, was the look in their eyes. Soon was a hard charger, while Kim seemed to be much less driven. His was the typically determined attitude of a Sniper Service officer, but hers was much softer, maybe even a little uncertain of what she had gotten herself into.

An act on the woman’s part, Ok-Lee wondered? According to Mc-Garvey they had been the shooters in Pyongyang, and the papers, money, and weapons in the storage locker seemed to confirm it. Now the husband was either dead or in a military prison in the North, and the woman was on the run.

Ok-Lee telephoned McGarvey at the hotel. “I hope you’ve had better luck with the laptop than I’ve had here.”

“I’ve got somebody working on it,” McGarvey said. “Did you come up with anything?”

“They were officers in the Sniper Service, and they were having an affair, but rather than give that up they resigned their commissions. Beyond that, except for the address of the apartment where they slept together, I’m drawing a blank. No voter records, no driver’s license, no phone records, nothing.”

“I should have something later this afternoon,” McGarvey said. “Why don’t you keep digging, and then come over here around eight, I’ll buy you dinner.”

Ok-Lee smiled. “How do you know I don’t have a husband and a dozen kids waiting at home for me?”

“No ring,” McGarvey said simply.

“Eight,” Ok-Lee said, but she thought it was something more than a bare ring finger.

Kim was standing at the window of her fifth-floor hotel room, looking down at the building rush-hour traffic when her cell phone lying on the nightstand chimed. She caught it on the second ring.

“
Ye.
” Yes, she said.

“Where were those photographs taken?” a man demanded in English. It was Alexandar; she recognized his voice, but he sounded angry.

“In front of the apartment,” she said. “I think he’s an American, probably CIA.”

“You’re damned right he is, or was. Name is Kirk McGarvey, and he was a shooter for the Agency until they brought him back to the Building and made him the director. He’s supposed to be retired now, so only something very big would bring him here to your apartment.”

“I didn’t know,” Kim said.

“What the hell did you and your husband do to attract his attention?”

“Just the job.”

“I mean where did you two fuck up? How did your names get into a CIA database?” Alexandar shouted.

Kim sat down on the bed, her heart pounding. Soon had never seemed so far away as he did now. She desperately needed him here with her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “We went there, did the job you hired us to do, and Soon and another man were arrested and taken off the plane. Obviously they’ve found out who Soon is, and under drugs he might have told them about me and where we live, but they wouldn’t have shared that information with the CIA. If anything they might have turned him over to the Chinese.”

“He hasn’t left Pyongyang.”

“Soon is still alive?” Kim asked excitedly. It was if a terribly heavy burden had been pulled away. “You know this for a fact?”

“He’s alive,” Alexandar said. “Did you recognize the woman?”

It was hard to keep on track now that she knew Soon hadn’t been executed. “NIS, probably. She was driving a car with government plates.”

“She’s Ok-Lee Lin, a minor field officer in the Security Law Operations Center. She was probably sent to show McGarvey around. What else does the NIS know about you?”

“They can’t know anything about us. Soon made sure of it after we left the service.”

The circuit was silent for several seconds, but then Alexandar was back. “It still doesn’t explain why he came to Seoul.”

Kim looked over toward the door. Soon was alive and she was going to make sure he got out. “Will you help me?”

“Yes, of course I’m going to help you,” Alexandar told her, the anger suddenly gone from his voice. “But first we have a bigger problem to take care of and you’re going to help me deal with it.”

“What problem?”

“Kirk McGarvey,” Alexandar said. “We’re going to kill him, you and I.”

Kim’s heart leapt to her throat. “I can’t,” she sputtered. “I wouldn’t know how to begin to find him.”

“No problem,” Alexandar said. “He’s right there at your hotel in a suite on the top floor.”

Kim almost dropped the phone. Her first instinct was to run, right now. Grab her things and get out, but Alexandar’s insistent voice was in her ear.

“Unless we kill McGarvey I won’t be able to help you get your husband out. Do you understand?”

“I can’t do this thing,” Kim said, trying to keep herself together. She was on the verge of tears again. “Not alone. Not without Soon.”

“I’ll help you.”

“How? Not from Tokyo.”

“I’m here in the city, very close to you,” Alexandar said, his voice
soft now, reassuring. “And what you have to do will be dangerous, but you won’t be on your own, I promise you.”

Kim didn’t know what to say. She was consumed by visions of her husband. She was lying next to him in their bed in the apartment, where they’d been so happy between assignments.

“Do you trust me?” Alexandar asked.

It was never supposed to be this way. Soon had promised her in the beginning that they would get out as quickly as possible.

“Do you believe that I won’t let you down?”

She nodded.
“Ye,”
she said.
“Ye.”

“Very good,” Alexandar said soothingly. “Now this is exactly what will happen.”

It was seven in the evening when Otto’s call came from Langley, and McGarvey sat up and put his feet over the edge of the bed. He’d managed only a couple hours of badly needed sleep, but he was supposed to meet Ok-Lee downstairs at the hotel’s O’Kim’s bar, so it was time to get up and take a shower anyway.

Rencke was excited, and his enthusiasm was like a shot of adrenaline. “We hit the jackpot, kemo sabe.”

“You got into the computer?” McGarvey asked.

“Of course I did, the encryption program was just a couple of steps above Stone Age. They’re the shooters, all right, and they’ve done five hits in the last twenty-four months, all for a Russian who they only know as Alexandar. Everything’s there, times, dates, places, methods, and payments to their account in Switzerland.”

“General Ho is on the list?”

“Yup, and they got paid a mil and a half, U.S. Seven-fifty before the hit, and seven-fifty within a couple of hours after the job was done,” Rencke said. “They flew up to Pyongyang via Beijing as part of a tour group. The last night they snuck out of the hotel, killed two cops on patrol, stole their uniforms and AKs, sealed everything up in plastic garbage bags, swam across the river, hiked over to the Chinese Embassy, and assassinated the general, his driver, and a pair of Chinese guards at the gate. They made certain that they were spotted by the embassy’s security cameras—to make sure the Chinese knew that it was a pair of North Korean cops who did the kill—then went back and swam across the river.”

They’d found the plastic bag that held the woman’s dirty clothes. It had bothered Ok-Lee because of its un-Koreaness.

“Pretty slick, actually,” Rencke was saying.

“They had to be either arrogant or stupid to keep something like that in a laptop that could go missing,” McGarvey said.

“Maybe they thought of it as insurance,” Rencke suggested. “If they went down so would Alexandar.”

“Did they know who the Russian really was and where he lived?”

“Just that he was somewhere in Tokyo and they guessed he was ex-KGB. But beyond that all they had was an e-mail address, which I checked. It’s a dead end.”

“They probably had a phone number in case of an emergency and they needed a lifeline,” McGarvey said.

“Wasn’t in the machine.”

McGarvey got up and walked over to the window and looked down at the street still clogged with traffic. It was getting dark and he was beginning to feel that he was missing something important, that they were all missing something important—even the shooters were.

“What else did you find? You said they’d made five hits in the last two years.”

“Yeah. Three months ago South Korea’s deputy ambassador to China—he was shot to death in Paris—and six months ago the Japanese
senator gunned down in Tokyo. They were soft on North Korea, wanted to have an appeasement with Kim Jong Il to avoid a war.”

“Who had the most to gain?’ McGarvey asked again. It was the part that bothered him most.

“Us,” Rencke said. “But it gets even more complicated than that, Mac. Remember Senator Thomas Moore, who got himself shot to death in Tel Aviv last year?”

“It was an accident, stray bullet from one of the refugee camps in Gaza. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“That’s what Mossad figured, but according to the laptop, Kim was the spotter and her husband Soon fired the shot.”