The Expediter (4 page)

“I’ve become a popular fellow all of a sudden.”

“Better you than me,” Ri said.

They came around the corner by the Taedong Gate, dozens of police and military troops all over the place. The street in front of the embassy was blocked at both ends by barricades. Four armed soldiers led by an officer manned the nearest barricade, and Pak had to stop.

He held out his identification booklet, and the lieutenant studied it and Pak’s face carefully before he handed it back and saluted. “They’re waiting for you, Colonel, but you’ll have to walk the rest of the way. The investigators want to keep the crime scene uncontaminated for as long as possible.”

Two ambulances were parked just up the block from the embassy.

“Have the bodies been moved?” Pak asked.

“No, sir.”

Pak backed up and parked behind a military jeep, then he and Ri passed through the barrier and headed down the street to the scene of intense activity in front of the embassy. He had the thought that if this had happened in gun-happy America every television, radio, and newspaper journalist in the world would have gathered like vultures for a feast of carrion. Such things were called media circuses, and rightly so. Something like that was impossible here, and gladly so. Some freedoms were worthless.

Major Shikai Chen, dressed in gray trousers and an open-necked white shirt, stood just outside the gate watching a team of medical examiners and forensic field technicians going over the four bodies. He was a short, slightly built man in his late forties, with round glasses that made him appear scholarly. He glanced up when Pak and Ri came around from behind the Mercedes, his expression unreadable.

“When you’ve finished looking, the bodies will be moved and this mess cleaned off your street,” he said coolly.

“I’ve finished looking,” Pak said. “Can you tell me precisely what has happened here?”

A hint of irritation crossed Chen’s eyes, but he nodded. “Very well.” He turned to the chief medical examiner standing over General Li’s body. “You may proceed. But I want the autopsy report on my desk within twenty-four hours, and the general’s body prepared for its return to Beijing.”

Pak thought that it was extraordinary that a Chinese officer was giving orders to a North Korean doctor, but he said nothing.

Chen turned back. “Two uniformed police officers waited in ambush, there, across the street in the doorway of the bank, and when the car and driver came for General Ho’s appointment with your premier, they opened fired without warning, causing the destruction you see here.”

Ambulance attendants were coming down the street with gurneys for all four bodies. Pak turned and looked at the bank where a police photographer was taking pictures of something on the ground. Presumably shell casings where the shooters stood in the shadows of the doorway.

He turned back. “Obviously someone carried out the assassination, but it wasn’t our people,” Pak said. “We have no reason for it. China is our ally.”

“Rebels. Malcontents. Traitors,” Chen shot back heatedly.

“Even if that were so, why kill one of your spymasters, Major?” Ri asked. “Unless he was here to spy on us.”

Chen bridled and stepped forward. “The ambassador will be calling on your premier as soon as he receives instructions from Beijing. I suggest you find out who did this before the situation gets out of hand.”

“Naturally,” Pak said. He glanced up at the embassy windows and the closed-circuit television cameras above the gate and on the building, and suddenly he had a sour feeling in his stomach. “Witnesses?” he asked. He nodded toward the cameras. “Tapes?”

“Yes,” Chen said. He took a cassette tape from his pocket and gave it to Pak. “They kept to the shadows for the most part so there aren’t many details, except their uniforms and weapons.”

For the first time he could remember, Pak was at a loss for words. Such an act was unthinkable here, unless Ri had hit upon something. But even if it were true that the Chinese had mounted a spy operation, he couldn’t imagine Kim Jong Il ordering the assassination. At the very least, relationships with their only real friend would be severely strained. At worst it could mean war, and Pak knew that if it came to it, Dear Leader was crazy enough to use the six nuclear weapons that had been hidden from the international inspectors. It was a chilling thought.

“Keep in touch, Colonel,” Chen said. “For all of our sakes.”

Kim woke up a few minutes after eight, bleary-eyed and groggy, and it took her a few moments to get her bearings and remember what she’d done last night. The finality of it came crashing down on her so hard she buried her face in her pillow. The worst part was the look in the young cop’s eyes as he lay dying.

Her Japanese roommate Sue Makewa was already up, and probably downstairs having breakfast, which was just as well because Kim didn’t think she could face anyone just now. She needed twenty minutes to get her act together.

She took a long, hot shower, and dressed in a fresh pair of jeans, a designer T-shirt, and a pink baseball cap with a Nike logo. Most of her packing was done, but she put her dirty clothes into the plastic bag, and stuffed it into her single suitcase.

Sue Makewa came in, a bright smile on her pretty, round face. “Good morning, sleepyhead,” she said in English. It was the tour group’s lingua franca. In addition to the eight Japanese and three South Koreans, an Australian couple had joined at the last minute in Beijing.

“Did you sleep well?” Kim asked.

“Like a dragon, until you started talking in your sleep and woke me up.”

Kim was horrified and it must have shown on her face.

“Don’t worry, I don’t speak a word of Korean,” Sue told her breezily. “So your little sex secrets are still safe. But it sounded like your boyfriend was being tough on you. Anyway the bus will be here any minute, so we’d better get downstairs.”

Kim busied herself finishing her packing. She’d never talked in her sleep, or at least she didn’t think she had. Soon had never mentioned it, and he was a light sleeper. Her roommate had no reason to lie about something like that, and it was very likely that she didn’t speak Korean, very few Japanese did. Koreans believed that they had migrated across the Sea of Japan and were the first, other than the aboriginal natives, to populate the islands. This view had always infuriated the Japanese, which was one of the reasons they had been so brutal during their occupation of the peninsula in World War II.

Sue zippered up her two bags and set them by the door. “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to go home. I’m tired of someone looking over my shoulder 24/7.”

“Me too,” Kim said.

“Do you have any relatives here?”

“None that I know of,” Kim said. “But even if I did they wouldn’t have let me see them on this trip. That kind of stuff takes a different set of paperwork. And a lot of it.”

Sue shook her head. “Bastards,” she said. “We could have had the
same setup if the Russians had invaded like they did in Germany. I would have hated it.”

“We do,” Kim said. “Have you ever been to Seoul?”

“Once. It’s sorta like Tokyo.”

“Now you’ve seen how it is here. Make the comparison. It’ll be a long time, if ever, before we’ll get together.”

“That’s crappy.”

“Yeah, crappy,” Kim said, surprised. It was the first time in the fourteen days they’d been together that her roommate had actually talked to her about something other than the tour. But then, she thought, perhaps she’d been too wound up to listen until now.

“We’d better get downstairs, the bus should be here any minute, and we don’t want to give Mr. Tae a heart attack,” Sue said. “He’s been pretty decent.”

Every foreigner visiting North Korea was assigned a guide, more like a watchdog, to make sure no one wandered off the official path or took unapproved photographs. Tae Kwon Hung was the senior guide for their group, and he had been kind, though Kim had been wary of him the entire time. She was sure that he was a cop sent to spy on them, specifically on her and Soon.

Kim zippered her hanging bag, doubled it over, and did up the clasps. This morning in the lobby would be the first real test. The guards they’d killed would have been reported missing by now, and if the hit were traced to someone from this hotel no one would be leaving North Korea any time soon.

Their room was on the eighteenth floor of the forty-five-story hotel that had been built just a few years ago, specifically for tourists and especially tour groups. By Western standards it was right out of the sixties or seventies, but here in the North it was luxurious by comparison to any of the other hotels in the city.

The elevator was full by the time they reached the ground floor and the general mood among all the tour groups leaving this morning was upbeat. Everyone seemed glad to be going home.

Mr. Tae and the other guides were waiting for them near the doors,
as were the guides for three other groups. Four buses were lined up outside to take them out to the airport, but the noise level was low. Everyone was anxious to leave, but just about everyone was nervous about last-minute complications.

Kim caught a glimpse of her husband coming across the lobby. He looked haggard, as if he hadn’t got any sleep last night. But she’d seen no sign on his face that anything was wrong, and she breathed a little sigh of relief.

Uniformed guards were standing around, looking bored, but there was no unusual activity that Kim could detect. She turned to their guides as Mr. Tae began his farewell speech, blaming the Americans for all their troubles, and Dear Leader for all the guidance and bounty in the workers’ paradise.

The assassination last night of General Ho was going to cause a ripple in paradise, Kim thought. She wondered how Kim Jong Il was going to explain it to the Chinese. It was one conversation she wished that she and Soon could hear.

It had taken most of the morning before they could find a video playback unit and a small black-and-white television to view the surveillance tape from the Chinese Embassy. Pak was sitting at his desk, watching the assassination in stop action for the fifth time, when Ri came in with their morning tea and noodle soup from the cafeteria downstairs.

“You pick out anything new?” Ri asked, setting the breakfast tray on top of a file cabinet.

“They were waiting in the doorway of the bank when the car came
for the general, but there’s no way of telling how long they were there beforehand,” Pak said.

Ri gave him his tea and soup and chopsticks. “The cameras should have caught them coming up the street.”

“Not if they remained in the shadows,” Pak said. He rewound the tape to a time two minutes before the hit and stopped it. “It’s too bad the cameras didn’t pan, but the sidewalk to the east and west of the bank entrance is in shadows. They could have easily reached the doorway without being spotted.”

“Right, and made their escape the same way,” Ri said.

Pak started the tape, and sipped his tea as he watched.

Two guards in shiny helmets came out of the embassy and walked to the gate. A minute later, headlights flashed from the left, and the Mercedes that had been sent to pick up General Ho slid into view and pulled up. The driver jumped out and opened the rear door. Almost immediately the general emerged from the embassy, crossing the narrow space inside the fence as the guards opened the gate.

Pak sat forward. “Now.”

General Ho stepped through the open gate, the view from the camera catching him from behind. At that exact moment two figures emerged from the shadows across the street, and raised their AKs.

Pak stopped the tape. “What do you see?”

“Two cops in uniform,” Ri said. “Armed with Kalashnikovs. One of them smaller than the other. Hard to tell, but they’re probably Koreans. Definitely not Americans, or even Japanese.”

“What else?” Pak prompted.

Ri studied the image, but then shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“They could have fired their weapons from
inside
the doorway. The cameras were in plain sight, they couldn’t have missed them, so why did they step out?”