The Expediter (17 page)

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.

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 the 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.

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.

“He’ll kill her,” Rencke said.

“I think he probably meant to kill them both when they got back from Pyongyang,” McGarvey said. “Mission accomplished, whatever the hell the mission was, and now it’s time to eliminate the loose ends.”

“Have you opened the laptop’s lid?” Rencke asked.

“No, should I?”

“Definitely not. I gave you a serial port cable with your sat phone. Do you still have it?”

“Right here,” McGarvey said. He’d taken it out of a pocket in his hanging bag.

“Plug it into the phone and I’ll take it from there.”

“Don’t I have to turn the laptop on first?” McGarvey asked.

“I’ll do that from here.”

“How?”

Rencke chuckled. “Kemo sabe, do I tell you how to shoot a gun?”

McGarvey set the laptop computer on the desk and plugged it into the sat phone.

“Got it,” Rencke said. “Give me an hour.”

“One more thing,” McGarvey said. “Can you find out if the North Koreans are getting their missiles ready to launch?”

“Dick asked me that this afternoon, and I’m on it,” Rencke said. “But we might not get any indication of what they’re doing until they launch.”

“It’ll be too late by then. How about the Chinese?”

“They went to DEFCON three about two hours ago,” Rencke said.

“We’re running out of time.”

“Yeah,” Rencke said. A green light on the front of the laptop came on. “One hour, Mac.”

Driving across the river to NIS headquarters in the Naegok-dong district after dropping McGarvey off at the Westin Chosun, Ok-Lee had time to examine where her loyalties lay most strongly.

She was a field officer in her country’s intelligence service and she held a strong belief and pride in the republic. But she was also a realist, as many intelligence officers became before they turned into cynics. Reuniting the nation, North and South, which was a dream of nearly
every man and woman on the peninsula, would never happen so long as Kim Jong Il was alive. But she also realized that confronting the maniac head on was nearly the same as suicide.

It was what they were faced with now, and the trouble was that no one on the fifth floor had any real idea of what to do next. Everyone seemed to be waiting for the Americans to talk some sense into Beijing, because no one believed that Kim Jong Il could be reasoned with, or trusted to keep his word if he did promise something.

And then there was Kirk McGarvey, arguably one of the most effective intelligence officers since World War II, come here to Seoul with a wild story of Russian intermediaries and South Korean assassins.

The thing was that in Ok-Lee’s estimation he was the only man on the planet who seemed to have any real idea what to do and how to go about it. The apparent leak back at Langley bothered her deeply, but the NIS wasn’t free of its spies, and anyway the instant he had introduced himself at Oasan she had begun to feel that it would be okay to turn over the entire problem to him. He could handle anything, you could see it in his eyes, in the way he held himself, and in the tone of his voice as much as what he said.

McGarvey was a man who exuded competence and self-confidence and at first she had resented his effect on her, though if half the stories about him were true he was a man among men, something rare.

At thirty-four, Ok-Lee’s love life was all but nonexistent. The few men she dated were either misogynists, as many Asians were, or they were simply stupid, conceited, or worse, weak.

Her sister said that Ok-Lee would never get married and have children because she was too hard. “If some man actually tries to get close to you the first thing you try to do is have a mental arm wrestling contest with him. Who wants that?”

She couldn’t respect a man who would lose to her, but if it ever came to it she had a feeling that McGarvey wouldn’t lose.

NIS headquarters was housed in a sweepingly modern building somewhat taken after the CIA’s Old Headquarters Building. She was passed through security at the outer gate, then drove up to her parking
spot, and took the elevator to her cubicle on the third floor in National Security Law Operations.

Bak in-Suk, chief of the Foreign Section, came out of his office, a skeptical look on his small, round face. He had married last year, but before that he and Ok-Lee had dated a few times, and he was one of the few men she’d ever found even slightly interesting. He was bright, and his major fault was that he knew it, but they were still friends.

“Did he bring anything we can use?”

Ok-Lee dropped her purse on her desk, and shook her head. “He’s chasing a dead end, or at least I think he is.”

“They must be damned scared to send a guy of his background out here,” Bak said. “Is that why you sent a surveillance team to watch some storage locker?”

“I did it to humor him, there’s nothing there.”

“It’s a waste of resources, with all the shit coming down around our heads.”

“You asked me to babysit the man, and that’s what I’m doing,” Ok-Lee said. “Look, does anyone upstairs have any idea what’s going on?”