The Expediter

by David Hagberg

  “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.”

  FIVE

  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.

  SIX

  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?”

  The answer dawned on Ri all at once. “Because they wanted to be seen.”

  In the bright muzzle flashes they were able to catch a few more details of the shooters’ faces, especially the taller of the two.

  “Definitely Korean,” Ri said.

  Pak rewound the tape and watched the shooting again. “What’s wrong with what we’re seeing?” he asked half to himself.

  Ri shrugged. “They fired eight times, you can count that from the muzzle flashes, which jibes with the number of shell casings found. And they were damned good shooters. They never missed once. Better than I could do.”

  “Better than any of our cops could do,” Pak said.

  “Unless they got lucky.”

  Pak stopped the tape at the clearest image of the two shooters, and it dawned on him what was wrong. “The one on the left. His uniform doesn’t fit him.”

  “Those guys get their lousy uniforms from the same place the Army does.”

  Pak looked up. “Have you ever seen a Korean so well fed that his uniform was too tight?”

  For a second Ri drew a blank, but then all of a sudden his face lit up. “Holy shit, you’re right. South Koreans.”

  “Yes. And who do you suppose sometimes trains South Korean snipers?”

  “Who?”

  “The CIA.”

  “They wanted to be picked up by the surveillance cameras to make the Chinese believe that it was our people who did the shooting,” Ri said. “But why? What’s the point?”

  It was ingenious, Pak had to admit. Bold, with a very small chance of success, and yet the bastards somehow got across the border, probably through one of the tunnels down south, made it all the way up here, and found uniforms somewhere.

  “To start a war between us and China,” Pak said. “I need to know if any of our cops have gone missing in the past twenty-four hours. Not just here in the city, but anywhere in the country.”

  “If they’re from the South maybe they brought everything with them,” Ri suggested. “Less risky that way.”

  “They’d have made sure the uniforms fit like they’re supposed to. Baggy.”

  “I’m on it,” Ri said and he went to his desk and started telephoning.

  Pak rewound the tape again to the beginning and tried to watch from a fresh perspective, as if this were the first time he was seeing it. The guards came out of the embassy. The car arrived and the driver opened the rear door. The guards opened the gate and the general came out. Moments later the shooters stepped into view and opened fire.

  He rewound the tape. The guards came out, the car arrived, the guards opened the gate, the general came out.

  And it struck him. The shooters not only knew that a car was coming to pick up the general, they knew the exact time it would be there, and that was impossible. He suspected that only a handful of people could have known such details. A few in the Chinese Embassy, and in the Guoanbu back in Beijing, and a few on Dear Leader’s staff.

  He would have bet his life that Dear Leader’s staff had not been compromised, and it was inconceivable that the South Koreans had the wherewithal to penetrate Chinese security to such an extent they could have come up with intel that good.

  But the assassination had taken place.

  The tape came to the shooting and Pak studied the images of the two figures. The one on the left was the largest, and his uniform was too tight, but the one on the right was slightly built, more typical of a North Korean. His uniform was a loose fit.

  Only a few spy agencies anywhere in the world had even the remotest possibility of penetrating Chinese intelligence: Russia’s FSB, Britain’s MI6, Israel’s Mossad, and America’s CIA.

  Russia wouldn’t be interested in starting trouble between China and North Korea, nor would Israel. England had some commercial interests on the peninsula, but South Korea’s chief partner was the United States.

  Pak stared at the television screen but the images weren’t registering. Dear Leader was insane, there was little doubt about it. But he was a wily politician who had been trained by his father, practically from birth, to run the country. Maybe his constant warning that America was bent on destroying him and North Korea was correct after all, and not just the ravings of a madman trying to turn attention away from his failed policies.

  Ri hung up the phone, an odd expression on his face. “You were right,” he said. He glanced up at the clock on the wall. “And we’ve got twenty-five minutes to catch them.”

  “Catch who?”

  “The bodies of two cops were fished out of the river around dawn, their necks broken. They were fully dressed, but their AKs had been fired. Eight times.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Doesn’t matter, Colonel. What matters is that they were assigned patrol duty on Yanggak Island.”

  “Yanggakdo Hotel,” Pak said. “Someone from one of the tour groups.”

  “That’s right,” Ri said. “And the next flight to Beijing leaves in twenty-five minutes.”

  SEVEN

  At Sunan International Airport, Soon and his roommate, a slightly built South Korean from Inch’on, were first off the bus, and along with Kim and others were herded into the departing passengers’ hall.

  The airport was busy this morning handling the four tour groups plus a smattering of North Korean and Chinese businessmen who had their own separate line. This close to finally getting out, everyone’s spirits had improved markedly since the hotel lobby.

  “I thought Beijing was horrible, but this place is in a time warp,” Sue said softly. “I’m glad we’re getting out.” They were in line to get their boarding passes.

  “Me too,” Kim whispered back. Her heart was pounding, her legs weak, and her palms wet. She felt like a wreck.

  Mr. Tae came over. “What was that?” he asked politely. He was a small man with thinning gray hair. He’d taught English in high school before he was given this job.

  “I was telling Kim how interesting this visit has been,” Sue said. “The time went fast.”

  Mr. Tae nodded his appreciation even though it was obvious Sue was lying. “Maybe you will come back someday.”

  Sue nodded. “Maybe.”

  Kim forced a smile and nodded. She felt stupid, as if everything she was thinking was showing on her face. But Mr. Tae merely smiled at her, and walked back to the head of the line to make sure no one in his group was running into a problem.

  “Guys like that have got to wonder why people like us come here,” Sue said. “I mean I can understand why you’re here but the only reason I came was because of the thesis I’m writing on the two Koreas.”

  “Did coming here help?” Kim asked, for something to say.

  “Not really. I could have gotten almost everything I needed from the Internet, except for the feel of the place.”
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br />   After their names were checked against the passenger manifest they were issued boarding passes and Mr. Tae led them through a gate where they surrendered their bags and were given claim checks. Before the luggage was loaded aboard the plane every piece would be opened and searched by an army of men, then sealed with customs tape.

  Just before immigration, Mr. Tae handed back their passports from which the North Korean visas had been removed. “As you have seen for yourselves, we are a peaceful nation of humble people. My sincere wish is for you to take that message home with you.”

  “Thank you,” someone from the group said, and everyone else nodded their assent. He’d been a pleasant guide, not as strict or demanding as they’d been told some of the others could be.

  The airport was going to be the most difficult time, Soon had warned her back in Seoul. “You’ll have to keep yourself together, no matter what’s happened to that point. They’ll know that a Chinese general was gunned down in front of his embassy, but we’ll be okay if they haven’t found the dead cops.”

  “What if they do?” Kim had asked. “They’ll know that it’s someone from the hotel.”

  “In that case the airport will be locked down, probably all morning while they check us out. But our papers are legitimate, we’ll leave no fingerprints or DNA, and if no one spots us swimming across the river there’ll be no way for them to single us out.”

  “What about the cameras at the embassy?”

  “Pyongyang is dark at night. Depending on the situation in the street it’s doubtful they’ll pick out much more than the fact that we’re wearing police uniforms.” He took her in his arms. “They won’t see our faces, I’ll make sure of it.”

  “I’m frightened,” she admitted.

  “You’d be a fool if you weren’t,” he said. “One step at a time, babe. One step at a time.”

  Kim looked up out of her thoughts in time to see her husband heading down the hall right behind his roommate to the door out to the bus that would take them to the Russian-built Tupolev jetliner, and her heart soared. They were actually going to make it. She forced herself to remain calm.