The Expediter

by David Hagberg

She had a point. “What do you suggest?” McGarvey asked.

  “You can stop the war, and for that Kim Jong Il will send Soon here to the States, where the two of us can go on trial with your CIA traitor and with Alexandar.”

  “Daddy?” Liz questioned.

  “Let’s get through tonight first,” McGarvey said. “But the Chinese are going to want something.”

  “Alexandar,” she said.

  SEVENTY–FIVE

  Turov’s Nokia encrypted telephone rang and he answered it. The caller was Daniel. It was a little after eleven in the morning in Tokyo and 9 P.M. in Washington, fully dark, which meant that Minoru and the others would soon be on their way out to the Cabin John house.

  “I have a solution to our mutual problem that’s not nearly as blunt as yours, and certainly a whole hell of a lot neater and more elegant.”

  “Oh, yes?” Turov said, smiling. He was seated on the deck overlooking the garden, the sound of splashing water soothing.

  “I’m going out to the Cabin John house and doing McGarvey myself. We know each other very well, and he won’t expect something like this coming from me.”

  It was exactly what Turov had expected. “Where are you at this moment?”

  “In my car. I’m on my way out there now.”

  “How far away are you, specifically?”

  “Why does that matter?” Daniel asked, a sudden note of suspicion in his voice. “Were your people planning on attacking this early?”

  “Not until just before dawn.”

  “Good thinking. They wouldn’t have been at their sharpest then. At any rate I’ll phone you when I’ve finished, and you can call off your people.”

  Turov looked up, the sound of splashing water in the pool soothing his nerves that had taken a spike. “What exactly is your plan? Tell me the details.”

  “Are you questioning my tradecraft again?” Daniel demanded angrily.

  “Not at all. I’m merely trying to help.”

  “Remember it was I who contacted you, it’s my money that’s lining your pockets. Don’t ever forget it, that is if you want to continue being my expediter.”

  “I won’t forget it. But I want you to remember that we have had a long history together. One that has benefited you as well as me. You wouldn’t be in your present position without the product I made sure got into your hands.”

  “It was never spectacular,” Daniel said.

  “No, but it was steady and most of all reliable. If you had brought back the sun and the moon both of us would have come under suspicion. As it is we have become rich men. I want to keep it that way.”

  “Very good,” Daniel said, somewhat mollified. “I expect there’ll be more work for you to do, but first I have to take care of this unfortunate turn of events.”

  “Yes, see to it,” Turov said. “But will you tell me your plan?”

  “He might be surprised to see me, but it won’t worry him, nor will he suspect that when his back is turned I will put a bullet in his head. Afterward I’ll kill the woman with his pistol, and putting my untraceable gun in her hands I’ll fire another shot so that she’ll have powder residue, and do the same with his body. She snuck up on him and fired a couple of shots, one of them mortally wounding the ex-director, and with his dying breath he managed to get off one shot which killed her.”

  “It’s a brilliant plan. You’ll be killing two birds with one stone, and no one will have any reason to suspect a thing.”

  “I knew that you’d see it my way,” Daniel said. “Call off your people, they’re no longer needed.”

  “I’ll see to it immediately,” Turov said. “Good luck.”

  Daniel chuckled. “Luck will play no part whatsoever.”

  After the connection was broken, Turov stood for a long minute, listening to the sounds of the water, the occasional splash of one of the golden carps, and a lark somewhere behind the house. His time with Daniel had been coming to a close; the relationship had become too dangerous. Time to end it once and for all. Perhaps even take the retirement he’d always planned on taking.

  He speed dialed Minoru’s number, which was answered on the first ring. “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “We’re en route. About fifteen minutes out.”

  “There’s been a slight change in plans,” Turov said, and he told his chief of staff what Daniel had planned. “Hold up until he goes in. Once the shooting starts it’ll provide the perfect distraction for you.

  “He might be successful,” Minoru said. “Crazier things have happened. How do you want me to handle it?”

  “I want everyone in that house dead before the night is out.”

  “Including Daniel?”

  “Especially Daniel,” Turov said, and broke the connection. It was time for a bottle of Krug and within a few days he would be enjoying the opera season in Sydney.

  SEVENTY–SIX

  They took turns watching from the upstairs windows, scuttling back and forth between the front and the back. At nine it was Liz’s turn. McGarvey was with Todd having coffee in the kitchen. The only light on in the house was from a small television Kim was watching in the breakfast nook.

  “Somone’s coming,” Liz called from the upstairs hall.

  “Shut off the TV,” McGarvey told Kim. He grabbed his pistol and hurried down the corridor to the front stair hall.

  “It’s a car from the highway,” Liz said.

  “Watch the back,” McGarvey called up to her as headlights flashed from across the clearing. He unlocked the front door, opened it, and stepped back out of the line of fire.

  Todd had gone into the living room where he was watching from one of the windows. “Shit,” he said. “It’s Otto.”

  Otto’s battered gray Mercedes diesel came down the gravel driveway and pulled up in front, and the Company’s Director of Special Projects, his frizzy red hair flying all over the place, jumped out and hurried up to the porch.

  McGarvey would have bet his life that the traitor inside the Company wasn’t Otto, but he hesitated for just a second before he holstered his pistol at the small of his back. A long time ago John Lyman Trotter, Jr., an old and trusted friend of his, had betrayed the Agency and had sold out to the Russians. It had nearly cost McGarvey his life. But not Otto, he could not believe it.

  Rencke came up the two steps to the porch and stopped a few feet from the open door. “Mac?” he called softly, the frightened look on his face clear even in the dim starlight.

  McGarvey hesitated just a moment longer. Todd was at the open French doors just across the stair hall, his pistol in hand.

  “In here,” McGarvey said, and he stepped around the corner to the doorway.

  “You scared the hell out of me, I shit you not,” Rencke said. “I thought I was too late and they’d already taken you down.”

  “We’re expecting company at any moment, so get in here,” McGarvey said. “And give your car keys to Todd. He’ll put the car in the garage.”

  Rencke saw Todd holster his pistol, and realized at once what it meant. “You’re expecting our resident bad guy to show up tonight, aren’t you?” He watched Todd’s eyes as he handed over his keys. “And you thought it was me. Cool.”

  Todd had to smile “You’re not going to think it’s so cool when we come under fire and you’re in the middle of it.” He went out to put Rencke’s car under cover and McGarvey closed the door.

  “Hi, Otto,” Elizabeth called softly from the head of the stairs.

  “Keeping watch for the bad guys?”

  “Yup.”

  “What are you doing out here?” McGarvey asked.

  “I know who our traitor is, and I’m a little surprised but not so unhappy, ya know,” Rencke said. “I had to come out here in person to tell you, ’cause I didn’t know how wired this place might be.”

  “Todd and Liz checked for bugs first thing. We’re clean. But I’m sorry you’re here, because now it’d be to risky for you to try to leave.”


  Rencke hopped from one foot to the other, something he did when he was excited or distracted. “I set one of my programs to look down Boyko’s track while he was in the KGB and FSB, mostly his foreign embassy assignments, but also the periods he spent in Moscow. Then I started matching those dates and places with those of our own field people.”

  “And you found some matches,” McGarvey said.

  “Bingo, but just one. Moscow, Beijing, Kabul, Seoul, and Tokyo. He was at all those places the same time as Boyko.”

  “Don’t tell me that it’s Howard?”

  “Correcto mundo,” Rencke said. “Howard McCann, our own Deputy Director of Operations. How about them apples? But how did you know?”

  “Just a guess, but I knew he’d been stationed in Kabul and Beijing, because he never stopped talking about it, and his product was always consistently good—not great, but good. But what abut the money? He doesn’t have it, and you said it wasn’t showing up in the black budgets.”

  “Unknown,” Rencke admitted. “But if he comes out here tonight like you suspect he will we can ask him. Wherever it’s coming from and however it’s being transferred to Boyko’s accounts, it’s a slick operation because I haven’t found even a tickle yet.”

  “Howard has to be working for somebody,” McGarvey said. “He’s not dealing on his own.”

  “Not unless he’s a raving lunatic. I mean who the hell would try to start a nuclear war?”

  Todd came back in a hurry. “I saw headlights coming from the highway,” he said.

  McGarvey switched on the hall light. “It’ll be McCann,” he said. “Turn on the light over the wing back chairs in the study and get into the dark corner by the desk. And you’d better open the French doors in case this thing goes down while he’s here and we need to make some room for ourselves in a hurry. He’ll be armed, he’s come out here to kill me, but he probably doesn’t know that Turov or his people will be coming our way too.”

  “Could get real interesting around here,” Todd said.

  “That it could,” McGarvey agreed.

  “Do you want to call for backup once he gets here?”

  “I want him to open up first.”

  Todd went back to the study that faced the rear of the house and switched on the light. It would put them at the disadvantage if the attack were to start now, but McGarvey wanted to give McCann a false sense of security at first.

  “Liz, we’ve got company coming from the highway,” he called up to his daughter.

  “I’ll keep the back covered,” she responded.

  Kim stood in the shadows behind them. “Give me a weapon.”

  “Not yet,” McGarvey told her.

  “He’s come here to kill me too.”

  “I want you upstairs with Otto for now.”

  “Goddamnit, I want a gun!”

  “If something develops I’ll think about it,” McGarvey said, and he motioned for Rencke to take her upstairs. “Keep your head down, and try to keep her quiet.”

  “What if she doesn’t cooperate?”

  “Do you have a gun?”

  “Yup.”

  “Shoot her.”

  SEVENTY–SEVEN

  As soon as Rencke and Kim were upstairs, McGarvey went into the dark living room and watched from one of the windows as headlights flashed along the driveway in the woods beyond the clearing. If it was McCann he was driving slowly, probably nervous about what he’d come out here to do.

  Unlike Otto he was surprised that the traitor was the DDO. He’d never particularly liked the man. McGarvey had always thought McCann was an officious little bureaucrat with a tight rein over the National Clandestine Service, which was the official name for Operations, but he’d never thought that the bastard had the imagination or the guts to play the role of a double.

  There’d been others who’d seemed equally bland, unimaginative, and ordinary until after they’d been outed; the FBI’s John Hanssen a few years ago, a couple of years before that their own Aldrich Ames, and earlier John Trotter. And when the last day finally came everyone was surprised. Everyone had the same question: Why?

  The CIA had an acronym for the reasons most intelligence officers turned against their own countries. It was MICE, which stood for money, ideology, conscience, and ego. Hanssen had played the game because his ego led him to believe that he was better than everyone else. Ames had done it for the money, nearly five million dollars from the KGB. And back in the fifties, the British spy Kim Philby had spied for the Russians because he truly believed that the Soviet system was better than Western democracies. He had been an ideologue. Others had become traitors, usually when their nations were at war, because some warped sense of conscience affected their understanding of what was morally right or wrong.

  A dark Lexus SUV came into the clearing and made its way to the house, pulling up where Rencke had parked, and the headlights went out. McGarvey couldn’t make out the driver until he opened the door and the dome light came on. It was McCann, and now there were almost no doubts left except where the DDO was getting his money, and what the long-range agenda was.

  McCann got out of the car and as he came around front he absently patted his right coat pocket. He was wearing a lightweight pin-striped suit and despite the warm weather a vest, and his thinning light hair was mussed as if he had driven out from the city with the windows down.

  He stopped and looked up at the mostly dark windows, then made his way up to the porch and hesitated a moment longer before he rang the doorbell.

  McGarvey waited long enough for McCann to ring the bell again before he went out into the hall and opened the door.

  “What the hell are you doing out here, Howard?” McGarvey demanded. He looked beyond McCann. “Are you alone?”

  McCann was as indignant as he usually was. “I’m alone, and I’m here because I heard you’d brought one of the Pyongyang shooters with you. Is it true?”

  “Yes, she’s here, but you’d better come in and get out of sight.”

  “Are you expecting trouble?” McCann asked, coming into the stair hall.

  “Yes,” McGarvey said, closing and locking the door. “I’m using the girl as bait.”

  “Who do you expect is coming after her?”

  “The man who hired her. Ex-KGB living in Tokyo under the name Alexandar Turov. Otto’s working on finding out who he really is, might be a guy named Boyko but we’re not sure yet.”

  McCann was obviously shook. “Well, for heaven’s sake, you should have let me in on your secret, we could have sent some muscle out here to help out. Haven’t you even told your daughter and her husband? I’m sure they would have dropped everything to come out. In fact we should call them right now.” McCann reached for his right pocket, but McGarvey held him off.

  “I don’t want my family involved. Not until we get through this.”

  McCann looked up toward the head of the stairs. “She up there?”

  McGarvey nodded. “Keeping watch. It was she who spotted your car coming up from the highway and I thought it might be starting already. But I don’t think it’ll happen until just before dawn.”

  “You’re probably right,” McCann agreed. “Which gives us time to get both of you out of here and to someplace safe.” He stopped, an odd expression coming into his eyes as something else occurred to him. “What makes you believe this Russian knows you’re out here?”

  “I think there’s a better than even chance he has a contact inside the Company. Someone with access to either the DO or housekeeping.”

  The same odd look came into McCann’s eyes as if he were trying to figure the odds of pulling out his pistol and having a shoot-out here and now in the stair hall. “I think that’s far-fetched. But do you have any idea who it might be?”

  “A couple of possibilities,” McGarvey said. “I have something back in the study I want to show you.” He stepped aside to let McCann go first, which the DDO did reluctantly.

  When they reached the study he went to the desk, his
back to McCann.

  “It’s just here,” he said.

  “Take your hand out of your pocket, Mr. McCann,” Todd said. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if I have to.”

  McGarvey turned around. McCann had reached into his pocket for a pistol and he stood perfectly still, the color gone from his face.

  “Is that why you came out here tonight, Howard?” McGarvey asked. “To kill me?” He walked over to McCann and took the Russian-made 5.45 mm PSM pistol out of the man’s pocket. It was the sort of pistol that Kim would have used. “A woman’s gun, but pretty effective at close range. Make it look as if the girl shot me. You’d probably use my gun to shoot her. Neat and tidy.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” McCann blustered.

  “Did Boyko have something on you from your days when you two were stationed in the same cities? Is that it, Howard?”

  McCann held his silence.

  “If it wasn’t blackmail, what then?” McGarvey pressed, his tone reasonable. “Not money, you’re not a rich man. So tell us why.”

  SEVENTY–EIGHT

  At the edge of the woods, one hundred meters west of the house, Minoru held up a hand for Lavrov to stop. They were dressed in black slacks and pullovers. A couple of lights were on downstairs, one in the front and the other in the back. A dark SUV was parked in front.

  “They’ve got company,” Lavrov said.

  “It’s Daniel, the colonel’s contact inside the CIA,” Minoru told him.

  He’d sent Lavrov’s four operators up the dirt track to a point where they could come down the hill and approach the house from the rear. McGarvey would be expecting an attack sometime later tonight or early morning and might have set the woman to watch the back. He wanted to be in place before the shooting began.

  “How do you want to play this?”

  Minoru pointed to the lights from the French doors at the side of the house near the back. They could see shadows moving through the curtains. “I want to take a look. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Daniel will do the job for us.”