The Expediter Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 camefor 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