Free The Expediter by David Hagberg Page B

legendary intelligence skills of an Allen Dulles, and the ruthlessness and brains to see both sides of an issue. He would have to be a risk-taker. Someone who’d always thought out of the box.
    When Pak had returned home from college in the U.S., he’d earned his masters and Ph.D. at Kim Il Sung University in the history, philosophy, structure, and notable personages of the Western intelligence apparatuses. Especially in the United States.
    Four men, beginning with Allen Dulles, America’s first true spymaster, had the most influence on how the U.S. looked at and dealt with the world from the standpoint of intelligence-gathering activities. In Pak’s estimation, besides Dulles, the others included William Colby and Donald Suthland Powers. All three of those men were dead.
    He had come to the United States to ask the fourth man to help avert a nuclear war.
    It was a few minutes past nine thirty by the time he was back at terminal G, and made his way to the U.S. Airways counter. He was booked on flight 784, which left at 10:45, and would arrive in Tampa, Florida, first thing in the morning where he had reserved a rental car for the short drive down to Sarasota.
    Now that he had come this far, he wasn’t at all sure what sort of a reception he would get, except that he could very well be shot on sight.

 
     
     
SIXTEEN

     
    Kirk McGarvey and his wife Kathleen were finishing a late breakfast, early lunch by the pool behind their house on Casey Key a few miles south of Sarasota when the telephone rang. It was nine in the morning of what promised to be a lovely early fall Florida day, after a long, hot, humid summer.
    They had decided to sail their forty-two-foot Island Packet south to Key West, and then up the East Coast and off to the Bahamas once the hurricane season was officially over next month. It seemed like years since they’d been anywhere together. Between McGarvey’s “projects” as Katy called them and his work at USF’s New College teaching Voltaire, plus Katy’s fund-raising efforts for three major charities plus the Ringling Museum of Art, there never seemed to be much time.
    Katy answered the phone. It was their daughter Elizabeth, who was calling from the CIA’s field operations training base, known as the Farm, near Williamsburg that she and her husband Todd Van Buren directed. She wanted to talk to her father, and she sounded a little breathless.
    “Have you been watching the news the last couple of days?” she asked. She was in her late twenties and the spitting image of her mother at that age; slender with a good build, an oval face, beautiful large eyes, short blond hair, and just a hint of an attitude that to invade her space might be risky.
    “You mean the North Korean thing?” McGarvey asked. He’d retired as director of the CIA a couple years ago, at the age of fifty, after a career as a black operations specialist in which he had killed people. Often he wasn’t proud of what he had done for his government, but his targets had all been truly bad people.
    He was a tall man with a solid build, a pleasant face, and gray-green eyes. Not so long ago he’d come out of retirement to take on a freelance assignment for the Agency in which he’d killed Osama bin Laden, and he still kept himself in top condition with a daily regimen of hard exercise.
    “What’s your take on it?” Liz asked. Whenever anything came up on the international scene, she always called her father to get his read, which would in turn be passed along to the officer candidates at the Farm.
    “Kim Jong Il is crazy enough to do something like that, if he had a reason. But it’d have to be big. As it is he’s practically cut his own throat.”
    “If China crosses his border will he go nuclear?”
    “I expect he would, and I expect the Chinese know it. If I were giving advice I’d go for a surgical strike. Find out where he’s hunkered down and take just him out. I don’t think anyone else over there would have