Ri knew what was good for him. He agreed in a full-throated manner.
Choi then looked at his drink and said, “My burden is this . . . like my father, and my grandfather, I am a keen expert on matters of history.”
“This is well known by all, Dae Wonsu.”
“Nothing has struck me more than what has happened in Ukraine, in Libya, in Iraq. When these nations parted with their most potent weapons, they were not rewarded with good relations. No, they became nonentities, lambs.”
“Yes,” Ri said. Okay, so we are, in fact, going to talk about the problems at Missile Guidance Bureau.
Choi sipped the Cognac. “We must produce better rockets. Able to fly further and more reliably. We must develop, develop, develop!”
“I agree completely,” Ri said. Choi was used to hearing this, of course, no matter the topic. The last time Choi Ji-hoon had heard the words “I disagree,” he was nine years old.
“The plutonium weapons are in our arsenal. Our uranium enrichment is progressing. We have miniaturized the bombs into warheads. Our nation has the power, but not the mechanism to deliver the power. We need a ballistic missile capable of delivering the warhead.”
Now Ri cocked his head in surprise. “I am told the Rodong system performed flawlessly in its most recent test. My eyes have been focused outward at RGB. Have I been misinformed?”
Choi waved a hand. “Rodong has a range of nine hundred kilometers. This makes it merely a defensive weapon. Yes, we can obliterate Seoul, but this will not protect us from America. They would gladly sacrifice South Korea in order to destroy us in North Korea. We need something with the range to reach the continental United States. The Taepodong-2 is not operational, and despite what I am being told by RGB, I don’t think it soon will be.”
Ri assumed his nation’s military leaders had received an earful from their grand marshal. Fortunately for Ri, however, he and his department had not been given responsibility for the development of the ballistic systems.
Unfortunately for Ri, he feared this was about to change.
Choi leaned forward. “Our military, our scientists, they have been unable to provide us with the technology we need. I want you to go out and get it.”
Ri thought of the nonproliferation sanctions. Of the naval blockade that checked shipping cargo in the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. He thought of the tight controls on the manufacture and sale of items involved in the construction of all things rocket, including dual-use items that the West feared might be smuggled into North Korea.
In short, he thought of the dozens of barriers in front of him.
But he said the only thing he could say. “Of course, Dae Wonsu. I will not fail.”
“You have three years.”
Now he thought of the seven dogs of Chongjin and he wondered if they were already hungry again after consuming General Gang.
“Three years? Three years for . . .”
“Three years to see that the Taepodong-2 is operational with our Missile Guidance Bureau.”
A purple vein on Ri’s forehead pulsed a few times, but he made no overt reaction. “That is not much time.”
“Three years is more time than I should give you. Does our nation have three years before our enemies attack?”
In a measured tone the general said, “I confess I do not know.”
“No, you don’t. The only thing that will stop an attack is the Taepodong-2. Operational and dependable. Our nuclear scientists have done their job. They have successfully miniaturized the device. But we have to be able to deliver it to the United States mainland.”
Choi held up three fingers. “Three years. Three years until I find someone else.”
Ri knew what would happen to him if Choi decided to find someone else.
11
Present day
Shortly before nine a.m. three large Chevy Suburbans rolled into the garage under the North Fairfax Street offices of Hendley Associates. The vehicles pulled up to an entrance, and out of view from the street all the doors on all the Suburbans opened as one, and a phalanx of young armed men stepped out. Soon a distinguished sixty-three-year-old woman climbed out of the center vehicle and moved purposefully to the entrance, where she was greeted by Gerry Hendley, ex–South Carolina senator and the director of both Hendley Associates and The Campus.
Gerry thought Director of National Intelligence Mary Pat Foley looked tired and worn. He knew she had been working hard since taking over the DNI job. She was the top intelligence official of the top intelligence community in the world, after all, so there was no surprise the position came with long hours and high stress. But even so, Gerry saw in Mary Pat a deep concern.
Together the two of them rode the elevator up to the fourth-floor conference room. On the way up Mary Pat said, “I like the new place.” She tried a smile, but Gerry had known Mary Pat and her husband, Ed, for years, and he could tell she was just going through the motions of small talk.
He made it easy on her. “Thanks very much. We were lucky to get the place. A private military contractor gave it up, and we moved in. It was stocked for our needs, we basically just switched out the locks and plugged in our computers.”
She nodded politely.
Gerry said, “I’m very sorry about Colin Hazelton. You knew him well, did you?”
Mary Pat nodded again, but made no reply.
A minute later they entered the conference room. The five men sitting at the table stood and came forward. John Clark, Domingo Chavez, Dominic Caruso, Sam Driscoll, and Jack Ryan, Jr., all shook hands with the DNI before sitting back down.
Mary Pat was here this morning because The Campus had been sent to Vietnam on her personal request. As DNI, Mary Pat had every intelligence asset in the U.S. government at her disposal, but she had reached out to Gerry Hendley and his team for help in the matter of Colin Hazelton because she wanted to keep the inquiry sensitive and below official channels.
Needless to say, she now felt that decision to have been a grave error.
John Clark began the meeting by running through everything that had happened between the time the Campus team arrived in Ho Chi Minh City and the moment their Gulfstream took off over the Gulf of Thailand with the body of Colin Hazelton hidden behind an access panel. He had the other members of the unit give their own perspective on specific events. Mary Pat sat quietly throughout the presentations, but she looked nearly overcome with emotion when Domingo relayed finding the wounded Hazelton in the street and his attempts to save him.
Ding had never seen Mary Pat like this, and he quickly toned down the level of detail in an attempt to spare her some discomfort.
Mary Pat seemed skeptical when she heard that Colin had written the letters DPRK in his last note, and she asked to look at the paper herself. Clark handed it over, and she had as much trouble deciphering the letters as the others.
When everyone was finished with the after-action report, Mary Pat took a moment to collect her thoughts. She said, “I could have stopped this before it got out of hand. I didn’t know the stakes,” she said. “Had I known . . . Christ. I thought this was just a corporate intelligence issue. Shady, maybe. Crooked at worst. But not this.”
Clark replied softly, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Hazelton thought it was just a corporate intelligence issue as well. His threat posture didn’t indicate he thought for a second he was in any physical danger.”
Mary Pat then said, “I feel I know the answer, but I have to rule it out so I will ask anyway. Any chance at all this was just random street crime?”
Jack Junior took this one. “None. I was the one watching when he was confronted. These guys were skilled, they locked on to Hazelton and trailed him for blocks. I don’t know why he was targeted or killed, but I do know there wasn’t anything random to it.”
Foley seemed satisfied by the answer, though she was still vi
sibly upset.
Gerry said, “Now, Mary Pat, it should come as no surprise we have questions for you. Why did you have us tail Hazelton? I assumed you suspected him of being involved in something illegal?”
She took a sip of water. “Colin, Ed, and I came up in CIA together. He’d been a pilot in the Air Force who’d moved into intelligence. He was a natural case officer. One of the good ones. After leaving the field, he worked for Ed for years on the seventh floor of the Agency, and became a trusted confidant to us both.
“When I moved out of CIA and began running the National Counterterrorism Center, I wanted to move Colin over with me. As always, a special personal security review was run on him, just a formality because he’d been in CIA for thirty years already. But the review turned up some problems.”
“Problems?” Gerry asked.
“Money problems. Colin had made some questionable investments. He put all of his savings in places where he thought the money would earn an especially high rate of return. High-risk Third World locations that others wouldn’t touch. Colin felt like he knew the region.”
“What happened?”
Mary Pat’s chest heaved. “The Arab Spring. Tunisia flipped, Libya tanked, Egypt went one way, then the other, and then in another direction.”
Ryan whistled. “Damn. Hazelton invested in North Africa?”
Mary Pat shrugged. “He’d made some good bets in the past. He grew overconfident in his ability to foresee events. And that proved his undoing. He borrowed some money, thinking he could earn it back. He lost that as well.
“When we found out about the investments they were still going strong. Nevertheless, we couldn’t take him at NCTC, there was too much potential for compromise with all that money offshore. Then CIA found he had failed to report some of his accounts. He said it was just a screwup on his part, and I believe him. Colin was a good pilot and a first-rate intelligence officer, and he was a good executive from a big-picture standpoint, but he could be a bit disorganized when it came to paperwork. At that point in his CIA career he was no longer clandestine, he was a Seventh Floor administrator. Personally I thought he should have been allowed to retire. But the new head of CIA, Jay Canfield, is a by-the-book guy, so he drummed Hazelton out a year before eligibility for his pension. Shortly after that was the coup in Egypt. Colin lost everything. He was out of work and desperate. Ed and I tried to help him on a personal level, but he was too proud. He wouldn’t return our calls.
“I’d gotten a tip from another old colleague that he’d started working for Duke Sharps in New York. I knew Duke before he left FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. Since he’s gone private sector he’s only become an unscrupulous opportunist.”
John Clark said, “That man is scum of the earth.”
Ding agreed with a nod, but the younger Campus operators all exchanged looks of surprise.
Mary Pat also agreed. “Sharps Global Intelligence Partners employs hundreds of ex-spies, soldiers, and police detectives all over the planet, and Duke has his fingerprints on most every shady event happening anywhere. Still, there’s one thing Duke has more of than morally questionable ex-spooks, and that’s lawyers. His operation has stayed up and running even though the Justice Department has tried to shut him down.”
Gerry Hendley said, “When you found out Hazelton worked for Sharps, what did you do?”
“At first I was just disappointed, but not terribly concerned. Some of Sharps’s clients skirt the law, sure, but he also works with aboveboard corporate accounts on completely benign investigative issues. I didn’t believe for an instant that Colin would do anything against the U.S. Still, I put some resources into him, flagged his passport to ping if he went abroad, just in case. Then, the other day, he flew to Prague. I wanted him followed there, but he left the Czech Republic before we got anyone in place, and went to Vietnam. Our assets there were deployed on another matter, and I didn’t want to alert the local authorities. So I called you, Gerry, and asked for help. John, you and your men tailed him in Ho Chi Minh City. I had no idea he was in any danger. I just wanted to know if he was involved in something illegal.”
Gerry could see that Mary Pat felt a sense of responsibility for what happened to Hazelton.
He said, “You didn’t get him killed. He met with some misfortune, yes, but a lot of it was self-inflicted.”
“I know that, Gerry. But if you work in the intelligence field long enough you really covet those few who’ve been with you all the way. He was a good man and a hell of an officer. If not so much in his later years, at least long ago. Ed and I both owed him a lot.”
It was quiet in the conference room for a moment, then Clark cleared his throat and said, “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to discern anything about the assassins. We had to leave the area before checking the body of the man I killed.”
Mary Pat replied, “I’m just glad you guys got out of there alive.”
Ryan pulled out his iPad. “Shortly before he was killed, however, Hazelton met with a woman. They had a short but apparently heated discussion. We didn’t get audio, but she was after something he was carrying, or at least something she thought he was carrying. She didn’t get it.”
Ryan pulled up the picture of the tall blonde sitting at the table with Hazelton and Mary Pat leaned forward and looked at it. “I don’t know her. E-mail it to me and I’ll have NSA run facial recog on it.”
Jack said, “We tried that. No luck.”
Mary Pat raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying your facial-recognition software here at The Campus is as good or better than the U.S. government’s?”
In truth, it was the same system. IT director Gavin Biery had the ability to plug in to the NSA’s database of images and use the same software the CIA was using. Mary Pat did not know this.
Gerry broke in quickly. “We’re not saying that at all. Jack will be happy to e-mail you the images of the young woman. Hopefully you’ll get lucky.”
Mary Pat let the matter go, and she stood, indicating the end to the meeting. “Look, gentlemen. I am concerned about whatever Hazelton was working on, of course. Especially if it involved North Korea. But I put you guys on this operation because I was worried about an old friend, not because I wanted you in danger. And now that old friend is dead. I’ll make inquiries; I don’t want you or your team risking your lives over this any longer. There are enough other problems on earth right now. I’m not going to push The Campus into the unknowns of some sort of corporate crime problem, even if there was an assumption by Hazelton that North Korea had something to do with it. This is probably drugs, money laundering, even gun running. State will work with the local authorities to find out whatever they can. That will have to be good enough.”
Mary Pat Foley left a short time later, and then Gerry Hendley sat back down with his five operators to discuss their options.
Ding said, “Don’t know about you, Gerry, but I’m pretty damn curious about those dudes who almost punched our ticket in Vietnam.”
“Me, too,” admitted both Ryan and Driscoll.
Clark was more diplomatic. “We’re all just back to regular operational duty. We aren’t tasked on anything specific yet, so our workload is light enough at the moment to where maybe we can dig a little deeper.”
Hendley thought it over first, but soon enough he said, “Don’t worry. We’re not dropping it. I think it’s safe to operate under the assumption that whoever killed Colin Hazelton knew who he was. That means there is a bad actor out there with no qualms about killing ex–CIA executives. As far as I’m concerned, that warrants our attention, whether or not we have any official blessing from the DNI.”
Ding smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that. Any idea what our next step is?”
Clark answered, “I’ve got an idea, I just didn’t want to burden Mary Pat with it.”
Gerry sighed. He knew, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. “Duke
Sharps?”
“Yeah. But we’re not about to start snooping on American citizens on the streets of New York. Not yet, anyway. For now we probe a little in open source to see what we can find out about Sharps and his operation. Anything too overt and he’ll pick up on it. He and his employees are extremely good about their own security. Sharps Global Intelligence Partners will be a tough nut to crack.”
12
One year earlier
The offices of Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation were in the Chung-guyok, or Central District, of Pyongyang, the nation’s capital of two and a half million. It was a large building complex with a tower in the center and several smaller buildings also associated with the mining industry nearby. Mining was the largest sector of the North Korean economy, employing thousands just here at the administration offices in Pyongyang, and a million more around the nation.
And for the past two weeks, at the top of the entire hierarchy sat Hwang Min-ho, and this continued to amaze him each and every morning.
As the son of employees of a party elite, Hwang Min-ho was given opportunities not afforded to ninety-nine percent of his nation’s children. Still, as with every citizen of North Korea, his future was ordained by the party. He was sent to study engineering at Beijing University, and then he was ordered to further his studies at Pyongyang University, where he earned the equivalent of a master’s degree in public policy. He began his career as a Korean Workers’ Party administrator in the Chagang Province. Chagang was one of the centers of the coal industry in the country, and Hwang’s engineering background helped him in his dealings with the problems faced by the mines.
It was a natural thing for him to move from the Korean Workers’ Party into the state-run mining entity, and by the age of thirty he was well ensconced in the administrative division of Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation.