“Exactly correct, Dae Wonsu. The other nations in the UN are not pursuing interdiction. Even before the return of Jack Ryan to the White House, the former President, Ed Kealty, had not harassed our shipments nearly to the extent we are seeing now.”
“So the problem is Jack Ryan, specifically.”
“Again, this is true. But not to worry, we have ordered more rocket tubes, they are being built by another company in Russia. It will take six months for delivery, but we will have everything else in place by the time they arrive, and I feel sure the Taepodong-2 will be operational well within my window for success in the mission.”
In truth, the Russians would ship him nothing until he paid them, and he could not pay them until Roblas delivered his five hundred million. This wouldn’t happen till Hwang’s damn rare earth–processing plant went live.
Ri troubled Choi with none of these additional details.
Choi just asked, “Won’t the Americans capture the next ship like they did with this one?”
Ri smiled. His sad eyes did not brighten, but the smile was there. “The Russians have an aircraft, the An-225, that is large enough to transport the tubes by air. We won’t have to worry about maritime interdiction.”
“You have less than two years.”
“Yes, Dae Wonsu. I am aware.”
“President Jack Ryan has two years left in his term.”
“I am aware of this as well, Dae Wonsu. If not for him, we would be operational much faster.”
“Your predecessor had many complaints about Jack Ryan as well.” Choi drank a long gulp of brandy. “I called them excuses.”
Ri realized he needed to create distance between himself and his predecessor, so as to keep distance between himself and the kennels at Chongjin. “I will not use them as excuses. Ryan is a problem, but we will succeed nonetheless.”
Choi looked across the table for a moment; his eyes were dull from the drink but they did not waver. “What do you know about Rangoon?”
Ri knew Choi wasn’t asking him what he knew about the capital of Myanmar, but instead about a particular event that happened there. When North Korean leadership spoke of Rangoon to the intelligence community, it could mean only one thing, because of the importance of the city to his nation’s intelligence agency.
Ri answered with confidence. “October ninth, 1983. I was a lieutenant in the Chosun Inmingun at the time. I will never forget learning of the bravery of our men who—”
Choi talked over him as if Ri were not speaking. “October ninth, 1983. My grandfather sent three assassins to plant a bomb to kill the president of South Korea during his visit to the Martyrs’ Mausoleum in Burma. The bomb missed Choon Doo-hwan, lamentably, because his motorcade had been delayed by traffic.”
Ri knew all of this, of course. Twenty-one people had been killed, forty-six wounded. He did not know why Choi was bringing up this thirty-year-old event.
Choi said, “As an expert on history, I cannot help but think about what might have been. If Rangoon had succeeded, South Korea would have been destabilized. Our army was better than theirs. America’s will would have faltered. My grandfather would have taken the entire peninsula within one, perhaps two years, and we would have been in a position of incredible strength. Economic strength. Military strength. The problems of the famine during the 1990s would have never occurred, the United States would have realized the pressure and sanctions were futile. Just think where we would be today if there had been a little less traffic on the road that afternoon in Rangoon.” Choi smiled wistfully.
General Ri nodded. Undoubtedly, some of Choi’s conclusions were sound. And undoubtedly those that were not sound would not be mentioned by Ri.
“You see what else would have happened?” Choi asked.
“I am sorry. I confess I do not.”
“My father would not have been killed by Jack Ryan.”
“Your father?”
“The Americans poisoned my father. How else to explain it? He was a healthy man. Hard of hearing, maybe, but his doctors say he would have lived another twenty to twenty-five years in good health.”
Ri didn’t believe this was true for an instant, though he had no doubt believing the elder Choi’s doctors would have made the claim he had been poisoned to deflect blame on themselves. Ri was the operations chief of RGB when Choi’s father died, and he and his people were ordered to find evidence of an assassination. Ri found no such evidence, because no such evidence existed.
Choi went back to Rangoon. “My grandfather’s bravery in ordering this attack on the leader of the South was only matched by his forward thinking. Just consider it for a moment, Ri.”
Ri couldn’t help but think the three assassins were the real brave ones, braver than the man who sent them down with orders to kill themselves after the attack. But of course he made no mention of this.
Choi finished his drink, and a beautiful young girl—Ri did not think she could have been more than seventeen—walked across the empty banquet room with a crystal flask and refilled Choi’s snifter. Choi did not regard her—instead, he kept talking.
“If Rangoon had succeeded it would have changed the fate of our nation. Indeed, the fate of the world.”
Ri bowed. “Yes.”
“If you were able to eliminate Jack Ryan, I feel certain this would have a similar outcome for our nation. Do you agree?”
Ri’s heart sank. He was being given another impossible task. But he said, “Yes. I agree wholeheartedly.”
Choi said, “I know the difficult thing is to make it look like someone else is involved.” Choi leaned forward halfway across the table. Ri caught the unmistakable smell of brandy, not from the snifter in his hand, but from his skin. “But that is your problem.”
An uncomfortable silence told General Ri that it was his turn to talk.
“Yes. Well . . . certainly there are many who would benefit from his death.”
“Of course. How would you do it?”
Ri blinked. He needed to say something to bolster Choi’s confidence in him. He tried to show no doubt, no hesitation. He spoke off the top of his head, fighting for the words just as they came out of his mouth. “I would find out his foreign travel schedule. I would use Middle Eastern bomb makers. I have access to them through our good relations with Syria and Iran. I would organize the affair through proxies.” He hastened to add, “But I would be involved with every aspect of it, because there could be no failure. Jack Ryan is well protected now, but if there is a credible attempt on his life, the Americans can do so much more to keep away from assassins. There will be no second opportunity.”
Choi nodded thoughtfully.
Ri worried he was about to order him to proceed, so he spoke quickly, couching his words of warning in layer over layer of deference, lest he offend the Dae Wonsu. “I am certain you are aware of this, because of your astute knowledge of world history, and I only bring this up to remind myself of the stakes of any such operation, but there is the need to remember how America reacts to insult, threat, and attack. Pearl Harbor is but one example. As the Japanese marshal admiral Isoroku Yamamoto said, they awoke a sleeping giant. America will look long and hard for the perpetrators of the act, and if they suspect for an instant we are the perpetrators, then they will seek revenge on our soil.”
Ri had hoped that would sink in for a moment, but Choi waved the threat away with his brandy snifter, sloshing some of the drink out of the bowl-shaped glass and onto the table.
“Your Middle Eastern bomber should not survive to talk.” Choi smiled as if he had solved all the problems and issues with one brilliant sentence.
Ri worked hard to match his leader’s smile with one of his own. “Yes, Dae Wonsu. That is an excellent idea.”
20
Londoner Edward Riley didn’t much care for New York, as it was not his home. But since his home didn’t much care
for him, he’d relocated here to the States five years earlier, and he was bloody well determined to make the best of it.
Part and parcel of making the best of it included the vehicle in which Riley now drove as he motored down the West Side Highway through mid-morning traffic. It was a coal-black BMW i8 electric sports car. It shined as if he’d coated it with cooking spray before leaving his garage, and its lean, aerodynamic form turned heads and earned whistles and compliments even here in the sneering Upper West Side.
Edward Riley loved the attention, which was an odd thing, really, because Edward Riley was a spy.
—
Claiming fame is frowned upon for intelligence officers, but Edward Riley’s claim to fame was undeniably impressive. He had been the youngest chief of station in the last thirty years at MI6, the foreign intelligence arm of the government of the United Kingdom. Now, at age thirty-six, he had the experience and the CV envied by men twice his age, and Riley played this up more like his own publicist than as a spook concerned with his own personal security.
As a young lad, short and sandy-haired Eddie had a love of language and culture. His parents traveled Europe as manufacturer representatives in the fitness-equipment industry, and he’d been to every country on the continent by age ten. Moreover, his grandparents on his mother’s side were ardent travelers who “borrowed” their grandson for summer hops to Africa and Asia and South America.
Eddie went into Eton with plans of following into his father’s business so he could continue to see the world, and he studied French and Arabic and Russian as a means to that end.
He hadn’t been a perfect candidate for intelligence work because although most spies have at least some level of loyalty to their own flag, Riley did not. It wasn’t that he was unpatriotic, really, rather he just didn’t give a toss about his own country or countrymen. But one of his professors at Eton was an unofficial recruiter for the Crown and he forwarded Eddie’s name on a hunch, and soon Eddie was met after class by a middle-aged woman and asked if he’d be interested in taking the civil service exams.
“Not particularly,” was the honest answer.
But the woman was persuasive, and she hyped the travel and the study of culture and within seconds a lightbulb went off and Eddie Riley realized this was a recruitment attempt for the British secret services.
And that sounded interesting—there wasn’t a James Bond film young Riley hadn’t seen five times—so his “not really” turned to “why not?”
One does not apply to MI6. Instead, one applies for a position at the coordination staff for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—this is personnel code for foreign intelligence work. Riley did this and then he breezed through his training, and soon he was off into the world, beginning every young officer’s saga of doing time at dusty outposts, learning the ropes the hard way.
Sana’a, Yemen. Windhoek, Namibia. Then a promotion to Montevideo, Uruguay.
After he had spent a year in South America the war in the Middle East had pulled enough more experienced intelligence officers into that region to leave some plum postings vacant for young officers who were both competent and easily mobile. He worked in Finland for a year, and then he did a longer stint in the British Virgin Islands. Riley made a name for himself and by age twenty-seven he was back in Europe, as assistant chief of station in Bulgaria, a rising star.
He’d been in that position for less than six months when his chief of station was recalled home due to a family illness. MI6 had plans to replace the senior spy with someone other than his young second-in-command, but a month as acting chief of station turned to three, and then by six someone decided he’d earned the position he’d fallen into, and the paperwork was completed to make it official.
Edward Riley of London became the twenty-seven-year-old SIS station chief of Bulgaria, making him the youngest in the service in more than thirty years.
But Riley did not stop there. He worked hard, which was important, and he had no qualms about using people and situations to his personal benefit. By his thirtieth birthday his skyrocketing career had landed him in Italy as station chief, a posting orders of magnitude more important than running the shop in nearby Bulgaria.
But in Rome it unraveled quickly. By violating orders and working with one group of local criminals he disrupted another local cell of Russian Mafia who were connected to the government in Moscow, as virtually all Russian criminals were. The criminals appealed to the SVR, Russian foreign intelligence, and the SVR developed an operation to get Riley out of the way.
The Russians identified Riley as the UK station chief, and then they targeted him, not for any lethal measures—that would have brought more trouble than the matter was worth—they just wanted him gone.
The Russians tricked him, though when it was over he had no one but himself to blame. A simple honey trap. Edward had a British wife and three small children, but one day he sat down next to a twenty-four-year-old Romanian model named Alina at a café he frequented on the Via Bergamo, and he started up a conversation.
She claimed to be an exchange student and she showed more interest in her textbook than in the handsome Briton chatting her up, but her beauty absolutely floored him, so he kept talking. He saw himself as the pursuer, so he didn’t think for one moment he was being played. He asked for her number and she refused, but she showed up at the same café a few days later, and they went for a walk on the Via Piave and soon enough they had somehow wandered into the lobby of the Hotel Oxford on the Via Boncompagni. He had no idea how a credit card in one of his aliases just appeared from his wallet into his hand, and then into the hand of the desk clerk, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand how he and young Alina found themselves in a fourth-floor suite on the bed.
A bloody mysterious thing all around, he told himself when it was over.
For her part Alina did not know she was working for the Russians. Instead, she thought she had been hired for this seduction by a British tabloid. She’d been paid well, and the tabloid, in fact, existed, but Alina had no idea it was owned, like much of the UK, by Russian concerns, and it went where Russian intelligence told it to go.
Even though the honey trap had been set and the paparazzi were in town to catch the young British spy in the act, it was really not quite so simple. Riley, like most adulterous spies, applied the tradecraft of his work to his pleasure. For a month he and his Romanian lover kept a clandestine relationship that would have made his MI6 training cadre proud. They used drop phones, they met in out-of-the-way cafés only after running surveillance detection routes, they varied their routines. Alina kept tipping off the cameramen as to where they would be and what they would be doing, but Riley kept the affair one step ahead of them, though wholly unaware anyone was on his trail.
On a moonlit beach in Sardinia the cameras finally caught him. Riley and Alina were nude, in flagrante delicto, and as the flashes flashed and the shutters clicked, thirty-one-year-old Edward Riley knew his career and his marriage were now items of the past.
The British tabloid was giddy with its reportage: photos of the topless blonde, the dashing young spy, bare-chested, on top of her, staring into the lens with a deer-in-the-headlights look that solidified the sordid nature of the tryst.
“On Her Majesty’s Sleazy Circus,” read the headline, and as Riley looked at the article the next morning he knew he’d been had, and he wished the rag had only the decency to admit what they’d done had been done for fucking Moscow by bylining the piece “Written with help from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.”
Riley was recalled to London, of course. He was shamed out of the service after years of work and the paparazzi chased him and his family outside their flat in Knightsbridge.
Something snapped within Riley and he turned to self-preservation mode, not allowing himself the self-acuity to take responsibility for his action. He blamed England, his own country, for the debacle?
??certainly not himself.
He kept a stiff upper lip for a few months, but there’s something about being the most publicly recognizable spy in your country that works against you, and Riley knew he’d have to do a runner and leave England behind.
And in swooped Duke Sharps. Riley had never met the man, he knew him only by his unscrupulous reputation. Duke had asked Edward to come over for a meeting, all expenses paid by Sharps Global Intelligence Partners, of course. Edward did so, he’d listened to the American’s spiel about the work, and he’d agreed on the spot. Edward was ecstatic to be back in the intelligence game, even in a commercial capacity. He could do unscrupulous. He’d go into it for the money, eschew right and wrong and good and evil, and look out for himself now.
Of course, he’d been concerned that his new notoriety would make him completely ineffectual as an intelligence asset. But something happened that Edward Riley did not expect. He found his fame worked to his advantage. In this odd version of intelligence work at Sharps Partners, having a reputation served him well. He met the important people, he dined with potential clients and CEOs, and he appeared on television as a talking head, giving his view on UK intelligence issues from New York bureaus of the big news stations.
And he made a lot of money. Sharps paid its operatives more when their operations were successful, unlike MI6, where the bloke meeting an informant over a dinner of whale blubber in Iceland with six years of service earned the exact same amount as the bloke with six years of shooting it out with Russian Spetsnaz in a shit-stained basement in Chechnya.
Though he had some “shine time” on TV, Riley wasn’t a figurehead at Sharps. That was Sharps’s job. No, the thirty-six-year-old Englishman worked surprisingly hard, built operations from the ground up, and put in the hours and the effort. He ran intelligence assets and demanded every bit of the same excellence he’d expected from his agents and officers when he was an MI6 station chief.
Sharps used Riley on the tough jobs, and Riley didn’t care. He was in it for the money, full stop.