By the time the three-year anniversary of his fall from grace came around he took a thorough look at his life and he realized he bloody well loved his job and his life of amorality.
The Crown could bugger off.
—
Edward Riley pulled his BMW sports car up to the valet stand at the Mandarin Oriental near Columbus Circle; he climbed out and winked at the young Dominican valet as the man approached the vehicle with an appreciative grin.
“Staying with us, sir?” he said, nearly salivating at the prospect of folding himself into the luxurious sports car.
“Just a meeting over tea at Asiate.”
The valet turned away from the car. “Perhaps with the woman who just arrived by taxi?”
“Tall, blond, legs for days?”
The Dominican smiled. He wanted Riley’s life, and he did not hide the fact. “That’s the one, sir.”
The Englishman ate it up. “Haven’t yet met her in person, but I’ve heard reports she is quite something.”
“A beauty, sir. You enjoy your meeting, and I’ll take great care of this beauty.”
Riley was a single man, if not on paper. His marriage had fallen apart in London, right after his fall from grace, and his wife—one of these days he’d go home and make it official, or she could bloody well come here with the papers to sign—had herself moved on. The thought of bedding this Frenchwoman was appealing, even though he hadn’t even met her yet, but this operation was too damn important for him to mix business with pleasure.
He’d keep his hands to himself on this one.
He found Veronika Martel at a corner table in the rear of the nearly empty restaurant, sitting with her back to the wall. She rose and shook his hand, and he gazed into her eyes and found her every bit as beautiful as the rumors.
Riley was certain she would know all about him. Or she would know what Russian intelligence wanted the world to know. She would have too much class to say anything about it, but the fact this woman was aware about the scandal that wrecked his life hung over this meeting like a weight.
But Riley told himself he wouldn’t let that threaten his authority. He chatted with the gorgeous blonde for a few minutes, a professional conversation about superficial matters. Her flight and her hotel and her impressions of the city and the United States. He found her to be intelligent but highly guarded.
Finally he got around to the subject of today’s meeting. “I know Duke talked to you about the Valley Floor assignment.”
“He did.”
“It’s not a bad posting,” he said. “You’ll be less than forty miles from Vegas, so you can commute in each morning. You’ll have to, really, no other options in the area. We’ll put you up in a nice hotel and take good care of you.
“The first week or so you’re just there to establish yourself. You’ll get the training on the diagnostic equipment here before heading over, so all you’ll be doing is looking at readouts on machinery at the rare earth hydroseparation facility. Our Science and Tech department will give you a cell phone that has the ability to pull the software we want directly off the system servers, but you’ll have to social engineer the password out of a systems administrator to obtain the access necessary.”
“I can manage that.”
“Undoubtedly,” Riley said. “New World Metals has a shipment of ore-processing equipment heading to North Korea this month, and the computers will fly in from Europe, so we do have some time constraints. This is all machinery for the refinery. All of the mining machinery is already there.”
“Where did they get that?”
“The Chinese were tossed out in such a hurry they weren’t able to take everything with them. They didn’t leave enough equipment to operate the mine in any profitable capacity, but they do have some drilling going on. The processing equipment is crucial now because the ore is starting to back up.”
“Then I won’t delay another moment to get started.”
“Excellent. I have a trainer flying into New York today. A woman from Brazil who works for Vale, a diversified metals mining concern there. She does just exactly the same thing you will be doing at the NewCorp facility. You’ll have three days to work with her and make yourself legitimate. I trust you can pull that off.”
Veronika had been slipping into and then out of roles for her entire career. She’d been a hotel desk clerk and a software engineer and a fishmonger and a college professor and even a bikini model at a Le Mans race. Seventy-two hours of intense prep could turn her into just about anything as long as scrutiny by experts wasn’t too high.
“I’ll do my best,” she said.
Riley looked into his teacup for a moment. “I’ll ask you the question Duke won’t ask. How does it make you feel to know your work will directly benefit North Korea?”
Martel was as calculating as Riley was off-the-cuff. “I don’t concern myself with that.”
“Good answer. Bloody lie, but I’ll take a lie that says what I want to hear. I know you were face-to-face with the DPRK agents in Vietnam. That was a poorly handled mess, and not my doing. You won’t see that level of unprofessionalism on this operation with me in charge, I can assure you of that.
“I also want you to understand what we are doing here. The end game is mining. Money for New World Metals, and some trickle-down for us at Sharps. We’re not employees of the North Koreans. We’re not doing anything we can’t be proud of.”
Martel considered mentioning the American employee of Sharps’s whose blood she’d wiped off of the passport. But she decided against it. Riley wanted to start fresh in this operation, and she felt the same way. There was no reason to reintroduce any ugly issues. She wanted him to understand he wouldn’t have to worry about her morale on this job. It was just a job, like all the others.
“Mr. Riley, I appreciate the gesture you seem to be making, but don’t feel like you need to tend to my morale. I honestly don’t give a damn what we are doing, who we are doing it for, or who we are doing it to. You have quite ably outlined my duties at Valley Floor, and I will comply to the best of my ability. You can rest assured I require no more special care than that.”
“I feel exactly the same way. We are men and women in a line of work where morality only gets in the way.”
“That’s a good way of putting it, Mr. Riley.”
Edward Riley’s face slipped into an easy grin. “You and I are going to get along perfectly, Ms. Martel.”
21
The conference room in the Situation Room below the West Wing began filling with principals before nine a.m. The President arrived soon after, and he waved the eleven men and women in front of him back to their seats.
The focus of today’s discussion, as written on the agenda and left at each place setting, was almost comically simplistic.
“United Nations sanctions options in pursuit of solutions re North Korea.”
The United States and the United Nations had spent most of the past seventy years pursuing solutions re North Korea, and when Ryan noticed the heading on his briefing paper he let out a slight groan and mumbled that he sure hoped they’d have their solution figured out before lunch.
In front of him at the table was his national security staff, mostly, but also his secretary of commerce and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as well as his chief of staff, Arnie Van Damm.
The conference began with a discussion by Jay Canfield of the specific tactics the North Koreans were using to move money, from banks in the Cayman Islands and Singapore, where large deposits had been made, to smaller accounts in Brunei, Antigua, Mexico, Singapore, and other locations. It was clear several large payments had been made in the past few months, but the CIA did not have the access into the banking systems to know where the money had gone.
After a lot of detailed and often arcane explanations, Canfield wrapped up his presentation in plain speak.
“Suffice it to say, Mr. President, that somebody is paying North Korea a hell of a lot of money, and North Korea, in turn, is wasting no time in blowing a hell of a lot of money. Who is paying them, and the full scope of what they are buying, is still unknown to us.”
Next the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Danielle Rush, laid out her proposal, developed along with the secretaries of state, commerce, and treasury, to seek a UN resolution enhancing existing economic sanctions against the state of North Korea.
The President listened to the twenty-minute presentation in silence.
When it was over Ryan slid his fingers under his eyeglasses and rubbed his tired eyes. “I get that we need to stop these transactions. I just don’t see what the hell we will achieve by going to the United Nations for another round of economic sanctions on Korea. All this talk about what the United Nations is going to do. The UN can’t do anything. It’s not an enforcement body. It relies on its member nations to enforce sanctions. What makes you think all these countries that are making money off of North Korea will comply with the new sanctions?”
Secretary of State Scott Adler fielded this. “We come out very strongly and say any nation who knowingly circumvents the sanctions will meet with unilateral sanctions from the U.S. Commerce Department. We make a big noise about getting our European and Asian partners on board with this. Once we have the UN stamp on this action, we can add our own measures to make it more effective.”
There was a half-hour of back and forth after this, discussions of the tenor and the tone of the sanctions. Finally President Ryan was sold on the fact this was a necessary step. He nodded and said, “Okay. You almost never hear me say this, but I agree the United Nations has an important role to play here. The U.S. and Europe already sanction our banks against working with the North Koreans. But the banks we have identified as being involved in this are all in countries not saddled by their own domestic sanctions against North Korea.”
Ambassador Rush said, “We need wording along the lines of a prohibition on commerce and banking . . . restrictions to third-country persons, banks, and other commercial entities from facilitating trade with North Korea. We’ll have to specify the thirty-eight accounts we’ve identified, all the go-betweens, all the countries involved.”
Ryan agreed. “That’s right. We have to shut down North Korea’s access to hard currency. The best way in the short term to do that is to get a UN resolution sanctioning the banks abroad they are working with now.”
The UN ambassador said, “If we, as a member of the UN Security Council, push for these new sanctions, the first step that will happen will be in the Security Council Sanctions Committee. They will have ten days to hold a rules vote to see if the measures requested meet the requirements of UN economic sanctions. This is a procedural vote, and it shouldn’t be a major problem, but it is a definite hurdle. There is a lot of arcane wording in the charter, and the UN officials in the Sanctions Committee must themselves decide if the request is even valid.”
Ryan said, “We can put pressure on the governments of the delegates.”
Ambassador Rush shook her head. “Won’t work. In the sanctions vote, sure, the ambassadors will vote in the interests of their own nations. But in this rules vote, the voters are employees of the UN. Simple bureaucrats. I’m not saying they are untouchable, but they are international law experts, and they pride themselves on reading the charter and ruling accordingly.”
Ryan nodded. “Okay. Get started on drafting the sanctions immediately. I want something to sign as soon as possible so we can get the ball rolling. Every day North Korea has all this cash in all these bank accounts in all these offshore banks is another day closer to their acquisition of an ICBM.”
“Mr. President,” Adler said. “I want you to be perfectly clear on one thing. When you go forward with this push to get another round of sanctions passed, you will be outnumbered. There are a lot of countries, and a lot of very powerful companies who are aware that North Korea has potential in the rare earth mineral sector. The big technology firms want electromagnets for their computers, for example, and the nations who get tax dollars from these firms—the French and the Germans and the Japanese and the Taiwanese, for example—they will all be under a lot of pressure to kill these sanctions.”
Ryan chuckled. “I’ve been outnumbered before. Hell, I’ve spent the last hour and a half staring back at you guys arguing this over.”
The room broke into laughter.
Adler smiled but stayed on point. “Diplomatically, politically, even ethically, we are going to look pretty awful if word gets out we are trying to inhibit an industry that has nothing to do with either weapons or human rights abuses. We will basically be saying to the world that we want to continue to starve a population of twenty-five million people in order to protect ourselves.”
Ryan said, “You know that’s bullshit. Nobody in North Korea who is starving now is going to get a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken when the government mineral mine starts producing.”
Arnie followed Adler’s argument. “But that’s how it will play in the press if we push to cut off their access to manufactured goods from abroad. Politically, Mr. President, this is a dead end.”
Ryan heaved. “I don’t do politics anymore. I won my last election and I can’t run again. You remember that, don’t you?”
Van Damm rolled his eyes at the comment. “I’m not talking about you. Midterms are coming up, you’ve got a tenuous hold on Congress and a contested Senate. If you concentrate on issues that move the needle in our favor, you can write your own ticket for the last two years of your administration.
“The populace focuses on the shiny objects in front of them. The media is talking about domestic issues first, then the Russia–Ukraine problem, and lastly the conflagration in the Middle East. North Korea’s craziness isn’t even a blip on the radar to these people anymore, even with the missile test and the interdiction of the rocket tubes from France. That was barely a one-news-cycle story. The country doesn’t care.”
“It’s not my job to just focus on what’s trending, Arnie. You know that. Just because this problem isn’t as overt as some of the other world flash points, it doesn’t mean I can just ignore it.”
“Fair enough,” Van Damm said. “But be warned. You won’t have a lot of friends on this issue.”
22
The Hendley Associates Gulfstream G550 flew overnight from Baltimore/Washington International Airport to Václav Havel Airport Prague. The aircraft had a range of well over 5,000 miles, so the 4,200-mile transoceanic flight was an easily makeable jaunt for the jet without any need to stop along the way to refuel.
On board the flight the needs of Jack Ryan, Dom Caruso, and Gavin Biery were attended to by Adara Sherman. She brought them drinks after takeoff, and the three passengers sat at the four-seat conference table in the center of the cabin so they could prep for the operation ahead.
The plan for the men during tonight’s flight over was to use the time to acquaint themselves with the area they would be operating in in Prague. Karel Skála lived in the Žižkov district of the city, far to the east of the tourist traps of the Old Town and Hradcany. It was a large area of apartment buildings, working-class neighborhoods, and municipal parks, and the men knew if they were going to run any kind of a surveillance package on their target there they would need to know the area without having to walk around with their nose in a map.
The service they were using on their laptops tonight to acquaint them with the eastern neighborhoods of Prague was state-of-the-art. Gavin had recently briefed the operators of The Campus about the new application from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency that now ran on their computers. It was called Map of the World, and it was an incredibly detailed interactive mapping service that could show the team virtually any place on earth, and also give them an easy interface through which they could pull up all data on the area known by
the U.S. intelligence agency and the other members of the “Five Eyes,” the English-speaking countries who shared intelligence product with the United States. Map of the World contained millions of pieces of information culled from open sources as well as the intelligence organizations from the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
They spent time testing Map of the World by researching their target’s apartment building. Through a few clicks they could see the façade, the parking area in the rear, photos of inner corridors, security camera angles and schematics, and even information on tenants of the building in the form of the computerized rental agreements kept on file by the property manager.
Map of the World was an incredible resource, like Google Earth on steroids, and Jack and Dom knew it would replace EagleView, the high-tech mapping program they had been using. EagleView was good, but it wasn’t going to tell you what time a particular trash bin on a particular street corner was emptied. Map of the World could do that—provided someone in the U.S. intelligence community had entered that bit of intel from any linked intelligence or open-source database.
Gavin Biery had loaded a mobile version of the service onto Jack and Dominic’s iPhones for quick reference while in the field, and he was even testing out a proprietary application he had created himself whereby the operators could speak commands into their phones and have answers computed for them using MOTW information, and then read aloud back to them.
As they ate their dinner and discussed the capabilities of the software, Gavin asked Jack to give it a try.
“What do I ask?”
“Whatever you want. Like I said, she’s still in beta, so don’t be too rough on her.”
Jack thought for a moment, then pushed the button on his mobile. “MOTW,” he said, letting the computer know he was talking to the Map of the World app. “Tell me which airport in Prague has the least police presence.”