It wasn’t as sure a method for getting her daughter up for school as being there in person to annoy her, but Annette needed to get to the office early to look at a new set of sat images, so it was the best method available to her.
By seven a.m. Annette had been at it for an hour already. She had made it her personal mission to somehow identify the visiting workers at the new Chongju rare earth–processing plant just north of the mine. This was hard work—the resolution provided by the KH-12 satellite in orbit over North Korea was impressive; in just the right conditions she could make out a license plate, although it was extraordinarily rare that she’d been lucky enough to have the conditions in place when she needed a tag number. But determining the identity of a group of one hundred fifty or so men from outer space was no easy task.
She had a couple working assumptions going. For one, she decided these workers were not North Korean. There were definite security measures around the temporary housing compound near the hotel in Chongju. North Korea, of course, subjected its own citizens to positively Orwellian levels of scrutiny and security protocols, but this looked more like an armed camp inside a North Korean city. Annette decided if these were local workers they wouldn’t have that number of guards, guns, and gates around them.
No, these were foreign workers, but foreign workers from where?
She wasn’t able to identify any obvious Caucasians or blacks among the few people standing around the trailers. Everyone she saw looked Asian, but it was impossible to tell if these were North Korean minders or workers from another Asian country. Of course, if they were workers from another country, China would be the first assumption, if not for the fact North Korea had kicked out their Chinese partners more than a year earlier.
She kept hunting, using her three monitors to look at each trash bin, each vehicle, each piece of clothing as closely as possible.
At eight a.m. she thought she had something, and by eight-fifteen the excitement of tangible results coursed through her like electric shocks.
Colonel Peters, Annette’s boss, arrived at work at eight-thirty a.m. to find Annette Brawley standing by his locked door with a smile on her face and two fresh cups of coffee in her hands.
His smile in return was more perfunctory. “Morning, Brawley. Any chance I can have a couple of minutes to myself before you waylay me with a PowerPoint?”
She replied like a schoolgirl. “Pu-lease, I just need a few minutes.”
He sighed. “Will I be impressed?”
“Positively floored.”
“Come on, then,” he said, and he opened the door to let Brawley in.
—
Peters had just set his briefcase down on his desk when Annette Brawley placed his coffee down, spun his computer to her, and began opening a PowerPoint loaded on the department server to put up on his wall screen. While doing so she said, “I know who is working at the rare earth metal refinery.”
She put up a picture of the temporary housing in Chongju. She’d highlighted several guard posts on the outside with red circles. “So first we see there are guards facing out and facing in, looks like two-way security. They don’t want the locals meeting with these folks, which means they aren’t locals.”
“I’ll buy that,” Peters said.
She changed the slide; now it showed some sort of kitchen facility. Wood-burning stoves. Women walking with pots. “Here is the mess area for the guest workers. It’s open-pit fires with grills on them, outdoor lean-to structures. Water tanks.”
“Right,” said Peters. “No refrigeration. Nasty.”
“Yeah. For us, anyhow. But not for them. Much of the Third World doesn’t refrigerate their meat. My daughter would gag if I told her that, but some of the things she eats make me want to puke.”
Another red circle was around a stack of square objects near the fire. “What’s that?” he asked. “Are those chicken coops?”
“Nope,” she said, and she clicked again, enlarging the area.
Peters leaned forward. They were definitely cages, each one approximately two feet square, based on a woman standing next to them. The Marine colonel tried to look inside. After a few seconds he said, “Wait. Are those . . . dogs?”
“Yes, they are,” she said. “Twenty crates here, twenty dogs. This image is from twenty-four hours ago.” She clicked the mouse and the next picture came up. It was of the same area. “And here is that mess facility just six and a half hours ago.”
Peters counted. “Eight of the crates are gone.”
“The guest workers ate Fido and his friends for dinner.”
“So . . . the guest workers are Korean? Koreans eat dog sometimes, don’t they?”
“They do. But so do some other Asian cultures. Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, and China.”
“Well, we know they aren’t Chinese.”
“No, sir. We know they aren’t anyone else but Chinese. Only the Chinese have experience with rare earth processing. None of the other countries deal in this industry at all.”
Now Peters cocked his head. “But . . . China was kicked out.”
Brawley smiled broadly. “The Chinese state-owned metal mining corporations, Chinalco and Minmetals, were kicked out, but what I have determined is that these guest workers are Chinese gangster miners.”
“Gangster miners?”
“Yes. There are illegal mining companies working all over the country.”
“How do you know?”
She clicked to the next slide. “This is a rare earth mine in Mongolia. It’s a gangster mine, run by an illegal outfit out of Shanghai. This image is from last August.” The mine was full of people. Cars, trucks, earth-moving equipment. “This mine has been underproducing for a few years, but they kept it open, digging out what they could. Three hundred fifty or so workers, based on the housing.”
She switched to the next slide, and the next, and the next. They all showed the same mine and surrounding buildings; the only difference was the date in the upper left corner changed. October, December, February.
She clicked to bring up the next image, from April. Peters looked at it for a moment and said, “I’ll be damned.”
Annette grinned. “Where did everyone go, boss?”
“To North Korea? To Chongju?”
“Damn right,” she said. “The gangster miners must have been hired in secret by the North Korean state-run mining industry because they didn’t have the expertise to operate the mine themselves. Same with the processing facility. The only difference there is the Chinese will need to somehow get some workers with experience in that. The existing gangster mines don’t process their own ore.”
Peters stood up from his desk. He had not even taken a sip of his coffee. “We need to run this up to the fifth floor. Even though it’s a little early to present the director with stories about dog meat, they’ll need to see this right away.”
“We?” she said. “I look like crap.”
“You look tired, Brawley. Like you’ve been working your ass off. That’s a good thing. I might have to rumple myself up a little before we go so you don’t make me look bad.” He said it with a smile.
“You couldn’t if you tried, boss.”
24
The breach of Karel Skála’s apartment building on Krišt’anova Street in Prague took place at two p.m. It went smoothly; an old man exited the building just as Ryan and Caruso walked up the steps and they caught the door before it closed. Once inside, they moved to the right, sticking close to the wall, and then they stepped into the stairwell without anyone noticing them.
The stairs were empty at this time of the afternoon, so they came out onto the fifth floor, still undetected. They made their way down to Karel Skála’s door, and Ryan knocked while Dom sized up the lock.
After a second and third knock, Ryan nodded to Dom and stepped out of the way. While Dom dropped to his knees
and began working on the lock, Ryan watched up the hallway, keeping his eyes trained on the stairwell. The elevator bank was closer than the stairs, but Jack knew he’d hear anyone coming via elevator long before the doors slid open. No, their main concern now was the possibility of a neighbor coming out of one of the five other apartments on this floor, or else the stairwell on the far end of the hallway flying open.
No words were exchanged between the two men. Ryan wanted to tell his cousin to hurry the fuck up, but he fought the urge. He knew Dom would defeat the lock faster than he could, so he forced himself to be patient.
Finally, Jack heard the click of the latch opening, and then he followed his cousin through the door.
The small entryway was dark and unremarkable, and this led to an equally dark hallway about twenty feet long. Halfway down on the right was an archway, and they found this led to a well-appointed living room. There was not a single light on in the small apartment, so Jack flipped on a lamp by a sofa so they could look around. Everything was neat and undisturbed.
Both men sniffed the air, trying to decide if anyone might be in the apartment, but neither man detected any particular smell.
They split up and did a quick but careful walk-through to make sure the place was unoccupied, then they met in the living room.
Dom spoke softly. “An office in back. No computer. Guest bedroom is empty as well.”
Jack said, “Master bedroom off the right here. Lot of junk lying around, it will take a little while to search this place. Let’s snoop around. I’ll start in the office. You start in the bedroom.” He then called Gavin. “Gavin, everything okay?”
Gavin Biery replied from his overwatch position: “All’s well outside.”
Jack reentered the master bedroom and looked for anything interesting out in the open, but that didn’t take long. Skála looked like he lived the life of a regular educated European male in his late twenties. There were clothes lying around, books and magazines on his bed, some cheap art on the wall. The guy obviously liked to play squash; there were racquets and other gear lying on a shelf, and a picture of Skála posing on a squash court and holding a trophy rested on his dresser, next to the small trophy itself.
Jack stepped into the master bathroom and went through the medicine cabinets, noted the man had what appeared to be a prescription to combat male pattern baldness, and a large bottle of over-the-counter medicine to treat an upset stomach.
On the other side of the apartment Dom combed through the office. He didn’t speak or read Czech so he couldn’t identify any of the papers or notes on Skála’s little desk, but nothing looked terribly interesting. He felt around under the desk, pulled out the drawers and looked for false compartments, and he searched behind the bookshelves of the small office. When he came up empty in this room he went into a guest room and checked under the bed, then stepped into the bathroom and started searching there.
In Skála’s bedroom Jack opened the closet and saw Skála had an impressive array of suits on one side, and on the far side, in the back of the closet, a long row of winter coats were pressed together tightly. Jack decided this would be a great place to hide a safe or anything else Skála wanted to keep hidden, so he began feeling around through the coats. While he searched for any sort of a safe or hidden door, Dom called from the kitchen.
“We can plant a bug in here, but we’ll just have to come back and get it if he doesn’t show up before we leave.”
Jack felt play in a board in the back wall of the closet. He yanked a few coats off the rod and dropped them to the floor to reveal a loose piece of wallboard a foot and a half wide and several feet tall. He started to pull on it, and while doing so, he said, “Hey, cuz. Check this out. I might have a—”
The large board peeled back easily, and behind it knelt a pale white man in his underwear. His eyes were red but wide, and he held a large metal object in his hand.
The man screamed and raised the metal object.
“What the—” Jack leapt back in surprise, which worked to his advantage, because the man jumped out from his hiding place swinging.
Jack rolled backward across the bed, ended up on his feet against the shelf with the squash equipment on it. The attacker came forward, leapt up on the bed, and raised the weapon high to swing it down. It was a brass lamp, big and heavy, and the man wielded it like a two-handed sword.
“Wait!” Ryan shouted, but the man swung again as he jumped off the bed. Ryan spun out of the way and felt the breeze as the brass lamp whipped by his face.
Ryan heard his cousin shout from the kitchen. “Jack?”
Ryan didn’t have time to answer. He stumbled back over the dresser as the man closed quickly, chasing Jack with the heavy blunt object. He swung again, but Jack managed to fall backward out of the bedroom and into the hall before the lamp connected.
He rolled to the left and shouted at the man again. This time he said, “Skála, wait!”
Dom Caruso turned into the hallway from the kitchen, his pistol already out of its Thunderwear holster. Skála swung at the gun before Caruso could fire, and the brass lamp in Skála’s hand clanged against the steel and polymer weapon, knocking it out of Caruso’s hand.
Caruso leapt back to avoid a second swing, but then he moved in quickly, got between the attacker and his weapon, and he slammed the man hard up against the wall of the hallway. The brass lamp clanged to the hardwood floor and Dom shoved the man again. The back of his head made violent contact with the wall. He slid down to the floor, dazed, and Dom stepped over him, fists balled and ready to break his jaw with a right cross.
Jack shouted, “No! Don’t hurt him. It’s Skála.”
Dom looked at the man’s face for a second, then he relaxed his hands, turned, and went to retrieve his pistol.
Jack stood up and looked down at the dazed man in his underwear. “You speak English?”
The Czech man was only twenty-eight, but his blond hair was wispy thin. His eyes were impossibly bloodshot, and he smelled like sweat and urine. Jack’s first impression was the man was some sort of a drug addict.
Skála nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“What the fuck were you doing in your closet?” Jack asked.
He coughed a few times. His throat sounded as dry as paper. “Hiding from you bastards.”
“How did you know we were here?”
This confused the man, it was plain to see. He rubbed his eyes. “You . . . Aren’t you with the North Koreans?”
Caruso holstered his pistol. He was pissed at losing his weapon in a fight with a man with more luck than training, and his anger was reflected in his voice. He snapped back, “Do we fucking look like we’re with the North Koreans?”
Jack added, “We’re American.”
Skála said, “So? The last American I talked to was working with the North Koreans.”
Hazelton, Jack thought, but he did not say it. Instead, he said, “We’re not with the North Koreans. Are they after you?”
Skála just nodded. He was still coming out of his daze, and he was plainly afraid.
Jack said, “We’re going to sit down in the living room and talk a minute. We have a man outside and we are in communication with him. He’ll tell us if anybody else shows up.”
This seemed to relax Skála a little. “I would very much like to have a beer,” he said.
—
While Dom went to the kitchen to get Skála a beer from the refrigerator, Jack went into the bedroom and looked at the little spider hole in the back of the closet. It was two feet wide and five feet tall and only a foot and a half deep, smaller than a casket and certainly just as dark.
The North Koreans had this guy spooked enough to virtually bury himself alive in his own home, and this realization chilled Ryan.
Inside the hole Ryan found Skála’s mobile phone and a laptop. There was a battery charger plugged into both
devices. Jack took it all out and headed back for the living room. Here he found Dom standing with a beer in his hand. Skála was in the bathroom urinating, but Dom made him leave the door open so he could be sure he wasn’t trying to escape through the little window high in the wall.
When Skála finished in the bathroom, he came out and sat on his couch across from an archway that led to the hallway to the front door. Dom gave him his beer, then sat next to him. Jack sat in the chair on Skála’s left.
Jack asked, “How long have you been in your wall?”
The man looked down at his watch for a second, then he said. “Almost two and a half days. I came out at night for a few minutes to walk around and use the toilet.”
“Who are you hiding from?”
He didn’t answer the question. Instead, he asked, “Who are you?”
“A friend of ours met you at the airport. He wanted us to look you up.”
“What friend?”
“Colin Hazelton?”
Skála didn’t react to the name at all. Jack said, “Big American. Early sixties.”
“Yes,” he said with a nod. “So . . . if you are friends with him—you are working with—”
Dom interrupted. “We told you we’re not with anybody. Somebody killed Hazelton. We think it might have been the North Koreans. We are here to find out why.”
“They killed him,” Skála said softly. He didn’t seem surprised, but the weight of the words affected him. He chugged a third of the bottle of beer. His terror was greater even than his exhaustion, and his hands trembled.
Jack said, “You gave Hazelton some documents.”
Skála nodded. “Yes. Five sets of papers. EU diplomatic passports and Czech travel authorizations.”
“You still have copies of them?”
“No. I deleted everything.” He shrugged. “Of course I did. I didn’t want to get caught with it.”
Jack winced in frustration. “Who were the people?”
“I don’t know. I was given photographs. I made everything else up.”
“Where were they from?”