“Is a squirter a bad guy running away?”
“Yes.”
“I’m watching him now. He is getting into a gray van with a man behind the wheel. They are leaving the scene.”
“Just let them go. We’ll be down in thirty seconds. You need to get us packed up and ready to get the fuck out of here.”
Gavin spun around, began running back to the office building. “I’m on it.”
—
The team had their hide site broken down, packed up, and loaded into the Mercedes in ten minutes flat. While Jack pulled the vehicle out of the underground parking garage, doing his best to keep from burning rubber to get out of the neighborhood, Dom called Adara from the backseat. She answered on the first ring. “Yes?”
Dom knew the encryption on his phone was good, so he had no worries about watching what he said. “You aren’t going to believe this.”
“You need another in extremis departure?”
“It’s becoming a thing, isn’t it?”
“Any wounded?”
“Negative. We’re okay, but we’ve got to get out of here.”
“What’s the opposition?”
“North Korean. I don’t know anything more than that, and I doubt they know who we are, but the local police are going to be looking for two guys matching the description of Jack and I as soon as they start taking statements at the crime scene.”
“Crime scene?” Adara asked.
“One dead local. Our target. Four dead foreign nationals. North Koreans.”
“Jesus, Dom.”
“Shit got crazy.”
“Just get here and I’ll get you out of the country.”
“Roger that.”
Dom ended the call and slipped the phone back in his pocket. Ryan called out from behind the wheel. “What did Sherman say?”
“She said she’ll be ready.”
Gavin spoke up for the first time. “Guys, I’m so sorry.” He explained what happened with the arrival of the building superintendent. Dom wasn’t in the mood to listen, he just closed his eyes and leaned his head back, but Jack paid attention.
When Biery had explained himself, Jack said, “If you had let us know you were leaving your overwatch we could have been ready, Gavin. You see that, don’t you?”
Gavin said, “Yeah. I see. It happened so fast. I . . . didn’t want to alarm you.”
Dom kept his eyes closed and his head back, but he said, “You know what really alarmed me? The half-dozen bastards shooting at me.”
“I’m sorry,” Gavin repeated.
The remainder of the drive to the airport passed in silence.
26
The flight from Chicago O’Hare to Reagan National was only ninety minutes in duration, but thirty-five-year-old CIA officer Adam Yao climbed up the jetway looking like he’d traveled halfway around the planet. And with good reason. This flight to D.C. was the end of nearly twenty-four hours of commercial air travel for Yao that began on the other side of the world and had left his body clock utterly confused. Although it was mid-morning now, Adam’s brain thought it was somewhere around midnight. After sleeping poorly in coach as well as traveling across nearly half the world’s time zones he struggled with the task of putting one foot in front of the other, and he noticed he was leaning onto his carry-on as he walked for balance.
Adam Yao’s flight from Singapore to D.C. was a three-legged odyssey that took him through Tokyo and Chicago before depositing him bleary-eyed and achy here at Reagan National. It was just nine-thirty a.m.; he’d love nothing more than to check into a hotel for a few hours’ rest before making an appearance at work, but his instructions were to get himself to McLean, Virginia, as soon as possible.
He planned on renting a car, but as soon as he turned his phone on after touchdown he received word a driver was outside in the arrivals area. He had no checked luggage—rare for a man flying halfway around the globe—so he stepped out into the bright morning and found a black Lincoln Navigator waiting for him.
Adam was an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, but he was no desk-riding embassy spook with diplomatic cover. He’d spent a good portion of his young career working in Hong Kong under non-official cover, meaning he worked out in the shadows. After Hong Kong he was transferred back to Langley for several months of desk work, but the very week he was cleared to return to NOC status he was wheels up for Singapore, desperate to leave the boring bureaucracy of federal government employment behind and get back to what he loved to do.
Work in the shadows.
While the home office of Yao’s employer, the Central Intelligence Agency, was here in McLean, CIA was not his destination this morning. Instead, he was driven to Liberty Crossing, a gated government building complex not far away from Langley HQ.
There are two main buildings at the Liberty Crossing property off Lewinsville Road; they are virtually identical, and they are referred to by those in government as LX1 and LX2. LX1 houses the National Counterterrorism Center, and LX2 is the home of ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Though the CIA was Yao’s employer, ODNI was the umbrella organization over all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, and this made ODNI Yao’s masters as well.
His identification was checked at the front gate, he was brought into the building and checked again, his phone was placed in a tiny locker, he was scanned and wanded, and after all these measures, measures that he had endured countless times in his decade with a top-secret clearance, he was ushered into an office on the third floor of the building.
He waited alone for a moment. There was coffee in front of him, but he’d had so much this morning already on the flight over from Chicago that his stomach burned, so he didn’t touch it.
Adam did not have a clue why he had been recalled to the United States, and he certainly did not know why he was here at LX2 instead of the CIA building just a ten-minute drive away. He was pretty good at guessing when things like this happened, but at the moment he was more tired than curious, so he just sat there.
Until a side door to the conference room opened.
When it did Adam glanced up, then he immediately launched to his feet. Entering the room alone was Brian Calhoun, the CIA’s director of National Clandestine Service. Calhoun was the head spy at the Agency, nearly at the top of the pecking order and so many rungs above Adam Yao he’d need a pen and a sheet of paper to figure out just how many positions separated them.
He’d never met Calhoun, outside a brief handshake during a debrief last year, but Yao was a fan, and now he wished he’d bothered to check the knot of his tie in the bathroom. He imagined he looked like hell, and Adam Yao was a young man who liked to make a good impression with his appearance.
Adam chanced a look behind the director of NCS as he entered, thinking for sure Calhoun would be followed by a gaggle of underlings, but instead Calhoun shut the side door himself and crossed the conference room with a smile.
“Son, that flight was a bitch, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, I’m fine, sir.”
“Then you’re a better man than me. Singapore to D.C. always kicks my ass. Australia’s worse, but not much.”
Adam said, “I managed some sleep along the way. I’m good to go, sir.” It wasn’t true, but he assumed Calhoun wasn’t here to listen to him complain about air travel.
“Take a seat.”
Both men sat down at the large table.
“I talked to your control officers on the fifth floor. I’ve read pretty much every report you’ve filed for the last nine months. You are doing a hell of a job.”
“Thank you, sir.” Adam couldn’t help it. His mind was spinning, trying to figure out what this was all about. A promotion? That would have surprised him. He had not been at his new assignment for long at all. Unless someone above him he didn’t know had move
d on, it didn’t seem likely they’d pull Adam out of NOC work to move him back to Langley. And unless he was being promoted to station chief, a half-dozen steps above his level now, then Brian Calhoun wouldn’t be involved in the promotion.
That meant, to Adam, that Calhoun must be here because of a new operation. A good NOC, no matter how deep he is in his cover and no matter what it is he is doing, knew he could be moved at any time. But again, Adam thought to himself, the damn head of the service shouldn’t be the guy doling out the op orders.
“Your work in Singapore is going nicely, so far. And what you did in Hong Kong was nothing short of magnificent.”
“Thank you very much,” Adam said.
“But we rushed you back home like this because we have a new opportunity, and we think you might be just the man for the job.”
“A new operation?”
“Potentially, yes.”
“Okay,” Adam said, a hint of confusion bleeding through into his voice.
Calhoun cocked his head. “Something wrong?”
Adam smiled apologetically and said, “You can understand my confusion, sir. Normally my control officer, or maybe a section head, would brief me. I find it more than surprising that someone like yourself is talking to me about a new assignment.”
Now it was Calhoun’s turn to smile. “Yao, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
As if on cue, the same side door opened and Mary Pat Foley, the director of national intelligence, entered the room. Adam rose to his feet quickly, and Calhoun did the same.
Yao never saw top-level IC execs without three or four attendants and subordinates. It was confusing to him to see both Calhoun and Foley unaccompanied.
“Good morning, Adam.”
“Madame Director.”
“I heard you flew in from Singapore.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And then we rushed you here without a shower?”
Adam reddened with embarrassment. “Is it that obvious?”
Mary Pat smiled without responding, then she, Calhoun, and Yao sat at the conference table. “How far did we get?” she asked Calhoun.
“He’s still in the ‘what the hell is going on?’ phase.”
Foley laughed. “Unfortunately, Adam, some government servants spend their entire career in that phase. Not you, though. I’ll explain everything. First, I assume Brian already gave you the whole obligatory ‘we love your work’ spiel?”
“Uh . . . yes, ma’am.”
“Then I will cut to the chase. Adam, what do you know about the mining sector in China?”
Adam raised his eyebrows, surprised by the question for a few reasons, but at least, as far as the topic was concerned, he found himself on firm ground. “Quite a bit. When I was working undercover in Hong Kong as a corporate investigations consultant I had a lot of issues with two of China’s six state-owned mining concerns. Chinalco and Minmetals. They were stealing technology from Western firms, and I worked to bring these transgressions to light.”
“And what about rare earth element mining in particular?”
He was still off kilter because he was in an ODNI conference room with the top intelligence official in the U.S. government, but now he was more intrigued by this mysterious operation than he was by the manner it was being presented to him. “That’s huge over in China. They are the player in the industry, controlling over ninety percent of the world’s extraction and supply.”
“Go on,” Mary Pat said.
Adam smiled. If this was a test, he was about to nail it. “There are seventeen rare earth minerals, and they all occur together, so while a rare earth deposit might have a higher relative proportion of one of the minerals as opposed to another, a rare earth mine extracts all of the minerals together as ore, and then sends it off to be processed.
“Rare earths are divided into two categories: light and heavy.
“China extracts the majority of the world’s rare earth minerals for a number of reasons: Low labor costs and negligible environment standards for a process that is very hard on the environment allow them to price the goods cheaply. But the main reason for China’s supply-side dominance is the discovery of massive mineral deposits. They simply have more of the stuff than anyone else. Having said that, they also use more of it than anyone else. China ran into trouble due to its explosive growth. Its manufacturing sector began using more of the rare earths just as its demand for other commodities increased, and this left less available to export, increasing the cost of the commodity.
“Australia has been increasing its mining in the past few years, as has the U.S., but they are whistling in the wind in this industry.”
“Why do you say that?”
“China will always be at a competitive advantage with the West. They have absurdly low labor costs, their mines operate on government land without paying for the privilege, there are virtually no environmental regs for them there. We have some rare earth mining in the West, but we pay a lot more to get the commodity out of the ground and processed than the Chinese ever will.”
Calhoun slapped Yao on his back, startling him. He looked to Mary Pat. “I told you Yao would know his stuff.”
Adam clarified, “I know a good bit about the Chinese rare earth operations, the major players and the regions where they mine the ore. And I understand the technique of the mining and the ore processing in a general sense, but I sure couldn’t operate a gas scrubber at a rare earth mine or anything like that.”
Mary Pat said, “We don’t need you with a pick down in a shaft, but we were hoping you would already possess some knowledge about the industry.”
“That I do,” Adam said. He was humble about a lot of things, but he had been sitting in China, Hong Kong and then Singapore for the past few years totally engrossed in the Chinese economy. He had all the confidence in the world about his deep knowledge of it.
Mary Pat then asked, “And what about the illegal rare earth mining industry in China?”
“Sure,” he said, a little less confidently. “Gangster mines. Illegal private corporations run by Chinese organized crime have big REM mines in Inner Mongolia as well as other places. They are successful because local and regional governments benefit from them. The gangsters pay bribes and such.” He chuckled. “And if you think the government-run mines fall short of environmental standards, the gangster miners are a whole lot worse.”
Foley turned to Calhoun and nodded. Adam realized he’d passed some sort of a test, but he wasn’t sure what that had earned him. Calhoun leaned forward on his elbows. “We have one hell of a problem, and we have one hell of an opportunity.”
“You want to put me into a Chinese mine?” Adam knew the Chinese government had tried to kill him once, in Hong Kong. They got close, so close it was clear an intelligence breach had occurred that gave them information about Yao and his actions. He wasn’t crazy about working in China, and he felt awkward about the fact it looked like he’d have to remind these two in front of him of his unique situation.
But Calhoun shook his head and said, “No. We’d need you to go into China for a very short time to establish your cover, but we are confident we have a way to make that happen. Your ultimate destination would, instead, be somewhere else.”
Adam relaxed a little, but he was careful not to show it. “Okay, where do you need me to go?”
Mary Pat took over. “Your file says you speak Korean.”
“Just fair. I spent a semester in high school as an exchange student in Seoul, then I returned for a semester of college. Studied the language in school, and took a night class while doing NOC work in HK.”
The two intelligence executives nodded at the young officer. They knew all this already.
Adam asked the next question with some concern. “We are talking about me going into South Korea. Correct?”
When the answer did not immedi
ately come from either Foley or Calhoun, Adam just muttered, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Mary Pat answered now. “What would you say if I told you we have a way to get you into North Korea?”
“I would respectfully ask you to provide a little more information.”
The room was tense, but Foley laughed. “That is understandable. Nearly two years ago Chinese geologists and miners working in the DPRK found deposits in the mountains of the Chongju region near their northern border with China. They dug test shafts and confirmed the find, then began establishing the infrastructure for extraction.”
Adam had heard something about this, but it had never been on his radar enough to look into it more closely.
Mary Pat said, “Then, about a year ago, Choi Ji-hoon threw the Chinese mining concern out of his country.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know. Some contractual issue, perhaps? What we do know is his new minister of mining, a man named Hwang, has recently allowed a group of illegal Chinese mining industry personnel into Chongju to work at the mine. Clearly he’s smart enough to know DPRK can’t extract the rare earths without expert help. The gangster miners are crucial to his operation.”
“Sounds prudent.”
“This gangster mining company is very experienced and well organized, but they have specialized in extraction, not processing. The North Koreans have to process the ore themselves now, they can’t very well hand it off to the Chinese after canceling the Chinese contract, so the illegal operation has established a front company in Shanghai for the sole purpose of obtaining processing technology and brainpower from abroad.” She paused. “Are you with me so far?”
Yao just nodded, urging her on.
“This company has been in contact with a Chinese national working at a rare earth mineral mine in California. We only found out about it because we’ve had a surveillance package on the man for some time. Initially we thought the man was working for Chinese intelligence. He is not. Quite the opposite, actually. He is a gangster miner himself who managed to get hired in the U.S. to headhunt talent at NewCorp, the American mining concern.