The man on the massage table did not hide his expression of relief.
“But I can hold you here till my friend the photog from the New York Post shows up outside and gets into position.”
Tischer gasped now. “Nein! No. Please, you must not do this.”
“Of course, you could always shoot out the back. Yeah . . . might work.” He affected another half-shrug. “Although I already told my pal from the Daily News that you might try that, so I don’t really recommend it.”
“Mein Gott. Why are you doing this to me?”
Riley took a step closer. “When your ugly mug is on the front page of the paper, are you gonna tell your family that little girl said she was eighteen? Will they believe you? She’s in an ambulance outside, and she don’t look eighteen to me, Hans.”
Tischer covered his face with his hands.
“I’ve gotta cut you loose, but I don’t gotta like it, and there’s no law that says I’ve gotta do it without walkin’ you by the press. You know what I’m sayin’?”
Tischer sobbed softly.
Riley leaned in now, closer and softer. “Or I can make it all go away. No name, no picture. No problem.”
Tischer looked up, eyes wide in disbelief. “Yes? How?”
Even softer, Riley said, “This is where it gets interesting, Hans.” He looked back over his shoulder to make sure the door was closed. “Three days from now your committee has a procedural vote.” Just as Riley expected, the emotions displayed on the face of the man in front of him ran the gamut. From confusion to outrage to a new concern.
After a few moments he said, “What is this?”
Riley shrugged, still in character. “It’s one guy needin’ a favor, that’s you. And another guy needin’ a favor. That’s me.”
“Who are you? You aren’t a policeman.”
“I’m the guy with the pictures of you in the act, I’m the guy with the friends in the press outside, and I’m the guy who will fucking burn you if you don’t vote against the sanctions hearing.”
“Why?”
Riley just said, “Why? Why does anyone do what they do? Why do you pull your pants down in nasty-ass places like this?” It wasn’t an answer to the question, but it had the effect of shutting down Tischer’s line of questioning.
The Austrian man looked down at the floor for a long time. “It won’t matter. If I vote the way you want me to, it won’t matter. There are nine of us. We took a straw poll yesterday, and the majority are in favor of the Security Council sanctions hearing. The vote on Friday is just a formality.”
Riley smiled. “You might just find others have changed their position since the last straw poll. The world is coming to its senses on the matter.”
Tischer realized what this man was saying. He’d gotten to others on the committee. The middle-aged Austrian did not doubt this for a second.
He said, “I tell you I will vote no, and you will let me go without anyone seeing me?”
“Yes. I go out and tell my buddy from the Post I was wrong, you weren’t here. He and I hit the road. Five minutes later you walk on out and go back to your life like nothing happened. You vote no on Friday and you’ll get an envelope with the disk with all the images my colleague took. You destroy that, and this whole little escapade is behind you.”
Tischer said, “You can’t possibly work for North Korea. Can you?”
“Of course not. I’m NYPD. Along with this, let’s just say I moonlight for an interested party. We’ll leave it there.”
Tischer nodded slowly. “Okay. Let us leave it there.”
Riley smiled.
30
John Clark, Ding Chavez, and Sam Driscoll had been in the city for five days before they managed to tail Sharps employee Edward Riley to the massage parlor on 29th Street. Driscoll had the eye when Riley went in, but then he continued on, walking under his umbrella up the street a few hundred yards, bought a gyro from a vendor on 3rd Avenue, and then stepped inside a covered bus stop to shield himself from the rain while he ate it. He was just within sight of the building Riley had entered, but he’d be useful only if he pulled his camera and its zoom lens from his backpack.
For now, however, he enjoyed his gyro, because he’d handed the eye off to Chavez.
Domingo Chavez approached from the other direction. He wore a suit and tie and talked into a mobile phone. He stopped inside a Duane Reade drugstore across the street from Riley’s destination, and he began looking at umbrellas at a stand. From his vantage point here he had a perfect view of the entrance to the building less than thirty yards away.
His conversation into his phone continued; it was Clark at the other end and he was back at the safe house, sitting in front of a computer and watching his men’s movements on a computerized map. Their banter was inane cover material about the perfect weather “back home” in L.A. as compared with here in New York. When Ding stopped in the pharmacy, Clark saw this on his map, and when Ding said—in a hushed voice—“across the street from my poz, basement entrance,” Clark began scanning the area on Map of the World for information.
It took just seconds to realize the location was a massage parlor. There were links to a webpage with a phone number and an offer of “Asian massage” that, without coming right out and offering sex for money, certainly implied as much by filling the webpage full of young Asian women in lingerie.
Clark was pretty sure this wasn’t the kind of place you got a referral from your doc to visit if you needed help treating a chronic sports injury.
He relayed his findings to Ding, who by then had begun browsing through other parts of the pharmacy. Ding made no reply; he just continued talking about the weather and glancing through the glass at the front of the room.
—
Riley left the building after just ten minutes, and on a hunch Sam stuck around while Ding trailed the target back in the direction of his car.
Five minutes after this, a nervous-looking middle-aged man in dress slacks and an open-collared dress shirt came up the steps from the exit of the building. Sam finished his gyro and reached into his backpack, from where he retrieved a Nikon with a 300-millimeter lens, and even as he snapped off a dozen pictures of the man’s face he had a feeling he knew who he was.
The man stood in the rain as if he were unaware of it while he hailed a taxi. Sam slipped his camera into his bag and headed back to the safe house.
—
Sharps Global Intelligence Partners’ corporate HQ was on the Upper West Side, so The Campus had secured a safe house nearby, in a sixteenth-floor condo on West 79th Street.
It was a simple three-bedroom, two-thousand-square-foot property, and the safe house itself gave the team no direct overwatch of any part of Sharps’s operation, but this wasn’t a normal surveillance. Their intentions had been simply to find any of Sharps’s operatives in the field, and track their movements and their contacts.
Their mission to prove Sharps was working with North Korea had taken on even more significance when Gerry called the team the day before and had them assemble for a conference call.
Gerry had started the conference by saying, “I’m sure you all have seen the news that there is going to be a procedural vote in the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee next week on the North Korean situation. Nine UN bureaucrats will decide if the request from the Ryan White House meets the arcane conditions to go before a full Security Council vote.
“Needless to say, the U.S. government needs this procedural vote to pass. Without it, the conduits to North Korea’s trade remain in place and they get closer and closer to buying the material and expertise they need to build the missiles they want.”
Clark asked, “If it’s just a pro forma–type vote, what’s the concern?”
“Wayne Duke Sharps is the concern. Mary Pat has heard rumors that employees from Sharps Global Intelligence Partners have
been walking the halls in the United Nations, trying to get meetings between Sharps and the nine members of the Sanctions Committee.”
“Influence peddling?”
“No question about it. Foley can keep Sharps himself away from the UN people, at least during their official duties. But Sharps Partners has agents all over Manhattan. She is concerned Sharps will find a way to get to these men and women, and either buy their votes or affect the outcome in some way.”
Ding said, “So . . . this damn well indicates Sharps is working for the North Koreans, right?”
“Just like in Vietnam, his organization clearly is working in the interests of the North Koreans, but there is no evidence he is working for them directly. It is crucial you find exactly what Sharps and his minions are up to. But there is something more important than that. If we can find out he is working for North Korea, in any direct way whatsoever, we can have him shut down ASAP. It is treasonous to work for a foreign power.”
Sam Driscoll said, “Why doesn’t Foley just contact the FBI? They could watch over them.”
Gerry said, “The problem with Sharps’s operation always has been that they have their fingers so far in the cookie jar at FBI and CIA, they are stocked with former employees and people who are still in contact with those in the government, that there is no way the FBI can get close enough to Sharps’s operation to catch him red-handed. They’ve only got a week and a half before the vote, so they will be running around going after the committee members. They’ll have to take risks to get this done, and this creates an opportunity for you.”
After that call, Clark refined his hunt for Sharps’s operators, and within hours they were tracking Edward Riley through New York as he met with United Nations Sanctions Committee leadership. It didn’t take them any time at all to realize what was going on.
Sam’s photos of the man leaving the massage parlor in the rain were brought up on the computer. No facial-recognition software was required. There were only nine people, seven men and two women, on the Sanctions Committee, and this photo was clearly Hans Tischer, a forty-one-year-old Austrian and career UN employee at One Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay.
Clark said, “Edward Riley is Sharps’s second-in-command, and he seems to be spearheading things as a director of operations. The rules vote next week is their objective. They are trying to affect the delegates on board, to get them to vote no on drafting another round of economic sanctions.”
Sam said, “We can nip this in the bud. Just let it slip to the press what Sharps is up to. That gets out and he’ll have to stop.”
Clark said, “I considered that, but the problem is, Sharps is the devil we know. There are other unscrupulous private intelligence firms in the U.S., plus there are similar companies in other countries who could operate here and stay below our radar. And above all, interested nations could do the same thing. I have no doubt the DPRK is running agents here in the city. They could be tasked with targeting the Sanctions Committee membership, and we’ll have no insight to what’s going on.
“No. We can’t tip our hand. If Sharps finds out his op is under surveillance, we will lose all the potential leverage we have in finding out how big this goes. We won’t blow Sharps unless we can prove he’s working for the North Koreans. That would put him in prison for treason.” Clark gave a sly smile. “And that couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
Ding said, “So we keep following him. If he meets with North Koreans we hit the jackpot, but if we know who he’s compromised, like this Austrian guy he just busted in the massage parlor, we can push back on them quietly, to try and pressure their vote.”
Sam had kicked off his shoes, and now he rubbed his calves. He’d been on nearly constant foot-follow surveillance for several days. “I guess we’d better get back out there. He’s in his office now, but he usually leaves around four.”
Clark stood. “No, Sam. You and Domingo stay here. It’s my turn at bat. Good news, though, Dom will be here in a couple hours to give us another pair of eyes in the hunt.”
31
Lieutenant General Ri was not one to micromanage his operations. At present he had more than one hundred different schemes and plans in motion around the globe, and they were most all being run effectively—some more effectively than others—by his subordinates.
Counterfeiting operations, drug-smuggling operations, weapons transfers to Syria and Iraq and East Africa, and weapons purchases from Iran and Pakistan. Kidnappings in Japan and in South Korea.
And Fire Axe, the assassination of the President of the United States, in Mexico.
He couldn’t involve himself any more in Fire Axe, for the sake of deniability, but of all the other operations, the New World Metals operation was different, and therefore it required his full attention and scrutiny. As far as Ri was concerned, the Dae Wonsu himself had gone so far as to threaten him with violent death if he did not attain the ICBM, he had two years left to do so, and Ri saw no possible way this would happen without the success of New World Metals and the Chongju mine.
So he kept an eye on every last aspect of the mission. Even though Ri and his RGB did not hire Duke Sharps directly, the North Korean lieutenant general knew all about the American man and his part in the plan. He knew the importance of the procedural vote in the United Nations, and he had been watching Sharps work via reports he received from Óscar Roblas.
Ri felt Sharps was doing an excellent job with his coercion operation, and under any other circumstances he would have simply allowed his American proxy force in New York City to continue on, but he knew how utterly important the success of Sharps and his operation was to Ri’s own personal fortune.
And two days earlier something had happened in Prague which further affected the equation. A team of RGB men had been looking for a low-ranking consular affairs officer who had helped them with some documentation they had needed to get foreign expertise into Chongju. Ri had not been micromanaging this situation, but he was, of course, aware of the “underground railroad” of scientists coming in to work at Chongju from nations that would not have permitted their travel. Ri had not even been aware the Czech consular official had disappeared, but, according to the report he read this morning, the man turned up back at his apartment in Prague, along with two Americans. The North Koreans moved in, a rush decision to eliminate the consular official was made because he was in the process of revealing aspects of the North Korean operation, and according to the surviving agents, the Americans had been ready to repel force with force of their own.
Four North Koreans, three from Ri’s own RGB, had died in a gunfight.
Lieutenant General Ri had been deeply distressed by this incident because he did not know who the Americans were, what they knew about his operation or his plans, or what they would do next. He immediately thought of Sharps in New York City and how incredibly crucial a good result in the United Nations would be to New World Metals’ continued transfer of the money he needed.
Ri would not sit back and hope for the best from Duke Sharps. He would send his own operators to monitor the situation and, if necessary, employ stronger measures. He’d sanction his men to kill on the streets of America, if necessary, because the stakes were high enough to warrant it.
That wasn’t Sharps’s game—this Ri had been informed by his U.S.-based RGB staff. The American ex–FBI agent skirted the laws in his home country, but he wouldn’t run crews of armed direct-action forces, so Ri had to look into other avenues for this.
The North Korean permanent mission to the United Nations is on the thirteenth floor of an office building on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 44th Street, a block away from the entrance to the United Nations building. The comings and goings of the personnel associated with the mission are carefully watched by FBI Counterintelligence Division special agents, as well as many other U.S. government entities. General Ri knew he could not easily call his New York office an
d simply order up agents to fan into the area to protect Duke Sharps and his employees as they worked on Ri’s behalf.
But Ri had other resources at his disposal in the city. There are more than two hundred thousand Koreans or Korean Americans living in New York, and Ri had influence over hundreds of North Korean agents or expatriates residing in the area, and some of these were covert employees of the Reconnaissance General Bureau. There were even direct-action agents in the city, there for the purpose of targeting North Korean dissidents or South Korean troublemakers. After a meeting and a phone call in his Pyongyang office, Ri had secured the use of a unit of twelve highly trained North Korean sleepers in Manhattan and notified their control of his desire that they watch over Sharps and report back.
Within twenty-four hours of his order, the North Koreans in Manhattan had begun shadowing Sharps Global Intelligence Partners employees while they worked their operations within the city. They were tasked with making sure the Americans succeeded in their efforts to affect the procedural vote, and they had been given the green light to use any measures and resources necessary to see that the mission was a success.
32
President of the United States Jack Ryan was officially off duty, or as off duty as a President ever gets. All his official responsibilities were done for the day, and this was one of those too-few evenings where the agenda didn’t have him meeting anyone after hours, or going anywhere but back to the residence.
After leaving the Oval around six, he had dinner with Cathy, Kyle, and Katie in the Family Dining Room, and there they made plans to watch a Discovery Channel show about snow leopards. Katie had announced to her family recently that she was destined to be a veterinarian, and although Kyle had mocked her because he walked the family dog around the Rose Garden more than she did, her parents were thrilled with her young ambition and they ramped up their intake of nature documentaries.