by Mark Greaney
He took another gulp of gin. “Sometimes it’s best to know.”
“Perhaps that is your philosophy. It is not mine.” She said it with an air of finality. She wanted to move on. “So . . . do you have them or not?”
Hazelton spoke slowly and softly, but stressing every word through a slur from the alcohol he’d been consuming all day, both here and in the lobby bar back at his hotel. “North . . . Fucking . . . Korea.”
No response from the Frenchwoman.
He said, “You did know, didn’t you?”
She did not answer. Instead, she replied, “You are very emotional, aren’t you? This surprises me. I know you were given a rush assignment, someone took ill and they pulled out and then you were called over, but New York should know better than to send in an emotional traveling officer.” Below the table, Hazelton felt the tip of her high-heeled shoe as it ran along his leg, just next to his ankle. There was a time in his life when this would have excited him, but that was long ago. This was work; he knew she was just feeling around to see if he had a briefcase. Soon he heard her toe thump his case, next to his leg.
She said, “Slide it to me, please.”
The big American just sat there. He drummed his fingers on the table. Considering.
He expected to see frustration on her face, but she was oddly cool about his delay. After several seconds she repeated herself with no change in tone. “Slide it to me, please.”
He didn’t know what he was going to do tonight. Would he pass the items or shred them and dump them in a river like fish food? The ramifications for each course of action had been weighing on him all day. But now a sense of composure came over him, and he heard himself say, “You know what? I didn’t sign on to this job to be an errand boy for a bunch of murdering psychos.” Then, “There is other work to be had without stooping this low.”
“I don’t understand,” the woman said, and while speaking she glanced into the street, a casual gaze. She looked bored, but Hazelton knew she was simply keeping an eye out for surveillance.
Hazelton waved his arm in the air angrily. “To hell with this. I’m out.”
The woman, by contrast, displayed no emotion. “Out?”
“I’m not passing the documents on to you.”
She sighed a little now. “Is this about money? If so, you will need to talk to New York. I have no authorization to—”
“It’s not about money. It’s about good and evil. That’s completely lost on you, isn’t it?”
“My job has nothing to do with either.”
Hazelton looked at the woman with complete derision. His decision had been made. “Tell yourself that if you need to, but you’re not getting these docs.” He kicked the briefcase loud enough for her to hear it.
The woman nodded. A countenance of calm. Her detachment was odd to Hazelton. He’d expected screaming and yelling. She just said, “This will complicate things. New York will be angry.”
“Screw New York.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to join you in your moral crusade.”
“Doll, I don’t give a damn what you do.”
“Then you won’t give a damn when I walk out of here and make a phone call.”
Hazelton paused, the strain of his work and the travel evident on his face. “Call him.”
“He will send someone to take that case from you.”
Hazelton smiled now. “He might try. But like you said, I’m not exactly new at this. I have a few tricks up my sleeve.”
“For your sake, I hope you do.” The Frenchwoman stood and turned away, passing the smiling waiter approaching the table with the wine on a silver tray.
—
Jack Ryan, Jr., watched it all through his camera from the rooftop across the street. He couldn’t hear the conversation, of course, but he correctly identified the body language.
“If that was a blind date, I don’t think they hit it off.”
Ding and Sam chuckled, but everyone stayed on mission. They watched while the tall woman pulled a phone from her purse and spoke into it, then began walking north.
Driscoll depressed his PTT controller. “Clark? Are we staying with Hazelton or do you want someone on the woman?”
Clark replied quickly. “She was after whatever is in that briefcase, so that case is now part of our mission. Still . . . I want to know more about her. One of you go with the blonde. The others stay put, eyes on that case.”
Jack and Sam took their eyes out of their optics and looked to Chavez, between them on the roof. Chavez said, “I’ll stay. You guys fight over it.”
Now Jack glanced to Sam, who slowly put his eye back in his spotting scope to watch the subject. “Go.”
Jack gave a big smile; it was the brightest light on the rooftop. “I owe you one, Sam.”
He was up and moving toward the fire escape in seconds, putting his camera into his pack as he walked through the dark.
Sam and Ding watched while Colin Hazelton drained the last of his gin and tonic, then gestured for the waiter to bring him another.
“What’s he hanging around for? He’s got another shitty date?” Sam asked rhetorically. Downstairs Clark was thinking the same thing. His voice was gravel, all annoyance and frustration. “Looks like we’re stuck here for a fourth round of g and t’s.”
The drink came and Hazelton let the waiter put it on the table in front of him. He said something to the waiter; all three Americans watching across the street thought he was asking for the bathroom, because the waiter pointed toward the back of the establishment. Hazelton stood; he left his drink, his coat, and his briefcase; and he headed to the back.
It was quiet in all three headsets for a moment. Then Ding said, “John? That look right to you?”
Clark understood what his second-in-command meant, but instead of revealing what he was thinking, he put it as a challenge to Driscoll. “Sam? What do you see?”
Driscoll adjusted his eye in his scope, looking at the empty table, the coat over the back of Hazelton’s chair, the briefcase on the other chair. He looked at the other tables in the restaurant, the well-heeled clientele seated or milling about. After a moment his eyes went back to the briefcase. He said, “If something was so important in that case that he refused to pass it to his contact, why would he leave it unattended at the table while he goes to take a leak?”
Clark said, “He wouldn’t.”
“Then the case is a decoy.”
“That’s right.”
“Meaning . . .” Driscoll had it in another second. “Hazelton isn’t coming back. He suspects surveillance on the front so he’s slipping out a rear exit.”
Ding confirmed this with “The old dine-and-dash routine.”
Clark said, “Bingo. I’m going to head through the restaurant and come out the back. It’s a north-south alley, but his hotel is behind us. You two stay on overwatch and keep an eye on the intersections to the north and south. Unless he can teleport, we’ll pick him back up.”
—
In the tea shop Clark dropped a few wadded dong notes on the table, paying for a drink that made his stomach churn, then he grabbed his jacket and headed toward the Lion d’Or across the street.
He’d just stepped off the curb when he saw something that made him pull up short. He backed onto the sidewalk, then looked around in all directions.
Softly he spoke over the communications net. “Ryan. Hold position.”
—
Jack Ryan, Jr., had been moving up Dao Cam Moc, but on Clark’s order he stopped. “Holding,” he replied. He turned toward the alcove of a closed electronics retailer and pretended to window shop.
“What’s your location?” Clark asked.
Jack looked down to his phone to a map of the area. Tiny colored dots displayed the position of the four men on the team, or more precisely, the positi
on of the GPS tracker each man wore under the belt loop in the small of his back. Clark’s green dot was two blocks to the southeast, still in the open-air tea shop.
Ryan said, “I’m two blocks northwest of your poz.”
Over the earbud Clark explained himself. “I’ve got eyes on four unknowns on motorcycles approaching from opposite ends of the street. They look like a team.”
A moment later Chavez, who was still on the roof with his camera, transmitted. “Black Ducatis?”
Clark said, “Roger that. They came from opposite directions and have different clothing, but it looks like they are riding identical bikes and wearing identical helmets. No coincidence.”
Ding picked all four bikes out of the traffic below. It took him several seconds, because they were spread out. “Good eye, John.”
“Not my first visit. I know when something doesn’t look right around here. Jack, I want you to continue north of your poz. If he takes that alley all the way through the district you can get ahead of him when he comes out on Pham The Hien, but only if you double-time it. Watch for these bikers, don’t let them catch you eyeing the subject.”
Ryan was still pretending to look over a shelf of high-end cameras in the shop window. He felt the blood pumping through his heart for the first time on this trip. His boring evening was suddenly building in intensity.
Jack took off in a jog. “On it. I’ll stay parallel to the bikers and get to the mouth of the alley before Hazelton exits.”
Clark said, “Sam and Ding, do what you can to catch up to Ryan.”
“We’re en route,” said Chavez. “A minute to get off the roof, that puts us three minutes behind you, Jack. Keep it loose till we catch up.”
—
Colin Hazelton stepped out into the alleyway behind the restaurant and headed due north, his hands in his pockets.
He was well aware he’d just made a very costly decision. Costly because he wouldn’t get paid for his work over the past four days, and costly because he’d lose his job for his decision to abort. But also costly because he’d left a three-hundred-dollar sport coat and a four-hundred-dollar briefcase behind.
All bad news for a man in the twilight of his work life who was also sixty thousand dollars in debt, and in possession of few marketable skills other than spycraft.
But in spite of this, for the first time all day, Hazelton felt a sense of peace. It even occurred to him that, despite the valuable property he’d left in the restaurant, at least he’d skipped out on his fifty-dollar bar tab, so he had to factor in that small win.
He managed a half-smile.
But it didn’t last. He thought about the events that brought him here, to this dimly lit alley, to this decision, and his mood darkened to match the low light of his surroundings.
It had been a year now since Wayne “Duke” Sharps, director of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners, interviewed Colin Hazelton in his Upper West Side Manhattan office about a job in “corporate intelligence.” Sharps had made it clear to the ex–CIA officer that the work at Sharps Partners would be safe, low-key, and nonpolitical, but it would also require Hazelton coming to terms with the fact he would no longer be working for the United States. He would, instead, be working for a paycheck.
Hazelton pushed back at this, insisting he’d never do anything against the red, white, and blue, but to that Sharps replied, “We don’t operate against U.S. interests.” He laughed at the thought. “We’re not devils here at SGIP, we’re just not angels.”
That sounded fine to Colin Hazelton. He was ex-CIA after a career as an Air Force pilot. He bled red, white, and blue, yes, but the times dictated his actions. He’d made a string of speculative international investments in emerging markets, mostly in North Africa, and they had all gone belly-up during the unexpected events of the Arab Spring.
Hazelton needed the work, so he took the job.
And Sharps’s promise of apolitical corporate intelligence work had proven true. For the past year Hazelton had not thought twice about his assignments or his clients.
Until this week, that is.
On Monday Hazelton’s employer had rushed him to Prague to meet with a government official to pick up travel documentation for five individuals. There wasn’t much exciting about this sort of thing; as an operations officer in the CIA, he’d secured alias travel for hundreds of agents around the world. Even working for Sharps this was not out of the ordinary; Hazelton had been involved in moving highly skilled foreign professionals who’d been unable to obtain U.S. work visas into the States. He saw it as a good thing; he was subverting American bureaucracy, not America itself.
Normally it was part of his job to inspect the documents. But not this time; for some reason, when the docs were presented to him in Prague they were sealed in a laminated pouch and his instructions were to deliver the package to a contact in Ho Chi Minh City, and then to return to New York.
He assumed the five sets of documents were for five Czech professionals, and they would be heading to some other country via Vietnam, not the States, as that would be an odd connection from Prague. Hazelton guessed the travelers would be going to work in Japan, or Singapore, or maybe even Australia.
It was strange he wasn’t allowed to see the documentation, but he let it go.
That was until last night on the flight over from Prague. With an hour and a half till landing, the burly American polished off a gin and tonic and began securing items in his roll-aboard and his briefcase. The laminated package full of docs was stowed under the fabric lining of his carry-on, but as he moved a pair of shoes to make room for his jacket, to his horror he realized there was a small tear in the lining of the case. He’d been using the luggage since the late eighties, and the secret compartment had finally given out. He tried to fix it, but this only made it worse. It was a rookie mistake for a spook, and Hazelton was no rookie, but he had been drinking, and that, along with Murphy’s Law, had worked against him.
As he sat in his first-class seat he thought about going through immigration in Vietnam and he began to sweat. If his carry-on was searched at all he knew they would find his stash. But thinking it over quickly, he realized he couldn’t remember a single visit to Vietnam where his person had been searched. If he removed the documents from the hidden compartment and simply stored them in a money belt around his waist, he’d be fine.
But to do this he knew he’d first need to remove them from the large square laminate package.
Hazelton took the document package into the lavatory, sat on the toilet, and tore it open with his teeth. Inside he found five plastic bags, each one containing a passport, a driver’s license, some credit cards, and a folded letter. Despite a strong presumption he was not supposed to look, he began thumbing through the documents.
A flight attendant knocked on the door to the bathroom, telling him to return to his seat because the pilot expected unstable air ahead.
But Hazelton ignored her; all his attention was concentrated on the travel documents. He was not surprised to find the black diplomatic passports. They were not fakes, these were legit, although he assumed they had been altered somehow. He looked at each of the photos. Four Caucasian men and one Caucasian woman.
He couldn’t be sure if they were Czech just by looking at them, but where they were from was not the issue.
It was where they were going. The letters in each person’s possession were travel authorizations, given by the Czech government, allowing the diplomat holding the corresponding passport to travel to North Korea to work in the Czech consulate there.
North Korea? Hazelton had spent the last year doing corporate intelligence work for Siemens, for Microsoft, for Land Rover, and for Maersk.
Now I’m working on behalf of the most brutal and repressive regime in the world?
As he sat on the toilet, his shoulders slamming from one wall to the other with the turbulence,
Hazelton decided these five individuals were nuclear scientists being snuck into North Korea. What the hell else could be going on? DPRK had been caught trying to move nuke experts before, and they had no major industry to speak of other than mining, which was handled almost exclusively by partners in China. He couldn’t be certain these were nuke scientists, of course, but he could damn well tell they weren’t Chinese miners.
And he knew this wasn’t some operation Sharps was running against the North Koreans. Duke Sharps wasn’t in the business of taking on despotic regimes for noble aims. He worked for money, there was money in getting brainpower into North Korea, so that had to be what was going on here.
He closed his eyes and leaned back against the bulkhead of the plane, still sitting on the toilet. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered to himself.
The fact Duke Sharps was shipping nefarious characters into the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea pissed Hazelton off, but the fact Hazelton was helping Sharps do it made him shudder.
Hazelton made it through airport immigration with the docs strapped to his midsection, and then an hour later he arrived at his hotel from the airport, salty remnants of dried sweat covering his body. He spent the afternoon in the lobby drinking, thinking about the money and the job and his need to make his financial problems go away, hoping against hope there was some sweet spot of inebriation he could find right as the time came to pass the docs off to the cutout here in Ho Chi Minh City so he wouldn’t feel like he was doing anything wrong.
Now Hazelton knew . . . a half-dozen Tanquerays at the lobby bar and three more at the restaurant—more than a pint of gin—this wasn’t even close to enough to washing away the stench of working for the North Koreans.
He’d balked tonight in the restaurant, refusing to give the docs to the gorgeous French spook, his cutout who would have taken them to the five travelers, probably lodged somewhere in the city. Then the French bitch had probably run off to tattletale to Duke Sharps, and now sixty-one-year-old Colin Hazelton found himself stinking drunk, staggering through a Third World back alley dodging whoever Sharps would send to find the dirty docs that Hazelton now held in a large money belt around his waist.
