by Mark Greaney
Katie loved learning about animals, and Kyle enjoyed it as well, although his sights were set firmly on a career as a professional stuntman, and he thought it unfair that his mom and dad didn’t support him by allowing him to build the scaffold on the back lawn with the mattresses below it, because without this how was he going to ever learn how to fall off buildings like the real stuntmen in the movies do?
Jack and Cathy put their foot down with Kyle, did their best to steer him toward something else—anything else—but as for Katie, the nine-year-old who didn’t like to operate the pooper scooper in the backyard was, in her parents’ eyes at least, well on her way to becoming a world-renowned zoologist or an exotic-animal vet.
Jack started heading back to his room to change to watch TV, but a steward let him know Mary Pat Foley was on the phone wishing to speak with him.
He took the call in his study. “Hey, Mary Pat. Anything wrong?”
“No, Mr. President, everything is fine. Sorry to disturb you like this.”
“Not at all. What’s up?”
Mary Pat said, “Mr. President, I think there is an opportunity here to get a human source inside North Korea, into the Chongju mine and refinery operations, to give us much better elucidation on the situation there. It won’t be easy, the officer will obviously be in great danger.”
“Wait. You said ‘officer,’ not ‘agent.’ You are talking about an employee of one of our intel agencies?”
“Yes, Mr. President. CIA. He’s a Chinese American, first-generation.” She offered the President no more information.
Ryan loosened his tie and leaned back. “You want a ‘go, no-go,’ from me. Is that it?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“The operation . . . how long in duration?”
“Open-ended. We don’t think it will be more than a couple months once our man is in country.”
“You are satisfied the backstopping of the officer’s legend is good? The infiltration plan is solid? You are convinced he has the best resources you can give him, and a clear understanding of the objectives?”
“Yes to all.”
“What about fail-safes if he gets in trouble?”
Mary Pat paused. “I could tell you about the training he has and the exfiltration options available to him if he is compromised, but I will be honest with you. If he is compromised while on the ground in North Korea, he will likely be captured and then killed, or else killed outright.”
“Is there a plan to coordinate with U.S. military in case of emergency? We have special operations troops near the South Korean border, of course. And the USS Freedom is in the Yellow Sea. SEALs on board the Freedom were the ones who found the launch tubes on that cargo ship.”
“We are going to play our cards very close to the vest on this operation, for purposes of OPSEC. If our man is compromised from over here it will be ruinous to him and to any future efforts we might have. But I will notify JSOC that a personnel recovery mission is a possibility.” Mary Pat knew JSOC would just ask for more information, and although she couldn’t blame them for that, she wouldn’t give any more information unless Yao was on the run in North Korea.
The very thought of this made her blood run cold.
Ryan was thinking, too. He pictured this unknown officer as a man standing at a precipice and facing a tightrope that led to the other side. There was no net below. And Jack Ryan was the one who had to tell him either to turn around and go home . . . or to start walking.
But he also pictured the future. A future where the West Coast of the United States was in range of North Korean ICBMs.
His deliberation was brief.
“Send him,” Ryan said. He wasn’t as sure as he made himself sound. It was his job to appear resolute, even to Mary Pat. If he vacillated it would add unnecessary uncertainty into her oversight of the operation. She needed to know she had his full support and backing, and even though the prospect of having a man on the ground in North Korea would probably lead him to redevelop his stomach ulcers in the next few weeks, his belief in the importance of this mission was without question.
Mary Pat said, “Thank you, Mr. President. Know we have our best people working on this, and I’ll meet with them daily.”
“I know you will, Mary Pat. You and I both know what’s at stake. For him, and for the U.S. Get the intelligence product we need, and then get his ass out of there.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Jack hung up the phone and went into the bedroom to change. Cathy was already there; she’d thrown on a jogging suit she liked to wear when lounging in the media room. She looked up at her husband and instantly asked, “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Jack faked a smile. “Nothing.” He sat down on the edge of the bed, suddenly very tired.
Cathy sat next to him. “Jack?”
“It was Mary Pat. She wanted my approval for an operation that will put a young officer in harm’s way.” He paused. “I gave that approval.”
Cathy hugged him. “It’s Mary Pat, Jack. She knows what she’s doing.”
He shrugged. “It feels like bullshit sometimes. I have to make decisions based on less information than the people who seek my approval. I know a fiftieth of what she knows, and I told her to go ahead. Maybe I should have spent a couple days looking at the operation.”
Cathy said, “You know, Jack, there are a lot of people who are paid to read all that raw data and put it into an easily digestible form for you. You are upsetting the natural order when you try and micromanage.”
Jack smiled, the lines around his eyes pronounced with his lack of sleep. “I know. And I trust the people we have working for us. I just feel like I should have as much information as I can get to make decisions as important as this.”
“You can’t know everything.”
“True. But I can always know more.” He sighed a long sigh and let his shoulders slump in a fashion that only Cathy had ever seen. “Two more years of this. Jesus. What was I thinking when I ran this last time?”
Cathy brushed her hand across the well-worn worry lines on his forehead, around his eyes. “You’ll miss this when it’s over. But when it’s over . . . we’ll have a lot more time to relax.”
He smiled now, took her hand in his. “Yeah.” He felt better. Just a little, but it was enough to get him off his ass. He stood and went to change out of his presidential uniform and into his dad uniform.
It was the best part of his day.
33
Having Dom Caruso up in New York, thereby giving Clark four sets of eyes instead of just three, had made a huge difference in the Campus operation to gain intelligence in the actions of Sharps Partners.
The other change to their operation that was proving helpful was that now they were primarily tracking the movements of Edward Riley. There was no question that he was in charge of the operation to influence the committee vote, and after the honey trap in the sleazy massage parlor the previous day, Clark and his men wondered if he’d managed to line up at least one vote in North Korea’s favor.
Tonight Riley took a cab to Chinatown at nine, so Sam, Domingo, and Dom followed him down. While Riley sat in a nearly empty dim sum restaurant on Mott Street, Sam took the eye in a nondescript charcoal-gray sedan. He had to circle the block four times to catch an open spot on the curb, but he found a place on Bayard near the corner that gave him a great backward view into the restaurant, as well as a fair angle of view to both the north and south on Mott. Once he parked, he pulled his camera from its bag and put it down between his feet.
Dom was on foot—he’d arrived by subway, then walked across Canal Street—and he remained two blocks up on Mott and out of direct view of the dim sum restaurant. He wore a black polo shirt and khakis and he sat alone at a fast-food restaurant on the corner of Mott and Canal, but he had earpiece comms with the team and was ready to move closer if Sa
m had to bug out for some reason, or if Riley left the restaurant with his contact on foot.
Ding was dressed in warm-up pants and a light sweatshirt, and he jogged at a leisurely pace south and west of the dim sum restaurant. While he listened in his headset to Sam call out news from his static surveillance up the street, he circled over to Columbus Park and made his way through pedestrians, all the while ready to head back and take the eye if Sam ran into any problems.
With only three men in the team there wasn’t a lot of room for error, but Clark was back at the safe house on the Upper West Side, both monitoring the team’s movements on the computer and working directly with the analysts in Alexandria on developing a better target picture on the UN bureaucrats involved in the Sanctions Committee vote.
Just after nine-thirty p.m. a woman wearing a beige raincoat walked past Dom’s position on the corner of Canal and Mott, and then she turned to head south. She was one of a hundred pedestrians he’d tracked in the past ten minutes, so she barely stood out and he hadn’t gotten a close look at her face, but two minutes later when Sam described a woman entering the dim sum restaurant alone, Dom recognized her as a person who’d passed his static point.
And when Sam confirmed that the woman had sat down at Edward Riley’s table, Dom said, “She came on foot from the west on Canal. She either parked up there somewhere or else she came up out of the subway.”
“Roger,” said Ding. “Sam, we need her ID’d as soon as possible.”
“Working on it,” replied Sam. His digital Nikon had a 500-millimeter lens. With this equipment and at this range he knew he should be able to catch her through the window and get a good headshot. Unfortunately, however, the conditions on the street were less than ideal. All the neon signs around were reflecting off the glass, so Sam couldn’t get a perfect sightline of her face. So far he could just tell she had dark brown or auburn hair, it was pulled back in a bun, and she appeared to be in her forties. He said, “Only two females on the committee.” He opened a small notebook on the passenger side of the car and thumbed through the images.
He found the first female profile. “This is definitely not Noreen Paige from the USA . . .” He turned two pages and found the other. “But this could well be Marleni Allende from Chile. Can’t be sure yet, though. I’ll have to wait for her to move to get a better line of sight.”
As soon as he said this he saw movement at the table; he’d been looking for any exchange of property between them, but this wasn’t that. Instead, the woman was speaking with her hands, and Riley was lolling his head back, clearly in some frustration.
Sam spoke for the benefit of the rest of the detail. “Our boy looks pissed. This should be fun.”
—
Ten minutes into his meeting with the UN official from Chile, Edward Riley finally began to accept her words at face value. This was no bluff.
The bloody bitch had changed her mind.
Riley had brought the twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars with him. They’d agreed on this amount in an early conversation, that one while making the harbor crossing on the Staten Island Ferry several days earlier. She’d come up with an excuse to cancel the first meet for the exchange, two days after that, but she’d agreed on tonight without hesitation. Now Riley realized he should have been more concerned that the lady was getting cold feet about taking money for her vote.
He’d always known this could happen. So far he’d managed to bribe two of the nine officials, and he’d coerced an agreement out of two more by threatening them with scandalous revelations, but he had thought he had Marleni Allende in the bag already.
Allende had a problem with money. She was a middle-class woman back home, an international law professor who, through merit alone, worked her way into a respectable but not terribly high-paying job in New York City, and here she was surrounded by men and women who made more money and lived better for it. Over time her resistance to running up her credit cards had weakened; it was easy to spend lavishly here in New York, and she’d put herself twenty thousand dollars in debt.
As soon as Riley and the rest of Sharps Partners identified her as a target they snooped around her bank accounts, and in minutes he had his attack vector sorted. He approached her, shocking her greatly, but she certainly seemed excited by the prospect of a financial lifeline.
But now it looked like he’d overestimated her concern for her financial problems, or else he’d underestimated her dedication to her organization.
And this led him to a new problem. He needed her no vote, but more than that, he needed her discretion. If she revealed the scheme to bribe UN officials, Riley himself would be the one facing the threat of a scandal.
He sipped his Tsingtao beer, taking a minute to regroup. Then he spoke, sticking with his Kincaid legend, the NYPD detective. With a Brooklyn accent he said, “Look, Marleni, you came here tonight on foot, you wanted to meet me in this out-of-the-way hole-in-the-wall. You’re dressed like you’re in a frickin’ Sam Spade novel, for cryin’ out loud. You don’t look to me like a woman who doesn’t want to go along with the plan. Just tell me what it is you want and I’ll do my best to make it happen.”
Allende shook her head. “Nothing. I want nothing. I came like this because I am ashamed to be meeting with you again. If someone I know sees me . . . I want the money, of course, but I am no criminal. I have a duty to my organization. I cannot do this. I will not.”
Riley gave her a challenging look. “How are you going to feel when the vote fails anyway because many of your colleagues don’t share your bright and shining sense of mission? You are going to be the only one who doesn’t benefit.”
“I know you have approached others. I can see it on their faces around the office. They all want to know if others in the committee know about their secret. I am sure they hope everyone knows, so everyone will go along quietly.”
Riley raised an eyebrow, but Marleni Allende lifted a hand quickly; on her face she had an expression of worry.
“I will go quietly, don’t doubt this. I will not say a word about anything that has happened. It is not my place to hurt my friends and coworkers. But I will not join in this . . . corruption.”
She stood. “I am sorry, Mr. Kincaid. Good night.”
Without another word she turned and headed for the door.
—
Allende was still in the restaurant when Driscoll noticed the new arrival to the neighborhood. A small black SUV with its lights off pulled up to the curb some twenty-five yards north of his position on the corner of Bayard and Mott. He could just see one person behind the wheel, but he wasn’t sure with all the reflecting neon from the Chinese character signs running up and down both sides of the street.
Marleni Allende—Sam had confirmed her identity when he got a perfect shot of her face during her meeting with Riley—stepped out of the dim sum place and began walking up Mott Street, in the direction of the black SUV.
Sam had not seen anything passed between Riley and the UN woman, and now, watching the way she had spun away and marched off, he read it as a show of resolution. He got the distinct impression she was turning her back on Riley, figuratively as well as literally.
Sam said, “Listen up. The woman is not going to play ball with Riley, and she is on the move, heading northbound on foot. A suspicious vehicle just pulled up on the corner.”
Ding called back. “I’m en route from the south.”
Dom said, “I’m in position if she comes all the way to Canal Street.”
Sam just sat in his dark car. As much as he wanted to tail the woman leaving on foot immediately, he wouldn’t reveal himself by firing up his engine right now. Instead, he sat and watched while she crossed the street. While she did so the SUV started to move forward, directly facing her. But a passing Audi sedan honked its horn and swerved to avoid a collision with the SUV, then it turned right onto Mott.
The black SUV
, all its lights still off, stopped and let the passing traffic by.
Sam said, “Be advised, we might have aggressors. This SUV is thinking about either following her or running her over. Can’t tell which yet.”
Dom said, “You’ve got to be kidding. In Manhattan?”
Sam said, “I just call ’em like I see ’em. Wait one—”
The SUV pulled into traffic behind the Audi and went straight on Bayard, passing behind the Chilean UN official, who was now back on the sidewalk and heading north toward Dom on the corner of Canal and Mott. The vehicle turned on its lights as it took off up the street.
Quickly Sam looked back toward the dim sum restaurant. Edward Riley was leaving through the front door, heading off to the south, in the opposite direction of the activity. He was talking on his phone, but he did not seem overly excited or concerned.
Sam said, “The SUV has moved on, but they might be handing off the tail to another team, or else they’re trying to get ahead of her. Can’t explain it, but I have a feeling they aren’t bugging out.”
Ding Chavez said, “Then we go on your intuition. I’ll stay parallel of you to the west, you stay in traffic, get up to Canal, and Dom will take the eye in the foot-follow when the target passes.”
Everyone agreed, and the three men all began the orchestrated ballet that is a coordinated mobile surveillance operation.
—
Ding was in condition yellow as he moved, his eyes open for any countersurveillance. But he had no way of seeing the seventy-year-old Korean woman sitting back from the window in the second-floor apartment over a bodega, the dirty curtains parted just enough for the lens of a video camera. She took twelve seconds of video as Ding passed below her.
A minute later she had sent the video to her local contact, an RGB officer. In a subsequent phone call she told the man that the Hispanic-looking fellow in the video was, unquestionably, near the British man she had been ordered to watch over tonight.
