by Mark Greaney
He didn’t know what was happening, but he asked, “Is something wrong?”
The woman hung up the phone and snatched up her purse. “Who . . . are . . . you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” He tried a little chuckle and stood up, began walking over to her. Don’t leave, he told himself. “You Googled me, remember?”
When he was halfway across the small suite, she turned and stormed for the door.
“What’s wrong? Wait.”
But she was gone, almost at a run, and the door slammed behind her.
“Damn it.” Ryan scrambled for his earpiece, digging for it in his pocket, but after a few seconds he gave up with the tiny contraption and dove headfirst across the bed. He grabbed his phone on the nightstand and unlocked it, then opened the conference call. “Dom! Get the fuck out of there! She knows!”
47
Caruso had found the phone; it was in a wheeled roll-aboard whose lock he picked in twenty seconds after spending a minute checking it for telltales. Within three and a half minutes of entering the Frenchwoman’s hotel room he had the device downloading to Gavin’s specially designed unit.
And then, within seconds of his beginning the download, the frantic call came from Ryan telling him the woman was loose and on her way back to her room. Caruso was less worried about her showing up while he was here—to travel from the thirty-ninth floor to the thirty-first floor she’d first have to go down to the lobby to reach the other elevator bank—and more worried about how the hell she knew he was here in the first place. She’d gotten a call, Ryan said, so Dom assumed she had confederates in the hallway who had seen him, confederates who were somehow patched into hotel security cameras, or confederates who had bugged her room.
Whatever the case, it meant unknown parties were involved in this and aware of him, and this meant trouble.
Dom wasn’t sure what to do, so he called out to Clark. “John?”
“I’m in the lobby, watching for trouble heading your way. Don’t see anyone, but get out of there. Could be someone already up on that floor.”
“This download is gonna take a few more minutes.”
Clark said, “It’s too late for covert. They know there was an intrusion. Just snag the phone and bolt.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
Caruso slipped the two phones joined with a cable into his backpack and started for the door. Her suite was similar to Ryan’s; there was a small hallway that ran along the kitchenette and hid the front door from the living and sleeping area, and Dom ran for it, but once he turned into the little hallway of the suite, he saw the latch of the door slowly lowering.
It was too late to escape out the front.
Caruso turned and ran back into the suite, leapt over the coffee table and onto the sofa, then over the back of the sofa to the balcony door. He unlocked it and flung it open, then started outside.
There was a boom of a handgun discharge in the room behind him, then the crashing of glass right next to his head as the sliding glass door shattered. Dom took the eight-foot-deep balcony in two bounds, rolled over the side of the railing, grabbing the metal bar on the outside of the balcony, then scaling down quickly to the bottom of the railing. A second loud report from the room sounded closer than the first, and Dom struggled to hold on as his feet dangled thirty-one stories over Las Vegas Boulevard.
He heard Clark in his ear calling to him, but he concentrated on swinging his body back, away from the building, to pick up some momentum. He’d just started his swing forward when he felt his fingers slip off the metalwork of the balcony above his outstretched arms, and he looked up just in time to see an Asian man in a black hoodie leaning over the side, a suppressed pistol in his hands.
Dom swung to the balcony below him, let go fully now, and crashed onto a padded settee and then through a plexiglass bistro table. The crash knocked the wind out of him, and he knew he’d battered his arms and ribs, but he fought his way to his feet and looked back and up.
The Asian assassin could not see him from the balcony above, but he must have dropped to the floor of the balcony, because Dom now saw the pistol appear at the end of an arm that waved back and forth, pointing down to the balcony where Dom stood.
With a flash and a loud boom, the man fired. The round crashed through the locked glass door just three feet to Dom’s left.
He dove to the ground on his right.
Another round barked; this one hit the glass closer to Dom.
Dom leapt back to his feet, grabbed a metal chair, and swung it up and out at the gun. He struck it as a fourth round fired, and he knocked the weapon from the man’s hand. It arced out away from the building and fell from view.
Dom didn’t want to wait around to see if this assassin had a backup, so he turned and ran through the shattered glass door. This room was empty, thankfully, so in seconds Dom was in the hall, and in seconds more he was in the stairwell. He raced down thirty floors in five minutes, adrenaline propelling him most of the way.
By the time he made it to the ground floor, Ryan and Clark were out front, waiting for the valet to retrieve the Mercedes. Dom walked up next to them without a word, and when the car came he helped Jack get his luggage in the back.
They were back on Las Vegas Boulevard before the first responders pulled up out front with reports of shots fired high in the massive tower.
—
While Ryan uploaded the files taken from Élise’s mobile phone, the rest of the team broke down the safe house. Dom called Adara Sherman and delivered news that she was more than accustomed to hearing these days. It was time to do another mad scramble to get the hell out of town.
—
The Gulfstream took off from Henderson Executive Airport, south of the city, at one-thirty in the morning.
Adara spent much of the first hour of the flight tending to Dominic Caruso. He had quite a few cuts and bruises, but no broken bones. Ryan thought his wounds looked pretty superficial, but Adara was the team medic and for some reason she felt the need to devote a lot of attention to Dom’s injuries.
While Dom got treatment in the back of the cabin, the rest of the group sat up front and discussed the events of the evening. It was abundantly clear there was a unit of North Korean operatives, sanctioned to kill, shadowing employees of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners. It was unknown if the Sharps people were coordinating with them or not. It was also decided there wasn’t a lot for the operators of The Campus to do other than return to Alexandria and wait for Gavin Biery to unlock whatever secrets Élise’s phone held.
Ryan had been compromised in all this, because an operative of Sharps’s clearly knew, or else highly suspected, that he’d coerced her away from her hotel room at the exact moment someone was breaking into it. The original plan would have had no comebacks on Ryan, because Élise would have never known her phone had been compromised.
This wasn’t good at all from a PERSEC perspective, but there wasn’t much any of them could do about this now.
Soon after their debrief, the men lowered the backs on their cabin chairs and began nodding off.
—
It was five-thirty in the morning D.C. time, and two-thirty a.m. on the body clocks of the worn-out men in the Gulfstream, when the light on the cabin phone began flashing.
Adara Sherman had been sitting on the couch next to the bandaged and sound-asleep Dominic Caruso. She reached over and picked up the mobile handset. Softly she said, “Aircraft.”
“Good morning, Ms. Sherman, Gavin Biery calling.”
“Hey, Mr. Biery. All the guys are resting at the moment.”
“Aw. I bet they are just adorable. Let the others sleep, but throw some water on Ryan and hand him the phone.”
“Right away, sir.”
Adara declined the suggestion to use water, so Ryan woke to find her gently nudging him. When he op
ened his eyes fully and sat up, she handed him the phone.
Ryan looked at her. “Biery?”
Adara nodded with a smile.
Ryan was angry for two seconds; then his face illuminated with excitement and he brought the phone to his ear. “You can’t possibly have anything for us yet, can you?”
“You forget how good I am, Ryan. Dom sent me the files he pulled from Élise Legrande’s device. They were two-fifty-six encrypted, but with an off-the-shelf commercial security software we’d figured out a few months back. It’s really not that hard when you take—”
“Gavin, that’s great, but what did you find in the files?”
“Well . . . the device was a working Samsung Galaxy phone, so I found some games and stuff. A few ringtones, too.”
Ryan was annoyed, but he was glad to hear the man had a little of his swagger back after his disastrous experience in the field in Prague.
Gavin waited for a reply, and when none came he asked, “Not funny?”
“What else, Gavin?”
“Oh, yeah, right. There is an application, apparently proprietary in nature. Clearly something that she downloaded from the NewCorp applications server.”
“What does it do?”
“The program is designed to do one thing and one thing only. It is set up to manage and operate a large series of froth flotation cells in sequence. I don’t really know what those are, but that’s not my department.”
Ryan had spent the past several days at the facility; he knew exactly what froth flotation cells were. “That’s the high-tech washing machines that the ore is put into. They separate the minerals from the rest of the powder. If you are saying this program is to run a bunch of them at one time, then it’s basically the center of the entire refinery process.”
“Bingo, Jack. Apparently the North Koreans have got themselves a processing plant, but they don’t have a brain for it. They sent this sexy French mademoiselle to the American processing plant and made a copy of their entire operation’s system.”
Ryan said, “As soon as we get back, we’ve got to get this intel to Mary Pat. She knows the big picture in all this much better than we do. Hopefully this will help her figure out what the hell to do next.”
48
The morning after his arrival in North Korea, CIA officer Adam Yao and his fellow Chinese mining technicians ate a breakfast of noodles and tea in the dining room of the Yanggakdo International Hotel, and then they were led into a banquet room on the second floor of the massive building.
After they had taken their seats, one of their minders stepped up on a riser and took his place behind a lectern. His Mandarin-speaking translator followed him up, and she picked up a microphone. Through the translator, the minder let everyone know they would be going back to the airport that afternoon for the hourlong flight north to Chongju, but for this morning, they would enjoy a lecture that would help them get acquainted with North Korea, its customs, its citizenry, and its rules.
Adam groaned inwardly.
The minder then ran down a list of dos and don’ts that everyone must abide by while here in Korea. Some of them seemed just a little picky. No spitting on the ground, for example. But others delved into the bizarre. They were told they were not allowed to fold, crumple, or discard any picture of the Dae Wonsu. This included newspapers, magazines, and other media, all of which had photos of the Supreme Leader on virtually every page. Adam wondered how newspapers were discarded, but he knew enough not to raise his hand and draw attention to himself.
It was explained that radios were outlawed, unless they had been converted to pick up only certain stations, all of which were controlled by the central government. There were only a few television stations, they broadcast only at certain times, and even their scheduled broadcasts were subject to interruption.
Adam wasn’t in town to watch TV, but some of the others mumbled quietly in annoyance.
After the minder stepped down, a woman took the stage and began what turned out to be a fifty-minute speech about the Dae Wonsu, his father, and their special relationship with China. The North Korean leadership was spoken of in reverential terms, and the woman’s eyes misted over more than once as she talked of the Choi family, claiming it was only through their action that “big brother” China had been saved from wars and famine. She said North Korea had invented several technologies crucial in mining, computer technology, and even air travel, all of which the people in the audience benefited from greatly.
It was complete and utter lunacy, and the small crowd, mostly pulled from China’s well-educated high-tech sector, sat angry and dismayed.
This was the first time Adam had seen up close and in person this level of brainwashing, and it was chilling. These people lived in a closed society, they had no access to the Internet, satellite TV, or even most radio.
Still, Adam’s colleagues knew who was paying their wages, and they also knew who held the guns out in the hallway. While any one of these Chinese technical advisers could have stood up and announced that everything the woman said was wrong, no one did so.
When the lecture on the intellectual, cultural, and historical supremacy of North Korea was over, several armed men entered the banquet room from a door on the right, followed by an entourage of older men in business suits. In the middle of the group a small man emerged, flanked on both sides by uniformed guards. Adam craned his neck to see the top of a bald head. Soon the bald man stepped onto the little stage and up to a microphone.
He spoke in Korean, which the translator converted, but his voice was even and easy to hear, so Adam understood the gist of his words even before they were relayed in Chinese.
“Good morning, and welcome to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. My name is Hwang Min-ho, and I am the director of Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation. It was I who invited you here, so I am very glad to see you all.”
Adam thought the man sounded somewhat meek and pleasant, especially in comparison to the harsh voices from most of the guards and minders he’d been in contact with since his arrival.
Hwang spoke for a while about the mine, the history of North Korea’s partnership with China on other projects, and his respect for both the nation of China and its abilities in the mining sector. His words seemed more literal, less jingoistic than those of the woman who had spoken before him, and Adam could easily read the crowd and discern their sense of relaxation.
Hwang then offered a surprisingly frank assessment of the conditions at Chongju. “You will find this facility to be more rudimentary than what you are accustomed to. We ask your patience while we build a processing facility that is state-of-the-art. It will take time. For now, however, we will start slowly and grow to greatness.”
Yao was surprised that Hwang did not show the same near-psychotic level of reverence for his own nation’s capability. Even the fact that Hwang was here addressing the Chinese workers in the first place was fascinating to the CIA non-official cover officer. He hadn’t expected to see this man in person at all.
Hwang said, “You are guest workers, but you are to be treated well. Your contract says you will work for eight weeks. Then you will be allowed one week for vacation, or, if you prefer, you can continue to work.”
A man near the front raised his hand and asked, “What is there to do around the mine on vacation?”
The director at the lectern shrugged. “Work.”
There was laughter throughout the room.
When he was finished with his presentation, Hwang Min-ho thanked everyone again and then asked, “Are there any questions?”
Adam hoped that the rest of his group would be smart enough to keep their mouths shut, but several hands shot up at once.
A middle-aged man who Adam had been told worked with electromagnetic milling machines was called on by Hwang. He asked, “Director, sir. Can you tell us about the electrical grid
we will find at the facility?”
Hwang smiled a little. “We have electricity from a hydroelectric dam nearby. For times when the dam is not generating power, which is often, but not too often, we have oil generators from your country that can keep critical functions up and running. It is not Shanghai, all lights and electric trains, but electricity at Chongju is a priority during the workday.” He smiled again. “At night you must all sleep so you can work the next day. You don’t need light to sleep.”
Adam already knew the facility and even the entire city of Chongju were “lights out” for about twelve hours a day because the electricity didn’t run. He’d seen the sat images.
Another person asked the one question Adam most wanted to know the answer to. “I understand the facility is still under construction. May we know when you expect to be operational?”
Hwang replied, “Construction of the property is complete. We just received a shipment of computers that arrived last week. You all will be responsible for getting them installed and running at your various workstations. Also, there is a new shipment of industrial powder-processing equipment, and some milling equipment at the refinery that needs to be installed and tested. Other than that, there is one shipment of large equipment still on the way. It should be here very soon. My fervent hope is we will be producing refined metals within one month.”
After saying he would be spending a lot of time at the processing facility in the next few weeks to oversee the opening, Hwang left the riser to polite but genuine applause from the Chinese nationals.
—
The bus delivered the technicians to the airport and drove them directly onto the tarmac and up to their aircraft. Adam climbed out of the bus into a blustery wind that foretold a thunderstorm. He looked into the early-evening sky and saw thick dark clouds just west of the capital.
