by Tom Clancy
“You know who I am. Shan Xin.”
She seemed very suspicious now, and Adam worried he’d overplayed his relationship with the Australian woman. He reached a hand through the fence. “You know what? Never mind. I’ll give it to him myself.”
But Powers put the sheet in her pocket. “I’ll see him in the lobby before he leaves for work. He has breakfast with his family in the restaurant there. It’s a luxury we foreign contractors do not enjoy. Spending time with our families, I mean.” She paused. “Let me guess. You would like it if I didn’t let anyone see me hand it to him, wouldn’t you?”
Adam just nodded.
“And it’s about conditions at the factory?”
He nodded again.
“You think he gives a damn?”
“Probably not.”
She shrugged. “Okay. I’ll do it. If you are lucky, they will send you home for complaining. Hell, maybe I should try it.”
Adam said, “Let’s see how it goes for me first.”
“Good idea.”
71
Duke Sharps lunched alone at a back table at Nice Matin restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, but he wasn’t very hungry. He picked at the turkey-and-avocado sandwich in front of him and he sipped a gin martini, very dirty, while he read The New York Times.
The above-the-fold article was about the assassination attempt on President Jack Ryan three days earlier, and this article had positively ruined his appetite.
The U.S. government claimed to have evidence tying the attack to North Korea. They weren’t revealing the source of their intel, and at this point it looked like some unsourced and unsubstantiated leak out of the White House, but the Times was running with it.
Sharps thought it was probably a lie, but even so, this lie could end up costing him a great deal of money. The Ryan administration was doing everything it could to beef up sanctions on North Korea, apparently even taking the extraordinary step of fingering them in the Mexico City massacre. It was incredible to Sharps that Ryan would blame Pyongyang for the killing of one U.S. ambassador, nine American Secret Service agents, and thirty-seven Mexican nationals, and the injuring of more than a hundred fifty, dozens critically.
Who knows, thought Sharps. Maybe they did have something on North Korea. But whatever they had, it would be tangential, a stretch. America was blaming who they wanted to blame for the attack, and it pissed Sharps off because his contract with Óscar Roblas’s New World Metals depended on North Korea getting a fair shake on the international markets.
Sharps stopped reading suddenly, and then he slowly lowered the newspaper in front of him, looking over the top as he did so.
John Clark sat in the chair on the other side of Sharps’s table. His face was placid, his legs were crossed, and he leaned back. Sharps hadn’t heard him sit down. The old bastard could still skulk around like the snake eater he used to be.
Duke saw the confidence on the man’s face, and he fought a sudden and unfamiliar feeling of uncertainty. He tried to make himself sound self-assured. “To what do I owe this pleasure, Mr. Clark?”
“No pleasure for you, Duke. You are sitting with the grim reaper.”
Sharps folded the paper and placed it in his lap, and then he leaned forward. “I beg your pardon?”
“If you had any thin fantasies of continuing on after today, you should probably go ahead and abandon that hope, because your life is over.”
Sharps chuckled. “I ran you out of town a few weeks ago. Circumstances not unlike this, if I remember correctly. If you think you have something on me, something big and bold and brash enough to where you can come back to my city all chuff and tough . . . well, then, let’s hear it.”
“I’d much rather you saw it.”
Duke Sharps blinked. “Saw it?”
Clark lifted his hands from under the table. In them he clutched a stack of eight-by-ten photographs.
“These are all time-stamped, but I won’t bore you with those details.”
“What are they?”
He slapped them down, one by one, and as they dropped on Duke’s turkey-and-avocado sandwich, Clark narrated. “This is you with your man Edward Riley.” It was a photo of the two men leaving Sharps Partners together. He dropped another photo. “This is your employee Veronika Martel entering your building.”
More photos dropped in quick succession. “This is your man Riley going to Martel’s apartment, and this is Riley leaving Martel’s apartment. This is Martel being carted out in a body bag.”
Sharps cocked his head. He started to say something but John Clark did not pause to let him speak. “This one is your man Riley in Mexico, at the property owned by your client, Óscar Roblas de Mota.”
He tossed down another picture, it spun around to Sharps’s chest, but he caught it. “This is your man Riley with a North Korean intelligence agent.”
“What in the hell is—”
“And this is your man Riley, a North Korean intelligence agent, and a poor fellow tied to a chair. That man is Adel Zarif, the would-be assassin of the President of the United States.”
Sharps did not even try to stammer an explanation or a quip. He turned white, looked back up to Clark, opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Clark leaned close. “Nothing? Okay . . . let me help you. Say that the photos are fakes.”
Duke cocked his head.
Clark nodded. “Go ahead.”
“Well . . . they are fakes. Complete forgeries. My attorneys will prove that—”
Clark leaned back in his chair. “Zarif is alive, he’s in U.S. custody, and he is singing like a bird. He’s fingered Riley, and we have video. Mexican police have two Cuban intelligence officers in custody as well, wounded but talking, and they will confirm coordinating with your employee in Cuernavaca. Apparently they are pissed, because it wasn’t till they were down there and under fire that they realized they had been co-opted into a plan to capture and kill the would-be presidential assassin before he could reveal the ringleaders of the plot.”
The stammer came now, and it was even more pathetic than Clark expected it to be. “John . . . you have to believe me. I had nothing to do with any of this. No knowledge whatsoever. Riley must have gone behind my back to—”
“It’s over, Sharps. Everything. You’ll go to prison or you’ll spend the next decade and all your money trying to stay out of prison. No one in this town, in this country, on this earth, will associate with you, because doing so will bring them nothing but hell.”
“What . . . what do you want?”
Clark chuckled now. “To watch you swing. Nothing more.”
“Come on. Come on!” Sharps shouted it now, and the entire restaurant turned to the two older men in the corner.
Clark said nothing.
Finally, in an excited whisper, Duke Sharps said, “Riley. I can give you Riley on a platter.”
“Necessary . . . but not sufficient.”
“He’s gone off grid. He’s gone off grid, but I will find him.”
“How?”
“He’s trying to do a deal. I heard about it from Roblas.”
“What deal?”
Sharps hesitated, but only for a moment. He was a beaten man. Full cooperation was his only play. “In Thailand. Some processing equipment for the North Koreans. He’s trying to go behind my back to do it, but I heard. Russian cargo planes. It goes down tomorrow. If you hurry you might be able to—”
Clark held up a finger to silence Duke, and then he finger-motioned someone over. A man appeared from the sidewalk-seating entrance of the restaurant. He was young, with dark hair and a trim beard. He wore a dark blue suit and sunglasses.
He pulled out FBI credentials and flashed them.
“Wayne Sharps, I’m Special Agent Caruso, FBI. On your feet.”
Sharps hesitated. Everyone in the restau
rant stared.
John Clark just sat there with his legs crossed and a satisfied smile on his face.
“I’m not going to ask you again,” Caruso said. “You stand, or I put you face-first on the floor with a knee in the back of your neck.”
Sharps stood now, and Caruso turned him around and cuffed him.
—
Adam Yao sat on the catwalk of his cone crusher with three of the other technicians. It was six p.m., another full day without power on his floor, but there were candles and flashlights, and the four men had spent nine hours sitting here on their cold and dormant machine, smoking and talking and wondering if the North Koreans were ever going to get their act together and turn the factory back on.
A man walked alone up the dark walkway in the middle of the powder-processing floor. All four cone crusher employees stood and came down from the catwalk when they realized it was Director Hwang. He’d never shown any interest in this part of the facility at all, but now he appeared fascinated by the cone crusher. He walked around it, seeming to inspect it in the dim light.
Yao stood in a line with the three others.
Hwang looked the men over now. In Mandarin he said, “Which one of you works with the computer?”
Adam stepped forward. “Shan Xin, Comrade Director.”
Hwang stared at him a long time. Adam just stared back, hoping like hell Hwang didn’t screw this up.
The director said, “I have questions about the software we need to buy to update the machinery. Are you the man I need to ask about this?”
“Yes, Comrade Director.”
“Then follow me.”
Adam followed the man back into an administrative section of the building. He’d never been here, and he was surprised when, after climbing up a staircase, he saw Dr. Helen Powers coming out of a room with her lab coat on. She nodded to Hwang and looked at Adam with surprise, but she said nothing.
They stepped into an office and Hwang closed the door. He looked nervous, like his demeanor before had been a put-on and now he was letting true feelings show.
“Have we met before?” he asked. It was a weird thing to say, but Adam knew the man just wanted to establish that Adam was, in fact, with Chinese intelligence.
“No, Comrade Director, but I believe we have a mutual friend. Chang Lan.”
Hwang blew out a sigh of relief, but afterward he appeared no less worried. He shook Adam’s hand.
“I had no idea you were here, inside the operation, the entire time.”
Adam kept his conversation in Mandarin. Hwang seemed to speak it well enough. “I understand you have your family with you.”
“Yes,” the director answered quickly. “Can we go tonight?”
“Better we do it early in the morning. When you leave for work. We can take your car.”
“And we will go to the border? Do you have a way across?”
Adam wasn’t sure what to say. He decided to stick to as much truth as he could think of. “We will travel by air. I am to take you and your family to a location near Sonchon, and we will be picked up.”
Hwang said, “But we must leave now. You do not have the time you think you do.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Chinese technicians will be leaving tonight.”
“What?”
“The processing facility will go dormant and the workers are being sent home.”
“Why? What has changed?”
Hwang blinked in surprise. “You don’t know?”
Now Adam said, “I don’t know what?”
“General Ri of the RGB killed himself yesterday.”
Oh, shit, Adam thought. He knew he needed to look like he was in charge, so he just nodded, then asked, “What did Ri have to do with Chongju?”
Hwang said, “Ri was the only chance we had to make the refinery work. We will never get the froth flotation tanks now. My only hope is to escape with my family to China.”
Adam thought it over for just a moment, because he realized every second was important now. “Okay. If they decide the refinery won’t work, they might have you shot. We’d better go tonight.”
“With my family,” Hwang added.
“Yes. It is arranged. We can accommodate all three of them.”
“Five.”
“Five?”
“My parents are coming.”
Adam shook his head. He kept speaking in Mandarin, though it was a challenge. “Your what? Parents? Hell, no. I can’t take everybody.”
“It’s no problem, I have them staying at a vacation cottage near the water. Just twenty minutes’ drive from Chongju.”
“We can’t bring your parents.”
“Then I cannot leave.”
Adam found himself wanting to punch a wall. After thinking it over a minute more, he said, “Okay. We take your car to the hotel. Pick up your family, go to the cottage, grab your parents, and head for the extraction.”
“What about your other agent?”
“What other agent?”
“Dr. Powers. The Australian.”
“She isn’t an agent. She just gave you the note.”
“My aide saw her do it. They will think she was involved.” Hwang looked away.
Adam said, “Internal security will kill her, won’t they?”
“Oh, yes. Of course they will.”
“Goddamn it.” Adam mumbled it in English.
“What?”
“It’s English. It means ‘The more, the merrier.’”
72
Five minutes later Hwang went back to his office and explained to his staff that he would drive himself back to the hotel and then go visit his parents. They assumed the director’s parents were home in Pyongyang, and he did nothing to dispel their assumption.
While the director was taking care of this and other matters, Yao was in the geology lab with Helen Powers. They were alone, which was a good thing for them both, because Adam decided he would speak English.
He didn’t think she would think much of her chances if he told her he was a Chinese spy. She put together on her own who he worked for the moment he dropped his accent fully. “Dr. Powers. Do you really want to get out of here?”
“I . . . you are American?”
“You tell anyone and I will be killed. You will be suspected, at best, and stood up against a wall right next to me, at worst. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Why the blazes would I tell anyone? You think I like these people? They are mad bastards.”
“Hwang and I are leaving, and if you stay, you will be in danger.”
“Let me get my purse.”
—
Adam drove behind the wheel of a silver Pyeonghwa Pronto, Hwang’s seven-passenger SUV. Hwang sat next to him in the front, and in the middle row sat his wife and two small children. They were all confused, but they were quiet, because they were obedient, and Hwang told them everything was fine.
Dr. Helen Powers sat in the third row, doing her best to keep her red hair under a black cap so it didn’t draw any more attention to the vehicle than necessary as they drove through the North Korean backcountry.
As they neared the cottage, Hwang spoke in Mandarin to Adam.
“Go-you.” Hwang said it softly.
Adam turned to Hwang. He wasn’t sure what the Korean was talking about, or even if he’d heard correctly. “Go-you” meant “dogs” in Mandarin. He knew the Korean word, so he checked.
“Gae?”
“Yes.” Hwang continued in Mandarin. “Dogs.”
“What about dogs?”
“You said Choi would have me shot. You are wrong. He wouldn’t have had me shot. He would have fed me to starving dogs.”
Adam turned back to the road. He squeezed the steering wheel tighter. “We’ve heard about th
at. Most of our analysts thought it was just an exaggerated rumor.”
“No rumor. General Gang of foreign intelligence was killed in this manner last year.”
Mother of God. “How do you know?”
“Because General Ri told me. He was there.” After a pause he said, “Ri killed himself and his family so they would not suffer the same fate.”
Yao shuddered. He wished like hell he had some way to talk to Acrid Herald control and let them know he was on the way. They said they’d be watching from above, which meant satellites, probably the KH-12 that Adam knew monitored North Korea, but now that he was picking up strays along the way, he could only hope the helicopter they were sending was big enough to handle everyone.
—
They arrived at the cottage at seven p.m. It wasn’t remote at all, just one of hundreds of cookie-cutter little homes with postage-stamp fenced yards that overlooked the coastline in a massive complex. A cool wind blew in from Korea Bay, and the moon provided enough light for Hwang to pick out the right unit. While many of North Korea’s citizens starved, a few thousand elite owned vacation cottages. Hwang’s family was one of the “haves,” and while it didn’t look like much to Yao, in this country it was an unfathomable luxury to ninety-nine percent of the population.
Adam said, “Okay, just like we planned it. Quickly. Don’t answer questions, just get them moving. No luggage. Just the clothes on their backs and any medicine they need in the next twenty-four hours.”
Hwang just nodded.
Everyone stayed in the vehicle except for Hwang, who climbed out and went to the front door. He knocked, and waited.
Adam rolled down the driver’s-side window. He was only twenty-five feet from Hwang at the door, and he wanted to listen to how Hwang told his presumably elderly parents that they had to leave right this minute.
An elderly man and woman stepped out and onto the stoop in front of the door. Hwang’s father put his hand on his son’s shoulder. He leaned on unsteady legs. Adam thought the old man was just using his son for balance, but quickly he realized he was leaning close to his son to say something.
“What is it, Father? We must hurry.”
