by Tom Clancy
As she sat with her eyes closed her phone chirped, the sound louder than the pattering rain on the roof of the Hyundai. “Oui?”
“This is control. I’m connecting you to a local agent.”
Local agent? As far as she knew, Veronika Martel was the only Sharps employee in the area other than the pretentious bald-headed American who had ruined her evening.
There was a delay on the line, then a heavily accented Asian voice came over the speaker. “I have the package. I will be arriving at your safe house in five minutes.”
She felt certain the man was North Korean. Not a local agent, but an interested party in her mission nonetheless. She knew better than to ask any questions.
“I’ll be here,” she said.
The man quickly asked, “Was he alone when you met with him?”
“The contact? I only presume so. It was not in my brief to establish whether or not he had any coverage on him. Why do you ask?”
“Five minutes,” came the non-response to her question, and the line went dead.
Veronika climbed out of her little Hyundai and walked up to the front door. She had a key to the villa, she’d been living here for several days, but she knocked on the door nonetheless, as per the arrangement. She waited for a moment on the porch, then heard the door unlock from the inside.
She was met by a North Korean. He was one of three security men who had been watching over the occupants of the safe house. Again, not Sharps employees, but interested parties in the operation. The three men had kept their distance from her, and she from them. This one said nothing at the door, she was certain he spoke neither English nor French, and he left the entryway, heading back into the living room.
Veronika folded her umbrella and hung her coat, then she stood alone, looking out the window at the rain, waiting to see headlights in the driveway.
Her plan was to avoid the others until the package arrived, but after a few minutes she decided that as much as she didn’t want to get into a conversation with anyone right now, it was her responsibility to check on the subjects of her work here in Vietnam.
She walked into the living room and found the three security officers standing along the wall behind four men and one woman, who sat on sofas and chairs. These five were all Caucasian; they looked straight at her as she entered the room, their faces illuminated by candlelight. Even in the amber glow Martel saw the apprehension in their eyes.
She felt obligated to make some remarks to calm the group down. In English she said, “Everything is in order. I am waiting for a visitor to arrive, and then we will proceed.”
Before anyone spoke, there was a knock at the front door. The three security men looked up and started toward the entryway, but Martel waved them back into their places and went herself.
She opened the door to find a man in a black motorcycle jacket. He was Asian; she assumed he was North Korean like the others, but she sure as hell was not going to ask.
The man carried a folder in his hand. He held it out and said, “You saw no one?”
She took the folder. “You already asked me this. What is wrong? What happened?”
She looked past him and into the parking circle. Two men sat in the rain on motorcycles. A third bike, presumably belonging to the man in front of her, was parked alongside them.
The North Korean stepped into the entryway and shut the door. “The American had men with him. We were not notified of this.”
“Nor was I. As I said before, it wasn’t my job to identify surveillance.” The man did not seem satisfied with her answer, so she added, “Call New York if you’d like to make a complaint about my performance.”
The North Korean’s nostrils flared. Martel presumed he wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to like this, but she couldn’t care less. She ignored the man’s glare and began looking through the folder. Inside she found five smaller manila folders. Opening them one at a time, she fanned through five complete sets of documents: EU diplomatic passports. Czech diplomatic assignments to Pyongyang. Credit cards bound with rubber bands.
She returned to the living room; the North Korean in the black jacket followed behind. Veronika looked at the photo page of each passport and each visa, and she took her time to match the documents to the five sitting in front of her. They sat quietly, nervously waiting for her to say something, but she did not rush herself.
All the documents looked perfect, except for the last of the passports. The cover appeared to be stained with red ink. Martel ran a thumb over the embossed cover and she realized the color was no stain, as it came off easily.
Looking at her thumb, she saw it was fresh blood.
Mon Dieu, she said to herself. These men had taken these by force from the American agent.
She glanced up at the North Korean. His eyes remained on her—surely he had seen her notice the blood. She thought he was enjoying her discomfort.
“Everything is in order,” Veronika Martel said. The North Korean left without another word, and within moments she heard three motorcycles firing up and driving off.
Martel put the documents on a table and moved a lamp closer. To the entire group she said, “Your flight leaves at nine-thirty a.m., arriving in Pyongyang at eleven thirty-five. I’ll go over your legends with each of you, and then you should try to get a few hours’ sleep. I will wake everyone at six.”
The one other female in the house, a redhead in her forties, stood up from the sofa and approached. Her Australian accent was obvious. “Would you mind it if I spoke to you in private?”
Veronika Martel just shrugged and moved into the kitchen. The woman followed. She was much shorter and a little heavier than Martel, and the lighting here did her no favors. Martel thought the redhead looked as if she hadn’t slept in days. It had been rough for all five of the Australians, she knew, as she had been with them all week.
The French intelligence agent said, “What can I do for you, Dr. Powers?”
The Australian closed the door all the way. She spoke softly. “Look. I . . . we agreed to come. The money was incredible, obviously, but it seemed like an adventure, you know?”
“What is your question?”
“I left a family behind back in Sydney. Six months’ work, and I’m back home. That’s what was agreed on.”
Martel put a hand out on the counter, strummed her perfect nails on the tiled surface.
Dr. Powers continued, “I . . . I just want to make sure the terms promised me are honored.”
Martel made no attempt to whisper. “Dr. Powers, my job is to facilitate your clandestine travel safely from Sydney to Pyongyang. Nothing more. Whatever agreement you have with the DPRK, it is between yourself and the DPRK.”
Powers looked to the door to the living room nervously. “I don’t trust them. They watch over us like we are prisoners. They won’t answer my questions. I just thought . . . you are working with them. Can you help me? Maybe just ask them to be a little more forthcoming about the arrangements in place. Please?”
Martel took her hand from the counter next to her and placed it on the smaller woman’s shoulder. With a little smile she said, “Doctor. I understand.”
The older redhead looked relieved. “I knew you would.”
“I understand that the fact I am female and I have round eyes, to you, means I should be more sympathetic than the North Korean men acting as security here. But nothing could be further from the truth. They have use for you, I do not.” She lowered her hand and headed for the door. “When you get to Pyongyang, I’m sure your concerns will be alleviated.”
Powers all but shouted, “Do you have any idea how ridiculous that statement sounds?”
Martel was unfazed by the redhead’s anger. “I didn’t agree to work for the North Koreans. You did. Your decision is made, and you would do well to make peace with that decision, because they are not going to allow you to chang
e your mind at this juncture.” She returned to the living room without another word.
As she passed out the documents and went over the individual legends for each of the five, she let herself wonder what would happen to these Australians. Working with the North Koreans certainly would be fraught with legitimate concern, but she expected all five of them to fulfill their contract with Pyongyang and to return home much wealthier than when they left. It was, of course, illegal work, and they were being paid with this in mind.
Martel knew very little about what these five would be doing for North Korea, but even so, she wasn’t worried about this operation from any sort of a moral standpoint. It wasn’t as if these people were nuclear scientists or rocket scientists. They were geologists, that was all. No threat to anyone, certainly, even if they were working for the North Koreans. No, this was just some industrial commercial and diplomatic subterfuge, nothing dangerous.
And then she paused for a moment, thinking about the blood on the passport and the annoying American who had no doubt shed it. If the North Koreans were willing to use violence in a foreign nation to secure the travel of these geologists, perhaps the stakes were higher than she thought.
She pushed the misgivings out of her mind, a skill she had developed and honed over her intelligence career.
Right now she just wanted to get these five on the nine-thirty flight tomorrow morning to Pyongyang, to sanitize the safe house, and then to go home.
Nothing else mattered to Veronika Martel.
5
The dented gray sedan carrying the four Campus operators and the body of ex–CIA officer Colin Hazelton pulled into the hangar of the fixed-base operator at the far east end of Tan Son Nhat airport just after one a.m.
The sole aircraft in the hangar, a sleek, white Gulfstream G550, had already been unplugged from its APU by the ground crew, who had conspicuously disappeared as the car approached the loading stairs.
As the men climbed out of the vehicle an attractive woman stepped out of the office of the fixed-base operator. Her blond hair was pulled into a neat bun, and her generic flight attendant’s uniform was perfectly pressed.
Adara Sherman was officially the flight coordinator for the Campus G550, but this was just one of her many duties. She also provided security to the aircraft, organized every bit of travel for the operators in her organization, dealt with customs issues, and performed other duties as required.
Clark stepped up to Sherman as soon as he climbed out from behind the wheel. “Good to see you again.”
“You, too, Mr. Clark.”
“What’s the situation?”
“We’re fine. Customs is dealt with, the ground crew and office personnel are giving us some space.”
“I assume that cost a small fortune.”
“Discretion comes cheaper here than in some other places. Can I help with the body?”
“We’ll handle him. Just let the flight crew know we needed to be out of the country an hour ago, so anything they can do to expedite will be appreciated.”
Sherman headed for the stairs.
Driscoll and Ryan carried the body of Colin Hazelton onto the plane while Clark and Chavez stood guard at the entrance to the hangar, making sure no personnel from the FBO or the airport made the mistake of taking a peek into the hangar during this critical moment of exposure.
Adara had already placed a body bag on the floor of the cabin. The presence of several ready-to-go body bags in the cargo hold of the G550 was a grim reminder to the operators of The Campus that the work they did was high stakes, but this was the first time one of the bags had been put to use. Hazelton’s body was zipped inside, then he was placed into a hidden compartment built between the rear bulkhead and the cargo hold. It was specifically designed to hide a full-sized man, but it was just barely large enough for this role. Each of the operators had tested it out, and it had even been used operationally to hide one of the men during immigration and customs inspections.
All agreed that the person who customized the compartment had done so with no plans to put it to personal use.
Hazelton had no complaints, however.
When all were on board and the hatch sealed, the pilots began taxiing toward the tarmac. Slowly at first, but soon they began expediting their departure off the nearly empty runway, and they were airborne in minutes.
—
Shortly after leveling off, Adara served the men coffee, juice, and water. Clark sat alone up at the bulkhead, and here he called Gerry Hendley, the director of The Campus and the owner of the jet. While he drank coffee, Clark carefully filled him in on everything that had happened.
Soon the entire team converged around the teak table in the center of the aircraft, and together they inspected the note Colin Hazelton had scribbled seconds before succumbing to his wounds. Both Clark and Chavez wore reading glasses, but even with their corrected vision it was hard to make out the writing. It was clear there were only four words in total on the page, one word alone, and then below it, two more. Then, at the bottom, four more letters had been scribbled, badly, almost one on top of the other. The wide blood smear across the chicken scratch only added to the difficulty of discerning Hazelton’s penmanship.
Chavez said, “The first word is four letters, but it’s completely obscured by the blood. Not a clue. Below it, there are two words. The first one looks like . . . is that ‘skata’?”
Clark said, “That means ‘shit’ in Greek.”
“You speak Greek?” Ryan asked, surprised.
“No, but I had Greeks working for me in Rainbow. Working for me causes a man to cuss, I guess. I heard that one a lot.”
Driscoll turned the sheet his way to look it over, and he leaned even closer. “It’s not ‘skata.’ I think it’s ‘skala.’”
After everyone looked again, Chavez and Ryan agreed with Driscoll, and Clark gave in to majority rule. “Okay, ‘skala.’ Sounds like a proper name. Central European, maybe?”
Ryan was already at his laptop Googling the word while Adara Sherman refilled his bone-china coffee cup next to him. With excitement he said, “Got it! It’s a town in Poland.” Then, with a voice less enthusiastic, “Wait. It’s also a town in Bulgaria. Shit. There’s one in Ukraine, too. Another in the Faroe Islands.”
Driscoll mumbled, “Well, damn. That’s not very helpful.”
Chavez said, “It might be a person as well. I knew a Hungarian Army captain with that surname, back in CIA. He died in a helo crash fifteen years ago, though. Clark, you know anybody named Skala?”
Clark shook his head. He was concentrating on the next word now. “What’s that? Four letters? Looks like ‘IATA.’ All caps.”
Ryan Googled that as well. “International Air Transport Association. Might just be a coincidence.”
Sherman was pouring orange juice for Chavez. She hadn’t said a word during the conversation, because no one had asked her opinion. But she glanced at the page and said, “Prague.”
The four men turned to look up at her, so she clarified. “Sorry. It’s the ICAO airport code. That’s Václav Havel in Prague. Czech Republic.”
Ding said, “I thought the Prague airport code was PRG.”
Sherman smiled. “You are thinking of the IATA code that’s used commercially, what you see on your ticket or when you book a flight. The ICAO is what pilots use.”
Ding looked at her doubtfully, but Clark buttressed her claim.
“Hazelton was a pilot. He was ex–Air Force and held a multi-engine private pilot’s license.”
Ryan said, “Skala could be a Czech name. Maybe if we go to Václav Havel Airport in Prague and start looking around for a guy named Skala, we will get lucky.”
Clark said, “For now we are heading back to D.C. The first item on our agenda after returning is to sit down with a certain someone and find out everything she knows about this. After that we
’ll decide how we are going to proceed.”
Clark held the note close to his face to look at the last scribble, down at the bottom of the page. After a few seconds he nodded, then tossed it on the table. “Hazelton’s last note tells us there is trouble ahead, boys.”
The others looked the note over. It was clear to all of them.
DPRK.
Sam took the words out of the others’ mouths. “I hate those guys.”
The Gulfstream flew northeast toward the dawn, the four men in back trying to catch as much sleep as possible because to a man they expected the events of the previous evening were merely the beginning, and more trouble lay ahead.
6
One year earlier
For as many of the twenty-eight years Choi Ji-hoon could remember, he had been surrounded by those who told him he would someday lead his nation. Most of those people were sycophants, though he’d never heard such a term. He knew these people only as unimportant. Still, he believed them. He believed them because his father, the only person who mattered, had told him the same thing. Choi Li-hung explained to his son, Choi Ji-hoon, that someday he would die, and when that happened, young Ji-hoon would replace him to become the Supreme Leader of North Korea.
Ji-hoon’s father promised his son he would rule, but he did not reveal to his son that he had absolutely no faith in his ability to do so. Choi the father thought his son to be weak and lazy and not exceptionally smart, and he considered him the biggest sycophant of all. By the age of twenty-two, young Ji-hoon had become a party official, and his one duty involved traveling around North Korea commissioning works of art to commemorate historical events in the nation. Ji-hoon turned this job into a vehicle by which he could suck up to his father. Every single painting and statue Ji-hoon ordered created was of Choi Li-hung, a blatant way to curry favor and earn his succession.
But Choi the father felt he had no choice. He did not want to bequeath his nation to one of his brothers; they all had sons of their own and Li-hung refused to allow his nephews to lead the DPRK for the cynical reason that by doing so he would decrease his own legacy to future generations. His other children were all daughters, and it was out of the question a woman would lead North Korea.