by Tom Clancy
“We have the ability to intercept communications between the gangster mining company and their agent in California. We know what the Chongju rare earth–processing plant needs as far as specialized labor. They are rushing to find the right people for the jobs, because in just two weeks they will be sending another group into North Korea to work at the mine and the processing plant. Our plan is to notify the gangster miners that he has recruited a Chinese American with knowledge of a critical piece of technology used in rare earth ore processing. That man, our man, will then fly to Shanghai to join the gangster miners, and from there go into Pyongyang along with the rest of the Chinese. He will go to Chongju under DPRK government control and work at the mine.”
Yao was astonished. This was a massive operation. “And report back to the U.S. some way?”
Calhoun answered this one. “That’s right. Science and Technology has some communications equipment that can go into DPRK. They say it is undetectable.”
Adam kept an impassive face, but he couldn’t help but think the eggheads at S&T wouldn’t be stood in front of a wall and shot if their “undetectable” device was somehow detected in the DPRK. If Adam went into North Korea, that fate would fall to him.
He muttered an unenergetic “Great.”
Mary Pat picked up on his doubt. “The North Koreans aren’t just allowing miners and processors into the country, they are also trying to get equipment in. The communications system will not travel with our asset. It will be embedded in a computer that our asset will have access to at the mine. We’ve learned a shipment of computers will be sent from Bulgaria to North Korea next week. We’ll have one of the machines altered with the hidden communications equipment. As long as our asset isn’t caught communicating with the device red-handed, our asset will be free and clear on this operation.”
“Yes, ma’am. I understand.” He noted that Mary Pat was speaking in general terms, still referring to the person going into North Korea as “our asset.” Clearly she wanted him to agree to go, but she wasn’t assuming anything yet, and this Adam appreciated.
He asked, “What specific intelligence are you trying to get from an asset in the Chongju mine?”
Mary Pat replied, “Satellites aren’t telling us what we need to know. Is there equipment in the mine in violation of sanctions? Are there personnel from other countries there? Experts? Specialists? How soon till that mine is generating revenue for the DPRK?”
“May I ask how many other CIA officers are operating inside North Korea?”
Mary Pat shook her head. “I can’t give you that information. I can only tell you that you will be working without a network in country.”
Adam assumed as much. If he went into the DPRK, he would be on his own. But this wasn’t the only thing bothering him. “I have to ask. Is this really that big an issue, considering all the other problems we have with North Korea? I mean, they are involved in illegal mining in violation of sanctions . . . but if you can get me in the country, shouldn’t I be trying to get a look at something more important than mining?”
Mary Pat said, “If possible, yes, you should. We see it as an incredible coincidence, and hopefully one we can capitalize on, that in a nation some forty-six thousand square miles in size, the Chongju mine happens to be located only twenty-four miles away from Sohae Satellite Launching Station. Sohae is where they launch their ICBMs.”
“That is a coincidence that probably seems a bit easier to capitalize on while we’re sitting here in Virginia. In country twenty-four miles might seem like a long way.”
She smiled. “Very true. And we’re not sending you there because of Sohae.”
Mary Pat shook her head. “President Ryan has dictated that this mine at Chongju represents a critical intelligence need of the United States.”
That sounded, to Adam, like hyperbole. He didn’t know Mary Pat Foley personally, but he knew that her reputation was of a supremely levelheaded individual. “What makes it a critical need?”
“Because estimates put the capacity under those mountains at two hundred thirteen million tons of heavy rare earth minerals. A value approaching, depending on market conditions, twelve trillion dollars.”
Adam reached out with both hands and took hold of the conference table. “Twelve trillion? That can’t be possible, can it?”
“It can. Is your imagination big enough to consider what all Pyongyang could buy with twelve trillion?”
Adam nodded slowly. “They could buy nukes, ballistic missiles, every bit of armament made by the Russians or the Chinese. They could buy technology and intellectual capital.”
Mary Pat leaned over the table. “They can buy all that, but they can also buy something more important. Friends.”
“Friends?”
“Votes in the UN. States that would go against official sanctions. Trading partners they can’t even dream of now. With that much money on the table, many nations who seem so perfectly resolute now in their insistence they won’t work with a rogue regime would suddenly find some flexibility in the issue.”
“Right.”
Mary Pat added, “And someone outside of North Korea is already paying them for the right to extract minerals there. A lot of money. These hard currency payments are being converted into an expansion of North Korea’s missile program. The rocket tubes captured off the coast of North Korea last week were purchased with this money, and we assume there is a lot more money, and a lot more proliferation, going on out there that we don’t know about.”
Calhoun said, “You see why this Chongju mine represents a clear and present danger to the United States, don’t you?”
Adam’s answer was barely audible. He was still in awe. “I get it,” he said. “North Korea with hard currency is a bad thing.”
Mary Pat nodded and said, “Now. Back to you. If you accept this operation, you need to understand something. This is not going to be a career maker for you, simply because you don’t need it. What you did in HK last year was more than enough to make your career. Your trip to North Korea is going to be one hundred percent risk for not much reward.”
Adam shrugged. “Maybe everybody says this, Director Foley, but I’m not looking for advancement. I’m looking for a challenge.”
She eyed him for a moment. Then looked away. “My husband and I loved what we did. There are a thousand frustrations and a million levels of bullshit with this job, but at its core, it can be one hell of a thrill, can’t it?”
Adam grinned. “Nothing like it.”
Calhoun nodded silently.
Mary Pat said, “We think our plan to get you in, established, and reporting back is solid. I just need to know if you will volunteer to go. So?”
Adam didn’t hesitate. “So . . . let’s do this.”
Mary Pat said, “Good. But remember, they don’t call it gangster mining without reason. You will be in danger from the people you are around the moment you get off the airplane in Shanghai.”
“I understand.”
“Time is critical, so we’ll need to get you up to speed very quickly. After a few days here you will go to California to learn the skills you need to backstop your legend. You have today to rest up and we’ll start tomorrow prepping you.”
The adrenaline coursing through Adam Yao dictated the next words out of his mouth. “I can start right now.”
Mary Pat shook her head. “Nope. Your national intelligence director is directing you to a hotel to sleep and take a shower. You’ll thank me in the morning. We’ll have someone drive you and then bring you some food, toiletries, and a change of gear. Tomorrow morning CIA will pick you up and begin a quick workup of your legend before you’re off to California.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
27
By the time Ryan, Caruso, and Biery returned to Alexandria, Virginia, from their mission in the Czech Republic, the rest of the Campus operati
onal staff had relocated to New York City to begin looking into the operation of Duke Sharps.
Dom and Jack would have loved to have joined their cohorts in Manhattan, not just so they could get to the bottom of the operation that had nearly cost them their lives, but also to avoid going back into their office and facing Gerry Hendley.
They had briefed Gerry over the sat phone during the long flight back to the States, and to say he was displeased was an understatement. Gerry wasn’t a field operative himself, so normally he demurred and left the “hot wash” aspects of the after-action reports to John Clark, but when he learned IT director Gavin Biery had been given an overwatch role during a covert breach, and Biery’s failure to warn the team about an approaching threat had resulted in the near death of two of his operators, the death of the target, and the deaths of somewhere to the tune of a half-dozen North Korean aggressors, all in the middle of a major European city, Gerry had told his two operators that as soon as their plane landed they needed to get themselves down from Baltimore and into Hendley Associates, and by then they better have some sort of an explanation.
Dom didn’t feel like he and Jack were at fault. As far as he was concerned Gavin was the one who screwed up, and Gavin should have taken most of the heat that was now focused on him and his cousin. But Jack understood Gavin couldn’t be blamed for not being a trained field operative. Just as Dom wouldn’t get grief from Hendley for failing to hack into an opposition computer server, Biery got a pass for his inability to execute his forced role in a covert entry.
But Gavin had not excused himself, far from it. He was nearly beside himself with shame for his mistake. By the end of the flight Dom had gotten to the point where he was no longer furious with the IT director, and Jack had told Gavin all along that the blame lay at his own feet, not Gavin’s, but the big man remained inconsolable.
This morning, while Dom and Jack were in Gerry’s office trying to explain what the hell had happened in Prague, Gavin sat sullenly at his desk, though he was working. He’d taken Karel Skála’s laptop, retrieved in Prague by Dom and Jack, and he did a deep search of deleted files on the hard drive. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for: five images sent to Skála three weeks earlier, just one week before Colin Hazelton died in Vietnam. There was no question that these were the five pictures used for the documents; they were typical passport pictures of four men and one woman, and they’d arrived at the right time. So Gavin uploaded the images into his facial-recognition application, and now the software ran on the machine in front of him.
While Gavin sat and sulked, the images were in the process of being measured hundreds of ways, from the width, height, depth, and shape of the periocular region of the face to the precise spatial relationship between the nose and the upper lip. The tabulated scores of each of the measurements were added together to create a numerical value for each face, which was then compared with millions of images of faces culled from virtually every source on the Internet, as well as the databases of the “Five Eyes” intelligence agencies of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Any image with a significantly different numerical value from the unknown images was instantly discarded by the computer, but those close in value were then compared more carefully.
The computer checked through the individual measurements for additional matches. If the ears were the same distance from the nose, the computer went on to the periocular depth. If that was similar to the unknown image, then the score measuring shape of the jawline was compared. If that panned out, then the computer moved on to the shape of the lips.
In this fashion, millions of images were compared with the unknown image. The process took some time, of course. Although all faces are different—even identical twins have differing measurements when evaluated as precisely as the facial-recognition software did—many faces of people who do not appear to the naked eye to be that similar actually have value scores that are nearly alike.
Gavin expected it would be another few hours before he knew if he would be able to put names to any of the five faces from Skála’s computer.
While Gavin’s monitor spun images faster than a slot machine, he leaned forward with his face between his elbows. He felt like shit. There was no getting around the mistake he made in Prague. Jack Junior, to his credit, had tried to tell Gavin it wasn’t his fault, but Gavin knew he’d blown it. His own actions, or inactions, had led to the death of an important witness and nearly caused the death of his two friends and colleagues.
Gavin Biery had no idea how he would ever redeem himself for his error.
Just then a computerized female voice startled him.
“Match found.”
Gavin lifted his head and stared at his machine in astonishment. He couldn’t believe an identity had been determined so quickly.
It was the woman, the redhead who looked to be in her mid-forties. The monitor displayed the image used in her passport photo in the Czech Republic on one side of the screen, and on the other was another picture of her. Here she stood at a lectern; apparently she was speaking to an audience. Several other photos, all identified by the facial-recog software as the same woman, were tiled under this photo.
Gavin saw why the software identified the redhead so quickly. She was apparently quite prominent in her field, and there were a lot of images of her on the Internet.
He worked another few minutes to double-check the woman’s name and biography with his own Internet search, then snatched up his phone’s receiver and dialed Gerry’s extension.
He supposed this could wait until Gerry’s meeting with Dom and Jack broke up, but Gavin thought it possible this bit of good news just might help the two cousins out of their predicament.
Hendley answered on the first ring. “Yeah, Gavin?” He sounded annoyed, and Gavin read that to mean he was annoyed not just at the two young men sitting in front of him, but also at the man on the other end of the line.
Gavin said, “Sorry to bother you, Gerry. But we have a match on a face we got from Karel Skála.”
Hendley sighed. “Okay. You’d better come up.”
Gavin swallowed. He wanted to take some of the heat off the cousins, but he didn’t want to go up there and sit with them while they got yelled at.
“Um . . . sure. I’m on the way.”
—
A few minutes later Gavin entered Hendley’s office and found Dom and Jack sitting quietly in front of the ex-senator’s desk. Hendley sat in his chair behind the desk, but unusual for him, he did not stand when Gavin came in.
An empty chair sat next to Jack.
Gerry said, “Come in, shut the door, and tell us what you’ve got.”
Gavin sat down. “I have an ID on the redheaded woman. The software is still trying to identify the other four images.”
Gerry Hendley waited for a moment, then he sighed. A little irritated. “Well, who is she?”
“Oh, sorry. Her name is Dr. Helen Powers. She is Australian. A geologist.”
Jack and Dom stared at each other. A geologist? They had been expecting the five mystery travelers to be nuclear engineers or rocket scientists.
Gavin said, “She’s a big deal in Australian geology, apparently, lots of pictures of her at conferences and such. She’s involved in the search for rare earth mineral deposits, mostly in the Australian outback.”
Dom said the thing the others were thinking. “Why the hell are all these people getting killed over geology?”
Gavin left a minute later, and Gerry turned his attention back to the two men in front of him. “Jack, Dominic. Prague was a disaster. You are lucky to have survived, and any chance that that target of yours might have been able to pass on more intelligence about whatever the North Koreans are planning was lost when he was killed.
“The fact that the last two men that The Campus has gone into the field to watch over have both
turned up dead within hours of our arrival makes me wonder if we need to reevaluate what the hell we are doing.”
Jack and Dom just nodded. They’d been doing a lot of that over the past hour. Now wasn’t the time to argue with the director of The Campus. But even taking that into consideration, Jack felt like he needed to get Gerry on another topic.
Jack said, “I guess this is not the time to ask. But I was wondering if there was any chance we could go up and support Clark’s operation in New York. He’s thin up there with just three guys.”
Gerry turned to Caruso. “Dom, I want you up there by this evening.”
Dominic sat up, surprised. Gerry said, “You are John Clark’s subordinate, don’t go thinking for yourself on this one. Let John use you for surveillance.”
Dom was too happy to be offended. He had pictured himself sitting at his desk for the next few months while Clark and the others got to delve into this mystery in the Big Apple, so he was thrilled to get the chance to go.
He said, “You’ve got it, Gerry.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. Was he going to be punished with desk duty?
Gerry said, “And as for you, Jack. That was your operation in Prague, there was a poor result, so you take the brunt of the heat.
“Let’s put you at your desk to remember what it’s like to do straight analytical work for a while. Go to work on Dr. Helen Powers. Find out what the hell is going on involving mines that is getting people murdered on multiple continents.”
“Okay, Gerry,” Jack said. He and his cousin stood to leave soon after.
Out in the hallway Dom put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Not fair, cuz. I pushed you to do the sneak-and-peek on Skála’s place.”
Ryan shrugged. “Gerry’s putting both of us where we need to go right now. You go up there and get some dirt on Sharps. I’ll stay here and figure out what the next piece to this puzzle is.”