by Tom Clancy
Adam cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You lost him?”
“Murdered,” she acknowledged. “He was out of the Agency, but he did die in the field. We don’t know for sure, but it’s quite possible North Korean assets killed him.”
“I’m a little curious as to why I didn’t hear anything about this in my workup for the op.”
“He wasn’t on official Agency work. He freelanced for a corporate intelligence firm. There is no known relationship between him and what is going on here. Not yet, anyway.”
Yao said nothing.
“In my job it doesn’t pay to be sentimental, but I look at it like this. The moment I become something other than a human being, I need to get out of this line of work.”
“Understandable.”
“I know about everything that happened in China last year.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
She leaned forward a little. “And I know about Jack Junior.”
Yao had met the son of the President of the United States in Hong Kong. Ryan had claimed to be working for a private investment company at the time, but soon enough Yao figured out that was a cover story for an intelligence mission Ryan was working. POTUS’s kid wasn’t CIA, that much was clear, but it was also clear that Ryan Junior was in direct comms with Director of National Intelligence Mary Pat Foley. Yao had thought it almost comically surreal at the time when he and the President’s son snuck over the border and onto the Chinese mainland, but the joke ended quickly when the shooting war started.
Yao and Ryan had accomplished their mission, and Ryan had kept quiet about who, exactly, he was working for. Yao had been told once, upon his return to the States, to keep Jack Ryan, Jr., out of his reports. No other mention had been made of the President’s son, and Yao had certainly told no one.
He knew that Mary Pat was aware of Ryan’s involvement in the Chinese operation, but he certainly did not expect her to talk to him about it, so this moment was a little awkward.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“That’s a complicated issue, and one that does not affect your work on this operation, but I do make mention of it to say I know you are going into harm’s way with some specific knowledge that must not fall into enemy hands.”
Yao wondered if Foley was going to give him a cyanide pill. Holy shit, that happens only in the movies, right?
“Yes, ma’am,” he said again. With a nervous chuckle he said, “I certainly won’t mention it.” He worried that comment sounded sarcastic, so he was pleased to see Foley shrug, as if the matter was put to bed.
She then said, “I am sure your control talked to you about in extremis extraction options.” She was talking about his ability to escape in an emergency.
“You mean the lack thereof?”
Foley nodded. “Yes. Your best bet is to head for the Chinese border if compromised. It’s guarded and patrolled, but the natural impediments to getting across, mountains and rivers and such, are relied on by both sides to some degree. It would be hard to get into China, but in an emergency, attempting it is your best course of action.”
“Yes, I’ve been briefed and I’ve memorized the routes.”
She added, “It’s also important you realize that even if you do make it over the border, you are not safe. We could get you back if you are picked up by the Chinese, but North Korean agents also patrol inside the Chinese border, looking for defectors and spies. If they catch you they will pull you back over the Yalu River and into the DPRK.”
Adam blew out a sigh. He knew this, but it was hard to take. “Right. That does complicate an extraction via China.” He and his control officers had considered sewing forged papers into his clothing to help him in the event of an overland escape into China. They went as far as creating an identity card that claimed him to be a resident of Liaoning Province, which bordered North Korea.
But ultimately they decided against it. As much as Yao would have liked to know he had a way out of North Korea in the case of emergency, the possibility the North Koreans would find the ID card and identify him as a spy had been too great. So in the end, he decided to go in “naked.”
If he was caught in China by the Chinese, he would be thrown into prison. If he was caught on either side of the border by the DPRK, he would be executed.
Foley said, “There is another option to get you out of the country. It would be in a worst-case scenario.”
Adam hadn’t been told of other options. “I’m all ears.”
“Actually, this is something from a code-word access program that you don’t need to know about.” She paused. “Unless, of course, you do. I’m asking you to trust me on this one. Trust me that we will do our best to get to you if something unforeseen happens.”
Adam had no idea what she was talking about, or why she’d even mentioned it, but he thanked her anyway.
After a time Mary Pat stood, shook Adam’s hand, and said, “Good luck, Avalanche. Remember, we need that intelligence, but we need men like you even more. Err on the side of personal safety.”
“Thank you, Madame Director,” said Yao.
“I look forward to welcoming you home when you are done.”
Yao smiled. “I look forward to coming home when I’m done.”
36
They had run out of coffee in the safe house, and John Clark found this wholly unacceptable. After the shootout, Sam, Ding, and Dom were all out this morning tailing a Sharps employee named Bridgeforth, and Clark decided he had time to run out to a coffee shop to grab a cup. As far as he was concerned, he would have just gone into the first 7-Eleven, or whatever the little bodegas around here were called—he didn’t need anything more fancy than a hot jolt of caffeine—but the closest place to him was actually right next door to his condo building down at street level, so he stepped in there.
Within ten seconds he turned to step back out, the place was too damn crowded, but there were already four college-age kids behind him in a line that blocked the exit, so with a sigh he decided to stick it out and wait his turn.
The crowd was heavy, even at nine forty-five in the morning when most of these young people should have been, at least as far as Clark was concerned, at work. The establishment was far too trendy for Clark’s taste; he was the oldest patron in sight by at least a quarter-century, and when he scanned the large menu handwritten in chalk on a board on the wall, he saw this roaster—the joint was even too pretentious to call itself a coffee shop—served every imaginable permutation of beans and teas and soy and foam. He rolled his eyes at the seemingly never-ending options of syrups and caramels and cookie bits and protein powders that could be added to the drink.
As he waited in line he had every intention of asking the waifish pixie behind the counter with the pin through her septum if he could, by any slim chance, purchase a regular goddamned cup of coffee, but fortunately for all involved, he had time to kill, and he spent the time rereading the choices of sixty or seventy drinks on the board. To his relief, on his second scan of the menu he finally saw that the establishment would be able to accommodate his outlandish request for a simple cup of black joe.
His transaction went smoothly, he even calmed a bit and bought himself a multigrain bagel, and he sat down at a small bistro table in the back. There was a New York Times on the seat next to him, so he picked it up and began looking at the front page.
President Ryan was taking heat from the Times for his stance on North Korea. Clark didn’t have to turn to the editorial section to see this; the invective came through in a front-page above-the-fold “straight news” piece. The procedural vote next week was going to be tight, and the Times reported on North Korea’s promises to use its bank accounts to help its citizenry. The North Koreans said any restriction on their ability to do this would starve innocent civilians.
The Times was pushing a “trust but verify” line, giving the DPRK the r
oom it needed to handle its banking affairs so it could spend the hard currency in its overseas bank accounts, with the caveat that Western accounting inspectors spot-check more financial transactions to make sure the DPRK wasn’t earning offshore monies via drugs or counterfeiting or illegal weapons sales.
Clark rolled his eyes. He was no accountant himself, but he sure knew assholes, and this made him an expert on Choi. He knew without reservation the lunatic kid running North Korea couldn’t be trusted to open his accounting ledgers to inspectors.
If the UN Sanctions Committee vote failed, then Choi would keep his worldwide criminal enterprises operating; and either he would give the UN cooked books to look through or else he would rope-a-dope them with obfuscations and delays, and it would be half a decade before the UN would pronounce him in violation of the agreement and do anything about it.
And in five years Choi could have the ICBM he was after, and when that happened, the UN wouldn’t do a damn thing to stop him ever again.
Clark tossed the paper on the table in frustration, and then looked up quickly when he realized a man was seating himself right in front of him at his little two-top.
The man had wavy blond hair streaked with gray, a ruddy complexion, and a big grin on his face.
Well, shit, Clark said to himself.
It was Duke Sharps.
Clark showed no surprise, and he said nothing, he just gazed at the man in front of him with eyes that were too cold to read.
Sharps kept his smile wide. Clark was pretty sure he was looking at veneers, and the man’s blue double-breasted blazer and striped shirt made him look to John like he should have been sitting on a yacht in Palm Beach instead of in a hipster coffee shop in Manhattan.
Duke said, “John Clark. It has been one hell of a long while. How are you, brother?” He extended a hand and Clark reluctantly shook it.
He was waiting for the man’s pitch or threat, whichever way Sharps was going to play it. Sharps, however, was in no rush.
“When and where was the last time we ran into one another? It was after I left the Bureau. You were at Rainbow. Was it over in the UK?”
“What can I do for you, Sharps?”
“Right to the chase? Not going to waste my time, I see. I respect that.” Sharps picked up the copy of the Times and pointed to the article Clark had just been reading. “A blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. No big fan of the Times, but they are right on this one. North Korea isn’t the bad guy here. They have as much right to interact in the marketplace as any other country. As long as they are not proliferating weapons, how dare Jack fucking Ryan tell them where they can put their money and how they can spend it?”
Clark snorted a little. “When did you become a card-carrying member of the Fair Play for the DPRK Committee?” Clark’s reference was to Lee Harvey Oswald. He had worked for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an organization that protested the U.S. government’s heavy-handed tactics over the communist island.
Sharps chuckled. After a moment he said, “I’m in the right on this one, Clark, but my high school debate team days are long behind me. I’m not going to try to convince you.” He leaned forward on his elbows. His smile dissipated. “An associate of mine mentioned he happened to notice a known colleague of yours down in Turtle Bay yesterday. I guess it could have been a coincidence, but it got me thinking. You’re an old fox like I am, and you know there is no such thing as a chance encounter. I snooped into your colleague, which led me to you. My man was on the job, and this leads me to believe you are on the job in some capacity as well. You aren’t with the Agency anymore, not even as a training cadre, so I’m guessing you’re doing contract work for someone.”
Sharps leaned closer. “Maybe some people are still scared of you. You’re an old snake eater, after all. But as far as I’m concerned, the operative word is ‘old.’”
Clark was not a snake eater, old or otherwise. That was an archaic term used for Green Berets, U.S. Army Special Forces, and Clark had been a Navy SEAL. He didn’t expect Sharps to know the difference, and he didn’t bother to correct him.
The sixty-year-old Sharps said, “I sit before you as a professional courtesy. I am here to kindly ask you to pack up your op and take your gang of washed-up boys down to Penn Station and put them, along with yourself, back on a train for D.C. You’re out of your element here. My guys and your guys keep bumping into one another . . . and somebody is going to get themselves hurt.”
Clark’s jaw tensed, clamping down tight to keep from saying what he wanted to say. He knew he had to take whatever Sharps dished out as a short-term tactical defeat. Sharps had somehow compromised his operation, and this was a terrible blow, but Clark identified something quickly. Sharps had misidentified what Clark’s operation was all about. He clearly thought Clark was working some sort of counterintelligence contract job for one of the foreign embassies or UN delegations. This would have been highly illegal, but Sharps wasn’t objecting on moral or legal grounds. No, his quarrel with Clark was that he thought Clark was trying to protect one of the delegates Sharps and Riley had been targeting.
If Clark pushed back at this moment, it would just up Sharps’s level of curiosity. Much better, Clark realized, for him to make Sharps think he’d won, that it was all over.
Clark, for the first time in this conversation and for one of the first times in his life, demurred.
With a long, slow nod he said, “You can’t get good help these days. My crew blew it. Fucking Keystone Kops.”
He saw the glint in Sharps’s eye, the look of a man full of his own power and worth. A winner, glorious in his victory but forcing a magnanimous comment. He said, “It happens, friend. Maybe my crew just got lucky.”
Clark pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed Ding. When he answered, Clark said, “Go back to the place, break it all down. Get yourself and the others to Penn Station in ninety minutes.” A pause. “Just do it. I’ll see you there.” Clark hung up and slipped the phone back in his jeans.
The glint in Sharps’s eye remained.
Clark shrugged like a man who knew he was busted, but a man acting like it was no big deal. “What the hell, the money wasn’t what we thought it was going to be, anyway. Shitty per diem. You’d think they had us working in Port-au-Prince for what they were giving us for food and booze.”
Sharps smiled. “Ouch.” With a nonchalance that Clark read as bullshit he said, “Since it doesn’t matter anymore, maybe you’ll tell me. Which delegation were you working for? My guess is Chile, or Denmark, but I’m prepared for you to surprise me.”
Clark put up an apologetic hand and gave his shoulders another huge shrug. “C’mon, Duke. We’re running home with our tails between our legs on this one. Allow me to retain a modicum of self-respect by not having me completely lose my professional decorum and reveal my client’s identity.”
Sharps said, “You had a lot of glory days in your career. One hell of a good run. Everybody gets old. Everybody loses their touch.” He smiled, a look that seemed like he felt sorry for the old man in front of him. “Just as there was honor in being the best, there is also honor in knowing when it’s over.”
Clark took three slow breaths, forced his blood pressure back down a notch, then stood and extended his hand. “Thanks, Duke. I owe you.”
Duke Sharps shook Clark’s hand, but he did not get up.
Clark pushed his way through a crowd of hipsters, left the coffee shop, and walked back to the safe house. He assumed he was being watched, but Sharps had known he was in the 79th Street coffee shop, which surely meant he knew Clark’s operation was set up at the building next door.
—
Five minutes later, Clark entered the safe house.
Sam and Dom were hurriedly packing up equipment, but Ding was standing in the middle of the room with a Glock pistol on his hip and a worried look on his face. “You okay?”
> “I’ll be better after I vomit.”
“What happened?”
“Sharps compromised us. I don’t know how he did it, but he did.”
Sam said, “So we’re all leaving?”
“No,” Clark said. “Sam, you are staying here. You’ll get an apartment or a hotel room with eyes on the front of Sharps’s building, and you will lock yourself in and stay out of sight. You’ll keep watch on who comes and goes into that entire building. It will be a shitty job, but you’ll have facial recog and video equipment to help you.”
“No problem,” Sam said.
“As for the rest of us, we’re going home, but we’ll be back.”
“What about the UN vote?” asked Caruso.
“My guess is the rules vote will end up ‘no,’ and the Sanctions Committee will not hear the petition to extend the economic sanctions on North Korea.”
Caruso couldn’t believe it. “So Sharps wins? Just like that?”
“He wins a battle, but only that. I’m going to take down that son of a bitch, and nothing I’ve ever done will give me greater pleasure.”
37
Iranian bomb maker Adel Zarif arrived in Mexico City using his Syrian papers after flying from Pyongyang to Havana, where he had to wait a day for his connection. Even in Cuba he’d been watched over by North Korean RGB minders, who allowed him freedom of action but little freedom of movement.
On touchdown at Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport he expected to be met by RGB, but instead a single Maldonado cartel member was waiting in the arrivals section for him. He gave his name as Emilio, and he spoke English. Zarif had learned English in Lebanon, and although his knowledge of the language was not as good as Emilio’s, they were able to communicate without any problems.
Together they drove to a building on a congested intersection in the downtown Tepito section of the city. Zarif was taken to a second-floor safe house that was guarded by three other men, all of whom seemed to be in their early twenties.