Full Force and Effect

20

Londoner Edward Riley didn’t much care for New York, as it was not his home. But since his home didn’t much care for him, he’d relocated here to the States five years earlier, and he was bloody well determined to make the best of it.

Part and parcel of making the best of it included the vehicle in which Riley now drove as he motored down the West Side Highway through mid-morning traffic. It was a coal-black BMW i8 electric sports car. It shined as if he’d coated it with cooking spray before leaving his garage, and its lean, aerodynamic form turned heads and earned whistles and compliments even here in the sneering Upper West Side.

Edward Riley loved the attention, which was an odd thing, really, because Edward Riley was a spy.

Claiming fame is frowned upon for intelligence officers, but Edward Riley’s claim to fame was undeniably impressive. He had been the youngest chief of station in the last thirty years at MI6, the foreign intelligence arm of the government of the United Kingdom. Now, at age thirty-six, he had the experience and the CV envied by men twice his age, and Riley played this up more like his own publicist than as a spook concerned with his own personal security.

As a young lad, short and sandy-haired Eddie had a love of language and culture. His parents traveled Europe as manufacturer representatives in the fitness-equipment industry, and he’d been to every country on the continent by age ten. Moreover, his grandparents on his mother’s side were ardent travelers who “borrowed” their grandson for summer hops to Africa and Asia and South America.

Eddie went into Eton with plans of following into his father’s business so he could continue to see the world, and he studied French and Arabic and Russian as a means to that end.

He hadn’t been a perfect candidate for intelligence work because although most spies have at least some level of loyalty to their own flag, Riley did not. It wasn’t that he was unpatriotic, really, rather he just didn’t give a toss about his own country or countrymen. But one of his professors at Eton was an unofficial recruiter for the Crown and he forwarded Eddie’s name on a hunch, and soon Eddie was met after class by a middle-aged woman and asked if he’d be interested in taking the civil service exams.

“Not particularly,” was the honest answer.

But the woman was persuasive, and she hyped the travel and the study of culture and within seconds a lightbulb went off and Eddie Riley realized this was a recruitment attempt for the British secret services.

And that sounded interesting — there wasn’t a James Bond film young Riley hadn’t seen five times — so his “not really” turned to “why not?”

One does not apply to MI6. Instead, one applies for a position at the coordination staff for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office — this is personnel code for foreign intelligence work. Riley did this and then he breezed through his training, and soon he was off into the world, beginning every young officer’s saga of doing time at dusty outposts, learning the ropes the hard way.

Sana’a, Yemen. Windhoek, Namibia. Then a promotion to Montevideo, Uruguay.

After he had spent a year in South America the war in the Middle East had pulled enough more experienced intelligence officers into that region to leave some plum postings vacant for young officers who were both competent and easily mobile. He worked in Finland for a year, and then he did a longer stint in the British Virgin Islands. Riley made a name for himself and by age twenty-seven he was back in Europe, as assistant chief of station in Bulgaria, a rising star.

He’d been in that position for less than six months when his chief of station was recalled home due to a family illness. MI6 had plans to replace the senior spy with someone other than his young second-in-command, but a month as acting chief of station turned to three, and then by six someone decided he’d earned the position he’d fallen into, and the paperwork was completed to make it official.

Edward Riley of London became the twenty-seven-year-old SIS station chief of Bulgaria, making him the youngest in the service in more than thirty years.

But Riley did not stop there. He worked hard, which was important, and he had no qualms about using people and situations to his personal benefit. By his thirtieth birthday his skyrocketing career had landed him in Italy as station chief, a posting orders of magnitude more important than running the shop in nearby Bulgaria.

But in Rome it unraveled quickly. By violating orders and working with one group of local criminals he disrupted another local cell of Russian Mafia who were connected to the government in Moscow, as virtually all Russian criminals were. The criminals appealed to the SVR, Russian foreign intelligence, and the SVR developed an operation to get Riley out of the way.

The Russians identified Riley as the UK station chief, and then they targeted him, not for any lethal measures — that would have brought more trouble than the matter was worth — they just wanted him gone.

The Russians tricked him, though when it was over he had no one but himself to blame. A simple honey trap. Edward had a British wife and three small children, but one day he sat down next to a twenty-four-year-old Romanian model named Alina at a café he frequented on the Via Bergamo, and he started up a conversation.

She claimed to be an exchange student and she showed more interest in her textbook than in the handsome Briton chatting her up, but her beauty absolutely floored him, so he kept talking. He saw himself as the pursuer, so he didn’t think for one moment he was being played. He asked for her number and she refused, but she showed up at the same café a few days later, and they went for a walk on the Via Piave and soon enough they had somehow wandered into the lobby of the Hotel Oxford on the Via Boncompagni. He had no idea how a credit card in one of his aliases just appeared from his wallet into his hand, and then into the hand of the desk clerk, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand how he and young Alina found themselves in a fourth-floor suite on the bed.

A bloody mysterious thing all around, he told himself when it was over.

For her part Alina did not know she was working for the Russians. Instead, she thought she had been hired for this seduction by a British tabloid. She’d been paid well, and the tabloid, in fact, existed, but Alina had no idea it was owned, like much of the UK, by Russian concerns, and it went where Russian intelligence told it to go.

Even though the honey trap had been set and the paparazzi were in town to catch the young British spy in the act, it was really not quite so simple. Riley, like most adulterous spies, applied the tradecraft of his work to his pleasure. For a month he and his Romanian lover kept a clandestine relationship that would have made his MI6 training cadre proud. They used drop phones, they met in out-of-the-way cafés only after running surveillance detection routes, they varied their routines. Alina kept tipping off the cameramen as to where they would be and what they would be doing, but Riley kept the affair one step ahead of them, though wholly unaware anyone was on his trail.

On a moonlit beach in Sardinia the cameras finally caught him. Riley and Alina were nude, in flagrante delicto, and as the flashes flashed and the shutters clicked, thirty-one-year-old Edward Riley knew his career and his marriage were now items of the past.

The British tabloid was giddy with its reportage: photos of the topless blonde, the dashing young spy, bare-chested, on top of her, staring into the lens with a deer-in-the-headlights look that solidified the sordid nature of the tryst.

“On Her Majesty’s Sleazy Circus,” read the headline, and as Riley looked at the article the next morning he knew he’d been had, and he wished the rag had only the decency to admit what they’d done had been done for fucking Moscow by bylining the piece “Written with help from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.”

Riley was recalled to London, of course. He was shamed out of the service after years of work and the paparazzi chased him and his family outside their flat in Knightsbridge.

Something snapped within Riley and he turned to self-preservation mode, not allowing himself the self-acuity to take responsibility for his action. He blamed England, his own country, for the debacle — certainly not himself.

He kept a stiff upper lip for a few months, but there’s something about being the most publicly recognizable spy in your country that works against you, and Riley knew he’d have to do a runner and leave England behind.

And in swooped Duke Sharps. Riley had never met the man, he knew him only by his unscrupulous reputation. Duke had asked Edward to come over for a meeting, all expenses paid by Sharps Global Intelligence Partners, of course. Edward did so, he’d listened to the American’s spiel about the work, and he’d agreed on the spot. Edward was ecstatic to be back in the intelligence game, even in a commercial capacity. He could do unscrupulous. He’d go into it for the money, eschew right and wrong and good and evil, and look out for himself now.

Of course, he’d been concerned that his new notoriety would make him completely ineffectual as an intelligence asset. But something happened that Edward Riley did not expect. He found his fame worked to his advantage. In this odd version of intelligence work at Sharps Partners, having a reputation served him well. He met the important people, he dined with potential clients and CEOs, and he appeared on television as a talking head, giving his view on UK intelligence issues from New York bureaus of the big news stations.

And he made a lot of money. Sharps paid its operatives more when their operations were successful, unlike MI6, where the bloke meeting an informant over a dinner of whale blubber in Iceland with six years of service earned the exact same amount as the bloke with six years of shooting it out with Russian Spetsnaz in a shit-stained basement in Chechnya.

Though he had some “shine time” on TV, Riley wasn’t a figurehead at Sharps. That was Sharps’s job. No, the thirty-six-year-old Englishman worked surprisingly hard, built operations from the ground up, and put in the hours and the effort. He ran intelligence assets and demanded every bit of the same excellence he’d expected from his agents and officers when he was an MI6 station chief.

Sharps used Riley on the tough jobs, and Riley didn’t care. He was in it for the money, full stop.

By the time the three-year anniversary of his fall from grace came around he took a thorough look at his life and he realized he bloody well loved his job and his life of amorality.

The Crown could bugger off.

Edward Riley pulled his BMW sports car up to the valet stand at the Mandarin Oriental near Columbus Circle; he climbed out and winked at the young Dominican valet as the man approached the vehicle with an appreciative grin.

“Staying with us, sir?” he said, nearly salivating at the prospect of folding himself into the luxurious sports car.

“Just a meeting over tea at Asiate.”

The valet turned away from the car. “Perhaps with the woman who just arrived by taxi?”

“Tall, blond, legs for days?”

The Dominican smiled. He wanted Riley’s life, and he did not hide the fact. “That’s the one, sir.”

The Englishman ate it up. “Haven’t yet met her in person, but I’ve heard reports she is quite something.”

“A beauty, sir. You enjoy your meeting, and I’ll take great care of this beauty.”

Riley was a single man, if not on paper. His marriage had fallen apart in London, right after his fall from grace, and his wife — one of these days he’d go home and make it official, or she could bloody well come here with the papers to sign — had herself moved on. The thought of bedding this Frenchwoman was appealing, even though he hadn’t even met her yet, but this operation was too damn important for him to mix business with pleasure.

He’d keep his hands to himself on this one.

He found Veronika Martel at a corner table in the rear of the nearly empty restaurant, sitting with her back to the wall. She rose and shook his hand, and he gazed into her eyes and found her every bit as beautiful as the rumors.

Riley was certain she would know all about him. Or she would know what Russian intelligence wanted the world to know. She would have too much class to say anything about it, but the fact this woman was aware about the scandal that wrecked his life hung over this meeting like a weight.

But Riley told himself he wouldn’t let that threaten his authority. He chatted with the gorgeous blonde for a few minutes, a professional conversation about superficial matters. Her flight and her hotel and her impressions of the city and the United States. He found her to be intelligent but highly guarded.

Finally he got around to the subject of today’s meeting. “I know Duke talked to you about the Valley Floor assignment.”

“He did.”

“It’s not a bad posting,” he said. “You’ll be less than forty miles from Vegas, so you can commute in each morning. You’ll have to, really, no other options in the area. We’ll put you up in a nice hotel and take good care of you.

“The first week or so you’re just there to establish yourself. You’ll get the training on the diagnostic equipment here before heading over, so all you’ll be doing is looking at readouts on machinery at the rare earth hydroseparation facility. Our Science and Tech department will give you a cell phone that has the ability to pull the software we want directly off the system servers, but you’ll have to social engineer the password out of a systems administrator to obtain the access necessary.”

“I can manage that.”

“Undoubtedly,” Riley said. “New World Metals has a shipment of ore-processing equipment heading to North Korea this month, and the computers will fly in from Europe, so we do have some time constraints. This is all machinery for the refinery. All of the mining machinery is already there.”

“Where did they get that?”

“The Chinese were tossed out in such a hurry they weren’t able to take everything with them. They didn’t leave enough equipment to operate the mine in any profitable capacity, but they do have some drilling going on. The processing equipment is crucial now because the ore is starting to back up.”

“Then I won’t delay another moment to get started.”

“Excellent. I have a trainer flying into New York today. A woman from Brazil who works for Vale, a diversified metals mining concern there. She does just exactly the same thing you will be doing at the NewCorp facility. You’ll have three days to work with her and make yourself legitimate. I trust you can pull that off.”

Veronika had been slipping into and then out of roles for her entire career. She’d been a hotel desk clerk and a software engineer and a fishmonger and a college professor and even a bikini model at a Le Mans race. Seventy-two hours of intense prep could turn her into just about anything as long as scrutiny by experts wasn’t too high.

“I’ll do my best,” she said.

Riley looked into his teacup for a moment. “I’ll ask you the question Duke won’t ask. How does it make you feel to know your work will directly benefit North Korea?”

Martel was as calculating as Riley was off-the-cuff. “I don’t concern myself with that.”

“Good answer. Bloody lie, but I’ll take a lie that says what I want to hear. I know you were face-to-face with the DPRK agents in Vietnam. That was a poorly handled mess, and not my doing. You won’t see that level of unprofessionalism on this operation with me in charge, I can assure you of that.

“I also want you to understand what we are doing here. The end game is mining. Money for New World Metals, and some trickle-down for us at Sharps. We’re not employees of the North Koreans. We’re not doing anything we can’t be proud of.”

Martel considered mentioning the American employee of Sharps’s whose blood she’d wiped off of the passport. But she decided against it. Riley wanted to start fresh in this operation, and she felt the same way. There was no reason to reintroduce any ugly issues. She wanted him to understand he wouldn’t have to worry about her morale on this job. It was just a job, like all the others.

“Mr. Riley, I appreciate the gesture you seem to be making, but don’t feel like you need to tend to my morale. I honestly don’t give a damn what we are doing, who we are doing it for, or who we are doing it to. You have quite ably outlined my duties at Valley Floor, and I will comply to the best of my ability. You can rest assured I require no more special care than that.”

“I feel exactly the same way. We are men and women in a line of work where morality only gets in the way.”

“That’s a good way of putting it, Mr. Riley.”

Edward Riley’s face slipped into an easy grin. “You and I are going to get along perfectly, Ms. Martel.”