Full Force and Effect

33

Having Dom Caruso up in New York, thereby giving Clark four sets of eyes instead of just three, had made a huge difference in the Campus operation to gain intelligence in the actions of Sharps Partners.

The other change to their operation that was proving helpful was that now they were primarily tracking the movements of Edward Riley. There was no question that he was in charge of the operation to influence the committee vote, and after the honey trap in the sleazy massage parlor the previous day, Clark and his men wondered if he’d managed to line up at least one vote in North Korea’s favor.

Tonight Riley took a cab to Chinatown at nine, so Sam, Domingo, and Dom followed him down. While Riley sat in a nearly empty dim sum restaurant on Mott Street, Sam took the eye in a nondescript charcoal-gray sedan. He had to circle the block four times to catch an open spot on the curb, but he found a place on Bayard near the corner that gave him a great backward view into the restaurant, as well as a fair angle of view to both the north and south on Mott. Once he parked, he pulled his camera from its bag and put it down between his feet.

Dom was on foot — he’d arrived by subway, then walked across Canal Street — and he remained two blocks up on Mott and out of direct view of the dim sum restaurant. He wore a black polo shirt and khakis and he sat alone at a fast-food restaurant on the corner of Mott and Canal, but he had earpiece comms with the team and was ready to move closer if Sam had to bug out for some reason, or if Riley left the restaurant with his contact on foot.

Ding was dressed in warm-up pants and a light sweatshirt, and he jogged at a leisurely pace south and west of the dim sum restaurant. While he listened in his headset to Sam call out news from his static surveillance up the street, he circled over to Columbus Park and made his way through pedestrians, all the while ready to head back and take the eye if Sam ran into any problems.

With only three men in the team there wasn’t a lot of room for error, but Clark was back at the safe house on the Upper West Side, both monitoring the team’s movements on the computer and working directly with the analysts in Alexandria on developing a better target picture on the UN bureaucrats involved in the Sanctions Committee vote.

Just after nine-thirty p.m. a woman wearing a beige raincoat walked past Dom’s position on the corner of Canal and Mott, and then she turned to head south. She was one of a hundred pedestrians he’d tracked in the past ten minutes, so she barely stood out and he hadn’t gotten a close look at her face, but two minutes later when Sam described a woman entering the dim sum restaurant alone, Dom recognized her as a person who’d passed his static point.

And when Sam confirmed that the woman had sat down at Edward Riley’s table, Dom said, “She came on foot from the west on Canal. She either parked up there somewhere or else she came up out of the subway.”

“Roger,” said Ding. “Sam, we need her ID’d as soon as possible.”

“Working on it,” replied Sam. His digital Nikon had a 500-millimeter lens. With this equipment and at this range he knew he should be able to catch her through the window and get a good headshot. Unfortunately, however, the conditions on the street were less than ideal. All the neon signs around were reflecting off the glass, so Sam couldn’t get a perfect sightline of her face. So far he could just tell she had dark brown or auburn hair, it was pulled back in a bun, and she appeared to be in her forties. He said, “Only two females on the committee.” He opened a small notebook on the passenger side of the car and thumbed through the images.

He found the first female profile. “This is definitely not Noreen Paige from the USA…” He turned two pages and found the other. “But this could well be Marleni Allende from Chile. Can’t be sure yet, though. I’ll have to wait for her to move to get a better line of sight.”

As soon as he said this he saw movement at the table; he’d been looking for any exchange of property between them, but this wasn’t that. Instead, the woman was speaking with her hands, and Riley was lolling his head back, clearly in some frustration.

Sam spoke for the benefit of the rest of the detail. “Our boy looks pissed. This should be fun.”

Ten minutes into his meeting with the UN official from Chile, Edward Riley finally began to accept her words at face value. This was no bluff.

The bloody bitch had changed her mind.

Riley had brought the twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars with him. They’d agreed on this amount in an early conversation, that one while making the harbor crossing on the Staten Island Ferry several days earlier. She’d come up with an excuse to cancel the first meet for the exchange, two days after that, but she’d agreed on tonight without hesitation. Now Riley realized he should have been more concerned that the lady was getting cold feet about taking money for her vote.

He’d always known this could happen. So far he’d managed to bribe two of the nine officials, and he’d coerced an agreement out of two more by threatening them with scandalous revelations, but he had thought he had Marleni Allende in the bag already.

Allende had a problem with money. She was a middle-class woman back home, an international law professor who, through merit alone, worked her way into a respectable but not terribly high-paying job in New York City, and here she was surrounded by men and women who made more money and lived better for it. Over time her resistance to running up her credit cards had weakened; it was easy to spend lavishly here in New York, and she’d put herself twenty thousand dollars in debt.

As soon as Riley and the rest of Sharps Partners identified her as a target they snooped around her bank accounts, and in minutes he had his attack vector sorted. He approached her, shocking her greatly, but she certainly seemed excited by the prospect of a financial lifeline.

But now it looked like he’d overestimated her concern for her financial problems, or else he’d underestimated her dedication to her organization.

And this led him to a new problem. He needed her no vote, but more than that, he needed her discretion. If she revealed the scheme to bribe UN officials, Riley himself would be the one facing the threat of a scandal.

He sipped his Tsingtao beer, taking a minute to regroup. Then he spoke, sticking with his Kincaid legend, the NYPD detective. With a Brooklyn accent he said, “Look, Marleni, you came here tonight on foot, you wanted to meet me in this out-of-the-way hole-in-the-wall. You’re dressed like you’re in a frickin’ Sam Spade novel, for cryin’ out loud. You don’t look to me like a woman who doesn’t want to go along with the plan. Just tell me what it is you want and I’ll do my best to make it happen.”

Allende shook her head. “Nothing. I want nothing. I came like this because I am ashamed to be meeting with you again. If someone I know sees me… I want the money, of course, but I am no criminal. I have a duty to my organization. I cannot do this. I will not.”

Riley gave her a challenging look. “How are you going to feel when the vote fails anyway because many of your colleagues don’t share your bright and shining sense of mission? You are going to be the only one who doesn’t benefit.”

“I know you have approached others. I can see it on their faces around the office. They all want to know if others in the committee know about their secret. I am sure they hope everyone knows, so everyone will go along quietly.”

Riley raised an eyebrow, but Marleni Allende lifted a hand quickly; on her face she had an expression of worry.

“I will go quietly, don’t doubt this. I will not say a word about anything that has happened. It is not my place to hurt my friends and coworkers. But I will not join in this… corruption.”

She stood. “I am sorry, Mr. Kincaid. Good night.”

Without another word she turned and headed for the door.

Allende was still in the restaurant when Driscoll noticed the new arrival to the neighborhood. A small black SUV with its lights off pulled up to the curb some twenty-five yards north of his position on the corner of Bayard and Mott. He could just see one person behind the wheel, but he wasn’t sure with all the reflecting neon from the Chinese character signs running up and down both sides of the street.

Marleni Allende — Sam had confirmed her identity when he got a perfect shot of her face during her meeting with Riley — stepped out of the dim sum place and began walking up Mott Street, in the direction of the black SUV.

Sam had not seen anything passed between Riley and the UN woman, and now, watching the way she had spun away and marched off, he read it as a show of resolution. He got the distinct impression she was turning her back on Riley, figuratively as well as literally.

Sam said, “Listen up. The woman is not going to play ball with Riley, and she is on the move, heading northbound on foot. A suspicious vehicle just pulled up on the corner.”

Ding called back. “I’m en route from the south.”

Dom said, “I’m in position if she comes all the way to Canal Street.”

Sam just sat in his dark car. As much as he wanted to tail the woman leaving on foot immediately, he wouldn’t reveal himself by firing up his engine right now. Instead, he sat and watched while she crossed the street. While she did so the SUV started to move forward, directly facing her. But a passing Audi sedan honked its horn and swerved to avoid a collision with the SUV, then it turned right onto Mott.

The black SUV, all its lights still off, stopped and let the passing traffic by.

Sam said, “Be advised, we might have aggressors. This SUV is thinking about either following her or running her over. Can’t tell which yet.”

Dom said, “You’ve got to be kidding. In Manhattan?”

Sam said, “I just call ’em like I see ’em. Wait one—”

The SUV pulled into traffic behind the Audi and went straight on Bayard, passing behind the Chilean UN official, who was now back on the sidewalk and heading north toward Dom on the corner of Canal and Mott. The vehicle turned on its lights as it took off up the street.

Quickly Sam looked back toward the dim sum restaurant. Edward Riley was leaving through the front door, heading off to the south, in the opposite direction of the activity. He was talking on his phone, but he did not seem overly excited or concerned.

Sam said, “The SUV has moved on, but they might be handing off the tail to another team, or else they’re trying to get ahead of her. Can’t explain it, but I have a feeling they aren’t bugging out.”

Ding Chavez said, “Then we go on your intuition. I’ll stay parallel of you to the west, you stay in traffic, get up to Canal, and Dom will take the eye in the foot-follow when the target passes.”

Everyone agreed, and the three men all began the orchestrated ballet that is a coordinated mobile surveillance operation.

Ding was in condition yellow as he moved, his eyes open for any countersurveillance. But he had no way of seeing the seventy-year-old Korean woman sitting back from the window in the second-floor apartment over a bodega, the dirty curtains parted just enough for the lens of a video camera. She took twelve seconds of video as Ding passed below her.

A minute later she had sent the video to her local contact, an RGB officer. In a subsequent phone call she told the man that the Hispanic-looking fellow in the video was, unquestionably, near the British man she had been ordered to watch over tonight.

She was just a watcher. There were other RGB men here in the area, and they had used her for intelligence about the activities in the dim sum restaurant, but she had never seen her contact face-to-face, nor did she know a thing about the mission.

She had been working on this job for the past several days. Once each day she would get a call from her contact, and she would go to the address listed, either a restaurant or a laundromat or a food court or a parking lot or, in this evening’s case, an empty and unlocked but obviously lived-in apartment on Mott Street in Chinatown.

She would then keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary around her. By her second day she recognized the one constant to each scene was the white man with the dark hair. She was not told his name, but when she pointed him out she was directed to keep watch for anyone else interested in him.

And now that she’d been at this for five days, she finally had success.

The Hispanic man she had identified tonight had not done anything wrong. He had not gotten too close to his subject, nor had he acted in any way different from any other random passerby on the street — any of the three times she had seen him.

That was what compromised him. The old lady had a memory like a trap. Three mornings earlier on 3rd Avenue the short, dark-haired man in his forties had been walking with another man, deep in conversation and with a cup of coffee in his hands. They were across the street and some seventy-five yards from where Edward Riley was having coffee with a contact at a Starbucks. The Korean lady had been stationed in a Hallmark shop, looking out the window and simply noting passersby.

Two days later, in the mid-afternoon, a construction worker in denim pants and a T-shirt sat on a residential stoop in Chelsea, a block and a half from where Riley and one of his agents had gone into a brownstone.

The Korean woman had been browsing in a luggage store on the corner, she’d been far from the construction worker, but she thought he might have been the suited Hispanic from two days earlier. If she’d had binoculars she could have made the connection with certainty, but her cover was more important to her than his cover, so she let it go.

But tonight she saw the same man again, running in the dark, dressed like he was just out for a jog. He was either a businessman — construction worker — jogger, or he was a member of the opposition.

She doubted seriously he was working alone, but she’d not managed to identify any confederates.

She neither knew nor cared about the reasons he was following Edward Riley, no more than she knew or cared about what Edward Riley was up to. But her grown son and daughter lived in North Korea, and her occasional work here in New York for RGB always brought good news from them. The last time she worked an operation here in the city for North Korean intelligence her son sent a letter a few months later telling her he had received a new bicycle and his sister a new radio. They did not know the reason why, but they thanked the Dae Wonsu and professed their everlasting love and affection for him.

The elderly Korean Manhattanite was pleased her work here in America brought her family happiness back home, even if she would have loved to be able to have them come here to live with her.

The three Campus operators continued their coordinated leapfrogging movements through Chinatown, and it was still something of a ballet, but by now the complexity of the choreography had increased because the black SUV had turned up again, this time shadowing the woman on Canal Street. Marleni Allende continued walking unaware, her beige raincoat contrasting with the T-shirts of many of the other pedestrians here shopping for cheap knockoff goods in the rows of sidewalk stalls. Behind her, carefully tracking her, the Ford Escape moved normally through traffic, turning onto perpendicular streets and then pulling back onto Canal moments later.

Caruso still had the eye; he was one hundred feet directly behind the target, which meant at times he was moving right along with the black Ford. He spoke softly, but his earbud picked up his words with no problem. “This is starting to feel like that deal in Vietnam. I count four in the Ford. They aren’t closing on her, but there are a lot of civilians around here.”

Sam had pushed ahead through traffic, and now he raced to the nearest subway stop on Canal. During Allende’s meeting in the restaurant, he’d called Clark and asked for information on the woman. Clark read aloud everything the Campus analysts had given him, and from this Sam knew she lived alone in an apartment in Midtown.

She wasn’t walking home, that was for sure. Unless the Chilean woman hailed a taxi, it was a fair bet she was going to go down into the subway.

He knew there was no way in hell he’d find a place to park to go on foot, but at least he’d be able to identify any threats on the woman when she passed by.

Dom had no concerns the UN woman was going to see him; she walked with her head down and her shoulders rolled forward. If she started to look back over her shoulder, Dom had the training to recognize the telltale body movements that would come before her eyes actually put her in position to compromise him.

But the men in the Ford were a concern. They were alternately behind him, next to him, and facing him as they went up one street and down the other, and he assumed whoever these guys were, they had the training to be on the lookout for countersurveillance.

So Dom stopped now and then to look at cheap T-shirts and tacky wallets for sale in the stalls, and he just made occasional spot checks on Allende to confirm the other team on her tail hadn’t yet closed distance on her.

As he walked he saw the Ford Escape leave the tail completely and move up the street. He called it out to his teammates, and they all surmised the Escape was heading to the subway station as well.

Sam asked over the net, “What are we doing, guys?”

Clark had been monitoring the progression of the tail. “You two have to call it. I’m not there and Ding doesn’t have the eye. Dom, I don’t want you guys in the subway if I can avoid it, but if you think this woman is in peril, I’ll approve you going down and watching over her. Dom? Sam? Talk to me.”

Sam watched the Ford stop at the entrance to the subway. Two Asian men climbed out of the back and hurried down the stairs.

Before Dom had a chance to respond to Clark’s query, Sam said, “I’ve got two potential North Korean FAMs descending into the Canal Street station. Both wearing light-colored button-downs under black business suits.”

FAMs meant the same thing to all four men on the net. “Fighting-aged males.” They could be spooks, military, or any other bad actor. Of course, they could also be insurance salesmen, on their way home from work.

But Clark was betting against the latter. “Sam, you stay in the vehicle. Ding, you catch up to Dom.”

“He’s in view ahead of me,” Ding said. It was evident he was still jogging, keeping his cover going as well as closing the distance between himself and the surveillance target.

Clark finished with, “Ding and Dom, follow Allende tight. Go overt if you have to, let the DPRK assholes know you’re there, but keep her out of danger. No unnecessary risks. You will lose comms with Sam and I up here, so reestablish contact as soon as you’re able. Good luck.”

In front of Dom, the Chilean woman in the raincoat descended into the station, unaware men were watching her at this moment, and equally unaware others were waiting for her below.