Full Force and Effect

43

Veronika Martel returned to her nineteenth-floor hotel room at the Palazzo on the Las Vegas Strip, threw her purse on her bed, and sat down at her open laptop. She clicked open a program; then she slipped a connector into the base of her mobile phone and the other end into the laptop. She hit a key, and instantly the contents of the phone, or at least the contents of the phone that were the application files stolen from NewCorp’s servers, began to upload to a cloud file-sharing service. There they would be picked up by Edward Riley and forwarded on to whoever at New World Metals LLC was going to give them to the North Koreans.

She didn’t know how that end of the chain worked, and she didn’t care. All she knew was her job, and the fact she had done her job perfectly today.

It had not been an easy task. It had been an ordeal to spend the last two weeks working in an industry she knew little about while simultaneously feigning rapt fascination with Ralph Baggett, the slovenly IT director at Valley Floor. This certainly didn’t make the top ten worst assignments she had faced in her career, but she would have much rather spent her time doing most anything other than this.

Nevertheless, she’d done it. She’d not gleaned the password to the server from Baggett as she had planned, but she had been able to download the files from his terminal, after he’d put in the password himself and left the machine unattended, and that was just as good.

The fact she’d pulled it off with a minimal amount of heavy petting and no actual sex with Baggett was a bonus for her, but she had been prepared to go to whatever lengths were necessary to achieve her goal.

And now, with her operation complete, Veronika had only to return to Valley Floor mine tomorrow for her last day of her two-week stint and then endure an evening bon voyage party with several people she’d been working with in Hydrometallurgy Quality Control, as well as Baggett, who’d managed to get himself invited along.

Veronika thought it idiotic that these people she’d worked with for only two weeks were throwing a going-away party for her. In France she could have worked in an office ten years and not even known the first names of her colleagues, but this was America, and it was the American way to be silly like this.

If she had her choice she’d fly home tonight and never see any of them again.

No. Actually, this was not true. There was someone she wouldn’t mind seeing again.

Veronika found it ironic that on the day she had executed her mission, she found the actual execution of the mission to be the second most interesting thing that had happened to her.

On that note, Veronika lifted her phone to make a call. Now that she had downloaded the NewCorp files, it was time for her to call Riley and report a contact.

Among the first things an intelligence officer learns as part of his or her training in both OPSEC and PERSEC is to report all contacts with strangers up the chain of command. An idle conversation about the weather with an unfamiliar person at the taxi queue might be relevant to someone with knowledge of the larger scheme of the operation, no matter how random it feels to the operator on the ground.

Meeting the son of the U.S. President while in the act of obtaining access to the plant application server could not possibly have any sort of relevance to her New World Metals operation, but letting her boss know was SOP. Operational security on any mission dictated that an agent in the field notify his or her control officer at the first sight of anything out of the ordinary, and if anything ever qualified as out of the ordinary it would be exactly this situation.

But as she prepared to dial Riley’s New York mobile number, Veronika stopped herself.

Wait. Could this be useful?

She put the phone down and thought for a moment, and when she was finished thinking she chastised herself for taking all afternoon to come to the obvious conclusion. She’d been in the corporate intel world so long she’d forgotten how to see past her small, narrow, and mundane marching orders and take a look at the larger picture.

The larger opportunity in front of her.

No, now was not the time to dutifully consider Sharps Global Intelligence Partners’ best practices.

Now was the time to look out for herself.

The U.S. President’s son. Yes, Veronika thought. I can use this.

Veronika had lived like a rudderless ship for the past few years working in corporate intel, but the one thing that guided her was the hope — she wondered if it was fantasy — that someday she would get back to French intelligence. She’d left on bad terms three years earlier, and she’d wanted back in almost from the start.

Her old colleagues had told her to forget about it. She wasn’t ever getting back in the good graces of the executives at DGSE.

Then today happened. Today she bumped Jack Ryan, Jr. There was no question that, if exploited carefully and slowly, he could prove to be an incredible access point for French intelligence. They could learn details about the American President that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to obtain.

And they could only do it through Veronika. They’d have to take her back.

Of course, Martel would need to start a relationship with the handsome and eligible young bachelor, but that problem looked like it was sorting itself out nicely. Jack had proven to be just like so many other men in this world. He would close the distance between the two of them without her having to lift a finger.

Yes. She would begin a relationship with Ryan, she would contact DGSE, and she would tell them she was coming home with a prize.

French intelligence would welcome her back with open arms.

She wasn’t going to breathe a word of this to Riley, of course. Instead, she would mention her going-away party to Ryan the next day when he came to her department, and she would spend the evening ignoring Baggett and cultivating Ryan as an asset.

She smiled to herself, satisfied to be finishing one job and overlapping into a job that had the potential to reap incredible rewards.