Full Force and Effect

53

After waiting for two days in Las Vegas for instructions from the home office, Veronika Martel finally received orders from Edward Riley to fly to New York. She didn’t even check into a hotel; instead, she drove right to the Sharps Global Intelligence Partners building, and there she was led into Sharps’s fifth-floor office.

Riley was there, but he said surprisingly little. Sharps did most of the talking as he grilled her about her actions over her two weeks at Valley Floor.

Martel had made the decision early on not to mention her contact with Jack Ryan, Jr. Had she done so from the start she would be in the clear, but now she saw no way she could explain that he had been around her at the time she was operational at Valley Floor and that she had simply neglected to mention it. If she revealed his actions, actions she thought at the time were born from his interest in her, then she would look either incompetent or complicit.

And Veronika did not think for a moment Riley would believe she was incompetent.

She didn’t see herself as such, either, but she wholly admitted she had been greedy. Her desire to turn a mundane corporate intelligence operation into a one-woman attempt to recruit an important contact and in so doing leave her corporate work behind had been foolish, and she had been grossly overconfident.

Now all she could do was mitigate the damage. Bury any evidence of her attempt to recruit Ryan and leave Sharps behind, and portray herself as the unjust victim of a Sharps op that had been compromised somewhere else.

This worked surprisingly well. Sharps had allowed that an unknown actor had showed up during the New World Metals operation first in Vietnam, then during a phase that occurred here in New York, and finally in Las Vegas. Sharps said that while Veronika had been involved in Vietnam and Vegas, she had no knowledge of the operation in New York, so he was of the opinion she was not to blame for whatever leak had allowed the theft of the mobile phone and the compromise of the operation.

Martel gave a full-throated defense of her actions; she was careful not to cast any aspersions on Riley, because he was (a) her supervisor and someone she would have to continue working with, and (b) right here in the room.

She wondered later if she should have gone ahead and beat up on the Englishman anyway, because Riley had maintained his uncomfortable silence throughout the entire meeting, and Veronika took this as either some sort of culpability, or even weakness.

When it was over, Duke told Veronika that she would be required to stay in town, perhaps for just a few days, but perhaps for longer.

That afternoon she found a vacation rental on the Lower East Side. She wasn’t operational, so she rented the property in her own name, but in a nod to her personal security she performed the transaction on the Internet and picked the key card up from a drop box so she wouldn’t have to deal with anyone face-to-face.

The place wasn’t home, and her unit was a small third-floor walk-up, but on the inside anyway it felt a little like Paris. It was better than a shoebox New York City hotel, and it was much better than a gaudy Vegas faux-wonderland casino hotel.

Sam Driscoll had spent a week and a half watching, filming, and reviewing every person who entered the offices of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners. He was across the street at an angle, north of Duke Sharps’s building on Columbus, and sometimes he couldn’t get great pictures of people entering. But virtually every person who exited the building got their picture taken, and these went into the facial-recognition program.

His boring work paid off on day ten, when the woman going by the name Élise Legrande entered the building. Ryan had made special mention of her, and he told Sam that anything he could do to track the woman after she left would be appreciated.

Sam had barely left his rented studio flat in a week and a half, so he was more than happy to take the opportunity to go off in hot pursuit. When she left the building an hour later Sam was seated on a park bench on the sidewalk next to the American Museum of Natural History, with a twelve-speed bike and a backpack next to him. The woman climbed into a cab and he took off after her, then easily tailed her a few blocks south to a coffee shop, where he saw her working on a tablet computer.

After an hour over a tea and her iPad, she climbed into another taxi. This time Sam had a difficult time tracking her, because she went all the way through Midtown, finally ending up on the Lower East Side. If he had been in a car or even on a motorcycle he would have lost her, but with his bike he was able to skirt traffic, and traffic laws, so he managed to keep her cab in sight until she climbed out on Clinton Street, put a code into a key box hanging from a railing in front of an apartment building, removed an electronic key card, and then carried her luggage up to the door.

Sam waited to see a light turn on on the third floor, and then he pedaled his bike all the way back up to 77th and Columbus.

The next morning Veronika rose early, dressed, and headed out on foot to a café for breakfast, and then she walked to a local market. She told herself she’d be here for a while, so she filled a grocery cart with food and drinks, and even flowers, and took it all back to her place.

It was a struggle to get everything up the three flights of stairs, but she managed, and she unlocked her door with her key card and struggled some more getting everything in and on the counter. After she had done this, she turned around and headed into her living room, and then she stopped cold.

She felt the expression of panic on her face, so she fought against it, and did her best to appear nonchalant.

She asked, “How did you find me?”

Jack Ryan, Jr., sat on the sofa, his legs crossed. He wore a dark gray pin-striped suit and a burgundy tie, and he appeared utterly calm.

“Sometimes the old-fashioned ways work best.”

“You’ve been watching Sharps’s office?”

“A colleague has.”

“What do you want?”

“Sit down, Veronika.”

Hearing her own name brought the panic back, but she did as instructed, and she tried again to feign an air of detachment. “How did you get into the apartment?” When Ryan did not immediately speak, she said, “Let me guess. You used the same site-code hack your people used to get into my hotel room in Las Vegas.”

Ryan replied, “Sometimes the new ways work best.”

“Who do you work for?”

Ryan did not reply.

“Like father, like son? You are CIA?”

He shook his head. “I know people. That’s all. No law against that. Sometimes they need help. You are the one who has to explain herself.”

“Corporate intelligence is as old as corporations themselves. I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of.”

Ryan chuckled, and it angered her.

“What is it you think you have on me?”

“Veronika Aimée Martel, age thirty-eight. Born Rambouillet, France. You served in the DGSE for seven years, received high marks, very high. Then you had an affair with a deputy of the French National Assembly.” Ryan wasn’t reading this, he had it memorized. “Not a big deal in France, I don’t guess, unless his wife happens to be the vice secretary of the Socialist Party.”

Veronika crossed her arms. A reflexive action to guard herself from danger.

“A bad decision on your part, but it shouldn’t have affected your career as a spy. Still, you got banished from the service, scooped up by Duke Sharps, and put back to work.”

“Very good, Jack. You have sources. That doesn’t give you the right to break into my flat.”

Now Ryan uncrossed his legs and looked forward. “My friends were there, in Ho Chi Minh City, the evening Colin Hazelton was murdered.”

Martel made no reaction. She didn’t know the name, but she could guess who Hazelton was. Still, she gave nothing away.

“They got a good picture of you that night, and they have the ability to put faces with names, but nothing came up on you. My guess is either DGSE or Sharps had all files with your image erased.”

“Not all, obviously — otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“You used your real name to rent this place. My friends searched for Veronika Martel, and they found some references to you. No image, but they didn’t need the image once they had the name.”

“What do you want? I didn’t kill this man in Ho Chi Minh City. I don’t even know what you are talking about.”

“North Korean assassins were in Vietnam, in the Czech Republic, in Vegas, and right here in New York. People are dying to keep your mission up and running.”

“It’s not my mission.”

“No. It’s Edward Riley’s mission. But you are his foot soldier, and now you are going to help my friends tie him directly to North Korea.”

She laughed now. “Ridiculous. He isn’t working with North Korea.”

“DPRK goons seem to turn up conveniently wherever he needs them. That’s good enough for me.”

“If that was true, they would be here now, wouldn’t they?”

“Believe me, there were concerns they would be. But I have friends all over your block, ready for them, and they swept your place for bugs. The North Koreans seem to have forgotten about you for the time being. My guess is you are sidelined, out of the operation after what happened in Las Vegas.”

“I hope that is true. If I am done, then I will return to Brussels and this will all be behind me.”

“You don’t understand the stakes, Veronika. You are in danger as long as you are working with Sharps. If the North Koreans think for a second you failed them, they will do to you what they did to Colin Hazelton.”

Ryan crossed over to her side of the sitting area and knelt in front of her. He moved so close she thought he was going to kiss her.

“Help us, and we will protect you.”

“I need no protection. I do need you to leave.” Ryan didn’t move back. “You tricked me once, in Las Vegas. You won’t trick me again.”

“This is no trick. I—”

“Are you going to arrest me? No? That is not the job of the CIA.” She smiled now. She had been off kilter for a while, but she felt like she had regained her ground. And now the man in front of her, so smug and sure of himself, did not know what to say. “Get out.”

“Please, Veronika.”

“Out!”

Jack Ryan sighed, then he pulled out a pen and wrote his phone number on a magazine. “My friends will keep someone in town. If you change your mind, or if you are in any trouble and need us, call me, and someone will be here in minutes.”

Veronika stood and pointed to the door. “Get out.”

Ryan left the apartment, certain that the woman behind him had no idea how far the North Koreans were willing to go to see this to the end.