Full Force and Effect

4

Veronika Martel took one more glance into her rearview mirror before turning her two-door Hyundai through the gates of the safe house. She’d checked the traffic behind her one hundred times during her drive; it was hard enough to do in the dark, but since the rain began a few minutes earlier, identifying any vehicles that might be following her had become all but impossible. Still, she told herself she was clean, she’d seen not a hint of a tail during her circuitous drive from central Ho Chi Minh City to Thu Duc, so she pulled up the drive of the two-story villa with little concern for her operational security.

A gravel parking circle sat to the side entrance of the villa and she took advantage of this, turning around to position her Hyundai so it was facing the road and ready for a fast escape. Martel was aware of no specific threats, but she was operational, and this sort of tradecraft was second nature to her.

It had been an hour and a half since meeting with the American at the Lion d’Or in Ho Chi Minh City. Thu Duc was only a dozen miles from the city center, but she’d been running a long surveillance detection route, stretched even longer by her control officer’s orders to take her time.

She sat in the Hyundai in the parking circle, listening to the rain on the roof of the vehicle. She could have gone inside the villa but she decided against it, since going inside would have entailed being around others, making small talk with people who were neither friends nor family while she waited for a call from her control officer. Martel had no interest in this. She wasn’t particularly friendly, and she most certainly could not be characterized as chatty. So she sat alone, enjoyed the patter of rain on the roof, and focused her thoughts.

North Korea. Christ.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the headrest.

Have you really fallen this far?

Veronika Martel was thirty-eight years old, an employee of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners of New York City. Duke Sharps had headhunted her after she left DGSE, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, French foreign intelligence, where she had spent more than a decade working as a case officer in embassies in the Middle East and Europe.

Now she was based at Sharps Partners’ European satellite office in Brussels, but her work in the corporate intelligence field took her all over the globe. In the past six months she’d served on operations in Mumbai, in Osaka, in Moscow, and in Madrid.

And now Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh City was unfamiliar turf for her, but Veronika went where New York told her to go, and this assignment was similar to ops she had done in Europe. Or at least it had been until her contact this evening made the unilateral decision to derail the operation by not handing over the documents he’d been tasked to bring with him from Prague.

She’d reported him to her New York control officer immediately — she wasn’t going to take the blame for the op falling apart. New York told her to head back to the safe house, but to take her time doing so, while they did what they could to rectify the situation.

Short of arranging a street mugging to get the package from Hazelton, she didn’t know what the hell her control officer in New York could do about it, but she did as ordered.

As she sat with her eyes closed her phone chirped, the sound louder than the pattering rain on the roof of the Hyundai. “Oui?”

“This is control. I’m connecting you to a local agent.”

Local agent? As far as she knew, Veronika Martel was the only Sharps employee in the area other than the pretentious bald-headed American who had ruined her evening.

There was a delay on the line, then a heavily accented Asian voice came over the speaker. “I have the package. I will be arriving at your safe house in five minutes.”

She felt certain the man was North Korean. Not a local agent, but an interested party in her mission nonetheless. She knew better than to ask any questions.

“I’ll be here,” she said.

The man quickly asked, “Was he alone when you met with him?”

“The contact? I only presume so. It was not in my brief to establish whether or not he had any coverage on him. Why do you ask?”

“Five minutes,” came the non-response to her question, and the line went dead.

Veronika climbed out of her little Hyundai and walked up to the front door. She had a key to the villa, she’d been living here for several days, but she knocked on the door nonetheless, as per the arrangement. She waited for a moment on the porch, then heard the door unlock from the inside.

She was met by a North Korean. He was one of three security men who had been watching over the occupants of the safe house. Again, not Sharps employees, but interested parties in the operation. The three men had kept their distance from her, and she from them. This one said nothing at the door, she was certain he spoke neither English nor French, and he left the entryway, heading back into the living room.

Veronika folded her umbrella and hung her coat, then she stood alone, looking out the window at the rain, waiting to see headlights in the driveway.

Her plan was to avoid the others until the package arrived, but after a few minutes she decided that as much as she didn’t want to get into a conversation with anyone right now, it was her responsibility to check on the subjects of her work here in Vietnam.

She walked into the living room and found the three security officers standing along the wall behind four men and one woman, who sat on sofas and chairs. These five were all Caucasian; they looked straight at her as she entered the room, their faces illuminated by candlelight. Even in the amber glow Martel saw the apprehension in their eyes.

She felt obligated to make some remarks to calm the group down. In English she said, “Everything is in order. I am waiting for a visitor to arrive, and then we will proceed.”

Before anyone spoke, there was a knock at the front door. The three security men looked up and started toward the entryway, but Martel waved them back into their places and went herself.

She opened the door to find a man in a black motorcycle jacket. He was Asian; she assumed he was North Korean like the others, but she sure as hell was not going to ask.

The man carried a folder in his hand. He held it out and said, “You saw no one?”

She took the folder. “You already asked me this. What is wrong? What happened?”

She looked past him and into the parking circle. Two men sat in the rain on motorcycles. A third bike, presumably belonging to the man in front of her, was parked alongside them.

The North Korean stepped into the entryway and shut the door. “The American had men with him. We were not notified of this.”

“Nor was I. As I said before, it wasn’t my job to identify surveillance.” The man did not seem satisfied with her answer, so she added, “Call New York if you’d like to make a complaint about my performance.”

The North Korean’s nostrils flared. Martel presumed he wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to like this, but she couldn’t care less. She ignored the man’s glare and began looking through the folder. Inside she found five smaller manila folders. Opening them one at a time, she fanned through five complete sets of documents: EU diplomatic passports. Czech diplomatic assignments to Pyongyang. Credit cards bound with rubber bands.

She returned to the living room; the North Korean in the black jacket followed behind. Veronika looked at the photo page of each passport and each visa, and she took her time to match the documents to the five sitting in front of her. They sat quietly, nervously waiting for her to say something, but she did not rush herself.

All the documents looked perfect, except for the last of the passports. The cover appeared to be stained with red ink. Martel ran a thumb over the embossed cover and she realized the color was no stain, as it came off easily.

Looking at her thumb, she saw it was fresh blood.

Mon Dieu, she said to herself. These men had taken these by force from the American agent.

She glanced up at the North Korean. His eyes remained on her — surely he had seen her notice the blood. She thought he was enjoying her discomfort.

“Everything is in order,” Veronika Martel said. The North Korean left without another word, and within moments she heard three motorcycles firing up and driving off.

Martel put the documents on a table and moved a lamp closer. To the entire group she said, “Your flight leaves at nine-thirty a.m., arriving in Pyongyang at eleven thirty-five. I’ll go over your legends with each of you, and then you should try to get a few hours’ sleep. I will wake everyone at six.”

The one other female in the house, a redhead in her forties, stood up from the sofa and approached. Her Australian accent was obvious. “Would you mind it if I spoke to you in private?”

Veronika Martel just shrugged and moved into the kitchen. The woman followed. She was much shorter and a little heavier than Martel, and the lighting here did her no favors. Martel thought the redhead looked as if she hadn’t slept in days. It had been rough for all five of the Australians, she knew, as she had been with them all week.

The French intelligence agent said, “What can I do for you, Dr. Powers?”

The Australian closed the door all the way. She spoke softly. “Look. I… we agreed to come. The money was incredible, obviously, but it seemed like an adventure, you know?”

“What is your question?”

“I left a family behind back in Sydney. Six months’ work, and I’m back home. That’s what was agreed on.”

Martel put a hand out on the counter, strummed her perfect nails on the tiled surface.

Dr. Powers continued, “I… I just want to make sure the terms promised me are honored.”

Martel made no attempt to whisper. “Dr. Powers, my job is to facilitate your clandestine travel safely from Sydney to Pyongyang. Nothing more. Whatever agreement you have with the DPRK, it is between yourself and the DPRK.”

Powers looked to the door to the living room nervously. “I don’t trust them. They watch over us like we are prisoners. They won’t answer my questions. I just thought… you are working with them. Can you help me? Maybe just ask them to be a little more forthcoming about the arrangements in place. Please?”

Martel took her hand from the counter next to her and placed it on the smaller woman’s shoulder. With a little smile she said, “Doctor. I understand.”

The older redhead looked relieved. “I knew you would.”

“I understand that the fact I am female and I have round eyes, to you, means I should be more sympathetic than the North Korean men acting as security here. But nothing could be further from the truth. They have use for you, I do not.” She lowered her hand and headed for the door. “When you get to Pyongyang, I’m sure your concerns will be alleviated.”

Powers all but shouted, “Do you have any idea how ridiculous that statement sounds?”

Martel was unfazed by the redhead’s anger. “I didn’t agree to work for the North Koreans. You did. Your decision is made, and you would do well to make peace with that decision, because they are not going to allow you to change your mind at this juncture.” She returned to the living room without another word.

As she passed out the documents and went over the individual legends for each of the five, she let herself wonder what would happen to these Australians. Working with the North Koreans certainly would be fraught with legitimate concern, but she expected all five of them to fulfill their contract with Pyongyang and to return home much wealthier than when they left. It was, of course, illegal work, and they were being paid with this in mind.

Martel knew very little about what these five would be doing for North Korea, but even so, she wasn’t worried about this operation from any sort of a moral standpoint. It wasn’t as if these people were nuclear scientists or rocket scientists. They were geologists, that was all. No threat to anyone, certainly, even if they were working for the North Koreans. No, this was just some industrial commercial and diplomatic subterfuge, nothing dangerous.

And then she paused for a moment, thinking about the blood on the passport and the annoying American who had no doubt shed it. If the North Koreans were willing to use violence in a foreign nation to secure the travel of these geologists, perhaps the stakes were higher than she thought.

She pushed the misgivings out of her mind, a skill she had developed and honed over her intelligence career.

Right now she just wanted to get these five on the nine-thirty flight tomorrow morning to Pyongyang, to sanitize the safe house, and then to go home.

Nothing else mattered to Veronika Martel.