Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

She nodded. “What is it?”

He looked around to make sure they were alone, and then he placed a folded sheet of paper through the fence wire. She took it.

“Don’t open it,” he said. “Can you give it to Director Hwang? I don’t know if I will see him at the factory today.”

Despite his instructions, she opened it. It was written in Chinese. “I speak Mandarin, but I can’t read it. What does it say?”

Adam was pissed, but this was part of NOC work. Misjudging how someone would react. Last night in bed he’d put it at seventy-five percent that she would do what he asked without question. Clearly now, he’d made the wrong call. He said, “I can’t tell you. It’s about the factory. Concerns we have about the conditions. He will not be mad at you. You can’t even read it.”

She was on guard. “Who are you?”

“You know who I am. Shan Xin.”

She seemed very suspicious now, and Adam worried he’d overplayed his relationship with the Australian woman. He reached a hand through the fence. “You know what? Never mind. I’ll give it to him myself.”

But Powers put the sheet in her pocket. “I’ll see him in the lobby before he leaves for work. He has breakfast with his family in the restaurant there. It’s a luxury we foreign contractors do not enjoy. Spending time with our families, I mean.” She paused. “Let me guess. You would like it if I didn’t let anyone see me hand it to him, wouldn’t you?”

Adam just nodded.

“And it’s about conditions at the factory?”

He nodded again.

“You think he gives a damn?”

“Probably not.”

She shrugged. “Okay. I’ll do it. If you are lucky, they will send you home for complaining. Hell, maybe I should try it.”

Adam said, “Let’s see how it goes for me first.”

“Good idea.”

71

Duke Sharps lunched alone at a back table at Nice Matin restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, but he wasn’t very hungry. He picked at the turkey-and-avocado sandwich in front of him and he sipped a gin martini, very dirty, while he read The New York Times .

The above-the-fold article was about the assassination attempt on President Jack Ryan three days earlier, and this article had positively ruined his appetite.

The U.S. government claimed to have evidence tying the attack to North Korea. They weren’t revealing the source of their intel, and at this point it looked like some unsourced and unsubstantiated leak out of the White House, but the Times was running with it.

Sharps thought it was probably a lie, but even so, this lie could end up costing him a great deal of money. The Ryan administration was doing everything it could to beef up sanctions on North Korea, apparently even taking the extraordinary step of fingering them in the Mexico City massacre. It was incredible to Sharps that Ryan would blame Pyongyang for the killing of one U.S. ambassador, nine American Secret Service agents, and thirty-seven Mexican nationals, and the injuring of more than a hundred fifty, dozens critically.

Who knows, thought Sharps. Maybe they did have something on North Korea. But whatever they had, it would be tangential, a stretch. America was blaming who they wanted to blame for the attack, and it pissed Sharps off because his contract with Óscar Roblas’s New World Metals depended on North Korea getting a fair shake on the international markets.

Sharps stopped reading suddenly, and then he slowly lowered the newspaper in front of him, looking over the top as he did so.

John Clark sat in the chair on the other side of Sharps’s table. His face was placid, his legs were crossed, and he leaned back. Sharps hadn’t heard him sit down. The old bastard could still skulk around like the snake eater he used to be.

Duke saw the confidence on the man’s face, and he fought a sudden and unfamiliar feeling of uncertainty. He tried to make himself sound self-assured. “To what do I owe this pleasure, Mr. Clark?”

“No pleasure for you, Duke. You are sitting with the grim reaper.”

Sharps folded the paper and placed it in his lap, and then he leaned forward. “I beg your pardon?”

“If you had any thin fantasies of continuing on after today, you should probably go ahead and abandon that hope, because your life is over.”

Sharps chuckled. “I ran you out of town a few weeks ago. Circumstances not unlike this, if I remember correctly. If you think you have something on me, something big and bold and brash enough to where you can come back to my city all chuff and tough . . . well, then, let’s hear it.”

“I’d much rather you saw it.”

Duke Sharps blinked. “ Saw it?”

Clark lifted his hands from under the table. In them he clutched a stack of eight-by-ten photographs.

“These are all time-stamped, but I won’t bore you with those details.”

“What are they?”

He slapped them down, one by one, and as they dropped on Duke’s turkey-and-avocado sandwich, Clark narrated. “This is you with your man Edward Riley.” It was a photo of the two men leaving Sharps Partners together. He dropped another photo. “This is your employee Veronika Martel entering your building.”

More photos dropped in quick succession. “This is your man Riley going to Martel’s apartment, and this is Riley leaving Martel’s apartment. This is Martel being carted out in a body bag.”

Sharps cocked his head. He started to say something but John Clark did not pause to let him speak. “This one is your man Riley in Mexico, at the property owned by your client, Óscar Roblas de Mota.”

He tossed down another picture, it spun around to Sharps’s chest, but he caught it. “This is your man Riley with a North Korean intelligence agent.”

“What in the hell is—”

“And this is your man Riley, a North Korean intelligence agent, and a poor fellow tied to a chair. That man is Adel Zarif, the would-be assassin of the President of the United States.”

Sharps did not even try to stammer an explanation or a quip. He turned white, looked back up to Clark, opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Clark leaned close. “Nothing? Okay . . . let me help you. Say that the photos are fakes.”

Duke cocked his head.

Clark nodded. “Go ahead.”

“Well . . . they are fakes. Complete forgeries. My attorneys will prove that—”

Clark leaned back in his chair. “Zarif is alive, he’s in U.S. custody, and he is singing like a bird. He’s fingered Riley, and we have video. Mexican police have two Cuban intelligence officers in custody as well, wounded but talking, and they will confirm coordinating with your employee in Cuernavaca. Apparently they are pissed, because it wasn’t till they were down there and under fire that they realized they had been co-opted into a plan to capture and kill the would-be presidential assassin before he could reveal the ringleaders of the plot.”

The stammer came now, and it was even more pathetic than Clark expected it to be. “John . . . you have to believe me. I had nothing to do with any of this. No knowledge whatsoever. Riley must have gone behind my back to—”

“It’s over, Sharps. Everything. You’ll go to prison or you’ll spend the next decade and all your money trying to stay out of prison. No one in this town, in this country, on this earth, will associate with you, because doing so will bring them nothing but hell.”

“What . . . what do you want?”

Clark chuckled now. “To watch you swing. Nothing more.”

“Come on. Come on! ” Sharps shouted it now, and the entire restaurant turned to the two older men in the corner.

Clark said nothing.