Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

The young Marines had suspected it from the beginning, but the experts in South Korea confirmed the find. These were the hollow stages of an intercontinental ballistic missile, and they corresponded in diameter to the Taepodong-2, North Korea’s still-unsuccessful longest-range nuclear-delivery vehicle.

Determining where all this equipment came from was the next order of business for the intelligence organizations of the West.

17

French intelligence operative Veronika Martel climbed out of a taxi on the corner of 88th and Columbus and began walking east in the rain. Her black umbrella protected her from the downpour, but it also helped her blend in with the other pedestrians, many of whom were under black umbrellas themselves.

Martel had no real reason to run a surveillance detection route here on the Upper West Side of New York City. It wasn’t like she was in Tripoli or Bucharest or Dubrovnik; she wasn’t even on the job at the moment. But SDRs were part of Martel’s life. She’d learned to leave nothing to chance, to expect every opportunity to turn into a potential for danger, to concern herself with the minutiae of her tradecraft to keep herself safe.

The reasons for her concerns about everyone and everything all boiled down to a simple explanation: Veronika Martel did not trust the world.

Even though her SDR took her north, south, east, and west through the rainy mid-morning streets of one of the most congested metropolises on earth, she arrived at the offices of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners at ten a.m. Exactly on time. After a quick security check by a guard who met her in the ground-floor lobby of the building, the two of them took the elevator up five stories and the door opened on the marble foyer of the executive office of the nation’s most successful corporate intelligence concern.

A guard force of six men manned the lobby; they all wore business suits and earpieces and salt-and-pepper hair over physiques that were still hardened from physical activity, making the men appear at once both distinguished and dangerous. Martel knew these guards were all ex-military, just like the force at her satellite office in Belgium, and just like the guard forces at all twenty-six sat offices around the globe. The men were polite and professional, but they all leered at her. Martel had come to expect this from men, and as always, it only stood to make her both uncomfortable and annoyed.

She didn’t come to New York often and she had not seen Wayne Sharps since the day he hired her three years earlier; she was virtually always in the field and she liked it that way, but she’d been summoned by the director of her company and she knew the value of showing her face around the home office once in a while to remind the execs who she was.

She felt like she knew the reason behind her summons. The operation in Ho Chi Minh City two weeks earlier had been an odd one. The North Koreans’ presence at the safe house, the Australians and their trepidation about what they had gotten themselves into, the American asset refusing to hand over the package. And the blood on the document, indicating it had been taken by force.

Veronika knew she had done everything correctly. Just as instructed. Nothing more, nothing less. She wasn’t in any trouble. She thought they were just bringing her in for consultations, to make certain she was comfortable with everything, or at least comfortable enough to keep her mouth shut and her head down.

And Veronika had no problem with that at all.

She was escorted into Wayne Sharps’s office by a secretary who Martel thought too young and attractive to have earned her position through merit alone, and once inside, she took in the view. The fifth-story corner office had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out to Columbus Avenue and 77th, presenting a stellar vista of the American Museum of Natural History across the street. Sharps himself sat behind his large desk with his feet up. He was on the phone, speaking Arabic—and speaking it well, Martel noted.

She sat down on a modern sectional sofa in a sunken seating area across the large office. Tea and coffee were placed in front of her, but she instead just looked at the sofa. Duke Sharps was known as particularly lecherous, and Veronika wondered how many women the sixty-year-old man had taken right here in his office.

She pushed the thought out of her mind. If he tried anything on her she’d send him headfirst out the window and down into Columbus Avenue traffic.

Finally he hung up the phone and spun the chair around, a little too dramatically, as far as Veronika was concerned. He crossed the room as she stood from the sofa. He was burly but not unattractive, though his face had leathered noticeably in the three years since she’d last seen him in person.

“My dear Ms. Martel,” he said with a wide grin.

“Lovely to see you, Mr. Sharps.”

“It’s Duke to you,” he said.

It’s Duke to everyone, she thought to herself.

“Veronika,” she replied, because she felt she had to, not because she liked the familiarity. She was European, after all, and normal Europeans rarely addressed business colleagues by their given names.

Moreover, Veronika Martel was not normal. She preferred keeping everyone at arm’s length.

They sat down, and Sharps poured coffee for Veronika without asking, even though she would have preferred tea. He asked her about her trip over, about the office back in Belgium she was based out of, and about a job she had done in Paris recently involving a city administrator and a problem with his daughter.

It was a small-time operation. Nothing that would be brought to Duke’s attention, since, at any one time, his company employed hundreds of operatives on dozens and dozens of missions. To Veronika it seemed as if he had just been brushing up on her file while she rode the elevator to his office.

After the small talk, Sharps got down to business. “Veronika, I read the reports. You were stellar on that job in Vietnam. You are one of my bright lights here in the corporation. I expect you to go far.”

She smiled dryly. She didn’t tell him about the blood on the passport. She didn’t have a clue if he already knew about it, but she wouldn’t bring it up, because she was , in fact, a bright light. She was an operative who did her job and kept her mouth shut.

She thought he would next show some contrition for the complications of the mission.

But instead Sharps said, “I was lucky to steal you away from DGSE.”

Veronika paused to regroup, then she responded with typical coyness. “You weren’t lucky. You were wealthy. That stole me away. Plus the fact that I’d been fired from DGSE and had few other options.”

He hesitated with a slightly open mouth, trying to decide how to take her comment. Apparently he took it as a joke, because he laughed boisterously. “Despite your problems in France, you didn’t come cheap, that’s for damn certain. But you are worth every last cent.”

“I do try to create value for myself.”

He nodded aggressively and repositioned himself on the sofa. Surprised by the movement, Veronika thought he was going to try and slide closer to her, but instead he just crossed his legs. She was uncertain if her surprised look had scared him off at the last second.

After a moment he said, “I have a new assignment for you. I expect it to last a few weeks in duration, though it might run over just a tad.”

“That is fine.”

“It’s a continuation of what you did in Vietnam.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll give you the background you didn’t have when you started this op. The North Koreans have discovered a huge deposit of rare earth minerals. I guess I should say the Chinese have discovered it, but that lunatic Choi has kicked out the Chinese, and now North Korea will continue operations on their own.”