Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

Edward Riley of London became the twenty-seven-year-old SIS station chief of Bulgaria, making him the youngest in the service in more than thirty years.

But Riley did not stop there. He worked hard, which was important, and he had no qualms about using people and situations to his personal benefit. By his thirtieth birthday his skyrocketing career had landed him in Italy as station chief, a posting orders of magnitude more important than running the shop in nearby Bulgaria.

But in Rome it unraveled quickly. By violating orders and working with one group of local criminals he disrupted another local cell of Russian Mafia who were connected to the government in Moscow, as virtually all Russian criminals were. The criminals appealed to the SVR, Russian foreign intelligence, and the SVR developed an operation to get Riley out of the way.

The Russians identified Riley as the UK station chief, and then they targeted him, not for any lethal measures—that would have brought more trouble than the matter was worth—they just wanted him gone.

The Russians tricked him, though when it was over he had no one but himself to blame. A simple honey trap. Edward had a British wife and three small children, but one day he sat down next to a twenty-four-year-old Romanian model named Alina at a café he frequented on the Via Bergamo, and he started up a conversation.

She claimed to be an exchange student and she showed more interest in her textbook than in the handsome Briton chatting her up, but her beauty absolutely floored him, so he kept talking. He saw himself as the pursuer, so he didn’t think for one moment he was being played. He asked for her number and she refused, but she showed up at the same café a few days later, and they went for a walk on the Via Piave and soon enough they had somehow wandered into the lobby of the Hotel Oxford on the Via Boncompagni. He had no idea how a credit card in one of his aliases just appeared from his wallet into his hand, and then into the hand of the desk clerk, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand how he and young Alina found themselves in a fourth-floor suite on the bed.

A bloody mysterious thing all around, he told himself when it was over.

For her part Alina did not know she was working for the Russians. Instead, she thought she had been hired for this seduction by a British tabloid. She’d been paid well, and the tabloid, in fact, existed, but Alina had no idea it was owned, like much of the UK, by Russian concerns, and it went where Russian intelligence told it to go.

Even though the honey trap had been set and the paparazzi were in town to catch the young British spy in the act, it was really not quite so simple. Riley, like most adulterous spies, applied the tradecraft of his work to his pleasure. For a month he and his Romanian lover kept a clandestine relationship that would have made his MI6 training cadre proud. They used drop phones, they met in out-of-the-way cafés only after running surveillance detection routes, they varied their routines. Alina kept tipping off the cameramen as to where they would be and what they would be doing, but Riley kept the affair one step ahead of them, though wholly unaware anyone was on his trail.

On a moonlit beach in Sardinia the cameras finally caught him. Riley and Alina were nude, in flagrante delicto, and as the flashes flashed and the shutters clicked, thirty-one-year-old Edward Riley knew his career and his marriage were now items of the past.

The British tabloid was giddy with its reportage: photos of the topless blonde, the dashing young spy, bare-chested, on top of her, staring into the lens with a deer-in-the-headlights look that solidified the sordid nature of the tryst.

“On Her Majesty’s Sleazy Circus,” read the headline, and as Riley looked at the article the next morning he knew he’d been had, and he wished the rag had only the decency to admit what they’d done had been done for fucking Moscow by bylining the piece “Written with help from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.”

Riley was recalled to London, of course. He was shamed out of the service after years of work and the paparazzi chased him and his family outside their flat in Knightsbridge.

Something snapped within Riley and he turned to self-preservation mode, not allowing himself the self-acuity to take responsibility for his action. He blamed England, his own country, for the debacle—certainly not himself.

He kept a stiff upper lip for a few months, but there’s something about being the most publicly recognizable spy in your country that works against you, and Riley knew he’d have to do a runner and leave England behind.

And in swooped Duke Sharps. Riley had never met the man, he knew him only by his unscrupulous reputation. Duke had asked Edward to come over for a meeting, all expenses paid by Sharps Global Intelligence Partners, of course. Edward did so, he’d listened to the American’s spiel about the work, and he’d agreed on the spot. Edward was ecstatic to be back in the intelligence game, even in a commercial capacity. He could do unscrupulous. He’d go into it for the money, eschew right and wrong and good and evil, and look out for himself now.

Of course, he’d been concerned that his new notoriety would make him completely ineffectual as an intelligence asset. But something happened that Edward Riley did not expect. He found his fame worked to his advantage. In this odd version of intelligence work at Sharps Partners, having a reputation served him well. He met the important people, he dined with potential clients and CEOs, and he appeared on television as a talking head, giving his view on UK intelligence issues from New York bureaus of the big news stations.

And he made a lot of money. Sharps paid its operatives more when their operations were successful, unlike MI6, where the bloke meeting an informant over a dinner of whale blubber in Iceland with six years of service earned the exact same amount as the bloke with six years of shooting it out with Russian Spetsnaz in a shit-stained basement in Chechnya.

Though he had some “shine time” on TV, Riley wasn’t a figurehead at Sharps. That was Sharps’s job. No, the thirty-six-year-old Englishman worked surprisingly hard, built operations from the ground up, and put in the hours and the effort. He ran intelligence assets and demanded every bit of the same excellence he’d expected from his agents and officers when he was an MI6 station chief.

Sharps used Riley on the tough jobs, and Riley didn’t care. He was in it for the money, full stop.

By the time the three-year anniversary of his fall from grace came around he took a thorough look at his life and he realized he bloody well loved his job and his life of amorality.

The Crown could bugger off.

—

Edward Riley pulled his BMW sports car up to the valet stand at the Mandarin Oriental near Columbus Circle; he climbed out and winked at the young Dominican valet as the man approached the vehicle with an appreciative grin.

“Staying with us, sir?” he said, nearly salivating at the prospect of folding himself into the luxurious sports car.

“Just a meeting over tea at Asiate.”

The valet turned away from the car. “Perhaps with the woman who just arrived by taxi?”

“Tall, blond, legs for days?”

The Dominican smiled. He wanted Riley’s life, and he did not hide the fact. “That’s the one, sir.”

The Englishman ate it up. “Haven’t yet met her in person, but I’ve heard reports she is quite something.”

“A beauty, sir. You enjoy your meeting, and I’ll take great care of this beauty.”

Riley was a single man, if not on paper. His marriage had fallen apart in London, right after his fall from grace, and his wife—one of these days he’d go home and make it official, or she could bloody well come here with the papers to sign—had herself moved on. The thought of bedding this Frenchwoman was appealing, even though he hadn’t even met her yet, but this operation was too damn important for him to mix business with pleasure.