Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

He’d keep his hands to himself on this one.

He found Veronika Martel at a corner table in the rear of the nearly empty restaurant, sitting with her back to the wall. She rose and shook his hand, and he gazed into her eyes and found her every bit as beautiful as the rumors.

Riley was certain she would know all about him. Or she would know what Russian intelligence wanted the world to know. She would have too much class to say anything about it, but the fact this woman was aware about the scandal that wrecked his life hung over this meeting like a weight.

But Riley told himself he wouldn’t let that threaten his authority. He chatted with the gorgeous blonde for a few minutes, a professional conversation about superficial matters. Her flight and her hotel and her impressions of the city and the United States. He found her to be intelligent but highly guarded.

Finally he got around to the subject of today’s meeting. “I know Duke talked to you about the Valley Floor assignment.”

“He did.”

“It’s not a bad posting,” he said. “You’ll be less than forty miles from Vegas, so you can commute in each morning. You’ll have to, really, no other options in the area. We’ll put you up in a nice hotel and take good care of you.

“The first week or so you’re just there to establish yourself. You’ll get the training on the diagnostic equipment here before heading over, so all you’ll be doing is looking at readouts on machinery at the rare earth hydroseparation facility. Our Science and Tech department will give you a cell phone that has the ability to pull the software we want directly off the system servers, but you’ll have to social engineer the password out of a systems administrator to obtain the access necessary.”

“I can manage that.”

“Undoubtedly,” Riley said. “New World Metals has a shipment of ore-processing equipment heading to North Korea this month, and the computers will fly in from Europe, so we do have some time constraints. This is all machinery for the refinery. All of the mining machinery is already there.”

“Where did they get that?”

“The Chinese were tossed out in such a hurry they weren’t able to take everything with them. They didn’t leave enough equipment to operate the mine in any profitable capacity, but they do have some drilling going on. The processing equipment is crucial now because the ore is starting to back up.”

“Then I won’t delay another moment to get started.”

“Excellent. I have a trainer flying into New York today. A woman from Brazil who works for Vale, a diversified metals mining concern there. She does just exactly the same thing you will be doing at the NewCorp facility. You’ll have three days to work with her and make yourself legitimate. I trust you can pull that off.”

Veronika had been slipping into and then out of roles for her entire career. She’d been a hotel desk clerk and a software engineer and a fishmonger and a college professor and even a bikini model at a Le Mans race. Seventy-two hours of intense prep could turn her into just about anything as long as scrutiny by experts wasn’t too high.

“I’ll do my best,” she said.

Riley looked into his teacup for a moment. “I’ll ask you the question Duke won’t ask. How does it make you feel to know your work will directly benefit North Korea?”

Martel was as calculating as Riley was off-the-cuff. “I don’t concern myself with that.”

“Good answer. Bloody lie, but I’ll take a lie that says what I want to hear. I know you were face-to-face with the DPRK agents in Vietnam. That was a poorly handled mess, and not my doing. You won’t see that level of unprofessionalism on this operation with me in charge, I can assure you of that.

“I also want you to understand what we are doing here. The end game is mining. Money for New World Metals, and some trickle-down for us at Sharps. We’re not employees of the North Koreans. We’re not doing anything we can’t be proud of.”

Martel considered mentioning the American employee of Sharps’s whose blood she’d wiped off of the passport. But she decided against it. Riley wanted to start fresh in this operation, and she felt the same way. There was no reason to reintroduce any ugly issues. She wanted him to understand he wouldn’t have to worry about her morale on this job. It was just a job, like all the others.

“Mr. Riley, I appreciate the gesture you seem to be making, but don’t feel like you need to tend to my morale. I honestly don’t give a damn what we are doing, who we are doing it for, or who we are doing it to. You have quite ably outlined my duties at Valley Floor, and I will comply to the best of my ability. You can rest assured I require no more special care than that.”

“I feel exactly the same way. We are men and women in a line of work where morality only gets in the way.”

“That’s a good way of putting it, Mr. Riley.”

Edward Riley’s face slipped into an easy grin. “You and I are going to get along perfectly, Ms. Martel.”

21

The conference room in the Situation Room below the West Wing began filling with principals before nine a.m. The President arrived soon after, and he waved the eleven men and women in front of him back to their seats.

The focus of today’s discussion, as written on the agenda and left at each place setting, was almost comically simplistic.

“United Nations sanctions options in pursuit of solutions re North Korea.”

The United States and the United Nations had spent most of the past seventy years pursuing solutions re North Korea, and when Ryan noticed the heading on his briefing paper he let out a slight groan and mumbled that he sure hoped they’d have their solution figured out before lunch.

In front of him at the table was his national security staff, mostly, but also his secretary of commerce and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as well as his chief of staff, Arnie Van Damm.

The conference began with a discussion by Jay Canfield of the specific tactics the North Koreans were using to move money, from banks in the Cayman Islands and Singapore, where large deposits had been made, to smaller accounts in Brunei, Antigua, Mexico, Singapore, and other locations. It was clear several large payments had been made in the past few months, but the CIA did not have the access into the banking systems to know where the money had gone.

After a lot of detailed and often arcane explanations, Canfield wrapped up his presentation in plain speak. “Suffice it to say, Mr. President, that somebody is paying North Korea a hell of a lot of money, and North Korea, in turn, is wasting no time in blowing a hell of a lot of money. Who is paying them, and the full scope of what they are buying, is still unknown to us.”

Next the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Danielle Rush, laid out her proposal, developed along with the secretaries of state, commerce, and treasury, to seek a UN resolution enhancing existing economic sanctions against the state of North Korea.

The President listened to the twenty-minute presentation in silence.

When it was over Ryan slid his fingers under his eyeglasses and rubbed his tired eyes. “I get that we need to stop these transactions. I just don’t see what the hell we will achieve by going to the United Nations for another round of economic sanctions on Korea. All this talk about what the United Nations is going to do. The UN can’t do anything. It’s not an enforcement body. It relies on its member nations to enforce sanctions. What makes you think all these countries that are making money off of North Korea will comply with the new sanctions?”

Secretary of State Scott Adler fielded this. “We come out very strongly and say any nation who knowingly circumvents the sanctions will meet with unilateral sanctions from the U.S. Commerce Department. We make a big noise about getting our European and Asian partners on board with this. Once we have the UN stamp on this action, we can add our own measures to make it more effective.”