Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

“You are required to—”

“You are required to sit there and shut the fuck up!”

The Austrian recoiled in surprise.

“Now, let’s figure out where we stand here. You are Hans Tischer. You are with the Austrian delegation to the UN. That means, even though my partner has pictures of you bumping uglies with some teenage hooker right in the middle of America’s greatest city, I have to let you go.”

The man on the massage table did not hide his expression of relief.

“But I can hold you here till my friend the photog from the New York Post shows up outside and gets into position.”

Tischer gasped now. “ Nein! No. Please, you must not do this.”

“Of course, you could always shoot out the back. Yeah . . . might work.” He affected another half-shrug. “Although I already told my pal from the Daily News that you might try that, so I don’t really recommend it.”

“ Mein Gott. Why are you doing this to me?”

Riley took a step closer. “When your ugly mug is on the front page of the paper, are you gonna tell your family that little girl said she was eighteen? Will they believe you? She’s in an ambulance outside, and she don’t look eighteen to me, Hans.”

Tischer covered his face with his hands.

“I’ve gotta cut you loose, but I don’t gotta like it, and there’s no law that says I’ve gotta do it without walkin’ you by the press. You know what I’m sayin’?”

Tischer sobbed softly.

Riley leaned in now, closer and softer. “Or I can make it all go away. No name, no picture. No problem.”

Tischer looked up, eyes wide in disbelief. “Yes? How?”

Even softer, Riley said, “This is where it gets interesting, Hans.” He looked back over his shoulder to make sure the door was closed. “Three days from now your committee has a procedural vote.” Just as Riley expected, the emotions displayed on the face of the man in front of him ran the gamut. From confusion to outrage to a new concern.

After a few moments he said, “What is this?”

Riley shrugged, still in character. “It’s one guy needin’ a favor, that’s you. And another guy needin’ a favor. That’s me.”

“Who are you? You aren’t a policeman.”

“I’m the guy with the pictures of you in the act, I’m the guy with the friends in the press outside, and I’m the guy who will fucking burn you if you don’t vote against the sanctions hearing.”

“Why?”

Riley just said, “Why? Why does anyone do what they do? Why do you pull your pants down in nasty-ass places like this?” It wasn’t an answer to the question, but it had the effect of shutting down Tischer’s line of questioning.

The Austrian man looked down at the floor for a long time. “It won’t matter. If I vote the way you want me to, it won’t matter. There are nine of us. We took a straw poll yesterday, and the majority are in favor of the Security Council sanctions hearing. The vote on Friday is just a formality.”

Riley smiled. “You might just find others have changed their position since the last straw poll. The world is coming to its senses on the matter.”

Tischer realized what this man was saying. He’d gotten to others on the committee. The middle-aged Austrian did not doubt this for a second.

He said, “I tell you I will vote no, and you will let me go without anyone seeing me?”

“Yes. I go out and tell my buddy from the Post I was wrong, you weren’t here. He and I hit the road. Five minutes later you walk on out and go back to your life like nothing happened. You vote no on Friday and you’ll get an envelope with the disk with all the images my colleague took. You destroy that, and this whole little escapade is behind you.”

Tischer said, “You can’t possibly work for North Korea. Can you?”

“Of course not. I’m NYPD. Along with this, let’s just say I moonlight for an interested party. We’ll leave it there.”

Tischer nodded slowly. “Okay. Let us leave it there.”

Riley smiled.

30

John Clark, Ding Chavez, and Sam Driscoll had been in the city for five days before they managed to tail Sharps employee Edward Riley to the massage parlor on 29th Street. Driscoll had the eye when Riley went in, but then he continued on, walking under his umbrella up the street a few hundred yards, bought a gyro from a vendor on 3rd Avenue, and then stepped inside a covered bus stop to shield himself from the rain while he ate it. He was just within sight of the building Riley had entered, but he’d be useful only if he pulled his camera and its zoom lens from his backpack.

For now, however, he enjoyed his gyro, because he’d handed the eye off to Chavez.

Domingo Chavez approached from the other direction. He wore a suit and tie and talked into a mobile phone. He stopped inside a Duane Reade drugstore across the street from Riley’s destination, and he began looking at umbrellas at a stand. From his vantage point here he had a perfect view of the entrance to the building less than thirty yards away.

His conversation into his phone continued; it was Clark at the other end and he was back at the safe house, sitting in front of a computer and watching his men’s movements on a computerized map. Their banter was inane cover material about the perfect weather “back home” in L.A. as compared with here in New York. When Ding stopped in the pharmacy, Clark saw this on his map, and when Ding said—in a hushed voice—“across the street from my poz, basement entrance,” Clark began scanning the area on Map of the World for information.

It took just seconds to realize the location was a massage parlor. There were links to a webpage with a phone number and an offer of “Asian massage” that, without coming right out and offering sex for money, certainly implied as much by filling the webpage full of young Asian women in lingerie.

Clark was pretty sure this wasn’t the kind of place you got a referral from your doc to visit if you needed help treating a chronic sports injury.

He relayed his findings to Ding, who by then had begun browsing through other parts of the pharmacy. Ding made no reply; he just continued talking about the weather and glancing through the glass at the front of the room.

—

Riley left the building after just ten minutes, and on a hunch Sam stuck around while Ding trailed the target back in the direction of his car.

Five minutes after this, a nervous-looking middle-aged man in dress slacks and an open-collared dress shirt came up the steps from the exit of the building. Sam finished his gyro and reached into his backpack, from where he retrieved a Nikon with a 300-millimeter lens, and even as he snapped off a dozen pictures of the man’s face he had a feeling he knew who he was.

The man stood in the rain as if he were unaware of it while he hailed a taxi. Sam slipped his camera into his bag and headed back to the safe house.

—

Sharps Global Intelligence Partners’ corporate HQ was on the Upper West Side, so The Campus had secured a safe house nearby, in a sixteenth-floor condo on West 79th Street.

It was a simple three-bedroom, two-thousand-square-foot property, and the safe house itself gave the team no direct overwatch of any part of Sharps’s operation, but this wasn’t a normal surveillance. Their intentions had been simply to find any of Sharps’s operatives in the field, and track their movements and their contacts.

Their mission to prove Sharps was working with North Korea had taken on even more significance when Gerry called the team the day before and had them assemble for a conference call.

Gerry had started the conference by saying, “I’m sure you all have seen the news that there is going to be a procedural vote in the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee next week on the North Korean situation. Nine UN bureaucrats will decide if the request from the Ryan White House meets the arcane conditions to go before a full Security Council vote.