Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

But Chavez and Caruso climbed up on the southbound platform, fifty yards away from the gaggle of cops across the station, and they made it up to street level with no one noticing them.

Sam picked them up a few minutes later and they were back in the 79th Street safe house shortly after that.

—

By the time Domingo and Dominic sat down with a bottle of water and a gun-cleaning kit, Campus IT staffers had already reviewed all the relevant NYPD and Metropolitan Transportation Authority camera footage in the area, and they saw nothing that identified their two operatives. There was always a chance some kid on the train had gotten his phone out, but this wasn’t an event likely to have been recorded, for the simple fact that everyone on that train was in immediate mortal peril and knew reaching for a phone or raising a hand to point a camera might have earned them a bullet to the head.

After spending hours on an after-action hot wash of the event with Clark in the living room of the safe house, they determined they had somehow managed to avoid compromise during the incident. No one had any idea just why the North Koreans were so hell-bent on killing a single member of the Sanctions Committee, but Sam’s assertion that Allende and Riley had not managed to come to terms on whatever it was they were meeting about made them all think it likely Riley had notified the North Koreans that the woman knew about the operation to coerce committee members, and the North Koreans decided to silence her before she could talk.

There was a lot of guessing necessary to come to this conclusion, but the facts all seemed to lead in this direction.

Clark said, “Just like in Vietnam, the North Koreans are playing for absolute keeps on this. In situations where some other bad actor might just pull up stakes and bug out, or else threaten a noncompliant party, the North Koreans are using lethal means. This is an ugly game they are playing, and we cannot make assumptions about how they will act without taking that into consideration.”

35

Adam Yao sat in a glass-walled conference room on the third floor of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A window faced southwest and he looked out over a green forested hillside that obstructed the view of anyone driving by on the Capital Beltway. Adam was sure the hill had been built with security in mind, but it was nice to veg out for a minute and gaze at the greenery. But not for long. After a moment he looked down to the reams of books, notes, and briefing papers laid out on the table in front of him.

Time to get back to work.

He had spent a full week of sixteen-hour days prepping for Operation Acrid Herald, the attempt to place a CIA asset into a rare earth mineral mining operation in northwestern North Korea. He would be leaving for the West Coast in the morning, heading to the Valley Floor rare earth mineral mine in California, for more specific training and legend building, before heading to China, where the real work would begin.

Acrid Herald was a code-word operation; only a select few in the U.S. intelligence agency had any inkling what was happening. For purposes of operational security, no one at CIA Station Seoul would be informed, and certainly no personnel from any South Korean intelligence agency would be read in on the plan, because of the likelihood North Korea had a penetration agent high up in the South Korean spy services.

Even most at Langley HQ would be kept away. The op was, instead, run out of an office suite converted into a special operations center at the ODNI’s Liberty Crossing complex.

A portion of Adam’s week had been spent committing to memory all the code words, call signs, radio frequencies, and other information he would need in his weeks in the danger zone. His code name was Avalanche; this moniker had been computer-generated for him, and Adam liked the sound of it, especially because he’d been told a recent code name generated by the computer for a male agent had been Sunflower.

Adam felt bad for Sunflower, whoever he was, and hoped his mission went off without a hitch. Having to call control to request a quick-reaction-force extract for Agent Sunflower didn’t sound like something Adam would much enjoy doing.

He’d take Avalanche any damn day over that. This operation might have been an incredibly difficult and dangerous mission, but, Adam told himself, at least they’d outfitted him with a badass call sign before he left.

While the plan was for Adam Yao to go to Valley Floor to learn the computer system he would be operating in Chongju, he knew he would already need to know his cover legend back-to-front when he got out to California, so he spent the afternoon of his last day here at LX2 digging deeper into his legend. This type of work was familiar to him, learning the life story of a fictional character, and he actually enjoyed the study. He felt like an actor preparing for a role, and although all the lines he would use on the stage would be improvisational, the better he knew his character’s upbringing, circumstances, education, and life experiences, the better able he would be to bring his character to life.

According to his legend, Adam was Shan Xin, a thirty-five-year-old mechanical engineer and Chinese national from Nanchang who moved to the U.S. to go to the University of Chicago, but then overstayed his student visa by fourteen years. The gangster miners in Shanghai would be told that he then took a job in the mining sector, where he became an expert in ore-processing machinery, specifically the computers used to operate a hydraulic cone crusher, a massive grinding device that turned the ore into precisely sized smaller bits so that the rare earth minerals contained within could be removed through a series of treatments and processes, depending on the minerals themselves. The CIA had learned through its access to the Chinese gangster mining operation that the North Koreans already had the huge crushing machines, as well as the hydraulic system to operate them, all thanks to the Chinalco operation that had pulled out a year before, but the Chinese had taken their computers with them when Choi threw them out of his country.

A new computer was on the way from France via Bulgaria, and the CIA had already intercepted it at the warehouse of a shipping agent and implanted the hardware that would allow Adam to use the device as something of a direct-line telephone back to his command and control here at ODNI.

The fact Adam, or Shan Xin, had lived and worked in the U.S. for the past eighteen years would account for both his knowledge of the equipment and the fact no one in the illegal mining company had ever heard of him. As with all undercover work, of course, there was always the chance Adam would run into someone who had been to the places Adam claimed to have visited or knew the people Adam claimed to have known, so it was crucial he got his legend information down cold to pull this off.

Like every good non-official cover officer, Adam was an expert at the ability to fold his own life experiences into his backstory; this always helped with a cover story, because the more truth involved, the less the chance to be caught in a deception.

And he would hide the fact that he spoke Korean. He and his control officers on Acrid Herald were working under the assumption the North Koreans might speak more freely around the Chinese workers than they would if they knew one of their number could understand them. The relationship between the North Korean minders and the illegal Chinese workers was sure to be unforthcoming, and the CIA knew they wanted to hear as much as possible from the Koreans that was not filtered through channels going to the Chinese.

Adam’s Korean wasn’t great, but he was trying to “crash-course” his skill level up a notch with intensive language study on top of all the other work he was doing. This morning he’d worked on his language skills with a native Korean speaker, a translator and trainer at CIA. Additionally, he had listened to recordings in the evening for the past few nights, and this had retuned his brain to the language somewhat, but today they focused on vocabulary specific to the mining industry.