Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

Six hours later it was midnight, and he’d gotten nowhere. Sharps’s system was ironclad. But unfortunately for Sharps, Gavin was not one to give up easily, so he ate a candy bar, changed his attack vector, and went back to work.

—

Jack Ryan, Jr., knocked his cell phone off the night table in his attempt to pick it up with a sleeping hand. Before he crawled off his bed to find the ringing phone on the floor, he looked at the clock at his bedside and saw it was three forty-eight a.m. A wave of panic nearly overcame him; he always thought about his dad when the phone rang at night. He knew his father was at once one of the most loved and most hated people in the world, depending on one’s point of view, and he knew there was always someone out there planning harm to him.

As he snatched up the phone to look at the caller ID he told himself there was a more likely explanation for the late call. It could be Gavin. Gavin worked all hours of the night, and he didn’t think twice about calling Jack when the mood arose. Jack had complained about it before, but Gavin kept on, and by now Jack had given up the fight.

The caller ID read “Biery.”

Ryan was relieved it wasn’t the White House calling, but he wasn’t thrilled about the early wake-up call.

“ Damn it , Gav.”

“Careful what you say, Ryan, you’re just going to have to take it all back when I tell you what I’ve got to tell you.”

Jack was sitting on the floor next to his bed now, his body half wrapped in the sheets. With a yawn he said, “What’s up?”

“Been working the last nine hours and forty-three minutes trying to get into Duke Sharps’s network. Gotta tell ya, his IT personnel are top-notch. The infrastructure is about as solid as I’ve ever—”

“I’m warning you, man. Tell me something I care about in five seconds or I’m hanging up.”

Gavin said, “The blonde you saw in Vietnam, the one you’ve probably been dreaming about for the past few weeks? She is in the USA right now, operating under the alias of Élise Legrande, working at a rare earth mineral–processing plant in California near the Nevada border.”

Jack rolled up to his knees and turned on the light next to the bed.

Gavin said, “Got your attention, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did. Your facial recog came up blank on her. But you found her in Sharps’s network?”

“Not exactly. I ran facial recog on people coming and going at Sharps’s building. From that I managed to ID a woman who works for a small boutique graphic-arts and printing company in Greenwich Village. I looked into the woman and saw she’d done time for forgery, and I researched her company and saw some of the equipment they owned. All top-of-the-line badge-making and AutoCAD stuff. I thought that seemed interesting, wondered if maybe Sharps farmed out some of their credential-making work, either for alias travel or fake employment badges for covers. I spent a couple hours hacking into the printer’s networks, haven’t gotten too deep yet but was able to break into files stored on a cloud server for them. Did some digging there and found a full set of credentials for your dream girl. Definitely the same woman.”

“And she’s working at a rare earth refinery?”

“Yes. She has a Canadian passport, a temp worker visa, and employment credentials at a rare earth consulting company in Ottawa called TRU Alloy. The worker visa gave me the idea that she would be working at a rare earth facility here in the States, and since there is only one major location, I did some open-source poking around on the NewCorp Valley Floor website. There is a note on an online bulletin board that one Élise Legrande from TRU Alloy arrived on Thursday, and she’ll be there for the next few days monitoring the use of some new equipment.”

“I’ll be damned, Gavin. That’s good work.”

“I know.” He paused. “I also know this doesn’t get me off the hook for Prague.”

“Prague was my mistake, not yours, Gavin. You can’t keep beating yourself up over it. You are too important to this organization. You accomplished more last night than all of us in the operations staff managed to accomplish in Prague and New York.”

Gavin brightened a little. “Thanks, Ryan. So, you think Gerry will let you go to Valley Floor?”

“I hope so. He was pissed about Prague, but now that the New York op has run into problems, we don’t have much left to go on. If this woman is working for Sharps, she might just be the link we need to tie them to North Korea.”

—

Mary Pat Foley made her second visit to the offices of Hendley Associates on a stormy afternoon, and she found the mood in the building wasn’t much better than the weather outside.

The UN Sanctions Committee procedural rules vote had taken place days ago and the Ryan administration had come out the loser. The vote failed; at least for the next 180 days, there could be no hearing on further economic sanctions against North Korea.

Everyone in the fourth-floor conference room at Hendley Associates knew the reason for the poor result. Several Sanctions Committee personnel had been influenced by Sharps Global Intelligence Partners. This could not be proven without a major Justice Department investigation, and as much as Mary Pat and the members of The Campus all wanted to shut Sharps down cold, none of them wanted to spin up the Justice Department on a process that would undoubtedly take longer than it would for the DPRK to acquire an arsenal of nuclear-tipped ICBMs.

No, Mary Pat was confident that The Campus could take the lead in monitoring the work of Sharps and his operational commander in the North Korea situation, Edward Riley. Even though The Campus had been compromised in New York, they had the talent and the resources to keep at it, and they didn’t have nearly the potential for compromise a federal bureaucracy like the Justice Department would have, where Sharps had feelers, informants, and access into virtually every corridor.

The discovery of a Sharps infiltrator at Valley Floor had been a huge revelation, and it gave her renewed confidence in The Campus. When Jack Ryan, Jr., revealed this to her, and outlined his plan to go to the facility himself, Mary Pat made a silent mental note to inform the handlers of Operation Acrid Herald. She saw no reason to believe her officer in place at Valley Floor, Adam Yao, was in any danger because of the Sharps woman—they worked in wholly different facilities at the large complex—but it was one more moving piece that needed to be monitored nonetheless.

For her part, Mary Pat did not mention a word of Acrid Herald to the men of The Campus, but she did pass on some information helpful to their operation. She informed them about construction of a mineral-processing facility near the city of Chongju in northwestern DPRK. She also revealed the existence of an unknown foreign benefactor who was providing the North Koreans with, at a minimum, tens of millions of dollars that they were in turn using to procure updated missile technology.

The Campus would keep digging into the Sharps operation, which they all thought to be merely a tiny piece of the larger North Korean scheme, but the fact that Sharps Partners had managed to influence a critical vote in the United Nations made it obvious it was a damn important piece.

39

Jack Ryan, Jr., flew to Las Vegas along with Domingo Chavez and John Clark in the Hendley Associates jet, and the three men took separate rooms in the Mandarin Oriental on the Strip. They checked into their rooms and then met to coordinate their plan of action.

Ryan would be going into the NewCorp Valley Floor facility the next morning. His visit had been arranged beforehand, and he felt ready.