Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

He would be using an unusual cover on this operation—none at all. By the time they found out about the woman’s work there—they were calling her Élise because they did not know her true identity—they knew there wasn’t much time to build an ironclad and backstopped legend for one of the Campus men, and then put him in place as part of a large-scale operation to find out what was going on. And by the time they got him up and running at Valley Floor, Élise might well have concluded her operation and moved on.

Instead, Gerry Hendley himself said he could simply make a couple phone calls, establish his interest in an investment, and have Ryan on his way in twenty-four hours using the “white side” of the house as a perfect excuse to obtain access to the facility.

When Ryan arrived, no one doubted him at NewCorp. Ryan was a financial analyst for Hendley Associates, and he had come to Valley Floor because his firm was considering buying shares in NewCorp in general and this facility in particular. The U.S. had been ramping up its rare earth industry over the past few years, as China began to have trouble meeting demand for its own needs in the commodity, and it was quite common for NewCorp executives to indulge accountants and financial analysts from investment firms who wanted to come for the tour and an examination of the processes and financials.

Of course, Ryan was aware of the fact a massive new deposit of rare earth minerals had been discovered, and this might have the effect of making the NewCorp shares all but worthless, if not for the fact the deposit had been found in an area where easy extraction was nearly impossible.

Jack certainly had no plans to discuss North Korea with the Valley Floor officials here. He had to show real interest in investing, and for that to look legit, he couldn’t be running around talking about a deposit somewhere else exponentially larger than what was under his feet right now.

Jack’s one objective at the facility was to make contact with Élise Legrande, or whatever the real name of the agent was. He needed to find out what she was doing at Valley Floor, to connect her mission, through Sharps, back to North Korea. If he could do this, he could stop Sharps and his operation, and he might be able to thwart whatever high-level industrial espionage she had in store.

The corporate announcement of Legrande’s visit to the facility mentioned the department she’d be working in, Hydrometallurgy Quality Control. Needless to say, Ryan planned on getting a tour of this area of the complex as soon as possible, in hope of running into the Sharps employee operating under the Canadian cover.

Jack didn’t even know if she was really Canadian. He doubted it. If he had to guess, the Canadian legend was an easy cover for her because she was actually French. He made this determination because Canada’s intelligence agencies worked relatively closely with their American counterparts, and so far they’d been able to find no identification for the woman. The French played their spooks closer to the vest, keeping them out of sight from the U.S. much more than the Canadians did.

Ryan knew at some point he’d have to meet her to be able to get close enough to skim her electronic devices. Clark had warned him to be especially careful with his “bump,” the process of making contact with someone in a way that is meant to appear accidental. Sharps did not hire junior intelligence officers, after all, so she would be on the lookout for an enemy approach that appeared casual.

—

His first opportunity for the bump came much faster than he’d anticipated.

In the late afternoon of his first day in the offices of Valley Floor, Ryan walked alone from his temporary office up a hallway on his way to a meeting with one of the company’s accountants. He was a little lost, but that was no big surprise. Valley Floor was a big complex, with more than a dozen buildings in all; this Ryan learned during a two-hour facility tour he took earlier in the day. He’d been taken out to the open mine, the water-treatment complex, and the ore-processing facility, as well as the R&D buildings and even the motor pool, where he got a look at the impressive massive earthmoving equipment.

Now, as he looked at a small map in his hand to make sure he was going in the right direction, he was glad his meeting was in the same building as his office. He knew he’d really get himself lost on the other end of the facility. He’d made it halfway up the hall when a door opened just ahead of him on his left, and the woman he’d last seen on a busy street in Ho Chi Minh City stepped out.

Jack had been moving quickly to his meeting, but he slowed as the blonde turned to shut the door behind her. She wouldn’t have seen the change in his gait, and he needed a second to come up with a spur-of-the-moment introduction.

She looked at him and he smiled, but before he could form a greeting he heard someone call out from behind. “Élise? There you are. We were supposed to meet in the second-floor lab. That’s where the server is.”

She looked away from Ryan and toward a man behind him. With a soft French-Canadian accent she said, “Yes, I am sorry, Ralph.” She laughed self-deprecatingly. “I’m still getting lost around here.”

Jack walked on. He was pretty certain she’d almost been caught in the act of lurking around the building, but he was just as sure that she’d managed to wiggle her way out of it without raising the suspicions of whomever she was talking to.

As he turned at the end of the hall he looked back over his shoulder and saw the woman walking away with the man who had been speaking to her. Jack recognized the man from the tour of the plant he’d taken earlier in the day. He was Ralph Baggett, the NewCorp Valley Floor IT director.

Immediately Ryan tried to determine if there was any significance to this. Could she be in the process of ingratiating herself to him as part of her mission here?

With nothing else to go on, Ryan decided he’d gin up a reason to meet with Ralph Baggett tomorrow, to see what he could find.

—

During his long drive back to his Las Vegas Strip hotel, Ryan called Gavin Biery in Alexandria to see if he could shed some light on what the woman might be up to. He filled Gavin in on how he had seen her around the IT guy, and snooping around the systems themselves, and from that he had determined the IT department was her particular focus.

“As it should be. That’s where the action is,” Biery said, making a joke Ryan didn’t have time for.

“Seriously. What’s her objective? Any guesses?”

Gavin didn’t have to think. “A password. Credentials to get into the system.”

“What could she do with that?”

Biery sighed, as if it was self-evident. “Ryan, I’ve held your hand through this stuff before.”

“Indulge me.”

“Keys to the kingdom. She logs on as him and she can insert viruses if she wants, or erase drives or commit untold damage to the physical system of the place by running equipment improperly. Several years ago we blew up some turbines in an Iranian nuclear reactor by uploading some malware.”

Jack thought that over. “No. If the North Koreans get the rare earth–processing facility set up, they will be at such a competitive advantage as compared to this place that there will be no competition. NewCorp has to pay U.S. wages to extract and process, the North Koreans will pay their people chicken feed. She’s not here to hurt Valley Floor, she’s here to take something that the North Koreans need.”

Gavin thought for a long while. Finally he said, “You got me there, Ryan. Unless she wants instructions on how to work machinery, or some sort of in-house database of experts, I can’t really say.”