Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

Wow, Adam thought. He and his cohorts were probably the only people in the hotel, and virtually the only foreign travelers in the huge city.

A small reception for the Chinese technicians began at nine p.m. in a banquet room in the basement. To get there, Adam had to line up with the others on the twenty-sixth floor and wait for a group of minders to come up and then ferry everyone down in groups in the elevator.

Adam knew he should have been made uneasy by the tight control; it was probably like being in a maximum-security prison, after all. But to Adam it felt more like his memories of grammar school. Grown-ups making the children line up and wait, and constantly checking their every move.

The banquet room was almost comically ornate, and five times too large for the quantity of Chinese technicians. A dozen waitresses worked the room, none of whom spoke a word of Chinese. Adam chatted with his new colleagues, but most of them were too nervous to enjoy themselves, so the conversation was stilted. One of the waitresses turned a radio on and held a PA microphone up to the little speaker, broadcasting thin and scratchy revolutionary music throughout the banquet hall. Adam would have enjoyed the spectacle of the scene, and he could have stayed for hours, but he stopped drinking after two beers. He figured he would need fifty to calm his nerves, considering his predicament, and he was very aware of the fact good intelligence officers did not become better intelligence officers the drunker they got, so he just held his mostly empty bottle, grinned stupidly, and bobbed his head with the music.

He tipped well, but not enough to draw attention to himself, and then he went to the door, where a minder met him to escort him back to his room.

On his way back up to the twenty-sixth floor, he remembered something else about this hotel. To confirm the rumor, he leaned around his minder at the front of the car and looked at the floor numbers.

Yes. Just like he’d been told, Adam saw that the fifth floor did not exist. He assumed that was where the watchers and listeners associated with North Korean counterintelligence all worked. He knew that here in the Yanggakdo International Hotel, every last thing he did and said would be recorded and videoed. Yao wasn’t terribly concerned by this. He’d lived in China, after all, so he was accustomed to draconian intelligence measures.

But when it came to paranoid security protocols, the DPRK was starting to make the Chinese look like rank amateurs.

45

Things were going according to plan for Veronika Martel. Her goal of getting close to Jack Ryan, Jr., was moving along even quicker and more easily than she’d anticipated, and she caught herself already thinking about her life back in Paris once she returned to French intelligence with him as a recruited asset.

He had come into her department just after nine this morning and spent most of an hour making notes about the equipment and the processes. Then he returned to her temporary office and talked to her a little more about solvent extraction. He’d thanked her for her time and exchanged business cards, and then, after allowing herself a reasonable time so as not to show a level of interest that had the tendency to drive confident men away, she’d brought up the evening soiree that her colleagues were putting on and, in as offhand a way as possible, she suggested Ryan might drop by. Ryan took the bait easily, and said he would love to attend. Luckily for Veronika, the woman in QC in charge of arranging the after-work event had yet to settle on a meeting place, so Veronika had gotten Ryan’s mobile number, with plans to text him when all was decided upon.

He’d gone back to his office for a few hours, but at the end of the day she told him everyone was getting together at eight o’clock in the trendy V Bar in the Venetian hotel.

Veronika had not doubted for a minute that he would show up. He entered the bar at eight-fifteen, looking admittedly handsome in a lightweight tan sport coat and jeans, and although he’d sat farther away than the ever-present and always annoying Ralph Baggett, Ryan had soon slipped down a few seats to position himself directly across from her.

Baggett, as he had been for the past two weeks, was doing his best to monopolize Martel’s time, but the French spy handled him deftly. She included Ryan in her conversations and did it in a way that she was certain felt natural to both Baggett and Ryan.

—

Things were going according to plan for Jack Ryan, Jr. His goal of getting close to Élise Legrand was progressing even quicker and more easily than he’d anticipated. He’d entered her department this morning, spent just the right amount of time with her to show casual interest, and garnered himself an invitation to her going-away party that evening.

As soon as he learned he’d see her again he relaxed, because he knew his objective would be easier to fulfill in a crowd than alone in her office. It was crucial that he get his hands on her phone, since Gavin Biery had decided it to be the most likely device she would employ to remove anything from the NewCorp servers. Jack had been trained in pickpocketing and other sleight-of-hand techniques, so he liked his chances if he could get close enough to the woman in a social environment where others were around.

He and the rest of the team had spent the early evening working out a plan to take a peek at her digital data. Ryan had the phone Gavin had sent him from Alexandria, and to extract the data from her phone and put it on Gavin’s he needed to have her device in his possession for only two to three minutes. He was certain he could do this at some point during the party, but the guys also bandied around other possibilities. Could he actually social-engineer more information out of her? Details on where she was going next, information about her client’s identity—the benefactor paying millions of dollars to the North Koreans? The Campus operatives knew there was likely as much or more crucial data in the head of Élise Legrande as there was on her phone, and the question remained how they could get that data out.

Clark was against Ryan pursuing some sort of physical relationship with the woman. Even when Jack suggested he ask her for an innocuous drink after the party so he could dig a little deeper into her psyche to see if there was an opening there, Clark was less than enthusiastic.

“One question for you, Ryan.”

“Shoot.”

“What happened to the last son of a bitch we watched having a drink with that woman? Have you forgotten about Vietnam?”

Dom had been sitting quietly, listening to the conversation, but he said, “Ouch.”

Ryan shook his head. “I’ve got you guys watching my back.”

“We were watching Hazelton’s back, too,” Clark growled. “Damn lot of good that did him.”

This sank in for a moment. Ultimately, however, a compromise was made in the form of another device Biery had FedExed over from Alexandria. It was a tiny clear earpiece with a half-inch-long dangling battery pack; it looked just like a small hearing aid, but it could attach via Bluetooth like a regular earpiece headset and transmit as well as receive. Unlike the other units the men wore, this one had an external microphone that picked up sounds around the person wearing it. Ryan tested it out, his hair just long enough to cover most of it in his ear, and with it in place the rest of the team could hear him and the conversations of those around him. And more important to Clark, Ryan would be able to hear transmissions and take direction.

Clark gave Ryan the green light to go to the party and do his best to access the Frenchwoman’s phone, and he gave him the yellow light to proceed carefully after that to garner more intel if feasible. That said, Clark was going to be listening in on the entire evening, and he even went along to the Venetian hotel and found a bench in the lobby’s shopping galleria, where he would be just a few seconds away if Ryan ran into trouble. He made it very clear to Ryan he would not hesitate to give the younger man the hook and put the kibosh on the operation if he didn’t think things were working out.