Who knows, thought Sharps. Maybe they did have something on North Korea. But whatever they had, it would be tangential, a stretch. America was blaming who they wanted to blame for the attack, and it pissed Sharps off because his contract with Óscar Roblas’s New World Metals depended on North Korea getting a fair shake on the international markets.
Sharps stopped reading suddenly, and then he slowly lowered the newspaper in front of him, looking over the top as he did so.
John Clark sat in the chair on the other side of Sharps’s table. His face was placid, his legs were crossed, and he leaned back. Sharps hadn’t heard him sit down. The old bastard could still skulk around like the snake eater he used to be.
Duke saw the confidence on the man’s face, and he fought a sudden and unfamiliar feeling of uncertainty. He tried to make himself sound self-assured. “To what do I owe this pleasure, Mr. Clark?”
“No pleasure for you, Duke. You are sitting with the grim reaper.”
Sharps folded the paper and placed it in his lap, and then he leaned forward. “I beg your pardon?”
“If you had any thin fantasies of continuing on after today, you should probably go ahead and abandon that hope, because your life is over.”
Sharps chuckled. “I ran you out of town a few weeks ago. Circumstances not unlike this, if I remember correctly. If you think you have something on me, something big and bold and brash enough to where you can come back to my city all chuff and tough… well, then, let’s hear it.”
“I’d much rather you saw it.”
Duke Sharps blinked. “Saw it?”
Clark lifted his hands from under the table. In them he clutched a stack of eight-by-ten photographs.
“These are all time-stamped, but I won’t bore you with those details.”
“What are they?”
He slapped them down, one by one, and as they dropped on Duke’s turkey-and-avocado sandwich, Clark narrated. “This is you with your man Edward Riley.” It was a photo of the two men leaving Sharps Partners together. He dropped another photo. “This is your employee Veronika Martel entering your building.”
More photos dropped in quick succession. “This is your man Riley going to Martel’s apartment, and this is Riley leaving Martel’s apartment. This is Martel being carted out in a body bag.”
Sharps cocked his head. He started to say something but John Clark did not pause to let him speak. “This one is your man Riley in Mexico, at the property owned by your client, Óscar Roblas de Mota.”
He tossed down another picture, it spun around to Sharps’s chest, but he caught it. “This is your man Riley with a North Korean intelligence agent.”
“What in the hell is—”
“And this is your man Riley, a North Korean intelligence agent, and a poor fellow tied to a chair. That man is Adel Zarif, the would-be assassin of the President of the United States.”
Sharps did not even try to stammer an explanation or a quip. He turned white, looked back up to Clark, opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Clark leaned close. “Nothing? Okay… let me help you. Say that the photos are fakes.”
Duke cocked his head.
Clark nodded. “Go ahead.”
“Well… they are fakes. Complete forgeries. My attorneys will prove that—”
Clark leaned back in his chair. “Zarif is alive, he’s in U.S. custody, and he is singing like a bird. He’s fingered Riley, and we have video. Mexican police have two Cuban intelligence officers in custody as well, wounded but talking, and they will confirm coordinating with your employee in Cuernavaca. Apparently they are pissed, because it wasn’t till they were down there and under fire that they realized they had been co-opted into a plan to capture and kill the would-be presidential assassin before he could reveal the ringleaders of the plot.”
The stammer came now, and it was even more pathetic than Clark expected it to be. “John… you have to believe me. I had nothing to do with any of this. No knowledge whatsoever. Riley must have gone behind my back to—”
“It’s over, Sharps. Everything. You’ll go to prison or you’ll spend the next decade and all your money trying to stay out of prison. No one in this town, in this country, on this earth, will associate with you, because doing so will bring them nothing but hell.”
“What… what do you want?”
Clark chuckled now. “To watch you swing. Nothing more.”
“Come on. Come on!” Sharps shouted it now, and the entire restaurant turned to the two older men in the corner.
Clark said nothing.
Finally, in an excited whisper, Duke Sharps said, “Riley. I can give you Riley on a platter.”
“Necessary… but not sufficient.”
“He’s gone off grid. He’s gone off grid, but I will find him.”
“How?”
“He’s trying to do a deal. I heard about it from Roblas.”
“What deal?”
Sharps hesitated, but only for a moment. He was a beaten man. Full cooperation was his only play. “In Thailand. Some processing equipment for the North Koreans. He’s trying to go behind my back to do it, but I heard. Russian cargo planes. It goes down tomorrow. If you hurry you might be able to—”
Clark held up a finger to silence Duke, and then he finger-motioned someone over. A man appeared from the sidewalk-seating entrance of the restaurant. He was young, with dark hair and a trim beard. He wore a dark blue suit and sunglasses.
He pulled out FBI credentials and flashed them.
“Wayne Sharps, I’m Special Agent Caruso, FBI. On your feet.”
Sharps hesitated. Everyone in the restaurant stared.
John Clark just sat there with his legs crossed and a satisfied smile on his face.
“I’m not going to ask you again,” Caruso said. “You stand, or I put you face-first on the floor with a knee in the back of your neck.”
Sharps stood now, and Caruso turned him around and cuffed him.
Adam Yao sat on the catwalk of his cone crusher with three of the other technicians. It was six p.m., another full day without power on his floor, but there were candles and flashlights, and the four men had spent nine hours sitting here on their cold and dormant machine, smoking and talking and wondering if the North Koreans were ever going to get their act together and turn the factory back on.
A man walked alone up the dark walkway in the middle of the powder-processing floor. All four cone crusher employees stood and came down from the catwalk when they realized it was Director Hwang. He’d never shown any interest in this part of the facility at all, but now he appeared fascinated by the cone crusher. He walked around it, seeming to inspect it in the dim light.
Yao stood in a line with the three others.
Hwang looked the men over now. In Mandarin he said, “Which one of you works with the computer?”
Adam stepped forward. “Shan Xin, Comrade Director.”
Hwang stared at him a long time. Adam just stared back, hoping like hell Hwang didn’t screw this up.
The director said, “I have questions about the software we need to buy to update the machinery. Are you the man I need to ask about this?”
“Yes, Comrade Director.”
“Then follow me.”