It looked to Hwang as if he was going to pick a time frame out of the air, though he didn’t seem to be even remotely aware of the complexity of the endeavor, or even what rare earth mining and processing entailed. Hwang knew that other nations had taken decades to produce their rare earth mineral industries, but he doubted Choi would give him that long. He hoped to, at least, hear him say ten to fifteen years.
Instead, Choi said, “Within eighteen months.”
The bald man’s heart sank, but he managed to keep his visage the same other than a slight trembling of his lower lip. The task before him was impossible, but he knew there would be no discussion in the matter. The Dae Wonsu had spoken.
Hwang loved the Dae Wonsu. Both the state and his parents had successfully brainwashed him into doing so, and he did not question his devotion to Choi. But even so, he knew Choi’s words to be madness.
After only the slightest hesitation, Hwang Min-ho said, “Yes. As the new director of Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation, I promise you we will meet with great success in the endeavor.” He added, “And we would be so honored for your continued advice.”
Choi nodded with a smile that made him look genuinely pleased with the talk, and then he stood.
Hwang stood quickly himself, and began a routine of beaming grins and bows, a show of utter subservience that was only enhanced by the fact he fully expected that the man in front of him would order him sent to a labor camp in exactly eighteen months.
9
Jack Ryan, Jr., awoke in the pitch dark, his eyes thick with sleep and his mind void of any clue of where the hell he was. He heard rain pounding on a window next to him, and he thought back, tried to remember the recent past.
This feels like jet lag. Where did you go this time, Jack?
It came to him slowly because he was so damn tired. Vietnam, Hazelton, the motorcycles, the plane ride home with the smell of death, halfway around the earth, the exhaustion after landing in Baltimore the previous evening.
Only then did it hit him. He realized where he was now.
He was home. His new place, a modern condominium overlooking the Potomac River in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. He barely knew his own home, he’d been traveling so much, so it took him a while to get his bearings. Finally, he rolled out of bed and walked toward the kitchen, hoping he could remember the way in the dark.
Jack had bought this place on Oronoco Street six weeks earlier, but it still felt brand-new to him. He’d been undergoing a battery of advanced tradecraft and operations training that took him all over the world — until last week, that is, when he and most other members of his unit rushed off to Asia on special assignment. Ryan realized he’d spent only six or seven nights at his Alexandria address since moving in, so it came as no real surprise that he’d been disoriented rising early on the morning after an exhausting flight around the world.
To combat the cobwebs in his head now he threw a pod into his coffee machine, filled the reservoir with water, flipped the device on, and stuck a cup under the spout. As he stood there with his eyes closed, the machine began to spew the hot black liquid into the cup. Jack had become a bit of a coffee snob, and he knew “pod” coffee couldn’t compete with “real” coffee in a taste contest, but in a speed race the pod won by a wide margin.
He stood in his dark kitchen and drank his coffee black and molten. It burned the back of his throat, but he needed the jolt because he could tell his brain was still somewhere back in Asia and he had to go to work today.
Thunder boomed on the street outside, and Ryan headed back upstairs to get in the shower.
Ryan had lived in Columbia, Maryland, for several years, but he moved here for the simple reason that his place of business had moved here. For years the offices of Hendley Associates had been north of D.C., in West Odenton, Maryland, but that building had been shuttered months back, after Chinese operatives learned of the existence of The Campus. A unit of Chinese Special Forces raided the property, killing several employees, and even though the threat had been repelled, both the “white side” Hendley Associates and the “dark side” Campus had closed up shop to prevent any further compromise.
Gerry Hendley had spent most of the intervening months looking for a new space, until finally deciding on a building here in Old Town Alexandria. The new Hendley Associates property was on North Fairfax Street, in a four-story brick Federalist office building with views of the Potomac River and the distant D.C. skyline. The building turned out to be perfect for Hendley’s needs. It had been built as the home of a government intelligence contractor run by a former U.S. Army general, before he’d left it behind to move his offices to an address inside the District.
Ryan dressed for work in a charcoal-gray pin-striped suit and a red silk tie. His formal attire contrasted a little with his thick, dark beard and his slightly longer than collar-length brown hair, but the beard and the hair were more important to him now than the suit. His father was President of the United States, so Jack had made it a focus of his attention to do whatever he could to avoid notice and attention. And in this task he had enjoyed near mission success; in the past few months only two or three times had anyone stepped up to him to inform him of the fact he was Jack Ryan, Jr., son of the President.
After he checked his suit in the mirror for lint, he stepped over to his nightstand and hefted a black pistol in a black leather holster from its nightly resting place by his clock. He slipped it into the waistband of his pants on his right side, then slid a small leather pouch containing an extra magazine for the weapon on his left side.
The operators of The Campus appreciated the relocation to Virginia for a few reasons, but one of the main perks was that they could easily and legally carry firearms here, unlike in nearby D.C. and in Maryland, which were both much more restrictive. Jack’s main carry weapon was the Austrian Glock 19, a squat, black, nearly featureless automatic pistol that carried sixteen rounds of nine-millimeter hollow-point ammunition. It was a simple and effective weapon, without a lot of bells and whistles such as a manual external safety. If one kept the gun loaded — which one should if one carried it for defensive purposes — anytime the trigger was pulled, a round would fire. There were no extra levers, switches, or buttons to slow down the process.
Ryan considered himself much more of an intelligence analyst than a gunfighter, but he had entered into gun battles multiple times in his years with The Campus. It went with the job, so Ryan went armed as often as he could possibly get away with it.
Jack Junior popped open his umbrella on his covered back deck and he locked his back door, then he shouldered his backpack and exited his property through his rear garden gate. He walked past his black Mercedes E-Class in the driveway and continued down the street.
Ryan enjoyed walking to work; inside the Beltway it was the closest thing to paradise anyone had managed to find, and even in the rain it beat getting stuck in morning traffic.
Ten minutes later he shook out his umbrella at the entrance to Hendley Associates and stood in front of a bulletproof glass door until he was buzzed into the lobby by one of four guards inside.
A dozen armed men were employed as the security force of Hendley Associates. They were all ex-CIA paramilitary operations officers with top-secret security clearances who’d taken contracts as static security in the private sector. They knew the organization they protected was a sub rosa intelligence outfit, and they knew they weren’t supposed to know more than that, save for one extra item of interest that was quite relevant to their positions. The son of the President of the United States was an analyst for the company. Jack Junior arrived each morning at eight a.m., unless of course he was out of town. No one could imagine he had any operational capacity for the company, but then again, none of the static security was aware of the true scope of the work done by the men on the top floor. The security force here just assumed that on occasion POTUS’s kid had to go into the field to conduct some sort of financial analytics task for Gerry Hendley.