He said, “You didn’t get him killed. He met with some misfortune, yes, but a lot of it was self-inflicted.”
“I know that, Gerry. But if you work in the intelligence field long enough you really covet those few who’ve been with you all the way. He was a good man and a hell of an officer. If not so much in his later years, at least long ago. Ed and I both owed him a lot.”
It was quiet in the conference room for a moment, then Clark cleared his throat and said, “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to discern anything about the assassins. We had to leave the area before checking the body of the man I killed.”
Mary Pat replied, “I’m just glad you guys got out of there alive.”
Ryan pulled out his iPad. “Shortly before he was killed, however, Hazelton met with a woman. They had a short but apparently heated discussion. We didn’t get audio, but she was after something he was carrying, or at least something she thought he was carrying. She didn’t get it.”
Ryan pulled up the picture of the tall blonde sitting at the table with Hazelton and Mary Pat leaned forward and looked at it. “I don’t know her. E-mail it to me and I’ll have NSA run facial recog on it.”
Jack said, “We tried that. No luck.”
Mary Pat raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying your facial-recognition software here at The Campus is as good or better than the U.S. government’s?”
In truth, it was the same system. IT director Gavin Biery had the ability to plug in to the NSA’s database of images and use the same software the CIA was using. Mary Pat did not know this.
Gerry broke in quickly. “We’re not saying that at all. Jack will be happy to e-mail you the images of the young woman. Hopefully you’ll get lucky.”
Mary Pat let the matter go, and she stood, indicating the end to the meeting. “Look, gentlemen. I am concerned about whatever Hazelton was working on, of course. Especially if it involved North Korea. But I put you guys on this operation because I was worried about an old friend, not because I wanted you in danger. And now that old friend is dead. I’ll make inquiries; I don’t want you or your team risking your lives over this any longer. There are enough other problems on earth right now. I’m not going to push The Campus into the unknowns of some sort of corporate crime problem, even if there was an assumption by Hazelton that North Korea had something to do with it. This is probably drugs, money laundering, even gun running. State will work with the local authorities to find out whatever they can. That will have to be good enough.”
Mary Pat Foley left a short time later, and then Gerry Hendley sat back down with his five operators to discuss their options.
Ding said, “Don’t know about you, Gerry, but I’m pretty damn curious about those dudes who almost punched our ticket in Vietnam.”
“Me, too,” admitted both Ryan and Driscoll.
Clark was more diplomatic. “We’re all just back to regular operational duty. We aren’t tasked on anything specific yet, so our workload is light enough at the moment to where maybe we can dig a little deeper.”
Hendley thought it over first, but soon enough he said, “Don’t worry. We’re not dropping it. I think it’s safe to operate under the assumption that whoever killed Colin Hazelton knew who he was. That means there is a bad actor out there with no qualms about killing ex — CIA executives. As far as I’m concerned, that warrants our attention, whether or not we have any official blessing from the DNI.”
Ding smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that. Any idea what our next step is?”
Clark answered, “I’ve got an idea, I just didn’t want to burden Mary Pat with it.”
Gerry sighed. He knew, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. “Duke Sharps?”
“Yeah. But we’re not about to start snooping on American citizens on the streets of New York. Not yet, anyway. For now we probe a little in open source to see what we can find out about Sharps and his operation. Anything too overt and he’ll pick up on it. He and his employees are extremely good about their own security. Sharps Global Intelligence Partners will be a tough nut to crack.”
12
The offices of Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation were in the Chung-guyok, or Central District, of Pyongyang, the nation’s capital of two and a half million. It was a large building complex with a tower in the center and several smaller buildings also associated with the mining industry nearby. Mining was the largest sector of the North Korean economy, employing thousands just here at the administration offices in Pyongyang, and a million more around the nation.
And for the past two weeks, at the top of the entire hierarchy sat Hwang Min-ho, and this continued to amaze him each and every morning.
As the son of employees of a party elite, Hwang Min-ho was given opportunities not afforded to ninety-nine percent of his nation’s children. Still, as with every citizen of North Korea, his future was ordained by the party. He was sent to study engineering at Beijing University, and then he was ordered to further his studies at Pyongyang University, where he earned the equivalent of a master’s degree in public policy. He began his career as a Korean Workers’ Party administrator in the Chagang Province. Chagang was one of the centers of the coal industry in the country, and Hwang’s engineering background helped him in his dealings with the problems faced by the mines.
It was a natural thing for him to move from the Korean Workers’ Party into the state-run mining entity, and by the age of thirty he was well ensconced in the administrative division of Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation.
He met his first wife at a Workers’ Party meeting when they were both still teenagers, but she had died on her twenty-second birthday while giving birth to a stillborn child. In that instant Hwang went from family man to bachelor, and it affected him greatly. He focused wholly on his career for the next twenty years, until finally meeting a young nurse at a copper mine in Ryanggang Province. Min-ho and So-ra were married a year later.
His intelligence, calm demeanor, and work ethic all made him a standout, and over the next two decades he rose through the ranks to the top echelon of the organization, finding himself the director of the coal and copper mining sectors of his company by age fifty.
When the rare earth mineral deposits were discovered at Chongju in Pyongan-bukto Province, many of the highest members of the company switched their focus to working with the Chinese on this new natural resource. Hwang, by contrast, remained focused on the nation’s established mining operations, and by keeping his head down and concentrating on coal and copper, when the smoke cleared after the Chongju/China debacle, Hwang was virtually the only top-level executive in the organization left standing. He was ordered to take the reins of the organization when the director was imprisoned, and though it was the proudest moment in his life as well as the lives of his wife, children, and elderly parents, he would have much rather remained focused on coal and copper.
Nevertheless, now he was in charge, and he could no longer save himself by staying away from the rare earth mine. In fact, it had become eighty percent of his work. Since the Chinese were still partnering with North Korea at the copper mines and the zinc mines and the tungsten mine and the near-dormant gold mines, he felt certain no issue at any of those locations would get him thrown into Kangdong reeducation camp, so he knew his time was best spent concerning himself with the mining sector that, if not exploited in the next year and a half, would result in his being tossed into the back of an armored truck and rolled to Kangdong.
Hwang was father to a boy of nine and a girl of eight, and he considered himself a family man, but like all men in North Korea, his first allegiance was to the state and not his family, so this morning he rose before dawn and met his driver in front of his house in an elite neighborhood that overlooked the Taedong River. They drove silently together on the wide, empty boulevards. It was still dark, and in the capital city there were very few lighted streets, as electricity was in such short supply, but the large neon propaganda billboards on top of the tall apartment blocks and office buildings glowed dazzlingly, and bright spotlights ringed the large statues of Choi Ji-hoon that stood in the center of major intersections and traffic circles.