“Tonight?”
“Yes. If I don’t come now, if you make me wait a week or a month, then you will have time to put some window dressing up at the mine. To reroute electricity or to take generators out of Pyongyang and truck them to the mountains just for my visit. To move every skilled miner in the nation to Chongju, and to put them in a new uniform made just for my visit. I have been at this a long time, amigos. I know all the tricks.”
Hwang started to balk, but General Ri, who had been silent for the vast majority of the meeting, stood suddenly. With the air of a military man he said, “Let us not delay.”
Even though the reception committee had less than twelve hours to put something together, in Pyongyang Óscar Roblas was treated like a visiting head of state, although no cameras recorded his arrival. He met a cavalcade of senior officials at a private residence set up for visiting dignitaries, and they promised their full cooperation, should he enter into partnership on Chongju.
Roblas’s other mining concern in North Korea had been a profitable exercise for him, and he found the North Koreans had held up their end of the bargain, so he was positively inclined to agree even before he headed up to Chongju.
The following morning they took off to the north in a long motorcade; Roblas sat with Ri and Hwang in a military SUV. They were silent on much of the journey. All that needed to be said had already been said, and there was little for the big Mexican to do but see for himself.
Roblas spent the day at the mine and the proposed location of the processing facility a few kilometers to the west of the pit itself. He walked the scoured earth, his patent leather shoes covered in mud and gravel. He knelt and held the dirt in his fingers.
Finally he smiled at Hwang and Ri. “Not so different from the Sierra Madre.”
They smiled back.
Over the next two months Roblas sat in his Mexico City office and worked in secret with his senior staff, ironing out just what was necessary to assemble a rare earth mining operation from next to nothing. Everything from how much water would be brought in to the list of United Nations sanctions that would have to be skirted for the operation to be successful. He worked closely with Hwang and his senior staff, and he worked with Ri as well, directing the head of North Korea’s foreign intelligence service in the drawing up of a battle plan of how to facilitate the successful mining operation.
The terms offered by Hwang were curious, but Roblas found them to be acceptable. There would be a huge capital outlay early on, of course, as Roblas deposited millions of dollars into North Korean offshore accounts. This was an initial cash buy-in that was a lot of money for the North Koreans, but nothing much for Roblas at all.
Then Roblas would use his own funds to move equipment and personnel into North Korea. This would cost, Roblas estimated, well north of $60 million. He’d been told about Choi’s demand that production begin in a year and a half, and this was a tight timeline, but the $12 trillion buried under the dirt gave Roblas the incentive to get it up and running.
The third major outlay for Roblas would be the largest. The day production began at the mineral processing facility, he would owe the North Koreans a one-time cash payment of $500 million. A lot of money, to be sure, especially after his other expenses, but after this the contractual terms were firmly in Roblas’s favor. He’d recoup his expenses in under five years, and he’d have so much pure profit after that his main concern would be on how to rake in and launder it all.
It was clear to the Mexican businessman that the North Koreans wanted the contract front-loaded to their advantage because they needed an infusion of cash. Roblas did not know why, nor did he ask. He knew theirs was a dirt-poor nation, and he hoped his money would go to improve the lives of the common people in North Korea, but he highly doubted this. He wondered if they would blow it all on luxury items and nuclear missiles, but he wondered this for only a moment, because he didn’t really care all that much.
Roblas intended to keep his name out of the entire affair. It would appear to the world, if they found out about it at all, as if North Korea itself had played the world mining industry like a Stradivarius, orchestrating the movement of manpower, brainpower, machine and natural resources, bringing everything together. Many would assume the DPRK had outside help, but on this venture, just as in other operations Roblas had undertaken in less permissive parts of the world, he would conduct his part of the business in secret.
In the lists and charts and white papers created by his staff about the hardships of bringing this plan to life, nothing appeared as a more obvious problem than the processing of the ore. Roblas and Hwang could build the mine and extract the ore, and once the ore was refined, Roblas could assist the North Koreans in getting it onto the world market in a way to maximize its value, but the highly technical and intensive processing of the minerals was beyond even the scope of Roblas and his Grupo Pacífico. A few mines around the world did their own processing, but only in the United States, China, and Canada. Even the Australians sent their ore to an Australian operation based in Malaysia to be processed.
But that would not work for the North Koreans. They would have to do it themselves, right there at the mine.
This was yet another crucial matter that he’d have to bring up with Duke Sharps.
Roblas’s Grupo Pacífico had relied on the work of Duke Sharps in New York City for much of its underhanded corporate espionage and investigations in the past decade, so it was a simple matter to contract with Sharps again.
The full scope of the North Korean operation was laid out to Sharps by Roblas himself at a luxury hotel in Saint Maarten. The American ex-spy agreed on the spot — as soon as Roblas agreed on a cost plus fee for the private intelligence firm.
Sharps charged an incredible amount of money for the work he did. Often the brash American infuriated Óscar Roblas by his near-extortionate fees and his occasional reluctance to get his hands really dirty. Sharps would spy, he would break some laws, and he would push some boundaries, but a man in Roblas’s line of work occasionally needed extreme measures taken, and Sharps was too aboveboard to do the real dirty work.
But Sharps and his people had their place. They would help get foreign nationals into North Korea, they would help move material and steal proprietary software needed for the production facility, they would pressure elected officials and UN members to vote the way the North Koreans desired to keep the money and the material moving. In the final analysis, even though Duke charged too much and refused to assassinate, kidnap, or beat Roblas’s enemies, the businessman in Óscar Roblas knew that Duke Sharps and his staff were worth every damn cent.
15
John Clark’s mobile phone’s alarm began chiming on his desk, and he looked away from the paperwork in front of him and turned it off. He sighed a little. It was ten a.m., time to do his daily exercises.
Damn, he thought to himself. Ten o’clock comes around every day, doesn’t it?
He got up and shut the door to his office, then opened a drawer in his desk and removed a blue racquetball. He sat back down in his chair, took the ball in his right hand in front of him, and began squeezing with all his might.
Clark did all manner of other exercises in a small gym he’d built for himself in his Emmitsburg, Maryland, farmhouse, but the workout he did there he actually enjoyed. His hand therapy, on the other hand, was miserable.
Clark’s hand had been smashed by torturers in Russia a couple of years back, and despite a half-dozen reconstructive surgeries in the intervening years the index finger on his right hand was still both stiff and weak. Arthritis and scar tissue around the small joints of the appendage were the root cause of the problem, and his surgeon had told him he’d done all he could to repair the damage. John asked the man what John himself could do to improve his situation, and the doctor had replied with a shrug.