“I’d say PT, every day, to strengthen the muscles and stretch the tissue. The only problem is the arthritis in the knuckles. Working out that hand is going to hurt. Every day, it will hurt.”
The doctor thought he was talking a senior citizen into just giving up on a full recovery and enjoying his retirement years in comfort, but the doctor didn’t know John Clark. Clark had happily accepted that ten-second primer on what he needed to do to make the best of his horribly damaged hand, and since that day he’d put himself through an excruciating daily twenty-minute regimen of stretching and strengthening.
The doc had been correct. Yes, it hurt. A lot. Every day. And even with all the pain and suffering, Clark’s trigger finger was still so noncompliant he’d taken to firing guns with his middle finger, resulting in the joke around The Campus that when Clark flipped you the bird, he really meant it. But his hand had improved markedly in the months he’d been putting himself through his daily ten a.m. torture session.
He squeezed down on the ball, and white-hot flame grew in the back of his hand and it shot up his index finger. He winced with pain.
And his office door flew open.
Clark quickly put the ball down and looked up at the doorway. Jack Ryan, Jr., stood there with a sheet of paper clutched in his hand. There was a wide grin on his face.
“Do you knock, kid?”
“Sorry, John,” Ryan said, but he looked too excited to mean it.
Clark blew out a long sigh. “What do you have?”
“Skala.” When Clark did not react to this, Ryan said, “Remember the name Hazelton wrote before he died?”
“Of course. Who is he?”
“Hazelton said he had something to do with Prague airport. It looked like a dead end, since we couldn’t find anyone by that name associated with the airport. But finally I found a guy named Karel Skála, who is a low-rung consular official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Czech Republic who works in the bureaucracy of the European Union. He operates out of an office at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building in Prague, so I didn’t see a connection. But after some more digging, I see that by appointment he will meet traveling EU diplomats at the customs and immigration office at Václav Havel Airport.”
Clark was impressed. He said, “Not too far of a stretch to speculate this guy gave something to Hazelton, and that was what the North Koreans were after. What might he have that interested them?”
Clark knew the answer to the question he had posed. He just wanted to see if Ryan would get it as well.
Ryan answered confidently. “Probably travel documentation. That’s foreign ministry territory. Issuing passports, entrance visas, or other EU documentation. Skála’s particular job involves preparing travel documentation for Czech diplomatic employees. This guy knows what he gave Hazelton, which means he probably knows why someone killed Hazelton. I say we pay the man a visit.”
Clark stood. “Let’s grab the guys and then go talk to Gerry.”
Twenty minutes later Gerry sat in the conference room surrounded by all the Campus operators. He rubbed his temples. “You want to go to the Czech Republic and find out what you can about this Skála character.”
“That’s right,” said Ryan.
“Covertly or overtly?”
“Covertly, for sure.”
Gerry looked at Clark. “What do you think, John?”
Clark said, “I’m for it. We can send Ryan and Caruso to Prague. While they are there, the rest of us will go up to New York. I want to put some resources into learning a little more about what Sharps Global Intelligence Partners is up to.”
Sam said, “John, you know Sharps, don’t you?”
“I did.”
“You guys are old buddies?”
Clark gave Driscoll a sideways glance. “I wouldn’t piss on Duke Sharps if he was on fire.”
“You and Mary Pat seem to feel the same about the guy. What did he do?”
“Duke Sharps was working for FBI’s Counterintelligence Division right after Nine-Eleven. He was based here, in Manhattan, and he was promoted to the top of the Manhattan Bureau. It was a time where we needed a lot of leadership in that job, but while everybody else saw it as their duty to stick around and work, Duke Sharps saw Nine-Eleven as an opportunity for personal enrichment. He quit FBI, then started his own consulting company. FBI needed his expertise, so they ended up paying him several times what they had been paying him.”
With a shrug Sam said, “Sounds like capitalism.”
“It gets worse. Sharps Partners was set up to work exclusively with the federal government, but slowly, over the next few years, he started branching out into the private sector, creating new divisions and offices to assist corporations on intelligence and counterintelligence matters. His work here in New York was still first-rate, from what I’ve been told, so the government kept their hands off. But after a while it became clear his private-sector work wasn’t as private-sector as everyone thought it was. He got caught working for the Saudis to identify Israeli Mossad officers in New York.”
Sam said, “Holy shit. Why the hell is he not in prison for that?”
“Sharps claimed he thought he was doing work on behalf of a Gulf oil company, corporate intel against a rival company. He also pled ignorance that the men he was tailing were Mossad. He was hauled into hearings, but they were kept quiet for a lot of reasons.”
“I’ll bet,” said Driscoll. “A guy with Sharps’s knowledge and clearances could raise a lot of issues in an open hearing.”
“Right. In the end, the government couldn’t prove he was knowingly working for a foreign power. He lost all his federal contracts, President Ryan saw to that, and everyone thought Sharps Partners would dissolve without all those contracts coming in. But a funny thing happened…”
Sam shook his head in disbelief. “He didn’t need the U.S. money anymore.”
“Nope. He had parlayed his high-profile FBI gig and U.S. contracts into God knows how many foreign deals. He basically became the guy in the U.S. the bad guys call when they want agents who talk and walk just like Americans, doing operations either on American soil or under the cover of the USA.”
“And no one has been able to prove anything?”
Clark shook his head. “Not a goddamned thing. Sharps has foreign entities and they work with other foreign entities that are set up by whatever shady government or criminal group wants to hire him. It’s a foolproof system, or at least it always has been.” Clark sneered. “If I can find any proof that treasonous bastard is taking one single dime from some other state actor for the purpose of conducting intelligence, then I will nail his balls to the steps of the FBI building as a gift to all the hardworking men and women in government who didn’t parlay their access and experience into a criminal career.”
Clark was ready to go. “We’ll need today to prep, to assemble equipment, to acquire transport and a safe house in theater. I’ll go down and talk to IT about getting us some access to cameras outside of Sharps’s office.”
Gerry said, “Okay. I agree to both operations. Good luck, guys. Your work is cut out for you. Sharps and his people are good at what they do, and New York City is their turf. You do not tail them into subways, or through any choke points, because they will spot you.”