Clark said, “Sam and Ding, do what you can to catch up to Ryan.”
“We’re en route,” said Chavez. “A minute to get off the roof, that puts us three minutes behind you, Jack. Keep it loose till we catch up.”
Colin Hazelton stepped out into the alleyway behind the restaurant and headed due north, his hands in his pockets.
He was well aware he’d just made a very costly decision. Costly because he wouldn’t get paid for his work over the past four days, and costly because he’d lose his job for his decision to abort. But also costly because he’d left a three-hundred-dollar sport coat and a four-hundred-dollar briefcase behind.
All bad news for a man in the twilight of his work life who was also sixty thousand dollars in debt, and in possession of few marketable skills other than spycraft.
But in spite of this, for the first time all day, Hazelton felt a sense of peace. It even occurred to him that, despite the valuable property he’d left in the restaurant, at least he’d skipped out on his fifty-dollar bar tab, so he had to factor in that small win.
He managed a half-smile.
But it didn’t last. He thought about the events that brought him here, to this dimly lit alley, to this decision, and his mood darkened to match the low light of his surroundings.
It had been a year now since Wayne “Duke” Sharps, director of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners, interviewed Colin Hazelton in his Upper West Side Manhattan office about a job in “corporate intelligence.” Sharps had made it clear to the ex — CIA officer that the work at Sharps Partners would be safe, low-key, and nonpolitical, but it would also require Hazelton coming to terms with the fact he would no longer be working for the United States. He would, instead, be working for a paycheck.
Hazelton pushed back at this, insisting he’d never do anything against the red, white, and blue, but to that Sharps replied, “We don’t operate against U.S. interests.” He laughed at the thought. “We’re not devils here at SGIP, we’re just not angels.”
That sounded fine to Colin Hazelton. He was ex-CIA after a career as an Air Force pilot. He bled red, white, and blue, yes, but the times dictated his actions. He’d made a string of speculative international investments in emerging markets, mostly in North Africa, and they had all gone belly-up during the unexpected events of the Arab Spring.
Hazelton needed the work, so he took the job.
And Sharps’s promise of apolitical corporate intelligence work had proven true. For the past year Hazelton had not thought twice about his assignments or his clients.
Until this week, that is.
On Monday Hazelton’s employer had rushed him to Prague to meet with a government official to pick up travel documentation for five individuals. There wasn’t much exciting about this sort of thing; as an operations officer in the CIA, he’d secured alias travel for hundreds of agents around the world. Even working for Sharps this was not out of the ordinary; Hazelton had been involved in moving highly skilled foreign professionals who’d been unable to obtain U.S. work visas into the States. He saw it as a good thing; he was subverting American bureaucracy, not America itself.
Normally it was part of his job to inspect the documents. But not this time; for some reason, when the docs were presented to him in Prague they were sealed in a laminated pouch and his instructions were to deliver the package to a contact in Ho Chi Minh City, and then to return to New York.
He assumed the five sets of documents were for five Czech professionals, and they would be heading to some other country via Vietnam, not the States, as that would be an odd connection from Prague. Hazelton guessed the travelers would be going to work in Japan, or Singapore, or maybe even Australia.
It was strange he wasn’t allowed to see the documentation, but he let it go.
That was until last night on the flight over from Prague. With an hour and a half till landing, the burly American polished off a gin and tonic and began securing items in his roll-aboard and his briefcase. The laminated package full of docs was stowed under the fabric lining of his carry-on, but as he moved a pair of shoes to make room for his jacket, to his horror he realized there was a small tear in the lining of the case. He’d been using the luggage since the late eighties, and the secret compartment had finally given out. He tried to fix it, but this only made it worse. It was a rookie mistake for a spook, and Hazelton was no rookie, but he had been drinking, and that, along with Murphy’s Law, had worked against him.
As he sat in his first-class seat he thought about going through immigration in Vietnam and he began to sweat. If his carry-on was searched at all he knew they would find his stash. But thinking it over quickly, he realized he couldn’t remember a single visit to Vietnam where his person had been searched. If he removed the documents from the hidden compartment and simply stored them in a money belt around his waist, he’d be fine.
But to do this he knew he’d first need to remove them from the large square laminate package.
Hazelton took the document package into the lavatory, sat on the toilet, and tore it open with his teeth. Inside he found five plastic bags, each one containing a passport, a driver’s license, some credit cards, and a folded letter. Despite a strong presumption he was not supposed to look, he began thumbing through the documents.
A flight attendant knocked on the door to the bathroom, telling him to return to his seat because the pilot expected unstable air ahead.
But Hazelton ignored her; all his attention was concentrated on the travel documents. He was not surprised to find the black diplomatic passports. They were not fakes, these were legit, although he assumed they had been altered somehow. He looked at each of the photos. Four Caucasian men and one Caucasian woman.
He couldn’t be sure if they were Czech just by looking at them, but where they were from was not the issue.
It was where they were going. The letters in each person’s possession were travel authorizations, given by the Czech government, allowing the diplomat holding the corresponding passport to travel to North Korea to work in the Czech consulate there.
North Korea? Hazelton had spent the last year doing corporate intelligence work for Siemens, for Microsoft, for Land Rover, and for Maersk.
Now I’m working on behalf of the most brutal and repressive regime in the world?
As he sat on the toilet, his shoulders slamming from one wall to the other with the turbulence, Hazelton decided these five individuals were nuclear scientists being snuck into North Korea. What the hell else could be going on? DPRK had been caught trying to move nuke experts before, and they had no major industry to speak of other than mining, which was handled almost exclusively by partners in China. He couldn’t be certain these were nuke scientists, of course, but he could damn well tell they weren’t Chinese miners.
And he knew this wasn’t some operation Sharps was running against the North Koreans. Duke Sharps wasn’t in the business of taking on despotic regimes for noble aims. He worked for money, there was money in getting brainpower into North Korea, so that had to be what was going on here.
He closed his eyes and leaned back against the bulkhead of the plane, still sitting on the toilet. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered to himself.
The fact Duke Sharps was shipping nefarious characters into the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea pissed Hazelton off, but the fact Hazelton was helping Sharps do it made him shudder.
Hazelton made it through airport immigration with the docs strapped to his midsection, and then an hour later he arrived at his hotel from the airport, salty remnants of dried sweat covering his body. He spent the afternoon in the lobby drinking, thinking about the money and the job and his need to make his financial problems go away, hoping against hope there was some sweet spot of inebriation he could find right as the time came to pass the docs off to the cutout here in Ho Chi Minh City so he wouldn’t feel like he was doing anything wrong.