Ri had hoped that would sink in for a moment, but Choi waved the threat away with his brandy snifter, sloshing some of the drink out of the bowl-shaped glass and onto the table.
“Your Middle Eastern bomber should not survive to talk.” Choi smiled as if he had solved all the problems and issues with one brilliant sentence.
Ri worked hard to match his leader’s smile with one of his own. “Yes, Dae Wonsu. That is an excellent idea.”
20
Londoner Edward Riley didn’t much care for New York, as it was not his home. But since his home didn’t much care for him, he’d relocated here to the States five years earlier, and he was bloody well determined to make the best of it.
Part and parcel of making the best of it included the vehicle in which Riley now drove as he motored down the West Side Highway through mid-morning traffic. It was a coal-black BMW i8 electric sports car. It shined as if he’d coated it with cooking spray before leaving his garage, and its lean, aerodynamic form turned heads and earned whistles and compliments even here in the sneering Upper West Side.
Edward Riley loved the attention, which was an odd thing, really, because Edward Riley was a spy.
Claiming fame is frowned upon for intelligence officers, but Edward Riley’s claim to fame was undeniably impressive. He had been the youngest chief of station in the last thirty years at MI6, the foreign intelligence arm of the government of the United Kingdom. Now, at age thirty-six, he had the experience and the CV envied by men twice his age, and Riley played this up more like his own publicist than as a spook concerned with his own personal security.
As a young lad, short and sandy-haired Eddie had a love of language and culture. His parents traveled Europe as manufacturer representatives in the fitness-equipment industry, and he’d been to every country on the continent by age ten. Moreover, his grandparents on his mother’s side were ardent travelers who “borrowed” their grandson for summer hops to Africa and Asia and South America.
Eddie went into Eton with plans of following into his father’s business so he could continue to see the world, and he studied French and Arabic and Russian as a means to that end.
He hadn’t been a perfect candidate for intelligence work because although most spies have at least some level of loyalty to their own flag, Riley did not. It wasn’t that he was unpatriotic, really, rather he just didn’t give a toss about his own country or countrymen. But one of his professors at Eton was an unofficial recruiter for the Crown and he forwarded Eddie’s name on a hunch, and soon Eddie was met after class by a middle-aged woman and asked if he’d be interested in taking the civil service exams.
“Not particularly,” was the honest answer.
But the woman was persuasive, and she hyped the travel and the study of culture and within seconds a lightbulb went off and Eddie Riley realized this was a recruitment attempt for the British secret services.
And that sounded interesting — there wasn’t a James Bond film young Riley hadn’t seen five times — so his “not really” turned to “why not?”
One does not apply to MI6. Instead, one applies for a position at the coordination staff for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office — this is personnel code for foreign intelligence work. Riley did this and then he breezed through his training, and soon he was off into the world, beginning every young officer’s saga of doing time at dusty outposts, learning the ropes the hard way.
Sana’a, Yemen. Windhoek, Namibia. Then a promotion to Montevideo, Uruguay.
After he had spent a year in South America the war in the Middle East had pulled enough more experienced intelligence officers into that region to leave some plum postings vacant for young officers who were both competent and easily mobile. He worked in Finland for a year, and then he did a longer stint in the British Virgin Islands. Riley made a name for himself and by age twenty-seven he was back in Europe, as assistant chief of station in Bulgaria, a rising star.
He’d been in that position for less than six months when his chief of station was recalled home due to a family illness. MI6 had plans to replace the senior spy with someone other than his young second-in-command, but a month as acting chief of station turned to three, and then by six someone decided he’d earned the position he’d fallen into, and the paperwork was completed to make it official.
Edward Riley of London became the twenty-seven-year-old SIS station chief of Bulgaria, making him the youngest in the service in more than thirty years.
But Riley did not stop there. He worked hard, which was important, and he had no qualms about using people and situations to his personal benefit. By his thirtieth birthday his skyrocketing career had landed him in Italy as station chief, a posting orders of magnitude more important than running the shop in nearby Bulgaria.
But in Rome it unraveled quickly. By violating orders and working with one group of local criminals he disrupted another local cell of Russian Mafia who were connected to the government in Moscow, as virtually all Russian criminals were. The criminals appealed to the SVR, Russian foreign intelligence, and the SVR developed an operation to get Riley out of the way.
The Russians identified Riley as the UK station chief, and then they targeted him, not for any lethal measures — that would have brought more trouble than the matter was worth — they just wanted him gone.
The Russians tricked him, though when it was over he had no one but himself to blame. A simple honey trap. Edward had a British wife and three small children, but one day he sat down next to a twenty-four-year-old Romanian model named Alina at a café he frequented on the Via Bergamo, and he started up a conversation.
She claimed to be an exchange student and she showed more interest in her textbook than in the handsome Briton chatting her up, but her beauty absolutely floored him, so he kept talking. He saw himself as the pursuer, so he didn’t think for one moment he was being played. He asked for her number and she refused, but she showed up at the same café a few days later, and they went for a walk on the Via Piave and soon enough they had somehow wandered into the lobby of the Hotel Oxford on the Via Boncompagni. He had no idea how a credit card in one of his aliases just appeared from his wallet into his hand, and then into the hand of the desk clerk, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand how he and young Alina found themselves in a fourth-floor suite on the bed.
A bloody mysterious thing all around, he told himself when it was over.
For her part Alina did not know she was working for the Russians. Instead, she thought she had been hired for this seduction by a British tabloid. She’d been paid well, and the tabloid, in fact, existed, but Alina had no idea it was owned, like much of the UK, by Russian concerns, and it went where Russian intelligence told it to go.
Even though the honey trap had been set and the paparazzi were in town to catch the young British spy in the act, it was really not quite so simple. Riley, like most adulterous spies, applied the tradecraft of his work to his pleasure. For a month he and his Romanian lover kept a clandestine relationship that would have made his MI6 training cadre proud. They used drop phones, they met in out-of-the-way cafés only after running surveillance detection routes, they varied their routines. Alina kept tipping off the cameramen as to where they would be and what they would be doing, but Riley kept the affair one step ahead of them, though wholly unaware anyone was on his trail.
On a moonlit beach in Sardinia the cameras finally caught him. Riley and Alina were nude, in flagrante delicto, and as the flashes flashed and the shutters clicked, thirty-one-year-old Edward Riley knew his career and his marriage were now items of the past.