The British tabloid was giddy with its reportage: photos of the topless blonde, the dashing young spy, bare-chested, on top of her, staring into the lens with a deer-in-the-headlights look that solidified the sordid nature of the tryst.
“On Her Majesty’s Sleazy Circus,” read the headline, and as Riley looked at the article the next morning he knew he’d been had, and he wished the rag had only the decency to admit what they’d done had been done for fucking Moscow by bylining the piece “Written with help from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.”
Riley was recalled to London, of course. He was shamed out of the service after years of work and the paparazzi chased him and his family outside their flat in Knightsbridge.
Something snapped within Riley and he turned to self-preservation mode, not allowing himself the self-acuity to take responsibility for his action. He blamed England, his own country, for the debacle — certainly not himself.
He kept a stiff upper lip for a few months, but there’s something about being the most publicly recognizable spy in your country that works against you, and Riley knew he’d have to do a runner and leave England behind.
And in swooped Duke Sharps. Riley had never met the man, he knew him only by his unscrupulous reputation. Duke had asked Edward to come over for a meeting, all expenses paid by Sharps Global Intelligence Partners, of course. Edward did so, he’d listened to the American’s spiel about the work, and he’d agreed on the spot. Edward was ecstatic to be back in the intelligence game, even in a commercial capacity. He could do unscrupulous. He’d go into it for the money, eschew right and wrong and good and evil, and look out for himself now.
Of course, he’d been concerned that his new notoriety would make him completely ineffectual as an intelligence asset. But something happened that Edward Riley did not expect. He found his fame worked to his advantage. In this odd version of intelligence work at Sharps Partners, having a reputation served him well. He met the important people, he dined with potential clients and CEOs, and he appeared on television as a talking head, giving his view on UK intelligence issues from New York bureaus of the big news stations.
And he made a lot of money. Sharps paid its operatives more when their operations were successful, unlike MI6, where the bloke meeting an informant over a dinner of whale blubber in Iceland with six years of service earned the exact same amount as the bloke with six years of shooting it out with Russian Spetsnaz in a shit-stained basement in Chechnya.
Though he had some “shine time” on TV, Riley wasn’t a figurehead at Sharps. That was Sharps’s job. No, the thirty-six-year-old Englishman worked surprisingly hard, built operations from the ground up, and put in the hours and the effort. He ran intelligence assets and demanded every bit of the same excellence he’d expected from his agents and officers when he was an MI6 station chief.
Sharps used Riley on the tough jobs, and Riley didn’t care. He was in it for the money, full stop.
By the time the three-year anniversary of his fall from grace came around he took a thorough look at his life and he realized he bloody well loved his job and his life of amorality.
The Crown could bugger off.
Edward Riley pulled his BMW sports car up to the valet stand at the Mandarin Oriental near Columbus Circle; he climbed out and winked at the young Dominican valet as the man approached the vehicle with an appreciative grin.
“Staying with us, sir?” he said, nearly salivating at the prospect of folding himself into the luxurious sports car.
“Just a meeting over tea at Asiate.”
The valet turned away from the car. “Perhaps with the woman who just arrived by taxi?”
“Tall, blond, legs for days?”
The Dominican smiled. He wanted Riley’s life, and he did not hide the fact. “That’s the one, sir.”
The Englishman ate it up. “Haven’t yet met her in person, but I’ve heard reports she is quite something.”
“A beauty, sir. You enjoy your meeting, and I’ll take great care of this beauty.”
Riley was a single man, if not on paper. His marriage had fallen apart in London, right after his fall from grace, and his wife — one of these days he’d go home and make it official, or she could bloody well come here with the papers to sign — had herself moved on. The thought of bedding this Frenchwoman was appealing, even though he hadn’t even met her yet, but this operation was too damn important for him to mix business with pleasure.
He’d keep his hands to himself on this one.
He found Veronika Martel at a corner table in the rear of the nearly empty restaurant, sitting with her back to the wall. She rose and shook his hand, and he gazed into her eyes and found her every bit as beautiful as the rumors.
Riley was certain she would know all about him. Or she would know what Russian intelligence wanted the world to know. She would have too much class to say anything about it, but the fact this woman was aware about the scandal that wrecked his life hung over this meeting like a weight.
But Riley told himself he wouldn’t let that threaten his authority. He chatted with the gorgeous blonde for a few minutes, a professional conversation about superficial matters. Her flight and her hotel and her impressions of the city and the United States. He found her to be intelligent but highly guarded.
Finally he got around to the subject of today’s meeting. “I know Duke talked to you about the Valley Floor assignment.”
“He did.”
“It’s not a bad posting,” he said. “You’ll be less than forty miles from Vegas, so you can commute in each morning. You’ll have to, really, no other options in the area. We’ll put you up in a nice hotel and take good care of you.
“The first week or so you’re just there to establish yourself. You’ll get the training on the diagnostic equipment here before heading over, so all you’ll be doing is looking at readouts on machinery at the rare earth hydroseparation facility. Our Science and Tech department will give you a cell phone that has the ability to pull the software we want directly off the system servers, but you’ll have to social engineer the password out of a systems administrator to obtain the access necessary.”
“I can manage that.”
“Undoubtedly,” Riley said. “New World Metals has a shipment of ore-processing equipment heading to North Korea this month, and the computers will fly in from Europe, so we do have some time constraints. This is all machinery for the refinery. All of the mining machinery is already there.”
“Where did they get that?”
“The Chinese were tossed out in such a hurry they weren’t able to take everything with them. They didn’t leave enough equipment to operate the mine in any profitable capacity, but they do have some drilling going on. The processing equipment is crucial now because the ore is starting to back up.”
“Then I won’t delay another moment to get started.”
“Excellent. I have a trainer flying into New York today. A woman from Brazil who works for Vale, a diversified metals mining concern there. She does just exactly the same thing you will be doing at the NewCorp facility. You’ll have three days to work with her and make yourself legitimate. I trust you can pull that off.”
Veronika had been slipping into and then out of roles for her entire career. She’d been a hotel desk clerk and a software engineer and a fishmonger and a college professor and even a bikini model at a Le Mans race. Seventy-two hours of intense prep could turn her into just about anything as long as scrutiny by experts wasn’t too high.
“I’ll do my best,” she said.
Riley looked into his teacup for a moment. “I’ll ask you the question Duke won’t ask. How does it make you feel to know your work will directly benefit North Korea?”