“And she’s working at a rare earth refinery?”
“Yes. She has a Canadian passport, a temp worker visa, and employment credentials at a rare earth consulting company in Ottawa called TRU Alloy. The worker visa gave me the idea that she would be working at a rare earth facility here in the States, and since there is only one major location, I did some open-source poking around on the NewCorp Valley Floor website. There is a note on an online bulletin board that one Élise Legrande from TRU Alloy arrived on Thursday, and she’ll be there for the next few days monitoring the use of some new equipment.”
“I’ll be damned, Gavin. That’s good work.”
“I know.” He paused. “I also know this doesn’t get me off the hook for Prague.”
“Prague was my mistake, not yours, Gavin. You can’t keep beating yourself up over it. You are too important to this organization. You accomplished more last night than all of us in the operations staff managed to accomplish in Prague and New York.”
Gavin brightened a little. “Thanks, Ryan. So, you think Gerry will let you go to Valley Floor?”
“I hope so. He was pissed about Prague, but now that the New York op has run into problems, we don’t have much left to go on. If this woman is working for Sharps, she might just be the link we need to tie them to North Korea.”
Mary Pat Foley made her second visit to the offices of Hendley Associates on a stormy afternoon, and she found the mood in the building wasn’t much better than the weather outside.
The UN Sanctions Committee procedural rules vote had taken place days ago and the Ryan administration had come out the loser. The vote failed; at least for the next 180 days, there could be no hearing on further economic sanctions against North Korea.
Everyone in the fourth-floor conference room at Hendley Associates knew the reason for the poor result. Several Sanctions Committee personnel had been influenced by Sharps Global Intelligence Partners. This could not be proven without a major Justice Department investigation, and as much as Mary Pat and the members of The Campus all wanted to shut Sharps down cold, none of them wanted to spin up the Justice Department on a process that would undoubtedly take longer than it would for the DPRK to acquire an arsenal of nuclear-tipped ICBMs.
No, Mary Pat was confident that The Campus could take the lead in monitoring the work of Sharps and his operational commander in the North Korea situation, Edward Riley. Even though The Campus had been compromised in New York, they had the talent and the resources to keep at it, and they didn’t have nearly the potential for compromise a federal bureaucracy like the Justice Department would have, where Sharps had feelers, informants, and access into virtually every corridor.
The discovery of a Sharps infiltrator at Valley Floor had been a huge revelation, and it gave her renewed confidence in The Campus. When Jack Ryan, Jr., revealed this to her, and outlined his plan to go to the facility himself, Mary Pat made a silent mental note to inform the handlers of Operation Acrid Herald. She saw no reason to believe her officer in place at Valley Floor, Adam Yao, was in any danger because of the Sharps woman — they worked in wholly different facilities at the large complex — but it was one more moving piece that needed to be monitored nonetheless.
For her part, Mary Pat did not mention a word of Acrid Herald to the men of The Campus, but she did pass on some information helpful to their operation. She informed them about construction of a mineral-processing facility near the city of Chongju in northwestern DPRK. She also revealed the existence of an unknown foreign benefactor who was providing the North Koreans with, at a minimum, tens of millions of dollars that they were in turn using to procure updated missile technology.
The Campus would keep digging into the Sharps operation, which they all thought to be merely a tiny piece of the larger North Korean scheme, but the fact that Sharps Partners had managed to influence a critical vote in the United Nations made it obvious it was a damn important piece.
39
Jack Ryan, Jr., flew to Las Vegas along with Domingo Chavez and John Clark in the Hendley Associates jet, and the three men took separate rooms in the Mandarin Oriental on the Strip. They checked into their rooms and then met to coordinate their plan of action.
Ryan would be going into the NewCorp Valley Floor facility the next morning. His visit had been arranged beforehand, and he felt ready.
He would be using an unusual cover on this operation — none at all. By the time they found out about the woman’s work there — they were calling her Élise because they did not know her true identity — they knew there wasn’t much time to build an ironclad and backstopped legend for one of the Campus men, and then put him in place as part of a large-scale operation to find out what was going on. And by the time they got him up and running at Valley Floor, Élise might well have concluded her operation and moved on.
Instead, Gerry Hendley himself said he could simply make a couple phone calls, establish his interest in an investment, and have Ryan on his way in twenty-four hours using the “white side” of the house as a perfect excuse to obtain access to the facility.
When Ryan arrived, no one doubted him at NewCorp. Ryan was a financial analyst for Hendley Associates, and he had come to Valley Floor because his firm was considering buying shares in NewCorp in general and this facility in particular. The U.S. had been ramping up its rare earth industry over the past few years, as China began to have trouble meeting demand for its own needs in the commodity, and it was quite common for NewCorp executives to indulge accountants and financial analysts from investment firms who wanted to come for the tour and an examination of the processes and financials.
Of course, Ryan was aware of the fact a massive new deposit of rare earth minerals had been discovered, and this might have the effect of making the NewCorp shares all but worthless, if not for the fact the deposit had been found in an area where easy extraction was nearly impossible.
Jack certainly had no plans to discuss North Korea with the Valley Floor officials here. He had to show real interest in investing, and for that to look legit, he couldn’t be running around talking about a deposit somewhere else exponentially larger than what was under his feet right now.
Jack’s one objective at the facility was to make contact with Élise Legrande, or whatever the real name of the agent was. He needed to find out what she was doing at Valley Floor, to connect her mission, through Sharps, back to North Korea. If he could do this, he could stop Sharps and his operation, and he might be able to thwart whatever high-level industrial espionage she had in store.
The corporate announcement of Legrande’s visit to the facility mentioned the department she’d be working in, Hydrometallurgy Quality Control. Needless to say, Ryan planned on getting a tour of this area of the complex as soon as possible, in hope of running into the Sharps employee operating under the Canadian cover.
Jack didn’t even know if she was really Canadian. He doubted it. If he had to guess, the Canadian legend was an easy cover for her because she was actually French. He made this determination because Canada’s intelligence agencies worked relatively closely with their American counterparts, and so far they’d been able to find no identification for the woman. The French played their spooks closer to the vest, keeping them out of sight from the U.S. much more than the Canadians did.