The Gulfstream took off from Henderson Executive Airport, south of the city, at one-thirty in the morning.
Adara spent much of the first hour of the flight tending to Dominic Caruso. He had quite a few cuts and bruises, but no broken bones. Ryan thought his wounds looked pretty superficial, but Adara was the team medic and for some reason she felt the need to devote a lot of attention to Dom’s injuries.
While Dom got treatment in the back of the cabin, the rest of the group sat up front and discussed the events of the evening. It was abundantly clear there was a unit of North Korean operatives, sanctioned to kill, shadowing employees of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners. It was unknown if the Sharps people were coordinating with them or not. It was also decided there wasn’t a lot for the operators of The Campus to do other than return to Alexandria and wait for Gavin Biery to unlock whatever secrets Élise’s phone held.
Ryan had been compromised in all this, because an operative of Sharps’s clearly knew, or else highly suspected, that he’d coerced her away from her hotel room at the exact moment someone was breaking into it. The original plan would have had no comebacks on Ryan, because Élise would have never known her phone had been compromised.
This wasn’t good at all from a PERSEC perspective, but there wasn’t much any of them could do about this now.
Soon after their debrief, the men lowered the backs on their cabin chairs and began nodding off.
It was five-thirty in the morning D.C. time, and two-thirty a.m. on the body clocks of the worn-out men in the Gulfstream, when the light on the cabin phone began flashing.
Adara Sherman had been sitting on the couch next to the bandaged and sound-asleep Dominic Caruso. She reached over and picked up the mobile handset. Softly she said, “Aircraft.”
“Good morning, Ms. Sherman, Gavin Biery calling.”
“Hey, Mr. Biery. All the guys are resting at the moment.”
“Aw. I bet they are just adorable. Let the others sleep, but throw some water on Ryan and hand him the phone.”
“Right away, sir.”
Adara declined the suggestion to use water, so Ryan woke to find her gently nudging him. When he opened his eyes fully and sat up, she handed him the phone.
Ryan looked at her. “Biery?”
Adara nodded with a smile.
Ryan was angry for two seconds; then his face illuminated with excitement and he brought the phone to his ear. “You can’t possibly have anything for us yet, can you?”
“You forget how good I am, Ryan. Dom sent me the files he pulled from Élise Legrande’s device. They were two-fifty-six encrypted, but with an off-the-shelf commercial security software we’d figured out a few months back. It’s really not that hard when you take—”
“Gavin, that’s great, but what did you find in the files?”
“Well… the device was a working Samsung Galaxy phone, so I found some games and stuff. A few ringtones, too.”
Ryan was annoyed, but he was glad to hear the man had a little of his swagger back after his disastrous experience in the field in Prague.
Gavin waited for a reply, and when none came he asked, “Not funny?”
“What else, Gavin?”
“Oh, yeah, right. There is an application, apparently proprietary in nature. Clearly something that she downloaded from the NewCorp applications server.”
“What does it do?”
“The program is designed to do one thing and one thing only. It is set up to manage and operate a large series of froth flotation cells in sequence. I don’t really know what those are, but that’s not my department.”
Ryan had spent the past several days at the facility; he knew exactly what froth flotation cells were. “That’s the high-tech washing machines that the ore is put into. They separate the minerals from the rest of the powder. If you are saying this program is to run a bunch of them at one time, then it’s basically the center of the entire refinery process.”
“Bingo, Jack. Apparently the North Koreans have got themselves a processing plant, but they don’t have a brain for it. They sent this sexy French mademoiselle to the American processing plant and made a copy of their entire operation’s system.”
Ryan said, “As soon as we get back, we’ve got to get this intel to Mary Pat. She knows the big picture in all this much better than we do. Hopefully this will help her figure out what the hell to do next.”
48
The morning after his arrival in North Korea, CIA officer Adam Yao and his fellow Chinese mining technicians ate a breakfast of noodles and tea in the dining room of the Yanggakdo International Hotel, and then they were led into a banquet room on the second floor of the massive building.
After they had taken their seats, one of their minders stepped up on a riser and took his place behind a lectern. His Mandarin-speaking translator followed him up, and she picked up a microphone. Through the translator, the minder let everyone know they would be going back to the airport that afternoon for the hourlong flight north to Chongju, but for this morning, they would enjoy a lecture that would help them get acquainted with North Korea, its customs, its citizenry, and its rules.
Adam groaned inwardly.
The minder then ran down a list of dos and don’ts that everyone must abide by while here in Korea. Some of them seemed just a little picky. No spitting on the ground, for example. But others delved into the bizarre. They were told they were not allowed to fold, crumple, or discard any picture of the Dae Wonsu. This included newspapers, magazines, and other media, all of which had photos of the Supreme Leader on virtually every page. Adam wondered how newspapers were discarded, but he knew enough not to raise his hand and draw attention to himself.
It was explained that radios were outlawed, unless they had been converted to pick up only certain stations, all of which were controlled by the central government. There were only a few television stations, they broadcast only at certain times, and even their scheduled broadcasts were subject to interruption.
Adam wasn’t in town to watch TV, but some of the others mumbled quietly in annoyance.
After the minder stepped down, a woman took the stage and began what turned out to be a fifty-minute speech about the Dae Wonsu, his father, and their special relationship with China. The North Korean leadership was spoken of in reverential terms, and the woman’s eyes misted over more than once as she talked of the Choi family, claiming it was only through their action that “big brother” China had been saved from wars and famine. She said North Korea had invented several technologies crucial in mining, computer technology, and even air travel, all of which the people in the audience benefited from greatly.
It was complete and utter lunacy, and the small crowd, mostly pulled from China’s well-educated high-tech sector, sat angry and dismayed.
This was the first time Adam had seen up close and in person this level of brainwashing, and it was chilling. These people lived in a closed society, they had no access to the Internet, satellite TV, or even most radio.
Still, Adam’s colleagues knew who was paying their wages, and they also knew who held the guns out in the hallway. While any one of these Chinese technical advisers could have stood up and announced that everything the woman said was wrong, no one did so.
When the lecture on the intellectual, cultural, and historical supremacy of North Korea was over, several armed men entered the banquet room from a door on the right, followed by an entourage of older men in business suits. In the middle of the group a small man emerged, flanked on both sides by uniformed guards. Adam craned his neck to see the top of a bald head. Soon the bald man stepped onto the little stage and up to a microphone.