Driscoll was already on the phone to his organization’s Gulfstream jet. “Sherman, Driscoll. En route to airport, ETA twenty-five mikes. Four pax in total. In extremis exfiltration, negative contraband. Negative injuries. Threat condition red. Confirm all.”
Over the phone Adara Sherman, the transportation and logistics coordinator for the team, repeated everything back to the operator in the field and let him know the aircraft would be ready for them when they got to the airport.
The men were quiet for a moment, the main sound in the sedan coming from the heavy breathing of exhausted men and the chest compressions Chavez continued on Hazelton’s thick torso, as well as the soft wheezes coming out of the wounded man’s mouth and nose. Foamy blood had formed on the ex — CIA man’s lips, and this told Chavez the internal bleeding in the lungs was as bad as he’d feared.
Ding had called this one correctly. Hazelton wasn’t going to make it.
As Chavez looked down at the man he was surprised to see Hazelton’s eyes open. Beneath a thin wheeze he made another sound, like he was trying to form words.
Chavez leaned over closer. “What’s that?”
Hazelton tried again. “Sh… Sharps.”
Chavez nodded quickly. “We know. You were working for Duke Sharps. Do you know who attacked you?”
Hazelton nodded emphatically, did his best to speak again, but just a pathetic croaking rasp came out of his mouth.
His arm reached out and began flailing around the backseat.
Ryan figured out what he was doing. “He wants a pen. Hurry!”
Driscoll found a pad and pen in the glove compartment and he passed them back. Ding held the pad for Hazelton, who took the pen and began furiously scratching with it. It was too dark to discern the writing here in the sedan, but Ding was able to see that all the blood on the man’s palm was also smearing the page.
In fifteen seconds Hazelton stopped. The pen fell from his hand and his head lolled to the side.
Ding put two fingers on the man’s carotid artery. After a half-minute he said, “John… to the airport.”
“Got it,” said Clark, then he turned at the next intersection. No use wasting time on a hospital drop-off now.
Chavez collapsed back in his seat, the dead man lying across his and Ryan’s laps. For the past ten minutes Chavez had worked as hard as he could to save the man, even risking his life to do so. Now he was wasted and worn out, both mentally and physically, from the strain of his efforts.
Ryan took the pad and held his flashlight’s beam up to it. “Fucking chicken scratch.”
Clark said, “Let’s worry about that when we’re wheels up.”
4
Veronika Martel took one more glance into her rearview mirror before turning her two-door Hyundai through the gates of the safe house. She’d checked the traffic behind her one hundred times during her drive; it was hard enough to do in the dark, but since the rain began a few minutes earlier, identifying any vehicles that might be following her had become all but impossible. Still, she told herself she was clean, she’d seen not a hint of a tail during her circuitous drive from central Ho Chi Minh City to Thu Duc, so she pulled up the drive of the two-story villa with little concern for her operational security.
A gravel parking circle sat to the side entrance of the villa and she took advantage of this, turning around to position her Hyundai so it was facing the road and ready for a fast escape. Martel was aware of no specific threats, but she was operational, and this sort of tradecraft was second nature to her.
It had been an hour and a half since meeting with the American at the Lion d’Or in Ho Chi Minh City. Thu Duc was only a dozen miles from the city center, but she’d been running a long surveillance detection route, stretched even longer by her control officer’s orders to take her time.
She sat in the Hyundai in the parking circle, listening to the rain on the roof of the vehicle. She could have gone inside the villa but she decided against it, since going inside would have entailed being around others, making small talk with people who were neither friends nor family while she waited for a call from her control officer. Martel had no interest in this. She wasn’t particularly friendly, and she most certainly could not be characterized as chatty. So she sat alone, enjoyed the patter of rain on the roof, and focused her thoughts.
North Korea. Christ.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the headrest.
Have you really fallen this far?
Veronika Martel was thirty-eight years old, an employee of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners of New York City. Duke Sharps had headhunted her after she left DGSE, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, French foreign intelligence, where she had spent more than a decade working as a case officer in embassies in the Middle East and Europe.
Now she was based at Sharps Partners’ European satellite office in Brussels, but her work in the corporate intelligence field took her all over the globe. In the past six months she’d served on operations in Mumbai, in Osaka, in Moscow, and in Madrid.
And now Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh City was unfamiliar turf for her, but Veronika went where New York told her to go, and this assignment was similar to ops she had done in Europe. Or at least it had been until her contact this evening made the unilateral decision to derail the operation by not handing over the documents he’d been tasked to bring with him from Prague.
She’d reported him to her New York control officer immediately — she wasn’t going to take the blame for the op falling apart. New York told her to head back to the safe house, but to take her time doing so, while they did what they could to rectify the situation.
Short of arranging a street mugging to get the package from Hazelton, she didn’t know what the hell her control officer in New York could do about it, but she did as ordered.
As she sat with her eyes closed her phone chirped, the sound louder than the pattering rain on the roof of the Hyundai. “Oui?”
“This is control. I’m connecting you to a local agent.”
Local agent? As far as she knew, Veronika Martel was the only Sharps employee in the area other than the pretentious bald-headed American who had ruined her evening.
There was a delay on the line, then a heavily accented Asian voice came over the speaker. “I have the package. I will be arriving at your safe house in five minutes.”
She felt certain the man was North Korean. Not a local agent, but an interested party in her mission nonetheless. She knew better than to ask any questions.
“I’ll be here,” she said.
The man quickly asked, “Was he alone when you met with him?”
“The contact? I only presume so. It was not in my brief to establish whether or not he had any coverage on him. Why do you ask?”
“Five minutes,” came the non-response to her question, and the line went dead.
Veronika climbed out of her little Hyundai and walked up to the front door. She had a key to the villa, she’d been living here for several days, but she knocked on the door nonetheless, as per the arrangement. She waited for a moment on the porch, then heard the door unlock from the inside.
She was met by a North Korean. He was one of three security men who had been watching over the occupants of the safe house. Again, not Sharps employees, but interested parties in the operation. The three men had kept their distance from her, and she from them. This one said nothing at the door, she was certain he spoke neither English nor French, and he left the entryway, heading back into the living room.
Veronika folded her umbrella and hung her coat, then she stood alone, looking out the window at the rain, waiting to see headlights in the driveway.