The Red Room (A Risk Agent Novel) - Softcover

Pearson, Ridley

3.2

660 ratings by Goodreads

9780515155327: The Red Room (A Risk Agent Novel)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0515155322 ISBN 13: 9780515155327

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2015

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John Knox and Grace Chu are back in the new Risk Agent novel— “another hit in this knockout thriller series” (Booklist) by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Choke Point.

Security operative John Knox and former Chinese Army spy Grace Chu have accepted a simple job in Istanbul: initiate the sale of a piece of ancient art worth millions to an anonymous client. But in Istanbul they find themselves in a melting pot of government agents and terrorists, where East meets West. Now Knox and Chu realize they are players in a bigger, more dangerous game than they ever imagined. Their client is himself a pawn in Iran’s nuclear program.

As they move closer to the truth, they understand better their own vulnerability. They are not alone in wanting contact with this client. Forced to test the loyalty of the very people who hired them, aware their next move could trigger a power shift in the Middle East, the two arrange a meeting that threatens to kill all involved.

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About the Author:

Ridley Pearson is the New York Times bestselling author of more than two dozen novels, including The Risk Agent and Choke Point, featuring John Knox and Grace Chu; the Walt Fleming novels; the Lou Boldt crime series; and many books for young readers, including the Kingdom Keepers series. He lives with his wife and two daughters in St. Louis, Missouri, and Hailey, Idaho

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright � 2014 by Page One, Inc.

Two men await a delivery van. Nameless men. Professionals. Proficient at blending in. The man with the camera—call him Alpha. The man who stands in the camera’s frame is Beta.

A white FedEx minivan appears in the camera’s field of view. It serves as the starting gun. Alpha eases the Nikon onto his chest. Turning away from the Sisli Merkez Mosque, he is jostled by Istanbul tourists posing for the perfect picture. It’s nearing the end of the day. Slanting sunshine slices through the smog, playing across the mosque’s stone dome and adjacent minaret. Hell of a photo.

Beta, looking so much like Alpha they might be mistaken for twins—each in a navy blue knit cap, black leather jacket, blue jeans—sees the camera lower and moves toward the curb. He cradles a canvas messenger bag beneath his right arm.

The van double-parks in front of a pharmacy, its emergency f lashers pulsing.

Alpha walks incrementally faster, entering the pharmacy only seconds behind the FedEx deliveryman. His job is to provide cover. Beta opens the van’s panel door and slips inside. After five days of surveillance, they know the delivery kid, always in a hurry, never locks the van in this part of town.

The pharmacy smells chemical. Alpha reaches the FedEx kid and, as if trying to slip past, allows himself to be tripped. He brings down most of the contents of a shelf as he falls. Turns and pulls the deliveryman along with him.

There is shouting as employees hurry to help. Boxes of medicine are spread across the floor, causing the employees to tiptoe as they approach. The delivery package has slid out of reach of both men.

The lens hangs broken from the camera’s body.

“Idiot! You clumsy bastard!” Alpha speaks English with an Eastern European accent. More training. The deliveryman is young, red-faced and unsure. He spouts apologies in Turkish.

Beta searches the contents of the first of six plastic bins arranged on the van’s open shelves, his fingers f lipping through the packages like a collector in a vinyl record store. He knows exactly what he’s looking for: he has its clone in his messenger bag.

Bin two. Bin three. An internal timer runs. The op calls for an abort at thirty. He’s at twenty-seven when his fingers stop at the air bill listing:

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE HOSPITAL

ABIDE - I H�RRIYET CADDESI

Istanbul, Turkey

Seven packages. More slowly now. The third shows the sender as a Swiss address. He makes the swap, his for theirs.

Forty-three seconds and counting . . .

No reaction. No adrenaline or concern or anxiety. The lapsed time is merely a statistic to be noted. It’s filed and processed. He stuffs the switched package into the messenger bag and comes out of the van with his back to the sidewalk. He walks the curb like a balance beam. No one has shouted at him. No one has approached. He slips out his phone and sends the text. The signal.

Alpha’s phone dings at his hip.

“My fault, my fault!” Alpha says. He helps the cautious delivery-man to his feet, making sure to keep the man faced away from the windows. In tourist Turkish, he manages something close to “�zg�n�m.” Sorry.

He inspects his broken camera, trying to force the lens back into place. He and the deliveryman exchange agonized looks. Alpha extends his hand, a peace offering. The deliveryman is delighted by his change of heart. They shake.

Alpha says in English, “All for some toothpaste.” A shared moment of tense humor.

Leaving the pharmacy, Alpha reads the text. It’s a smiley emoticon. Success.

He makes a phone call. Hears a click. No voice. He keys in a five number string followed by three pound signs. Hears a second tone.

“It’s done,” he says, speaking Hebrew.

NINE DAYS LATER

A veil of fog obscures the steep steel-and-glass-clad marvels that rise out of Hong Kong harbor. From the twenty-second-floor off ices of Rutherford Risk in the Chamberlain Tower, John Knox thinks the trolleys and cars look like toys. On the glass, pinpricks of mist collect and join, growing into drops and skidding down the glass in a race, obscuring the view. It’s not raining, but will be within the hour.

Knox steals a look at his own ref lection, while behind his image another appears: an imposing figure of a man, older by a few years, unable to disguise a brutal intensity that impressed Knox when the two first met in Kuwait, another Knox ago. David Dulwich still walks with a limp, although his gait has vastly improved since the car accident in Shanghai two-plus years ago. The men embrace.

“This way,” Dulwich says.

Knox notes the lack of small talk, wonders if the brief phone call that detoured him to Hong Kong was as much of the personal stuff as he and Sarge were going to bother with.

The starkly contemporary off ices of Rutherford Risk reflect the tastes of company president Brian Primer, whose warm side only surfaces when a client is present. Knox knows Primer as a calculating son of a bitch who concerns himself with margins and profitability, often at the expense of his assets—like Knox. He treats his clients almost reverently and stops short of tolerating loss of life on either side of the ledger.

Down the corridor, the maple off ice doors, marked only by a number, rise to ten feet and are a full meter across, ensuring that any visitor, no matter how large, feels physically insignificant.

Primer, a proponent of Frank Wisner’s “mighty Wurlitzer,” required his architect and interior decorator to work with a team of psychologists. Wisner, the first director of the CIA, created front organizations and planted media stooges in order to “play any propaganda tune needed.” Primer can work a meeting.

To Knox’s surprise, he’s led not to Primer’s off ice but to the se- cure elevator. It drops thirty stories so fast he feels like he’s floating. He’s ridden it only once before.

Hong Kong high-rises are anchored deeply into the mountains. Lessons learned from mudslides a century earlier have prompted the creation of structures able to withstand both the ground giving way and the pummeling of typhoon winds and rain. Twenty meters below grade, storm shelters and storage rooms are carved into the hillside. It’s here, outside a door marked PRIVATE, that Dulwich removes anything containing metal—coins, wristwatch, Bluetooth device, smart phone, belt. He places the items in a cubby, turns the lock and asks Knox to do the same. Knox does so and pockets the plastic key.

Dulwich swipes his ID card and admits Knox to a small vestibule where they must wait for the door to close before a second can be opened. A body scanner hums. A green light indicates that they are clear.

“The Red Room,” Knox says. “So cloak and dagger.”

Still, Dulwich is silent. The barrier is seven inches of steel and insulating concrete weighing three hundred pounds, yet it moves fluidly, clicks shut and locks electronically. The Red Room is a twenty-square-foot bunker with pale green walls and a strip of exposed overhead lights. The furniture is clear, ensuring that nothing can be hidden inside it. Knox has heard of it, but took it to be company myth.

“I’ve never had the pleasure,” he says.

Dulwich checks his watch. “We don’t have long.” He produces an A4 manila envelope. Knox can’t believe he didn’t see it, marvels at how quickly one can lose one’s edge. He’s been back to import/export for a matter of months; the operation in Amsterdam is still fresh in his memory but apparently not in his skill set.

Dulwich slides the envelope across the table like it’s radioactive.

“Your schedule, not mine,” Knox says. He finds the Red Room claustrophobic. He can handle small spaces; a top-secret facility, impenetrable to all eavesdropping technologies, causes undue pressure.

Dulwich taps the envelope.

David Dulwich is usually not the melodramatic type. It’s one reason Knox doesn’t mind doing the occasional piece of work for him. The rest of his time, John Knox is a trader, traveling the world for rare goods, in business with his younger brother, Tommy. Dropping into a James Bond movie is a little much.

“Sarge?”

“They’re of you. The pictures. You love looking at yourself, Knox. So go ahead.”

“Moi?” Knox fails to entertain his host. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“I have plenty of pictures of myself, all of them stunning.”

An uncomfortable smirk crawls across Dulwich’s lips. “Not like these you don’t.”

Knox suppresses the urge to take the bait. He wants more from Dulwich, who knows that Knox is a reluctant freelancer. His brother, Tommy, isn’t in the best shape—the experts call him cerebrally and physically impaired, autistic, mentally challenged. He is, in fact, highly functional with medication and care. Knox can’t risk leaving him alone on this earth—but he’s attracted to the work Dulwich offers for more than just the money. He has a savior complex that probably bleeds over from caring for his damaged sibling.

Still, he’s in no hurry to screw things up by rising to the wrong fly. Dulwich will eventually play the money card. Knox has been robbed, embezzled from by his company’s bookkeeper. Things are tight. Have been for some time.

But Dulwich doesn’t start there.

“I don’t go in for drama,” Dulwich says.

“An understatement.”

“This is an in-and-out—a week tops—that can do a lot of good.”

“Good, like Amsterdam?” Dulwich understands which buttons to push.

“No, not like Amsterdam. Not even close. Frog and the scorpion. Open the envelope.”

Knox doesn’t understand the reference but doesn’t want to appear ignorant. He wants to open the envelope—oh, how he wants to; but there’s commitment that accompanies the act, and he can’t bring himself to do it without knowing more.

“Political?” Knox wishes he had hidden the astonishment in his voice. Like all private contractors, Rutherford Risk’s bread and butter comes from U.S. government jobs: guarding convoys of supplies, providing security details, moving funds, interrupting the Internet, burning drug crops. It’s the occasional insurgency Knox wants no part of.

“Open the envelope.”

“Wrong guy.”

“Turns out you’re the only guy, or we wouldn’t be locked in the Red Room.”

“Maybe you should unlock the door.”

“Maybe you should open the envelope. There are good guys and bad guys on every team, Knox. Even good teams have their share of bad apples. But I wouldn’t put you on the bad team. Not ever. Now goddamn it, look—”

Dulwich takes the envelope back, opens it and slams down a handful of 8x10s. Shot with a high-powered telephoto at a good distance.

Knox can’t pretend it’s not his profile. It takes him several long seconds to digest the look of the caf� and the apparent location: Bethany, Jordan. That gives him the other man in the photo, a man with Jordanian and Circassian blood, Akram Okle.

“I was never told flat out,” Knox says, defending himself, “that the piece was black market. Every antiquity has passed through too many hands to count. Sometimes that includes mine. I’m offered a piece; I know a buyer. More like a matchmaker. I can see how that might be politically embarrassing, but I don’t work for you, Sarge. I’m not your employee. I’m a contractor. I—”

“You are so off base you’re running around the outfield.” Dulwich f lips through the stack of photographs. Three show Knox and Okle engaged in what Knox thinks must be their most recent deal; more troubling are the final two photos, which go back eighteen months earlier. There’s no way Knox has been followed for eighteen months; he keeps track of such things. So it’s Okle who’s being surveilled.

“Okay, I give up. The frog and the scorpion?”

Dulwich arches his eyebrows as if Knox should know this one. “Frog and a scorpion meet on the river bank. Scorpion asks for a lift to the other side. Frog says, ‘why would I do that, you’ll sting me.’ Scorpion says he won’t and they sign a treaty. The frog carries him on his back. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog. As they’re both going under, the frog says, ‘Why would you do this? We’re both going to die!’ Scorpion says, ‘It’s my nature . . .’”

“Akram’s a good client,” Knox says. “I see certain pieces, I think of him first. He only buys the rarest of the rare. There aren’t many people who can afford such things. You go where the market is.”

“He’s a middleman.”

“None of my business.”

“It is now.”

Rutherford Risk pays out six figures to employees at various Internet security companies, on top of the seven figures budgeted for their own hackers who roam cyberspace probing for firewall vulnerabilities. When a back door is discovered in an existing operating system, Rutherford receives an alert before Microsoft or Adobe or Sun or Apple can identify the issue, a day or two before they can offer a patch.

During that window—hours, or minutes sometimes—people like Grace Chu, a private contractor based in Hong Kong and specializing in forensic accounting, are able to slip through the back door undetected.

Thanks to other sources on the inside of those companies, Grace Chu is also told when to get out.

Most of her days are spent poring over spreadsheets or money wire transactions, establishing trails and hard evidence for the client, most typically Rutherford Risk. Today she works like a day trader, jumping in and out of the market, seizing opportunity, playing margins. She’s attempting to establish and trace an individual’s net worth. It’s a nerve-racking exercise not meant for the faint of heart. A moment’s hesitation and the SEC or FBI will have her location. Get out too quickly and she loses her only chance at access.

Today she’s inside the server of a Jordanian bank; tonight or to- morrow, if the current back door holds, an Iranian investment firm. She’s curious about the op. Yesterday, Dulwich instructed her to data-mine this man’s financials. Dulwich wants her travel plans left open. He sounded uncertain. It’s new territory—Dulwich at sea, running her personally. Success will mean promotion; she can taste it. To prove herself as a field operative capable of on-the-fly intelligence gathering and analysis will put her in a class by herself. She knows of no one at Rutherford Risk with this particular hybrid skill set.

She works wirelessly using a “hopper”—a cellular Wi-Fi device that jumps among three carriers randomly, the same technology that makes her jailbroken iPhone impossible to eavesdrop on. It costs her some speed, but she has grown accustomed to the pauses.

She’s working from the downtown campus cafeteria of the University of Hong Kong, meaning her IP address is shared by a few hundred at a time, making a quick trace difficult, if not impossible. She’s stolen a user ID and password off a nearby, far too casual user.

The bank’s firewall is impenetrable. The last effective cyber raid was in 2004. This back door they’ve been g...

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