Power and Empire

by Marc Cameron

  Customarily, Ryan would have tucked his head and rolled when falling from ten or twelve feet—but something told him he’d be better off with a broken leg than swimming in this slimy muck. The scant ten inches of water did little to break his fall, but he did his best to absorb much of the impact with bent knees. The floor of the tunnel was at a slight angle and he was just able to keep his feet, surfing on the snot-slick moss when he splashed down, wildly waving both arms in an effort to keep from falling face-first into the sewage. It was far from graceful, but it worked. He spun in time to see the shadow of the Asian woman slide to the bottom of the ladder behind him.

  Floundering for just a moment, she wasted no time before sloshing off toward her original point of entry. Jack limped to go after her, but his right knee rebelled, slowing him down to a fast, hobbling limp. Lighter than Jack by nearly a hundred pounds—and a hell of a runner—the Asian woman looked over her shoulder, directly at Jack, her eyes wide.

  “Nee-ge—rō!” she said. “Run!”

  The way she spoke was full of urgency, and he felt certain it was Japanese. Ryan heard a splash behind him and turned to face a man with a machete who’d just come down the ladder.

  The wiry man stood with his mouth hanging open and the machete raised above his head. He was alone and looked almost as surprised as Jack felt.

  “Friend?” Ryan said, peering at the man in the scant light from above. “Amigo?”

  The man shook his head and grinned, realizing he was the only one with a weapon in hand. Even in the shadows—hell, especially in the shadows—Ryan could see the vacantness in the man’s eyes.

  “You can’t reason with evil,” Clark always said. So Jack didn’t try.

  He could have tried to draw his pistol, but his hands were wet and slick. Even if he was able to get a shot off, the man would be on top of him in an instant with the heavy blade—making the odds too great that it would be a lose-lose endeavor. Instead, Ryan feinted right, causing the man to swing the blade across his own body. The slick footing made the man’s actions more exaggerated, allowing Ryan to shoot in and trap the arm against the other man’s chest and drive him backward into the ladder. The snotty moss worked both ways, making it all but impossible for Ryan to keep his opponent trapped. He followed up with a quick head-butt to the bridge of the man’s nose. The blow stunned him, but without proper grounding, there hadn’t been enough power in it to do much damage.

  “¡Boludo!” Machete Man grunted, struggling to escape and bring the blade back into play.

  Jack wasted no effort on words, instead driving his knee into the man’s unprotected groin. It worked to dislodge the blade, but unfortunately it also dislodged Ryan, and both men fell, splashing into the flowing filthy water.

  Ryan’s feet had grown used to the temperature, but the cold liquid hitting his knees took the breath out of him. The other man took the worst of it, landing on his back and slamming his head against the mossy stone floor. Fighting blind, Ryan straddled him, clawed for the face now, feeling and then losing a grip on his chin. Ryan heard him gurgle and then felt a sharp blow to his side. The son of a bitch had gotten a hand free and now proceeded to pummel him in the ribs. A shot went low and took him over the liver, sending waves of pain and nausea through Ryan’s gut. He redoubled his efforts, sinking a thumb into the man’s eye and forcing his face sideways and into the muck. The man bucked and thrashed, sputtering, trying anything to get his nose above the surface. Ryan braced himself against the slick moss with his free hand as best he could, coming up on his toes and pressing down with all the weight of his body on the other man’s chest. He heard a sickening gurgle as the man aspirated a lungful of fetid sewage, and then the struggling ceased. Ryan waited a few more seconds to be sure and then pushed himself upward, chancing a quick look with his flashlight once he got to his feet.

  Panting, filth dripping from his nose, he stood with a hand on one knee and vomited. Jack wiped his mouth with the sleeve over his biceps—the only relatively clean portion of his shirt. He spat and opened and shut his eyes several times to clear them, knowing this image would stay with him for a very long time. The silhouette of the other man was barely visible in the shadows as the river of sewage carried him away. That, he thought, was a hell of a way to die.

  • • •

  The pain in Jack’s knee and ribs had subsided to a dull ache by the time he limped back to the stone building. A quick peek out the cracked door revealed only a young couple feeding some ducks and a uniformed groundskeeper on a riding lawn mower. Ryan knew he was likely to cause an international incident—or at the very least commit aggravated assault to the noses of every Argentine he passed—if he didn’t get out of his sewage-soaked clothing.

  Chavez was grouchy about it, but he told Midas to break away from Foreign Minister Li’s hotel and grab Jack a pair of sweats and his Brooks runners from his room at the Panamericano, along with a half-dozen bottles of water and the biggest container of hand sanitizer Midas could find—which turned out to be not nearly as big as Jack had hoped for.

  Ryan rinsed off the best he could inside the stone building while Midas stood guard outside. Beyond salvation, everything from his skin out, including the Rockports, went into a dumpster. The fresh clothes and relatively disinfected feet allowed Ryan to make it back to the hotel without drawing too much attention. People who passed him smelled something amiss, but Jack looked clean and tidy. Such an awful stench couldn’t be coming from him. Midas led the way and called the elevator while Jack waited by himself in a deserted corner beyond the baby-grand piano in the Panamericano’s lobby until he was sure they would have the elevator to themselves.

  He cleaned his gun and other equipment first. Some scrubbing and a few minutes under the blow dryer took care of the Thunderwear holster. It was made of textile, but thankfully it had been semiprotected by his slacks. The radio equipment was waterproof, so it was a fairly straightforward process to get it clean. His watchband, on the other hand, was toast. His cell phone had survived unscathed but for a cracked screen. Twenty minutes in a near scalding shower and two more bottles of hand sanitizer later, Ryan finally felt almost clean again.

  He briefly considered calling his mother to see if there was some kind of prophylactic medication he should take, but there was no good way to explain his situation to her. “Hey, Mom, I was just tromping around in some South American sewers today. Wondering if I should be worried . . .”

  He decided he’d ask Adara if he got the chance.

  Ryan had to will himself to take it easy on the aftershave, knowing too much would draw as much attention as the phantom odor he hoped to conceal. Finally scrubbed and wearing a pressed button-down shirt, fresh khaki slacks, and a pair of Crockett & Jones dark brown oxfords he’d be able to run in if the need arose, he headed to meet Midas in the lobby.

  The former Delta commander’s nose curled as soon as Ryan walked up.

  “Like my granny used to say, you got something Bab-O won’t wash off!”

  “Damn it!” Jack grimaced and started to turn around and head back to his hotel room. “Seriously? You can still smell it?”

  Midas’s wide shoulders bounced as he chuckled, already walking toward the valet with the keys. “You’re fine,” he said. “I think my nose hairs are still melted from when I picked you up.”

  40

  Midas didn’t mind navigating, so Ryan slid in behind the wheel of the Peugeot. He enjoyed driving a stick. It made him feel alive, even in the stop-and-go Buenos Aires traffic. He nearly ran over an older female pedestrian at a four-way intersection—which meant he was getting the hang of driving like an Argentine. She gave him an energetic “Up yours” gesture and called him “¡Pelotudo!” which appeared to be the go-to word for angry people in this country.

  Ryan turned left on Avenida Santa Fe, working through what little they did know about the situation while he drove. The team had been over it until they wer
e blue in the face, and there were a dozen plausible scenarios—but some vital piece of evidence that would make everything fall into place still eluded them.

  Eddie Feng was a Taiwanese national. Vincent Chen was also from Taiwan, but living in the United States with a cover identity selling imported greeting cards from the People’s Republic of China. So far, the only thing linking the two men was their propensity to frequent Tres Equis/Sun Yee On triad strip clubs that exploited underage girls—a trait that should have earned them both a spot in a very dark hole but didn’t explain Chen’s connection to the PRC and whether he was friend or foe. The meetings between the Chinese and the other delegations had definitely brought him to Argentina.

  This Japanese girl added a new twist to the mix. The guy Ryan killed from Villa 31 had apparently been after her with a machete—which by virtue of her enemies edged her into the good-guy column. Sometimes, though, the enemy of my enemy was, well, just another damn enemy. It was not too much of a leap to assume she was there because of the Japanese delegation—but ministers of agriculture rarely engendered enough intrigue to cause someone to run through a tunnel filled with sewage. And if this woman had arrived with the Japanese agricultural delegation, how did she even know about the existence of the tunnel? Jack had seen her exit the Palacio Duhau Hyatt, the same hotel where the Chinese foreign minister was staying. The Japanese had rooms at the Four Seasons, more than five blocks away. Why was she there? Why had she gotten to Villa 31 right after the brunette with known ties to Chen? She’d warned Jack to run. Why hadn’t she confronted him—or, at the very least, left him to his own fate?

  Ryan tapped the steering wheel in thought. He had a lot of puzzle pieces. They just seemed to be from different puzzles.

  He passed the Parrilla Aires Criollos restaurant on his right, and continued for another block and a half to a parking garage just beyond the intersection with Riobamba. A chilly wind blew in from the Río de la Plata, which, at 120 miles wide, seemed more like a bay off the Atlantic than a river. Once he was parked, Ryan grabbed a dark windbreaker from the back of the Peugeot. It would cut the wind, and had the added benefit of being nighttime camouflage, should he need to move covertly when the sun went down.

  The men split up after they left the vehicle, Midas loitering his way east, browsing the shops along Santa Fe while Jack went north a block on narrow, tree-lined Riobamba. Businesses occupied the bottom floor of most buildings, but judging from the many balconies above, most of the upper floors were private apartments. Ever thinking strategically, Jack noted the prevalence of concrete railings and statuary around the balconies and thought how the Secret Service would avoid this kind of street like the plague. There were just too damn many places to hide.

  Pockets of old men with jaunty tamlike gaucho hats sat here and there at the many sidewalk cafés on the quiet street, sipping yerba mate through a silver straw in a communal gourd called a mate that gave the drink its name. Mate was a national pastime. Entire shops were devoted to mate mugs and straws and thermoses, as well as exotic leather carriers resembling a tall binocular case in which to store everything. The hotel valet had offered Jack a drink from his mate straw, instructing him to empty it before passing it back. Jack had complied, grudgingly, and found it tasted like a mixture of boiling water and hay. He preferred to get his caffeine fix from actual tea, or a good old cup of coffee. The stuff made by the Navy stewards in the White House was particularly good . . . but he didn’t get by there to see his folks as much as he used to. Certainly not as much as he should.

  It was a little after four p.m. when Ryan turned back to the east on Arenales, paralleling Santa Fe for several blocks so he could come in the opposite direction from Midas with the restaurant in the middle. The thought of Navy mess coffee made him wish for a cup, and he began to look for a likely shop as he walked. It would give him something to do as he whiled away the hours . . . and watched.

  In days gone by, arriving on station early was a double-edged sword. Get there too late and you missed important changes in personnel, local habits, and anyone from the other team who decided to set up an ambush or conduct countersurveillance. Coming in too early ran the risk of drawing unwanted attention.

  Then smartphones came along and devoured the collective brain of society. Mobile phones were the single greatest thing to happen to a surveillance team in recent history—and communication had nothing to do with it. Trained observers generally relied on a set of known habits and best practices. But just as a baboon might alert the gazelle of a leopard’s presence in the wild, being noticed by the local populace was a surefire way to spook a target. Since most noses had become buried in a phone screen, it was a safe bet that a person could spend a couple hours browsing local stores in a three-block operational area without drawing so much as a second look. That time more than doubled if a stop at the neighborhood coffee shop was added to the mix.

  City crews had already come by and dropped off wooden barricades in front of Parrilla Aires Criollos. These ten-foot-long sawhorses leaned against a row of garbage bins, causing pedestrian traffic to split and flow around them like water around a boulder in the middle of a river. Uniformed officers began to arrive approximately an hour after Ryan and Midas came on station.

  The newly formed Buenos Aires city police looked to be playing second fiddle to the beret-wearing Grupo Alacrán, the elite Scorpion Group of the Gendarmería Nacional Argentina. Dour-looking men with H&K MP5 submachine guns and Steyr AUG assault rifles deployed from two four-door Volkswagen Amarok pickups and a white Mercedes-Benz communications van on either side of the restaurant door.

  Right-wing death squads during Argentina’s “Dirty War” of the 1970s and 1980s left the population suspicious of the military—or anything that resembled it. The Army was not allowed to take part in civilian affairs, but the government got around this by describing the GNA as a “civilian security force of a military nature.” The Scorpion Group looked about as military as they came, but then they had to be. While other squads within the Gendarmería provided Argentina with border security, Grupo Alacrán was tasked with the mission of combating terrorism and often assisted with the protection of Argentine and visiting dignitaries.

  These new arrivals set up the wooden barricades quickly, forcing pedestrians to cross Avenida Santa Fe in order to go east or west rather than walk in front of the restaurant. Ryan and Midas quickly found themselves outside the perimeter, half a block from the restaurant.

  The presence of men with machine guns upped the feel of the operational tempo, putting Ryan and Midas on their toes. Buenos Aires had seen more than its share of domestic terror, with a recent bombing in front of a Gendarmería building. Members of the Scorpion Group eyed people in the passing crowd as if they were food, their mean-mug looks sending people across the street as surely as the wooden barricades. A dog handler with a visage as fierce as that of his Belgian Malinois stood at parade rest to the right of the restaurant doors.

  None of these guys were on a mobile phone.

  In an effort to remain inconspicuous, Ryan and Midas had looked through the window of every shop for three blocks on either side of the restaurant up and down Avenida Santa Fe, some of them twice. Midas was able to work his way up to a vacant seventh-floor balcony above a restaurant called La Madeleine at the end of the block. Ryan claimed a vacant window seat at the McDonald’s almost directly across the street from the dinner meeting venue. He was pretending to surf on his cell when Adara called. He relayed her message to Midas over the radio a moment later.

  “Chen’s moving.”

  “About time,” Midas said. “I stopped to gawk at that shoe store down there so many times I was about to have to break down and buy me a new pair of Pumas whether I need them or not. They coming this way?”

  “She didn’t know yet,” Jack said. “Don’t you get shot up there, brother. These Gendarmería guys look a little jumpy if you ask me.”

  “Yes
, Mom,” Midas said.

  Across Santa Fe, a caravan of dark sedans, each much larger than the bulk of the vehicles in Buenos Aires, began to arrive in front of Parrilla Aires Criollos. Men in dark suits dismounted from the front to hold the doors for more important men in more expensive suits as they exited the rear seats. Uniformed Buenos Aires city police officers moved wooden barricades while Grupo Alacrán operators stood by and glared over their SMGs.

  Little of this would be for the agricultural delegations. The foreign minister of China was definitely on his way.

  Personal security was minimal for secretaries and ministers of agriculture, but it wasn’t nonexistent. Express kidnappings—impromptu abductions of people who looked like they had money—were all too common in South America. To make matters worse, the respective countries of each of these delegations had advertised their attendance well in advance. Some governments, like Japan, sent a security man; other officials, like the Swiss minister of agriculture, were wealthy enough to hire someone on their own to watch their back.

  Jack made a mental note of each delegation as it arrived. So far, he’d seen representatives from six countries: Argentina, India, Japan, Switzerland, Thailand, and the Netherlands. Each minister had at least one security man, and between three and five assistants. The Gendarmería had closed the restaurant to regular customers, but it was a relatively small space, and the private function would come close to filling at least half the seats.

  Ryan looked at his watch—six twenty-three. Another hour and it would be dark. It was still far too early for most Argentines to eat dinner, but many of the visiting ministers would be more in the mood for breakfast. Seven p.m. in Buenos Aires was midnight in Amsterdam and six a.m. in Beijing—so concessions for the time differences were made in the spirit of good diplomacy. Ryan’s North American stomach was on D.C. time. Six-thirty was just about right for dinner. He loved a good steak, but eating one every night after nine o’clock seemed like a recipe for bad dreams and blood with the consistency of 30 weight motor oil.