by Tom Clancy
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.
Ryan knew at some point he’d have to meet her to be able to get close enough to skim her electronic devices. Clark had warned him to be especially careful with his “bump,” the process of making contact with someone in a way that is meant to appear accidental. Sharps did not hire junior intelligence officers, after all, so she would be on the lookout for an enemy approach that appeared casual.
—
His first opportunity for the bump came much faster than he’d anticipated.
In the late afternoon of his first day in the offices of Valley Floor, Ryan walked alone from his temporary office up a hallway on his way to a meeting with one of the company’s accountants. He was a little lost, but that was no big surprise. Valley Floor was a big complex, with more than a dozen buildings in all; this Ryan learned during a two-hour facility tour he took earlier in the day. He’d been taken out to the open mine, the water-treatment complex, and the ore-processing facility, as well as the R&D buildings and even the motor pool, where he got a look at the impressive massive earthmoving equipment.
Now, as he looked at a small map in his hand to make sure he was going in the right direction, he was glad his meeting was in the same building as his office. He knew he’d really get himself lost on the other end of the facility. He’d made it halfway up the hall when a door opened just ahead of him on his left, and the woman he’d last seen on a busy street in Ho Chi Minh City stepped out.
Jack had been moving quickly to his meeting, but he slowed as the blonde turned to shut the door behind her. She wouldn’t have seen the change in his gait, and he needed a second to come up with a spur-of-the-moment introduction.
She looked at him and he smiled, but before he could form a greeting he heard someone call out from behind. “Élise? There you are. We were supposed to meet in the second-floor lab. That’s where the server is.”
She looked away from Ryan and toward a man behind him. With a soft French-Canadian accent she said, “Yes, I am sorry, Ralph.” She laughed self-deprecatingly. “I’m still getting lost around here.”
Jack walked on. He was pretty certain she’d almost been caught in the act of lurking around the building, but he was just as sure that she’d managed to wiggle her way out of it without raising the suspicions of whomever she was talking to.
As he turned at the end of the hall he looked back over his shoulder and saw the woman walking away with the man who had been speaking to her. Jack recognized the man from the tour of the plant he’d taken earlier in the day. He was Ralph Baggett, the NewCorp Valley Floor IT director.
Immediately Ryan tried to determine if there was any significance to this. Could she be in the process of ingratiating herself to him as part of her mission here?
With nothing else to go on, Ryan decided he’d gin up a reason to meet with Ralph Baggett tomorrow, to see what he could find.
—
During his long drive back to his Las Vegas Strip hotel, Ryan called Gavin Biery in Alexandria to see if he could shed some light on what the woman might be up to. He filled Gavin in on how he had seen her around the IT guy, and snooping around the systems themselves, and from that he had determined the IT department was her particular focus.
“As it should be. That’s where the action is,” Biery said, making a joke Ryan didn’t have time for.
“Seriously. What’s her objective? Any guesses?”
Gavin didn’t have to think. “A password. Credentials to get into the system.”
“What could she do with that?”
Biery sighed, as if it was self-evident. “Ryan, I’ve held your hand through this stuff before.”
“Indulge me.”
“Keys to the kingdom. She logs on as him and she can insert viruses if she wants, or erase drives or commit untold damage to the physical system of the place by running equipment improperly. Several years ago we blew up some turbines in an Iranian nuclear reactor by uploading some malware.”
Jack thought that over. “No. If the North Koreans get the rare earth–processing facility set up, they will be at such a competitive advantage as compared to this place that there will be no competition. NewCorp has to pay U.S. wages to extract and process, the North Koreans will pay their people chicken feed. She’s not here to hurt Valley Floor, she’s here to take something that the North Koreans need.”
Gavin thought for a long while. Finally he said, “You got me there, Ryan. Unless she wants instructions on how to work machinery, or some sort of in-house database of experts, I can’t really say.”
Jack knew he’d have to figure this out fo
r himself.
Biery then said, “If you think she’s trying to get info from them, she’ll have to put it somewhere.”
Jack said, “Like on a drive or something?”
“Yeah, but you don’t really need a dedicated piece of equipment. A better bet would be to make it part of something she carries all the time. My guess would be her mobile phone.”
“So . . . I should just snatch her phone? Like what we didn’t pull off in Prague?”
“Yeah. I’ll FedEx you a dummy phone that you can carry. If you get hold of hers, just link them up with a little connector built into the side, and it will copy everything on her device.”
“What if it’s encrypted?”
“Oh, it will be encrypted for sure. But the copy will still be made. We get it back here and we go to work on cracking it.” Biery’s confident voice returned. “I’m pretty good at that sort of thing, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I noticed.”
“The only problem is getting your hands on her device. We’ll have to see if you have the skills to make that happen.”
“I’ll do my best, Gav. Send me that phone.”
40
The official presidential visit to Mexico City had been on the books for months, which meant members of the Secret Service had been devoting attention to it virtually just as long.
Now, just five days before his arrival, the advance team had already been on the ground in the city for days. They had a temporary operations center at the aptly named InterContinental Presidente hotel, and they’d met with Secret Service personnel stationed here in the city as well as with other law enforcement and intelligence partners at the U.S. embassy on the beautiful Paseo de la Reforma.
The lead advance agent for the trip was a twenty-year veteran of the service named Dale Herbers. Herbers was a road warrior for the Secret Service; he had arrived in Mexico City on a direct flight from London after working the President’s recent trip to the United Kingdom.
The UK trip, like every international POTUS trip he’d led in his career, had gone off flawlessly, but Herbers knew Mexico City would be the most difficult operation he’d run as lead advance agent. There was a confluence of credible threats, access to weapons, and well-developed criminal infrastructure in the area that meant Herbers would have to bring his A game to his preparations.
The public image of the Secret Service is the square-jawed linebacker-looking man in sunglasses and a suit who moves close enough to the President of the United States to catch a bullet for him, and these men did exist, but the truth of the service is more mundane. For every close protection agent caught on camera at Jack Ryan’s shoulder, there were a hundred or more other men and women working to ensure the safety of all protectees. And for every second a Secret Service agent is responding to a threat to the life of his protectee, there are literally years’ worth of meetings to make certain that those threats never materialize.
Today in a conference room at his suite in the InterContinental, Dale Herbers had convened one of those meetings. It was a breakfast gathering of high-ranking local law enforcement officials as well as the department heads of several U.S. agencies based at the embassy. The point of today’s confab was to run down, again, the list of known potential threats in the area, and to make sure all organizations had the same level of confidence that the threats were at a manageable level.
From the outset, the Secret Service knew that Mexico was going to be a security challenge. There had been credible threats from the Maldonado cartel after their leader, Antonio Maldonado, was gunned down six months earlier, and while virtually all analysts in D.C. agreed there was little chance his brother Santiago Maldonado would be able to execute an attack on the President in Mexico City, the analysts weren’t able to say with confidence that someone affiliated with the organization wouldn’t try something against SWORDSMAN—the Secret Service’s code name for President Ryan.
Herbers kicked off the meeting after introductions. “Okay. Since Antonio Maldonado was killed, his brother Santiago has been blaming the U.S. Whether or not the U.S. was involved in the raid in Acapulco doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Santiago is telling his minions that we were involved, and his minions have weapons. It’s been our assessment in D.C. that the threats we’ve gotten are more aspirational in nature than credible in nature, and we’ve been in touch with your various agencies and departments over the past few weeks to make sure you all agree.
“Now we’re five days out from the visit, and I wanted to get one final chance for us to all sit down and talk about any concerns we may have about this threat and any other out there.
“So . . . do we expect an attack by followers of the Maldonados?”
He turned to a sixty-five-year-old Mexican with a thick mustache and thicker eyeglasses. He was the head of the División de Inteligencia de la Policía Federal. The Federal Police’s Department of Intelligence.
The man shook his head without reservation. “No. They control large parts of Guerrero state, but that is far away from the capital. The other cartels keep them out of the Distrito Federal for the most part.” He shrugged. “Sure, we’ve arrested known Maldonado men in the capital, but that was before the shootout in Acapulco. Once Antonio Maldonado was taken off of the chessboard, the group has become much more violent, but very much less organized.”
Herbers took this all in. It tracked, more or less, with what others had been saying about the organization previously, but he wanted to make sure nothing new had happened.
The local director of the Drug Enforcement Administration was seated across the table from Herbers. “Raúl? What say you?”
The silver-haired Hispanic American nodded. “I agree. Once Antonio died, Maldonado members posted dozens of threats against SWORDSMAN on social media sites. Federal Police, along with us, raided a safe house in Iguala about two months after the Acapulco shootout, and found a DVD. On it was a video of men with RPGs saying they would kill Jack Ryan when he came to Mexico. We assume it was going to be uploaded to YouTube or something. Still, that was months back. Nothing like that recently.”
Herbers had seen the video. Things like that never failed to get the attention of the Secret Service.
Herbers said, “One thing bothers me, though. These guys used to be all over Twitter screaming threats about SWORDSMAN, making videos and such. But now as the date of his arrival nears, we aren’t hearing the same amount of chatter. Does that concern anyone?”
The director of the Secret Service office here in Mexico City said, “I considered that. Wondered if maybe they were going radio silent because they had something cooking. But ultimately I determined it’s just like the others say. These guys are in such disarray right now, they couldn’t put together a real threat. Obviously I’m all for fortifying the motorcade and SWORDSMAN’s appearances to condition-red levels, but I don’t see Maldonado’s people orchestrating an attack.”
Herbers gave the matter one last prod. He turned to the embassy FBI agent-in-charge. “Any chance they could be coordinating with another group? Russians? Cubans, North Koreans? Any other bad actor who’s got POTUS in their sights?”
The AIC didn’t discount the possibility out of hand, but he clearly doubted it. “We have seen transactional relationships between all sorts of different groups and Maldonado. He gets guns from Russia, meth from North Korea, he sells to organized crime in the States. But something on a scale of a presidential assassination? I think that’s a bridge too far.”
“Fair enough,” said Herbers. He had a dozen more items on his agenda, and every one of them seemed just as important at the time.
41
Adel Zarif had been pestering his Mexican contacts for days about the bomb-making materials he needed, but Emilio and the others had just pled ignorance, claiming some men would arrive from the West and talk to him soon enough.
With five days before the Presi
dent’s arrival in Mexico, the Iranian had reached the point where he was considering contacting the North Koreans directly to complain about the situation. He had a contact number for a team of RGB men here in Mexico, with instructions to call as soon as the operation was complete, but he thought he might have to call it to raise his concerns about the lack of activity.
Things were getting dire, but Emilio’s continued promises had persuaded Zarif to wait.
Finally, with just four days left, Emilio sat Zarif down on the couch in the living room of his tiny safe-house apartment.
He said, “I’ve been asked to get a list of everything you want.”
Zarif cocked his head. “I don’t know what is available to me.”
“Everything.”
“What does that mean?”
“We have access to Base Aérea Militar Numero Siete. It’s an Army facility in the state of Guerrero. We can obtain anything that they have in their weapons stores. If what you need is small enough to fit in the trunk of a car, we can have it for you by tomorrow.”
Zarif was astonished. He was worried he’d have to make his weapon out of fertilizer and gasoline. At the very high end he’d hoped they would have access to some TNT. But Emilio was promising him ready-made military ordnance.
It didn’t get any better than that.
Zarif thought it over, trying to determine what would work best for the task at hand. The President would be traveling in his limousine, and the limo used by the U.S. President was legendary, and that was a problem for Zarif for two reasons. One, if it was as good as the legend, then it would take a massive charge, or else an extremely well-made device, to penetrate it.
And two, the legend was just that, a legend. There were very few specific details known about the vehicle itself. The weight, the thickness of the steel, the types of other materials used, and the locations of the most and least vulnerable parts—it was all officially unknown. Zarif was an engineer, he could do a lot with good data, but in his research on the vehicle itself he had discovered little more than conjecture, rumor, hyperbole, and wild guesses.