by Tom Clancy
He walked through the crowded downtown district in the warm rain until he found a cheap hostel, and here he booked a private room for the night. There was no request for an ID or passport or credit card, and the old man behind the counter took no notice of the fact the man’s English was spoken with an accent.
Zarif’s room was flea-infested and smelled of mold, but he felt safe enough here, so he sat at the little card table in the corner, put his head down, and tried to come up with a plan.
It took him an hour, but it would have taken him longer if he had other options. As it was, he had very little money, no Spanish-language skills, and not a single friend in the entire country of Mexico.
There were two things, and two things only, that he did have. He had contact information in the form of a phone number and an e-mail address to a North Korean intelligence agent in Cuba, and he had information that, if revealed to the world, would likely get North Korea burned to the ground by the USA.
So Zarif’s one option was blackmail.
He started a video recording on his phone, placed the phone on the desk, and scooted his chair back to put himself in the picture. He spoke in English.
“My name is Adel Zarif. I was living in Damascus when I was contacted by the Reconnaissance General Bureau of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. I was hired to assassinate Jack Ryan in Mexico City. I was offered asylum in the coastal city of Hamhung once the job was complete . . .”
His entire recording lasted only four minutes, but it laid out the entire operation. He sent the video file to the e-mail address of his North Korean contact in Cuba. And then he sent a text message right after this.
I will e-mail this recording to every newspaper and television station in America. You have one hour to call me to hear my demands.
—
The call came in less than twenty minutes. Zarif demanded from the North Koreans $2 million and a face-to-face exchange in Mexico. The RGB agent said he would call the Iranian back as soon as arrangements had been made, but Zarif just laughed in his face, telling him he would destroy his phone before it could be traced and then call the RGB man back from another phone in eighteen hours.
Zarif had not made it through a half-dozen Middle Eastern wars by being a fool. He did what he said he would do, shattering his phone with a brick behind his hostel, before heading out to find another phone and another place to stay the night.
He didn’t know what he would do with $2 million, he still had no documents and no friends. But he determined he could get a lot further with the money than without it, and he suspected he could make it out of Mexico eventually, and find someplace to hide.
It wasn’t a perfect plan, but those were problems for another day, because he knew the North Koreans would try to kill him if they got the chance.
63
Adam Yao woke this morning, as he had every morning he’d been in Chongju, to the sounds of roosters crowing. He looked to the clock on the wall of the temporary housing trailer and saw it was only five-thirty, but he was wide awake so he rolled out of bed and headed to the toilet.
A few minutes later he stepped outside the unit he shared with eight other men and women, and he stretched on the asphalt parking lot. It was a misty, cool morning, still dark outside, but the moon glowed through the vapor. The cooks wouldn’t have the breakfast of tea and noodles ready until seven, and the Chinese technicians wouldn’t climb in the buses for the twenty-minute bus ride to the refinery until eight, so Adam decided he would take this opportunity to glean some intel the only way available to him right now. He would go for a morning run inside the perimeter of the fence surrounding the compound, and he would see what he could see.
As he jogged he saw several bored and tired North Korean guards who just glanced at him and then went back to their conversations and their cigarettes. As he passed the hotel adjacent to the temporary housing compound, he saw several black cars and vans. These he knew belonged to Hwang Min-ho, who had arrived the previous evening from Pyongyang.
Adam knew something important was going on. The day before at work he’d been ordered to reduce his daily quota of powder. On the three previous days he’d been directed to work until he had produced eight hundred kilograms of crushed ore, which took him twelve hours. But yesterday this was changed to just one hundred kilos.
He had not asked any questions, he simply complied, but in the break room other Chinese technicians had been talking about the changes in their own work spaces, and one man relayed how the North Korean shift supervisor had told him the separation equipment that was due to arrive any day had been delayed. Adam knew this intel was secondhand at best, and he had no way of judging its accuracy, but the fact Hwang himself came in that evening made him wonder if the North Koreans had some sort of a crisis on their hands.
On his second lap around the inside of the fence he was surprised to notice another runner slowly jogging in the distance around the unfenced portion of the parking lot. He was too far away and it was too dark to see him clearly, but Adam assumed the man must have been a guest at the hotel.
Adam slowed his jog. For a moment he thought the runner might have been Hwang himself, because the man was small and slight, but soon he discounted this possibility because Hwang was bald, and the runner definitely had hair.
On his next lap he tried to time his run so he would be on the fence line at the same moment the runner approached on the other side of the fence. Adam was more curious than anything, because now he had put together the likelihood that the runner might be one of the foreign guest workers from Australia. Adam had seen them at the refinery, although none of them had business in his part of the plant, and he knew they were staying in the hotel.
He timed his lap perfectly. As he neared the approaching runner on the other side of the fence he realized he had been mistaken. This was not a man, this was the redheaded Australian woman he’d seen a few times before.
She smiled and waved as she approached. Adam waved back and kept running.
When she was still in front of him and closing, she called out to him. “Ni hao.” Hello.
Surprised to hear the white woman speak Mandarin, Adam slowed. He nodded to her. “Ni hao.”
She stopped fully now. “Ni hao ma?” How are you?
Adam stopped as well. “Wo hen hao. Ni ne?” I am fine, and you?
She continued in stilted Mandarin. “I am good. I am Dr. Powers, from Australia.”
“Shan Xin. From China. You speak very good Mandarin.”
“Thank you. I went to university in Shenzhen. My husband is from there.”
In truth her Chinese was fair at best, it was heavily accented with an Australian twang, but Adam felt his heart pounding. Perhaps he could get some information from this woman, and do it without revealing anything about his true identity.
But he knew he needed to go slowly and carefully so as not to arouse suspicion. He started with some idle conversation. “You run every day?”
“There is nothing else to do,” she said. “What is your job at Chongju?”
“I am the computer operator of the cone crushing machine in the powder-processing department. I arrived just last week. And you?”
“I am a geologist. I have been here for over a month.”
Adam smiled and nodded. “Very good.”
She shook her head. Even in the darkness, Adam thought she looked sad.
He said, “You are far from home.”
She didn’t hesitate to open up. “I have two children. A boy and a girl. I miss them.”
“I understand. I have a boy and a girl, too.”
She brightened a little. “Really? How lovely. What are their names?”
The woman was obviously bored and lonely. Adam made up names, ages, and even personalities of two children. It was called mirroring, and it was probably the oldest social engineering trick in the bo
ok, but it was also supremely effective.
“You have pictures?”
Adam let his shoulders droop. “They took all our personal belongings in Shanghai. They were just pictures. What does it matter? Now I cannot look into the eyes of little Lanfen, my daughter, before I go to sleep at night.”
Adam was a good actor. Powers bought it hook, line, and sinker. He felt bad for the deception—she was probably a nice woman who’d made a bad decision in coming here—but he had a job to do, and bad acting in his job would compromise his mission and could get him killed.
Powers said, “I regret coming. I would go home in a minute, but they won’t let us leave until the facility is producing.”
Adam saw an opportunity. He was rushing things, he knew, but this was too good to pass up. “I worry about when that will happen. Yesterday they told us the refinery will not start on time. Some equipment was supposed to arrive, but it has been delayed. You want to leave, but I do not. There are no jobs in mining where I come from. I am afraid they will send us home if it doesn’t come soon.”
Powers waved away Adam’s concern. “The arrival of the flotation cells was held up. Don’t worry. Hwang will get more here soon. He has to.”
“Has to?”
“It’s all about money. The North Koreans don’t get paid until the refinery starts producing. On the day the refinery goes on line, North Korea stands to get five hundred million U.S. dollars from their foreign partner.”
“I see,” he said. “How do you know all this?”
Instantly he saw he’d gone too far with his questioning. She hesitated in answering, and she looked around to make sure they were not being watched. Dr. Powers was concerned about what she had just said because, Adam assumed, it was something she was not supposed to know.
As a NOC, Adam knew how to put sources at ease. He laughed. “Maybe you shouldn’t say anything else to me.” He smiled. “I am just a computer technician. I am happy you think the facility will go on line soon. That is all I care about.”
She relaxed, and a minute later the two of them had jogged off in separate directions along opposite sides of the fence line.
—
Three hours later Adam sat at his terminal, typing out his report for the operations center of Acrid Herald. He did not use Dr. Powers’s name or even make any reference to her, because if his mission was discovered he did not want her implicated, but he reported her claim that North Korea would receive a $500 million payment on the day the refinery went live.
From what Adam knew about where that money was going and what it was being used for, he hoped like hell that day never came.
64
Óscar Roblas de Mota had been asleep in his suite at the Pan Pacific hotel in Singapore when the attack on Jack Ryan occurred in his hometown ten thousand miles away. He slept in the next morning, and it wasn’t until one of his personal assistants roused him at nine that he heard the news.
From nine a.m. till ten a.m. he sat in his white bathrobe on the sofa and watched television, both U.S. and Mexican satellite stations. By now there was video of the ambush from cell phones, helicopter news crews, and security cameras. A virtual glut of moving pictures of the entire attack from multiple angles.
He called a half-dozen friends in government in the district; he was as dialed-in as anyone could be there, after all. Everyone was saying the attack was the work of Santiago Maldonado, but Roblas didn’t buy that for a minute. The Maldonados had claimed responsibility, but they weren’t an active group inside Mexico City. Sure, they could have driven into town for the attack, but Roblas didn’t see them as competent enough to pull off anything of this magnitude. He knew they had recently failed in an attempt to kill the mayor of a small city in Guerrero, and here they were, supposedly taking out dozens of trained security and wounding the President of the United States?
Not a chance.
In the back of his mind Roblas thought of General Ri. The North Korean intelligence chief would have people who could have done this, and he would also have contacts within the Maldonado clan. There was no question as to motive. Ri’s schemes had been thwarted on the mining front and on the ICBM front, in both cases by the man who narrowly escaped death the day before in Mexico City.
At eleven a.m. Roblas tore himself away from the screen and showered, then he dressed for a lunch meeting with bankers, but as he did so he became more and more suspicious that the North Koreans were responsible for what had happened.
He was not angry that they had tried, he was angry that they had failed, and he was very angry that they had done it in “his” city.
He was just about to head with his entourage down to his limousine when a secure call came for him on the satellite phone. Just receiving word of the call itself convinced him he was right about what had happened.
“Bueno?”
It was one of Ri’s translators, speaking English. “Good afternoon. Comrade General Ri for you, sir.”
Roblas offered no greeting. Instead, he said, “What has happened in my city?”
Ri replied, “At this point, I only know what is in the international press.”
“I don’t believe you. Maldonado did not do this. It was either you or the Russians.”
“Then it was the Russians.” The translator waited a long time for a reply from Mexico.
Finally, Roblas said, “If you did have anything to do with this, I hope, for your sake and mine, that you cleaned up your mess.”
There was a long pause. “There is some mess left to clean up.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Ri said, “A man has reached out to us. He appears to be responsible for what happened yesterday.”
“I am listening.”
Ri explained the extortion demand of the Iranian who was now, apparently, somewhere in Mexico.
When Ri was finished, Óscar Roblas said, “This is not my concern. Why should I involve myself in this? I am not responsible for what you have done!”
Ri answered back calmly, and the translator spoke almost robotically. “You may not be responsible, but this does concern you.”
“What does that mean?”
“You have invested a great deal of time and effort into Chongju. You are very close to reaping a return on your considerable investment.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Not at all. But let me put it to you like this. Do you think there will be a valuable mining operation at Chongju if America comes to the erroneous conclusion North Korea tried to kill its president yesterday?”
Roblas understood. If there was war, North Korea would lose. And if North Korea lost, Roblas would lose as well.
It was a simple business proposition. Risk versus reward. As he thought about it, he felt the reward potential was favorable. The potential for risk in sending someone to silence the assassin was high, but not as high as the potential for reward if the mission was successful.
And Ri was right. Roblas had already invested a lot into this endeavor. A phone call now was just one more small thing.
Ri asked, “Do you have access to someone who can deal with the problem in Mexico?”
Roblas looked down at his hands and saw they trembled. He was furious for being dragged into this.
But there was a man. Not a Mexican; Roblas wouldn’t send his own people into this hornets’ nest of culpability. He needed to do what he could to maintain a veneer of plausible deniability. Instead, he would have his people contact Edward Riley. He was Sharps’s man, but while Sharps would balk at this and run for cover, Riley would do it willingly. Riley would do anything.
He would clean this up.
Roblas said, “Give me a number for one of your agents. I will hand that number to a man, and I don’t know what will happen after that. As I told you, I am not involved in this.”
Ri said, “Sometimes m
atters outside of our control must be dealt with so that misunderstandings are not made.”
Roblas hung up the phone on the director of North Korean foreign intelligence.
—
Jack Ryan, Jr., shaved his beard off in the ninety minutes he spent in his Alexandria condo before being picked up by White House personnel for the ride to the hospital. He looked like a new man, or at least he felt he looked the same as he used to before growing the beard, and that was the idea. He didn’t want his meager attempt at a natural disguise outed to the world if someone happened to get a photograph of him. The beard would grow back, but if that became the new publicly known image of him, the beard would do him no good.
This was to be a private family visit, but Ryan knew how the media operated, and there would be a lot of photogs around the hospital trying to get a money shot of the shell-shocked presidential family. Ryan would do all in his power to stay off tonight’s TV and out of tomorrow’s newspapers, but he returned his appearance to the non-Campus version of Jack Ryan, Jr., just in case.
Just before nine p.m. he was ushered into the hospital through a back delivery entrance and then taken to a private waiting room. Here he was reunited with his sister Sally, his mom, and his younger siblings, Katie and Kyle. There were also dozens of police and Secret Service, but they had the good manners to give the family some space to be alone.
At nine-thirty they were brought into the President’s hospital room. Jack had been told over and over that his father would be in a great deal of pain for a few weeks but his injuries were not life-threatening, and in truth he looked good considering the pictures the younger Ryan had seen of the flipped limo, but Jack Junior was still shocked by his father’s weakened state. His fit, vital, and bright-eyed dad now lay there sound asleep in a hospital gown, an oxygen tube in his nose and a large bandage on his forehead.
Dr. Maura Handwerker was by his side as she had been since he staggered aboard Air Force One, and she immediately apologized to the family, saying she’d had to give the President some pain medication before they arrived and he’d be out of it for the rest of the night. She said the President had fought for hours against the meds, but finally relented when she explained to him he wouldn’t sleep a moment in so much discomfort, and the next day he would be utterly useless.