by Tom Clancy
Caruso added, “Something that Riley and his buddy from Pyongyang couldn’t pull off without more muscle.”
Clark agreed. “Yep. All we can do is keep tracking. And stay the hell out of the way if those guns come out of their waistbands.”
Soon the entourage led by Riley drove in a three-vehicle convoy toward the center of the city, and within ten minutes Clark called their destination. “They’re heading back to that theater they reconned earlier.”
And they did just that. Riley climbed out of the Lexus a few blocks from the entrance and then the Lexus rolled on, and the Jeeps peeled off and headed up side streets. Dom tracked one of them to a lot two blocks to the south, and Ryan found the other idling on a side street two blocks to the north.
While the rest of the Campus team took positions on all compass points and waited, Chavez went into the theater and bought a ticket.
Soon Riley came inside and stood at the concession stand without buying anything. Chavez saw the two backpacks, and at first he thought they might have held explosives, but almost immediately he remembered the big purchase at the bookstore.
It came together quickly for him. He transmitted into his earpiece mike. “Unless Riley is the newest member of the Toluca walking bookmobile, he’s here for an exchange. He’s got a couple of packs that I think are supposed to look like money bags.”
Clark said, “Loaded with the paperbacks?”
“Yep.”
Sam Driscoll asked, “Why do you need a dozen guys for a handoff?”
Clark answered that. “Because either you think it’s going to go bad or you know it’s going to go bad.”
“Meaning they are planning on whacking somebody?”
Ding said, “Or maybe just grabbing them. Don’t know. This should be interesting. Maybe I should buy some popcorn.”
—
Twenty minutes later The Campus tailed the Lexus and the two Jeeps out of town to the south, and every one of the American operators wondered about the identity of the guy Riley and his goons had just kidnapped off the street.
—
President of the United States Jack Ryan had spent a miserable day pretending he wasn’t miserable. Everything he had done since waking up this morning had been an act. An act for his doctors, telling them he didn’t need any painkillers heavier than anti-inflammatories, because he didn’t want to be doped up; an act for the reporters from Fox and The Washington Post who shared a staged and controlled five-minute visit with the President, to show just how well he was doing twenty-four hours after the attack.
An act during his quick phone call with Patrick O’Day, husband of Andrea Price O’Day. She was still in Mexico City receiving care, and her husband was by her side. Her condition had been downgraded from critical to serious, but she was in a medically induced coma, and American doctors were consulting with the Mexican neuros on how to proceed. Jack knew the last thing Pat needed was to listen to him complain about his own aches and pains, so he lied and told Andrea’s husband he was fine and then they prayed together for her recovery.
An act for the world leaders he spoke with on the phone and the dozens more he communicated with via videotaped message, all meant to convince America’s allies that all was right with the good ship Ryan.
And an act for his wife, Cathy, so that she wouldn’t worry any more than she naturally would, and a greater act for his kids so they wouldn’t be terrified about the monsters out there in the world who would want to hurt their dad.
But there was one person and one person only to whom Ryan spoke the pure, unvarnished truth. Arnie Van Damm got that duty, and a difficult duty it was. When the doctors and nurses were out of earshot, when the family had returned to the White House to finally get some sleep, when there were no more reporters or well-wishers or lookie-loos, Ryan bitched and moaned at Arnie.
“Nurse Ratched over there has got this goddamned dressing too tight! She and Maura are trying to shove these fucking elephant tranquilizers down my damn throat. Do they think I can be a chief executive and a zombie at the same time? I’m going to get AG Murray to investigate them to see if they are Russian spies. And those Secret Service guys yesterday . . . let me tell you. I know they had a job to do, but those young wild asses slung me around into that car like a rag doll when I was trying to help Andrea.”
Arnie listened to every last complaint and concern, and there were a dozen more; he took notes where needed, and nodded sympathetically throughout. When the tirades were finally over, he nodded more and said, “Jack. If you aren’t hurting and bitching, then you aren’t living.” He smiled. “Clearly, you are living, and considering the alternative and how close you came to that alternative yesterday, I’d say that’s a pretty good deal.”
“Did you listen to a thing I just said?”
“Yes, and I think you are just pissed because the Russkies didn’t attack. You thought your presence was the one thing holding back the red tide against America, but now you see that even when they thought you were out of the picture, they still have to consider it a bit before kicking off an invasion.”
“Funny, Arnie.”
“On a serious note, Mary Pat is outside.”
Jack nodded. “Bring her in. She knows me well enough to know my happy face is a put-on. I don’t have to fake anything for her.”
Mary Pat Foley entered a moment later, and Arnie stayed in the room. She asked about Jack’s condition, about how he felt and how the doctors were treating him, and Jack grumbled a little, but all the venting he’d done to Arnie had let enough steam out of the kettle so that he no longer needed to blow his top.
Finally, she said, “I thought you’d want to know where we are with finding the culprit for the attack. We’re only a day into the investigation, but we’ve turned up a little.”
“What did you find?”
“Dead Maldonado operatives at the scene. A dozen guys. Only four known cartel goons, but the others all had Maldonado tattoos and IDs linking them back to Guerrero state, where that clan rules the roads.”
“What about the explosive? I don’t remember a damn thing about a bomb. I woke up thinking we’d been in a traffic accident. Everybody says it was a hell of a blast.”
“Hundred-five-millimeter howitzer shells. Three of them. Looks like they came from the Mexican military.”
“Holy hell,” Ryan muttered. He’d seen what a 105 could do in the Marine Corps, and it wasn’t pretty.
“One of the high-explosive rounds impacted directly with the front limousine. Killed the four Secret Service men riding in it. A second shell hit right in front of your vehicle. If you were fifteen feet ahead it would be all over, Jack.”
That sank in for a moment.
“That knocked you upside down. Ambassador Styles broke his neck in the flip. He died instantly, mercifully. The last shell hit behind your limo. It took out a counterassault team vehicle and the vehicle next to it.”
Jack looked down at the wires, tubes, and bandages that seemed to be holding him together. “Arnie?”
Van Damm had been looking down at his phone. “Sir?”
“Come here and shake my hand.”
Arnie stepped over and lightly squeezed the fingertips on Ryan’s immobilized left hand, because his right hand was wrapped to his chest and completely covered in cotton bandages.
“Forget everything I just said. I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”
“Forgotten, Mr. President.”
“You know I yell at you because I can’t yell at anybody else.”
“Of course I do.”
Ryan said, “When we leave the White House you have my permission to write a kiss-and-tell book about what an ass I can be. You’ll make a mint. Hell, I’ll write the foreword.”
Van Damm and Mary Pat both smiled. Arnie said, “When I get out of here all I want to do is go to some tiny quiet college i
n New England, teach a class in conflict resolution or something, and decompress.”
Ryan cracked a smile himself. It was his first authentic smile in the past day. “That sounds pretty good. I might take that class.”
“That would make me uncomfortable, Mr. President, because you will be a recurring case study.”
67
It was nearly eleven p.m. when Edward Riley and his entourage neared the Cuernavaca address given to him by Roblas’s banker. There were no lights on this winding hilly road, but the houses they’d passed in the past few minutes had all been palatial mansions in gated grounds. This seemed to be some sort of neighborhood for the elite, and Riley knew they were near enough to Mexico City that this was probably a getaway for the city’s wealthiest inhabitants.
He had expected the banker to give him access to a remote rustic farm, but when he arrived at the actual address he found something altogether different. Like the other properties on the road, it was a massive gated compound on a wooded hillside, and high on the distant hill at the center of the parcel he saw an ultramodern space-age building bathed in dramatic outdoor lighting. It was a private mansion with a pool that surrounded it almost like a moat, and from the road it looked like a big white-and-glass spaceship hovering in the nighttime sky and looming over the valley.
They pulled up the two-hundred-yard-long winding driveway and parked in front of the house. Riley ordered that Zarif be kept in one of the Jeeps surrounded by four of the armed Cuban DI agents while Riley and Kim headed up to the front door of the mansion. The door, like the gate back down the hill, was unlocked. Inside, all the lights were on and ceiling fans slowly rotated high over a massive cylindrical-shaped great room, which, through two-story-high floor-to-ceiling windows, overlooked a beautifully landscaped backyard pool complete with waterfalls and fountains.
The majority of the décor inside was as white as the building itself. Zarif was brought into the great room and tied to a chair, and even though Riley had been told there would be no one around, he had the Cubans fan out and check the grounds and the buildings from top to bottom. They found a pool house, a detached guesthouse, a garage, and a few other outbuildings, and after searching through everything, they confirmed they were indeed alone.
RGB agent Kim had two pairs of Cubans begin patrols of the grounds, and the other six men he placed around the main building: three outside on the wraparound second-floor balcony, and three inside with the prisoner.
Zarif had said nothing during the hourlong drive, and he said nothing when Riley pulled off the pillowcase. It took him a moment to adjust to the light, but when he did he just gazed at the opulence all around him with some confusion.
Riley sat down on the sofa in front of him. “Well, then, let’s get started, shall we?”
—
The Campus had struggled to keep sight of Riley’s caravan while remaining undetected, and this was a difficult mission, but all four vehicles in their surveillance package were driven by experts in vehicle tails. Just outside Toluca, when it appeared that Riley and his entourage were leaving the suburbs and not heading back to Mexico City, Caruso and Ryan peeled away and accelerated beyond their targets, and they raced forward to probable turnoffs ahead. Each time Riley and his three vehicles passed them, another vehicle in the Campus detail would make a move, by either going down adjacent roads to avoid being seen or directly passing the target if absolutely unavoidable.
The darkness and a gentle but steady evening rain helped in this endeavor, but Clark knew they couldn’t continue on for too long without being detected by the men ahead.
Finally Riley turned off the highway and into the city of Cuernavaca, and he and the other vehicles rolled through the city itself. The Campus men lost them for several minutes. Fortunately, Chavez noticed three sets of taillights ascending a hillside off to the side of the road, so with a lot of coordination and a few wrong turns, The Campus regained the eye on the man they had tracked all the way from New York.
The Lexus and the two Jeeps turned into the gate of a modern mansion just after eleven p.m. At the time, only Clark and Driscoll were close, and they were a hundred fifty yards back on a winding road, so initially they missed the fact that their targets had left the road. But with some quick backtracking they saw the lights of the vehicles as they parked in front of the space-age building on the hill.
Clark notified the team, and then he called Gavin in Alexandria and told him to find out who owned the property and to call back the second he had something. With this done, he notified his men of the game plan. “I want two guys inside the grounds, head for the back. The objective is a photograph of the unknown subject they picked up behind the theater. Riley came a long way to get that guy, and I want to know who the hell he is.”
Driscoll and Ryan were given the overwatch job, based solely on the equipment in each man’s backpack. Driscoll had the best camera, and Ryan had a dark hoodie and a night-vision monocle. Both men were carrying small Smith & Wesson pistols in their Thunderwear holsters, but neither had any intention of getting into a gunfight with a dozen men.
Especially on behalf of some victim who meant nothing to them at this point.
They jumped the fence from an adjacent property thirty minutes after Riley and his crew arrived at the mansion, and they found themselves in a grove of pecan trees. Ryan spent a few moments scanning through his forty-millimeter night-observation device to make sure there were no dogs or men in the area, but once they were clear, they were slowed down some by pecans on the ground. Every step seemed to make a loud noise for the first twenty-five yards as the shells cracked underfoot.
Finally they reached some open ground. Here Ryan scanned the house again, and he saw a man on a tower looking in his general direction, so he and Sam backed into the trees and moved laterally along the fence, farther toward the back of the property.
They found a decent hide after ducking a pair of two-man patrols, and they ended up low in a copse of cohune palm that grew alongside a little pond in the back of the property, halfway between the fence and the pool house at the back edge of the main building. From here they had a good vantage point that gave them a view of the entire back of the main house.
Driscoll brought out his Nikon, attached a 500-millimeter lens, and centered on the movement in the expansive and bright main room of the house. As soon as he focused he could see Edward Riley pacing back and forth. He snapped a few pictures. Also in the room was the Asian man they had first seen around noon at the hotel in Mexico City. Sam photographed him as well. With them were three Hispanic-looking tough guys, and seated was the unknown individual who Riley had picked up in Toluca earlier in the evening.
Sam spoke softly into his earpiece microphone as he snapped some pictures of the man. “This poor guy has taken a beating. Looks like the North Korean is tuning him up, trying to get him to talk, I guess.”
Clark was still outside the property in the Durango. “Is Riley the one asking the questions?”
Sam saw Riley speaking at that moment. Soon the Asian man backhanded the bound victim again.
“That’s my read on it. Sending the headshot now to Gavin.”
Gavin had been given the heads-up in Alexandria to expedite the processing of the image just as soon as it came through.
—
The conference call that kept all the men connected to one another by their headsets received a new guest just five minutes after Sam sent the image.
“Hey, guys. It’s Gavin. I just loaded the image. Expect it to take a half-hour or more, if there is a hit at all.”
“That’s fine. What about the property?”
“Owned by a Mexican bank. Did some digging through CIA, and traced it back to Grupo Pacífico.”
Ryan said, “Just like the plane Riley flew down on.”
“Bingo,” Biery confirmed. “Owned by Óscar Roblas. Doesn’t look like it’s a person
al address. More like a place he loans out or throws parties in. Typical rich-guy stuff that the rest of us don’t ever—”
There was a pause on the line. Clark said, “Gavin? Did we lose you?”
“Uh . . . no. But you won’t believe this. Facial recog is complete.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m really not.” Gavin seemed stunned himself. “Oh, I see. I set it up so it would first run through the FBI and CIA’s database of wanted subjects. It saves time that way because it’s not just looking over a general database of—”
Jack Ryan, Jr., interjected over Biery’s explanation. “Who the fuck is it, Gavin?”
“Oh. Sorry. According to the FBI Most Wanted database, that man’s name is Adel Zarif, he is a forty-eight-year-old Iranian from—”
John Clark spoke for the rest of the team. “We know who he is.”
And it was true. Everyone in The Campus was aware of one of the most notorious terrorist bomb makers of the past fifteen years.
Caruso spoke next. “You know what this means, right?”
Clark did. “The IED yesterday.”
It sank in slowly to the five men surrounding the mansion. The perpetrator of the attempted assassination of the President of the United States, Jack’s father, was right in front of them.
And this clearly meant Riley and the North Koreans were involved as well. No one knew who the other ten men were, but if this had something to do with the attack on Jack Ryan, Sr., it seemed likely the Hispanics in the mix were Maldonado gunmen.
Clark said, “We are not calling this in to Mexican law enforcement.”
A universal agreement was reached immediately on this. No one was confident the Mexicans could take this place down before the men inside escaped. Then Clark added, “We could call Hendley and have him notify Mary Pat. She would contact Justice and they would put together an FBI package. Surely they have assets staged in Mexico City after what went down yesterday.”