by Marc Cameron
“I have MP,” Arnie said. “Want me to put her on speaker?”
Ryan shook his head. “On second thought, go ahead and patch in Bob Burgess, too. I’d like to get a sitrep on the safety of the Seventh Fleet while we’re at it.”
44
Ding Chavez stood with Jack Ryan, Jr., on the sidewalk in front of the Freddo ice cream shop, across the street from Recoleta Cemetery. Ten feet away, Midas and Adara flanked the seething Japanese woman.
“Impossible to prove,” Ding said. “It’s not like Kōanchōsa-chō carry around ID cards.”
The Kōanchōsa-chō, or Public Security Intelligence Agency, was akin to the CIA, FBI counterintelligence, and MI6, responsible for gathering intelligence and conducting counterespionage activities against both internal and external threats to the people of Japan.
“She has support and training,” Ryan said. “It’s no easy task to get a suppressed rifle into the country and then set up a sniper hide across the street from an international event. And I did see her following the brunette.”
“Tell me her name again,” Ding said.
Ryan looked at the palm of his hand where he’d written it down. “Yukiko,” he said. “At least that’s the name she gave.”
“Well, shit,” Chavez said. He’d worked with a couple Kōanchōsa-chō guys a few years before. They’d been good intelligence officers, if a bit humorless for Ding’s taste. But the IC world was not one where you could name-drop. For one thing, cover identities came and went. A real name might get nothing but a blank stare—even if you were both talking about the same person.
Chavez walked over to look the woman in the eye. “You’ve put us in a bit of a pickle,” he said.
Yukiko glared. “I could scream rape.”
“Go for it,” Chavez said. “I doubt you want to talk to the cops any worse than we do—even if you are Kōanchōsa-chō. Hell, especially if you are.”
Her eyes flashed toward the cemetery wall. “We waste time standing here.”
“How’s that?” Chavez said.
“You are CIA?”
Chavez shook his head. “Nice try.”
The Japanese woman stared hard at him, obviously thinking through her options. If she were truly Japanese intelligence, she’d realize she didn’t have many. At length, her shoulders dropped and she heaved a long sigh. She nodded toward Jack.
“Your young friend says they went into the cemetery.”
“They did.” Chavez played along. That tidbit of information wasn’t exactly a state secret. “Probably went straight over the far side before we could get around.”
Yukiko shook her head. “I do not believe that is true.”
Adara moved a half-step closer. “What, then?”
“The Basilica del Pilar is at the northeast corner of the grounds. Many of the churches in Buenos Aires have underground cloisters where nuns or Jesuit priests—”
“No, no, no.” Jack cut her off. “No more tunnels!” He said it loud enough that a passing couple turned to look at the crazy turista.
“As I was saying.” The Japanese woman gave a half-smile, then turned back to Chavez. “Jesuit priests constructed tunnels under many portions of the city. Some believe they planned to build a network so vast as to connect most of the churches in Buenos Aires.”
“Okay . . .” Chavez said. “Let’s say Chen took one of these tunnels. Can you take us to the entrance?”
“Trust me,” Jack said. “You don’t want to go down there.”
Yukiko shook her head. “There are almost five thousand burial vaults in an area covering fifty thousand square meters. There may be many entrances . . . or the way down could be beneath the church itself.”
“If there is one,” Chavez said.
The Japanese woman conceded the point. “This is true,” she said, nodding at Jack again. “But as your young friend will tell you, at least one of the tunnels leads to the slums on the other side of the tracks. Vincent Chen has a contact there who offers him protection, a man named Santiago Salazar. He is the father of Amanda Salazar, the Paraguayan woman you followed from the bombing. He is what you would call a neighborhood criminal boss in this villa miseria. I placed a listening device against the window of his home earlier today.”
“Let me guess,” Jack said. “Right before a guy with a machete chased you back into the sewer tunnel?”
“Correct,” Yukiko said.
Adara sighed. “Then he knows the device is there.”
“Maybe not,” Jack said. “The guy with the machete never made it back to tell him.”
“Ah,” Adara said. “Right.”
Ryan turned back to Yukiko. “I watched Amanda Salazar cut through the train yard,” he said. “Why didn’t she use the tunnel if it comes up near her father’s house?”
“Would you?” Yukiko said. “If you did not have to? I believe she suffers from . . . heijokyōfushō . . . fear of small places.”
“Claustrophobia,” Chavez said.
“Yes,” Yukiko said. “That is the word. In any case, we should hurry. My phone was damaged when you knocked me down. My room is behind the Hyatt on Montevideo. I have another phone there, but they will reach Salazar’s very soon. We must hurry if we hope to learn anything of value from the device I planted.”
Chavez raised an eyebrow. “Sure you don’t have a partner there as well?”
“Believe me,” Yukiko said, “if I had a partner, you would be aware of that by now.”
Chavez looked at the rest of his team.
Both Midas and Adara shrugged.
“We have to do something,” Jack said.
“All right, then.” Chavez motioned up the street with his open hand, nodding to Midas and Adara. “Feel free to shoot her if she tries anything.”
“Aye, sir,” Adara said.
Chavez turned to Ryan as the other two led the way with the Japanese woman in tow. “Notice how she kept calling you my ‘young friend’ like you were some kind of kid?”
Jack chuckled. “Ding, Ding, Ding,” he whispered so Yukiko couldn’t hear the name. “She’s not calling me that because I look like a kid. She’s calling me that because you’re old.”
“Get your ass moving, Ryan.”
• • •
President Jack Ryan rummaged through the bottom drawer of the desk in his study while Arnie van Damm took care of arranging the phone call. Ryan found the golf ball he was looking for and dropped it on the floor. Van Damm looked up at the clunk as the ball hit the carpet, and saw Ryan had kicked off his shoe.
“What?” Ryan said, rolling the ball around under his foot.
Van Damm held up both hands. “Hey,” he said. “This is your office. Who am I to judge?”
The phone gave an audible tone and the White House operator said, “Both parties are on the line, Mr. President.”
The director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense acknowledged that they were, indeed, there.
Ryan said, “Are you guys watching the news?”
“Just now,” Mary Pat said. “My deputy called me about thirty seconds before you did.”
“Same here,” Burgess said. “They’re saying Foreign Minister Li was injured but not badly. He’d be a likely target if Zhao’s behind this.”
“Could be,” the DNI said. “One thing’s certain, Li will leverage the hell out of this. Surviving an assassination attempt is a great way to boost political approval ratings.”
“Don’t remind me,” Ryan said. “My numbers went up fourteen points after the bombing in Mexico City. For some reason, not dying is seen as heroic. In any case, we shouldn’t discount the possibility that this bombing is related to everything else.”
“I agree,” the SecDef said. “If you put together the Orion explosion, the attack on the oil rig in Chad, the USS Rogue incident, and these event
s in Argentina—all lines converge on Zhao.”
“Maybe,” Mary Pat said. “But the woman who survived the attack in which the Rogue was involved described the pirates as being Indonesian or Malaysian.”
“That is true,” Burgess said. “But I’d put money on finding Zhao’s fingerprints on the payment to any of a half-dozen terrorist groups around Indonesia—as we did with Boko Haram in Chad. He’s pissed because our Freedom of Navigation ops are making him look bad, so he makes a play for one of our ships. Rogue wasn’t broadcasting on AIS and her schedule wasn’t advertised, but the fact that they were helping out as part of Malaysian antipiracy efforts was in all the papers down there. It was no secret that she was to berth in Australia prior to returning to her task force group. The average speed of a Cyclone-class PC is open-source. Anyone who wanted to target her would have had to wait for her to leave and start a countdown. Enough yachties sail through that area this time of year heading for Bali or Singapore that it would be easy to grab one when Rogue was presumably close enough to render aid.”
“A lot of moving parts,” Mary Pat said. “But it very nearly got the job done.”
“Not really,” Burgess said. “We have security measures to keep bad actors from getting too close to one of our ships, but at some point the VBSS teams have to close the distance with the RHIB to do their jobs.”
“I’m glad you brought up the terrorist groups, Bob,” Ryan said. “I’ve asked Dr. Miller to come in tomorrow and do some focused digging. Mary Pat, I’d appreciate it if you could get with her bosses and make sure she’s read into anything we have on Laskar Jihad, Jemaah Islamiyah . . . and that old East Timor independence group we looked into . . . What were they called?”
“Revolutionary Front,” the DNI said, demonstrating why she held the position she did.
“That’s the one,” Ryan continued. “We’ll cast a broad net. Hell, let’s get Dr. Miller access to cases on the He-Man Woman Haters Club if they have a chapter in that part of the world.”
Mary Pat chuckled. “As soon as we’re done here, Mr. President,” she said. “I’ll look into this Argentina thing as well.”
Ryan knew by “looking into it” Mary Pat would bring to bear the investigative and analytical brainpower of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies under her purview. For all the information silos, turf wars, and territorial fights between the various agencies, when a personal directive went out from the DNI, one could almost hear the collective mental gears turning in Washington.
“You’re excused, then, Mary Pat,” Ryan said. “And thanks for your work.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” the DNI said, and then disconnected.
“Now,” Ryan continued, “Bob, bring me up to speed on our ships in the WestPac.”
“We’ve moved everyone out of the storm path,” Burgess said. “Or at least we did. This typhoon is all over the damned place. Its westerly course has now veered sharply north, putting it on a collision course for Central Japan. The Bōsō Peninsula gives some protection to Tokyo Bay if a storm comes in from the east, but Typhoon Catelyn is heading straight up the pipe.”
“Leaving Yokosuka vulnerable,” Ryan said, picturing the geography around the American Naval facility.
“Correct,” the SecDef said. “The storm may well yet turn west again, but Admiral Blackley ordered all vessels out to sea. They’ll head north and wait out the storm in colder waters. Even if it continues that way, it’ll lose steam.”
“Very well,” Ryan said. He knew Vice Admiral Blackley well and trusted the man’s judgment. “Let me know if anything develops.”
Ryan leaned back on the couch and gave a nod to van Damm, who ended the call.
The CoS drummed his fingers on the desk, eyes narrow. Arnie van Damm’s mind was always moving near light speed, one or two steps ahead of most people in the room—when it came to politics, at least.
Ryan raised an eyebrow. “What’s on your mind?”
“Jack,” van Damm said. Calling him by his given name was a sure sign the CoS was about to dispense some serious advice. “I know you, and I know you’re counting on this upcoming summit to meet face-to-face with President Zhao.”
Ryan had the golf ball in his hand now, rolling it back and forth with his fingers. “I’ve met him before,” he said.
“True, but that meeting was absent the present facts.” Van Damm glanced at a scratch pad on the desk. “RSMC Tokyo clocks Typhoon Catelyn with sustained winds of a hundred five miles an hour. And she’s showing rapid intensification.”
“I don’t think we’re supposed to call them ‘she’ anymore.”
Van Damm rolled his eyes. “If this genderless storm with a female name makes landfall anywhere near the Kantō Plain, Japan might be a little busy with recovery efforts to host the G20.”
“True,” Ryan said.
“The evidence against Zhao is mounting,” van Damm said. “And what we do have is pretty damned . . . well, damning. I know you want to meet him, shake his hand, get what you believe is a true measure of the man, but that might not be possible. Jack, you may well have to make a decision on Zhao without looking him in the eye.”
45
Yukiko’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a tidy but older brick building a block and a half to the northeast of the Palacio Duhau Hyatt, where the Chinese foreign minister was staying. Buenos Aires city police and members of Foreign Minister Li’s protective detail had barricaded both ends of Avenida Alvear in front of the hotel and Posadas behind, forcing the Campus operators to approach the Kōanchōsa-chō operative’s room from Libertador. On the other side of Libertador was the train yard. Five hundred meters beyond that were the slums of Villa 31 and, presumably, Vincent Chen’s little band of terrorists.
Chavez placed a call to John Clark as they walked, asking him to check with his contacts in the Japanese intelligence community to see if any of them could verify a Monzaki Yukiko. He was still waiting to hear back when they arrived in front of the building.
The single apartment elevator was Old World–style, with a wooden door and an accordion gate that had to be shut manually before the car would operate. There was only enough room inside for four at a time, so Chavez, Ryan, and Adara squeezed in with the Japanese woman, leaving Midas to bound up the stairs.
The car chugged upward slowly with the weight of four passengers, and the former Delta commander was leaning against a plaster-covered wall when Jack pushed open the door.
“You’re staying alone,” Chavez asked again.
Yukiko held up her little finger, bending it at the knuckle. “Yubikiri,” she said. “I promise.”
Midas and Adara went through the door first, clearing the room before allowing Yukiko inside.
“I guess you really weren’t expecting company,” Midas said when he came back to the door. “You’re as messy as my young friend.”
Chavez’s phone buzzed. He answered it, nodded a few times, and then motioned for Yukiko to hold up her right hand, thumb extended. She did, revealing a crescent scar on the web.
“Looks like it’s her,” Chavez said. “Thanks, Mr. C.”
Yukiko smiled. “Mr. C? My father knew a man named John who was sometimes called that.”
Chavez winked at the others in the group. “That’s what Mr. C said.”
It took more than a phone call to be completely accepted, but the fact that John Clark apparently knew her father put Monzaki Yukiko well on the road. The IC world was often a multigenerational affair, with children following parents into the business. Clearances could be somewhat easier to obtain when a relative had already been scrutinized to the nth degree during a security background check.
Free now to move as she pleased without getting shot, Yukiko wasted no time in retrieving a spare mobile phone from a bag on her dresser and dialing up what was presumably a GSM bug like the ones Campus operators often deployed.
The device was active, picking up the periodic clang of pots or the sound of someone belching.
“Kitchen?” Adara asked.
Yukiko nodded. “The microphone is directly against the window. Cheap glass is very good at conducting sound. There is a large table approximately five feet from the wall. If Chen holds a meeting, there is a good chance it will be at that table.”
Jack rubbed a hand over the top of his head. “I don’t get it, Yukiko. What’s the Japanese connection?”
“Please call me Yuki,” she said. “That is a very good question. Have you heard of Chongryon?”
“Sounds Korean,” Jack said.
Chavez nodded. “Isn’t that the political arm of the DPRK in Japan?”
“Precisely that,” Yuki said. “My organization has linked members of Chongryon to acts of espionage in Japan. Kim Soo, a Korean woman with strong ties to this group, is one of Vincent Chen’s many paramours. My research leads me to believe Chen has many female contacts around the world—Amanda Salazar as a case in point. He is quite charming, but mixing work with pleasure will be his eventual downfall. I would not have been aware of Vincent Chen if he’d had better taste in women.”
Midas took a deep breath. “This is a cruddy thing to bring up, but it impacts operational security. If we’re working together now, we need to know about the blonde who was shot.”
Yuki tilted her head to the side, her face passive. “Beatriz Campos was also from Paraguay. She is . . . was a known assassin and a terrorist, already convicted in absentia for the murder of two Japanese businessmen during a visit to Peru. My organization believes Kim Soo is complicit in a plot to disrupt the upcoming G20 Summit. I was sent here to follow her and glean any useful intelligence. Suspicions against Kim are just that, suspicions, but the evidence against Beatriz Campos is irrefutable. I had no idea she would be here, but when I found out, I simply seized the opportunity . . .”
