by Tom Clancy
He was given his own small apartment in a back corner of the safe house, and a stocked refrigerator full of Pacífico beer that he would not drink and foreign food he would not eat, and he had Emilio at his beck and call, which meant sending him out to get meat and salad and bread and bottled water.
And a laptop computer. Zarif had a lot of work to do to pull off this Mexico operation, and he did not want to spend his time sitting around in some apartment waiting for something to happen.
At the end of the first day Emilio delivered Zarif a clean cell phone and a used laptop, and once he leeched onto the Wi-Fi signal from an Internet café downstairs, he was able to begin his research and start his operation.
He had been told that Maldonado had men working in the Federal Police, and they would meet with him five days before the American President’s arrival to go over the motorcade route. In the meantime, however, Zarif spent virtually all his time on YouTube, pulling up clips of previous presidential visits to the city.
From the beginning he knew the President’s arrival was the best time for him to act. Even if he had a perfect itinerary for the official visit to go on, there would be so many unknown variables at each location that his chances of success would be low.
But two absolutes, he knew already, were that the President would land at Benito Juárez airport, and then he would go via motorcade to the Palacio Nacional in the center of the city, where he would meet with President Lopez of Mexico.
With two fixed points to work with, he then had only to observe previous motorcades’ movements through the city to get a feeling for the route. Yes, Zarif knew the U.S. Secret Service would do what they could to change the route from other visits, but there almost always existed unavoidable repetitions, usually nearest to the beginning and ending of the route, where the President’s vehicle would necessarily have to pass.
He watched video after video, official films, documentaries in Spanish and English and even Chinese, as well as dozens upon dozens of jerky and blurry camera-phone street-level clips, and he pored over every frame, doing his best to match locations in the videos to places he could pinpoint on Google Maps. Using the Street View feature, he’d made his own maps, and it was a slow and laborious process, but from time to time he would ask for Emilio’s help in identifying a street or a building in the videos. From this Zarif managed to trace his best estimate of the route taken by every official motorcade coming from the airport on record.
After working for two days on little else, he had identified four locations where every official motorcade from Benito Juárez to the Palacio Nacional passed.
This was progress, but he knew he was doing this backward. He had no access to explosives himself; those had to be provided to him. Furthermore, he had no idea what he would be given to work with. Without this information, he found it impossible to pinpoint an exact location for his action. The conditions on the street would normally determine what kind of weapon he chose, but in this instance, the weaponry he was given access to would determine where he would place it.
On the third day Zarif met with two Maldonado men who were also members of the Federal District police force. These men knew details of the upcoming presidential visit, and they confirmed Zarif’s assumption about the general route of the motorcade.
He showed them four locations he’d circled on a map, and he asked them to drive him to each so he could take a look. Along with Emilio, the men immediately piled into a new Cadillac Escalade driven by yet another Maldonado member, and the five took off into the city.
Zarif had spent the last few years in Syria, and there, even in government-held Damascus, he never went anywhere without a small team of armed and trained men who were always on the lookout for attackers. But here in Mexico City, despite what he’d heard about how dangerous the place was, he felt incredibly safe.
A few blocks from his Tepito safe house they stopped at a streetlight. On the sidewalk next to him he saw two blond-haired young women. The driver of his car rolled his window down and whistled, and one of the women laughed and spoke back in English.
The Mexican driver turned to Zarif in the backseat. “American girls.” He smiled and Zarif turned and stared at them.
He was going to change their world when he killed their President, and they didn’t even know it.
The first location on the agenda was near the airport, on Oriente 172. Zarif saw in the open-source videos that every motorcade passed by here after leaving a VIP airport gate. Immediately he disregarded this as a potential attack point. On Street View he had not noticed any obvious problems with the surroundings, but in person he saw there was a police checkpoint just up the street. No matter what kind of bomb he would plant, he wouldn’t just be placing a backpack on the ground and walking away. Zarif’s kind of high-yield bombs required hours at the location to construct and secure them, and of course he needed to do this with utmost care. He couldn’t be worrying about the cops two blocks away while he was laboring over his device.
The second location was on a wide road in a warehouse district near the airport. He’d been told the area was quiet at night, and that sounded good, but Zarif thought the sidewalks on either side of the street were too empty. He could set the bomb here with no problem, but no matter how well he hid it he felt it was likely it would be discovered before the event.
Zarif knew all about how the U.S. Secret Service would comb the motorcade route on the day before the action—his bomb needed to be invisible for this operation to have any chance for success.
The third location was at the other end of the route, much closer to the President’s destination, the Palacio Nacional in the Centro Histórico. This was a wide north-south street running through Tepito called Vidal Alcocer, with low buildings and construction on one side of the street and parking lots on the other.
From the outset Zarif felt like the intersection had potential. There was a market on the two-lane street that entered the intersection from the east and west, and this meant a lot of traffic, especially now at four in the afternoon. In the evening, on the other hand, he felt the area might have been quieter, as there were no residential buildings for several blocks.
He looked at the construction site on the corner, then he turned to his contact. “Is there a way we could arrange a visit to that unfinished building?”
Emilio looked at him, somewhat perplexed, then he just climbed out of the Cadillac and began walking across the street. Zarif followed after a moment. Emilio walked right up to the orange plastic tarp barrier, ducked down, and lifted it up for the bomber.
Zarif crawled in and began looking around. The construction site was obviously dormant. It appeared nothing had happened here in weeks or months, although the smell of concrete and plaster and dust was prevalent.
From the shape of the floors and the poured-concrete ramp it seemed to Zarif that this place was going to be a parking garage of some sort. The northern and western walls already were poured, there was a framed staircase that was built up three stories in the center of the property, but the southern and eastern sides of the building stood open, save for some areas where metal beams and an open rebar grid had been set.
There were walls going up here, or at least there had been before the project shut down. Now it was just a twelve-foot-tall net of thick iron and steel, waiting for tons and tons of poured concrete.
Zarif walked over to the rebar on the eastern side, and he put his hands inside the latticework of hot metal.
Here. Here exactly. Ten feet off the ground and facing out, he would build his bomb and he would fill in the concrete around it. If he put a steel plate in back to direct the force toward the street, and if he covered it all uniformly, it would appear to be a new wall, nothing more.
Of course, Zarif did have one problem. He couldn’t very well just take over construction of a downtown parking lot on his own.
“Emilio,” he said, �
�I need a construction team, and some way we can work in here without anyone stopping us.”
“No hay problema.” No problem.
Zarif smiled. He still didn’t know anything about the bomb he would be using in this operation, and this was a problem, but he had no complaints about the level of service he was getting from his local contacts. The Maldonado people moved around and acted with all the authority of the Syrian Army back in Damascus.
38
Gavin had spent the first couple days after the debacle in Prague absolutely useless to anyone. He was so downtrodden he’d barely shown up for work, he’d done little more than sit at his desk, and other than making excuses about a cold he’d picked up during all the international running around he’d done a few days earlier, he barely spoke to his coworkers.
But by the end of his third day something clicked in him. He needed to make himself useful here in the office, because he had proven to be utterly useless in the field.
His subordinates in the IT department here at Hendley Associates, assisted by the analytical staff in the building, had been overseeing the Clark operation up in New York City. He’d heard earlier in the day that the operation had folded, and the men were on their way back to the D.C. area.
Just as his staff were shutting down their machines to go home for the evening, Gavin stepped out of his office and asked his chief analytical systems engineer to fill him in on the operation. He led Gavin through a forty-five-minute primer on the steps he had taken to provide intelligence to Clark and his team in New York.
Needless to say, Biery’s team of first-rate hackers had, at first, tried to find a way to hack into the Sharps computer network. But they’d been unable to crack the secure infrastructure, so they moved on to digging into the personalities working for the company. At this task they’d had great success. All this information had helped Clark and his team locate Riley and his subordinates during the operation, and they’d photographed them meeting with United Nations personnel, but they were unable to find a smoking gun that could have proven Sharps Partners was either actively interfering with the Sanctions Committee vote or working with the North Korean state.
Gavin knew what The Campus needed right now. They needed some access into the Sharps network, so he went back into his office. The small amount of staff still in the IT department all grabbed their briefcases and headed for the doors, and they assumed Gavin would do the same, but instead he sat at his desk and started his work.
He told himself he was going to find a way into the network of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners.
Six hours later it was midnight, and he’d gotten nowhere. Sharps’s system was ironclad. But unfortunately for Sharps, Gavin was not one to give up easily, so he ate a candy bar, changed his attack vector, and went back to work.
—
Jack Ryan, Jr., knocked his cell phone off the night table in his attempt to pick it up with a sleeping hand. Before he crawled off his bed to find the ringing phone on the floor, he looked at the clock at his bedside and saw it was three forty-eight a.m. A wave of panic nearly overcame him; he always thought about his dad when the phone rang at night. He knew his father was at once one of the most loved and most hated people in the world, depending on one’s point of view, and he knew there was always someone out there planning harm to him.
As he snatched up the phone to look at the caller ID he told himself there was a more likely explanation for the late call. It could be Gavin. Gavin worked all hours of the night, and he didn’t think twice about calling Jack when the mood arose. Jack had complained about it before, but Gavin kept on, and by now Jack had given up the fight.
The caller ID read “Biery.”
Ryan was relieved it wasn’t the White House calling, but he wasn’t thrilled about the early wake-up call.
“Damn it, Gav.”
“Careful what you say, Ryan, you’re just going to have to take it all back when I tell you what I’ve got to tell you.”
Jack was sitting on the floor next to his bed now, his body half wrapped in the sheets. With a yawn he said, “What’s up?”
“Been working the last nine hours and forty-three minutes trying to get into Duke Sharps’s network. Gotta tell ya, his IT personnel are top-notch. The infrastructure is about as solid as I’ve ever—”
“I’m warning you, man. Tell me something I care about in five seconds or I’m hanging up.”
Gavin said, “The blonde you saw in Vietnam, the one you’ve probably been dreaming about for the past few weeks? She is in the USA right now, operating under the alias of Élise Legrande, working at a rare earth mineral–processing plant in California near the Nevada border.”
Jack rolled up to his knees and turned on the light next to the bed.
Gavin said, “Got your attention, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did. Your facial recog came up blank on her. But you found her in Sharps’s network?”
“Not exactly. I ran facial recog on people coming and going at Sharps’s building. From that I managed to ID a woman who works for a small boutique graphic-arts and printing company in Greenwich Village. I looked into the woman and saw she’d done time for forgery, and I researched her company and saw some of the equipment they owned. All top-of-the-line badge-making and AutoCAD stuff. I thought that seemed interesting, wondered if maybe Sharps farmed out some of their credential-making work, either for alias travel or fake employment badges for covers. I spent a couple hours hacking into the printer’s networks, haven’t gotten too deep yet but was able to break into files stored on a cloud server for them. Did some digging there and found a full set of credentials for your dream girl. Definitely the same woman.”
“And she’s working at a rare earth refinery?”
“Yes. She has a Canadian passport, a temp worker visa, and employment credentials at a rare earth consulting company in Ottawa called TRU Alloy. The worker visa gave me the idea that she would be working at a rare earth facility here in the States, and since there is only one major location, I did some open-source poking around on the NewCorp Valley Floor website. There is a note on an online bulletin board that one Élise Legrande from TRU Alloy arrived on Thursday, and she’ll be there for the next few days monitoring the use of some new equipment.”
“I’ll be damned, Gavin. That’s good work.”
“I know.” He paused. “I also know this doesn’t get me off the hook for Prague.”
“Prague was my mistake, not yours, Gavin. You can’t keep beating yourself up over it. You are too important to this organization. You accomplished more last night than all of us in the operations staff managed to accomplish in Prague and New York.”
Gavin brightened a little. “Thanks, Ryan. So, you think Gerry will let you go to Valley Floor?”
“I hope so. He was pissed about Prague, but now that the New York op has run into problems, we don’t have much left to go on. If this woman is working for Sharps, she might just be the link we need to tie them to North Korea.”
—
Mary Pat Foley made her second visit to the offices of Hendley Associates on a stormy afternoon, and she found the mood in the building wasn’t much better than the weather outside.
The UN Sanctions Committee procedural rules vote had taken place days ago and the Ryan administration had come out the loser. The vote failed; at least for the next 180 days, there could be no hearing on further economic sanctions against North Korea.
Everyone in the fourth-floor conference room at Hendley Associates knew the reason for the poor result. Several Sanctions Committee personnel had been influenced by Sharps Global Intelligence Partners. This could not be proven without a major Justice Department investigation, and as much as Mary Pat and the members of The Campus all wanted to shut Sharps down cold, none of them wanted to spin up the Justice Department on a process that would undoubtedly take longer than it would for the DPRK to acquire
an arsenal of nuclear-tipped ICBMs.
No, Mary Pat was confident that The Campus could take the lead in monitoring the work of Sharps and his operational commander in the North Korea situation, Edward Riley. Even though The Campus had been compromised in New York, they had the talent and the resources to keep at it, and they didn’t have nearly the potential for compromise a federal bureaucracy like the Justice Department would have, where Sharps had feelers, informants, and access into virtually every corridor.
The discovery of a Sharps infiltrator at Valley Floor had been a huge revelation, and it gave her renewed confidence in The Campus. When Jack Ryan, Jr., revealed this to her, and outlined his plan to go to the facility himself, Mary Pat made a silent mental note to inform the handlers of Operation Acrid Herald. She saw no reason to believe her officer in place at Valley Floor, Adam Yao, was in any danger because of the Sharps woman—they worked in wholly different facilities at the large complex—but it was one more moving piece that needed to be monitored nonetheless.
For her part, Mary Pat did not mention a word of Acrid Herald to the men of The Campus, but she did pass on some information helpful to their operation. She informed them about construction of a mineral-processing facility near the city of Chongju in northwestern DPRK. She also revealed the existence of an unknown foreign benefactor who was providing the North Koreans with, at a minimum, tens of millions of dollars that they were in turn using to procure updated missile technology.
The Campus would keep digging into the Sharps operation, which they all thought to be merely a tiny piece of the larger North Korean scheme, but the fact that Sharps Partners had managed to influence a critical vote in the United Nations made it obvious it was a damn important piece.
39
