“Yes, Mr. President.”
Jack closed his eyes and tried to think of anything but the pain in his right shoulder.
Arnie got the recording to the news media within a half-hour of its being made. The Dow had dropped 1,000 points in the first hour after the attack, stopping trading for an hour. After Ryan’s “proof of life” went out, trading was restarted, and the Dow rebounded 619 points. It would still be rocked for the day, but not nearly as bad as Wall Street had feared initially.
Adel Zarif found a bus station within an hour of the attack by the North Koreans at the safe house, and with little understanding of where he was going, he boarded a coach for Toluca. It was about forty miles away, west of the capital, so he arrived in the afternoon, just as the daily shower began.
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.”