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 book, 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?”