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 personal 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.