Five minutes later, Clark entered the safe house.
Sam and Dom were hurriedly packing up equipment, but Ding was standing in the middle of the room with a Glock pistol on his hip and a worried look on his face. “You okay?”
“I’ll be better after I vomit.”
“What happened?”
“Sharps compromised us. I don’t know how he did it, but he did.”
Sam said, “So we’re all leaving?”
“No,” Clark said. “Sam, you are staying here. You’ll get an apartment or a hotel room with eyes on the front of Sharps’s building, and you will lock yourself in and stay out of sight. You’ll keep watch on who comes and goes into that entire building. It will be a shitty job, but you’ll have facial recog and video equipment to help you.”
“No problem,” Sam said.
“As for the rest of us, we’re going home, but we’ll be back.”
“What about the UN vote?” asked Caruso.
“My guess is the rules vote will end up ‘no,’ and the Sanctions Committee will not hear the petition to extend the economic sanctions on North Korea.”
Caruso couldn’t believe it. “So Sharps wins? Just like that?”
“He wins a battle, but only that. I’m going to take down that son of a bitch, and nothing I’ve ever done will give me greater pleasure.”
37
Iranian bomb maker Adel Zarif arrived in Mexico City using his Syrian papers after flying from Pyongyang to Havana, where he had to wait a day for his connection. Even in Cuba he’d been watched over by North Korean RGB minders, who allowed him freedom of action but little freedom of movement.
On touchdown at Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport he expected to be met by RGB, but instead a single Maldonado cartel member was waiting in the arrivals section for him. He gave his name as Emilio, and he spoke English. Zarif had learned English in Lebanon, and although his knowledge of the language was not as good as Emilio’s, they were able to communicate without any problems.
Together they drove to a building on a congested intersection in the downtown Tepito section of the city. Zarif was taken to a second-floor safe house that was guarded by three other men, all of whom seemed to be in their early twenties.
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.