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.”