Ryan knew at some point he’d have to meet her to be able to get close enough to skim her electronic devices. Clark had warned him to be especially careful with his “bump,” the process of making contact with someone in a way that is meant to appear accidental. Sharps did not hire junior intelligence officers, after all, so she would be on the lookout for an enemy approach that appeared casual.
His first opportunity for the bump came much faster than he’d anticipated.
In the late afternoon of his first day in the offices of Valley Floor, Ryan walked alone from his temporary office up a hallway on his way to a meeting with one of the company’s accountants. He was a little lost, but that was no big surprise. Valley Floor was a big complex, with more than a dozen buildings in all; this Ryan learned during a two-hour facility tour he took earlier in the day. He’d been taken out to the open mine, the water-treatment complex, and the ore-processing facility, as well as the R&D buildings and even the motor pool, where he got a look at the impressive massive earthmoving equipment.
Now, as he looked at a small map in his hand to make sure he was going in the right direction, he was glad his meeting was in the same building as his office. He knew he’d really get himself lost on the other end of the facility. He’d made it halfway up the hall when a door opened just ahead of him on his left, and the woman he’d last seen on a busy street in Ho Chi Minh City stepped out.
Jack had been moving quickly to his meeting, but he slowed as the blonde turned to shut the door behind her. She wouldn’t have seen the change in his gait, and he needed a second to come up with a spur-of-the-moment introduction.
She looked at him and he smiled, but before he could form a greeting he heard someone call out from behind. “Élise? There you are. We were supposed to meet in the second-floor lab. That’s where the server is.”
She looked away from Ryan and toward a man behind him. With a soft French-Canadian accent she said, “Yes, I am sorry, Ralph.” She laughed self-deprecatingly. “I’m still getting lost around here.”
Jack walked on. He was pretty certain she’d almost been caught in the act of lurking around the building, but he was just as sure that she’d managed to wiggle her way out of it without raising the suspicions of whomever she was talking to.
As he turned at the end of the hall he looked back over his shoulder and saw the woman walking away with the man who had been speaking to her. Jack recognized the man from the tour of the plant he’d taken earlier in the day. He was Ralph Baggett, the NewCorp Valley Floor IT director.
Immediately Ryan tried to determine if there was any significance to this. Could she be in the process of ingratiating herself to him as part of her mission here?
With nothing else to go on, Ryan decided he’d gin up a reason to meet with Ralph Baggett tomorrow, to see what he could find.
During his long drive back to his Las Vegas Strip hotel, Ryan called Gavin Biery in Alexandria to see if he could shed some light on what the woman might be up to. He filled Gavin in on how he had seen her around the IT guy, and snooping around the systems themselves, and from that he had determined the IT department was her particular focus.
“As it should be. That’s where the action is,” Biery said, making a joke Ryan didn’t have time for.
“Seriously. What’s her objective? Any guesses?”
Gavin didn’t have to think. “A password. Credentials to get into the system.”
“What could she do with that?”
Biery sighed, as if it was self-evident. “Ryan, I’ve held your hand through this stuff before.”
“Indulge me.”
“Keys to the kingdom. She logs on as him and she can insert viruses if she wants, or erase drives or commit untold damage to the physical system of the place by running equipment improperly. Several years ago we blew up some turbines in an Iranian nuclear reactor by uploading some malware.”
Jack thought that over. “No. If the North Koreans get the rare earth — processing facility set up, they will be at such a competitive advantage as compared to this place that there will be no competition. NewCorp has to pay U.S. wages to extract and process, the North Koreans will pay their people chicken feed. She’s not here to hurt Valley Floor, she’s here to take something that the North Koreans need.”
Gavin thought for a long while. Finally he said, “You got me there, Ryan. Unless she wants instructions on how to work machinery, or some sort of in-house database of experts, I can’t really say.”
Jack knew he’d have to figure this out for himself.
Biery then said, “If you think she’s trying to get info from them, she’ll have to put it somewhere.”
Jack said, “Like on a drive or something?”
“Yeah, but you don’t really need a dedicated piece of equipment. A better bet would be to make it part of something she carries all the time. My guess would be her mobile phone.”
“So… I should just snatch her phone? Like what we didn’t pull off in Prague?”
“Yeah. I’ll FedEx you a dummy phone that you can carry. If you get hold of hers, just link them up with a little connector built into the side, and it will copy everything on her device.”
“What if it’s encrypted?”
“Oh, it will be encrypted for sure. But the copy will still be made. We get it back here and we go to work on cracking it.” Biery’s confident voice returned. “I’m pretty good at that sort of thing, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I noticed.”
“The only problem is getting your hands on her device. We’ll have to see if you have the skills to make that happen.”
“I’ll do my best, Gav. Send me that phone.”
40
The official presidential visit to Mexico City had been on the books for months, which meant members of the Secret Service had been devoting attention to it virtually just as long.
Now, just five days before his arrival, the advance team had already been on the ground in the city for days. They had a temporary operations center at the aptly named InterContinental Presidente hotel, and they’d met with Secret Service personnel stationed here in the city as well as with other law enforcement and intelligence partners at the U.S. embassy on the beautiful Paseo de la Reforma.
The lead advance agent for the trip was a twenty-year veteran of the service named Dale Herbers. Herbers was a road warrior for the Secret Service; he had arrived in Mexico City on a direct flight from London after working the President’s recent trip to the United Kingdom.
The UK trip, like every international POTUS trip he’d led in his career, had gone off flawlessly, but Herbers knew Mexico City would be the most difficult operation he’d run as lead advance agent. There was a confluence of credible threats, access to weapons, and well-developed criminal infrastructure in the area that meant Herbers would have to bring his A game to his preparations.
The public image of the Secret Service is the square-jawed linebacker-looking man in sunglasses and a suit who moves close enough to the President of the United States to catch a bullet for him, and these men did exist, but the truth of the service is more mundane. For every close protection agent caught on camera at Jack Ryan’s shoulder, there were a hundred or more other men and women working to ensure the safety of all protectees. And for every second a Secret Service agent is responding to a threat to the life of his protectee, there are literally years’ worth of meetings to make certain that those threats never materialize.