Removing the chair he habitually propped against any hotel door, he did one final “testicles, spectacles, wallet, and comb” check to make certain he had everything he needed — and then headed into the hallway, leaving the POR FAVOR, NO MOLESTAR sign hanging on the handle.
He made it to the lobby at two twenty-five a.m., teaming up with Midas in the blue Peugeot 408—which, to Jack’s surprise, was turbo-charged.
The streets were far from empty at three in the morning, but the traffic was light enough that Jack had no trouble keeping Chavez and Adara and their Renault in sight as they headed northwest on Avenida del Libertador. The two-car caravan worked its way through Barrio Chino and then drove west to do a quick drive-by of the Chinese embassy.
The Peugeot was far from quick off the line, especially compared to his Beemer back home, but Jack found it zippy enough to get him into trouble at intersections. Buenos Aires seemed completely devoid of four-way stops. According to the guidebook, the vehicle with the most momentum carried the right-of-way, and for a damn-the-torpedoes hard charger like Jack, that came in pretty handy.
Adara’s voice came over the net as they passed the high walls of the embassy. “Here be dragons.”
“No doubt,” Ryan said. “But just what kind of dragons remains to be seen…”
They continued west, eventually hitting Avenida General Paz and taking it south until it joined the autopista back to Ministro Pistarini International.
Chavez went into the terminal while the others posted outside. The rain had stopped, but the early-morning air was still cool enough to be bracing.
Ding came over Ryan’s earpiece less than an hour later.
“Heads up, guys,” he said. “A blond female just met our guy and one other Asian male when they cleared customs.”
“A blonde, you say?” Adara said. “Interesting.”
“That’s affirm,” Chavez said. “I have one more Asian male in the middle of the pack behind Chen and his buddy. So far they haven’t had any interaction, but that doesn’t surprise me. Chen’s wearing gray slacks and a black three-button. His buddy’s in jeans and a white long-sleeve. Female is in dark slacks and a fawn blouse.”
Midas chuckled. “Fawn?”
“Yes, fawn,” Chavez said. “Like tan.”
“I see her through the window,” Midas said. “Pretty sure that color is wheat.”
“Dumbass,” Chavez said. “The blonde is pulling the bags. I’m right behind them. The lone Asian male is in jeans and a light blue jacket. Jack, you and Midas mark him, see what he does when we get back on the autopista.”
“Copy that,” Jack said. “We’ll be…”
Ryan paused, watching Chen and his small entourage exit the double doors from the airport. He focused on the blonde who brought up the rear.
“Does the female look familiar to anybody?”
She didn’t, so Jack kept working on the connection, whatever it was, in the back of his mind. There was something about her that struck a nerve.
Adara picked up Chavez, but they lingered an extra two minutes as though they were waiting for someone else before pulling around to follow Chen and the others to the parking lot across the street and beyond a row of concrete construction barriers, where they got into a red Chevy compact.
“Got him,” Midas said a moment later. Jack and he watched the loner load his bag into a black Toyota HiLux pickup and climb into the passenger seat. The back glass was tinted, but Jack thought he could make out a female behind the wheel.
Jack counted to twenty, then fell in behind the HiLux.
Both teams stayed well back in the light traffic of early morning. Where the autopista crossed General Paz, the HiLux took the ramp to go north, generally backtracking the route the Campus operators had taken to reach the airport. The Chevrolet continued toward downtown.
“You want me to follow?” Jack asked, eyes over the guardrail as he watched the HiLux accelerate northwest while the Chevrolet continued northeast. “They could be going to the Chinese embassy.”
“Negative,” Chavez said. “Let’s focus on Chen. We’re not even certain they’re together.”
“Copy that,” Jack said. As usual, there were never enough of them to do perfect surveillance.
They followed the Chevy east along Avenida 25 de Mayo, and then wound through the city in what were surely a series of halfhearted surveillance detection routes, only to end up at a tall set of brick apartments off Avenida Santa Fe in the San Isidro neighborhood of Acassuso, northwest of Buenos Aires proper.
Adara kept the Renault heading north on Santa Fe while the Chevy turned left down Libertad, a much smaller street, and came to a stop in front of what looked like a small school or daycare center.
Adara came over the net. “That’s interesting.”
“I agree,” Midas said. “They wound back through town, when the General Paz would have gotten them here much quicker.”
“There is that,” Adara said. “But the blue HiLux we saw at the airport, it’s parked right around the corner.”
38
Ryan and Midas sat in the Peugeot half a block up Libertad from the apartment building while Adara and Chavez met Lisanne to grab the little Clio she and the pilots had been driving. With Chen turning up with so many confederates, the team needed a fresh set of wheels.
When they returned with the Renault, Ryan and Midas went to check out the neoclassical French mansion that was now the Palacio Duhau — Park Hyatt hotel on Avenida Alvear. The hotel also happened to be located in the swank neighborhood of Recoleta — less than eight blocks from the Parrilla Aires Criollos restaurant, where Argentina’s minister of agriculture was hosting tonight’s dinner. Several U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and National Security Agency, kept tabs on traveling members of foreign governments via both open-source and intercepted signals intelligence — and Gavin Biery’s team at Hendley Associates kept tabs on the tabs-keepers. A quick check with the IT guru told the Campus operators the Chinese foreign minister had chosen the Hyatt for his stay in Buenos Aires.
The team was still unsure as to the purpose of Vincent Chen’s visit, other than being reasonably certain it had something to do with the Chinese foreign minister. And even that didn’t narrow things down very much. They knew someone had bombed a subway tunnel outside of Beijing. Eddie Feng obviously thought Chen was behind the attack. He was Taiwanese and he had a code name, so it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. They booted around the idea of sending up a warning through the State Department to contact the Chinese delegation regarding a possible threat to the foreign minister — but decided against it for a number of reasons.
First, the halls of the government in the People’s Republic of China were even more byzantine than those of the United States. Given the fact that President Ryan had dropped a bomb on a Chinese office building that housed a group of hackers destroying American defense computers, trust between the two nations was less than nil. PRC bureaucrats would see treachery in any U.S. action. They would hold the information while its credibility was verified, ensuring that this was not some ploy to make them lose face — or worse. Any pertinent intelligence regarding a plot against the foreign minister would take days to climb to the top of an actual decision maker’s desk and then trickle back down to his security detail — who now formed a phalanx of armed men in dark suits around Foreign Minister Li, half a block from the spot where Jack Ryan, Jr., stood on the sidewalk.