Miller’s phone began to play “The Ride of the Valkyries” in her jacket pocket. She’d sealed it in a Ziploc bag in the event they swamped the canoe, and it took her a couple seconds to dig it out.
“Wonder who that could be?” Eric teased. “Ten Downing Street, mayhaps?”
She waved him away and put the phone to her ear.
“Hello.”
It was a woman’s voice, straight to the point.
“Dr. Ann Miller?”
“This is she.”
“Dr. Miller, please hold for the President of the United States.”
Miller stood at once, dropping her stick into the fire. It was stupid, she realized, but she remained there anyway. Eric looked at her like she’d lost her mind.
An instant later: “Dr. Miller, Jack Ryan here. I apologize for calling so late, but I have some things I’d like you to look over. Would you mind coming by my office tomorrow morning?”
Eric moved in closer now and pressed his ear to hers, listening.
“Of course, Mr. President.”
“Very well,” Ryan said. “I’ll send a car for you.”
“No, no,” she stammered. “I mean, that won’t be necessary, sir. We’re in the Shenandoah right now. My boyfriend can drop me off.”
“Shall we say nine o’clock tomorrow morning, then?”
Eric feigned a pout after she’d hung up. “Should I be jealous?”
She laughed, draining off nervous energy. “I don’t know,” she said. “He is pretty cool. Maybe a little.”
She picked up a camp chair and headed to the car.
“What are you doing?” Eric said.
“Going home,” she said. “A girl can’t wear flannel to the White House twice in a row.”
Ryan hung up the phone at the same moment Arnie van Damm burst in through the door from the secretaries’ suite.
“What’s Betty doing here on a Saturday night?” He waved his hand before Ryan could answer. “Never mind. You need to get to a television. Something’s going on in Buenos Aires.”
Ryan groaned, moving toward his private study off the Oval. Arnie never wanted him to watch TV when good news was breaking.
“Some kind of bombing,” van Damm continued.
Ryan’s stomach tightened at the word. “Any of our people?” It was always his first question.
Van Damm shook his head. “A meeting of agricultural ministers, I guess. No U.S. representatives were present.” The CoS scratched his bald head. “I’m not sure why, but Foreign Minister Li was there. It’s unspooling even as we speak. Unconfirmed number of dead.”
Arnie followed Ryan into the small study down a short hall off the Oval Office. He picked up the remote because God forbid Ryan should have to turn on his own television.
They stood together in silence for a time and watched live reports of shaky cell phone footage. The plate-glass windows in the front of what looked like a restaurant had been shattered. Uniformed men and women appeared to be moving in all directions. Two fire trucks were parked out front, their lights pulsing in the evening darkness, causing the video footage to flare dramatically. Ambulances rolled up on scene, motioned forward by the uniforms. The commentary was in Spanish, and an American news anchor did her best to repeat a whole lot of nothing over and over again. What else could she do? Nothing was precisely what everyone in the United States knew at this point.
Arnie asked, “Shall I round up the NSC? The Principal Committee, at least?”
The Principal Committee was an abbreviated version of the National Security Council — consisting of the DNI, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, D/CIA, and a handful of cabinet secretaries. They could convene in the Situation Room, but the number was small enough that they could meet in his office.
Ryan thought over the value of calling in even the abbreviated committee on a Saturday evening. “No Americans are involved?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Arnie said.
“But China again…”
“Yep.”
Ryan watched two Argentine firefighters carry a body out of the restaurant in a bag. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Let’s just get Mary Pat on the line for now. I want to run a couple things by her.”
Van Damm sat down at the small desk in the cramped study and went to work getting in touch with the DNI while Ryan sat back on one of the two tufted leather chairs to watch the coverage from Buenos Aires. The news crawl along the bottom of the screen carried the BREAKING NEWS message, but with nothing but amateur video coming in, there was little to report. The crawl repeated headlines from the last few hours, including news of Typhoon Catelyn gathering strength two hundred nautical miles east of Okinawa. He’d already been briefed on what was then Tropical Storm Catelyn when it narrowly missed the U.S. Naval base on Guam. Now the damn thing had turned north toward Yokosuka, Japan.
“I have MP,” Arnie said. “Want me to put her on speaker?”
Ryan shook his head. “On second thought, go ahead and patch in Bob Burgess, too. I’d like to get a sitrep on the safety of the Seventh Fleet while we’re at it.”
44
Ding Chavez stood with Jack Ryan, Jr., on the sidewalk in front of the Freddo ice cream shop, across the street from Recoleta Cemetery. Ten feet away, Midas and Adara flanked the seething Japanese woman.
“Impossible to prove,” Ding said. “It’s not like Kōanchōsa-chō carry around ID cards.”
The Kōanchōsa-chō, or Public Security Intelligence Agency, was akin to the CIA, FBI counterintelligence, and MI6, responsible for gathering intelligence and conducting counterespionage activities against both internal and external threats to the people of Japan.
“She has support and training,” Ryan said. “It’s no easy task to get a suppressed rifle into the country and then set up a sniper hide across the street from an international event. And I did see her following the brunette.”
“Tell me her name again,” Ding said.
Ryan looked at the palm of his hand where he’d written it down. “Yukiko,” he said. “At least that’s the name she gave.”
“Well, shit,” Chavez said. He’d worked with a couple Kōanchōsa-chō guys a few years before. They’d been good intelligence officers, if a bit humorless for Ding’s taste. But the IC world was not one where you could name-drop. For one thing, cover identities came and went. A real name might get nothing but a blank stare — even if you were both talking about the same person.
Chavez walked over to look the woman in the eye. “You’ve put us in a bit of a pickle,” he said.
Yukiko glared. “I could scream rape.”
“Go for it,” Chavez said. “I doubt you want to talk to the cops any worse than we do — even if you are Kōanchōsa-chō. Hell, especially if you are.”
Her eyes flashed toward the cemetery wall. “We waste time standing here.”
“How’s that?” Chavez said.
“You are CIA?”
Chavez shook his head. “Nice try.”
The Japanese woman stared hard at him, obviously thinking through her options. If she were truly Japanese intelligence, she’d realize she didn’t have many. At length, her shoulders dropped and she heaved a long sigh. She nodded toward Jack.
“Your young friend says they went into the cemetery.”
“They did.” Chavez played along. That tidbit of information wasn’t exactly a state secret. “Probably went straight over the far side before we could get around.”
Yukiko shook her head. “I do not believe that is true.”
Adara moved a half-step closer. “What, then?”
“The Basilica del Pilar is at the northeast corner of the grounds. Many of the churches in Buenos Aires have underground cloisters where nuns or Jesuit priests—”