Full Force and Effect

64

Óscar Roblas de Mota had been asleep in his suite at the Pan Pacific hotel in Singapore when the attack on Jack Ryan occurred in his hometown ten thousand miles away. He slept in the next morning, and it wasn’t until one of his personal assistants roused him at nine that he heard the news.

From nine a.m. till ten a.m. he sat in his white bathrobe on the sofa and watched television, both U.S. and Mexican satellite stations. By now there was video of the ambush from cell phones, helicopter news crews, and security cameras. A virtual glut of moving pictures of the entire attack from multiple angles.

He called a half-dozen friends in government in the district; he was as dialed-in as anyone could be there, after all. Everyone was saying the attack was the work of Santiago Maldonado, but Roblas didn’t buy that for a minute. The Maldonados had claimed responsibility, but they weren’t an active group inside Mexico City. Sure, they could have driven into town for the attack, but Roblas didn’t see them as competent enough to pull off anything of this magnitude. He knew they had recently failed in an attempt to kill the mayor of a small city in Guerrero, and here they were, supposedly taking out dozens of trained security and wounding the President of the United States?

Not a chance.

In the back of his mind Roblas thought of General Ri. The North Korean intelligence chief would have people who could have done this, and he would also have contacts within the Maldonado clan. There was no question as to motive. Ri’s schemes had been thwarted on the mining front and on the ICBM front, in both cases by the man who narrowly escaped death the day before in Mexico City.

At eleven a.m. Roblas tore himself away from the screen and showered, then he dressed for a lunch meeting with bankers, but as he did so he became more and more suspicious that the North Koreans were responsible for what had happened.

He was not angry that they had tried, he was angry that they had failed, and he was very angry that they had done it in “his” city.

He was just about to head with his entourage down to his limousine when a secure call came for him on the satellite phone. Just receiving word of the call itself convinced him he was right about what had happened.

“Bueno?”

It was one of Ri’s translators, speaking English. “Good afternoon. Comrade General Ri for you, sir.”

Roblas offered no greeting. Instead, he said, “What has happened in my city?”

Ri replied, “At this point, I only know what is in the international press.”

“I don’t believe you. Maldonado did not do this. It was either you or the Russians.”

“Then it was the Russians.” The translator waited a long time for a reply from Mexico.

Finally, Roblas said, “If you did have anything to do with this, I hope, for your sake and mine, that you cleaned up your mess.”

There was a long pause. “There is some mess left to clean up.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Ri said, “A man has reached out to us. He appears to be responsible for what happened yesterday.”

“I am listening.”

Ri explained the extortion demand of the Iranian who was now, apparently, somewhere in Mexico.

When Ri was finished, Óscar Roblas said, “This is not my concern. Why should I involve myself in this? I am not responsible for what you have done!”

Ri answered back calmly, and the translator spoke almost robotically. “You may not be responsible, but this does concern you.”

“What does that mean?”

“You have invested a great deal of time and effort into Chongju. You are very close to reaping a return on your considerable investment.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Not at all. But let me put it to you like this. Do you think there will be a valuable mining operation at Chongju if America comes to the erroneous conclusion North Korea tried to kill its president yesterday?”

Roblas understood. If there was war, North Korea would lose. And if North Korea lost, Roblas would lose as well.

It was a simple business proposition. Risk versus reward. As he thought about it, he felt the reward potential was favorable. The potential for risk in sending someone to silence the assassin was high, but not as high as the potential for reward if the mission was successful.

And Ri was right. Roblas had already invested a lot into this endeavor. A phone call now was just one more small thing.

Ri asked, “Do you have access to someone who can deal with the problem in Mexico?”

Roblas looked down at his hands and saw they trembled. He was furious for being dragged into this.

But there was a man. Not a Mexican; Roblas wouldn’t send his own people into this hornets’ nest of culpability. He needed to do what he could to maintain a veneer of plausible deniability. Instead, he would have his people contact Edward Riley. He was Sharps’s man, but while Sharps would balk at this and run for cover, Riley would do it willingly. Riley would do anything.

He would clean this up.

Roblas said, “Give me a number for one of your agents. I will hand that number to a man, and I don’t know what will happen after that. As I told you, I am not involved in this.”

Ri said, “Sometimes matters outside of our control must be dealt with so that misunderstandings are not made.”

Roblas hung up the phone on the director of North Korean foreign intelligence.

Jack Ryan, Jr., shaved his beard off in the ninety minutes he spent in his Alexandria condo before being picked up by White House personnel for the ride to the hospital. He looked like a new man, or at least he felt he looked the same as he used to before growing the beard, and that was the idea. He didn’t want his meager attempt at a natural disguise outed to the world if someone happened to get a photograph of him. The beard would grow back, but if that became the new publicly known image of him, the beard would do him no good.

This was to be a private family visit, but Ryan knew how the media operated, and there would be a lot of photogs around the hospital trying to get a money shot of the shell-shocked presidential family. Ryan would do all in his power to stay off tonight’s TV and out of tomorrow’s newspapers, but he returned his appearance to the non-Campus version of Jack Ryan, Jr., just in case.

Just before nine p.m. he was ushered into the hospital through a back delivery entrance and then taken to a private waiting room. Here he was reunited with his sister Sally, his mom, and his younger siblings, Katie and Kyle. There were also dozens of police and Secret Service, but they had the good manners to give the family some space to be alone.

At nine-thirty they were brought into the President’s hospital room. Jack had been told over and over that his father would be in a great deal of pain for a few weeks but his injuries were not life-threatening, and in truth he looked good considering the pictures the younger Ryan had seen of the flipped limo, but Jack Junior was still shocked by his father’s weakened state. His fit, vital, and bright-eyed dad now lay there sound asleep in a hospital gown, an oxygen tube in his nose and a large bandage on his forehead.

Dr. Maura Handwerker was by his side as she had been since he staggered aboard Air Force One, and she immediately apologized to the family, saying she’d had to give the President some pain medication before they arrived and he’d be out of it for the rest of the night. She said the President had fought for hours against the meds, but finally relented when she explained to him he wouldn’t sleep a moment in so much discomfort, and the next day he would be utterly useless.

Without Jack Senior to talk to, the family just stood at his bedside and caught up. Jack hadn’t seen his big sister in months, and Katie and Kyle lamented that it had been ages since he’d visited them in the White House.

Jack caught his mom’s eye; he saw worry on her face, not just about her husband, but also about her son, as she wondered what he was involved in that had made him so remote recently. He did his best to reassure her with a hug, because there wasn’t much he could say.

As the conversation moved away from Jack Junior and on to other things, he stood over his father, looked at his bandages and his predicament, and wondered about the son of a bitch who had done this to him.

Everyone was pinning this on Santiago Maldonado, but if Jack had to bet right now, he’d say it was the president of Russia, perhaps using Maldonado as a proxy.

Just then his phone vibrated in his pants pocket. He excused himself and stepped out of the room into the hallway. Two Secret Service agents stood there by the door, and Jack knew they weren’t going anywhere, so he walked a few feet farther.

The caller ID let him know it was Chavez on the line.

“Hey, Ding.”

“Sorry. I know you are with your dad.”

“It’s okay.”

“How is he?”

“Tough.”

“Damn right he is.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Something’s weird, I’ll say that. We’ve been hunting for Riley all afternoon with no joy. Went to all his haunts. Finally, we turned to Gavin — we should have gone to him first, to tell you the truth. He traced the LoJack security feature on the guy’s BMW.”

“Smart.”

“Yeah. Turns out Riley drove to Teterboro Airport about two hours ago and parked his car in a long-term lot. We spent another half-hour trying to figure out the destinations of the aircraft leaving shortly after his arrival. There were about a half-dozen corporate planes that he could have been on, but we ruled out all but one by looking into the owners, the destinations, and then deciding neither Sharps nor Riley had any known dealings with them.”

“So… where do you think he went?”

“Jack… we think he went to Mexico City.”

Jack turned his head toward his father’s room. He watched through a glass partition as Sally lifted Katie up onto the edge of the bed. The little girl was fighting back tears as she leaned over and kissed her sleeping father.

Ryan’s voice dropped an octave. “What would he be doing down there?”

Ding said, “We don’t know, but we thought we’d go find out. He’s on a plane owned by a shell company set up at an Antiguan bank. Gavin researched the CIA’s Intelink-TS database for financial forensics, and it led him to Grupo Pacífico. It’s an oil, gas, and mineral company owned by a Mexican billionaire named Óscar Roblas de Mota. Grupo Pacífico isn’t an overt client of Duke Sharps’s, but Sam’s facial-recognition work in front of Sharps’s Upper West Side digs turned up a pair of Grupo Pacífico execs paying old Duke a visit.”

“I’ll be damned,” Ryan said. He didn’t know what it meant. That there could be any connection to Riley’s trip and the assassination attempt was still too much of a stretch to seriously contemplate. But the fact that Riley was heading to Mexico City the day of the attack, and the day after committing a brazen murder in New York, seemed particularly troublesome to say the least.

Ding said, “We’re heading down tonight. Not even sure how we’ll track him once we’re there, but we’ve got a couple ideas. Clark says stay where you are if you need to be with your dad, but if you are able to get away—”

Ryan was already moving. “I’ll be at the airport in an hour.”

Ding said, “Roger that. Tell your old man we’re thinking of him.”