Full Force and Effect

67

It was nearly eleven p.m. when Edward Riley and his entourage neared the Cuernavaca address given to him by Roblas’s banker. There were no lights on this winding hilly road, but the houses they’d passed in the past few minutes had all been palatial mansions in gated grounds. This seemed to be some sort of neighborhood for the elite, and Riley knew they were near enough to Mexico City that this was probably a getaway for the city’s wealthiest inhabitants.

He had expected the banker to give him access to a remote rustic farm, but when he arrived at the actual address he found something altogether different. Like the other properties on the road, it was a massive gated compound on a wooded hillside, and high on the distant hill at the center of the parcel he saw an ultramodern space-age building bathed in dramatic outdoor lighting. It was a private mansion with a pool that surrounded it almost like a moat, and from the road it looked like a big white-and-glass spaceship hovering in the nighttime sky and looming over the valley.

They pulled up the two-hundred-yard-long winding driveway and parked in front of the house. Riley ordered that Zarif be kept in one of the Jeeps surrounded by four of the armed Cuban DI agents while Riley and Kim headed up to the front door of the mansion. The door, like the gate back down the hill, was unlocked. Inside, all the lights were on and ceiling fans slowly rotated high over a massive cylindrical-shaped great room, which, through two-story-high floor-to-ceiling windows, overlooked a beautifully landscaped backyard pool complete with waterfalls and fountains.

The majority of the décor inside was as white as the building itself. Zarif was brought into the great room and tied to a chair, and even though Riley had been told there would be no one around, he had the Cubans fan out and check the grounds and the buildings from top to bottom. They found a pool house, a detached guesthouse, a garage, and a few other outbuildings, and after searching through everything, they confirmed they were indeed alone.

RGB agent Kim had two pairs of Cubans begin patrols of the grounds, and the other six men he placed around the main building: three outside on the wraparound second-floor balcony, and three inside with the prisoner.

Zarif had said nothing during the hourlong drive, and he said nothing when Riley pulled off the pillowcase. It took him a moment to adjust to the light, but when he did he just gazed at the opulence all around him with some confusion.

Riley sat down on the sofa in front of him. “Well, then, let’s get started, shall we?”

The Campus had struggled to keep sight of Riley’s caravan while remaining undetected, and this was a difficult mission, but all four vehicles in their surveillance package were driven by experts in vehicle tails. Just outside Toluca, when it appeared that Riley and his entourage were leaving the suburbs and not heading back to Mexico City, Caruso and Ryan peeled away and accelerated beyond their targets, and they raced forward to probable turnoffs ahead. Each time Riley and his three vehicles passed them, another vehicle in the Campus detail would make a move, by either going down adjacent roads to avoid being seen or directly passing the target if absolutely unavoidable.

The darkness and a gentle but steady evening rain helped in this endeavor, but Clark knew they couldn’t continue on for too long without being detected by the men ahead.

Finally Riley turned off the highway and into the city of Cuernavaca, and he and the other vehicles rolled through the city itself. The Campus men lost them for several minutes. Fortunately, Chavez noticed three sets of taillights ascending a hillside off to the side of the road, so with a lot of coordination and a few wrong turns, The Campus regained the eye on the man they had tracked all the way from New York.

The Lexus and the two Jeeps turned into the gate of a modern mansion just after eleven p.m. At the time, only Clark and Driscoll were close, and they were a hundred fifty yards back on a winding road, so initially they missed the fact that their targets had left the road. But with some quick backtracking they saw the lights of the vehicles as they parked in front of the space-age building on the hill.

Clark notified the team, and then he called Gavin in Alexandria and told him to find out who owned the property and to call back the second he had something. With this done, he notified his men of the game plan. “I want two guys inside the grounds, head for the back. The objective is a photograph of the unknown subject they picked up behind the theater. Riley came a long way to get that guy, and I want to know who the hell he is.”

Driscoll and Ryan were given the overwatch job, based solely on the equipment in each man’s backpack. Driscoll had the best camera, and Ryan had a dark hoodie and a night-vision monocle. Both men were carrying small Smith & Wesson pistols in their Thunderwear holsters, but neither had any intention of getting into a gunfight with a dozen men.

Especially on behalf of some victim who meant nothing to them at this point.

They jumped the fence from an adjacent property thirty minutes after Riley and his crew arrived at the mansion, and they found themselves in a grove of pecan trees. Ryan spent a few moments scanning through his forty-millimeter night-observation device to make sure there were no dogs or men in the area, but once they were clear, they were slowed down some by pecans on the ground. Every step seemed to make a loud noise for the first twenty-five yards as the shells cracked underfoot.

Finally they reached some open ground. Here Ryan scanned the house again, and he saw a man on a tower looking in his general direction, so he and Sam backed into the trees and moved laterally along the fence, farther toward the back of the property.

They found a decent hide after ducking a pair of two-man patrols, and they ended up low in a copse of cohune palm that grew alongside a little pond in the back of the property, halfway between the fence and the pool house at the back edge of the main building. From here they had a good vantage point that gave them a view of the entire back of the main house.

Driscoll brought out his Nikon, attached a 500-millimeter lens, and centered on the movement in the expansive and bright main room of the house. As soon as he focused he could see Edward Riley pacing back and forth. He snapped a few pictures. Also in the room was the Asian man they had first seen around noon at the hotel in Mexico City. Sam photographed him as well. With them were three Hispanic-looking tough guys, and seated was the unknown individual who Riley had picked up in Toluca earlier in the evening.

Sam spoke softly into his earpiece microphone as he snapped some pictures of the man. “This poor guy has taken a beating. Looks like the North Korean is tuning him up, trying to get him to talk, I guess.”

Clark was still outside the property in the Durango. “Is Riley the one asking the questions?”

Sam saw Riley speaking at that moment. Soon the Asian man backhanded the bound victim again.

“That’s my read on it. Sending the headshot now to Gavin.”

Gavin had been given the heads-up in Alexandria to expedite the processing of the image just as soon as it came through.

The conference call that kept all the men connected to one another by their headsets received a new guest just five minutes after Sam sent the image.

“Hey, guys. It’s Gavin. I just loaded the image. Expect it to take a half-hour or more, if there is a hit at all.”

“That’s fine. What about the property?”

“Owned by a Mexican bank. Did some digging through CIA, and traced it back to Grupo Pacífico.”

Ryan said, “Just like the plane Riley flew down on.”

“Bingo,” Biery confirmed. “Owned by Óscar Roblas. Doesn’t look like it’s a personal address. More like a place he loans out or throws parties in. Typical rich-guy stuff that the rest of us don’t ever—”

There was a pause on the line. Clark said, “Gavin? Did we lose you?”

“Uh… no. But you won’t believe this. Facial recog is complete.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m really not.” Gavin seemed stunned himself. “Oh, I see. I set it up so it would first run through the FBI and CIA’s database of wanted subjects. It saves time that way because it’s not just looking over a general database of—”

Jack Ryan, Jr., interjected over Biery’s explanation. “Who the fuck is it, Gavin?”

“Oh. Sorry. According to the FBI Most Wanted database, that man’s name is Adel Zarif, he is a forty-eight-year-old Iranian from—”

John Clark spoke for the rest of the team. “We know who he is.”

And it was true. Everyone in The Campus was aware of one of the most notorious terrorist bomb makers of the past fifteen years.

Caruso spoke next. “You know what this means, right?”

Clark did. “The IED yesterday.”

It sank in slowly to the five men surrounding the mansion. The perpetrator of the attempted assassination of the President of the United States, Jack’s father, was right in front of them.

And this clearly meant Riley and the North Koreans were involved as well. No one knew who the other ten men were, but if this had something to do with the attack on Jack Ryan, Sr., it seemed likely the Hispanics in the mix were Maldonado gunmen.

Clark said, “We are not calling this in to Mexican law enforcement.”

A universal agreement was reached immediately on this. No one was confident the Mexicans could take this place down before the men inside escaped. Then Clark added, “We could call Hendley and have him notify Mary Pat. She would contact Justice and they would put together an FBI package. Surely they have assets staged in Mexico City after what went down yesterday.”

No one spoke.

“Or we go after him now. There are a dozen men in there. Riley I’m not too concerned about. The RGB trains some decent combatants, but we’ve dealt with several in the past few weeks.”

Ryan said, “The other guys must be part of the Maldonado cartel. As a fighting force, they suck.”

Clark replied, “We don’t know who they are for sure. Best possible scenario is they are Maldonado men. If that is the case, I like our chances hitting that residence.”

Sam was the first to speak up. “We don’t know who all Riley is working with. All it’s going to take is for him to call up a friendly helo to land on the lawn to fly that guy away. That happens, we’re left with pictures only.”

Jack Ryan, Jr., had already decided he was going to hit that house in front of him, with or without the rest of The Campus. Those men had tried to kill his father, and they’d come damn close. The discussion on the commo net among his colleagues was academic to him, although he knew that without any help his chances for survival would be nil.

Clark said, “Okay. We are going to take that building down. We don’t have breaching charges, body armor, long guns, intel on the OPFOR, or an exfil plan. We probably don’t have much time, either. We do have pistols, the element of surprise, and a need. I want to hear everyone’s ideas, and I want to hear them now.”

The team spent the next five minutes on a plan. While they were doing so, Dom Caruso dropped over the eastern wall of the property, two hundred yards from Ryan and Driscoll on the northern side.

He found excellent cover by low-crawling through some flowering jacaranda. When he was in position he called over the network, “How are we going to cross all that open ground?”

Domingo Chavez answered this. “You need a distraction, and I’ve got an idea.”

Edward Riley was impressed with the Iranian’s ability to deal with pain. Certainly by now his jaw and nose were broken, the orbital bone of his skull looked like it had been cracked, and several of his teeth had been knocked out. Blood flowed easily from his mouth and nose and the swollen blackness under his left eye. But he’d said little more than “Allahu akbar” and some words Riley took to be curses.

The Englishman looked at his watch. He wanted to have this entire episode behind him in a day, but it wasn’t looking good. Even if the man talked right now, and that didn’t look likely, Riley would still have to go check out the location of this alleged computer where Zarif uploaded the file. He didn’t know if the man had any confederates here in the country, or if he’d simply gone to a library or an electronics shop, or even if he had loaded the video onto a mobile phone and mailed it to some random address. Somewhere, Riley was convinced, was evidence that could link North Korea to the assassination attempt the day before.

Suddenly there was a disturbance upstairs. Someone was calling out in Spanish from the balcony over the front door. Riley looked to the Cubans around him.

A Cuban who spoke English entered the room and addressed Riley and Kim. “They say a car is approaching up the drive. Mercedes. The driver is the only occupant.”

That didn’t sound like a threat to Riley, but it did sound like something he needed to deal with. He headed to the front door with the Cuban who spoke English. Zarif would remain out of sight because the front door was in a large entryway with wraparound stairs that shielded the expansive living area.

Riley opened the front door in time to see a well-dressed Latin man in his mid-forties climb out of his black Mercedes with his keys in his hand. His necktie was loose and his shirt was unbuttoned, and he staggered a little as he climbed up the steps.

“May I help you?” Riley asked.

“¿Qué?”

The Cuban spoke to the man. He was all the way in the entryway before he responded.

The Cuban said, “He’s asking where his uncle Óscar is.”

“Óscar Roblas?”

“Sí,” said the man. He was clearly drunk; Riley could see his Spanish was slurred. “Tío Óscar.”

“Tell him Óscar Roblas loaned this house to us tonight. He can call him if he wants, but I invite him to do so outside. We have an important business meeting under way.”

Riley put his hand on the man’s chest and started to push him toward the door. The man staggered some more, and then said something.

“He asks if he can use the bathroom before he leaves. He says it is an emergency.”

Riley looked at the man for several seconds. Finally, he said, “Yes. Of course he can.”

The Latin man nodded and began heading toward the hallway to the back rooms; he had made it about ten feet when he heard the distinctive click of the hammer of a pistol two feet behind his head. The sound echoed in the sterile and spartan entryway of the modern house.

“Good evening, Mr. Domingo Chavez. How lovely of you to drop by.”