Power and Empire

32

Helen Reid, Hendley Associates’ chief pilot, battled white-knuckle downdrafts and a torrential downpour to bring the Gulfstream 550 in for a long landing, touching down farther along Runway 29 so she could scoot out of the way of an Aerolíneas Argentinas Airbus coming in behind her on final approach. A ground controller with excellent English got her off the runway quickly and guided her to the northeast corner of Buenos Aires’s Ministro Pistarini International Airport, where she parked at the General Aviation terminal.

Jack and the other Campus operators were relieved to be back on terra firma and were packed and ready to go by the time she set the parking brake. The ownership of the Hendley jet was a matter of open record, but Argentines considered their country an extremely worthwhile destination for tourist travel, so the operators would just declare the purpose of their trip was pleasure and claim it was a company getaway.

The team traveled with passports issued by the State Department with all the appropriate biometrics for their cover identities. It was one of the benefits of having friends in extremely high places. Argentina’s kidnapping rates had dropped some in recent years, but the son of the President of the United States made for an awfully tempting target.

Argentine Immigration and Customs required those arriving via private aircraft to carry all luggage inside the terminal for scanning and inspection while the aircraft remained locked behind a secure fence — which made bringing in the firearms problematic. Chavez solved the issue by having the pilots report a problem with an oil-pressure gauge. This necessitated a move to the nearby maintenance hangar, where Adara and Lisanne could pop in and retrieve the handguns and comms gear. The appropriate amount of exposed leg was still one of the most useful social-engineering mechanisms in the world. The women were much less likely to be challenged considering the Latin machismo of the country. Even so, they would tuck the pistols under their clothing just to be on the safe side.

Less than twenty minutes after they touched down, the team carried their bags out the front doors of the General Aviation terminal and sprinted through the late-afternoon downpour to locate the three rental cars that were supposed to be staged outside. The plan was for Adara and Lisanne to wait with the pilots and grab the guns once the Gulfstream was towed to the maintenance hangar while Ding, Midas, and Jack took the other two cars to check into their rooms at the Hotel Panamericano downtown.

Except there was only one rental car — a tiny orange Renault Clio hatchback.

Lisanne whipped out her cell phone like it was a weapon. With her black hair plastered to her cheeks, she stood in the driving rain and set about chastising the rental car company in a mixture of Spanish, Arabic, and English for making her look bad. No plan survived first contact. Shit happened. And luckily, this screwup didn’t cost the team anything but wet clothes and time. Jack couldn’t help but think her handling of the situation was pretty damned impressive.

Someone at the rental car company finally owned up to the mistake and promised to deliver the two larger cars to the hotel. Chavez, Midas, and Jack would cab it to the Panamericano with the bulk of the luggage. The pilots would drop Adara and the weapons off later and then return to their hotel nearer the airport with Lisanne. Clark had been clear that he didn’t want them near any kind of surveillance operation, no matter how much Lisanne offered to help — which she did. A lot. They were crossing the line by having her help retrieve the pistols and comms gear, but that couldn’t be helped unless they wanted to go in naked.

Chavez and Midas rode together in one cab while Jack, who spoke only enough Spanish to order a beer, piled into another one by himself with the rest of the luggage. His cabbie was an avuncular man named Rodrigo. Rodrigo, who had sandy hair and a philosophical bent, started speaking the moment Jack’s door slammed shut.

It was rush hour and the Autopista Luis Dellepiane was bumper-to-bumper and door-to-door. Drivers appeared to pay no attention to the lane markings or the rain and oozed forward in a magma flow of steaming gridlock. Periodically, a motorcycle would find a gap and roar between the slower-moving cars, splitting lanes. Sometimes they missed the side mirrors. Sometimes they did not.

In the first five miles Jack counted at least a half-dozen billboards displaying a variety of beautiful and long-legged women in classy clothing that, as far as he could tell, advertised various clinics that removed unwanted body hair. He would have joked with Midas about it, but then he considered all the crazy crap hawked on billboards in the United States and thought better of it.

Inching toward a tollbooth, Rodrigo pulled a one-hundred-peso note from his pocket. He must have seen Jack looking from the large bill to the sign above the booth that said he was in the lane for exact change.

“No one pays attention to the signs,” Rodrigo said in a slow but earnest voice. “The price of toll changes every week or two.” He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Inflation in my country… It is…” He held his hand in front of his face, fingers together in the gesture used to explain something important. “It is… subir como pedo de buzo—how do you say? It rises like the fart of a scuba diver.”

Ryan wanted to chuckle at the imagery of bubbles shooting toward the surface, but the look on Rodrigo’s face said the euphemism was no laughing matter.

They continued through the tollbooth after paying, inching down the autopista in the heavy traffic. Rodrigo used the time to give Ryan a crash course in Argentina, enlightening him on everything from the economy — he had to pay his mortgage in U.S. dollars — to the beauty of Iguazu Falls — Ryan and everyone else in the world simply had to see this place at least once.

In a tediously slow but earnest voice, Rodrigo went on to declare that Argentine beef was the most delicious, Argentine women were beautiful beyond all description — especially when dancing the tango — and Argentine footballers possessed a superhuman talent at the game. Ryan was an Arsenal fan, but he kept quiet about that, knowing football — soccer to Americans — was a touchy subject in many parts of the world. Argentine fans often seemed to treat the act of simply attending a match as a blood sport.

Rodrigo continued. “God gave Argentina the most beautiful rivers in all the world. He blessed Argentina with incredible mountains and fruits that are sweet above all others. Here in Argentina, God has planted fields that yield bushels of grain and endless pampas of grass, filled with herds of fat cattle and fine horses—”

Just then the driver of the car ahead of the taxi rolled down his window and tossed a full bag of trash onto the wet roadway. A piece of sopping-wet paper flew up and stuck to the cab’s windshield, forcing Rodrigo to roll down his window and reach around to remove it.

The cabbie smoothed his sandy hair with a rain-soaked hand and glanced at Jack in the rearview mirror. “And then God messed it all up by putting the Argentines here.”

The two cabs arrived within moments of each other, dropping Ryan, Chavez, and Midas at the Panamericano on Carlos Pelligrini, a short walk from the city’s famous obelisk on a small one-way street that ran adjacent to the greenbelt and the fourteen-lane-wide Avenida 9 de Julio.

Ryan retrieved the luggage from the back of the taxi and paid the seven-hundred-peso fare — around forty U.S. dollars. Rodrigo nodded and wished him well in a droning voice that sounded as if the cabbie was certain something ominous was going to befall him.

Ostensibly the Panamericano was a five-star hotel, and its limestone façade and turn-of-the-century signage looked welcoming enough after the long trip south, but it had just enough sketchy online reviews to make it unlikely the Campus team would run into anyone they were supposed to be watching.

Jack stacked the bags on a cart and looked at his watch and then at Chavez. “What’s the plan?”

“Argentines don’t eat until after eight. We’ll do some foot recon, but if we want to get a true picture of the place, we should wait to eat.”

Midas chuckled. “You’re just scared of Adara.”

“Well”—Chavez gave a mock shudder—“she does spend a hell of a lot of time doing CrossFit.”

Three hours later, six blocks to the north of the hotel and seven blocks west of Avenida 9 de Julio, an attractive brunette named Amanda Salazar sat at a table at the back of the Parrilla Aires Criollos restaurant with her friend Beatriz, an equally attractive blonde. A set of rawhide boleadoras, a weighted throwing weapon of stone and rawhide, hung from the wall above them with other assorted gaucho paraphernalia. Multitasking, or at least multitasking skillfully, was impossible, so the young women divided their responsibilities.

Amanda’s job was to laugh between sips of La Azul Malbec and bat her impossibly long eyelashes at the attentive older man who waited on their table. She wore her shoulder-length hair down and loose. Beatriz wore hers up, pulled back with unseen pins that made her look older, though at twenty-six she was actually the younger of the two. Beatriz did her share of smiling as well, but she left flirting with the waiter to her partner. Under the table, the blonde concentrated on her work, wiggling the face off the heating vent with the tip of her toe.

Parrilla Aires Criollos was an upscale restaurant with gaucho decor, tile floors, and crisp white tablecloths. As the name implied, it served Argentine cuisine and grilled meat with a distinctly Spanish flair. The long tablecloths, aided by Amanda’s entrancing laugh, helped to conceal the tedious work removing the vent cover.

Amanda and Beatriz were dressed in stylish blouses and skirts, each wearing just enough makeup and jewelry to make them attractive but not especially memorable. Classy dress was the norm in Buenos Aires, and dressing down would have garnered more attention. Each woman carried a brown leather briefcase, leading people to think they were lawyers, or perhaps some other brand of young professional women who had decided to grab some dinner before they got an early start at some of the local clubs.

Tonight, they had chosen to arrive exactly at eight p.m. The restaurant was busy enough that all eyes would not be focused on them but not so crowded that they would have trouble finding a table in the area they wanted. They’d come in for a late lunch two days earlier, locating the area where they would have to sit in order to accomplish their mission. The area near the bar, it seemed, was reserved for private functions. But if no such function was scheduled, guests were seated here when all the other tables were filled. A visit to the restrooms during their lunchtime visit took the young women near enough to locate the vent cover and devise their plan.

Either woman was capable of removing a vent or captivating the emotions of all manner of man or woman. They had met Franco, the waiter, on this previous visit. Whether he intended to or not, the man’s extra attention to Amanda’s water glass made it obvious that he was smitten with the beautiful brunette. He took her order first and smiled his thin smile when he gave her his suggestion for just the right pairing of wine and food. Far from being jealous, Beatriz had considered this a happy circumstance and allowed it to dictate their respective duties the following night. She would much rather deal with high explosives than the attentions of an overly attentive waiter with greasy hair.

Tonight, Amanda had caught Franco’s eye across the long and narrow dining room as soon as they came through the door. He rushed forward, still carrying a tray of dirty glasses he’d just cleaned off one of the tables, greeting her effusively. She pointed out the area near the bar and begged to sit there.

Like most instances where women preplanned their dealings with men, it was all too easy.

The scouting visit on the previous evening revealed the heating vents were held in place by friction rather than screws. In theory, this should have made it easier to remove. Beatriz kicked off her shoe as soon as they sat down, going straight to work with her toe. The metal louver appeared to be glued in place at first, but she finally got it to budge a little by pushing the face back and forth rather than trying to simply hook it with her nail and pull it out. Eventually, she was able to wiggle it out. She felt the metal and surrounding boxy collar slide free from the wood panel at the same moment Franco chose to visit their table. Beatriz was just able to catch the piece of metal with her bare foot and wedge it against the wall. The waiter smiled at Amanda, paying Beatriz no attention at all, and placed a platter containing their picada on the table. The girls’ accents gave away the fact that they were not from Argentina, and Franco felt it a duty to explain the bits of baked cheese and sliced meat people from his beloved country ate before a main meal. Beatriz balanced the grate in place, keeping her face passive while the arch of her foot began to spasm and cramp. Amanda noted her friend’s discomfort and asked Franco to suggest another wine for them to try. He scurried off to find “something just right” for the beautiful señorita who had chosen to return to his restaurant.

Beatriz sighed with relief when she let the grate slip to the floor and come to rest on top of her foot. Franco was a waiter and therefore not trained in the art of espionage or tradecraft — but surely any man with his pudgy physique and halting demeanor would suspect that two attractive women he’d only just met might have ulterior motives.

One of them might, perhaps, be trying to distract him while her friend placed a bomb inside the wall of his restaurant.

Beatriz gave a whispered scoff, shaking her head at Amanda. “Hope. It is every man’s demise.”

Amanda raised her eyebrows, the facial equivalent of a shrug. “And the downfall of most women,” she said.

The bomb itself was small, made from military-grade RDX. A key component of C-4 was cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine. The name was a mouthful, so the British developers simply called it Research Department eXplosive. This particular batch of RDX was manufactured at a munitions plant outside Islamabad. Pakistani operatives were fond of the stuff and had used it to great effect in bombings against India and the West. Motor oil or some other carbon-based product was often mixed with the explosive to mask the material’s origin. Amanda and Beatriz left it plain. They wanted investigators to know the RDX came from Pakistan. Their briefcase device contained half a kilo of the plasticized material, a bit of PETN, and a blasting cap with a detonator attached to an arming device and then a mobile phone — also from Pakistan.

As the two women talked, Beatriz used her foot to lift and push her briefcase into the space behind the vent cover. It took only a moment, and stooping slightly, she was able to replace the cover before Franco returned with a bottle of Schroeder Merlot from Patagonia.

To his shame, Amanda said she preferred the earlier Malbec, and he slunk away with the open bottle.

Fairly giddy with the success of this portion of their mission, the women dug into the contents of the picada. Beatriz absentmindedly twirled a lock of blond hair over her ear as she began to peruse the menus, getting down to the business of deciding what to have for dinner. It turned out that placing a bomb was very good for one’s appetite.

Neither woman noticed the tall, bearded man with the fit-looking blonde. The well-dressed couple stopped just inside the front door, both scanning the now crowded restaurant as if looking for just the perfect table.