Power and Empire

This Japanese girl added a new twist to the mix. The guy Ryan killed from Villa 31 had apparently been after her with a machete — which by virtue of her enemies edged her into the good-guy column. Sometimes, though, the enemy of my enemy was, well, just another damn enemy. It was not too much of a leap to assume she was there because of the Japanese delegation — but ministers of agriculture rarely engendered enough intrigue to cause someone to run through a tunnel filled with sewage. And if this woman had arrived with the Japanese agricultural delegation, how did she even know about the existence of the tunnel? Jack had seen her exit the Palacio Duhau Hyatt, the same hotel where the Chinese foreign minister was staying. The Japanese had rooms at the Four Seasons, more than five blocks away. Why was she there? Why had she gotten to Villa 31 right after the brunette with known ties to Chen? She’d warned Jack to run. Why hadn’t she confronted him — or, at the very least, left him to his own fate?

Ryan tapped the steering wheel in thought. He had a lot of puzzle pieces. They just seemed to be from different puzzles.

He passed the Parrilla Aires Criollos restaurant on his right, and continued for another block and a half to a parking garage just beyond the intersection with Riobamba. A chilly wind blew in from the Río de la Plata, which, at 120 miles wide, seemed more like a bay off the Atlantic than a river. Once he was parked, Ryan grabbed a dark windbreaker from the back of the Peugeot. It would cut the wind, and had the added benefit of being nighttime camouflage, should he need to move covertly when the sun went down.

The men split up after they left the vehicle, Midas loitering his way east, browsing the shops along Santa Fe while Jack went north a block on narrow, tree-lined Riobamba. Businesses occupied the bottom floor of most buildings, but judging from the many balconies above, most of the upper floors were private apartments. Ever thinking strategically, Jack noted the prevalence of concrete railings and statuary around the balconies and thought how the Secret Service would avoid this kind of street like the plague. There were just too damn many places to hide.

Pockets of old men with jaunty tamlike gaucho hats sat here and there at the many sidewalk cafés on the quiet street, sipping yerba mate through a silver straw in a communal gourd called a mate that gave the drink its name. Mate was a national pastime. Entire shops were devoted to mate mugs and straws and thermoses, as well as exotic leather carriers resembling a tall binocular case in which to store everything. The hotel valet had offered Jack a drink from his mate straw, instructing him to empty it before passing it back. Jack had complied, grudgingly, and found it tasted like a mixture of boiling water and hay. He preferred to get his caffeine fix from actual tea, or a good old cup of coffee. The stuff made by the Navy stewards in the White House was particularly good… but he didn’t get by there to see his folks as much as he used to. Certainly not as much as he should.

It was a little after four p.m. when Ryan turned back to the east on Arenales, paralleling Santa Fe for several blocks so he could come in the opposite direction from Midas with the restaurant in the middle. The thought of Navy mess coffee made him wish for a cup, and he began to look for a likely shop as he walked. It would give him something to do as he whiled away the hours… and watched.

In days gone by, arriving on station early was a double-edged sword. Get there too late and you missed important changes in personnel, local habits, and anyone from the other team who decided to set up an ambush or conduct countersurveillance. Coming in too early ran the risk of drawing unwanted attention.

Then smartphones came along and devoured the collective brain of society. Mobile phones were the single greatest thing to happen to a surveillance team in recent history — and communication had nothing to do with it. Trained observers generally relied on a set of known habits and best practices. But just as a baboon might alert the gazelle of a leopard’s presence in the wild, being noticed by the local populace was a surefire way to spook a target. Since most noses had become buried in a phone screen, it was a safe bet that a person could spend a couple hours browsing local stores in a three-block operational area without drawing so much as a second look. That time more than doubled if a stop at the neighborhood coffee shop was added to the mix.

City crews had already come by and dropped off wooden barricades in front of Parrilla Aires Criollos. These ten-foot-long sawhorses leaned against a row of garbage bins, causing pedestrian traffic to split and flow around them like water around a boulder in the middle of a river. Uniformed officers began to arrive approximately an hour after Ryan and Midas came on station.