Power and Empire

The Japanese woman conceded the point. “This is true,” she said, nodding at Jack again. “But as your young friend will tell you, at least one of the tunnels leads to the slums on the other side of the tracks. Vincent Chen has a contact there who offers him protection, a man named Santiago Salazar. He is the father of Amanda Salazar, the Paraguayan woman you followed from the bombing. He is what you would call a neighborhood criminal boss in this villa miseria. I placed a listening device against the window of his home earlier today.”

“Let me guess,” Jack said. “Right before a guy with a machete chased you back into the sewer tunnel?”

“Correct,” Yukiko said.

Adara sighed. “Then he knows the device is there.”

“Maybe not,” Jack said. “The guy with the machete never made it back to tell him.”

“Ah,” Adara said. “Right.”

Ryan turned back to Yukiko. “I watched Amanda Salazar cut through the train yard,” he said. “Why didn’t she use the tunnel if it comes up near her father’s house?”

“Would you?” Yukiko said. “If you did not have to? I believe she suffers from… heijokyōfushō… fear of small places.”

“Claustrophobia,” Chavez said.

“Yes,” Yukiko said. “That is the word. In any case, we should hurry. My phone was damaged when you knocked me down. My room is behind the Hyatt on Montevideo. I have another phone there, but they will reach Salazar’s very soon. We must hurry if we hope to learn anything of value from the device I planted.”

Chavez raised an eyebrow. “Sure you don’t have a partner there as well?”

“Believe me,” Yukiko said, “if I had a partner, you would be aware of that by now.”

Chavez looked at the rest of his team.

Both Midas and Adara shrugged.

“We have to do something,” Jack said.

“All right, then.” Chavez motioned up the street with his open hand, nodding to Midas and Adara. “Feel free to shoot her if she tries anything.”

“Aye, sir,” Adara said.

Chavez turned to Ryan as the other two led the way with the Japanese woman in tow. “Notice how she kept calling you my ‘young friend’ like you were some kind of kid?”

Jack chuckled. “Ding, Ding, Ding,” he whispered so Yukiko couldn’t hear the name. “She’s not calling me that because I look like a kid. She’s calling me that because you’re old.”

“Get your ass moving, Ryan.”

• • •

President Jack Ryan rummaged through the bottom drawer of the desk in his study while Arnie van Damm took care of arranging the phone call. Ryan found the golf ball he was looking for and dropped it on the floor. Van Damm looked up at the clunk as the ball hit the carpet, and saw Ryan had kicked off his shoe.

“What?” Ryan said, rolling the ball around under his foot.

Van Damm held up both hands. “Hey,” he said. “This is your office. Who am I to judge?”

The phone gave an audible tone and the White House operator said, “Both parties are on the line, Mr. President.”

The director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense acknowledged that they were, indeed, there.

Ryan said, “Are you guys watching the news?”

“Just now,” Mary Pat said. “My deputy called me about thirty seconds before you did.”

“Same here,” Burgess said. “They’re saying Foreign Minister Li was injured but not badly. He’d be a likely target if Zhao’s behind this.”

“Could be,” the DNI said. “One thing’s certain, Li will leverage the hell out of this. Surviving an assassination attempt is a great way to boost political approval ratings.”

“Don’t remind me,” Ryan said. “My numbers went up fourteen points after the bombing in Mexico City. For some reason, not dying is seen as heroic. In any case, we shouldn’t discount the possibility that this bombing is related to everything else.”

“I agree,” the SecDef said. “If you put together the Orion explosion, the attack on the oil rig in Chad, the USS Rogue incident, and these events in Argentina — all lines converge on Zhao.”

“Maybe,” Mary Pat said. “But the woman who survived the attack in which the Rogue was involved described the pirates as being Indonesian or Malaysian.”

“That is true,” Burgess said. “But I’d put money on finding Zhao’s fingerprints on the payment to any of a half-dozen terrorist groups around Indonesia — as we did with Boko Haram in Chad. He’s pissed because our Freedom of Navigation ops are making him look bad, so he makes a play for one of our ships. Rogue wasn’t broadcasting on AIS and her schedule wasn’t advertised, but the fact that they were helping out as part of Malaysian antipiracy efforts was in all the papers down there. It was no secret that she was to berth in Australia prior to returning to her task force group. The average speed of a Cyclone-class PC is open-source. Anyone who wanted to target her would have had to wait for her to leave and start a countdown. Enough yachties sail through that area this time of year heading for Bali or Singapore that it would be easy to grab one when Rogue was presumably close enough to render aid.”

“A lot of moving parts,” Mary Pat said. “But it very nearly got the job done.”