Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

“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.”

65

Edward Riley flew from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey direct to Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport in the back of an Embraer Phenom 300 corporate jet owned by one of Óscar Roblas’s shell companies. He landed just after three a.m. and was driven by a hired car to a hotel in the posh Polanco neighborhood of the city.

He’d worked on his plan for most of the flight, so he caught a few hours’ sleep in the early morning, and then, just after nine a.m., he was visited by an RGB agent named Kim who explained that he himself had just arrived from Havana the evening before. Kim had been the one in contact with Zarif, and he came over to Mexico once it was clear Zarif was attempting to blackmail North Korea for $2 million.

Riley thought the sum to be relatively small, but he understood why Zarif chose this amount. The bomb maker wouldn’t have easy access to banks, so the cash had to be carried, and two million U.S. dollars was about the largest amount easily transported by a single person. He could have carried a lot more in euros, but either Zarif did not know this or else he felt dollars would be more useful here in the Western Hemisphere.

Kim had spoken to Zarif just before arriving at Riley’s hotel. The Iranian had demanded to work with a middleman, someone who was not Asian, someone who spoke English. He’d explained that this person would make the transfer at eight p.m. that evening at the Cinépolis movie theater in Toluca.

Riley would be this man.

It had already been decided by North Korea that there would be no blackmail money paid to Zarif. Having him alive and able to reveal details of Operation Fire Axe was not a suitable option, so Kim had made no attempt to collect the funds.

Riley agreed with their assessment in general, although Roblas’s people had given him the phone number of a local banker he could call at any hour if he needed cash to buy back evidence. Even though Riley knew Óscar Roblas could have easily come up with the money to buy the man’s silence, there could be no guarantees Zarif wouldn’t just reveal his knowledge about the North Koreans’ involvement in the attack anyway.

So the solution was simple: Zarif had to die.

But Riley knew this wasn’t a situation where they could just shoot him dead on the street. The man had allegedly created a video detailing North Korea’s involvement in the assassination attempt, and Zarif would have to be a complete and utter fool to arrive at the location for the exchange without leaving an ace in the hole. No, the bomb maker would have secured a copy of that video with someone, or he would have mailed it to an address, or saved it on a computer that was not on his person.

Riley needed to know what Zarif had done to ensure his safety, and there was only one way to get that information.

The Englishman pictured a long and uncomfortable night of brutal torture.

He needed a secure location to do this, and his Polanco hotel room would hardly suffice for what he had in mind. He told Roblas’s banker he needed only ten thousand dollars, and he expected to return that to him when the operation was complete, but what he needed more was a location somewhere in the area where he would not be disturbed for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The banker put him on hold for several minutes, presumably to contact either Roblas or someone below him, and then he returned to the line with an address. He said it was a private villa in Cuernavaca, a city in the mountains an hour south of the capital. The banker promised Riley no one would bother him there.

Next came a discussion between Kim and Riley about how to get their hands on Adel Zarif. Riley had transported cash for blackmail payments before in his career. He knew one million U.S. dollars, if acquired in hundred-dollar bills, would easily fit into an average-sized school backpack. He went to a nearby department store and purchased two dark backpacks, then stepped into a used-book store and bought enough cheap paperback novels to fill the packs.

Once he had his decoys, he and Kim drove together to Toluca, where they reconnoitered the movie theater and the streets around it. It was just after three p.m., so he knew Zarif would probably not be in the area, but Riley wanted to figure out why he had decided on this location for the drop. Once they circled the block a couple of times, he had his answer.

He explained his conclusion to Kim. “There are a lot of ways out of that cineplex. Each of the six screens has its own fire escape, and there is a main entrance and a back way out of the lobby. He’s worried about a double cross. We need all the exits covered.”

“How do you propose we do that? There are two of us, and you will be inside.”

Riley said, “I can hire a team of local muscle, but that’s going to take more time than we have.”

Kim understood this would be his responsibility. “I can get RGB men here from Mexico City.”

“No. If Zarif sees Asians, he’ll run.”

Kim thought for a moment more. “I have a better idea. Let me make a call.”

In the late afternoon, ten operatives of Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence arrived in two Jeep Cherokees. The North Koreans had good working relations with the Cubans, and the DI men had a large operation here in Mexico. Kim had to go all the way up to General Ri to secure this in extremis operational partnership, but Riley liked the arrangement. Zarif was an Iranian with no experience in the Spanish-speaking world, so Riley felt certain a crew of Cubans on the streets around here would not raise alarms the way North Koreans would.