Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

“Come here and shake my hand.”

Arnie stepped over and lightly squeezed the fingertips on Ryan’s immobilized left hand, because his right hand was wrapped to his chest and completely covered in cotton bandages.

“Forget everything I just said. I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”

“Forgotten, Mr. President.”

“You know I yell at you because I can’t yell at anybody else.”

“Of course I do.”

Ryan said, “When we leave the White House you have my permission to write a kiss-and-tell book about what an ass I can be. You’ll make a mint. Hell, I’ll write the foreword.”

Van Damm and Mary Pat both smiled. Arnie said, “When I get out of here all I want to do is go to some tiny quiet college in New England, teach a class in conflict resolution or something, and decompress.”

Ryan cracked a smile himself. It was his first authentic smile in the past day. “That sounds pretty good. I might take that class.”

“That would make me uncomfortable, Mr. President, because you will be a recurring case study.”

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.