“And you can tell this how?” Ryan asked.
“There’s a certain look in the eye of someone protecting a man whom he respects.”
“And you believe this speaks to what kind of man Zhao is?”
“I do,” Montgomery said. “That said, even despots have friends. I’ll keep an eye on the colonel, just to get a pulse for what kind of human being he is. If he’s what I believe he is, that says something. I get the feeling this guy would walk through fire to protect Zhao Chengzhi, even if he was not the paramount leader of China.”
Montgomery glanced at his watch and grimaced at the time. The workout had gone longer than he’d planned. That was the problem with operating so close to the President. A smart, observant guy like Ryan noticed when the routine changed.
“Mr. President,” he said, “I must ask to be excused. Special Agent Gallagher will be in charge for a few hours.”
“Everything okay?”
Montgomery smiled. “Everything’s fine, sir,” he said. “I’m going out to Beltsville to observe some AOP scenarios leading up to the G20.”
“Attack on the principal,” Ryan mused. “Who’s going to try and kill me this time?”
“Keep this to yourself,” Montgomery said. “But it’s the Chinese.”
“What are my odds?” Ryan peered over his reading glasses. “And you’d better not say stellar.”
25
A waitress who was far too chipper for six o’clock in the morning had just brought John Clark a plate of eggs and wheat toast when his cell began to buzz on the table beside his plate. He accepted the call and put the phone to his ear, using his fork to fiddle with his eggs as he listened.
“Hey, Gavin,” he said.
“Smokinggun.txt!” Gavin Biery said, his voice jubilant.
Clark took a bite of eggs. He wasn’t hungry, but he knew he would need the energy. “I have no idea what that means.”
“Right,” Biery said. “It’s a white-hat-hacker term for the digital clue that breaks a case wide open. I’m always looking for this very thing when I search for hidden malware or forensic evidence.”
Clark trapped his phone between his ear and his shoulder while he used both hands to butter his toast. “Okay . . .”
Biery took a deep breath, as was his custom when he prepared to launch into a lengthy explanation. “The dark web isn’t what I’d call surf-friendly, but GRAMS lets you search some of the sites.”
“GRAMS?”
“Think of it as the Google of the darknet,” Biery said. “Anyway, I did some snooping for the name Matarife, figuring anyone who went by a moniker like ‘the Slaughterer’ probably has an ego the size of the Death Star. There are billions of sites on the surface web, so this kind of guy can hide in plain sight. The darknet is smaller. Users rely on anonymity, but they stand out more once you focus on them. Took me a couple hops from one sick site to another, but I eventually stumbled onto your guy.” Biery exhaled hard. “I gotta tell you, John, there’s a reason they call it the dark web. This Matarife makes snuff videos—stuff you can’t unsee. Prevailing chatter is that they’re the real deal. The computer script alone about made me puke. I thought I might be able to grab metadata from some of the photos but didn’t have any luck.”
Clark closed his eyes, willing himself not to interrupt. The crescendo of Gavin Biery’s voice said he was moving toward something big.
“But you know what? People aren’t suddenly born on the darknet. At some point, somewhere back in time, they had a presence on the surface web. That’s how they found that Silk Road guy, an old post on Reddit advertising his site. So I did a search on the only slightly less perverted visible portion of the Web. Turns out a user calling himself Matarife 13 had a long convo on an S-and-M chatroom three years ago where he posted some photos. He was running decent OPSEC even back then, using a VPN and an anonymizer program to scrub the metadata—”
“What?” Clark said, biting his tongue.
“He used a virtual private network and a program to wipe the digital fingerprint off any photos he uploaded—except he didn’t. Matarife chose a sloppy anonymizer that left behind EXIF data on a couple of his posted photographs.”
“And that means?”
“It means, John,” Gavin said, “that you need to get a pen, because I’m about to give you the GPS coordinates to this filthy piece of shit’s house.”
? ? ?
Outside the United States, crime bosses employ sizable armies to guard against the almost inevitable attack from rival gangs. Like something from a Hollywood action flick, cold-blooded men wearing dark sunglasses and tight black Tshirts patrol remote hacienda grounds with MP5s, AK-47s, and even the occasional Hi-Point SMG. These residences have high walls, rimmed with broken glass to discourage intruders. They’re often fortified with electric fences and vicious dogs.
Farther north of the border, cartels contend less with marauding competition and more with teams of raiding law enforcement. They’re still heavily armed, but these U.S.-based operations put more trust in CCTV cameras, often purchased from their local Walmart. Sometimes they rely on nothing but a good standoff from any neighbors and acres of grain sorghum to act as a buffer.
If Ernie Pacheco—Matarife’s real name—had known that John Clark was creeping through the sorghum field behind his ranch north of Alvarado, Texas, he would have opted for a lot more than three strands of sagging barbed wire.
The team of Campus operators had originally flown to Dallas on a commercial flight. Clark had declared his Wilson Combat .45 in his checked baggage but brought little more with him on this trip than the communication and surveillance equipment needed to watch Eddie Feng. He had none of the gear he would have normally used to execute an early-morning assault of a rural compound.