Ryan rinsed off the best he could inside the stone building while Midas stood guard outside. Beyond salvation, everything from his skin out, including the Rockports, went into a dumpster. The fresh clothes and relatively disinfected feet allowed Ryan to make it back to the hotel without drawing too much attention. People who passed him smelled something amiss, but Jack looked clean and tidy. Such an awful stench couldn’t be coming from him. Midas led the way and called the elevator while Jack waited by himself in a deserted corner beyond the baby-grand piano in the Panamericano’s lobby until he was sure they would have the elevator to themselves.
He cleaned his gun and other equipment first. Some scrubbing and a few minutes under the blow dryer took care of the Thunderwear holster. It was made of textile, but thankfully it had been semiprotected by his slacks. The radio equipment was waterproof, so it was a fairly straightforward process to get it clean. His watchband, on the other hand, was toast. His cell phone had survived unscathed but for a cracked screen. Twenty minutes in a near scalding shower and two more bottles of hand sanitizer later, Ryan finally felt almost clean again.
He briefly considered calling his mother to see if there was some kind of prophylactic medication he should take, but there was no good way to explain his situation to her. “Hey, Mom, I was just tromping around in some South American sewers today. Wondering if I should be worried . . .”
He decided he’d ask Adara if he got the chance.
Ryan had to will himself to take it easy on the aftershave, knowing too much would draw as much attention as the phantom odor he hoped to conceal. Finally scrubbed and wearing a pressed button-down shirt, fresh khaki slacks, and a pair of Crockett & Jones dark brown oxfords he’d be able to run in if the need arose, he headed to meet Midas in the lobby.
The former Delta commander’s nose curled as soon as Ryan walked up.
“Like my granny used to say, you got something Bab-O won’t wash off!”
“Damn it!” Jack grimaced and started to turn around and head back to his hotel room. “Seriously? You can still smell it?”
Midas’s wide shoulders bounced as he chuckled, already walking toward the valet with the keys. “You’re fine,” he said. “I think my nose hairs are still melted from when I picked you up.”
40
Midas didn’t mind navigating, so Ryan slid in behind the wheel of the Peugeot. He enjoyed driving a stick. It made him feel alive, even in the stop-and-go Buenos Aires traffic. He nearly ran over an older female pedestrian at a four-way intersection—which meant he was getting the hang of driving like an Argentine. She gave him an energetic “Up yours” gesture and called him “?Pelotudo!” which appeared to be the go-to word for angry people in this country.
Ryan turned left on Avenida Santa Fe, working through what little they did know about the situation while he drove. The team had been over it until they were blue in the face, and there were a dozen plausible scenarios—but some vital piece of evidence that would make everything fall into place still eluded them.
Eddie Feng was a Taiwanese national. Vincent Chen was also from Taiwan, but living in the United States with a cover identity selling imported greeting cards from the People’s Republic of China. So far, the only thing linking the two men was their propensity to frequent Tres Equis/Sun Yee On triad strip clubs that exploited underage girls—a trait that should have earned them both a spot in a very dark hole but didn’t explain Chen’s connection to the PRC and whether he was friend or foe. The meetings between the Chinese and the other delegations had definitely brought him to Argentina.
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.