“I’m in the middle of something I can’t leave right now, but I can get Ryan on the way to help you.” Chavez knew sending Jack into mainland China was questionable, at best. But he knew Tong was at the center of the entire conflict with China, and Guangzhou was close to the Hong Kong border, anyway, unlike Beijing.
At least, Ding told himself, he wasn’t sending Jack to Beijing.
“What’s wrong with Jack?”
“I’ve got too much to do to have to watch out for the Junior Pres.”
“Jack’s an asset, Yao. Take my word for it.”
“I don’t know.”
“Take it or leave it.”
Yao sighed. “I’ll take him. At least he knows people who can make things happen. Have him go to HK, and I can meet him at the airport and get him over the border.”
“Okay. Call me back in ninety minutes and I’ll put the two of you together.”
SIXTY-THREE
Jack Ryan, Jr., drove across the Francis Scott Key Bridge, his eyes fixed on a taxi in the traffic one hundred yards ahead.
It was just after seven in the morning, and Jack had tailed the cab since it left Melanie’s Alexandria carriage-house apartment twenty minutes earlier.
Today was the third day in a row he had shown up at her place before dawn, parking his car several blocks over from Princess Street and then finding a secluded spot in a tiny garden across the street. Each day he watched her windows with his binoculars as soon as there was enough light in the sky to do so, and he stayed there until she left for work, walking up the street to catch the Metro.
Then, for the past two days anyhow, he’d checked her mailbox and her trash, but he’d not found anything of value. He’d left within minutes of her departure for work, and he’d spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how he was going to confront her about Center.
Today his plan had been to break into her flat once she left; he knew he could pick her door lock with ease, but his plan had been derailed when a cab pulled up to her door at six-forty and she’d rushed out, already dressed for work.
Jack hurried back to his car, and then caught up to the taxi on the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway. He’d recognized early on that she wasn’t going to her job in McLean, but instead was heading into D.C.
Now, as he followed her off the bridge and into Georgetown, he thought about the murder of all the CIA officers two weeks earlier, and it sickened him to think she might have somehow been involved.
“Unwittingly, Jack,” he said, telling himself aloud she would not be working either against him or for the Chinese without being seriously duped.
He wanted to believe it, anyway.
His phone chirped in the console. He touched the hands-free button on the steering wheel.
“Ryan.”
“Jack, it’s Ding.”
“Hey. Are you in Beijing?”
“Yes. Sorry, no time to talk. I just called the Gulfstream. You need to be at BWI in an hour.”
“Granger rescinded it.”
“Okay. Roger that. I’m in D.C., en route to BWI. Where am I heading?”
“Hong Kong.”
Jack knew it was unlikely Ding’s satellite call was being monitored, and Gavin and his team had spent hours searching his car for trackers or listening devices, but he also knew there was no point in saying anything more that could give away operational intel, so he asked no more questions.
“Okay,” he said, and he hung up. He was thick in the streets of Georgetown now, and the best way north to Baltimore was up ahead, so he continued following Melanie’s cab until he could turn off.
He could not see the taxi at the moment because a dry-cleaning van had pulled out of a drive on P Street directly behind it.
As Jack drove he thought about just calling Melanie and talking to her. If he was going to Hong Kong he would not get any answers about what was going on for days, at least, and that worried him greatly. But he also worried that if he did talk to her, she might pick up on the fact he was leaving town, and this could be dangerous to his mission.
Because Center would know.
As they crossed over the Rock Creek Parkway, Jack resigned himself to the fact that he would get no answers, but then he saw the taxi turn onto the on-ramp for the parkway. Jack realized she would be heading north, too, which was odd, because he could not imagine why she had the cab run her into Georgetown just to leave D.C.
He accelerated as he crossed the overpass to make the turn on the ramp, but ahead of him he saw the dry- cleaning van pull up alongside Melanie’s cab, as if it was trying to pass her on the steeply graded one-lane looping on-ramp.
“Idiot,” he said as he watched from some seventy-five yards back.
Just then, as the van pulled directly next to the taxi, its side door opened. It was such an odd sight that Ryan did not know what was happening at first, and he was slow to recognize danger.
Until he saw the barrel of a submachine gun appear from the dark interior of the van.
Before his eyes, the gun fired a long automatic burst, flame and smoke blew from the barrel, and the front passenger-side window of the cab exploded in a cloud of glass dust.
Jack screamed inside his BMW as Melanie’s cab veered hard to the left, drove off the ramp on the inside of the turn, and then flipped and rolled down the hill, coming to rest on its roof.
The dry-cleaning van stopped lower on the ramp, and two armed men leapt out of the back.
Jack was armed with his Glock 23, but he was too far back to stop his car here and engage the men at the bottom of the ramp. Instead, acting more on impulse than anything else, he drove the BMW 335i off the ramp at speed, launched through the air, hit the grassy hill, and then skidded sideways as he lost control, careening down to the bottom of the hill toward the upside-down taxi.
Jack’s airbag deployed and slammed him in the face; his arms flew through the air helter-skelter as the BMW bottomed out and then bounced back into the air. He sideswiped a tree on the hill, skidded through grass and mud, and then slammed down again at the bottom of the hill and came to rest. The windshield was badly cracked, but through it Ryan realized he was facing the two gunmen, fifteen yards ahead and approaching the taxi.
Jack was dazed, and his field of view was obstructed by dust and the cracked windshield, but the gunmen were slowed as well, and they looked directly at him. They apparently did not recognize the BMW as a threat; they assumed, obviously, that another motorist had crashed his car behind all the commotion on the on-ramp from the overpass.
Jack Ryan fought through the fog of his daze. Just as the gunmen refocused their attention on the crashed cab, kneeling down to look inside the inverted vehicle with their submachine guns at the ready, Jack drew his Glock, raised it with unsteady hands, and then fired through the smashed windshield.
Over and over and over he dumped rounds at the two men in front of him. One flipped back into the grass, his weapon tumbling away from his crumpled body.
The other man fired back, and the windshield just to Ryan’s right blew in, spitting bits of safety glass into Jack’s face. Jack’s own spent casings bounced around the inside of his car, singeing his face and arms when they pinged off him on their way to the backseat or down to the floorboard or passenger seat in the front.
Ryan emptied his pistol at the two threats, firing thirteen rounds in total. When his gun locked open he
