The Execution (16 page)

CHAPTER 41

E
lian Martinez was looking in the mirror, straightening his black bow tie, when he heard the door buzz.

“You expecting anyone?” he called to his wife, Kelli.

“No,” she called back.

“Guess I better get it then,” he said.

There’d been some push-in robberies in the neighborhood lately, the same guy in every case, forcing his way into women’s apartments, stealing their stuff, beating them up. Elian figured it was always better to have a male voice answer the buzzer.

He came out of the bathroom, pulling on his coat. He was going to be late for work if he didn’t get lucky with the traffic.

He pushed the button on the intercom. “Yes?”

A voice in Spanish came back, “Señor Martinez, it’s Sergeant Benividez with the Policía Federal. We’re here for the credentials inspection.”

“The what?”

“I’m sure the Secret Service informed you. We’re part of President Vargas’s advance team. We’re validating the credentials of everyone who’ll be—”

“Ah, sí, momento, momento!”
He pressed the button releasing the lock down in the vestibule. He could hear the buzz of the lock mechanism right through the wall.

“What is it?” Kelli said. She spoke no Spanish. Elian was getting his Ph.D. at NYU, moonlighting as a waiter. He and Kelli had met the first day of grad school and they were both finishing up their dissertations in Econ. He could practically taste the money he’d be making on Wall Street come this time next year. But in the meantime, they were currently clipping coupons and pulling nickels out of the couch cushions, just trying to get by.

Elian said to her, “I told you about President Vargas, right?”

Kelli said, “Only about twenty times.”

“Hey, give me a break. I think it’s cool, I might be personally serving the president of Mexico.”

“Why don’t you slip him your résumé inside his oysters?”

“Ha ha. Though actually not a bad idea.”

There was a knock on the door.

Elian opened the door and let two men into the room. They were both wearing dark suits, sunglasses. A big guy and a medium-sized guy. The big guy seemed a little out of shape to be presidential security, but this was Mexico, maybe their standards were different than the United States.

“Come in, come in,” Elian said, ushering them in. “Sorry about this . . . the mess.”

The smaller man entered first, looking around. He acted very official. “We’ll make this nice and quick,” he said. “Sorry for the inconvenience. We just need to see your credential documents yet again, to log you into the database. This won’t take but a few minutes.”

Elian frowned. “The Secret Service said they were taking care of everything. Is there some reason why—”

“We have to double-check every detail,” the man said, smiling broadly. “It is a redundancy, I agree. But that is our job. Be assured, you will see us at least one more time before the event. You understand how it is.”

Elian nodded as though he did. “Sure, sure, no problem.” Elian just wanted to get it over with so he could get to work. He went back into the bedroom, pulled out the manila envelope they’d given him the other day, and carried it back into the main room. He emptied the contents onto the hall table. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

“Exactamente
.
”

Elian hadn’t really looked in the envelope yet. There was a plastic ID with a hologram running across his photograph, plus some kind of itinerary with a big official-looking seal on it and a letter of instruction. The big man picked up everything from the envelope, then nodded to the other man. The other man took out a small digital camera and snapped a picture of each item, front and back.

“Muy bueno,”
he said, when he was finished. “
Muchas gracias,
my friend. Your cooperation is most appreciated.”

“De nada,”
Elian said. “Is that it?”

“That is all for now, señor.”

Elian nodded, thinking, That was easy, and opened the door for the men. They departed without handshakes, walking straight to the hallway elevator.

After Elian had closed the door, and heard the elevator door open and close, he felt oddly relieved. Something about authority figures, especially such humorless ones as those, always bugged him.

“Are they gone already?” asked Kelli, coming out of the bathroom with her head tilted, sliding a small pearl earring into her right earlobe. She tended bar in a midtown hotel three nights a week and was also getting ready for work. Kelli was a beautiful woman, with porcelain skin, red hair, and very green eyes that had a skeptical expression. Even now, after he’d known her for four years, she still seemed impossibly exotic to him. “That was super quick,” she said.

“Just checking up on me, I guess,” said Elian.

“Well, wouldn’t they have copies or something? Why would they need to take pictures of it?”

“He said it was just a verification process.” Elian shrugged. One thing he did know was that you didn’t get anywhere by bugging Mexican cops with a bunch of questions. He was lucky they left without demanding a bribe. Plus, beneath his grin, the shorter man gave Elian the impression that nothing would give him more pleasure than having to tune up a reluctant civilian with a nightstick. And the guy with the big gut . . . he looked even worse.

“Huh,” Kelli said.

“It’s fine,” Elian said, stealing a kiss from her. “I gotta go, baby.”

“I’m coming with,” she said.

He opened the door and slipped his arm around her narrow waist, feeling like the luckiest guy in the world. She wore a green dress that matched her eyes, tight as a glove on her slim torso. All those jerks at the hotel bar would be perving over her, hitting on her, trying to get her phone number. And every night Kelli came home to him.
Him!
It amazed him sometimes.

By the time he got to the bottom of the staircase, he had forgotten all about the men from the Policía Federal.

CHAPTER 42

T
he essence of executive protection, as performed by the Secret Service, is to examine an event and its location in excruciating detail, then to provide a plan for every contingency. Every conceivable form of attack is imagined and planned against, with backups and backups to the backups and fallback plans and worst-case scenarios. The direct ring of protection around the principal is provided by a protection detail that moves with him or her. Around that ring is a secondary layer of protection primarily composed of Secret Service agents whose position is generally stationary—but which may include special local law enforcement assets—bomb-sniffing dogs and their handlers, snipers and executive protection specialists. This ring secures the facility rather than the individual. Then around that is the largest ring of security, which is generally composed primarily of local law enforcement. This third ring is responsible for the lowest-level functions like traffic control, running metal detectors, and guarding barricades—but also includes specialty units like SWAT, air units, bomb squads, and so on.

New York City has the deepest law enforcement bench on the planet, and more highly trained specialty units than any other law enforcement agency in the country—with the exception of most of the federal law enforcement agencies—and long experience handling security at large, complex, high-value sites. It’s a rare day that the NYPD isn’t blocking off a stretch of road for some visiting potentate or a posse of finance ministers.

None of which made Fisk’s job any easier. The head of every specialized unit in the NYPD outranked Fisk, and was guaranteed to be jealous of his or her turf and distrustful of Fisk’s perceived lack of a defined jurisdiction. There were a lot of egos to be juggled, a lot of phone calls to be made, a lot of memos to be sent.

On top of that, the UN is a particularly complex protection assignment. Inside the UN, protection is supposed to be provided and coordinated by the UN’s own people. This meant that every time anybody walked in or out of the UN building, a handoff had to be made between UN security and the NYPD. The personal security details of the Mexican president accompanied them onto the property, while the main shell of protection had to remain outside the perimeter of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza.

As much as Fisk looked down on this sort of assignment, it had demanded every ounce of his energy and attention over the past few days.

THERE IS MORE THAN ONE NEW YORK.
Most cops live in a New York of parochial schools, family-owned garbage-hauling businesses, cars with sticky doors and dinged fenders, cramped little houses, outer borough accents.

Ocampo was not part of that New York. It was part of the other New York, the one many see only in the movies, the New York of their daydreams, the one full of hipster artists and supermodels and hedge fund managers and celebrities.

Fisk lived in an odd sort of middle ground—in both worlds—having been raised as the son of a diplomat. And yet he was not really of either world. Fisk had grown up all over the map, going to American schools full of very privileged kids who thought the world was theirs by right. It was a world Fisk could have lived in if he’d chosen to.

But for reasons he’d never quite understood, he’d walked away from that world and had chosen to work in a blue-collar world populated by people who didn’t expect the universe to shower them with glory and money, beauty and fame. The truth was, the world favors very few with all of that. For most people—even the hedge fund managers and hipster/model/actresses—life is mostly a lot of hard work, bad deli sandwiches, trips to the dentist, coaching the kid’s soccer team.

As he walked in the front door of Ocampo, he felt a bittersweet sense of recognition. The restaurant was designed to make people feel like they’d risen above all that quotidian crap and ascended into some broader, more powerful, more amped-up world. You went to Ocampo and you felt like a star, like somebody. This was the clientele they catered to. This was the experience they worked so hard to give you.

He found Dukes standing with his cadre of Secret Service agents, ready to do the technical security clearance. He did not seem very impressed with the establishment.

“You know what we call this kind of place in the Secret Service?” said Dukes, in regard to the restaurant where American president Obama and Mexican president Vargas would be dining the following evening.

“Overpriced?” Fisk said.

“A kill box,” said Dukes.

GARZA ARRIVED MINUTES LATER
with a contingent of EMP agents and the agency’s head, General de Aguilar, now dressed in a dark suit rather than his military uniform.

Garza slowed a bit when she saw Fisk, and something like a look of regret passed over her face like a shadow. Fisk remained impassive. He noticed she had changed her clothes and perhaps had a shower, and wished he had done the same.

The chairs were large, the tables were heavy and very shiny, the art on the walls was just Mexican enough to feel edgy, but not so much as to make the would-be rich feel like they’d walked into something that could be described as a “Mexican restaurant.” There were plenty of those in Manhattan and across the country. Here at Ocampo, there would be no steaming fajita skillets, no spicy chorizo, and, most especially, no mariachi band crooning and bumming tips at your table. Entrées started at seventy-five bucks and went up steeply from there.

Dukes said, “What do they serve here, dollar bills?”

“A ‘kill box,’ huh?” said Fisk. Fisk was no trained bodyguard, but even he could see that the restaurant was a less than optimal place to bring someone you wanted to protect, starting with the wide span of plate-glass window in front. There was one door in front, one in the back. No internal stairs, no basement, no elevator. If things went sideways here, there was no place to run except through the kitchen and there was no place to hide.

It was four thirty—a time when most New York restaurants are empty and preparing for dinner—and yet at least half of the tables were full, diners drinking out of clay cups, munching raw shellfish artfully positioned on huge plates with Mayan-themed designs painted on them. The host was a smiling young man who seemed determined from the first moment to let you know that while he might be working the door at a restaurant right now, he had graduated from an Ivy League school and was cut out for far bigger things than this.

Dukes said, “Where’s Delgado?”

The young man picked up his phone, dialing nervously. He turned away from them, speaking in a hushed tone, then hung up, almost dropping the telephone. “Coming right now.”

Out of the darkness in back came a trim man with a thick mustache and a professionally hospitable expression.

“Agent Dukes!” he said, with a generous Mexican accent—so generous, Fisk wondered if it was less than 100 percent real. “What a great, great pleasure to see you again! And your . . . friends.”

Dukes stood with his hands on his hips and looked around the restaurant with an expression of disdain. He said, “What are these people doing here, Mr. Delgado?”

“Pardon me, sir?”

Dukes tapped his watch with his index finger. “You said this place would be empty until seven.”

Mr. Delgado smiled widely beneath his ample mustache and said, “I apologize if I conveyed that impression to you, Agent Dukes. I cannot recall my exact words, of course . . . though I am sure what I would have said is that our clientele is thin until about—”

Dukes clapped him on the shoulder, warmly but forcefully. “Nope. You said ‘empty.’ ” He smiled at the diners, some of whom were now looking at the large number of suited men—and women—in front. “Mr. Delgado, would you kindly get these fine folks out of here.”

Delgado looked appalled. “Get them . . . out? You mean . . . ?”

“I mean instruct them to leave.”

“All right, I . . . certainly. If you could give us maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, we should be able to wrap this up in a manner that’s not too egregiously—”

“Right now,” said Dukes, giving Delgado the sort of stare a man might give you in the prison weight room before he took your barbell away from you.

For a moment Delgado looked helplessly around the room. “Agent Dukes, please. Ten short minutes.”

“Mr. Delgado, you are hosting a pair of heads of state tomorrow night. It will make for a nice little photograph of you and Mr. Obama and Mr. Vargas, something that will hang on the wall here long after each man has ended his term. Unless you want to explain to the owner why this venue had to be scrapped at the last minute . . . ?”

Mr. Delgado rallied then, snapping his fingers impatiently at one of the waiters, calling him over for a quick conversation full of angry, whispered sibilance. Soon a rush of waiters emerged bearing takeout cartons and checks, followed by a parade of indignant customers.

Within just a few minutes, the restaurant was empty. Once the overfed men and their beautiful women were gone, the place appeared somehow hollow and gloomy, almost like an abandoned movie set, the quiet majesty of the place having vanished the moment its glamorous occupants did.