Virgilio was a question mark. Assuming Fisk had been given his legal name, the man showed up on none of Intel’s many databases. He was registered as part of President Vargas’s security team, but nothing deeper than that. Fisk put in a request for more background on Virgilio . . . and realized that he suddenly felt invigorated.
He was onto something here. He could feel it.
CHAPTER 21
Kiser called him back just over an hour later.
“I thought you weren’t interested in our little Rockaway Beach party,” he said.
“I’m not,” said Fisk. “What’s the latest?”
“No identifications yet, but it’s early. Going at it from missing persons reports, but nothing definitive yet. Not even after the story has hit all the news shows.”
Fisk said, “Immigrants or even first-generation Mexicans might not watch the mainstream channels. If you want to use the media, go on Telemundo or Univision.”
“Speaking of good advice,” said Kiser, “your sweep-the-beach idea netted us something. A bottle.”
“Cerveza?”
“No, a soft drink named Jarritos. Heard of it?”
“I think so.”
“Most popular soft drink brand in Mexico, the country that drinks more sugary soft drinks per capita than any other.”
“Good.”
“Wiped clean. No fingerprints.”
“Oh well.”
“But,” said Kiser, “inside the bottle was a cigarette butt.”
Fisk rolled his eyes at Detective Kiser’s dramatic storytelling, even though he got the adrenaline thing of a hot investigation. “You can’t wait for DNA. Takes too much time.”
“Crime Scene Unit pulls a partial print off the cigarette. Very partial, but the lab thinks they can get something out of it.”
“Good,” said Fisk. “Meanwhile, where do they sell this Jarritos?”
“We’re on it. The flavor is tamarind. Heard of that?”
“No.”
“Me neither, but it’s the second most popular flavor of Jarritos in Mexico. So, very common. I checked with the Organized Crime Control Bureau, they said you can tell a Mexican neighborhood in New York City by two things, a short woman selling churros at the subway station and a convenience store with a Jarritos sign in the window. I’m trying to get a couple of Mexican American uniforms transferred over to help out.”
“Someone is going to come forward with a missing son, boyfriend, or husband,” said Fisk. “Let me ask you this. Have you gotten a call from the Mexican consulate or the Mexican president’s advance team?”
“No. Why? What am I looking at?”
Fisk smiled at the note of concern in Kiser’s voice. “Maybe nothing, maybe something.”
“I will say a prayer tonight that it is nothing,” said Kiser. “I got enough to deal with as it is.”
CHAPTER 22
Cecilia Garza made it to JFK Airport just in time to see the president’s Boeing 737 touch down. The aircraft sat dormant until members of the Estado Mayor Presidencial drove out onto the tarmac in black Chevy Suburbans.
Garza stepped out of the silver Suburban, eyeing the airport in the dying light of day. She knew it had been swept, and that all the sight lines had been taken into consideration for President Vargas’s brief walk down a flight of wheeled steps and into his waiting Suburban. She also knew that Chuparosa liked to do his killing at close range. But the news of the beheadings had her on edge, and nothing felt assured or guaranteed anymore.
She watched General de Aguilar stand at attention, awaiting his president. She was stirred by the sight of the aging general in his uniform, standing so crisply against the night, dwarfed by the Aeroméxico aircraft. It reminded her that there was purpose and meaning behind such military formalities regarding heads of state, beyond its great expense.
The president’s personal EMP soldiers exited first, dressed in suits, eyeing the scene. A few moments of waiting, and then President Vargas appeared, descending the stairs sure-footedly, looking smart and vital as he saluted General de Aguilar and ducked inside his armored Suburban with the twin Mexican flags on the fender.
An aide closed the door and the vehicle started away immediately. It was a warm night, but Garza felt a chill. Why had Chuparosa come to the United States just to kill President Vargas? What kind of statement was he trying to make, if any, by threatening the Mexican president away from his own soil? Was it a message aimed at the United States? And if so—why?
And was the Zeta cartel behind this action, or had Chuparosa gone off on his own? And if he had—again, why?
Jefe returned. “The easy part is over,” he said.
“Indeed,” agreed Garza. The airplane began taxiing away. “Where will it go?”
“An airfield nearby. It will be guarded, of course.” The general removed his hat before climbing back inside the vehicle. “You have a good mind, Comandante,” he said, paying her a rare compliment.
She followed him inside the car bound for Manhattan.
CHAPTER 23
Fisk called ahead to Felix Dukes before heading over to the Secret Service’s New York field office, in a secure and anonymous office building next to a major chain hotel in downtown Brooklyn. It had formerly been located with the New York City emergency command center and the CIA station in 7 World Trade Center.
In an average week, the New York field office—the Secret Service’s largest away from Washington, D.C.—pursued six protective assignments. United Nations Week had of course multiplied that number many times, with up to two-thirds of the world’s leaders—many of them the object of previous assassination attempts—coming to one of the most crowded and yet still most open cities in the world. This in addition to the dozens of counterfeiting cases the agency was working at any given time. Fisk was a familiar sight at the building, and was brought up to the highly secure top floors.
Homeland Security funds had made the Intel Division what it was, and the Secret Service had benefited from post-9/11 expenditures as well. Their new facility was a marvel. The Secret Service did their own phone tracking from a state-of-the-art wire room. Dukes had once shown Fisk a vault filled with disguises, false vehicle decals, and the fake-grass tarps agents hid beneath during both protective and undercover assignments. The Secret Service’s polygraphs were considered the gold standard, and the New York field office conducted theirs in a warren of rooms they referred to as “the truth laboratory.”
United Nations Week qualified as a “national special security event,” in national security parlance. That put it on a level with U.S. presidential nominating conventions, inaugurations, and the G20 summits. Complicating security measures was the fact that many foreign leaders stayed in the same hotels, providing would-be assassins clusters of targets—and they moved in conspicuous, slow-moving motorcades from event to event. Even with NYPD escorts and sirens wailing, New York motorists and cabdrivers were much more reluctant to make room for emergency vehicles than drivers in most of the rest of the country. And it wasn’t just the world leaders: almost all traveled with spouses and children, all of whom needed protection.
“Broadside” was the name they had given to the Secret Service’s command center. From the secure room, agents tracked the movements of dignitaries and their attendant security details in real time. Many foreign leaders were familiar with their case agent after multiple trips to the United States. Dukes had graduated up from detail leader for former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—one of the biggest of the big-target dignitaries of the past few years—to heading the Dignitary Protection Division at the command center.