“I guess we’re both just sexist pigs,” Quinn said.
Garcia nodded slowly then turned to stare out the passenger window. She rarely turned away during a conversation, and Quinn had learned to pay attention when she did.
Quinn felt the evening he’d planned so meticulously slipping away. He lived the kind of life where dinner plans were often interrupted or postponed, but he couldn’t help but feel like this was something beyond that. He started the truck and did a quick head check over his shoulder before pulling back out into traffic.
“Being overprotective is in my blood,” Quinn said. “I do it with my brother. I do it with Jacques. There’s zero chance I can turn it off when it comes to you.”
“I know,” Garcia said, still looking away. “And that’s becoming a real problem.”
Chapter 10
Deputy U.S. Marshal August “Gus” Bowen made his way through a narrow kitchen corridor, nodding to his new set of eyes. Bowen had befriended Bruce, the fat little sous-chef, earlier that evening with the gift of a couple of Cohiba cigars that he’d scored from a deputy working the Dominican protection detail. Bruce had balked at first, looking sideways at Deputy Bowen’s black eye and his raw and swollen nose. The split in his upper lip really required stitches but Bowen didn’t have the time for that. Anyway, it was beginning to scab already. His neatly trimmed salt and pepper goatee covered some of the damage to his face, but there was no way of hiding the fact that he’d been the recipient of a recent beat down.
His hair had gone prematurely silver following his last tour in Iraq, an outward sign of what his Army shrink called “a bevy of unresolved issues.” The shrink had advised him to take up quiet hobbies to relieve the stress in his life. He already sailed most weekends and had been drawing since junior high. The doc said he should do more of both if he didn’t want to hang up his gun — or worse. So he’d drawn more pictures of boats, and did his best to chill. He eventually moved on to drawing people — and it turned out he was a pretty good artist. He wasn’t about to quit his day job, but he gave away at least one sketch each week to someone he met in the course of his duties.
Bowen would never admit it, but those same unresolved issues were what earned him the beating the previous night. He’d ended up telling his detail supervisor the injuries were from a bar fight over a beautiful woman — which wasn’t too far from the truth — except they hadn’t been in the bar and the girl a long way from beautiful.
The Dominican cigars and a quick pencil sketch of the sous-chef standing over a simmering pot had earned Bowen that valuable set of extra eyes in the hotel kitchen. Contacts in the backrooms and basements of hotels and restaurants were priceless sources of information, and Deputy Bowen shamelessly curried favor with as many as possible when working this kind of job. The more eyes and ears he had working for him, the safer his protectee would be.
Department of State Diplomatic Security Agents attended enough formal functions that they were allowed to voucher the purchase of a tuxedo. The United States Marshals Service had experience protecting witnesses and federal judges, so they helped out State every year during the United Nations General Assembly. Door-kickers didn’t see much use for tuxedos so Bowen was told to voucher the rental of a nice black one for the evening. Accustomed to wearing khaki slacks and polo shirts — or at the most, an off-the-rack suit — the tux made him feel oddly out of place and stood in stark contrast to his injured face. Bowen was in his mid-thirties, a hair over six feet, and trim, with the powerful shoulders of a boxer.
Enough visiting federal agents needed formal wear for just a few functions that several tailors in Manhattan ran thriving businesses renting custom slacks with invisible slash pockets and belt loops — unheard of on regular tuxedos. Under his jacket, he carried a small Motorola radio, a Benchmade automatic knife, handcuffs, an expandable baton, a .40 caliber Glock, and two spare magazines. The gear made him look slightly less streamlined than James Bond, but his trim appearance helped to smooth the lines. He normally carried a second, smaller Glock of the same caliber in an inside-the-waistband holster near the small of his back. This arrangement proved too bulky for the tux so he made do by putting the second gun in an ankle holster — giving him a loadout of fifty-six rounds of ammunition. Considering the “friends” he’d made over the past year, Bowen knew even that might not be enough.
Dignitary protection was a matter of securing concentric rings — like the layers of an onion. NYPD handled the outer ring, blocking streets, placing extra patrol in the area, deploying truckloads of highly trained ESU tactical units to both preempt and deal with attacks. Bowen’s job was the middle ring, looking outbound from the protectee and checking the pulse of the people working at the event. He made his way down the line, relaying his information to the Diplomatic Security agent in charge who worked the innermost ring up in the dining room with the rest of the detail protecting the Uzbek foreign minister.
A light static crackled in the deputy’s clear silicone earpiece. “Babayev Advance, Babayev Advance, Babayev Shift Leader.” It was Special Agent Hancock, second-in-command of the protective detail for Uzbek foreign minister, Shuker Babayev.
“Babayev Advance here.” The deputy spoke into the small microphone pinned to the inside of his tuxedo shirt collar. “Go for Bowen.”
“Switch to Foxtrot 6,” Hancock said, using code to direct the conversation away from the open channel shared by the twenty-four other State Department protection details assigned to one of five different frequencies.
“I got a guy who wants to see you,” Hancock said, when they were both on the same channel.
Odd, Bowen thought. Visitors were not the norm while on an active protection detail. He assumed it was one of the two dozen deputy marshals assigned to a different delegation who wanted to bullshit about the latest drama going on in Marshals Service HQ.
“You got a name?” Bowen asked.
“What’s your location,” Agent Hancock said. “I’ll send him to you.”
Bowen told the DS agent where he was then asked for a name again.
Hancock remained coy. “Big dude. Kind of scary lookin’. He says you two are friends.”
“Okay…” Bowen felt his hackles rise. This was straight-up weird, and his gut told him that weird could only mean one thing.
“Azam is bringing him your way right now,” Hancock said. “I think our Uzbek friend is getting hungry and wants to sample the menu.”
The Uzbek minister’s single native security agent was a giant teddy bear named Azam. He seemed too gentle a man for his chosen profession but was big enough that Bowen wouldn’t have wanted to see him angry.
“Roger that,” Bowen said. “I got a guy here who will fix him something to tide him over until they feed us.”
Bowen had made it past the twin doors of a large walk-in freezer at the back of the kitchen and turned to hunt down the fat little sous-chef.
Steam snapped at the lids of a half dozen five-gallon soup pots sending the heady odor of lobster bisque into the air, already full of the cursing and tension that went along with feeding three hundred of the world’s elite including the U.S. Secretary of State.
Agents from several other details filtered in and out of the kitchen, feeding information to their respective detail bosses — but none of them had Bruce in their corner. Bowen asked for some bread and cheese for Azam. The sous-chef gave him a hearty thumbs-up, smiling as if he was part of a conspiracy, then shouted orders to his brigade of prep chefs who chopped, sautéed, and stirred the various sauces and side dishes that were being served at tonight’s banquet. One of them peeled away to see to Bowen’s request.