When Agent Dale Herbers started his workup of the Mexico official visit, he and his staff quickly identified the short stretch of Eje 1 as a location that needed special attention. Every motorcade had to either go down this long, straight six-lane thoroughfare or else navigate the narrow two-lane streets of the Tepito and Centro districts. As much as the Secret Service tried to avoid taking the President on a predictable route, it had been decided that was preferable to taking him through a narrow warren of alleys surrounded by close-in buildings, subjecting the motorcade to twice as many turns and forcing it to travel much more slowly through such a rough district.
No, this stretch of Eje 1, called Vidal Alcocer, was undoubtedly the best route to take.
Which meant every motorcade from the airport used it, and this was a problem.
So now Herbers was here, looking over every block with a critical eye. He walked this vulnerable part of the motorcade route shadowed by four other Secret Service agents and four detectives from Mexico’s Federal District police. They took notes on paper and on tablet computers, as Herbers directed the different organizations in how to prepare for the upcoming motorcade.
On the corner of Vidal Alcocer and José J. Herrera, Herbers noticed a construction site with a long twelve-foot-high wall running north and south along the sidewalk, and next to it a street market running west on Herrera.
A Mexican detective explained how they had planned to barricade the market off from the motorcade route, and Herbers immediately crossed the street and ducked under the orange tarp at the southern edge of the site. The others followed him in.
He and his team spent a few minutes inside, walking around. He was looking for stashed weapons, a sniper’s hide, anything out of the ordinary.
As soon as he headed over to the clean and newly poured concrete eastern wall of the site, he smelled the rotten stench of something dead. The other men smelled it, too, and it took less than thirty seconds for a Mexican Federal District officer to shine his flashlight in the sealed drain on the floor of the garage.
“Gato,” he said. Cat.
Herbers looked himself. “Poor kitty must have gone down there before they covered the drain and got caught.”
He didn’t give it another thought.
Herbers looked at the wall next. One of his men had a flashlight of his own and he walked the length of the wall, tapping it both at waist height and a little higher than his head, just to confirm there was no false compartment built into it.
A bomb-sniffing dog was led along the wall; she sniffed in the edges and immediately pulled her head back and sneezed. She kept walking, kept trying to sniff the area, and sneezed again.
Herbers glanced up to the dog handler for an explanation.
The handler just said, “Construction dust. Masonry and loose grout.” He kept going. Within seconds they were moving into the next concrete staircase.
Herbers kept scanning the area for a few minutes. He saw a radio on a bucket, and he lifted the device and kicked over the bucket to make sure it wasn’t wired to anything. He turned the radio on and heard a scratchy accordion-heavy tune. He flipped it off and replaced it on the bucket.
Herbers addressed both the Secret Service agents with him and the Federal District police detectives. “I’ll need this place sealed off with tape, and officers outside on the corner during the transit.”
One of the Mexican detectives said, “I will have two cars behind the barricade outside on José J. Herrera. Four men watching the people at the market and the crowd that will form at the barricades so they can see the limo. I’ll task two more men just to make sure no one tries to slip under the tarp to get into the construction site.”
“That’s fine,” Herbers said, then he addressed his number two. “Rick, I want a pair of our guys here as well.”
“You got it.”
“Let’s put a long gun at the top of the stairs. It will give us a good view of the entire length of the street.”
Rick made a note.
They climbed out of the construction site and moved on to the next choke point, a turn to the west that would take them deep into the Centro Histórico toward the Palacio Nacional.
Herbers and his team had dozens of problem areas to check before the President arrived in less than forty-eight hours.
53
After waiting for two days in Las Vegas for instructions from the home office, Veronika Martel finally received orders from Edward Riley to fly to New York. She didn’t even check into a hotel; instead, she drove right to the Sharps Global Intelligence Partners building, and there she was led into Sharps’s fifth-floor office.
Riley was there, but he said surprisingly little. Sharps did most of the talking as he grilled her about her actions over her two weeks at Valley Floor.
Martel had made the decision early on not to mention her contact with Jack Ryan, Jr. Had she done so from the start she would be in the clear, but now she saw no way she could explain that he had been around her at the time she was operational at Valley Floor and that she had simply neglected to mention it. If she revealed his actions, actions she thought at the time were born from his interest in her, then she would look either incompetent or complicit.
And Veronika did not think for a moment Riley would believe she was incompetent.
She didn’t see herself as such, either, but she wholly admitted she had been greedy. Her desire to turn a mundane corporate intelligence operation into a one-woman attempt to recruit an important contact and in so doing leave her corporate work behind had been foolish, and she had been grossly overconfident.
Now all she could do was mitigate the damage. Bury any evidence of her attempt to recruit Ryan and leave Sharps behind, and portray herself as the unjust victim of a Sharps op that had been compromised somewhere else.
This worked surprisingly well. Sharps had allowed that an unknown actor had showed up during the New World Metals operation first in Vietnam, then during a phase that occurred here in New York, and finally in Las Vegas. Sharps said that while Veronika had been involved in Vietnam and Vegas, she had no knowledge of the operation in New York, so he was of the opinion she was not to blame for whatever leak had allowed the theft of the mobile phone and the compromise of the operation.
Martel gave a full-throated defense of her actions; she was careful not to cast any aspersions on Riley, because he was (a) her supervisor and someone she would have to continue working with, and (b) right here in the room.
She wondered later if she should have gone ahead and beat up on the Englishman anyway, because Riley had maintained his uncomfortable silence throughout the entire meeting, and Veronika took this as either some sort of culpability, or even weakness.
When it was over, Duke told Veronika that she would be required to stay in town, perhaps for just a few days, but perhaps for longer.
That afternoon she found a vacation rental on the Lower East Side. She wasn’t operational, so she rented the property in her own name, but in a nod to her personal security she performed the transaction on the Internet and picked the key card up from a drop box so she wouldn’t have to deal with anyone face-to-face.
The place wasn’t home, and her unit was a small third-floor walk-up, but on the inside anyway it felt a little like Paris. It was better than a shoebox New York City hotel, and it was much better than a gaudy Vegas faux-wonderland casino hotel.
Sam Driscoll had spent a week and a half watching, filming, and reviewing every person who entered the offices of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners. He was across the street at an angle, north of Duke Sharps’s building on Columbus, and sometimes he couldn’t get great pictures of people entering. But virtually every person who exited the building got their picture taken, and these went into the facial-recognition program.