Zarif was furious. “No one told me about this.”
“Relax. It is good. They will make sure Ryan is dead.”
“No, they won’t. They will be seen in the crowd before the President comes, and someone will warn the Americans.”
Emilio tried to wave away the comment, but Zarif demanded to speak to the Maldonado cell leader. After a few minutes more trying to allay Zarif’s fears, Emilio finally dialed a number on his mobile phone and spoke to the man on the other end for a minute. Finally, after a conversation translated by Emilio, Zarif persuaded the cell leader to have the Maldonado men back out of the crowd and move one block east of the motorcade route. He explained that once the explosion rocked the street, they could run one block and shoot up the scene to their hearts’ content.
The cell leader put his men in four pickup trucks and parked them on Nicolas Bravo, with orders to wait for the big bang and then race to the scene. Two trucks would hit the motorcade from the southeast on José J. Herrera, and two more from the northeast on Nacional.
Zarif felt like these men were going to race up to the site where Jack Ryan already lay dead, and then do nothing more than get themselves massacred by the hundred or so cops and Secret Service agents who were still alive. But that wasn’t his problem. He felt better now that there would be no tip-offs to the coming event, so he and Emilio stepped into a Starbucks, ordered iced coffees, and sat down to watch the video feed on his phone.
The Iranian had command-detonated devices by watching video cameras, but he was pretty sure this was the first time anyone had assassinated a world leader via iPhone.
57
Air Force One touched down at 12:05 p.m. The pilot brought the aircraft to a predetermined point on the tarmac and then the mobile stairs were driven up. Quickly a red carpet was rolled out, and members of a forty-man honor guard took their positions on either side.
Bomb squad personnel, K9 teams, counterassault SWAT officers, and hundreds of other American security forces representing a half-dozen federal agencies were already at the airport; they’d arrived more than a week earlier with the advance team or else on one of the four C-141 cargo aircraft full of men and equipment that had landed the day before.
Dozens of Secret Service agents fanned out around the aircraft, among them Lead Advance Agent Dale Herbers, who took a position watching the expanse of Benito Juárez International’s tarmac along with the rest of the team. His advance work was now complete, and normally he would be moving on to his next location immediately, but the security needs here in Mexico required him to stay for POTUS’s arrival and motorcade to the Palacio Nacional and then his hotel.
Twelve minutes after landing, Lead Protection Agent Andrea Price O’Day exited the aircraft and walked down the stairs. She took up a position at the foot of the stairs, and seconds later, President of the United States Jack Ryan emerged from Air Force One and headed down himself. There was no music for him — this was not an official state visit but rather an official visit, which was one step down and less full of pomp and circumstance.
Still, Ryan was greeted at the bottom of the stairs by the Mexican foreign minister and a few other high-level functionaries, and while he stood there talking, mostly through an interpreter, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Horatio Styles quietly came out of the airplane and descended. He followed the President in the receiving line, and then headed for the limo with Ryan and O’Day.
The Beasts were parked back to front, and small flags of Mexico hung from poles on the fenders. It was de rigueur on foreign trips to display the local flag on the President’s vehicle as a show of respect. The limo in front was positioned just beyond the honor guard, and the back door to the rear limo was lined up perfectly with the red carpet and the door was open. O’Day stood at the door while Ryan folded his six-foot frame into the vehicle, and after Ambassador Styles entered the back of the big black limo, she shut the door and ordered her team to the cars.
O’Day got in the front passenger side of Ryan’s limo, next to driver Mitchell Delaney. Two agents rode on the running boards of the vehicle as it rolled forward in the motorcade, but they would hop off and get into a chase car at the airport’s exit.
In front of the presidential limo was the other Beast, and in front of that a dozen black Chevy Suburbans carrying Secret Service, White House, and Department of State personnel. Ahead of these were Mexican police cars, some dozen in all, and at the very front of the convoy, twenty-one Mexican Federal Police motorcycles rumbled through the intersections, all of which had already been blocked off with more police.
Behind the President’s vehicle came two Suburbans ferrying close protection agents, then three specially outfitted Suburbans carrying the counterassault team. These vehicles all had open back gates full of armed men scanning both sides of the road, and they had hatches on the roof they could use to stand and fire from above. A fourth counterassault vehicle carried more heavy weapons and security equipment for the SWAT officers.
After this main security contingent came the Roadrunner, the unofficial name given to the Mobile Command and Control Vehicle, a Suburban filled with high-tech communications equipment that allowed the President and his team secure comms even while driving in foreign countries.
After the Roadrunner were two white sixteen-passenger media vans, then another twelve SUVs and sedans carrying more VIPs. All of these vehicles were already full, as the press and other staff traveling with the President had deplaned before the President.
The U.S. contingent of the motorcade was thirty-five vehicles, but the Mexicans added more than eighty, most in the form of uniformed Federal Police on motorcycles.
In the lead media van, sixteen reporters from print, television, and wire services sat crammed together. In the middle of the first row behind the driver, twenty-seven-year-old CNN reporter Jill Crosby checked the service on her mobile phone. She was new to international travel, and although she’d been told she’d have no more trouble getting a signal in Mexico City than she would at the Washington Bureau where she worked, she needed to confirm it for herself.
She breathed a sigh of relief when her phone displayed four bars, a full-strength signal.
She’d never traveled with the President before and she had no plans to call anyone other than her boyfriend this afternoon, but she wanted to be ready for anything. That was her mantra, and it had gotten her this far. After all, you didn’t make it this high in CNN at such a young age, assigned to an international flight aboard Air Force One, without working your ass off and leaving nothing to chance.
In the backseat of the Beast, Ryan and Styles drank bottled water and discussed protocol, but only for a short time, because the President wanted to hear another of the ambassador’s old war stories. The Marine had been in Grenada, and in Panama, and he’d finished his military career fighting in the Middle East. He wasn’t one to offer up long tales about past action, especially not to the President, who had his own fascinating history that was somewhat longer than the younger ambassador’s, but Ryan had been a Marine himself, and he peppered Styles with questions about his time in the service like a fascinated college student.
It was 2:18 a.m. in Pyongyang, North Korea, but General Ri Tae-jin wore his full uniform, and he sat at his desk in his office in the Reconnaissance General Bureau. Across the room was a thirty-two-inch CRT television tuned to the American television news station CNN. With the general in his office was a female translator, herself in the green uniform of the Chosun Inmingun, the Korean military. She had been ordered here with no explanation of why she was to sit with the general throughout the early morning and provide running translations of U.S. television news.