“Spare me the formalities. My gun and badge are already on...
“Let’s go, boys,” she said.
The FBI team sent by Deputy Director Raymond Dahlgren to seize Gideon Davis surrounded the Virginia welcome station with more than thirty men. The signal on the secure phone that Nancy Clement had given him had not moved in twenty-four minutes.
Teams were dispatched to lock down the men’s bathroom, the ladies’ bathroom, both doors of the welcome station itself, as well as the candy station. In addition, a roving group accompanied by a canine “agent” patrolled rapidly down the line of cars. The canine had been given a shirt believed to have been worn by Gideon Davis in the hope it might pick up a scent trail.
The dog pounced on a van before the entry teams had gotten situated around the welcome station. The canine team was forced to breach the vehicle while the other teams raced for the welcome station.
After eleven El Salvadoran nationals emerged from the van, the nearly uncontrollable dog had invaded the vehicle where it discovered half a kilo of low-grade Mexican tar heroin concealed inside a hollowed-out stack of Brazilian pornographic magazines.
Meanwhile, women had begun to scream, children were running, tiny dogs were escaping from their owners—in short, all hell was breaking loose as the various teams attempted to raid the welcome center.
It took nearly thirty minutes to gain control of the situation, with the result that a great many perfectly innocent travelers, including one Japanese consular official, were held on their knees at gunpoint. The consular official, a former national judo champion who did not share the conciliatory nature of most of his countrymen, spent a good ten minutes screaming at the chief of the HRT unit in his excellent English that he was going to lodge a formal complaint with the State Department.
It was only then that Gideon Davis’s cell phone was finally located, lodged behind a stack of brochures for Colonial Williamsburg.
27
WASHINGTON, DC
Special Agent Shanelle Greenfield Klotz liked to claim that she hated dog-and-pony shows. But the fact was, she was enormously talented at them, in large part because she enjoyed conducting them. She was a small, thin woman—as a matter of record, the smallest, lightest sworn agent in the entire Secret Service.
She was also—again, this was a matter of record—the smartest. At least as measured by the IQ test given to every prospective agent in the Secret Service. She was also the only biracial half-black, half-Jew in the Secret Service and generally recognized as the Service’s leading expert in facilities security. She was, by any measure, an odd bird. Despite that, it was nearly impossible to find anyone who would bad-mouth her. Everybody in the Secret Service loved the shit out of her.
When she was eleven years old, Shanelle had come home crying one day from school. Her grandfather, Grandpa Joe Greenfield, asked her what was wrong, and she had said, “Grandpa Joe, everybody hates me!”
̶ghtttttt t‡0;Kiddo,” Grandpa Joe said, “your problem is you’re a smarty-pants. Nobody likes a smarty-pants. The secret, you want to be liked, you gotta be a mensch.”
This was the first time Shanelle could recall having heard the word. “What’s a mensch, Grandpa Joe?”
“Boiled down? He’s your unpretentious guy who gives a shit about other people. He don’t dress too snappy. He don’t make people feel dumb. He don’t make ’em feel funny-looking. He don’t ever make ’em feel small. He asks ’em how they’re doing. Then when they tell him, he listens. Just do that, and you can get away with murder.” Moidah, that was the way Grandpa Joe pronounced it. He winked and pulled a silver dollar out of her ear. “See? I should know.”
Shanelle had never forgotten the lesson.
As far as the world could see, she had become a mensch at age eleven. But, in her heart, she was still a smarty-pants. Which was why, although she would never admit it, she loved doing a dog-and-pony show. Because it was one of the few things in her life where she could just be a straight-up smarty-pants and people would thank her for it.
Her visitor was a spare, spiderlike man, Captain Fred Steele, the liaison for the District of Columbia Police Department. Steele was responsible for securing and monitoring the outermost perimeter, roughly five square miles, during the State of the Union address. Although there would be only limited coordination between his agency and the Secret Service, Shanelle had invited him here to get an overview of their protocols. She led the visitor through a full-body scanner, past two Secret Service agents, and through a pair of heavy oak doors into the House Chamber.
“The presidential security operation,” Special Agent Klotz said, “provided by the United States Secret Service, is the largest, most thorough, most expensive, and most extensively trained executive protection detail anywhere. Other than the inauguration of a president, no single event consumes a greater share of the attention and resources of the Secret Service than the State of the Union address. Not only is the president in attendance, but so is the entire top layer of the United States government. Other than one so-called ‘designated survivor’—a member of the president’s cabinet, who is holed up in a secure location outside Washington, DC—all the rest of the top players in the government attend the speech, including virtually the entire House and Senate, the entire Supreme Court, and the cabinet.”
They strolled up the aisle toward the podium where the president would deliver his speech to the nation in less than twenty-four hours.
“The president’s speech, mandated by custom as well as by the Constitution, is given every year, except for the year of a president’s inauguration, in the House chambers of the US Capitol.”
Captain Steele eyed the large room. She sensed he was considering how a terrorist might use the terrain of the semicircular arrangement of the room to kill the president.
“To give you a sense of what we do to protect POTUS, I’ll describe the various security rings. First of all, we surround the principal with a team whose job is to protect his person and the immediate space around him. That interior circle is manned exclusively by Secret Service personnel. Next we maintain a secondary ="0ce ring to control and monitor the surrounding crowd, constantly scanning the venue for potential threats. Again, that’s all Secret Service—although in this facility there’s some assistance from the Capitol Police. Finally, we maintain a third security ring, which protects the grounds, the surrounding buildings, vehicles, perimeter entry and egress. Ideally, that ring is roughly half a mile in diameter. For the State of the Union address, it’s even larger. Which is why we’re enlisting the resources of your department along with FBI, Capitol Police—not to mention Air Force and FAA elements to monitor and control the airspace around the Capitol. Plus, while I can’t get into specifics, one might presume there is a standby tactical force from, say, Delta or the SEALs or the FBI’s HRT unit.
“Now, my modest little area of expertise is facilities. In a perfect world, I’d have torn this place down and built it from the ground up. Blast walls, air locks, filtration systems, cameras, sally ports. That’s my little fantasy, you know, putting them all in a bunker. But unfortunately, I live in the real world. My job is made a little trickier because the US Capitol was designed in the late eighteenth century, without a shred of concern for security. It’s been redesigned and rebuilt four or five times since. It’s not commonly known, but there are secret passages, underground spaces that were bricked over a century ago, spaces behind walls, unused vents. From a security perspective, it’s a complete nightmare.
“So we just have to grind it out. We work our way through every aspect of this building. Structural, mechanical, the electrical and plumbing and heating systems. Every bit of it has to be examined and reexamined. Visually inspected if possible. If not, then using a number of imaging technologies.”
“What about sweeping for bombs?” the visitor asked. “What are the protocols for controlling access?”