“No, he is here under deep cover. Brought in on my recommendation.”
“Because of a threat to your president. Why didn’t you alert the United Nations, the State Department, Secret Service . . . ?”
“Is that what you would do when your president visits a foreign power? Even a close ally? Do you turn his welfare over to them? No. We are his security force, and we are best suited to safeguard him against any threat.”
They were on the bridge, crossing over into Manhattan. Garza looked for landmarks, spotting the Empire State Building spire to the west. The sight of that icon should have set her mind at ease, should have demonstrated to her that she was beyond the reach of the man who had filled the plaza in front of the Palacio de Justicia in Nuevo Laredo with headless corpses. But apparently now nothing was beyond his reach.
She was certain now. Chuparosa was here.
Fisk asked, “Which drug cartel is it? The Zetas? Sinaloa?”
Garza shook her head. “None of the above.”
Fisk looked at her. “Colombians?”
“Can you drive any faster?”
She was not ready to explain it fully. And there was no way to explain it partially. She knew that questioning a man’s driving was the surest way to get him to speed up and to distract him from the issue at hand.
Fifteen years ago, Cecilia Garza wouldn’t have felt even a ghost of shame at feeling vulnerable in front of a stranger. In fact her twenty-year-old self would have been ashamed not to feel deeply, would have considered it almost a moral imperative, a necessary affirmation of her own humanity. But now? Sometimes she hardly even recognized the person she had become. A decade and a half ago she had been an outgoing, lighthearted, maybe even somewhat frivolous person. University life, ditching early classes, taking weekend trips with girlfriends, singing karaoke when that craze was new. Dancing with strangers and drinking with friends. That girl wouldn’t have had a moment’s regret about feeling insecure. In truth, she had been proud and even protective of her volatile artistic temperament, nurturing it: thinking of herself as someone alive to the rhythms of the world, her skin raw and sensitive to every change of wind, every frothing wave washing across the surface of her life. Like her mother. And her young sister.
Would that girl have recognized who Cecilia Garza was today? No. No, she wouldn’t.
Because of course she knew the answer. She had become the Ice Queen almost as an act of pure will. Between her first and third years at university, she had not spoken to her father even once—other than an occasional exchange of meaningless pleasantries when she came home to visit her mother and her sister. Her father had disapproved of her choice of career and friends and lifestyle. So they had become . . . no, not precisely estranged. Almost worse, they had become infinitely distant from each other, irrelevant to each other somehow.
So when the phone had rung at her squalid little hippie-student-chick apartment in the Coyoacán district near UNAM, and she had answered and heard her father say, “Cecilia, it’s Papi”—she had known something terrible had happened.
And yet it turned out to be worse than anything she could ever have imagined.
That had been the beginning of the cocoon phase—a metamorphosis that had resulted, even demanded, the replacement of the frivolous and emotional girl of a decade and a half ago, emerging not as a beautiful butterfly, but as the lady Ice Queen, a woman without weakness, without pity, without fear.
She said suddenly, “I should not have left the crime scene.”
Fisk shook his head. “We’re good at that. We know some things. I can guarantee you that nothing will be withheld—fingerprints, trace evidence, nothing. Let the professionals do their work. This is what we can do.”
She appreciated his professionalism. Even if what he was saying was just for her benefit, she acknowledged the gesture as one she herself would have made.
“Focus on when you saw him last,” said Fisk, speeding north toward Fifty-seventh Street and the Four Seasons. “Because if someone had wanted to pick up his trail, they would have done it at President Vargas’s hotel.”
CHAPTER 30
The head of security for the Four Seasons was an African man named Nnamdi Nwokcha. He wore a much nicer suit than Fisk’s, and had evidently spent a great deal of time shining his shoes. But inside the security room off the rear of the lobby, he ran the complex hotel camera system like he’d been born for the job.
“I was trained in IT,” Nwokcha said as he began fiddling with the buttons on the console that ran the hotel security camera system. “During the downturn, I wasn’t able to find work in my field. Drove a cab for a while, then ended up in security.” He punched in some numbers. “Good system. RAID array, saves data to the cloud every ten minutes. We’re in the process of replacing all the cameras, but over seventy-five percent are now high-def.”
Garza said, “We were at the bar, he came in alone.”
“Do you have a photograph of the man?” Nwokcha asked.
“No,” said Garza.
“Was he a guest?”
“Yes, but unregistered.”
Nwokcha switched from the lobby door camera to a camera just inside the bar, focused on the entrance. Garza gave him an estimate of the time. “The real heart of this system is the software. It’s absurdly sophisticated. Full facial recognition, AI search functionality, and a threat assessment, object-oriented database. We have the capability to run every returning guest’s face as they walk in the door and greet them by name by the time they reach the front desk if we wanted to. Management decided that is a little too presumptuous and creepy, though.”
Nwokcha stopped the playback so that the image of each guest’s face flickered on the screen. “That’s him,” said Garza.
Nwokcha reset the playback, showing Virgilio entering, glancing around, spotting someone, and starting toward them.
A new angle showed him greeting Garza. Nwokcha improved the zoom function. There was no sound, but Fisk would not have been surprised if it existed somewhere on this system.
“What am I looking for?”
Garza said, “I don’t know. Maybe someone at the bar.”
Fisk could tell she was searching for a particular individual.
Nwochka said, “Male? Female? Be specific.”
“I don’t know him by sight. I am told he is neither short nor tall, neither thin nor fat. His age should be late forties.”
Fisk said, more to Garza than the security head, “That’s not much to go on.”
Garza said, without moving her eyes from the screen, “I know the methods more than the man.”
“Then we are looking for somebody looking at Virgilio,” said Fisk. “And maybe you.”
Nwokcha found another camera angle which seemed to be situated above the bar itself. As Virgilio left, and Garza turned to request her food bill, a young woman turned her head, tracking the man back across the lounge to the exit.
“There,” said Garza.
The young Latin woman excused herself, disengaging from the heavy gentleman she had been in the process of flattering. On high heels and in a snug black cocktail dress, she started out of the lounge after Virgilio.
“Aha,” said Nwokcha. He switched back to the lobby camera.
They watched as Virgilio walked directly to the revolving doors, pushing through to the street.
The young woman followed, not quickly but casually.
Nwokcha picked them up outside, just in front of the entrance, under the overhang.
Virgilio waited, then jogged across the street to his waiting car.
The young woman just stood there on the sidewalk, holding the strap of her handbag, looking intently in Virgilio’s direction. A bellman approached her, apparently inquiring if she needed a taxi. She did not answer or even acknowledge him, and he turned to a late-arriving guest.