Dukes said, “What do they serve here, dollar bills?”
“A ‘kill box,’ huh?” said Fisk. Fisk was no trained bodyguard, but even he could see that the restaurant was a less than optimal place to bring someone you wanted to protect, starting with the wide span of plate-glass window in front. There was one door in front, one in the back. No internal stairs, no basement, no elevator. If things went sideways here, there was no place to run except through the kitchen and there was no place to hide.
It was four thirty—a time when most New York restaurants are empty and preparing for dinner—and yet at least half of the tables were full, diners drinking out of clay cups, munching raw shellfish artfully positioned on huge plates with Mayan-themed designs painted on them. The host was a smiling young man who seemed determined from the first moment to let you know that while he might be working the door at a restaurant right now, he had graduated from an Ivy League school and was cut out for far bigger things than this.
Dukes said, “Where’s Delgado?”
The young man picked up his phone, dialing nervously. He turned away from them, speaking in a hushed tone, then hung up, almost dropping the telephone. “Coming right now.”
Out of the darkness in back came a trim man with a thick mustache and a professionally hospitable expression.
“Agent Dukes!” he said, with a generous Mexican accent—so generous, Fisk wondered if it was less than 100 percent real. “What a great, great pleasure to see you again! And your . . . friends.”
Dukes stood with his hands on his hips and looked around the restaurant with an expression of disdain. He said, “What are these people doing here, Mr. Delgado?”
“Pardon me, sir?”
Dukes tapped his watch with his index finger. “You said this place would be empty until seven.”
Mr. Delgado smiled widely beneath his ample mustache and said, “I apologize if I conveyed that impression to you, Agent Dukes. I cannot recall my exact words, of course . . . though I am sure what I would have said is that our clientele is thin until about—”
Dukes clapped him on the shoulder, warmly but forcefully. “Nope. You said ‘empty.’ ” He smiled at the diners, some of whom were now looking at the large number of suited men—and women—in front. “Mr. Delgado, would you kindly get these fine folks out of here.”
Delgado looked appalled. “Get them . . . out? You mean . . . ?”
“I mean instruct them to leave.”
“All right, I . . . certainly. If you could give us maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, we should be able to wrap this up in a manner that’s not too egregiously—”
“Right now,” said Dukes, giving Delgado the sort of stare a man might give you in the prison weight room before he took your barbell away from you.
For a moment Delgado looked helplessly around the room. “Agent Dukes, please. Ten short minutes.”
“Mr. Delgado, you are hosting a pair of heads of state tomorrow night. It will make for a nice little photograph of you and Mr. Obama and Mr. Vargas, something that will hang on the wall here long after each man has ended his term. Unless you want to explain to the owner why this venue had to be scrapped at the last minute . . . ?”
Mr. Delgado rallied then, snapping his fingers impatiently at one of the waiters, calling him over for a quick conversation full of angry, whispered sibilance. Soon a rush of waiters emerged bearing takeout cartons and checks, followed by a parade of indignant customers.
Within just a few minutes, the restaurant was empty. Once the overfed men and their beautiful women were gone, the place appeared somehow hollow and gloomy, almost like an abandoned movie set, the quiet majesty of the place having vanished the moment its glamorous occupants did.
CHAPTER 43
Ten minutes later, Dukes, along with a member of the Secret Service’s Technical Security Division, began his presentation, which continued for nearly an hour without a break. That the venue had already been cleared by the Technical Security Division hardly mattered, now that a new and substantial potential threat had been identified. Dog teams would sweep the restaurant at least three times in the next twenty-four hours, sniffing for explosives. Dukes went over fire safety inside the establishment, discussed where the various chemical, biological, and radiological sensors would be placed, and discussed how a layer of bulletproof glass and blast webbing would be constructed over the front windows.
He noted where the jump teams would be hidden across the street, where the counterassault team would be stationed, addressed roof security and air cover of the entire block in the West Village. Approximately ninety minutes before the dinner, the entire four-block radius would be put on “POTUS freeze.” An agent in the presidential protective detail then stepped forward to briefly discuss his goals and duties. The “package” was what he called the protective detail, whether in or out of the motorcade, as in, “Nobody moves to the package unless they want to get shot in the heart. The package will move to you.”
Dukes resumed, pointing out choke points on a map, talking transitions and shift changes, none of which interested Fisk. He stole a glance at Garza a few times, found her staring off, somewhere else mentally. Fisk’s ears perked back up when Dukes addressed obscure but persistent threats: poison gas, mortar attack, suicide bombers. It was no wonder that the Secret Service was regarded as a clan of hard-nosed paranoiacs. The job rewarded incredibly hardworking, detail-oriented, humorless people, who expected the worst from humanity and took no shit from anyone.
Accordingly, Dukes did not take questions.
“I will say—not for the record, but just so that you will understand the level of extra effort that will need to be exerted here—that this location was chosen against the very strenuous objection of my agency. Let me explain what the Secret Service likes in a venue. We like large steel-framed, low-rise buildings on high ground, with underground ingress and egress, substantial interior walls that can be used as defensive fallback and rally points, multiple elevators and multiple stairs, concrete or stone exterior walls, land buffering the building from the street, separate and easily controllable mechanical rooms with backup generators, modern fire suppression and security systems, fully redundant and high-bandwidth communication connections, exterior walls which are not shared with adjoining properties, and ten thousand square feet of controllable floor space on the event floor. Rural is good. A perimeter fence is super nice. A twelve-foot blast wall with razor wire . . . even better.”
Dukes smiled tightly.
“As you can see, this Mexican seafood restaurant has precisely zero of these features. None. It’s a relatively small restaurant in a row of typical four-story, wood-frame commercial buildings constructed over a century ago. Charming windows looking out on a pleasant view of a heavily traveled street. Unrestricted sight lines extending to higher buildings along Seventh Avenue and several blocks down Waverly. A minimally competent sniper could engage the front of the building with effective aimed fire from any of over three hundred different vantage points. An RPG could pass from the front of the restaurant to virtually any interior point of the restaurant. A truck bomb could level the place.”
Dukes folded his hands at his waist.
“Also, while not publicly part of either president’s schedule, the event is known, and we are monitoring chatter on the Internet. As such, you can only imagine my level of enthusiasm for this venue. But the choice has been made above my pay level, and so we are going to make it work. We in the Secret Service never, ever question the wisdom of our superiors, or second-guess the political choices of those we protect. We just shut up and do our job.