A man wearing a heavy black backpack had hopped the barricade fence and begun striding quickly across the street toward the president. The perimeter EMP agents were the ones yelling at him to halt.
The man wore a dark ball cap with no insignia on the crest. As he came, he readied a Nikon camera strung around his neck, as though to get a picture.
At the same time, he swung his backpack forward off one shoulder, as though he were about to throw it.
Garza perceived all of this as happening in extreme slow motion.
Both items—the camera and the backpack—were potential weapons.
Her reaction time lagged just a second. Because to her eyes, this man did not match the video image of Chuparosa she had been playing and replaying in her mind since yesterday evening.
A Secret Service agent broke from the rear SUV of the idling motorcade and drew his weapon, a SIG Sauer P229. Into his suit jacket cuff, he shouted, “Breach! Breach!”
Garza was also drawing, her Beretta coming out of her shoulder holster as she jumped in front of President Vargas. She shouted, “Amenaza! Amenaza!” Threat! Threat!
A third individual sprang from the crowd behind the side barricade, wearing a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves and dark pants. He was aiming a Glock at the man and shouting, “Get to the ground! Get on the ground!”
The man with the camera stopped, momentarily mystified by the triumvirate of armed people yelling at him. Then he recognized the weapons in their hands. He went down to one knee, then the next, half collapsing, half complying.
The Secret Service agent was on him first, grabbing a free hand and driving his knee into the photographer’s back.
The gunman from the crowd was a close second. The Secret Service agent, not knowing this man, pointed his gun at him.
Fisk’s hands went up quickly. “Fisk! NYPD Intel!”
“Jesus!” said the agent.
Garza kept her grip on Vargas, watching the photographer grunt and try to explain himself on the ground. When the Secret Service agent rolled him over, there was a wet spot on the pavement where the photographer’s groin had been.
Garza did not remain to watch any more. She turned and pushed President Vargas’s head down and ran him to the consulate entrance, past the stunned greeting party, getting him inside as fast as possible.
Once safely inside, she scanned the interior of the consulate entrance. She began to relinquish her grip on the president’s suit jacket when she felt it pull away from her.
“It was only a goddamn photographer!” he said behind her.
Garza turned. She saw the flash of anger cross the president’s face as he fixed his jacket. It stunned her.
“Have we not had enough bad press!” he said. “A photographer. Not an assassin!”
Garza was stunned. It was all she could do to walk away from him, quickly, before she said something back to him. She left him to the watchful eyes of her EMP compatriots, striding back out through the door to the sidewalk.
The photographer was being led to a police car by two uniformed officers. Every photographer in the media throng was still snapping away.
Fisk had turned his face away in an attempt to avoid them, but it was much too late. The Secret Service agent was huddling with his compatriots. One of them held an M4 carbine.
Garza went to Fisk, pulling him behind the president’s SUV, blocking them from view.
“What are you doing here in disguise?” she said.
He billowed out his shirt, trying to air out his sweat. “It’s not much of a disguise. I left my jacket in the car and rolled up my sleeves.”
“Why weren’t you at the hotel this morning?” she asked.
Fisk frowned. “I’m not supposed to be here at all. Dubin—my boss—thinks I’m spending too much time on one visiting dignitary. I think he got a complaint from Dukes about us. And if I’d gone to the hotel first, I would have had to check in with them.”
Garza said, “They know you’re here now.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s not good. Thanks to that idiot with the camera.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know,” said Fisk. “Got any openings in Mexico?”
Garza smiled. “Depends. Can you be corrupted?”
“Only by red wine,” he said.
Garza grinned, then backed off.
“What is it?”
She shook her head. “Vargas. He didn’t like the way that looked.”
Fisk sighed. “Believe me, he would have loved it had that idiot had an explosive device in his backpack.”
Garza was steamed.
“Interesting start to the day,” said Fisk.
“Was that urine I saw on the road?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah,” said Fisk. “Looking into the business end of a handgun does that to people.”
Garza took a moment to scan the crowd. They were starting to disperse now that the show was over.
“I was feeling good about having an image of Chuparosa,” she said. “But now suddenly I feel we are no closer to him. No how, or where, or when.”
“He’s killed off everybody who could answer those questions.”
“He couldn’t have killed everybody,” said Garza. “He is staying somewhere. Someone is helping him.”
Fisk said, “I had a look at the seating plan for the dinner tonight. Obama and Vargas are seated at separate tables, which I guess is a power hosting thing. It gives the gathering two prime tables for guests to sit at, and by guests I mean donors.”
Garza nodded. “So?”
“Obama’s seatmates were all named on the diagram. As were Vargas’s seatmates . . . except for one. One was left empty.”
“Why?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
Garza shook her head. “I haven’t seen the chart.”
“Well, then two other things came to mind. One was the mysterious presence of a U.S. marshal at the security review. I recognized her on the way out. She gave me a very vague nonanswer about what she was doing there. As you may know, they handle fugitives and federal witness relocation. And where was the restaurant owner? Two heads of state are coming to your establishment for an important dinner, and you’re not present at the security review? You’re not overseeing every little detail?”
“Fair point,” she said. “Who is the owner?”
“A limited partnership. Some shell corporation. But even shell corporations have to file legal papers and tax forms.” Fisk crossed his arms, looking down at her over his sunglasses. “I think we need to go pay this fellow a visit, Comandante.”
Garza nodded. “I think we do, too.”
CHAPTER 54
Chuparosa entered the garage dressed in a pair of light coveralls. He lifted the rear door of the fish truck with the Teixeira Brothers logo on the side and loaded in the deep tray of finely chopped ice.
He opened the four cases of shellfish, kneeling on the floor of the van. Blue Points, Chincoteagues, littlenecks, and Wellfleets, one box each. He spread the fresh ice in and around the oysters.
Packed in the ice beneath several layers of Wellfleets were the plastic frames of two Glock 17s. The trigger guards of each frame had been ground off, and all of the straight edges of the frame and handgrips had been modified with a Dremel tool in order to mimic the shape and roughness of an oyster.
Both guns had been fieldstripped, their slides and magazines distributed in the lining of a box of oyster knives. Each handle of the sixty-eight knives contained a single 124-grain 9mm Hydra-Shok hollow-point round sealed inside a lead lining so that they could not be detected by X-rays.
The barrels of the Glocks had been inserted inside the handle of a hand truck he had bought at the Home Depot on DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn.
Silencers were the easy part. The two AAC Ti-RANT cans were top-of-the-line military-grade suppressors, slightly modified. Each had been disassembled, the tubes and pistons painted the same color as the hand truck and attached to the cross member, the baffles disassembled and slid onto the handles of the truck in place of the original rubber grips and painted matte black.