He and Jamie showed their ID to guards and ran past barricades into the ornate hotel's lobby. Next to the check-in desk, the concierge directed them to a banquet room on the hotel's second floor. They ran up a staircase and along a thickly carpeted corridor to where they showed their ID to more guards and entered the brightly lit command post for Global Protective Services.
Tables filled the huge room. Computers and monitors seemed everywhere, phones ringing, printers whirring, dozens of agents working to keep up with the massive influx of information. Outside the hotel, more sirens wailed.
For several weeks prior to the conference, GPS advance teams had traveled to New Orleans and studied the security layout of this and other hotels where clients were staying. They assessed possible routes to the conference as well as to various tourist spots that the delegates would insist on visiting. The agents took photographs. They made diagrams of streets and the room patterns of floors and suites. They created time charts of how long it took to get from one building to another. They did background checks on limousine services and arranged for armored cars to be available. They hired guards to make certain the limos weren't tampered with and that the guards inspected each vehicle on a regular schedule. They arranged for medical personnel to be on call and made detailed notes about how to reach the nearest hospitals. These and numerous other preparations were the hidden part of the protective world, each security measure made to look effortless when in fact everything was the result of intense planning.
Amid the organized commotion, a tall woman looked up from a printout she studied. A former Marine who was also a former member of the Defense Intelligence Agency, she wore dark slacks and a dark blouse that could be made to look formal or casual, depending on the type of client she needed to blend with. Her red hair was cut short. Her strong features had only faint makeup and were tight with fatigue. Looking as if she welcomed the distraction, she approached Cavanaugh and Jamie.
"I hear you're the new boss."
"Just my bad luck," Cavanaugh said. "Jamie, this is Dawn Finch, the best advance agent we have."
"Flattery, flattery."
"Dawn, this is my wife, Jamie."
"Word came my way about that, also. You're full of surprises."
"Let's hope tomorrow doesn't bring surprises."
"Here's how it lays out." Dawn led them to various charts mounted on a wall.
Cavanaugh studied them. "I don't like the pattern of the choke points." He referred to the potential attack sites common to every route that the attendees would need to use.
"Yeah, the convention center's in a centralized area. The Warehouse/Arts district, Canal Street, the French Quarter. Everything's within a few blocks. No matter how we try to vary the routes, everybody has to pass through the bottlenecks here and here. Bombs and snipers are the big worry, of course. We tag-teamed with the police and the government agencies to reinforce security at those points, keep the protestors back, occupy roofs, watch for movement at windows, that sort of thing."
"How many agents?"
"Eight thousand and more on the way."
For a moment, Cavanaugh thought he hadn't heard correctly. "Eight thousand?"
"To hit that many people, you need a dispersive weapon, a dirty bomb, something like that," Dawn continued. "Homeland Security has radiation and pathogen detectors all over the waterfront. Any vehicle that enters the downtown area is being scanned."
"Give me a list of the most influential delegates."
"What do you have in mind?"
"To make sure tomorrow doesn't happen."
11
"Remember almost the first thing I told you when I brought you to our training camp?" Carl asked Raoul.
They paused outside the warehouse. Insects swarmed around the overhead light. A tugboat sounded from the Mississippi's gloom.
"I told you rest was the operator's friend, that you should take advantage of it whenever possible. You put in a good day, Mr. Ramirez."
Raoul stood straighter in response to the term of respect.
"You did what you were instructed. You executed your orders perfectly. Now it's time to reward yourself with sleep. It'll be difficult. Plenty of exciting things going on. But tomorrow's where we're headed, and the most important thing you can do now is stretch out. Even if all you manage to do is keep your eyes shut, you'll still get the benefit. Clear?"
"Yes, Mr. Bowie."
"Okay then." Carl slapped him on the back and gave an approving nod to guards near the door. Then he opened it and ushered Raoul inside.
The warehouse was in shadow, only a few dim lights near the lavatories. A male smell filled the area, the musky odor of men primed for action. Bodies shifted on cots, occasionally snoring and coughing.
Carl gave Raoul another reassuring slap on the back and watched him go to his cot, where the young man obediently closed his eyes. Carl surveyed the other men, then switched his attention to the knapsacks against the wall to his right. Sixty of them.
*
"Nerve gas," Carl had told the swarthy man weeks earlier. Blazing noon. They were at the training camp, far from the shots and explosions of the conditioning exercises at the main part of the facility.
Sweating from the heat and humidity, his suit sticking to him, the man peered into a corrugated metal structure large enough to hold one hundred chickens. The birds clucked, pecked at each other, and scratched the dirt floor, looking for food.
"I got these from a farm-supply outlet a hundred miles from here," Carl explained. "Just another customer. Nobody paid attention."
Stepping among the chickens, sending them scurrying noisily, Carl set a knapsack in their midst. "As you know from your experiences in Iraq, detonation devices of this sort require a two-step process, one to arm them, the other to set them off. The two stages guarantee that the devices won't go off prematurely-in our hands, for instance."
The man eyed the knapsack and took several steps back from it.
"After all, we want to make sure the detonations occur at the scheduled time and place. So this is step one." Carl pulled a cord on the side of the knapsack. Then he made his way through the clucking chickens, emerged from the structure, and shut the door. He walked around the building and lowered metal panels over the screened windows.
The van was a hundred yards away through ferns and weeds. Some of the ground was spongy and caused the man to look annoyed at the seeds on his pants and the mud on his dress shoes.
Carl opened the van's side hatch and indicated a television that received signals from a camera in the concrete-block structure. The image came from high in a corner, angling down toward the chickens.
"The pull-cord on the knapsack activates a radio receiver attached to the detonator," Carl said. "On the day of the event, all the receivers-sixty of them-will be calibrated to a common frequency used by law enforcement. God knows, there'll be plenty of law enforcement in the area, all of them eager to stay in radio contact with each other. One of them will inadvertently set off the detonators. But just in case, I'll send a radio signal of my own. For the safety of this demonstration, I chose an uncommon frequency so a radio broadcast from a police car that happens to be in the area won't get us killed. Ready?"
The man nodded.
Carl pressed a button on a transmitter and drew the man's attention toward the television.
A black cloud billowed from the knapsack. Ominously silent, it filled the structure so thickly that the chickens could no longer be seen.
"Of course, the nerve gas is colorless," Carl said. "The smoke is for dramatic effect. For the TV cameras. Otherwise, all the viewers at home would see is people falling down. Terrifying enough. But this way, the cameras will see mysterious black clouds spreading and joining. The viewers will watch with rapt attention as the clouds clear, and then the thousands of corpses will slowly come into view. Bear in mind, there won't be any on-site announcer to describe what's happening. Everybody in the area will be dead."