The Execution

by Dick Wolf

  New York City has the deepest law enforcement bench on the planet, and more highly trained specialty units than any other law enforcement agency in the country—with the exception of most of the federal law enforcement agencies—and long experience handling security at large, complex, high-value sites. It’s a rare day that the NYPD isn’t blocking off a stretch of road for some visiting potentate or a posse of finance ministers.

  None of which made Fisk’s job any easier. The head of every specialized unit in the NYPD outranked Fisk, and was guaranteed to be jealous of his or her turf and distrustful of Fisk’s perceived lack of a defined jurisdiction. There were a lot of egos to be juggled, a lot of phone calls to be made, a lot of memos to be sent.

  On top of that, the UN is a particularly complex protection assignment. Inside the UN, protection is supposed to be provided and coordinated by the UN’s own people. This meant that every time anybody walked in or out of the UN building, a handoff had to be made between UN security and the NYPD. The personal security details of the Mexican president accompanied them onto the property, while the main shell of protection had to remain outside the perimeter of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza.

  As much as Fisk looked down on this sort of assignment, it had demanded every ounce of his energy and attention over the past few days.

  THERE IS MORE THAN ONE NEW YORK. Most cops live in a New York of parochial schools, family-owned garbage-hauling businesses, cars with sticky doors and dinged fenders, cramped little houses, outer borough accents.

  Ocampo was not part of that New York. It was part of the other New York, the one many see only in the movies, the New York of their daydreams, the one full of hipster artists and supermodels and hedge fund managers and celebrities.

  Fisk lived in an odd sort of middle ground—in both worlds—having been raised as the son of a diplomat. And yet he was not really of either world. Fisk had grown up all over the map, going to American schools full of very privileged kids who thought the world was theirs by right. It was a world Fisk could have lived in if he’d chosen to.

  But for reasons he’d never quite understood, he’d walked away from that world and had chosen to work in a blue-collar world populated by people who didn’t expect the universe to shower them with glory and money, beauty and fame. The truth was, the world favors very few with all of that. For most people—even the hedge fund managers and hipster/model/actresses—life is mostly a lot of hard work, bad deli sandwiches, trips to the dentist, coaching the kid’s soccer team.

  As he walked in the front door of Ocampo, he felt a bittersweet sense of recognition. The restaurant was designed to make people feel like they’d risen above all that quotidian crap and ascended into some broader, more powerful, more amped-up world. You went to Ocampo and you felt like a star, like somebody. This was the clientele they catered to. This was the experience they worked so hard to give you.

  He found Dukes standing with his cadre of Secret Service agents, ready to do the technical security clearance. He did not seem very impressed with the establishment.

  “You know what we call this kind of place in the Secret Service?” said Dukes, in regard to the restaurant where American president Obama and Mexican president Vargas would be dining the following evening.

  “Overpriced?” Fisk said.

  “A kill box,” said Dukes.

  GARZA ARRIVED MINUTES LATER with a contingent of EMP agents and the agency’s head, General de Aguilar, now dressed in a dark suit rather than his military uniform.

  Garza slowed a bit when she saw Fisk, and something like a look of regret passed over her face like a shadow. Fisk remained impassive. He noticed she had changed her clothes and perhaps had a shower, and wished he had done the same.

  The chairs were large, the tables were heavy and very shiny, the art on the walls was just Mexican enough to feel edgy, but not so much as to make the would-be rich feel like they’d walked into something that could be described as a “Mexican restaurant.” There were plenty of those in Manhattan and across the country. Here at Ocampo, there would be no steaming fajita skillets, no spicy chorizo, and, most especially, no mariachi band crooning and bumming tips at your table. Entrées started at seventy-five bucks and went up steeply from there.

  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.

  “So what’s our strategy? All traffic functions en route will be conducted on a need-to-know basis. NYPD will prepare for a rolling street blockage with minimal notice. We will have intersection control for both presidents’ motorcades, and will have two lanes of setback—that is, space between the motorcade and other traffic—whenever possible. We will bring our principals in through the alley in the back, and we’ll close and barricade the street between Greenwich and West Tenth. The upper floors of the restaurant’s building include residential space, and will be evacuated and occupied by counterattack agents starting three hours before the event is to start.”

  He surveyed the room, hands on his hips.

  “There’s your site prep. If I failed to cover anything . . . well, it was not an oversight. You know as much as you need to know, and more than enough to assist without getting in our way.”

  His last remarks seemed aimed at the Mexican security contingent.

  “Good day.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Fisk stopped Dukes before he left.

  “I notice the owner is not here.”

  “Guess not,” said Dukes.

  “C’mon,” said Fisk.

  Dukes just shook his head.

  “You vetted this guy? I don’t like the caginess.”

  Dukes sighed. “I know you’re not presuming to tell me how to do my job, Fisk,” he said, giving Fisk a borderline hard stare. “Here’s the thing, Fisk. Your job is all about the Why. Lot of gray areas—why a guy kills somebody, does this, does that. Lot of questions to be answered. But for us, for me . . . it’s all black and white. The principal lives or the principal dies. Why is just a distraction. Why kills.”

  Fisk grumbled, “So President Vargas just loves a good fish taco then.”

  “That must be it,” said Dukes. “Look, when you start telling me everything you know about your job, I’ll start telling you everything I know about mine.”

  “Point taken.”

  “Point made.”

  Dukes went off out of the restaurant. That was when Fisk saw a deputy U.S. marshal standing near the door. A short woman with squat hips and straight brown hair, wearing a dark-jacketed suit. He went over to her. “Graben, is it?”

  “Detective Fisk.”

  She did not offer to shake his hand.

  “It’s been a while,” he said.

  “Heard you were out of action. Put up on the shelf.”

  “They pulled me back down. Can I ask you a question?”

  “No,” she said.

  “What is a deputy U.S. marshal doing here?”

  Graben shrugged. “I’m not here.”

  “Really,” said Fisk. “That old thing.”

  “That old thing.”

  The U.S. Marshals Service is charged with protecting and supporting U.S. federal courts, as well as conducting fugitive investigations. Another thing they are known for is the Witness Security Program, protecting, relocating, and assigning new identities to witnesses and other high-threat individuals.

  “Good to see you back in the game, Fisk,” she said, turning and following Dukes out the door.

  Fisk stood there a moment, processing the interaction, then followed her out.

  He watched her get into the vehicle behind Dukes’s sedan and follow him away, heading uptown.

  CHAPTER 45

  Fisk was unsure of his next move as he turned around, and found himself facing Cecilia Garza.

  She was looking, not at his eyes, but at his chin.

  “Thanks for the update on the No Fly boys,” said Fisk. “The dead Zeta hitters.”

  “Dead traffickers,” she said. “I assumed someone else would forward you that information.”

  “Detective Kiser did, wholly by accident.”

  “I am not a person who apologizes,” she said. “But I want to.” Her eyes came up to his. “For what I said about your former partner, your girlfriend. That was uncalled for. I think you are right, I was distraught, I did not handle it well. You were right about my emotions, and I lashed out. Will you accept my apology?”

  Fisk watched her. He had the feeling that if he said yes right awa
y, she would walk on and never look back.

  He said, “I’m trying to figure out how much of your personality is a mask and how much is real.”

  She nodded as though she had expected some pushback. “I am so tired of never being able to trust,” she said. “Anyone. It derives from work. I have so few people I can truly trust in Mexico, in the PF and elsewhere in law enforcement. Virgilio was one of those people. Corruption is so rampant, it is a part of doing what we do, it is deep within the system. The men in my unit are the cleanest in the force . . . but beyond that I have to assume that every cop I deal with is on the payroll of the cartels.”

  “I’m not.”

  She waved that away. “Of course, I am just trying to explain. The pay is so low that bribes have become part of the system, like gratuities. Part of the pay scale. Never for me. But for many. If not most. You do not have to murder someone, or smuggle drugs, or break into evidence lockers. Thousands of pesos just to look the other way.”

  “I get it. It’s hard not to be cynical.”

  “And the truth is that I see something in you, something that I like. And that is a complication. I do not like complications.”

  Fisk felt a little heat at the back of his neck. “. . . I see.”

  “I have no time for complications right now.”

  “No, of course,” he said. “Me neither.”

  Garza nodded as though something had been agreed to. “Do you accept my apology?”

  Fisk said, “If I say yes, am I ever going to see you again?”

  CHAPTER 46

  Nicole?” said Fisk, entering Intel headquarters. “Why are you still here?”

  “Work to do,” she said.

  “Can you push those traffic camera captures to my secure laptop?” he said, passing quickly, heading for his office. “This is Colonel Garza.”

  Nicole nodded at her a little strangely. “I remember her from yesterday.”