by Dick Wolf
Fisk smiled again. “She’s tough.”
Escher turned on him. “You know her?”
“Know of her. Let me get in there, see what I can do. You’re not going to win the jurisdictional issue. My guess is somebody’s going to slap a temporary injunction on the NYPD and seal this thing until somebody on the federal level works out who’s got what. If he’s in New York on a diplomatic passport, they’ll claim there’s some kind of diplomatic immunity.”
Escher shook her head in disgust. “The guy’s dead, he’s beyond needing immunity. Are they going to fly up an entire crime lab to process this, too?”
Fisk nodded, showing her his open hands in a gesture of calm. “Let me see.”
A skirmish erupted to their left, as a Secret Service agent got into it with a Mexican PF bodyguard who was trying to enter the vehicle. The Secret Service agent was physically restraining the man.
Fisk hustled over, and with others separated the two men. That brought the deputy inspector over, coming around one end of the car. Garza marched around the other end.
Fisk said to the Secret Service agent, “You know better than that. Get Dukes on the phone.”
Then he went to head off Garza.
“You’re going to need the NYPD on this one,” he told her.
“Detective Fisk,” she said. “I don’t have time to debate this. I have lost a man—”
She was going to say more, but stopped.
Fisk said, “Could I have a word with you over here, Comandante?”
Garza looked at the other officials, then stepped to the side with Fisk away from the others.
She looked even more pale than she had when he met her at Intel headquarters yesterday—though her bearing, perhaps exacerbated by the turf argument, was more erect, her chin higher, her eyes more imperious.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t give a shit about any of this squabbling here. It’s only holding things up. I’m playing a much longer game. I want to know what is going on here.”
She did not hesitate with her comeback. “I wanted your help yesterday. You refused. You want answers for what has happened here? I don’t have them yet. But when I get them, they will remain with me.”
“Okay, we got off on the wrong foot yesterday. Get my meaning? It’s an American idiom. We didn’t hit it off right. I’m ready to apologize and move forward if you are.”
“No.”
“I see.” Fisk looked back at the others, who were standing around waiting to see what came of this head to head argument. “I imagine General de Aguilar has official duties to attend to. I’m wondering where the other man is at this hour. His name was Virgilio.”
He read distress in Garza’s refusal to answer.
“I’m telling you right now, my Intel Division can help you better than anyone. If your man is missing, we can mobilize and follow his tracks. But—and that’s a big goddamn but—you need to be up front with me about what is going on here.”
“I accept.”
“You . . . what?” Fisk all but scratched his head. “Didn’t you just refuse to apologize a moment ago?”
“You were rude yesterday. But I am more than willing to put aside pride in order to draw upon your full resources in order to—”
“ ‘Full resources’ is a matter to be decided. We move predicated on the level of seriousness.”
Garza said, “It is of the utmost seriousness, but the focus is President Umberto Vargas.”
“Who is going to be signing a treaty with our president in a few days.” Fisk reset, thumbing his pockets, checking her eyes for signs of untruth. “What do you think happened here?”
Garza said, “This man was with Virgilio last night.”
“He is part of the Presidential Guard?”
“Yes,” said Garza, her eyes narrowing just a bit. “And no.”
“Where is Virgilio now?” asked Fisk.
Garza swallowed. “I believe he has been taken.”
CHAPTER 29
In Fisk’s car, on the way back into Manhattan, Cecilia Garza finished a telephone call with General de Aguilar, the head of the EMP, updating him on the discovery of the dead man. She was cognizant that Fisk understood Spanish, and did not go into full detail. She hung up and looked at Fisk, watching him drive.
At first she thought he was still wearing the same clothes as the day before, but no. This was a fresh blue shirt, red necktie, and gray suit tailored to his athletic frame. He had about him a look of solidity, as though nothing that happened around him was going to move him from what he intended to do. He was quite handsome. This was something she generally distrusted in a man.
She felt a wave of vertigo as he cut across two lanes of traffic. The possibility of losing Virgilio made her sick. She might never be able to convince a foreigner what kind of man he was.
“I know this man,” she said. Her voice came out strident and high-handed, as it always did when she felt stressed or defensive. Sometimes it was useful to have that quality. But she was not sure if this was one of those times. “We have been in a state of war, of civil war. Nobody trusts the police, and often with good reason. I would put my life in his hands.”
“He is not a federale?”
“He was a member of the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional. The CISEN. Do you know what that is?”
“Mexican CIA. The equivalent.”
“There is a new group forming . . .”
“The CNI,” said Fisk. It was a new national intelligence agency within CISEN, created by the newly elected President Vargas, aimed at centralizing and coordinating efforts against organized crime, part of an overall movement to centralize Mexico’s security apparatus.”
“Calderón was focused on attacking major criminal groups,” said Garza, referring to the previous Mexican president. “It was effective at times, but at a great cost. We saw massive waves of violence unleashed all across the country. Vargas’s strategy is to prevent violence through intelligence gathering and improved communication within the Interior Ministry.”
“Sounds like you voted for him.”
“I did.”
“So what was Virgilio, if that is his real name, doing here as part of Vargas’s advance team? I know he did not register with our people.”
“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 p
erson. 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.
After almost a minute or so, she turned and walked east, as though nothing had happened.
“Any more?” asked Garza.
“That is our only outdoor camera.”
“It cannot pan up?” She wanted to see Virgilio get into his car, apparently.
“No, it is fixed.”
Fisk said, “She was marking him.”
Garza straightened. “Yes.”
“Marking him?” said Nwokcha.
“Signaling someone,” said Fisk. “Someone who is not on camera.”
“Pointing him out,” said Garza, doubly anxious now.
Nwokcha had isolated her face from the bar and was running it through their system. “The system has her flagged as a hooker.”
“It does?” said Fisk.
“There’s an algorithm for that. Young women in short dresses who come and go frequently and aren’t tagged to a specific room . . . the system flags them as prostitutes.”
“So you can blackball them?”
“Hardly. A hotel without working girls? We’d be out of business in no time. No, we just want to know who is coming and going.” He tapped a few more keys. “Her first visit to the hotel, apparently. No additional information.”
“She’s Mexican,” said Garza.
Fisk said, “You’re sure?”
“Of course I am.”
Fisk asked Nwokcha, “Is that the best image?”
“The computer automatically displays the clearest facial image, the one most suitable for further analysis.”
Fisk said, “Could we get a printout?”
“Not from here. But I can e-mail you the image.”
Fisk gave him his Intel address and waited for the e-mail to arrive at his phone. Garza had stepped away to call in an update.
Fisk asked Nwokcha, “Does the system do anything for people who don’t show their faces?”
Fisk’s phone hummed with the arriving e-mail. He opened the attachment and looked at the photo image of the woman. On his phone, she looked even younger, maybe nineteen or twenty. He forwarded the image to Intel.
CHAPTER 31
Back in his car, before pulling out, Fisk turned to face Garza. “We need to issue an alert about Virgilio.”
“He’s already dead,” said Garza.
Fisk studied her. Her jaw trembled a bit, but her eyes remained fierce, focused. “You’re saying he wouldn’t have allowed himself to have been taken alive?”
“Only if incapacitated. I realize there is always a chance . . . but if the aim is to extract information, about President Vargas’s movements and security, he won’t cooperate. He will be killed when he refuses.”
“Then there is no reason not to issue an alert. It might give us a lead.”
Garza looked through the windshield at busy Fifty-seventh Street. She had already resigned herself to Virgilio’s fate.
Fisk continued, “If you are reluctant because of showing your organization’s vulnerability, or disclosing his true identity . . .”
Garza turned to Fisk. “He was a good man. I cannot accept that he is gone . . . and yet I have to.”
Fisk was checking his mirrors.
“What is it?” she asked.
Fisk said, “I’m making sure nobody picked us up at the hotel to follow us.”
Garza’s eyes narrowed, and she looked at the hotel doors as Fisk pulled out into traffic.
“All right, Comandante,” he said. “I think it is time for you to tell me who this guy is you’re looking for.”
She looked off into the distance as though she was trying to decide whether or not she could trust him.