Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

On the third day Zarif met with two Maldonado men who were also members of the Federal District police force. These men knew details of the upcoming presidential visit, and they confirmed Zarif’s assumption about the general route of the motorcade.

He showed them four locations he’d circled on a map, and he asked them to drive him to each so he could take a look. Along with Emilio, the men immediately piled into a new Cadillac Escalade driven by yet another Maldonado member, and the five took off into the city.

Zarif had spent the last few years in Syria, and there, even in government-held Damascus, he never went anywhere without a small team of armed and trained men who were always on the lookout for attackers. But here in Mexico City, despite what he’d heard about how dangerous the place was, he felt incredibly safe.

A few blocks from his Tepito safe house they stopped at a streetlight. On the sidewalk next to him he saw two blond-haired young women. The driver of his car rolled his window down and whistled, and one of the women laughed and spoke back in English.

The Mexican driver turned to Zarif in the backseat. “American girls.” He smiled and Zarif turned and stared at them.

He was going to change their world when he killed their President, and they didn’t even know it.

The first location on the agenda was near the airport, on Oriente 172. Zarif saw in the open-source videos that every motorcade passed by here after leaving a VIP airport gate. Immediately he disregarded this as a potential attack point. On Street View he had not noticed any obvious problems with the surroundings, but in person he saw there was a police checkpoint just up the street. No matter what kind of bomb he would plant, he wouldn’t just be placing a backpack on the ground and walking away. Zarif’s kind of high-yield bombs required hours at the location to construct and secure them, and of course he needed to do this with utmost care. He couldn’t be worrying about the cops two blocks away while he was laboring over his device.

The second location was on a wide road in a warehouse district near the airport. He’d been told the area was quiet at night, and that sounded good, but Zarif thought the sidewalks on either side of the street were too empty. He could set the bomb here with no problem, but no matter how well he hid it he felt it was likely it would be discovered before the event.

Zarif knew all about how the U.S. Secret Service would comb the motorcade route on the day before the action—his bomb needed to be invisible for this operation to have any chance for success.

The third location was at the other end of the route, much closer to the President’s destination, the Palacio Nacional in the Centro Histórico. This was a wide north-south street running through Tepito called Vidal Alcocer, with low buildings and construction on one side of the street and parking lots on the other.

From the outset Zarif felt like the intersection had potential. There was a market on the two-lane street that entered the intersection from the east and west, and this meant a lot of traffic, especially now at four in the afternoon. In the evening, on the other hand, he felt the area might have been quieter, as there were no residential buildings for several blocks.

He looked at the construction site on the corner, then he turned to his contact. “Is there a way we could arrange a visit to that unfinished building?”

Emilio looked at him, somewhat perplexed, then he just climbed out of the Cadillac and began walking across the street. Zarif followed after a moment. Emilio walked right up to the orange plastic tarp barrier, ducked down, and lifted it up for the bomber.

Zarif crawled in and began looking around. The construction site was obviously dormant. It appeared nothing had happened here in weeks or months, although the smell of concrete and plaster and dust was prevalent.

From the shape of the floors and the poured-concrete ramp it seemed to Zarif that this place was going to be a parking garage of some sort. The northern and western walls already were poured, there was a framed staircase that was built up three stories in the center of the property, but the southern and eastern sides of the building stood open, save for some areas where metal beams and an open rebar grid had been set.

There were walls going up here, or at least there had been before the project shut down. Now it was just a twelve-foot-tall net of thick iron and steel, waiting for tons and tons of poured concrete.

Zarif walked over to the rebar on the eastern side, and he put his hands inside the latticework of hot metal.

Here. Here exactly. Ten feet off the ground and facing out, he would build his bomb and he would fill in the concrete around it. If he put a steel plate in back to direct the force toward the street, and if he covered it all uniformly, it would appear to be a new wall, nothing more.

Of course, Zarif did have one problem. He couldn’t very well just take over construction of a downtown parking lot on his own.

“Emilio,” he said, “I need a construction team, and some way we can work in here without anyone stopping us.”

“No hay problema.” No problem.

Zarif smiled. He still didn’t know anything about the bomb he would be using in this operation, and this was a problem, but he had no complaints about the level of service he was getting from his local contacts. The Maldonado people moved around and acted with all the authority of the Syrian Army back in Damascus.

38

Gavin had spent the first couple days after the debacle in Prague absolutely useless to anyone. He was so downtrodden he’d barely shown up for work, he’d done little more than sit at his desk, and other than making excuses about a cold he’d picked up during all the international running around he’d done a few days earlier, he barely spoke to his coworkers.

But by the end of his third day something clicked in him. He needed to make himself useful here in the office, because he had proven to be utterly useless in the field.

His subordinates in the IT department here at Hendley Associates, assisted by the analytical staff in the building, had been overseeing the Clark operation up in New York City. He’d heard earlier in the day that the operation had folded, and the men were on their way back to the D.C. area.

Just as his staff were shutting down their machines to go home for the evening, Gavin stepped out of his office and asked his chief analytical systems engineer to fill him in on the operation. He led Gavin through a forty-five-minute primer on the steps he had taken to provide intelligence to Clark and his team in New York.

Needless to say, Biery’s team of first-rate hackers had, at first, tried to find a way to hack into the Sharps computer network. But they’d been unable to crack the secure infrastructure, so they moved on to digging into the personalities working for the company. At this task they’d had great success. All this information had helped Clark and his team locate Riley and his subordinates during the operation, and they’d photographed them meeting with United Nations personnel, but they were unable to find a smoking gun that could have proven Sharps Partners was either actively interfering with the Sanctions Committee vote or working with the North Korean state.

Gavin knew what The Campus needed right now. They needed some access into the Sharps network, so he went back into his office. The small amount of staff still in the IT department all grabbed their briefcases and headed for the doors, and they assumed Gavin would do the same, but instead he sat at his desk and started his work.

He told himself he was going to find a way into the network of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners.