Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

Jack knew he’d have to figure this out for himself.

Biery then said, “If you think she’s trying to get info from them, she’ll have to put it somewhere.”

Jack said, “Like on a drive or something?”

“Yeah, but you don’t really need a dedicated piece of equipment. A better bet would be to make it part of something she carries all the time. My guess would be her mobile phone.”

“So . . . I should just snatch her phone? Like what we didn’t pull off in Prague?”

“Yeah. I’ll FedEx you a dummy phone that you can carry. If you get hold of hers, just link them up with a little connector built into the side, and it will copy everything on her device.”

“What if it’s encrypted?”

“Oh, it will be encrypted for sure. But the copy will still be made. We get it back here and we go to work on cracking it.” Biery’s confident voice returned. “I’m pretty good at that sort of thing, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“I noticed.”

“The only problem is getting your hands on her device. We’ll have to see if you have the skills to make that happen.”

“I’ll do my best, Gav. Send me that phone.”

40

The official presidential visit to Mexico City had been on the books for months, which meant members of the Secret Service had been devoting attention to it virtually just as long.

Now, just five days before his arrival, the advance team had already been on the ground in the city for days. They had a temporary operations center at the aptly named InterContinental Presidente hotel, and they’d met with Secret Service personnel stationed here in the city as well as with other law enforcement and intelligence partners at the U.S. embassy on the beautiful Paseo de la Reforma.

The lead advance agent for the trip was a twenty-year veteran of the service named Dale Herbers. Herbers was a road warrior for the Secret Service; he had arrived in Mexico City on a direct flight from London after working the President’s recent trip to the United Kingdom.

The UK trip, like every international POTUS trip he’d led in his career, had gone off flawlessly, but Herbers knew Mexico City would be the most difficult operation he’d run as lead advance agent. There was a confluence of credible threats, access to weapons, and well-developed criminal infrastructure in the area that meant Herbers would have to bring his A game to his preparations.

The public image of the Secret Service is the square-jawed linebacker-looking man in sunglasses and a suit who moves close enough to the President of the United States to catch a bullet for him, and these men did exist, but the truth of the service is more mundane. For every close protection agent caught on camera at Jack Ryan’s shoulder, there were a hundred or more other men and women working to ensure the safety of all protectees. And for every second a Secret Service agent is responding to a threat to the life of his protectee, there are literally years’ worth of meetings to make certain that those threats never materialize.

Today in a conference room at his suite in the InterContinental, Dale Herbers had convened one of those meetings. It was a breakfast gathering of high-ranking local law enforcement officials as well as the department heads of several U.S. agencies based at the embassy. The point of today’s confab was to run down, again, the list of known potential threats in the area, and to make sure all organizations had the same level of confidence that the threats were at a manageable level.

From the outset, the Secret Service knew that Mexico was going to be a security challenge. There had been credible threats from the Maldonado cartel after their leader, Antonio Maldonado, was gunned down six months earlier, and while virtually all analysts in D.C. agreed there was little chance his brother Santiago Maldonado would be able to execute an attack on the President in Mexico City, the analysts weren’t able to say with confidence that someone affiliated with the organization wouldn’t try something against SWORDSMAN—the Secret Service’s code name for President Ryan.

Herbers kicked off the meeting after introductions. “Okay. Since Antonio Maldonado was killed, his brother Santiago has been blaming the U.S. Whether or not the U.S. was involved in the raid in Acapulco doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Santiago is telling his minions that we were involved, and his minions have weapons. It’s been our assessment in D.C. that the threats we’ve gotten are more aspirational in nature than credible in nature, and we’ve been in touch with your various agencies and departments over the past few weeks to make sure you all agree.

“Now we’re five days out from the visit, and I wanted to get one final chance for us to all sit down and talk about any concerns we may have about this threat and any other out there.

“So . . . do we expect an attack by followers of the Maldonados?”

He turned to a sixty-five-year-old Mexican with a thick mustache and thicker eyeglasses. He was the head of the División de Inteligencia de la Policía Federal. The Federal Police’s Department of Intelligence.

The man shook his head without reservation. “No. They control large parts of Guerrero state, but that is far away from the capital. The other cartels keep them out of the Distrito Federal for the most part.” He shrugged. “Sure, we’ve arrested known Maldonado men in the capital, but that was before the shootout in Acapulco. Once Antonio Maldonado was taken off of the chessboard, the group has become much more violent, but very much less organized.”

Herbers took this all in. It tracked, more or less, with what others had been saying about the organization previously, but he wanted to make sure nothing new had happened.

The local director of the Drug Enforcement Administration was seated across the table from Herbers. “Raúl? What say you?”

The silver-haired Hispanic American nodded. “I agree. Once Antonio died, Maldonado members posted dozens of threats against SWORDSMAN on social media sites. Federal Police, along with us, raided a safe house in Iguala about two months after the Acapulco shootout, and found a DVD. On it was a video of men with RPGs saying they would kill Jack Ryan when he came to Mexico. We assume it was going to be uploaded to YouTube or something. Still, that was months back. Nothing like that recently.”

Herbers had seen the video. Things like that never failed to get the attention of the Secret Service.

Herbers said, “One thing bothers me, though. These guys used to be all over Twitter screaming threats about SWORDSMAN, making videos and such. But now as the date of his arrival nears, we aren’t hearing the same amount of chatter. Does that concern anyone?”

The director of the Secret Service office here in Mexico City said, “I considered that. Wondered if maybe they were going radio silent because they had something cooking. But ultimately I determined it’s just like the others say. These guys are in such disarray right now, they couldn’t put together a real threat. Obviously I’m all for fortifying the motorcade and SWORDSMAN’s appearances to condition-red levels, but I don’t see Maldonado’s people orchestrating an attack.”

Herbers gave the matter one last prod. He turned to the embassy FBI agent-in-charge. “Any chance they could be coordinating with another group? Russians? Cubans, North Koreans? Any other bad actor who’s got POTUS in their sights?”

The AIC didn’t discount the possibility out of hand, but he clearly doubted it. “We have seen transactional relationships between all sorts of different groups and Maldonado. He gets guns from Russia, meth from North Korea, he sells to organized crime in the States. But something on a scale of a presidential assassination? I think that’s a bridge too far.”