Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

One of the most important parts of the advance team’s work was identifying the choke points and crowd gathering locations, the places where the motorcade would need to slow down to negotiate turns. Today his role was to assign American and Mexican law enforcement to these key portions of the motorcade, and to identify any other potential threats so as to deal with them now, before the President arrived.

In all the official events SWORDSMAN would attend here in Mexico, even those open to the public, every spectator and participant would be subjected to screening. This meant they would either pass through metal detectors or be wanded. And all bags would, of course, be searched. But it was impossible to secure the route, every window, rooftop, alleyway, every pocket of every civilian on every sidewalk, and every car on every side street.

Motorcades were a mess, but the Secret Service was accustomed to dealing with them. The President would be ushered along the way in “the bubble,” a Secret Service term meaning a protective cocoon of close protection agents, a large counterassault team that rode just behind him, and an array of static Secret Service men on rooftops and barricade positions along the route.

There were more than two hundred agents here in Mexico City for the visit, and virtually every last one of them had a role in the motorcade from the airport. And that was just the first line of defense. Mexican Federal Police would have another six hundred officers involved in roadblocks, motorcycle escorts, traffic control, and crowd overwatch.

And Herbers had one more thing going in his favor.

The Beast.

The presidential limousine was a highly modified and customized Cadillac DTS and had acquired the name “the Beast” because of its size and weight. But bulletproof glass and thick armor plating were just two of the vehicle’s features. Run-flat tires, night-vision equipment, an internal oxygen supply, and secure communications also made up the vehicle’s security measures, and another, identical vehicle always ran in the motorcade so the President would have a backup if his primary broke down.

Herbers had been informed that SWORDSMAN had been asked to stay in the Beast for the duration of the drive by his lead protection agent, Andrea Price O’Day. This wasn’t likely to be an issue; some Presidents liked to get out and glad-hand the crowd, but that wasn’t really Ryan’s style. While Herbers thought him to be a kind and approachable man, Ryan didn’t possess the politician gene of so many of the other people he’d worked around in his twenty-three years on the service. Ryan didn’t go out of his way to meet people unless it was necessary to win an election.

The convoy of advance-team men and women stopped many times along the route, and all of them would then climb out of their vehicles. Herbers would see a group of open windows that bothered him, or a troublesome building with balconies or other potential aggressor overwatch positions, or even just narrow side streets that ran close to his route that he wanted to look over to see if he felt it necessary to block them off.

This was an experienced group, and despite all the stops, they accomplished the first half of the route in good time. But then they traveled through the high-crime neighborhood of Tepito, and this part of the city required extra care.

When Agent Dale Herbers started his workup of the Mexico official visit, he and his staff quickly identified the short stretch of Eje 1 as a location that needed special attention. Every motorcade had to either go down this long, straight six-lane thoroughfare or else navigate the narrow two-lane streets of the Tepito and Centro districts. As much as the Secret Service tried to avoid taking the President on a predictable route, it had been decided that was preferable to taking him through a narrow warren of alleys surrounded by close-in buildings, subjecting the motorcade to twice as many turns and forcing it to travel much more slowly through such a rough district.

No, this stretch of Eje 1, called Vidal Alcocer, was undoubtedly the best route to take.

Which meant every motorcade from the airport used it, and this was a problem.

So now Herbers was here, looking over every block with a critical eye. He walked this vulnerable part of the motorcade route shadowed by four other Secret Service agents and four detectives from Mexico’s Federal District police. They took notes on paper and on tablet computers, as Herbers directed the different organizations in how to prepare for the upcoming motorcade.

On the corner of Vidal Alcocer and José J. Herrera, Herbers noticed a construction site with a long twelve-foot-high wall running north and south along the sidewalk, and next to it a street market running west on Herrera.

A Mexican detective explained how they had planned to barricade the market off from the motorcade route, and Herbers immediately crossed the street and ducked under the orange tarp at the southern edge of the site. The others followed him in.

He and his team spent a few minutes inside, walking around. He was looking for stashed weapons, a sniper’s hide, anything out of the ordinary.

As soon as he headed over to the clean and newly poured concrete eastern wall of the site, he smelled the rotten stench of something dead. The other men smelled it, too, and it took less than thirty seconds for a Mexican Federal District officer to shine his flashlight in the sealed drain on the floor of the garage.

“Gato,” he said. Cat .

Herbers looked himself. “Poor kitty must have gone down there before they covered the drain and got caught.”

He didn’t give it another thought.

Herbers looked at the wall next. One of his men had a flashlight of his own and he walked the length of the wall, tapping it both at waist height and a little higher than his head, just to confirm there was no false compartment built into it.

A bomb-sniffing dog was led along the wall; she sniffed in the edges and immediately pulled her head back and sneezed. She kept walking, kept trying to sniff the area, and sneezed again.

Herbers glanced up to the dog handler for an explanation.

The handler just said, “Construction dust. Masonry and loose grout.” He kept going. Within seconds they were moving into the next concrete staircase.

Herbers kept scanning the area for a few minutes. He saw a radio on a bucket, and he lifted the device and kicked over the bucket to make sure it wasn’t wired to anything. He turned the radio on and heard a scratchy accordion-heavy tune. He flipped it off and replaced it on the bucket.

Herbers addressed both the Secret Service agents with him and the Federal District police detectives. “I’ll need this place sealed off with tape, and officers outside on the corner during the transit.”

One of the Mexican detectives said, “I will have two cars behind the barricade outside on José J. Herrera. Four men watching the people at the market and the crowd that will form at the barricades so they can see the limo. I’ll task two more men just to make sure no one tries to slip under the tarp to get into the construction site.”

“That’s fine,” Herbers said, then he addressed his number two. “Rick, I want a pair of our guys here as well.”

“You got it.”

“Let’s put a long gun at the top of the stairs. It will give us a good view of the entire length of the street.”

Rick made a note.

They climbed out of the construction site and moved on to the next choke point, a turn to the west that would take them deep into the Centro Histórico toward the Palacio Nacional.

Herbers and his team had dozens of problem areas to check before the President arrived in less than forty-eight hours.

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