Hidden Order

CHAPTER 44

The bald-headed CIA operative watching the house had a thick neck, broad shoulders, and meaty hands that looked like a bunch of sausages sewn together. His were not the hands of a surgeon or a pianist, but they nevertheless conducted very skilled labor. If this were not so, he never would have risen to the level he had.

When he picked up the phone vibrating on the armrest next to him, it looked like a child’s toy being held in a baseball mitt. He activated the call. “Samuel speaking,” he said.

“You’re being retasked. Priority one,” a voice said on the other end.

“Same targets?” Samuel asked, his eyes never leaving the house.

“No.”

“What is my new target, please?”

“It’s all in the file. You know where to find it.”

“When?”

“Now,” said the voice. “I’m sending someone to relieve you. They should be arriving any moment.”

“Understood,” Samuel replied and disconnected the call. Less than ten minutes later, another black Lincoln Town Car pulled up across the street and turned off its lights. The parking lights came on momentarily before being extinguished. The relief shift had arrived. Samuel started his car, checked for traffic, and pulled away.

As he did, there was a third car just up the street whose occupants had watched the changing of the guard transpire.

“Did you see that?” McGee asked. “No Hello Igor how are you? How is Natasha and little Boris? No nothing. That’s not how these limo drivers are. They’re all tight, they all come from the same part of the world, and they all clump at the same companies. That was way too fast.”

Ryan agreed. “You’re right,” she replied. “He wasn’t here for some late-night airport run. They’ve got all the team members under surveillance. He was watching Tara’s building to see if we’d show up.”

“Or to follow her if she left,” McGee said as he looked at the clock on the dash. “It’s your call. What do you want to do?”

She didn’t need to think about it. She knew exactly what she wanted to do. “Follow him.”

“Roger that,” he replied.

After letting two cars pass, McGee pulled into the street and began tailing the black Town Car.

It was the only move they could make at this point; the only move that Phil Durkin wouldn’t see coming.

The comparison of the espionage world to chess was quite apt, except that to be the best, your mind had to be trained to see the board in all three dimensions. Of all the former teammates Ryan could have reached out to, Florentino was the most obvious. They had not only anticipated that she would do it, they had been ready for her. Hindsight was always twenty-twenty and she and McGee both now realized what a mistake it had been.

For his part, though, McGee didn’t seem to have fully learned the lesson. He wanted to go after another team member, this time being “more careful.” As far as Ryan was concerned, being “more careful” was not a clever enough plan. They needed to be more cunning. There was no use trying to grab another gazelle from the back of the herd if there was a predator hiding in the bushes waiting to spring once you made your move.

Ryan’s plan was to wait until the predator had left the safety of the bushes and then spring her own trap. Was the man driving the Town Car their predator? She couldn’t be one hundred percent sure yet, but her gut told her that they were right on the money, and her gut was seldom, if ever, wrong.

As they followed him, the driver conducted multiple SDRs to ascertain if he had anyone on his tail.

“This guy appears to have had a little bit of training,” said McGee.

“Which means we were right to follow him,” Ryan replied. “Whatever you do, don’t lose him.”

They came close to doing just that, three times. The driver of the Town Car was good, but McGee and Ryan were better.

He led them to a neighborhood alive with nightlife in the northwest part of the city, known as Adams Morgan. After circling the block, he parked illegally on Eighteenth Street near a twenty-four-hour restaurant called “the DINER” and left his vehicle with its flashers on.

“What’s he up to now?” McGee asked as he eased the Mustang into a no-parking zone at the end of the block. “He can’t be here for the coffee.”

Ryan turned in her seat and watched out the rear window. “Why not?”

“Because I’ve eaten here before. The coffee’s good, but it’s not worth driving halfway across town and risking a parking ticket over.”

By her count, they had passed at least three places where the driver could have gotten coffee and been able to legally park. “Maybe he’s getting something to eat.”

“Maybe. Or maybe there’s another reason he left his surveillance post and had to hightail it over here.”

A few minutes later, the man reemerged with a Styrofoam cup and climbed back in his Town Car.

“I call bullshit,” said McGee.

“You can call it whatever you want,” Ryan stated, as she continued to watch him, “but get ready because he’s going to pull a U-turn.”

“Where’s he going now?” he asked as he checked the approaching traffic and tried to figure out how he was going to execute the same maneuver without the driver of the Town Car seeing him.

“I don’t know, but something tells me he didn’t know either until he went into that diner.”

Samuel placed his hot tea in a cup holder before gauging the traffic and executing his U-turn. No sooner had he done so than his cell phone rang.

“Samuel speaking,” he said after activating the call.

“You retrieved the envelope?” the voice on the other side asked.

“I did.”

“You read the contents?”

“I did.”

“I understand there are personal reasons why this assignment could be problematic,” the voice said. “But you are not going to allow any personal reasons to make this assignment problematic. Is that correct?”

“That is correct,” replied Samuel. He had removed the envelope from its hiding place in the bathroom, read, and then memorized its contents. All of it was printed on a water-soluble paper, which he destroyed by dropping it in a toilet and flushing.

The target was indeed known to him. They had a history together. But that history would not stop him from carrying out his assignment. His job was to act, not to ask questions. This would be like any other assignment. A job was just that, a job.

Once the call was finished, he placed his cell phone down on the seat and picked back up his tea. Peeling back the plastic lid, he blew into the cup and gauged the temperature by how much steam rose from the surface. It was much too hot to drink now, but by the time he got to Bill Wise’s house, it should be just about perfect.