Target Omega

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Garin took the interior elevator to the Mayflower’s ground level. The hotel was still quiet. Olivia was secure in Room 546. She was not to open the door for anyone but Dwyer’s men.

Garin walked to the lobby and up the staircase near the front entrance to the mezzanine level, where a bank of curtained windows provided a view of the area in front of the hotel. He pulled aside one of the curtains and scanned the sidewalks, street, and buildings. The only signs of life were the cab drivers seated in the taxis along the curb. The area was clear otherwise. Garin knew that someone could be lurking in an alley, possibly on an adjacent rooftop, but was fairly confident the surveillance-detection route he’d used made that unlikely.

Garin turned to descend the stairs back to the lobby. He needed to get back to the safe house for a couple of hours of sleep before his next step.

Congo Knox was comfortable but alert. The entrance to the Mayflower had seen no traffic in nearly two hours. Nor had there been any motion within the lobby that he could see. He could acquire any target emerging from the hotel doors with ease.

A barely perceptible movement of a curtain in the mezzanine level above the entrance caught Knox’s attention. He estimated that it had moved less than an inch, remained in that position for three to five seconds, and then slowly moved to its original position.

He could see no one behind the curtain. There wasn’t even a shadow. But Knox knew that Garin would be emerging from the entrance within seconds. No one else had reason to peek from behind a mezzanine-level curtain at an empty Connecticut Avenue at two thirty in the morning. Only a person who had reason to think someone was looking for him.

Knox exhaled slowly and relaxed his muscles. The muzzle of his M110 was trained on the center of the entrance. Although he was positioned at a forty-five-degree angle to the Mayflower’s door, he had a full view of the entire entry. He would acquire Garin within a fraction of a second. A fraction later Garin would be dead.

Knox could see shadows of movement within the lobby. The shadows of a dead man. It was a matter of moments now. One shot. Another kill. Then off to breakfast.

As Knox’s earpiece crackled, he could hear the screeching tires of fast-moving vehicles pierce the quiet of the night. His scope remained focused on the entrance, where the glass door to the left was beginning to open outward. Knox listened to the low voice in his earpiece as he caught the unmistakable profile of Michael Garin appear in the portal, oblivious to Knox’s presence atop Washington Square.

Seconds later Knox’s earpiece fell silent. Knox pressed his throat mike with his left hand and gently uttered two words: “Roger that.”

As Garin walked south on Connecticut, the vague sensation of being in a sniper’s sights haunting him once again, three black Ford Explorers sped past him and braked to an abrupt halt in front of the Mayflower’s entrance. Four men sprang from each of the SUVs. Six walked rapidly into the hotel while the remainder fanned out around the perimeter of the building. To Knox, they appeared to be former military. He paid them no further attention.

Garin turned left toward the Farragut North Metro station. At the same time, Knox rose to one knee and smoothly and silently gathered his things to leave.

Michael Garin would not die by Congo Knox’s hand this day.