by John Weisman
Tom pointed to the stucco. “Back side.”
“From the back, you’ll want to drill high—into the crown molding.”
“Then we’ll need a ladder?”
“Of course.” Reuven ambled off toward the scenery bay. Thirty seconds later, he was back with a trifolded aluminum multipurpose ladder, the tips of its rails sheathed in soft plastic. “Your wish, Stafford Pasha…”
“Let’s go, Reuven.” Tom was getting impatient.
The Israeli set the ladder down next to Tom, hoisted himself aboard the forklift, and turned on the engine. He reached for the lift control. The wall section rose slowly. Reuven eyeballed the height. “We want three meters. I think that’s close. You measure.”
Tom pulled a ten-meter cloth tape measure out of the tool kit and clipped it to the pocket of his coveralls. He straightened out the ladder and locked the sections in place. Then he inclined the rails against the wall section, snugged the antislip feet against the concrete, and climbed up until he was able to snag the hook end against the top of the crown molding. He handed the tape measure to Reuven. “Distance?”
The Israeli knelt and squinted. “Eight centimeters short.”
He vaulted onto the forklift and eased the wall upward while Tom held on to the ladder, then jumped down and checked the tape. “Only half a centimeter off.”
Tom unhooked the tape and let it fall, watching as Reuven caught the end one-handed. “Close enough for government work.”
20
11:35 A.M. Tom tightened the elastic band on his protective goggles, leaned forward on the ladder so that he could put pressure on the silent drill, and squeezed the trigger. The bit overrevved and gouged a thumbnail-size hole in the rough plaster surface. “Goddamnit.” Tom released the trigger, wiped the bit clean, and prepared to start over.
From below, Reuven looked up. “You’re okay. Just take it slow and easy.”
“Gotcha.” Tom applied pressure cautiously, gauging carefully as the bit revolved ever so slowly. “Okay.” He stopped the drill, pressed the tip against the plaster, and eased his finger onto the trigger.
The bit began to turn slowly. Tom put some of his weight behind the drill and watched, satisfied, as the bit eased smoothly into the rough-surfaced plaster. Particles of fine dust floated down onto his coveralls.
Now he increased the speed of the drill, feeling momentary resistance as the bit passed through the plaster and chewed on the lath beneath.
He increased the revolutions. The plaster dust was now joined by tiny wood shavings, which were, in turn, followed by gray masonry dust. Tom pressed harder. The drill bore into the wall. He cocked his head to examine the metric markings on the bit. He’d penetrated just over ten centimeters so far. He’d be coming to the stone sheathing soon—and then it would be time to switch drill bits.
11:39 A.M. Tom pulled the bit out of the wall. He was sweating now, and his arms had begun to ache from holding the drill rock-steady. He hung the drill off the utility belt he’d cinched around his waist, inserted a fiber-optic Snake-Lens Scope into the hole, and depressed the light button. The fiber-optic cable was 2.75 millimeters in diameter—just over a tenth of an inch. It had a close-focusing lens with a fifty-degree field of view. The scope had been designed for SWAT teams so they could peer under doors and into the interiors of locked cars and vans. It was an off-the-shelf model powered by double-A batteries. This one had red-light illumination. But you could get them with bright white, or blue, or even infrared light for clandestine operations. He’d bought the scope out of a police-supply catalog on a whim. It had cost just over three hundred dollars. Now he was glad he’d splurged. He turned the knurled fine-focus knob on the eyepiece until he was satisfied with what he saw, counted the striations, then dead-reckoned how much drilling was left undone.
He was getting close—certainly within an inch and a half of the adjoining wall. He extracted the fiber-optic scope, inserted his measuring rod, and squinted at the markings Reuven had etched on the aluminum as a guide. Yup—three-point-six centimeters to go. He retrieved the drill, removed the drill shaft, and replaced it with a long titanium 1mm bit. He double-checked to see that the bit was seated securely and then eased the unit back into the hole.
11:55 A.M. “You’re through. Did you feel it?” Reuven was perched on a ladder on the opposite side of the wall.
“Yes.” Tom held the drill steady, eased it out, and hung it on his belt. He pulled the minivacuum up and sucked dust out of the hole, then inserted the fiber-optic. “Looks clean.”
Now he took the minicamera out of his breast pocket, activated the power, and, using the measuring rod, eased the device into the hole. As he did, he heard Reuven scramble down the ladder. “I’ll check the video.”
Tom waited until he heard Reuven say, “Okay—go.”
“Roger that.” He pushed on the rod, eyes focused on the measurements. “One-half centimeter.” He felt slight resistance. “See anything?”
“No.”
Tom grunted. He applied more pressure, pushing the camera another twenty-five millimeters. “Now?”
“Not yet.”
Tom examined the markings on the rod. The lens should have cleared the crown molding by now. He squinted and counted the lines etched on the rod. “You’re right, Reuven—I was one centimeter off.” Holding the rod steady, Tom pushed.
Too hard. The rod shot forward more than two centimeters—about half an inch.
“I can see very clearly now,” Reuven said facetiously.
“I’ll bet you can.” Tom was pissed. He’d shoved the goddamn camera right through the crown molding. He clambered down the ladder and went around the other side to examine his handiwork. He wasn’t impressed. “Jeezus H,” he said, hands on his hips. “Let’s do it all over again.”
12:36 P.M. The entire back of Tom’s coveralls was wet with perspiration. The front was covered with dust from the drilling. But he didn’t care. He stared at the image on the monitor and grinned. It had taken three attempts, but he’d finally gotten it right. He looked over at Reuven, who gave him an upturned thumb and a mischievous grin. “Am I that big an asshole?”
“You show real promise, Tom. A few more run-throughs and we’ll make you into a regular second-story guy.”
“Thanks.” It might have been easier if Reuven had done the drilling, but Tom had insisted on doing the work himself. “I’m simply a little out of practice is all.”
Tom noted the noncommittal expression on Reuven’s face. Who was he kidding? The last time Tom worked with silent drills was during the breaking-and-entering refresher he’d taken down at the Farm in 2002 as an excuse to get out of the office. He was on shaky ground here and he knew it.
“If we have to drill from the back, maybe it would be better if you did it.”
“Nah.” Reuven waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “You know what Suvorov said.”
“Suvorov?”
“Eighteenth-century Russian general. ‘Train hard, fight easy.’ That was his credo.” The Israeli jerked his thumb toward the wall section. “You’re getting the feel of it. We’ve got, what—a week perhaps, before we can move. By the time we do this for real, you’ll be fine.”
1:58 P . M .
RUE LAMBERT, MONTMARTRE
Tom thought, You have to hand it to the bad guys: they plan well. This frigging street is going to be impossible. Rue Lambert was narrow—barely wide enough for a panel truck. It was short—just over fifty meters in length. It was one-way—dead-ending into another one-way street. It was the kind of street on which people know one another, where the one small bistro served the same customers every day. Where the owner of the corner café knows everyone in the neighborhood by name and keeps a wary eye out for strangers. It was, all in all, a perfect milieu for countersurveillance. And a lousy environment in which to do the surveilling.
Oh, it was possible. If you had a crew of sixty. You could run them through as tourists and workers, changing clothes and appearances over a ten
-day period. Or if there was enough time to preplan, you could rent a flat—or break into one if the owners were away—and use it as an observation post. But Tom didn’t have sixty people, there was nothing for rent—he’d had his French employees check—and no one was on vacation. So there was no choice. They’d have to do this the hard way.
Tom eased the two wheels on the passenger’s side of the truck up onto the curb so traffic could pass. He and Reuven had changed into the anonymous sort of coveralls worn by tradesmen and laborers. The old tan Renault with its junk-filled cab and dented, rusty cargo bay didn’t rate a second look. Tom and Reuven had changed their appearances. Tom’s face was obscured by a thick mustache, and his hair—a wig—was frizzy brown and stuck out from under a knit cap. Reuven wore a neat beard and a full head of short gray hair.
As he parked, Tom angled the Renault so that his side-view mirror caught the entrance of the old house that sat adjacent to the bistro. He’d memorized the angle of Shahram Shahristani’s surveillance photograph, and the run-down bistro—L’Étrier was the name on the awning—had to be the place. The awning was rolled back and the tables and chairs had been removed.
Tom eased the door open, pulled a newspaper from between the seats, and extracted himself from the van. He tucked the newspaper under his arm and waited as Reuven opened the passenger-side door. They locked the vehicle, then ambled to the end of the street, toward the café, which was on the southwest corner where rue Lambert dead-ended into rue Nicolet. Tom pushed through the door. The place had the sour smell of stale beer and old cigarette smoke. He dropped onto one of the bar stools that sat facing the smoke-stained window, opened the newspaper, and turned his back to the bar.
Reuven walked across creaking floorboards to where the proprietor stood, cigarette dangling from his lips, his elbow resting on discolored copper, perusing a newspaper. He ordered two glasses of red wine. Tom watched as the man reached down and pulled an unlabeled bottle from the well, drew two smudged glasses off the shelf, gave them a halfhearted wipe-down, then filled them.
“Merci.” Reuven dropped coins onto the bar, picked up the glasses, walked over to where Tom was perched, and set them down.
Tom nodded at the Israeli, who drew a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his coveralls, pulled one out, then set the pack on the window shelf. The pack held a wide-angle video lens that transmitted a signal to a digital recorder in the truck. The high-definition images were date- and time-stamped.
The two men sat silently, sipped their wine, and scanned the street. L’Étrier was just emptying out. The bistro occupied the basement and
ground floor of a narrow, nineteenth-century four-story house. Above it, according to Tom’s research, there were four apartments. To the left of the restaurant was another four-story building of about the same vintage. The ground floor had once held some sort of shop. Now the shop had been gutted and the whole building was in the process of being renovated. Above the shop were six apartments—two to a floor—one of which was Ben Said’s safe house. Problem one was separating the intelligence wheat from the intelligence chaff so they’d know which flat to bug.
But for the moment, what Tom and Reuven wanted was to get a sense of rue Lambert’s rhythms and pace so they could find ways to adapt themselves to the street and become a part of the environment. Surveillance is one of the most basic yet difficult aspects of intelligence work. It requires long hours, intense concentration, flawless record keeping, and constant focus. A surveillant has to be able to hide in plain sight—much the same way as hunters or snipers camouflage their positions. Indeed, in many ways, surveilling is similar to hunting or sniping. A good hunter, for example, identifies the track used by his prey and sets up an ambush position long enough in advance so that the jungle, or the forest, or the mountain trail returns to its normal condition: the crickets chirp, the birds come and go, the insects resume their normal activities.
It’s much the same on a surveillance detail. If you’re using an OP23 to photograph a target, for example, you run a two- or even three-man team, one of whose eyes are looking through a telephoto lens every second of every minute of the day so there is absolutely no chance that the target will show himself and not be noted or photographed. Every single sighting is logged. Every individual entering and exiting the location is logged and photographed. The license plates, make, model, and physical description of every vehicle—cars, taxis, trucks, vans, motorcycles, bicycles, jitneys, rickshaws—that comes into contact with the target location is noted.
If audio surveillance is being conducted from an OP, simple but effective means have to be used to camouflage the listening devices, most of which have been developed by the technical section of the National Security Agency, which use lasers and other technical means to pick up sounds as low as a whisper at ranges up to 250 yards. Sometimes, for example, the surveillance team will use a technique that is commonly used by snipers or countersnipers working in urban environments. The team builds a motionless for long periods of time.
Indeed, fatigue is a critical factor in surveillance operations. It is mind-numbing to stare through a long lens, a pair of binoculars, or a spotting scope for hours on end. Concentration becomes hard to maintain. The mind wanders. Other factors also intrude. In vehicle-based surveillance operations, for example, any motion of the vehicle at all will give the team’s position away—something many law enforcement surveillance details find out the hard way. In Hollywood, surveillance is easy. You pull a car into an alley, slink below the dash, and do a Starsky and Hutch sneak-and-peek through the windshield. But that’s Hollywood. In real life, operators have to fight through boredom, monotony, and hour-after-hour, day-after-day, week-after-week tedium, but just…keep…going.
3:46 P.M. Reuven was on his fourth cigarette. Their wineglasses were still a third full. No one had entered or left the safe-house building and the workmen were starting to pack up and close down the ground-floor site for the day.
Tom had just lifted the wine to his lips when the cell phone in his coveralls vibrated. He set the glass down, pulled the phone out, and held it to his ear. “Allô.”
“C’est Tony. On peut parler?” Tony Wyman sounded stressed.
“Sure,” Tom answered in French. “What’s up?”
“I’ve just come in from the home office.”
Tom cracked a smile. “Bienvenue.”
“Stow it. The job’s off. Come back to the office. No need to waste your time waiting around where you are.”
“You’re kidding.”
“’Fraid not.” Wyman sighed. Tom could hear the man exhale. He sounded uncharacteristically exhausted—almost as if he’d been beaten. “Get moving—now. We have to talk.”
21
3 NOVEMBER 2003
6:37 P . M .
223 RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. HONORÉ
“THEY WHAT?” Tom looked across the desk at Antony Wyman. Wyman had been flying all day. He hadn’t even checked into his hotel, and yet he was impeccably turned out. How the man could do that was something Tom couldn’t fathom. “Who shut me down? I’ll talk to them. C’mon, Tony—let me talk to whoever it was.”
Wyman shook his head. “You know that’s impossible.”
Tom pulled uncomfortably at his wet shirt collar. “How can they be so stupid?” It had been a rush to get back. He and Reuven had made their way from rue Lambert to the warehouse, changed clothes and IDs, then run a cleaning route to the safe house, where they’d changed clothes and identities once more. Since it was rush hour, Tom used the motorcycle to get to the 4627 offices near the Place des Ternes. It had started to rain just as he’d sped through the Place du Brésil and he’d gotten soaked. He’d been riding alone. Reuven declined Tom’s invitation to accompany him, saying there was some trolling to be done and they’d catch up in the morning.
Tom’s curt tone reflected his mood. “I was just starting to make some headway, damnit.”
“They don’t care about headway,” Wyman growled. He glanced
around the office with the look of a drill sergeant making a white-glove inspection, then he refocused on Tom. “Look, the seventh floor24 is running scared these days. There are more CYA leaks coming out of Langley than I’ve ever seen—and I’d be very surprised if a lot of them weren’t sanctioned from the top as a way of putting some blue sky between CIA and the administration on these Iraq screwups. As much as I dislike admitting it, politics plays a part in what we do. Sometimes we just have to back off—delay taking action until we can find another way of achieving our goals without making waves.”
“You’re sounding like one of them, Tony.” Tom wasn’t willing to accept that kind of rationalization—even from someone like Wyman. “Goddamnit, this is too important. I’m onto something big here. Immense.”
“I understand. I know the stakes, Tom. More than that—it’s personal. These sons of bitches killed Jim McGee and I want their heads on pikes as much as you do. But we’re up against a six-hundred-pound gorilla here and its name is bureaucracy. Langley insists on total control, and right now they’re yanking at our leash and saying, ‘Sit; stay.’ Don’t forget—we’re contractors.”
“We’re operators, and they’re idiots.” Tom clenched his fists. “Look at how Langley dealt with MJ’s stuff.”
“When has incompetence ever stopped anyone at Langley from becoming a division chief—or DCI, for that matter?”
“Jeezus, Tony—”
“Look, I’m more pissed than you are.” Wyman’s palm slapped the desk. “It’s absurd: I was told point-blank there is no Tariq Ben Said.”
“But—”
“Oh, they admit there’s a bomber out there. But they insist that by laying low and setting out traplines, the system will find him before he can do any damage.”
Wyman caught the incredulous look on Tom’s face and cut him off before he could speak. “Don’t ask me which system and what traplines, Tom, because I have no more idea what the hell they’re talking about than you do. Worse, they take a harder line on Imad Mugniyah. It wasn’t Mugniyah. Not in Gaza; and not in the surveillance photographs Shahram took on rue Lambert. The official line is that Mugniyah is somewhere in Lebanon, running Hezbollah’s operations against the Israelis and surveilling the American embassy. He is not involved with al-Qa’ida. And he is not partnered with Tariq Ben Said, because there is no Tariq Ben Said. Full stop.”
