And he could not claim that he hadn’t known what to expect.
Antoine Obeng was a thug, a rebel warlord who had secured an official government post through guileful manipulation after the fractures of civil war were weakly repaired. Now he was chief of police in the nation’s capital, a title that validated his ego and legitimized the power he relished above all else. But he continued his behind-the-scenes leadership of the outlaw militias that roamed the city at will and held the inestimably productive mines in the countryside by force of arms.
Much could be said for his endurance in a nation where political control changed hands often and violently, and death by assassination was the fate of most competing warlords.
Nonetheless, it was only the convenient location of the top-end hotel and its exceptional services catering to diplomatic and business travelers from abroad that had curbed the visitor’s annoyance over the inexhaustible convolutions of the bargaining.
A man of rigorous discipline, he preferred sticking to a tight routine. Every morning since his arrival he had taken a swim in the indoor pool at six o’clock, a time when few others were outside their rooms and he stood the best chance of having it to himself. It was also the one time each day he felt at ease moving about without his personal guard, wanting an interval of solitude.
After taking the elevator up from his room to the twelfth-floor recreational area, he would put on his bathing trunks in the locker room between the gym and solarium, rinse off in the shower, then walk through the short connecting corridor to the glass-enclosed pool and do his laps for precisely an hour.
On the first day, a garrulous Dutch banker had intruded on his privacy and asked whether he cared to have breakfast in the hotel restaurant after finishing his “dip.” Shunning interaction with strangers, he had tersely declined and ignored the man until he’d backed off.
In the three days since, he had found the pool empty and gone about his laps without disturbance.
Then, today, he had reached the locker room and again encountered undesired company.
Habitually alert, he whisked his eyes over the men inside. Both were fit and in their midthirties. One had blond hair, the other brown. They were wearing workout clothes and speaking American English to each other with the easy familiarity of close friends or associates. The blond-haired man had a somewhat tousled appearance and a light growth of beard. He was neatly hanging his street apparel in a locker. His companion sat removing items from his gym bag. A folded towel and sports bottle were on the bench next to him.
Superficially, they seemed of a type. Professionals on an overseas junket. Of no particular interest to him besides being trespassers upon what he had come to regard as his proprietary domain.
But he trusted the unconscious perception of environmental cues we call instinct. And something in the air told him to be careful.
As he stood inside the entryway, the men gave him mannerly nods. He noted them without response and went to the nearest free locker to the door, an ear attuned to their conversation.
“The taxis around here, Jesus, that ride from the airport gave me bruises where I sit. Plus he must have just missed getting us crunched at least twice,” said the man with the twenty-four-hour stubble. He yawned. “Thought I’d never make it to the conference.”
The one on the bench looked amused. “You should’ve listened to my advice, taken a metered cab. Their drivers have to be licensed. And they carry identity cards.”
“Like that’s going to do you any good. Or you really think the insurance companies pay off around here? Assuming they have insurance companies.”
“Maybe not, but you’d know who to curse out for putting you in a body cast.”
The bristle-cheeked man grinned and reached inside the locker to adjust his trousers on the hook. The other’s hand was returning to his bag.
Without letting another instant pass, the morning swimmer abruptly abandoned his locker and strode back out the door.
The pair in the room exchanged glances.
His hand coming out of the gym bag with a .22 N.A.A. Black Widow, the man on the bench sprang to his feet and slipped the five-shot minirevolver into the belly band under his sweatshirt.
The stubbled man simultaneously turned from his open locker, leaving its door flung wide. From his trouser pocket he’d removed a holstered Beretta 950 BS semiautomatic, his own choice of a peekaboo gun. He stuffed the deep-concealment holster into the pocket of his loosely fitting workout pants.
Both trotted to the doorway, then slowed as they went into the hall and looked up and down its length.
Neither saw any sign of the swimmer.
They split off in opposite directions, each using restraint to keep from moving too quickly. If the swimmer had about-faced for a reason unconnected to their presence—as they hoped was the case—it would do no good to raise his suspicions now.
Reaching the bank of three elevators, the brown-haired man glanced at the floor indicators above their doors. The numbers over the first and last cars were dark. The second elevator in line was descending, the number eleven and Down arrow lit up. He pressed the call button to be certain that the stationary cars weren’t sitting on his floor, the swimmer perhaps having ducked inside to wait out his pursuers, trick them into thinking he’d taken the other car. Send them chasing it via the stairwell while he stayed put.
No such luck.
Both cars began to rise from the ground-floor entrance lobby, obviously unoccupied.
He returned his eyes to the indicator panel above the middle car.
The eight had flashed on.
Seven, six, five...
The elevator stopped at the fourth floor and its indicator light blinked off.
He frowned, looked down the hall at his partner, shook his head.
“Shit,” he muttered to himself.
The Wildcat had retreated to his den.
“I can’t figure where we slipped up,” the blond man was explaining over his handheld radio. “One minute he’s walking through the door, heading toward a locker, then he just takes off. In and out ...”
“Never mind,” Tom Ricci said into his communications headset. He’d heard the locker room banter through installed surveillance mikes and thought the slipup was evident. You went incognito, you stuck with what you knew, kept your act simple. Instead, they’d gotten too clever for their own good.
There was an impermeable tunnel of silence over the radio. Then, “How do you want us to proceed?”
Ricci took a breath. Along with a couple of snoop techs named Gallagher and Thompson, he was across the street from the hotel, in an office hastily rented through a cutout and used as a spy post for the past several days.
“Stay at the hotel,” he said. “You’ll hear from me.”
More silence. The blond man at the other end of the trunked connection understood what Ricci’s order meant. He and his buddy were finished. Removed from the action, and soon to be cut loose from the fledgling RDT. Good night, take care, see you again sometime.
“Okay,” he said, his regret and disappointment evident despite the digital scrambling process that robbed so much tonality from the human voice.
Ricci aborted contact and passed Thompson’s headset back to him. He wasn’t unsympathetic to the snatch team but neither were their hurt feelings of paramount concern to him. The bungled opportunity at the hotel meant things were about to get a lot more difficult for him and the rest of his task force.
They had maintained a constant watch on Le Chaut Sauvage—the Wildcat—almost from the moment the terrorist arrived in the country, acting on reliable word from a plant among Antoine Obeng’s inner circle. In essence, their operational model was the Mossad’s abduction of Adolf Eichmann from his safe haven in Argentina a half century ago: success achieved through simplicity of planning and execution. A small team watches the target’s patterns of movement, subdues him when a clean opening is presented, rustles him out of the country.
No witnesses
, no fuss, no muss.
There were, however, some major differences between the past and present scenarios. The Israeli agents had shadowed their target for months without interference from Argentinian officials, who had a decent political relationship with their government, were aware of their activities in the country, and had lent them a sort of passive endorsement. By contrast, Ricci’s team had no such temperate climate in which to carry out a mission that had necessarily been planned on short notice. They were undermanned and underresourced. They were in a nation that was on the shakiest diplomatic terms with America and just recently had been taken off the State Department’s list of designated terrorist sponsors. The capital’s top cop was a crooked, venal son of a bitch who exercised his power in shameless cahoots with bands of khat-chewing thieves and looters. And, most significantly, the Wildcat was in the city at his direct invitation, enjoying the protective graces of the police and criminal militias that Obeng commanded with equal impunity.
It was a difficult and potentially ugly situation for Ricci and his men. If they got into a pinch, there would be no U.S. liaison—no one at all—to provide a bailout. They were entirely on their own string.
You asked for it, he thought, you got it.
Thompson had turned to him from the multiplex transmitter.
“What’s next?” he said.
Ricci leaned back in his chair. The answer to that question depended on his assessment of what the Wildcat had or had not come to suspect and, moreover, what his degree of suspicion might be—which meant Ricci needed to slip into the skin of a mercenary killer and international fugitive. The scary part was that it came easily to him. So easily it had made him close to dysfunctional when he was working undercover with the Boston P.D. So easily he’d eventually requested a transfer out of the Special Investigations Unit on psychological grounds.
And here he was again. Back where he didn’t want to be. He could know his enemy, see the world through his eyes, walk in his shoes. Sure he could. It was a natural inclination that he distrusted for the lines it blurred, an effortless reach into the darkness within him.
If he were the Wildcat, what would he do?
Had the topic of conversation in the locker room been the weather or hotel food, had the two men inside been exchanging war stories about fatherhood, home repairs, deadlines, simple stuff, chances were that the Wildcat would have hardly paid attention to them, and they’d have been able to make their intended move on him as he got ready for his swim. But instead, they chose to gripe about the local taxi service, and that had seemed unconvincing even to Ricci. An American traveling to this country for a business conference, staying at an expensive, first-class hotel, was no small potato with whatever firm he represented. It was far more likely than not that a courtesy car would be waiting for him at the airline terminal. And that the driver engaged by his corporate hosts would treat him like royalty.
Okay, then. The two men’s small talk had struck a false note, and their quarry had been sensitive to it. But not all hosts were equally hospitable. It wasn’t inconceivable that they’d have taken cabs from the airport, and it wasn’t as if they’d done anything that was a tangible and conclusive tip-off—revealing their firearms too soon, for instance. Would their clumsiness have been enough to make the Wildcat drop out of sight, abandon an immensely profitable deal that was well on the way toward finalization? Or would he instead opt to take extra precautions and accelerate the pace of his talks, clinch things before leaving the country?
Ricci stared at the ceiling and thought in silence a while longer. He imagined the tactile sensation of holding the illicit diamonds in hand, their weight and smoothness, his fingers clenched tightly around the forbidden gems.
Then he sat forward, looked at Thompson and Gallagher.
“We’re shifting to our fallback options,” he said. “Let’s have the intercept teams keep close tabs on the airport and other departure routes just in case. But five gets you ten our guy isn’t going anywhere before he pays Obeng another visit.”
Ricci’s bet was on the money.
It was late afternoon when Le Chaut Sauvage appeared. Two of his bodyguards had preceded him out of the hotel, looking up and down the street, scouting for any indication of a threat. Then one of them made a discreet all-clear gesture with his hand, and the Wildcat emerged onto the sidewalk, another couple of guards trailing a few steps behind.
Minutes earlier, a line of five police vehicles had arrived at the entrance, two standard patrol cars followed by a diesel-fueled South African Lion 1, reinforced from frame to engine block with ballistic-and-blast-resistant carbon fiber monocoque. After pulling the big, armored four-by-four up to the curb, several of its uniformed occupants had exited and leaned against its heavy flank with their arms folded imposingly across their chests.
The group from the hotel moved straight toward the Lion 1. One of the uniforms standing beside it opened the rear door, and the Wildcat climbed in back between the original pair of bodyguards to have left the hotel. The second two hovered beside the vehicle until his door shut and then went to the lead police car and got into it.
Behind drawn shades in the office across the street, Ricci and his techs watched on an LCD panel as the motorcade pulled into the two-way avenue bisecting the downtown area and then rolled eastward, the pictures feeding from 180-degree trackable spy eyes suctioned to the windowpane.
Ricci glanced at the city map on the wall above the monitoring station. East was toward police headquarters, Obeng’s official seat of corruption, its location circled on the map with a red highlighter. His unofficial cradle lay west of the downtown area. Ricci had penned the words “Gang Central Station” above the blue circle that marked its coordinates.
A vertical crease etched itself in the middle of his forehead. Something wasn’t kosher about what he’d just observed. A few somethings. If the Wildcat believed he might be under surveillance, why stroll out the front of the hotel, head so openly to the cop station, make the trip there surrounded by a goddamned cortege?
“Alert the strike team at Gang Central that company’s on its way,” he abruptly said to Thompson.
Thompson spun around in his chair and looked at him. “Will do,” he said, sounding confused. His eyes went to the wall map. “But—”
“I can read that as well as you,” Ricci said. “The whole scene in front of the hotel was a dupe. Like a game of three-card monte. Soon as Wildcat reaches police HQ, he’s out the back door and into a different vehicle.” He paused, his mind racing. “We’ll keep one of the tail cars on him. Let’s have the others sit outside the cop station, make themselves just conspicuous enough so our man feels comfortable he’s outsmarted us,” he said.
Comprehension dawned on Thompson’s face. He nodded briskly and turned to the multiplexer.
Ricci chewed the inside of his mouth, still thinking hard, making sure he’d covered all his bases. Then he rose from his chair and grabbed the shoulder-holstered FN Five-Seven pistol that was hung over the backrest.
“Have Simmons and Grillo bring around the tac van,” he said, and strapped on the holster. Basics first; he would finish gearing up en route. “I’m heading out to meet them.”
Since before the civil war, Antoine Obeng had presided over his rackets from a five-story commercial frame building set back from the street on a low hill in one of the city’s quieter outlying neighborhoods. A paved blacktop turnaround gave motor access to the main doors and led to the entrance and exit ramps of its sunken parking garage. Descending behind it were three or four yards of terraced slope and manicured shrubbery, below which the neat plants yielded to a snarl of wild, thorny growth that went down another thirty feet to the bottom of the hillside and then extended outward into a small, flat, muddy barrens.
On the ground floor were two businesses that Obeng owned and controlled through tamely obedient surrogates : the main offices of a shipping/mailing company and a travel agency. These afforded the warlord with useful fronts for launderi
ng a portion of his criminal earnings, distributing forged documents, and orchestrating a multiplicity of smuggling operations, a partial index of which included the transport of stolen luxury cars and antiquities, bootlegged music and video recordings, illegal weapons and narcotics, and the meat, hides, horns, and hooves of exotic animals killed by poachers in wilderness preserves all across central and western Africa.
Like everyone else in the city, the thirty or so employees of Obeng’s front businesses were aware of his command of the militias and indeed could not have possibly failed to notice the regular comings and goings of his hoodlum lackeys. But only a few knowingly participated in his lawless undertakings or profited from them in any way. The majority of these men and women showed up each morning for an honest day’s work, went home to their families at quitting time, and brought home modest paychecks at the end of the week.
They were what Tom Ricci had called “solid citizens” back when he’d carried a detective’s tin.
They were also convenient human shields for Obeng.
From Ricci’s standpoint, this was not good.
As he sloshed through a foul-smelling drainage culvert in a near squat, his boots awash in brown sludge, his arms, legs, and ballistic helmet soiled with wet clots of grime that had peeled like fresh scabs off the curved, close-pressing top and sides of the channel, Ricci knew the worst things that could go wrong with his maneuver would be having innocent civilians taken hostage, injured, or, even more unthinkable to him, killed during its execution.
Morally wrong, operationally wrong, politically wrong. Rollie Thibodeau had correctly pointed out aboard the Pomona that the mere presence of his RDT on foreign soil shredded several chapters of international law. Without question, the course of action on which they were now embarked would trash the rest of the rule book.
Bio-Strike (2000) Page 12
