by Craig Reed
"Who are the Watt Brothers?" Naomi asked.
"A couple of nice boys. If their home, they'll help us."
"Help us with what?"
"A diversion, my dear. The Watt boys and their friends are very good at creating mayhem."
* * *
Jamil Al-Farooq looked up from the BMW's engine and glanced at the house of the target and the unknown car in the driveway. He had already radioed in the car's license plate, and found out it was a rental. He didn't know where Hassan had gotten the information from, and he didn't care. He wasn't paid to think, but he was making good money and he was encouraged to indulge in his penchant for violence. Right now, his orders were to watch the house and follow whoever got into the rental car.
Jamil straightened up to look at his partner, Ishack Adeel, who was sitting in the passenger seat, reading a newspaper. Jamil couldn't hide the expression of anger. Ishack was pretty much useless and Jamil had no idea why Tamrez had put the two of them together. He reached over and tapped on the passenger's side window. Ishack looked up and rolled down the window.
"What?"
Jamil's hand twitched, fighting the urge to pull his pistol from its shoulder holster and shoot Ishack in the face. "I could use some help!" he growled.
Ishack shrugged. "It's only one house. Shouldn’t take both of us."
A group of young teenage boys came straggling down the street. They stopped and looked at the BMW.
"Kif!" one of them said. "You have a problem with your jammie, mister?"
"Just a small one," Jamil said, trying to sound pleasant.
Suddenly, the other boys clustered around Jamil and started asking questions.
"Is that a BMW?"
"What sort of gas mileage does it get?"
"Was it expensive to buy?"
"Why did you get a blue one?"
"Can we see the engine?"
The boys moved toward the front of the car. Jamil rapped hard on Ishack's window and motioned for him to get out. Ishack shot an ugly glare at Jamil, opened the door and exited. They moved to the front of the car, using their bodies to force the boys away. The boys moved slowly, still peppering the two men with questions about the car, their clothes, and even Jamil's shoes.
They were so intent on shooing the boys away from the car that they didn't see another boy crouched behind the BMW. He held a long tube attached to a can and was spraying the can's contents up the car's tailpipe as fast as possible. After thirty seconds, he finished the can and dropped it into a bag he had slung over one shoulder. He rose and ran to join the others, slapping one of his friends in the back.
"Tag!" he yelled. He continued running down the road, turning left at the intersection. With a shout, the rest of the boys ran after him, any interest in the car suddenly forgotten.
Jamil watched them disappear around the corner, then turned to snarl at Ishack. "You watch the house!"
He got back into the car. Ishack glared at him, but went around the front and began looking at the engine. Jamil glanced at his watch and decided to wait another ten minutes before he and Ishack moved to a different observation location.
A few minutes later, Ishack closed the hood and walked to the passenger-side door. Jamil could see two people, a white man and a black woman, getting into the rental car. Jamil started the engine as Ishack climbed into the passenger seat. The engine caught, idled for a few second, then died. Surprised, Jamil tried starting the car again, but this time, it wouldn't even start. The rental car was making a U-turn in the wide driveway when Jamil tried a third time, then a fourth.
The rental car turned left onto the street and drove out of sight. Several more attempts by Jamil failed to start the car. After fifteen minutes, he admitted defeat and produced his cell phone to report his failure.
Hassan's Estate
The study was Hassan's favorite room in the house. It was where he did most of his business, both legal and illegal. The room’s furnishings were a testament to Hassan's wealth, from the antique desk to the 16th century grandfather's clock, to the finely crafted Iranian rugs. Here, Hassan usually felt powerful and secure.
But the presence of Yasir Ilshu in this sanctuary was robbing Hassan of those feelings. Even Tamrez's normally comforting presence was not easing Hassan's worry. The ICA assassin was sitting in one of the chairs in front of Hassan's desk, looking relaxed almost to the point of boredom, although Hassan knew that was an illusion. Ilshu thought he was as corrupt as the rest of the infidels, and if Ilshu was ordered to kill Hassan, he would do so without hesitation.
At the moment, Hassan was listening to Jamil's terse excuses for failing to follow a rental car that had left a home he was watching. The excuse involved something about a pack of boys and expanding foam being squirted into the tailpipe.
After listening for a bit, Hassan shouted into the phone in Arabic, "I am not interested in your excuses, you stupid camel jockey! Car repair costs are coming out of yours and Ishack's wages, and I will make sure that Tamrez gives you and that sand flea Ishack the worse jobs in the organization for the next six months! Is that understood? Now get the car towed and get back here in less than three hours, or don't bother coming back at all!"
He slammed down the retro-looking phone's handset back into its cradle and leaned back.
"Is there a problem?" Ilshu asked.
"Nothing I cannot take care of," Hassan replied calmly. "When do you leave?"
"Plane leaves in four hours."
"You do as you must, but I definitely do not like not knowing who this new player is."
"It doesn't matter," Ilshu said, dismissing the idea with a wave of his hand. "Aswegen is dead, the records are destroyed. They can't do much of anything."
"Much of anything? They killed nearly a dozen of my best recruits!" Hassan retorted. "It will take me months to recruit enough new blood to replace them!"
Ilshu appraised Hassan coolly. "Perhaps you should focus more on quality instead of quantity. Your men were not sufficiently trained. Most of them shot off full clips with one pull of the trigger. They also had no tactical sense, no idea how to work together. Against unarmed sheep, they did fine, but against wolves like those from last night? It was they who were the sheep and they were slaughtered. Very disappointing."
Hassan felt his face become flush. "This group could become a threat!"
"A threat to you, maybe," Ilshu said. He let his eyes drift around the room. "You have plenty to lose."
Hassan's jaw tightened in anticipation of an acerbic response, but before he could speak, the phone rang. He snatched it up.
"Yes?" He listened for a minute, then said, "Keep a watch on the place. I'm sending help. Good job."
He hung up and looked at Tamrez. "They're staying at the Cape Africa Hotel, rooms 418, 419, and 420. Take some men and eliminate the problem. Take a couple alive if possible, but dead is just as good. Search their rooms and bring back any data that might shed light on who these people are."
Tamrez nodded. "Do you want to use any of the recruits?"
"No. Our men only. We're dealing with professionals and we will treat them as such from this point forward." He looked over at Ilshu as he said the last part of the sentence, then back to Tamrez.
"No mistakes and no mercy."
"Yes sir."
After Tamrez left, Hassan leaned back in his chair and stared at Ilshu. "That should take care of the problem."
Ilshu returned the stare with cold eyes of his own.
"I hope so, but don't be so sure.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Cape Africa Hotel
Dante Alvarez was uneasy.
The others had checked in with him and Danielle, relaying the name of Kamal Hassan for Danielle to research as well as that of another possible connection to SeaStar Ventures. Dante knew Danielle well enough to know she was in full data-mining mode, not in the mood to talk.
Something nagged at Dante's mind as he stared out the window at the city. His cumulative experience with the Se
cret Service was telling him that something was wrong, but there was nothing he could put his finger on. He looked back at Danielle, who sat hunched over her laptop, while the tablet next to her ran a different program.
"I'm going to take a look around," he said, moving away from the window.
Danielle looked up. "Something wrong?"
"My subconscious is telling me yes, but I don't see anything to confirm it. I'm going to go down to the lobby and maybe walk around the building. When I come back, I'll use three knocks, pause for a count of two, then two more knocks."
Danielle pulled out her H&K SOCOM, and placed it next to her. "Don't forget to knock.”
Dante nodded, then checked his own pistol. While combat was not Danielle's primary job, she had been rigorously trained by both Tanner and Liam so that she wasn't a liability if she did get involved in a firefight.
He left the suite and headed to the elevators. The hallway was typical of hotels everywhere, a thick, multi-colored carpet, textured wallpaper in shades of browns and grays, the room doors white with golden room numbers, and overhead recessed lighting. The hallway was almost quiet except for the faint sounds of a TV from a room he passed on his left, and a shower from a room on his right.
He smiled and nodded to a young couple who looked to be tourists emerging from a room ahead of him. He was tall, athletic looking, and blond, while she was shorter, short reddish hair, and on thin side. "Good morning," the man said pleasantly in English with a strong Dutch accent.
"Good morning," Dante replied. "Going out to see the sights?"
"Yes," the man answered. "Do you happen to know any interesting places close by? It’s our first day here, and we want to start nearby."
They walked to the elevators, Dante recalling what knowledge he'd gleaned from a Capetown tourist magazine he'd read on the plane. The couple, on their honeymoon from the Netherlands, were friendly and polite, a change from most of the people Dante dealt with when in the field as a member of OUTCAST. The man, Gilpin, did all the talking, while Anke, his bride, stayed silent, content to let her new husband lead the conversation.
When they emerged from the elevator, Gilpin asked, "Richard, are you here on business or vacation?"
"Business," Dante said, unflinching at the mention of his cover name. "A few of my colleges are out running down industry leads, so I’m holding down the fort here until they get back."
Gilpin nodded. "What sort of business are you in?"
They walked into the lobby and Dante's senses screamed trouble. The lobby wasn't huge, but still large enough to have a gift shop, a restaurant, a couple of sitting areas, and the front desk. A couple dozen people milled about the lobby, some entering, some leaving.
"Information security," he said, eyes scanning the room, picking out three men who didn't seem to belong.
"Indeed?" Gilpin said, not noticing that he had lost Dante's full interest. "Do you do any work in the Netherlands?"
"No." Dante turned his head so that he could see the three men out of the corner of his eye. The trio, all Middle Eastern, with dark hair and sun-soaked skin, was sitting in the lobby near each other. One dressed in a suit was reading a newspaper, while a second, wearing an oversized rugby jersey and jeans, was sprawled in a chair, apparently asleep. The third, also in a suit, stood near the front doors, perusing a rack of brochures.
"I hope to see you again."
Dante was mentally startled, but managed to hide it behind a smile. "You too, Gilpin, Anke. Have a good day."
Dante changed directions toward the front desk as the couple walked across the lobby, toward the front doors. As they did so, all three men, even the one that had been faking sleep, watched the couple walk out. The two sitting looked at the third man by the door, who gave a subtle shake of his head.
As the fake sleeper readjusted himself in the chair, for an instant Dante could see the outline of a pistol in the man's belt, under the jersey. A jolt of electricity spiked down Dante's spine. He glanced at the other two, looking for the tell-tale bulge of weapons. Now that he was focused, Dante noticed that the other two were also armed.
Senses now fully awakened, Dante surreptitiously scanned the lobby again, looking for anyone else that was suspicious. He hadn't spotted anyone else by the time he reached the front desk, but his instincts told him something was going to happen, and soon.
He exchanged pleasantries with the desk clerk, picked up a copy of a newspaper from the rack, folded it under his right arm and walked back toward the elevator. As he did so, four more Middle Eastern men walked in, and immediately the gunman by the door stepped away from the brochures and started talking to the largest of the four newcomers. Dante continued walking, appearing to ignore the discussion by the front door. He palmed his cell phone and pushed the preset for Danielle. She answered on the second ring.
"Yes?"
"We may have a problem."
"What is it?"
Dante walked up to the nearest of the two elevators and pushed the button. “There are seven men in the lobby, all Middle Eastern, three of them armed."
"Let me check the hotel security camera."
Dante heard her tapping on the keyboard. One of the first things she had done when the team had taken the rooms was to hack into the hotel's security system.
"Okay… Where are you now?"
The elevator's signal dinged and the doors opened to Dante's right. He waited until the half a dozen people got out of the car before he stepped in and pushed the "6" button, the phone still held to his ear.
"On the elevator," he said. The door closed and the car started rising.
"I have you and I have our guys," Danielle reported. "A couple of them just went into the restaurant and two more into the gift shop. One's heading for the bathroom and the other two are sitting in the lobby, far apart from each other."
"Setting a trap?"
"I have no idea, but I'm calling the others right now."
* * *
From his location at a table just inside the hotel restaurant’s entrance, Wahid Tamrez could see most of the lobby and the two men he'd left sitting there. He was seated with Dahab, one of his most trusted men. They'd both ordered coffee, and to satisfy his sweet tooth, Dahab also ordered biscuits. Neither man said much to the other as they waited for their prey.
One of Hassan's secrets of success was that he had contacts everywhere in South Africa and beyond, and at all levels of society. Hotels were one of the best places to pick up valuable information and to scope out targets to either rob or kidnap for either ransom or the underground slavery market. It hadn't taken too long once word got out that Hassan was looking for six individuals when a clerk from the Cape Africa Hotel called.
The employee described the six people as “definitely Americans”—four men and two women, one of the women being black — and how all six had come in early that morning after what one of them described as, "One hell of a night on the town." He had also said that four of them had since left, and he didn't know when they would be back.
Tamrez had wanted to kill the two who were already up in the rooms, then take out the others as they arrived, but Hassan vetoed the idea when Tamrez called to report his progress.
"I don't want to take the chance any of them will get away," Hassan said. "Wait until they they're all in their rooms at once, then get them. If we kill two of them first, the others may get suspicious if they call their associates and receive no reply. Don’t do anything to spook them. And remember, make sure one of them is still alive for questioning, especially if they are American.”
The possibility that Americans were involved worried Tamrez. He knew the Northstar Venture had a valuable cargo, but for once, Hassan had not told him what that cargo was. If the Americans were interested in SeaStar Ventures, which almost certainly meant they were interested in the unknown cargo, then that could lead them to Hassan's connections with the ICA.
As he sipped his coffee, Tamrez considered the clerk behind the front desk. The man
had run up a gambling debt of over fifty thousand rand in one of Hassan's establishments, and was eager to do something about it. In return for clearing his debt, the clerk had agreed to signal Tamrez when the other Americans arrived.
Under the circumstances, Tamrez had decided to let the targets go up to their rooms, then go up and kill them there, out of sight of the public. He would lead a team to hit all three rooms at once, killing them before they could react. Then they would escape down the fire stairs and drive away before the police showed up.
To steer the authorities away from investigating the coming massacre, Tamrez decided to use a trick he'd learned in the past. One of his men was carrying a briefcase with half a kilo of heroin, twenty thousand U.S. dollars, a testing kit, syringes, and a few pairs of latex gloves. Once the targets were dead, they would disperse the briefcase's contents and the room to make it look like a drug deal gone bad. With a little pressure from Hassan's agents inside the SAPS, the matter would be dropped and the case listed as “gang violence."
Tamrez waited with the patience of a long-time predator. His men were spread out all over the place outside. The net was cast. If things went right, it would all be over with in less than five minutes.
Now, all he needed was for the Americans to show up…
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Using the conference call app on their smart phones, the four OUTCAST members in the field listened to both Danielle and Dante's descriptions of the hotel situation.
"Any chance we're being paranoid?" Liam asked.
"Not from where I'm sitting," Naomi replied. "According to Ashcroft, Hassan has eyes everywhere, and we know for a fact he had people watching Ashcroft’s house."
"And they're armed," Dante added. "Just pistols as far as I can tell, but they might have heavier firepower hidden nearby. A couple of them were carrying briefcases."
"Dani," Tanner said, "are there any other guests who might have something these guys would be interested in? Or is it only us?”
Danielle’s reply was immediate. "I've checked. Mostly tourists and businesspeople that are in fields not usually associated with criminal activity. There's ten or twelve Arabs loitering around the hotel, which is a hell of a lot for a robbery or kidnapping."
