The Cypriot said, “If we move the Syrian fucker, he’ll know—”
Asher interrupted quietly, “Please do it,” and disconnected.
Schullman looked up from his laptop. “Uptown. West Side.”
Asher said, “Thank you. Can you lead the mobile team, please?”
Schullman shrugged into his jacket, hiding a shoulder holster and a hand cannon. “And Daria?”
The faint echo of a smile crossed Asher’s thin features. “I don’t think we need worry. She’ll be there.”
“But how—”
Asher patted him on the shoulder. “That’s Daria. When she dances, she always likes to lead.”
* * *
Syrian Agent Khalid Belhadj’s commuter train was just reaching the Hudson River when his cell phone vibrated. He confirmed that the call was being routed through a secure server in Estonia, then accepted the text message.
Belhadj returned his phone to his pocket. He wore a shapeless dun raincoat, brown trousers, shoddy oxfords. He knew he looked and moved like a soldier, so he’d added a brimmed hat, a few sizes too large for his head. The brim hid his granite-hard eyes and watchful stare. The baggy clothes hid his rigid, on-point body language. The coat hid a Springfield .45 handgun that could punch a hole through cinder block.
He pondered the message. It seemed his meeting was being moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The change of venue would have made Belhadj suspicious. Except he’d been suspicious about each and every aspect of the meeting for days now. The change of plan didn’t trigger further suspicion; it confirmed his instincts.
* * *
Daria remembered one of her trainers in Israeli Intelligence expounding on the subject of countersurveillance: “You don’t shoot birds in the bushes, idiot! You spook them, get them to fly. Surveillance can be easy to hide but difficult to transport.”
From her second-story perch in the Hyatt bar, Daria could not tell which unmoving trucks, which idle pedestrians, which slowly cruising taxis had been watching Forty-second Street, waiting for her. Hiding in plain sight.
Until they weren’t.
She caught the motion of the long, white truck with the logo of a film company, as well as five pedestrians who, simultaneously, touched their ears or glanced around, then hurried away in the same direction. Individually, they had blended into the scene nicely. Now choreographically mobile, they became a unit, an ensemble.
That wasn’t what worried Daria.
No. It was the movement on at least two, possibly three, roofs. Snipers.
This was not a benign surveillance unit. This was a kill squad.
* * *
In Langley, John Broom spun around, located Nanette Sylvestri, the Person in Charge. The tall, gangly woman towered over most everyone else in the Shark Tank. She was willow slim, with tightly cropped hair the color of old nickels. She’d been in the agency for nearly thirty years and had run many operations. She was the one you called in to run the Shark Tank for big events like today.
“Nanette?”
Her eyes were glued to the eight flat-screen monitors that reflected real-time intelligence from Forty-second Street. She nodded, acknowledging she had heard him, but keeping her eyes darting from screen to screen.
“Something’s wrong here.”
She offered a grim smile. “You think? We’re out of place.”
“No,” John said, “It’s something else.”
Six
The tool Owen Cain Thorson used to regain control of Operation Pegasus—the name selected at random by a computer somewhere at Langley—wasn’t some high-tech CIA gizmo. It was Google Maps. He typed in the intersection the Gibron woman had named.
He was pissed about being caught off guard like this, but he refused to let his team see that. Rather, he exuded an easy calm that seemed to indicate:
No worries. We got this
.
“It’s a busy intersection,” he told the men in the truck as well as those on the streets, the rooftop shooters and the Shark Tank at Langley. “Subway stop, bus stop, tons of foot traffic, retail in every direction.”
Translation: tactically, Seventy-second and Broadway was a circus.
Another agent turned in his seat. “I sent Daniels ahead on his motorcycle. We’ll need four or five parking spaces for this freaking whale.”
Owen said, “Good, thank you,” his eyes locked on the Google map, toggling between satellite images and the gridded map image. “Skyhook: status, please.”
* * *
The leader of the three-man sniper team had been on the roof of the Grand Hyatt. He hopped down maintenance stairs, three stairs at a time, his rifle in a golf bag on his back. “Copy! We are on the move but you’re gonna get there first!”
The man carried a British-made L115A3 long-range rifle, which fires a heavy, 8.6 millimeter bullet that, over greater distances, is less likely to be deflected by wind than the average bullet. His other shooters carried similar weapons.
“Copy that, Skyhook.” Thorson peered at the computerized map. “We have a fifteen-story building to the northeast. We have a twelve-story building to the northwest. Both with good line of sight. We are working on getting you access to both. We have a lot of civilians on foot but…” he paused, lied, “… we’re working on a way to clear some of that before you’re green-lit.”
The sniper team leader burst out of a maintenance door of the Hyatt just as Daria was exiting the hotel on the far side.
* * *
In the Shark Tank beneath Langley, John Broom looked up at the tall scarecrow of a woman who ran the room.
Nanette Sylvestri said, “And you are absolutely sure…?”
John nodded.
“Go.”
With Nanette’s permission to jump into the communications stream, John bent at the waist to put his lips closer to the microphone that stood up on a flexible metal wand from the main communications array. “Pegasus: hold position! You’re being faked out!”
The dozen other analysts in the room waited, some rising to their feet. Everyone heard static. Then the Texan’s voice sounded from the mobile unit in midtown Manhattan. “Ah, no can do. We are mobile.”
John sat and began stabbing keys on the computer console. Nanette Sylvestri touched his shoulder. “John?”
“Hang on.”
“Talk to me, John! What are you seeing, the rest of us aren’t? Thorson’s team has to reacquire the targets. You heard Gibron’s call. She’s not meeting the Syrian on Forty-second. They’re—”
“Bennett-Smith,” John said, scanning through CIA archives. “That’s the name she used when she called the FBI. Hang on … hang on … Colin Bennett-Smith.”
“We know she’s meeting Belhadj. The other thing’s just a code name.”
But John shook his head. “No, he’s real. Bennett-Smith. Former MI-6. Mother was Egyptian. He can pass for Middle Eastern. Resigned in 2009 … um, alcoholism.… Worked with Shin Bet during the first and second intifada. Worked in Fatah camps. Daria Gibron last worked with him … ah, seven years ago.”
“So what? Either she’s using an ex-spook’s name as code for Belhadj, or she and Belhadj are meeting this ex-spook. Right?”
He turned and looked up at the woman who—had he been standing—still would have towered over him. “I don’t know. Something isn’t scanning. Whether Bennett-Smith is Belhadj, or whether he’s meeting Belhadj and Daria, either way: why tell Ray Calabrese about any of it? He’s in Los Angeles.”
Nanette thought about the chess pieces. “So what are you thinking?’
“That Daria knew she wasn’t leaving the message for Calabrese. She was leaving it for us.”
* * *
Daria took the subway and emerged near Lincoln Center on Sixty-sixth Street. She meandered, enjoying the cityscape. She wanted to give the surveillance team plenty of time to set up.
Her wardrobe was fine for business or air travel but she planned to venture within plain sight of the watchers. That would call for an upgrade. Or more accurately: a downgrade. On a side street, she spotted a funky clothing store that catered to the clubbing scene and the leather crowd. She stepped in, realizing in a heartbeat that, in her early thirties, she was the oldest customer by a decade.
“Hey. We help you?” The clerk was a hunky lad with a shaved skull, a nose ring, and a leather kilt.
Daria waggled her fingers at him and smiled. “Just shopping.” Within ten minutes, she’d found a thin, supple, slate-gray lambskin tank, a short latex skirt in silver, and boots with more zippers, studs, and chains than actual leather. She found a black pleather duster so long it actually scraped her boot heels. She found a small tube of molding paste for her hair. “Is there a changing booth?”
She walked up to the counter a few minutes later, hair slicked back and wearing the new clothes plus the very large, plastic-rimmed sunglasses. She paid with cash.
“Here’s your change,” the young clerk said.
“Thank you.”
As she reached the door, he added, “I’m, ah, off at ten. If you’d like to get, you know, a drink or something?”
He was maybe twenty-four years old. This gladdened Daria greatly. “Maybe another time. Have you a stick of gum?”
The kid was only too happy to provide a stick. She folded it in two and slipped it onto her pink tongue. The kid blushed.
Daria strutted out in leather and latex.
* * *
Owen Cain Thorson put his CIA team back together on the West Side, near where Broadway cut a diagonal swath through the rigidly gridded blocks. Not easy, given a massive truck and three roof-bound snipers.
Thorson reported to Langley that Project Pegasus was in position at Seventy-second and Broadway a full thirty minutes before the rescheduled 4:00
P.M.
meeting. Things were going right for the white hats.
All told, Thorson’s team was eighteen people deep: four in the truck, three snipers on the roofs, five pedestrians, and six in vehicles ranging from a Kawasaki motorcycle to a Land Rover. Everyone was in place when the Texan relayed the news from Nanette Sylvestri and John Broom, back in the Shark Tank: the change-of-venue thing might have been a clever con by the Gibron woman.
* * *
Khalid Belhadj’s train pulled into Grand Central Terminal at 3:35
P.M.
The Syrian, in his shabby suit and too-large hat, drew nobody’s attention as he bought a city map and realized he no longer was within walking distance of the rendezvous. He stepped out onto Lexington and hailed a taxi.
* * *
Someone in the command truck had pasted a Post-it note over one of the terminals:
leather jacket, jeans, flats, red blouse, shoulder-length straight black hair.
Next to it was the two-year-old photo of Daria in front of a bookstore, wiping shorter hair away from her forehead.
Eighteen pairs of eyes were on the lookout.
* * *
Daria stopped along the way and bought a disposable mobile phone with prepaid minutes.
With her hair slicked back and dressed in punk-vogue, the long coat billowing like a cape, Daria strutted past the newly reparked command vehicle, heading toward the subway stop. She chewed her gum enthusiastically because the act of chewing, plus the shadows cast by oversized sunglasses, can fool face-recognition software.
She approached the plaza from the south, oblivious to the cold.
* * *
“Hang on.”
One of the watchers in the truck used a joystick to zoom in on a female approaching the zone. She was the right height but the leather-and-latex outfit was wrong. Her long thighs pistoned in and out of the duster, revealing comically hip boots. She seemed fifteen years too young for the printed-out profile he’d just scanned. He squinted at the screen. His eyes darted to the Post-it with the wardrobe Daria had been wearing at JFK.
He was about to speak up when the punk girl turned sharply right and stepped into a bank.
Just then, the comms crackled. One of the snipers, fifteen stories off the pavement, spoke into his epaulette mike. “Look alive. We have Bowler.”
The Texan adjusted the camera hidden in the roof air vents of the big rig. He panned the sidewalk and Thorson and his men watched the monitor.
Khalid Belhadj, the Syrian terrorist, stood at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. He wore a baggy coat and too-large hat, but there was no mistaking those eyes.
Owen Cain Thorson said, “We got the bastard.”
* * *
Daria was third in line for a bank teller. She kept the sunglasses on and chewed her gum vigorously, aware she was on closed circuit television. When it was her turn, she deferred to people standing behind her. She was waiting for the eldest of the cashiers, the one with
MANAGER
on her name tag.
The bank manager’s name tag read
MARY LU.
“Hi. How can we help you today?”
“You are about to be robbed.”
The cashier’s cheery smile faltered.
Daria had adopted a bad Central European accent. She sounded like an extra in a
Dracula
movie. “Do you see the big, white truck over my left shoulder?”
The manager’s blue eyes flickered over Daria’s left shoulder.
“See the two men lounging on the bus bench across the way?”
Blue eyes flicked toward the little triangular park, and back again.
“The first thing you should know is that we are heavily armed.” Daria pronounced
we
as
vee
. “We represent the People’s Army of Slomeria and we are willing to sacrifice our lives and the lives of capitalist fools for our cause. The second thing to know is that we are happy to use our weapons. Yes? The third thing to know is that we have snipers on roofs, so even if our ground troops are compromised, lives will be lost. The fourth thing to know is that my commander will walk in here in ninety seconds with two duffel bags. You will instruct your clerks to empty their tills. You will not call police. Do you understand?”