“Well,” Evers said, a wry smile on his thin lips, “you’ll want to eat some great steak while you’re in Argentina.” His expression grew conspiratorial. “As a British diplomat I’m probably not supposed to say this, but it’s a fact that Argentine beef makes the finest steaks in the world—better even than the Angus that comes from Scotland—and one of the best places for it is a German restaurant called the Zum Edelweiss. It’s near the Colón Theater—an easy walk from your hotel. Afterward, as you said, you’d probably like to do a bit of pub crawling. The one place I recommend you stay away from is an Irish bar called Mrs. Kelley’s Kitchen.” He jerked his chin past me, indicating the crowded sidewalk to my right. “It’s about two or three blocks in that direction.”
“Good advice.” As much as I might want to visit the Mrs. Kelley’s Kitchen franchise, I was going to stay away. I didn’t want Gwilliam Kelley’s antennae up. I looked over at Mick Owen, who was in charge of procuring weapons. “Has Mick told you that we’re interested in getting our hands on some hunting gear for our visit to Misiones Province?”
Evers’s head bobbed up and down. “I’ve been looking through my sources,” he said. “But your request could pose a problem.”
“Nothing serious I hope.”
“I don’t know yet. I have a couple of leads,” he said, his face showing concern. “I may be able to have something for you by early tomorrow morning.”
I was puzzled. The request was not all that tough to handle. Then I looked into Mick’s face and realized what the real story was. We’d probably put Robert Evers between a rock and a hard place. Brits do not like weapons. They leave weapons to folks like Mick and me.
Nevertheless, I pressed the Brit spook. “Do you think you’ll be able to help us out?”
Robert Evers ran a hand through his thick hair, displaying, for the first time since I’d laid eyes on him, a bit of nervousness. “I believe so,” he finally said. “I think so.”
Well, that was at least potential good news. If Evers could secure weapons and ammo, we could put the rest of our equipment together in a few hours at camping supply or army surplus stores.
The Brit polished off his coffee and stood up. “I have to go,” he said. “Organizational meeting at the embassy. Keep the ambassador happy and off our backs, y’know.” He shook hands all around. “Good to meet you chaps,” he said. “Enjoy the city.” He winked at Mick. “Chau, Mr. Owen. I’ll be in touch.”
I gave some thought to calling Gunny Jarriel at our embassy but decided against it. He’d already been helpful, and since we were here in mufti, if my presence became known, it might get him in hot water. And so I checked into the Étoile. Even before I unpacked, Mick turned the cable TV on. Once we’d taken that step, which would ensure that our conversation would remain private, Mick explained that Robert Evers had put his ass on the line for us. MI6’s activities in Buenos Aires, he said, were highly restricted by the political bosses in London, who for reasons unknown to anyone did not want to offend the Argentine government with operations that entailed the recruiting and running of Argentine nationals.
You say that kind of thinking doesn’t make sense. I guess Robert Evers agrees with you, because he bent the rules from the git-go. Bent ’em, hell. According to Mick he paid ’em no attention whatsoever. He had aggressively recruited Argentine nationals as agents from the day he’d arrived, and now he was using his networks to gather intel for Mick and me.
Which is why we knew that Gwilliam Kelley was still in Buenos Aires, checked into a five-room suite on the top floor of the Grand Hyatt, the huge luxury hotel sitting next to the French Embassy, at the southern terminus of the twenty-four-lane-wide, traffic-intensive, pedestrian nightmare, Avenida de 9 Julio. The 9 Julio is Buenos Aires’s equivalent of Paris’s Champs Élysées, Rome’s Via Nazionale, or London’s Pall Mall—or, more accurately, all of them rolled into one huge, two-mile-long thoroughfare, flanked by towering office buildings and apartment houses, many topped with huge neon signs that give it a Times Square–like, almost carnival atmosphere.
Robert Evers had an agent on the Hyatt’s concierge staff, and so Gwilliam’s comings and goings were being roughly covered. Evers’s man had even managed to insert one of his subagents into the hotel’s regular rotation of limo drivers, which gave him the opportunity to drive Gwilliam and his VERB occasionally. Gwilliam’s schedule was irregularly regular. His day began at 1800 and stretched until the early morning hours. He jumped from club to club, ending every night at his own saloon, where he held court from three in the morning until about 0630. Then, three days ago, he and his VERB had gotten up early—it was just after noon when they called for a limo—and, joined by a local attorney and a sleazy-looking Colombian in an ice cream suit, they’d driven out to the northwestern town of Tigre, where the Colombian paid a suitcase full of cash to buy a huge, walled villa with an adjacent dock, on the Arroyo Gambado, one of more than three dozen hundred-foot-wide tributaries that empty into one of the delta’s main waterways, the Río Lujan. The place was now guarded, Evers had said, by what he described as an eclectic group of South Americans.
“Eclectic?” I asked.
“Colombians, Panamanians, and Nicaraguans,” Evers said. “They were probably trained by Israelis or Cubans and got their experience guarding narcotraficantes.”
That made sense. A whole generation of Latin American bodyguards has been trained by renegade Israelis and former East German and Cuban security officers to work for the Colombian drug cartels. Now, many of them hired out elsewhere in the world.
Twenty hours later, according to another of Evers’s agents, Brendan O’Donnell and two of his four TIRA comrades from Mrs. Kelley’s Kitchen had caught a commercial flight from BA’s downtown Aeroparque to Posadas airport, about ten miles south of the Paraguayan/Argentine border in Misiones Province. They’d left BA not even a full day before we’d arrived—no wonder Robert Evers had emphasized that we’d have to move fast.
Moving fast was something we were good at. Boomerang and Timex were already scouring the city for web gear. Rotten Randy was out shopping for edged weapons. Hugo had a list of the clothes we’d need, and the addresses of half a dozen stores where he’d find ’em. Money was no problem. DET Bravo’s covert nature lent itself to keeping huge amounts of operational cash in the fireproof safe next to my desk in the basement of Curzon Street House. Mick and I had each packed five hundred one-hundred-dollar bills in our carry-ons. I figured we’d be able to deal with the bean counters later.
The only out-of-the-ordinary request Robert Evers had made was that each of us go to one of the many five-shots-for-five-dollars instant photo machines scattered throughout the city, and provide him with a strip of portraits. “Humor me,” he said. “They’re for my scrapbook.”
It was a strange thing to ask for, but as Robert was tossing so many favors in our direction I didn’t give it a second thought. “You want pictures, you got ’em,” I said, and six hours later, Mick handed the young spook six strips of quick-and-dirty color portraits. We’d made sure that in at least one of the photographs on each strip, each of us showed young Robert Evers that he was number one so far as we were concerned.
Mick reported that Robert Evers’s face had cracked a smile. “He said, ‘Oh, those are the ones I’ll put on display,’ and slipped the photos into the breast pocket of his jacket.”
I shrugged. “To each his own.” And then I got on with my work. I checked in with Nod DiCarlo, who reported in prearranged code that things on the Gerry Kelley front were all quiet. He told me that the local soccer team had scored a goal. That meant one of Mick’s techs had managed to slip a tap onto the phone line at Gerry’s Hay’s Mews home. He added that Nigel had gone sightseeing. That meant he’d snuck into the garage of Kelley’s office building and planted a beacon on the frame of Gerry’s Mercedes.
And he told me that Digger’s energetically active social life looked as if it had just taken a turn toward the positive. That translated into the fac
t that O’Toole’s embassy squeeze had given him a line on obtaining one of NSA’s new handheld cell phone monitors. “I think he’ll score within a few hours,” Nod reported. Good: that told me they’d have one in hand soon. I told Nod to pass bravo Zulus to the men, then rang off. I had work to do.
I’d assigned myself as transportation officer and was pulling up to the terminal at Aeroparque Jorge Newbery, the single-runway airport that sits on the banks of the Río de la Plata a mere ten minutes from downtown, when I realized I was going at things ass-backward.
Item: flying up to Misiones Province wasn’t going to solve anything. Brendan O’Donnell and his TIRA-lira-liras were long gone, and picking up their trail was going to be difficult, if not impossible. Locating them might take days—and days were something I didn’t have.
Item: the action was going to be here in Buenos Aires. That’s where one of Gwilliam’s pals had just bought a big, private villa that was convenient to hundreds of miles of anonymous waterways. It was where Britain and the United States maintained two huge embassy compounds, where hundreds of Brits and Americans could be killed simultaneously. Similar ops had been done before. In 1998, Usama Bin Laden attacked our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania at the same time. In 1985, Abu Nidal had staged dual attacks on airports in Rome and Vienna during the peak Christmas-travel season.
“Only by watching the enemy and learning his intentions,” General Tai Li’ang wrote in his treatise on strategy The Li’ang Hsi-Huey, “can you learn what steps you must take to control the events that will dictate the outcome of the struggle.”
That couldn’t happen if I was up in Misiones Province chasing Brendan O’Donnell. It would only happen if I remained in Buenos Aires and prepared myself and my men for the battle ahead. I wanted to see what was going on behind the walls of that villa—it would help determine whether Gwilliam and his people were planning an attack on the American Embassy.
And so, instead of buying airline tickets, I jumped back in the cab and told the driver to take me to the Plaza Italia, which is a short walk from the American Embassy. Yes, I realize that I told you not so long ago that I was wary about making my presence known to anybody at the embassy. But I wasn’t planning to pay a visit or make any social calls. I wanted to do a quick threat assessment, and see if the embassy was vulnerable.
How could I make that sort of judgment in a matter of minutes or hours, you want to know. Well, in point of fact, it’s a simple matter of knowing what to look for, and what sorts of questions to ask. And I’ve been looking and asking for a couple of decades now. And so, I took myself for a walk. I started at the bus stop 150 yards from the heavily fortified gate that led to the consular section, and walked all the way around the perimeter of the nine-foot, RPG-resistant, mesh and steel post fence that surrounds the huge, modernistic compound.
AMEMBASSY Buenos Aires (as it’s called in State Department–speak) is one of our newer facilities. It was designed under guidelines established by a commission on embassy security headed by former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, in the wake of embassy attacks on American diplomatic facilities in Beirut, Khartoum, and Islamabad, among other places. The building sits facing northwest on a five-acre triangle of land bordered by three wide avenues. The embassy grounds are contiguous on one side to a secure Argentine government site. Directly across from the building’s facade is a large, fenced open park. The closest structures—a large block of five-story commercial office buildings—are more than five hundred yards away, across Boulevard John F. Kennedy.
The embassy itself is constructed of reinforced concrete, with explosion-resistant windows, heavy, terrorist-proof metal doors, and interior “safe rooms” in case of invasion. It is set back from the street by a minimum of one hundred feet. The entryway is protected by a four-foot-high concrete barrier that conceals, behind it, a trench deep and wide enough to prevent the heaviest cement truck—the new millennium’s terrorist vehicles of choice because they can ram through most antiterrorist barriers—from crashing through and propelling itself under the embassy portico.
Access to the embassy is closely monitored by cameras and also by roving patrols of local police, supplied by the Argentine authorities, who patrol the perimeter of the compound. Inside the fence line, security is handled by special agents from DS (State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security) and the Marine Security contingent, which was currently headed by my old safety-net compadre, Gunny Jarriel. To gain access, you had to pass through a primary checkpoint, where your identity was established by an FSN (it stands for Foreign Service National, which is State- speak for a local employee), who then allowed you to proceed into a small, bomb-resistant chamber containing a one-person-at-a-time metal detector.
If you were carrying no weapons, you’d be cleared to proceed into a second chamber, which contained a remote-controlled, ever-so-slow-moving revolving door whose sections and ceiling were all made of thick, bulletproof, bomb-resistant steel. The reason for the revolving door was that it was equipped with explosives-detection devices. If the sniffer warning light went off, the security guard could freeze the door in place and isolate you until reinforcements arrived, and in any case you’d be confined 150 feet from the embassy itself.
From the revolving door, you went through a second metal detector, this one manned by a DS agent. After this checkpoint, you were admitted to the compound. If you weren’t carrying a State Department, DOD, or federal law enforcement ID, you would have to be escorted to your destination. Automobiles, including the ambassador’s limo, went through similar procedures as they threaded their way through a series of narrow S-turns that precluded any suicide bomber accessing the embassy garage at high speed. Staff parking was all outside, beyond the perimeter fence, and was patrolled by both local security guards and Buenos Aires cops. In other words, the place was being run according to the commission rules. Security was tight. Everything was done by the numbers.
Which is why it took me less than half an hour of seemingly aimless meandering to spot the flaws. But spotting flaws wasn’t going to be enough. I wanted to know whether the place was under active surveillance—whether Brendan O’Donnell and his people had been able to identify the same chinks in the embassy’s armor that I had. And the only way to do that would be to mount what’s known in the trade as a counter-surveillance. Now, in most Hollywood movies (Beverly Hills Cop comes to mind), surveillance is a couple of bad guys sitting in a car across the street from their target, and countersurveillance is a pair of cops sitting in their car watching the bad guys, who never seem to notice ’em. In real life, that kind of shit doesn’t work.
In real life, surveillance is often sophisticated and hard to spot, and mounting countersurveillance is difficult, tedious, and boring. It is hard to stay unnoticed for long. It is even harder to remain alert. It is in many ways like sentry duty: you have to overcome boredom, monotony, and ennui. You have to remain finely tuned so that you can pick up even the slightest ripple that might give the opposition away. You also have to be continually innovative and constantly unconventional. You have to be able to change your appearance at the literal drop of a hat. I am talking about hard work. It is no fun.
It was late afternoon when Boomerang and I took the first shift. I sent Rotten Randy Michaels over to Mrs. Kelley’s Kitchen to get a look at the people running the place and scope the location. Yes, I know that we’d previously decided not to go near the place so as not to spook the tangos. But if anyone could get in and out without causing any ripples it was the former Ranger, Rotten Randy. Meanwhile, I hired a pair of taxis—two of the thousands of anonymous yellow and black Renaults that cruised the streets. Then I gave the drivers three hundred dollars each to let me and Boomerang (or the second shift of Timex and Randy) drive the cabs while they rode in the backseat like passengers. Given the thick wad of greenbacks we were waving it wasn’t hard to convince ’em. Then I had the drivers take us to a clothing store where I bought eight different patterned short-sleeved shirts and eight on
e-size-fits-all hats. Timex bought us a pair of off-the-shelf bright yellow Motorola Talkabout radios and five dozen double-A Energizers. We made sure we had fully charged the batteries in our global-capable cellular phones. Then it was time to go to work.
1613. I cruised the neighborhood around the embassy looking for static surveillance: parked cars with someone inside, or people loitering in the street. Except for a few delivery trucks, a Federal Express van, and a lone pasaperro with a trio of unruly dogs making his way around the intersection of John F. Kennedy and Avenida Colombia, I came up dry.
1656. I parked at a cab stand on Kennedy and scanned the windows of the office buildings. I saw nothing untoward. I wheeled the cab onto an anonymous side street and switched vehicles with Boomerang, then headed out again.
1715. The dog walker meandered down Colombia, pulled along by the same three unruly pups. He stopped to joke with the rent-a-cop walking post by the long line of parked cars belonging to the embassy staff. The guard played with one of the dogs, a friendly, hyperactive Airedale who kept trying to do backflips.
1724. The dog walker made his second go-round just as most of the embassy employees left work. Some headed toward the Plaza Italia; others climbed into their vehicles and drove off. None of them checked beneath their cars before they climbed inside. Not one checked the trunk, or under the hood. I tell you, these naíve diplo-dinks are as unobservant as that Australian singer Oblivious Newton-John.
Boomerang and I remained in the neighborhood until well after dark, without noting any suspicious activity. Well, that was to be expected. If I were a tango and I were going to hit an embassy, I’d hit it when it was full of people, not after working hours. But when you’re mounting a countersurveillance operation you cannot assume anything. And so, at midnight, Boomerang and I were relieved by Rotten Randy and Timex, who lingered on station to watch, look, and listen all night, even though it cut considerably into their eating and—most important—their beer-drinking and pussy-chasing plans. Those would have to wait until after Boomerang and I took over the duty at 0600.
Detachment Bravo Page 13