by Marcus Wynne
Britta sighed. “Oh, Youssef, are you political? Is that what this is?”
“If political means to be willing to take action, then I am political.”
“What sort of actions can one man do? You are so alone, it seems that all you have is hatred. This is the first time I’ve seen that in you, Youssef. You’re so much more than that. There’s so much that is fine in you. Let your anger go. You’re right, your friend can’t enjoy those things . . . but why can’t you enjoy them for him? Why should you deny yourself a life worth living because of past sadnesses? Your friend is gone . . . let us go and lift a glass in his memory today. Let yourself feel some good things, enjoy people and the day, Youssef . . . maybe then your anger will ease.”
Youssef stared stubbornly at the foot of the bed, refusing to meet Britta’s pleading look.
“It’s easy for you to say that,” he said. “Your life is so open and easy . . . it would be different if you had lost someone close to you to the Americans and the Jews. Perhaps you wouldn’t be so happy, so carefree.”
“I’m getting angry,” Britta said. “You know very little about me, Youssef, but you’re quick to judge me. Maybe I have lost people, not in the same way, but lost all the same. How we feel about things is a choice. We can choose to find the bad in it, or we can choose to find the good in it and go on with our lives. I will always take that path. I will always look to find the good and the good is always in there. It’s up to us to find it and let it guide us on a good path. You’ve been wandering alone here in my city and you were guided to me. I believe that. And maybe you should take it as a sign that there is some sweetness for you instead of all the bitterness you carry around. Hasn’t this been good?”
She gestured at the bed and the room and the open window.
“Hasn’t it?” she said. “I know you’ve enjoyed yourself and I’ve enjoyed you. Let a little light in, Youssef, and enjoy life. Your friend would want you to do that.”
Youssef threw back the covers, spilling coffee from the mug clenched in his hand. He stood up and set the coffee mug down on the floor. His shoulders were hunched and his hands came up as though to ward something off.
“You don’t understand what I must do,” he said. “I need to be alone today, do you understand?”
“Then be alone!” Britta snapped. She threw back the covers and got out of bed, snatching up her silken bathrobe and throwing it around herself. She went into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.
Youssef watched her go with something akin to relief. Her anger gave him a sense of justification. He took his underwear from the floor and slipped it on, then put on his pants and shirt and looked around for his shoes. After he slipped on his low-rise hiking shoes, he picked up his courier bag and slung it over his shoulder. Then he went to the door and went out, shutting the door quietly behind himself. From the bathroom he heard the sound of weeping, and he steeled himself against that sad sound as he went down the narrow stairs to the street. It was early yet, and there were only a few people out on the street. He wandered away, aimlessly at first, standing on a canal bridge and staring at the murky water beneath, then wandering along, letting his feet take him where they would. He passed Dam Square, and realized he was close to the Central Train Station.
Along the pedestrian walkway and alleys that paralleled the main street that led from Dam Square to the station were numerous small travel agencies specializing in discount airfares. Youssef wandered along, looking at the prices, and found himself standing outside one agency that posted a cheap fare from Amsterdam to Toronto. He thought about it for a time, and thought out a possible itinerary. He could fly into Toronto, go through the relaxed Canadian customs, then take a bus from Toronto into the US on his forged US passport. Then he could fly or stay on the bus to get to Washington, DC, where he could blend into the faceless crowds that filled the Washington, DC youth hostel during the summer. He could be one more traveler, seeing the sights of Washington, DC, enjoying the nightlife, just another face in the crowd.
He hadn’t received his activation signal yet, but with Internet access he could get it anywhere.
Even in Washington, DC.
ATHENS, GREECE, HANS’S SURVEILLANCE TEAM SAFE HOUSE
Charley tapped Dale on the shoulder and handed him a steaming mug of coffee.
“Here you go,” he said. “They really know how to make good coffee here. They understand the subtleties.”
“Thanks,” Dale said, taking the cup.
“Hoka hey,” Charley said.
“What does that mean?” Hans said from the sofa where he watched Dale and Charley hunched over the small monitors and computers set out on a battered folding table.
“It means it’s a good day to die,” Charley said.
Hans laughed. “You have a dark sense of humor, Charley.”
“Well, it is, isn’t it?” Charley said. “We’ve got the early part of what promises to be a simply stunning day. The sun is shining, and the girls are out in their short skirts and summer dresses, we’ve got the perfect box on the perfect quarry, and we’ve got the serious shooters coming in to bag and tag him. Then we can party. Damn right it’s a good day.”
Hans laughed and the equipment operator, a bone-thin palefaced Dutchman dressed all in black, joined him.
“You know how to enjoy life, my friend,” Hans said.
“It’s all a matter of priorities, friend,” Charley said. “A long time ago I learned the difference between being serious about what I did and taking myself seriously while doing it. The first is essential, the second is disastrous.”
“That’s wise,” Hans said.
“That’s because I’m an old gray-haired dog and I’ve reached the age of wisdom,” Charley said. “Isn’t that right, Dale?”
Dale mumbled something from his seat at the equipment operator’s shoulder and drank his coffee.
“Now that,” Charley said in a voice pitched for Hans’s ear alone, “is a way too serious guy.”
Hans bit back a smile and winked.
“Hans, run it down for me, will you?” Dale said.
“Sure, my friend,” Hans said. “We have four people in the room next door, two equipment operators and two walkers, one of them armed. In the lobby we have four walkers, and standing off two minutes away I have three cars. We have radio contact with everyone and everyone is fresh. Bin Faisal is awake and has taken a shower. He had a pot of coffee and some rolls and a newspaper brought to his room; so far he hasn’t gone out, which is not unlike him. He’s taking his time reading and drinking his coffee and appears to be in no hurry to go anywhere. Callan is on the ground and on his way here. He will coordinate the snatch team to take bin Faisal on the street once we get him out and moving.”
“Where’s the snatch team?” Dale asked.
“They’re in a safe house of their own choosing. Callan is keeping it compartmented right now. They will have a liaison man with us when Callan arrives, and he’ll coordinate everything with us.”
“So what about us?” Charley said.
“I assumed that you would want to be on the street when the snatch goes down,” Hans said.
“That’s right where I intend to be,” Charley said. “Come too far to miss out on that. Dale?”
“Yeah,” Dale said. He set his coffee cup down and got up and stretched his back and arms. “I intend to be in on the kill. All of us deserve that.”
“Well, then, Mr. Ahmad bin Faisal,” Charley said. “Get your ass up and moving. We’re just about ready to take your terrorist ass.”
NOVEMBER SEVENTEENTH HIT TEAM, NEAR THE ATHENS HILTON HOTEL, ATHENS, GREECE
Costas, the leader for the operation, sat in a Fiat with stolen license plates down the street from the Athens Hilton. He could see one of Hans’s vehicles, a watcher car. What gave them away were the small stick-on mirrors placed on each of the side mirrors which gave a true 360-degree view around the vehicle when you counted the inside rearview mirror. With a prepaid cell phone
and a digital messaging pager he could communicate with the members of his hit team assembled loosely in a box that surrounded the surveillance team setting up around the Athens Hilton.
His pager beeped, and he looked down at the display which showed a line of numbers. This sequence meant that the lobby team had identified the surveillance-team members in the lobby, the ones that would be the first responders to any movement by Ahmad bin Faisal. While they couldn’t be sure, it was a good bet that a team of this size and expertise had rooms in the Hilton, and penetration of bin Faisal’s room. Costas’s last instructions to bin Faisal had been to remain in his room till noon, then, if he hadn’t been contacted, to go about his business and wait for them to find a way to get to him.
Costas entered in the numbers that sent the message MESSAGE RECEIVED and sent it to his lobby crew. With their pagers set to vibrate and a number code worked out in advance, they had a nearly untraceable and low-key method of real-time communications. Cell phones, ubiquitous in the crowded streets of Athens, were for realtime and urgent communications.
Anna, her long hair bound into a neat, tight bun at the top of her head, shifted in the seat beside him. Beneath a newspaper beside her was an Israeli mini-Uzi, the one without the collapsible stock. It was nearly useless for anything beyond pistol range, but at close range—say next to a car or a few feet away from a target—it would put eight hundred rounds a minute of 9mm into a human being. It was an excellent assassination weapon, and Anna was highly skilled with it. Costas, as one of November Seventeenth’s premier assassins, carried a US government-issue Colt .45 Model 1911 semi-automatic pistol, one that had been pilfered from the stocks of weapons the US had hidden in Greece during the 1950s, when Greece had been a staging area for operations into communist Yugoslavia. The big .45 had been used in a number of assassinations of US diplomatic and military personnel.
The two of them planned to add to their body count today, although their primary job was command and control. All told, there were five teams of two shooters each, deployed loosely in and around the surveillance box of the Americans. The shooters blended into their surroundings, as it was their territory—a message they meant to bring home to the American intelligence agents working bin Faisal. They planned a straightforward killing of as many of the surveillance team as possible, leaving the bodies with their incriminating weapons and surveillance equipment, and enough people left alive to add to the confusion when the police and the press arrived to take note of an American intelligence operation blown in violence on Greek soil.
It would be a killing blow against the Americans and a clear message about operating on Greek soil. It would be a great embarrassment to the American president and his anti-terrorist campaign and a severe blow against US–Greek relations. And November Seventeenth would fade into the background once again, their signature of the .45 in several killings and a message taking credit for it in the press.
Anna and Costas found it exciting to the point of sexuality. They’d had sex three times last night, and the older man found himself rising like a young stallion to the younger woman. But now they were focused on the job ahead of them, and they were both cool and calm and collected like the professionals they were.
There was killing to be done.
ATHENS, GREECE, HANS’S SURVEILLANCE TEAM SAFE HOUSE
Mike Callan rode in the back of a panel delivery van with big side-sliding doors. Crouched in the back, dressed in leather jackets, work boots, and Levis, with balaclavas rolled up like hats on their heads, were six operators from DOMINANCE RAIN. Following closely behind the van was a Chevy Suburban with blacked-out windows that contained six more men, all heavily armed, the cover car.
“Let me out at the corner,” Callan said to the driver. He stepped over the men crouched in the back and slid into the empty front passenger seat. The van slowed to a stop, and Callan, touching his ear where he wore a radio earpiece, got out without another word. He strode away, down a few doors in the residential neighborhood, then bounded up the stairs to the lower doorway entrance to the safe house where Hans had set up operations. He pushed the button beside the door and waited for the door to buzz open, then went up where he was greeted by one of Hans’s gunfighters, his hand on a weapon hidden beneath the front of his jacket.
“Where’s Hans?” Callan said.
“Right here,” Hans said from the door behind his man. “We’re in here.”
Callan came into the small operations room and looked over the folding tables burdened with laptops, monitors, cameras, and radio equipment. Dale and Charley stood to greet him.
“Right on time,” Dale said.
“That’s my definition of right on time—ten minutes early,” Callan said. “You ready to go to work?”
“We’ve been working, Massah Callan,” Charley said. “We’s been working hard.”
Callan grinned and helped himself to a cup of coffee from the pot warming on a corner of a folding table. “I know that. Good work, too. We’re just about ready to wrap this guy up.”
“Are you going to run coordination for your team?” Dale said.
“Yeah, I’m going to sit right here and watch the deal go down. You guys working the street or are you going to stay here with me?”
“Working the street,” Dale said. “I want to see this guy go down.”
“Likewise,” Charley said.
“I will be here,” Hans said. “I don’t have the bloodlust of these two.”
“I’ll enjoy the company,” Callan said. “It’s been a long while since we talked, Hans.”
“Run down what your crew is going to do, will you, Mike?” Dale said.
“Sure,” Callan said. “Straightforward and simple, just the way I like it. They’re standing off in a van with a cover car two blocks away from the hotel. When Hans’s people put bin Faisal on the street, they’ll box him in and we’ll know where he is. There’re a number of places along all the routes out of the hotel where we can pull the van in; we pull the van alongside, door opens, my boys go out, grab him, and throw him in the back of the van. He gets hooded and shot up with tranquilizer while the van evacs with the cover car sweeping up behind if necessary. Then they move to a staging area, a warehouse a few miles from here, and we dope him up some more. Then he goes on a military transport out of the airport as diplomatic cargo. He’ll come to his senses in a safe house in northern Virginia, where we will begin the process of straining his brains dry.”
“Sounds good to me,” Charley said.
“Have your guys done a snatch before?” Dale said.
“They swept up that Serbian prison commander in Belgrade and a narco in downtown Bogotá, right out of the middle of his security detail,” Callan said. “They know what they’re doing.”
“Not your usual private sector–type action,” Dale observed dryly.
“We’re a long way past that,” Callan said. “You knew that going in.”
“I like it where I’m at,” Dale said.
“Bin Faisal is leaving his room,” the equipment operator said. “He’s getting ready to go.”
“Let’s hit the street,” Dale said.
ATHENS HILTON HOTEL, ATHENS, GREECE
In the lobby, busy with guests coming and going from the front desk and the restaurant, Hans’s four streetwalkers prepared themselves. An unshaven young man, casual in a rumpled polo shirt and khaki pants, eased himself out of an overstuffed armchair directly across from the concierge desk. He walked out the tall glass doors and lingered by the taxi stand directly in front of the hotel entrance. His three partners stayed in the lobby, positioned to watch every entrance, exit, and elevator. Their slow movements were unnoticed by everyone except the two middle-aged Greek men parked behind newspapers in adjoining armchairs nudged in a corner. One of them took out his digital pager and tapped out a short message.
Out on the street, slouched behind the wheel of his car, Costas looked down at his pager display.
Subjects moving.
“It’s time to work,” Costas said, looking at his partner Anna, who patted the paper bag that concealed her weapon.
Back at the Hilton, Ahmad bin Faisal entered the lobby from the central elevator. He looked cool and aquiline in a short-sleeved light blue silk shirt and linen trousers. The Arab paused, looked round the lobby as though he expected to see someone, then took out a cigarette from his silver case and lit it with his gold lighter. His head wreathed in aromatic smoke, bin Faisal went out the hotel entrance doors to the taxi stand outside.
“May I call you a cab, sir?” the doorman asked.
Bin Faisal regarded him for a moment, then said, “No. It’s such a beautiful day, I think I will walk.”
He turned away from the doorman and gazed up at the flags of many countries on the long row of flagpoles that followed the curved driveway out from the front of the hotel to the car-choked Vasileos Konstantinou Boulevard. The flags snapped and fluttered in the morning breeze. Bin Faisal drew deep on his Turkish cigarette, and let the smoke eddy and whirl around him. Then he walked to the crossing in front of the hotel, crossed the street, and turned left onto Vasilissis Sofias, a quiet side street. He had in mind an easy stroll that would take him to the Plaka for some light shopping, and then a late lunch at the Hotel Bretagna in Syntagma Square. As he had been instructed, he took no cautionary countersurveillance measures, and was careful to look the part of the tourist. He suspected he was being watched, though; the hair on the back of his neck stirred.
All around him, careful and discreet action took place.
Two of Hans’s streetwalkers from the lobby followed him out. A woman in a tan pantsuit that was a size too small passed him quickly and paced ahead of him; a tired-looking man crossed to the other side of the street and stayed abreast of the Arab. Fifty yards behind him, two other members of Hans’s team got out of a battered Fiat and followed.