Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
Zack Hightower wasn’t usually the man sitting in the back of the surveillance vehicle, but here he was, eating a tuna salad sandwich he’d bought at a gas station in Arlington before dawn, and downing it with Gatorade.
It was two thirty in the afternoon; laptops sat in front of him on a table fashioned out of particle board and two-by-fours and attached to the inside wall of the white GMC Savana, and he leaned back in a swivel chair bungeed to the opposite wall.
His boots were propped on a stack of hard-shell Pelican cases and nylon Eberlestock modular bags of various shapes and styles.
His left thigh was stiff, the effects of the gunshot wound still bugging him a little, but it wasn’t that bad. He’d taken some Advil this morning and he had more if he needed it, though in typical Zack fashion, the loose pills were mixed in with the lint balls in the front left pocket of his jeans.
Up behind the wheel, Arnold Reyes sat with his head back on the headrest and his cheap sunglasses on, shielding his eyes so that anyone walking by might think he was asleep.
The logistics coordinator of this small team of assets had been drafted to drive one of the two vehicles today, the decision being made hastily this morning when Irene Ortega surprised the team by driving to work from her condo, though it was less than a fifteen-minute walk through D.C.
The team quickly decided to split up, so another vehicle was rented, and now Zack and Arnold, the two non-operational team members, sat in the original van with the equipment, making sure the subject didn’t leave her work and either come back here to her car or head out on foot in some other direction.
Zack was dressed in a leather bomber jacket with a knit cap, jeans, and boots.
Arnold, on the other hand, was dressed in a coat and tie; his wool overcoat lay on the seat next to him.
He wore a suit to Ghost Town every day, Hanley had mentioned, and apparently no one had thought to tell him he didn’t need to dress for the office while driving a backup van in the field.
This was the first day of surveillance, and the first day of any surveillance operation was often a mess.
While Arnold watched Irene’s car in a parking garage on G Street NW, just a block and a half from the Department of State where she was working at the moment, and Zack watched images from a camera positioned under a bench across the street from a rear exit of Irene’s workplace, Court Gentry and Chris Travers had gone to her short-term rental at the Carriage House Condominium near Washington Circle, just a mile to the northwest. The men code-named Six and Teddy were dressed in disguise as telecom repairmen, head-to-toe in blue coveralls, tool belts adorned with the accoutrements of their trade, and shoulder bags over their working-class winter coats that kept them warm as they walked towards the building.
Court held a small ladder, and after slipping through a back door in a rear loading area and into an elevator, they shot straight up to Ortega’s eighth-floor condo, picking the lock there just seconds after Jill Mori remotely shut down the woman’s wireless service to disable any Internet-based cameras she might have had inside.
The men carried signal scramblers on their tool belts; they were fashioned to look like flashlights but designed to disrupt any recording devices left on in the room, a typical countersurveillance measure, and they swept the unit for bugs with handheld radio frequency scanners just in case someone else was as interested in Ortega as they were.
They found nothing amiss, so they separated and went to work.
Moving silently throughout the space, independently from one another, the pair placed three bugs and three pinhole cameras, and they photographed everything they could see lying around.
Books, magazines, mail, even the contents of her fridge and freezer and the bottles in her medicine cabinet.
After just a few minutes of searching, Court’s phone vibrated, and he tapped the AirPod in his right ear.
Travers did the same, indicating to both men that someone had initiated a conference call with the assets.
Court answered softly, so as not to be heard either in the hallway or in a neighboring unit. “Yeah?”
“It’s me, Six.” Technically, Zack was supposed to confirm his identity with his code name, Night Train, but it was common for Zack to bend the rules in the field.
“What’s up?”
“Subject just exited the rear of her building, might be heading your way.”
Court looked to his watch. It was 2:48 in the afternoon, early for her to be coming home from work. He said, “Going out for coffee?”
“There’s a Starbucks in her building.”
“But she’s definitely not going for her car.”
“Definitely not. She’s on foot. Heading away from the garage. We’re firing up, going after her.”
“Roger, we’ll exfil now. Stay on the line, keep us updated.”
“Will do, but it’s a short walk from her to you, so you better prep to boogie.”
“Wilco.”
They were packed up and ready to go in no time; Court checked in with Jill to make sure there was no one outside the door in the hallway, and once Gumdrop confirmed this, he and Travers left, heading for the elevator.
They’d made it halfway there when Zack spoke up again. “We’ve got visual on the subject at this time. She’s still on foot, east of her building, turning to the north.”
“Still coming this way?” Court said.
“Possibly. Still heading north, in your direction, ten minutes to your poz.”
“Leaving her car in the garage? Why would she do that?” Court asked.
“I’m just telling you what I see. You need to get out.”
“We’re exfilling now.”
Three minutes later they were outside; their rented burgundy Chrysler Pacifica minivan was parked on M Street NW, and here they dumped the ladder and the utility belts into the back.
Just as they shut the rear hatch, Zack came over Court’s earpiece.
“Be advised, subject is heading into the Metro at George Washington University.”
“Okay,” Court said. “You close enough to get on her train?”
“Can be.” After a second, he said, “This is just on the other side of Washington Circle.”
“So?” Court asked, confused.
Travers said, “Meaning she walked almost all the way back home to get on the Metro by her house. Why didn’t she bring her car back here?”
“She’s going back to work, maybe?” Court speculated.
“Maybe,” Zack said. “Or else she’s running an SDR.”
A surveillance detection route was a tactic used the world over by spies to check if someone was following them.
Court shook his head as he climbed into the passenger seat. “This lady is a desk jockey at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. What does she know about SDRs?”
To this, Zack said, “I guess I’m about to find out. I’m on foot heading down the escalator, Arnold is topside in the van.”
Travers sat down behind the wheel of the burgundy minivan. Court opened a map on the dashboard screen, and Travers began looking to pull out into the heavy afternoon traffic.
Over their earpieces, Zack said, “She’s going for the eastbound platform. That’s going to put her on the Blue line or the Orange line.”
Court had no idea where either of those Metro lines would lead. He knew cities in Russia, in Pakistan, in Mexico, even in rural Brazil or Guatemala, way better than he knew his own nation’s capital. He turned to Travers. “You used to live here, right?”
Travers answered, “Heading east, Blue and Orange both go to Farragut West, then…uhh…” He thought a moment.
“Where?” Court demanded as he began pulling up the info on his phone.
“It’s been a minute. There’s another station, then Metro Center, then Smithsonian, and L’Enfant, there might be another before Smithsonian.”
Court had it up on his screen now. “Federal Triangle is after Metro Center.”
“That’s right,” Travers confirmed.
They pulled out of the parking space now. “Got it. We just keep heading east. Night Train, you’re on her platform?”
“Affirmative. There’s a Blue line coming in one minute. The Downtown Largo train.”
Travers said, “We’re going to lose signal down there when you’re in the tunnel, but we’ll pick you up again at the next station.”
“Roger that.”
Court and Chris had only gone half a block in the gridlock a half mile north of the White House when Zack spoke again. “We’re on the Blue line. Say again, Blue line.”
“Copy.” Court looked to Travers from the passenger seat. “Where can we intercept them?”
“All depends on parking,” Travers said.
“What if we don’t park? What if I jump out and you keep going?”
“Forget about the Farragut stations. We won’t make it. If she gets out there, Night Train can stay with her. Ditto McPherson Square, we won’t get there in time. Let’s try for Metro Center.”
“Do it.”
The minivan raced forward during a break in traffic.
—
Zack Hightower stood in the train car just forward of his target’s car, and he watched while Irene Ortega sat near a doorway near the rear.
The car was half full. Zack was glad it wasn’t yet rush hour; he had a good view of her out of the corner of his eye, well enough to see that she seemed alert.
Her eyes flitted left and right, and he got the impression she was checking to see if she was being followed, and she wasn’t terribly subtle about it.
If she was a spy, Zack decided, then she wasn’t a very good one.
He wondered who she suspected was following her right now. Feds? Other people in her agency?
Zack had decades of training in countersurveillance, so he scanned 360, nonchalantly, and saw no one who fit the obvious mold for a countersurveillance agent, but he knew he could not be sure.
The FBI used a unit called the Special Surveillance Group, a force of trained operatives, from their late teens to well into their seventies, who worked exclusively on surveillance missions.
These weren’t feds, spooks, soldiers, or cops, just regular people who worked for the FBI, people who fit in wherever they were tasked to work, so that all the people the Bureau used to tail suspects around the world didn’t look anything like central-casting G-men.
But the SSG had been gutted in the last year and replaced mostly by Gauntlet Group contractors. The Gauntlet crew were mostly military-aged males, and even though there were some females, most of the women had military or law enforcement backgrounds and didn’t blend in as well as the SSG had.
The train stopped at the Farragut West station; a few people got on and a few got off, and then Irene herself stood, went to the door.
Zack headed to the nearest door of his car, stepped halfway out, and then realized Ortega had not gotten off.
He backed inside, and the door closed.
For a moment he worried she’d outsmarted him, but when he went back to look into the next car, he saw that she was still there.
He did realize that this was a fuckup, however. If there was someone watching her, then they might have noticed the fact that he’d looked down the platform, then stepped back on the train, as if he were trying to anticipate the movements of someone else.
He hadn’t expected to do anything more than ride in the back of a van all day, so he’d been caught by surprise when he went operational, but he knew he needed to up his game.
He sat down next to the door, leaned forward a little, and just caught sight of Ortega’s boots, fifty feet down the train in the last car.
Quickly, while they were still in the station and before the train went back into the tunnel, he tapped out a quick text on his phone.
Cont past Farragut on Blue. She’s def squirrely—6, get to me, ASAP. No sight of counter, but I’m burned if so.
—
Court read the text aloud in the minivan as it shot through a yellow light that turned red before they left the intersection.
Both men understood Zack’s abbreviated text, but Travers deciphered it aloud, anyway.
“Ortega is nervous about something, and Zack outed himself, not to her but to anybody that he hasn’t ID’d that might be watching her.”
Court said, “He never was the most low-profile guy out there, was he?”
“Nope,” Travers said. “This sounds like a job for the Gray Man.”
“Don’t fucking start,” Court mumbled as he looked at his phone.
A couple of minutes later they were a few more blocks to the southeast when Court received another text from Zack. He read this one aloud, as well.
Continuing past McPherson. She’s nervous. Where r u 6?
“Looks like about two minutes to Metro Center,” Travers said as he changed lanes.
“Or twenty, depending on this traffic,” Court barked in frustration.