Chapter Twenty-Five #2
To this, Hightower used his coffee mug to motion across the table towards Court. “Does this squirrelly little fucker strike you as an assassin?”
Travers conceded the point. “Not at all.”
“I’m five-ten,” Court mumbled in frustration.
“Which brings me to my next point,” Hanley said. “Today was not how I want us doing things. Making the decision to push Arnold into the eye position for what could have been a critical—”
Court interrupted. “You realize that if Teddy, me, or Night Train were in that museum today, we could easily have been picked up on by countersurveillance. It took sending a guy like Bricklayer in there…” He looked to Arnold. “No offense.”
Arnold just waved a hand in the air, dismissing his worry, and he sipped his coffee.
Hanley said, “You’re the fucking Gray Man. You could have—”
“I was dressed as a telecom repairman. I had a change of clothes in the Pacifica, but I didn’t know we’d be going to a museum until after I’d gotten into the Savana.”
Hanley turned to Hightower. “What’s your excuse? You look like the roadie for an aging death metal band.”
Zack’s eyes flitted around the room. “Thanks?”
“You’re getting a haircut and a shave before you do anything else operational.”
“Understood. When I get back from Boulder, I’ll look like a choirboy.”
Matt sighed. “You don’t have to look like a choirboy. You can look like a car salesman, an accountant, whatever. You cannot look like a professional wrestler.”
“Loud and clear, boss.”
Jill had been busy on her computer, but now she looked up.
“I’ve got the first match. On Arnold’s glasses, the room Ortega didn’t go into.
One subject is Lewis Shaw; he’s an employee of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
He’s in IT, not an analyst, he’s GS-10, a midlevel government employee. ”
She raised her eyebrows. “Pretty impressive, actually; he’s only thirty years old.”
Hanley said, “That’s the same agency Ortega works for. Why is she interested in an IT guy in her office? And who is the other person he met with in that room?”
“I’ve got nothing on him coming up so far.”
Hanley said, “Send me the image. I’ll get Pace to run it at CIA and see if anything—”
“Oh my goodness,” Jill interrupted, leaning close to her screen now. She manipulated an image there, enlarging and then refining it.
“What is it?” Hanley asked.
“This man…interacting with Shaw. He’s…he’s not real.”
“He’s not what?” Hanley exclaimed.
“I mean…his face isn’t real. He’s wearing a mask.”
Travers said, “A mask? Like a medical mask?”
“No, like a Halloween mask.”
Court rushed around the table so he could see the screen. “What the hell are you talking about?”
She cleaned up the image even more. At first to Court, it looked like a man in a black watch cap; his skin was a little pale and he was older, maybe fifties or sixties.
But when she zoomed in on his eyes, it was evident that there were slight rings around them, as if there were eye holes in some sort of high-quality latex mask. “I’ll be damned. That’s good.”
Hightower said, “How the hell are you going to walk through a museum with a mask on?”
Arnold hadn’t spoken during the entire conversation, but now he said, “It’s the Smithsonian. It’s free to enter, but you must pass through a metal detector first.”
Hanley said, “The security guards? Were they paying attention?”
Arnold shrugged. “I could barely see them, to be honest.”
Jill went back through the video from the glasses, and they watched from Arnold’s point of view as he passed by two bored-looking security officers. They never actually looked closely at his face, only at his keys as he put them in a container, then passed through the metal detector.
Travers said, “Here’s the problem, though. You might have been able to get past those two dummies in a high-quality latex mask, but you wouldn’t have been able to plan that they wouldn’t engage you.”
Hanley said, “Which means our guy put the mask on after he got into the building. Just for the meeting with Shaw. Probably in the bathroom.” To Jill he asked, “We have images of people going into and out of bathrooms?”
“Not unless Arnold just happened to catch them doing it,” Jill said.
Hanley quickly shook his head. “There’s no way of knowing when the other guy came in. He could have been in the building for hours before the meeting.”
Court was frustrated. “All that work, and we have no idea who the other guy was.”
Hanley said, “No problem. We focus on two people now. Irene Ortega and Lewis Shaw.”
Hightower shook his head at this. “We have to wait on Shaw, boss. Gumdrop can dig into him, find out whatever she can so when we can target him, we do it effectively. But right now, with a group this small, we can’t split into two surveillance teams.”
Court said, “He’s right. We’ve already got Irene’s place wired.
There’s a hotel across the street from her place, and every room in the back of that building is facing every window in that woman’s apartment.
I say we put up twenty-four-hour physical surveillance on her with an eye to detecting countersurveillance, because we know she had counter on her this afternoon.
We see anybody on the street we don’t like, we hear or see anything in her unit, and we figure out what they’re up to. ”
“Okay,” Hanley said. Then, “Okay, we’ll set up overwatch at Ortega’s place, and we’ll evaluate the situation there. What we don’t want to do is react impulsively. If whoever is following Ortega is investigating her just like we are, we might end up with a blue-on-blue incident that nobody wants.
“I’ll call Lacy at CIA now, tell her to get Jim Pace focusing on Shaw, as well. He’ll be able to see what intelligence he had access to, where he’s been, who he might be affiliated with inside the government.”
The meeting broke up soon after; Arnold headed to the hotel across the street from Ortega’s home to get a high-floor rear-facing suite for an overwatch team, while Jill continued looking through both the video feeds and open-source data about other faces at the museum she’d identified.
Court and Zack poured themselves some more coffee, and they stood in the kitchen when Hanley came in.
Out of earshot of the others, even Travers, the only other asset on the team, Matt said, “Listen carefully, gents. I am not impressed with how today went. That was basic surveillance tradecraft, and still, you almost fucked it up.”
Court spoke up in defense of the team. “It’s our first day together, we don’t have many bodies to work with, and we’re just figuring out how—”
“I don’t give a damn,” Hanley said firmly. “Trey Watkins is acting like the entire American government is some sort of a threat right now, and we’re right in the middle of Washington, D.C. You guys have to step the fuck up on your game, and you have to do it now.”
The former DDO did not wait for a response; he just left the room.
Zack blew on his coffee, then gave Court a little smile. “We’ve been operational in this new organization for less than thirty hours and we’re already in trouble.”
Court shrugged. “No big deal, I’m used to it. Hell, even when I work alone, I yell at myself a lot.”