Chapter 10
DOHA, QATAR
STANLEY Albertus Hurley was down to his last cigarette.
This was a problem.
For one thing, the cup of sweet, Yemeni-style coffee on the table in front of him wasn’t going to drink itself.
While the java was black like Hurley preferred, it contained enough sugar to satiate a class full of kindergartners.
Without another cigarette to deaden the taste, Hurley might have to resort to chewing on one of the half a dozen butts overflowing from a prominently placed ashtray.
The café he’d chosen only served the syrupy coffee and Hurley was on his second cup.
In addition to its sweetness, the brew also packed quite the punch.
Absent a steady supply of nicotine to calm his nerves, Hurley was afraid his heart might just explode.
But that was only part of the problem.
Without a cigarette to occupy him, he had nothing to combat the boredom that always accompanied the surveillance portion of an operation, and when Stan Hurley grew bored, bad things tended to happen to bad people.
Like the pair of shitbags loitering on the park benches to his right.
“Movement on the boat.”
The disembodied voice was alarmingly loud in his left ear, adding still more fuel to the fire that was Hurley’s irritation.
The low-profile communications set his agency surveillance team was employing was working better than advertised from a reception perspective.
Brad Steele and his watchers were located in one of the many hotels overlooking the Corniche promenade.
The straight-line distance between their ocean-view room and Hurley’s post at the sugary coffee café had to be at least half a mile, but Brad’s voice was clear as a bell.
The problem lay with Hurley’s earpiece’s volume control.
For reasons known only to the Almighty, the radio seemed to have just two settings—whisper mode and carnival barker.
Hurley had tried to lower the volume, but he kept missing radio calls.
Conversely, the higher setting meant that Brad’s reports rattled his fillings.
He desperately needed another cigarette.
Hurley cupped his hand around his mouth as if shielding his cigarette from the ocean breeze before replying. Just because he hadn’t detected a countersurveillance team didn’t mean they weren’t out there. “Copy that. Any sign of Moe or Curly?”
“Negative. My mobile team doesn’t have them either.”
Hurley stubbed his final cigarette into the ashtray as he considered this development.
The Corniche promenade seemed custom-designed for this operation.
The pedestrian area stretched along a meandering path for almost four and a half miles, following the semicircular inlet formed by the Doha Bay.
Hurley sat at the pathway’s northeastern corner, at the top of a lazy, lowercase c.
From his perch he had ocean to his front and superb sight lines to his right as the promenade curved past parks, eateries, hotels, and the Old Doha Port.
To his left, a cobblestone walkway continued northeast past resorts and private beaches before turning due north and emptying into a private marina.
Hurley was not big on vacationing in the Middle East, as he subscribed to the notion that business and pleasure were best not mixed.
Even so, he had to admit that the Qataris had done a respectable job of turning their capital into a destination of sorts.
The evening breeze coming off the water was cool against his face, and the sound of waves lapping against the beach combined with the calls of seagulls added a tranquil soundtrack to his contemplation.
He could taste the salt on his tongue, and the scents of grilling meat and brewing coffee permeated the air.
Doha wasn’t Club Med, but it sure beat the hell out of the view from the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul or Martyrs’ Square in Beirut.
Except Hurley wasn’t here to soak in the sights.
“Wait… belay my last. Moe is approaching the boat from the west. He’s abeam the mosque now.”
Brad had been watching submarine movies again.
While Hurley wasn’t a stickler for radio protocol, he expected communications to be pithy and understandable.
The word belay didn’t fit either of these categories.
That said, Hurley was willing to overlook Brad’s nautical fixation in favor of the information the sharp-eyed surveillance expert had just relayed.
At long last, one of his Orion team trainees was on the move.
He might just make it through engagement without a final cigarette.
Or not.
The ne’er-do-wells who’d been giving him the stink eye for the last thirty minutes shambled to their feet.
Hurley had clocked them when they’d first stumbled out of the mosque.
They had the hard look of men who had been living on the razor’s edge.
If he had to guess, the pair had probably gone looking for charity at the mosque and been unsatisfied with the offering.
Hurley was the café’s sole patron and closing time was approaching.
He’d thought the pair might decide to panhandle, but instead of asking for money, they’d apparently decided to take it.
From him.
Clearly, he needed to frown more.
Glancing past the pair, Hurley tried to spot Moe, but couldn’t.
The two would-be Orion operatives he’d chosen for this exercise were promising recruits, but for different reasons.
Moe, who was actually named Brian Smith, was a natural at conducting the sticks-and-bricks aspects of espionage.
He could pass through a crowd like a fish through water, exhibiting none of the nervous ticks common to new operatives.
This was good.
What was not quite as good was that Smith was not a case officer charged with executing brush passes or servicing dead drops.
Orion operatives existed for a single purpose—to assassinate their nation’s enemies.
It was one thing to move undetected along a foreign street.
It was quite another to stick a pistol in an unarmed man’s face and pull the trigger.
“I’m gonna need you to flex your team to cover the meet,” Hurley said, scratching his mouth as he spoke to conceal his moving lips. “I’ve got a real-world situation.”
The description real-world was significant.
Even though Moe and Curly, Smith and Pete Evans, had flown into Qatar on legends and were operating as if this were a sanctioned Orion hit, it was not.
The boat bobbing in the quay at the small pier to Hurley’s right didn’t contain a terrorist financier and his bodyguard.
Instead, the craft belonged to the CIA’s maritime branch, and it was crewed by agency paramilitary officers.
Hurley had taken to heart the feedback Irene, Stansfield, and Dr. Lewis had each provided on the curriculum he’d instituted for Orion team hopefuls.
While Mitch Rapp could be counted as an unrivaled success, it was becoming apparent that this was due more to Rapp’s unique qualities than Hurley’s aptitude as an instructor.
Though it pained him to admit it, Stan had come around to the idea that, like Rapp, he was also a unique operative and the program could benefit from a more standardized syllabus.
Taking a page out of the training fledgling case officers received at the CIA’s legendary Farm, Hurley had instituted an away trip at the midway point in his operatives’ training regimen.
The away trip was a chance for trainees to prove, under conditions that were more challenging than an exercise in an American city, that they’d internalized the training thus far, while still allowing Hurley to institute a safety net of sorts in the form of agency employees.
Conducting a linkup in Doha was more stressful than walking the streets of Cincinnati, but much less dangerous than running an SDR in Moscow.
In theory.
“Roger that, Stan. Do you need my team to flex to you?”
Now Brad had gone from standing on the bridge of the Red October to commanding a tactical team. Maybe a class on radio etiquette was in order.
“Just keep your fucking eyes on Moe and Curly,” Hurley said.
If Brad’s feelings were hurt by the exchange, he didn’t say, which was just fine by Stan.
The pair of bums were approaching his table.