Chapter 22
DOHA, QATAR
STAN Hurley surveyed the quiet street as the call to prayer echoed from a nearby minaret.
Though only six kilometers distant, the grimy neighborhood off Al Mutasim Street seemed a world away from the waterfront’s sparkling buildings and pedestrian area.
Traffic snarled past single-story storefronts topped by apartments.
Though seagulls still whirled overhead, the air had lost its salty tang in favor of the acrid smell of exhaust and cooking meat.
If the Corniche was what Doha presented to tourists, this neighborhood was the city’s true face.
The one without makeup.
“It’s the same motorcycle. This time approaching from the west.”
Hurley turned his regard from the cityscape to the storefront that sat at the T-intersection of west?east-running Al Matar Al Qadeem Street and north?south Al Mutasim.
Since a watched pot never boils, Hurley had taken his eyes off the shabby entrance in the hopes that doing so might bring the sidewalk out front to life.
For most of the afternoon, he’d watched from his third-story hotel room just south of the storefront.
Though the neon sign in the window proclaimed that Sunshine Vacations was open for business, no one had seen fit to frequent the travel agency.
But that might be about to change.
“Copy,” Hurley said. “Get a shot of the license plate and the rider’s face if you can.”
“Roger.”
The black Suzuki and its helmet-clad rider motored tantalizingly closer to the travel agency’s corner location.
In the hours Hurley had been staked out across the street, he’d seen traffic ebb and flow, driven in large part by the mosque adjacent to the travel agency.
Congestion increased during prayer times and waned after the service ended.
Brad and the three other members of Hurley’s agency surveillance team were located in a second hotel a block west of the targeted storefront.
In the haphazard manner of building construction in this part of the world, Brad’s hotel jutted a bit farther over the road than its neighbors, allowing for an unobstructed view east down Al Matar Al Qadeem Street toward the travel agency.
Between his vantage point and that of the surveillance team, Hurley had the means to capture most of the traffic meandering down the streets, but it had been to no avail.
Not a single pedestrian had so much as glanced at the travel agency, and the motorcycles and cars motored through the intersection without even slowing.
Until now.
“He’s stopping. The motorcycle’s stopping!”
Hurley refrained from pointing out that he was closer to the travel agency than Brad and could therefore see exactly what was happening.
Surveillance was the epitome of long periods of boredom broken by brief intervals of excitement.
Given the choice, he’d take exuberance over a missed opportunity driven by a watcher who’d fallen asleep.
“Copy,” Hurley said. “Stay on the street in case he’s got company. I’ve got the motorcyclist.”
“Roger that.”
As someone who’d spent a large portion of his adult life staring at storefronts, apartment buildings, and the like, Hurley had developed a sort of innate sense for what mattered.
Part of this came from the ability to observe a setting and zero in on what didn’t fit.
What event wasn’t part of a city block’s natural equilibrium.
The second part came from experience. In the same way a beat cop who’s patrolled a section of a city for twenty years had a feel for who belonged and who didn’t, Hurley’s operator sense often picked up on the subliminal cues that differentiated one pedestrian or motorist from another.
Case in point, the Suzuki had pinged his radar the first time the rider had motored down the street.
Maybe it had been the bike’s speed in relation to the other vehicular traffic, maybe the motorcycle had loitered for a fraction of a second in front of the travel agency, or maybe the rider had turned his head toward the storefront for an instant.
Why Hurley had been alerted by the motorcycle wasn’t important.
Like all good operatives, he’d long ago given up on trying to quantify what his gut was telling him in favor of just trusting it.
And now this trust was about to be put to the test.
The motorcycle drew abeam of the storefront without slowing or activating a turn signal.
Hurley was in the process of cursing when the bike wobbled before swinging to the left in a tight arc.
Ignoring the open parking spots in front of the travel agency, the rider pulled onto the sidewalk instead.
After orientating the bike’s nose to the west, the rider popped the kickstand and killed the engine.
It wasn’t lost on Hurley that the motorcycle’s positioning would allow the rider to jet off the sidewalk into traffic flowing west rather than forcing him to cut across it.
It was as if the rider was worried about making a quick getaway.
Interesting.
Hurley allowed the strap around his neck to catch his binoculars as he reached for a tripod-mounted camera. Centering the viewfinder on the rider, Hurley snapped a series of digital pictures as the motorcyclist dismounted. After fastidiously shucking a pair of gloves, the rider removed his helmet.
“Got you,” Hurley whispered as he captured several profile shots and at least one frontal image of the rider.
His initial impression didn’t yield much.
Dark features and hair, beard, slightly crooked nose.
Probably Arab, but maybe Persian, Greek, Turkish, or even Israeli.
Hurley didn’t think the man looked familiar, but he was more focused on his actions than his face.
A white box was mounted just behind the motorcycle’s seat.
At first glance, Hurley had thought it was strapped to the frame, but now he could see that the container was welded to the metal.
Even more intriguing, it was secured with not one but two distinct locks.
The rider disabled a padlock with a key from his pocket, then dialed in a combination to the second lock.
After popping the hasps on the combination lock, the man paused to look left and then right down Al Matar Al Qadeem before gazing south along Al Mutasim.
His eyes even flickered up to take in Stan’s hotel room.
The room’s ambient darkness combined with the reflection from the outside lights should have made the glass difficult if not impossible to see through, but Hurley still froze.
Old habits were hard to break.
After a final visual sweep, the man turned back to the container and plunged his hands inside the box.
“Watcha got there?” Hurley whispered as he adjusted the camera’s zoom.
A black backpack emerged. Its size and shape could have accommodated anything from a folding stock AK-47 with extra magazines to a block of cheese. Hurley really wanted to know what was in that backpack.
The man slung the pack over his shoulder, latched the compartment closed, and headed for the door.
“Street’s still clear. Did you get facials of the rider?”
“Yep,” Hurley said. “How long before we can get results from the agency’s database?”
“The search goes pretty quick. It’s getting the images there that’s the problem. A day or two to dip-pouch them back to the States. Then the analysts go to work. They have a new computer program that can help match the images, but I’d say you’re looking at a week at least.”
Too long.
The shooter he’d interrogated on the boat hadn’t exactly been a wealth of information.
As far as Hurley had been able to determine, his attempted murder had been the result of an overeager operative exercising too much initiative.
According to the gunman’s telling, he was part of a Hezbollah cell operating in Doha that was tasked with surveilling Westerners.
A sympathizer who worked in the security and customs department at Doha International Airport screened incoming passports for Western travelers and passed the information to the gunman’s cell leader, who in turn designated targets of interest. Specifically, these targets were people the cell leader wanted to keep track of on the off chance they might be agents for a Western intelligence or law enforcement organization.
As a single traveler with a European passport, Hurley had been flagged and marked for surveillance.
The gunman was supposed to watch and report, nothing more, but something about Hurley had not felt right.
Hurley seated alone at the café had presented an opportunity too good to pass by, so the operative had elected to take matters into his own hands.
Hurley had questioned the man on this part of his story numerous times and believed the gunman was telling the truth.
This was good news in that the man’s account seemed to suggest that neither Hurley’s legend nor the Orion program’s secrecy had been pierced.
The not-so-good news was that Hezbollah was operating in Doha for reasons Hurley still didn’t know.
In classic terrorist methodology, the gunman’s cell was operationally walled off from whatever else the terrorist organization was attempting to accomplish.
The gunman knew that his assignment was to surveil Western targets, nothing more.
Hurley was a pretty persuasive interrogator, and the only additional information he’d been able to pry from the gunman was the address and name for the front company that had facilitated his movement to Doha from Lebanon.
Sunshine Vacations.
Hurley didn’t know what was going on inside the travel agency, but he didn’t intend to leave Doha without finding out.
“Change of plan,” Hurley said as he broke down the camera system. “I’m going in.”
“Say again?”
“I’m going in.”
“I thought Irene said no breaking and entering.”
“She did,” Hurley said. “Luckily, I don’t have to break anything.”
“Then how—”
“What’s the electronic sign in the window say?”
Hurley packed away the system into its travel bag and zipped it closed.
“Open.”
“There you go.”