35. Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter thirty-five
Noble stood in the shadows of a recessed door, his back to the wall, a cup of coffee in one hand, waiting.
He checked his watch. It was close to eleven o’clock in the evening.
Most hotels change shifts around eleven.
Noble leaned out for a peek along the boulevard.
He had dressed in a dark watch cap scavenged from a dumpster behind a second-hand store, and a tan overcoat with grease stains.
If anyone bothered to look closely, they’d see his shoes were not the shoes of a homeless man living on the street.
His pants and shirts were clean as well.
But Noble was betting nobody would bother to look that closely.
He eyed the front of the hotel, sipped coffee, and waited.
He was just starting to think the hotel ran a four to midnight shift when the front door opened and Xanders emerged. His green jacket with the gold shoulder epaulettes hung open and his chin rested on his chest as he thumped down the short flight of steps to the side walk.
A large delivery van rumbled along the street, bathing Noble in the smell of burning oil and diesel, momentarily blocking his view.
He fought back a cough and waved a hand in front of his face.
Once the truck had past, Noble saw that Xanders had turned right and would be walking directly past Noble’s chosen hiding place.
The choice of the recessed door two blocks down from the hotel was more than just a lucky guess.
Noble had been sitting on the address all day.
He’d watched Xanders arrive behind the wheel of a dust covered Citro?n with a busted tail light.
That had been at three in the afternoon.
Since then, Noble had lifted a few wallets in a busy shopping district, gotten his hands on a burner phone, and assembled his disguise before stuffing himself with a local dish called sarma.
It stank of cabbage, sauerkraut and paprika but the ground beef and rice more than made up for the smell.
Noble had eaten until he was full to bursting.
Ask any soldier and they’ll tell you, eat when you have the chance.
You never know where the next meal is coming from, or when.
In Green Berets, Noble had often survived days on nothing but a single MRE.
He thought things would be different in counter intelligence, but spies often had the same problem as special forces operators; long periods of waiting and watching.
Often that surveillance is done in inconvenient hard to reach locations.
In comparison, a musty smelling doorframe with the occasional cockroach scuttling about his feet, felt like easy duty.
Xanders stuck a pair of earbuds in and loped along the sidewalk to his dusty Citro?n.
Like most civilians, Xanders lived in condition white.
He was blissfully unaware of his surroundings and not looking for threats.
Living in a city will do that to you. People living in the first world rarely have to deal with actual violence and, because it’s not a part of their everyday life, it falls off their radar.
Spies live in condition yellow, always alert for possible danger, always looking for threats, ready to move into condition red at the first hint of anything out of the ordinary.
Noble waited for Xanders to unlock his Citro?n with the key fob before he stepped out of the doorframe. The locks released with a dull clunk. The headlamps flashed once. Xanders pocketed the keys and reached for the driver side door.
Noble peeled the plastic lid off the cup, tapped Xanders on the shoulder and tossed the coffee in Xanders’s face as soon as he turned.
In movies and television shows, cops always call out someone’s name from ten feet away.
That’s a cheap Hollywood gimmick that allows directors to add unnecessary chase scenes into a program.
These foot chases always seem to take place to the frantic beat of a bongo drum.
In real life, if you want to roll up a suspect, you get as close as possible and incapacitate them before they have a chance to react.
That’s exactly what Noble did.
The hot coffee splashed against Xanders’s face with an evil hiss.
Xanders’s eyes clamped shut and his mouth hinged open for a scream.
Noble never let him get the sound out. He grabbed the back of Xanders’s head, rammed him face first into the frame of the Citro?n and heard bone snap.
The earbuds popped loose and tumbled across the sidewalk, still playing music from Xanders’s phone.
Noble heard the tiny screech of Serbian metal.
Blood pissed from Xanders’s broken nose all over the driver’s door and down his shirt. He made a soft squeak and his knees unbuckled. He started to sag.
Noble pressed the young man against the car with one hand and opened the driver’s side door with the other. “Get in and slide over.”
Xanders, cupping blood from his nose and trying to wipe scalding coffee from his face, started to shake his head.
Noble stuffed a hand in his coat pocket where he had half a dozen pens held together by a rubber band. He pressed the shape of the pens against the coat, showing the outline against the coarse fabric. “Get in or I’ll shoot you dead right now.”
Xanders’s eyes opened wide. His mouth worked silently a moment, then he scrambled into the car. Noble pushed in behind him, forcing Xanders into the passenger seat.
“Don’t get any funny ideas, kid,” Noble said as he jammed the starter button. The Citro?n hiccupped to life. Noble pulled the door closed with a bang and shifted into gear. “Play your cards right, you might get out of this alive.”