It was possible, of course, that Charlie was wrong about Russell Ott. But the more he learned and thought about him, the more unlikely that seemed. If he
Charlie stood and slowly threaded through the tables, watching Ott’s eyes, his hands, his body language. Ott, shoving his cell phone in an outside pocket, turned his eyes away as Charlie approached.
“Russell,” Mallory said.
Ott frowned. Pretty much what Charlie had expected. In the next minute or two, he would learn several things about Russell Ott that would tell him how this was going to go: clean or messy.
“You don’t remember me.”
“Should I?”
“Depends.”
Charles Mallory placed his right hand on Ott’s left shoulder for a moment, confusing him. Both men were about the same height, a couple inches over six feet, but Ott had a pasty, out-of-shape appearance.
Charlie nodded toward the table by the window. “Join me for a couple minutes?”
Ott looked at the table. His eyes narrowed.
First observation: It took Russell Ott a while to process things. He probably wasn’t used to physical confrontation. Couldn’t summon a natural response to a potential threat like this. Mallory’s assurance bewildered him.
“I think you have a wrong person,” Ott said, forcing a smile.
“No. I don’t.”
“What’s it about?”
“A surveillance operation you ran in the South of France several days ago. I have some information about it that might interest you.”
Mallory moved his hand slightly, toward the opening in his jacket, just to see how Russell Ott would react. He saw something flash in his eyes. It could have become a game of chicken, then. But it didn’t. Second observation: Ott was not carrying a gun.
“What are you talking about? What sort of information?”
“Why it went wrong.”
Ott’s eyes turned to the doorway, then to Mallory’s hands.
“Let’s go sit down. I’m not going to hurt you.”
After a brief hesitation, Russell Ott let Mallory follow him to the table by the window. Charlie waited until he was all the way in, then slid across from him. It was a plastic booth with a dark wooden tabletop. Two paper placemats, silverware. Outside, rush-hour traffic stopped and started.
Ott pushed the knife and fork to the side, then tried to line them up. “Okay,” he said, taking a new tone. “What’s this about? What would you know about a surveillance operation in France?”
“More than you, I suspect.”
Ott’s eyes became uncertain again. His right hand was fidgeting with the fork.
“Here’s the thing,” Charlie said. “I don’t want to hurt you, I want to help you. But I need to ask you a few questions, and I need you to answer them. Okay? If you do, everything will be all right. You can leave and you won’t have to ever see me again. If you don’t want to.”
Charlie knew that Ott might have been weighing some wild options at this point—bolting, attacking, shouting for someone to call 911—but that he was too paralyzed to actually act.
A waitress came over, smiled. Charlie waved her away.
“It was connected with a project in Kampala, Uganda,” he said. “You may know that. But I don’t think you know that it was connected to a larger project. In other words, I don’t think you really know what you’re working on. Or where the information you’re gathering is ultimately going.”
Ott looked quickly at Mallory’s hands.
“You were hired to monitor the surveillance of Frederick Collins. You arranged for the relay with Albert Hahn. Ahmed Hassan.”
Charles Mallory saw the recognition sweep across his face.
“But despite your surveillance, you couldn’t get him. You still can’t. Even when Collins is sitting right across from you.”
Charlie smiled and leaned forward slightly. He pulled the handgun from the front of his jeans and let Russell Ott see it. That was enough. Charlie had long ago found that showing a gun to someone unexpectedly was a most effective way of learning about that person’s character.
Third observation: This was a man who would give up information before he would risk his life. A man of deception in his work, perhaps, but not when faced with a pointed gun.
He sensed something else, too, which was surprising: Ott did not know him as Charles Mallory. He knew him as Frederick Collins, and that was all. That was the project he had been hired to work on. Tracking Frederick Collins. It was that compartmentalized.
“What do you want?”
“I want to know who your employer is. And I want to know how you’re able to make contact with the Hassan Network.”
Ott closed his eyes and breathed heavily. His left eye began to twitch, his forehead appeared to be dampening. He opened his eyes and looked straight at Charlie. He wasn’t reacting well to this. “I can’t say.”
“All right.” Charlie nodded, genially, as if he had just said something agreeable. He took a quick scan of the restaurant and lifted the gun in his right hand. “And what if the stakes were raised, what if it became a matter of life and death?”
The lies that he had been told about Frederick Collins would only make him more fearful, Charles Mallory knew. For a moment, he played out the scenario that couldn’t happen: if Ott refused to talk, he would have to shoot. Once he did, he would probably be able to walk out the front door and just disappear. It was unlikely anyone in the restaurant would try to become involved. They would be too stunned to react immediately.
But that was not how this was going to happen.
“Let me just clarify the situation,” he said. “One more time. You answer my questions and you can walk out of here. You don’t, and you can’t. Okay? That seems pretty straightforward to me. So, again: I want to know who your employer is. And how you communicate with the Hassan Network. How you reach them, how they reach you.”
Charlie was smiling slightly, his expression conveying a different impression than his words, so that someone glancing over might think they were having a friendly conversation. But his heart was racing.
Ott hunched forward and straightened the knife, then the fork, his body language indicating that he was about to give in. “I don’t communicate with them,” he said, in almost a whisper. “I do surveillance contracting. Okay? The other’s not my part of the deal.”
“Even if that were true, though, you worked with Hassan in the past. But let’s not take these questions out of order. Start with the first. Who were you working for when you made your mistake in Nice?”
“Mistake.”
“Yes.”
Ott’s eyes kept going to the gun, which Mallory held in view just below the tabletop. “What mistake?”
“You coordinated a surveillance operation designed to take out a bad guy—a guy named Frederick Collins. The problem is, Frederick Collins was not a bad guy. So someone must’ve given you incorrect information. You trusted this person enough that you didn’t bother to properly check out what you were told. That alone tells me a great deal about your client. And it almost makes me think it has something to do with the government.”
“No.” Again he saw a change in Ott’s eyes, some vague confusion clouding his thinking. “What are you going to do with this information?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said.
“I don’t know who the client is.”
Charlie adjusted the gun.
“There’s a middleman,” Ott said. “Someone who represents the client. The client is larger than what happened in Nice. It’s a much larger project.”
