Viennese hotels to “confirm” the reservation of a Mr. Jack Finch, but doing so would have created too many possibilities of an airline or hotel employee learning from the evening news about the selfsame Jack Finch’s demise, finding the previous call to be too weird under the circumstances to be merely a coincidence, and contacting the authorities, who might then want to check on whether other airlines and hotels had received similar calls. If Finch had been conducting his business like a good, oblivious civilian, Horton would have been able to nail down his travel details easily enough. The fact that he couldn’t indicated some security consciousness on the part of Finch, and suggested too that Horton felt circumscribed in his ability to look, lest his inquiries tip Finch off. Regardless, the upshot was that the locus of our attention had to be the sister. If we could get a fix on her, we would also be fixing Finch. After that, we would have to improvise.
On the one hand, Emma Capps, widowed but retaining her married name, was fairly easy to track. For starters, we had both her home and work addresses, courtesy of standard IRS paperwork. We also had plenty of photographs, scraped from the university’s website, from Capps’s Facebook page, and from Capps’s own website, where she blogged about trends in the art world and advertised her paintings-impressive oil works that were at once recognizably realistic but also bathed in an otherworldly, melting luminescence. On the other hand, none of us was particularly familiar with Vienna, we knew nothing of Capps’s daily habits, and we had only four days before Finch was expected to arrive in the city.
Still, an experienced four-man team, operating within urban concealment, can typically nail down the details of a civilian’s routine within a matter of days, and so it was for us with Capps. The fourth-floor flat in the declasse 15th District, near Westbanhof, the main train station; morning yoga at Bikram Yoga College, a few blocks away; breakfast at Cafe Westend, also in her neighborhood; the university in the afternoon, where, given the paucity of students because of the summer break, we assumed she was painting rather than teaching. She was an attractive woman of about fifty with wavy brown hair, an erect posture, and a purposeful stride-easy to watch in both senses of the phrase. She seemed to live alone, and I wondered what had happened to her deceased husband, and how old she’d been when she’d lost him, and whether there had been any children beforehand. If there had been, presumably they were now grown and living on their own. Horton hadn’t included such details in her file, either because he didn’t have them, or, more likely, because he understood that no one other than a sociopath wants to become overly familiar with the humanity of someone targeted, even peripherally, in an op. And, indeed, as we watched Capps and learned her routines, I felt an inchoate hope that there were children somewhere, or a lover, or someone else in her life besides the brother we were about to take away.
On the fourth day we were watching her, the day we expected Finch to arrive, she stayed at the university later than usual. The four of us had shadowed her from her neighborhood that morning and were now taking turns circling the university, and at first I was concerned when she failed to emerge around five as she had previously. I would have expected her to meet Finch at the airport, or at least at Westbanhof Station. Could he have been coming in on a late flight? Had he canceled, or had Horton been wrong about him coming in the first place? But then I realized there was another possibility-simply that Finch, who had been visiting his sister here for many years, would know his way around and require no escort. So maybe the deviation in routine was a good sign.
Turned out it was. Capps left the university at close to six. There were plenty of pedestrians about, all enjoying the late summer daylight, and there were also lots of bicyclists and motor scooters and cars, so following Capps without being observed was easy. I stayed on her from a discreet distance, then watched her enter Cafe Pruckel, a classic Viennese coffee shop in one of the glorious nineteenth-century buildings that characterized the area-where, with the kind of serendipity that occasionally smiles down upon an op, Dox was presently taking a load off while Treven, Larison and I worked the street. I called him on the mobile he was carrying.
“Our girl is coming to see you,” I said when he picked up. “Did you-”
“Saw her already, amigo. I’m at one of the sidewalk tables, enjoying a tasty espresso and apple strudel
“‘
“Means with whipped cream.”
“I know what it means.”
“Oh. Well, when in Rome and all that, you know, I just like to blend.”
For a moment, I pictured enormous, goateed Dox amidst the effete students and artistes of the area. What I pictured couldn’t fairly be characterized as blending.
“That’s…admirable,” I said.
“
“Stay put for now. One of us will get a table on the other side of the building or inside so we have a view of both entrances. She might be meeting her friend there.”
The oblique references were probably unnecessary-the phones Horton had supplied were encrypted, and at this distance we were connected by their radio function rather than through a cell tower. But no sense taking chances.
“Roger that. Tell you what, get here soon so I can get up and drain the dragon. I’ve got three espressos inside me at this point and I think at least two are trying to get out.”
“Hold it in for five more minutes. I’ll buzz you as soon as we have someone else inside.”
“Can we make it four? I swear, I am currently engaged in mortal bladiatorial combat, and-”
“Look, I’ll try,” I said, exasperated. I clicked off and called Larison and Treven. Larison headed into the cafe; Treven, who was on a rented motor scooter, stayed outside.
Once Larison had confirmed he was inside and could see Capps, I told Dox to pull out. If Capps was indeed meeting Finch here, I didn’t want to give him the chance to log more of us than was strictly necessary.
I waited on a bench under the shade of some trees in the nearby Stadtpark, just a harmless-looking Japanese tourist taking in the sights and sounds and smells, savoring the sense of loneliness and freedom that comes only from solitary sojourns in strange lands, where all the everyday things seem subtly wondrous and different and new, where there’s no one to please or disappoint or explain to, where the traveler finds himself suspended between the beguilement of the comforts he left behind, and the allure of an imaginary future he senses but knows he can never really have.
I passed nearly an hour that way, the day’s heat slowly loosening, the trees’ shadows lengthening, pensioners and lovers and dog walkers drifting past me, occasionally enjoying an adjacent park bench. Maybe Horton’s intel had been faulty. Maybe Finch wouldn’t show. Maybe I’d get credit in the next life, or the afterlife, for trying, for a good faith effort that had ultimately failed to produce results.
My mobile buzzed. Larison’s number. I clicked answer. “Yeah.”
“Gang’s all here,” he said in his gravelly whisper.
I could hear the sounds of the cafe around him-music, conversation, laughter. “Good. Sound quality okay?”
The phones we were carrying were equipped with the latest listening gear-integrated electronic amplifiers. State of the art, as Horton had promised. Not as powerful as a parabolic mic, but a hell of a lot smaller and less obtrusive. Depending on overall acoustics, the user could eavesdrop on a quiet conversation as much as thirty feet away through a pair of ordinary wire-line earbuds, the kind Larison would be wearing right now.
“Excellent,” he said.
“Good. Let me know if you find out where we’ll be dining and staying.”
“I will.”
“Does it look like just us? Or should we expect extra company?
“Unless the extra company is cooling its heels outside, it looks like just us.”
So Finch was traveling without security. Unexpected, given his position, and even more so given the quality of enemy he must have developed through his information-brokering hobbies. Maybe he felt the dirt he had banked made him untouchable. Maybe he felt his side trip to Vienna had been planned discreetly enough to offer adequate protection. It didn’t matter. I’d have Treven make a pass on the motor scooter and Dox on foot to confirm, but for now it seemed like good news for us.
“All right,” I said. “If you learn anything or need anything, we’re nearby.”
“Copacetic for now.”
I clicked off and considered. For the moment, I didn’t want to say anything to Larison, but in my mind his cover was already blown. Even if Finch was relaxed enough to travel without a bodyguard, the way he had planned this trip suggested a degree of security sensitivity-certainly enough for him to log Larison and his danger vibe. Dox
