the base of the window frame and pulled back the curtain partway.
He could see Sarhan’s home, but in addition to the privacy fence there was a tree, which blocked a significant portion of the sight line. The laser mic worked by being beamed through a window at something inside, such as a picture on a wall, that would vibrate as people spoke. Harvath could already tell they weren’t going to get any audio. And until he figured out whether it was worth the risk to get close enough to the house to plant his two remote cameras, he wasn’t going to be getting any decent video either. The only things he had a halfway decent view of were the street and Sarhan’s driveway.
Pulling back from the window, he turned off his monocular and assembled the equipment. After everything had been camouflaged and positioned in the window just the way he wanted it, he checked the image quality on his laptop and then began streaming the feeds back to Reston.
He had worked out a shift schedule with Nicholas so that there would always be a set of eyes on the house. In the morning, the little man would covertly reestablish the home’s power. They had decided to wait until daylight in case any of the lights had been left on. The last thing they wanted to do was advertise that the home was suddenly occupied.
Sliding a Cliff Bar from his pack, Harvath leaned back against the wall and tried to make himself comfortable. There was no telling how long he would be here.
CHAPTER 50
While it was Nicholas’s shift, Harvath closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift off. It was morning and he had been asleep for several hours when his cell phone began vibrating and woke him up.
He popped the earbud in, and his eyes were drawn to the laptop as he activated the call.
“Do you see what I see?” asked Nicholas from the SCIF back in Reston.
“I do now,” replied Harvath as he grabbed a pair of binoculars and crawled over to the window. A white passenger van had pulled up in front of Sarhan’s house. He read off the license plate number.
“I’m running it now.”
Harvath readjusted the laser mic and also activated a small parabolic he had pointed toward the driveway.
Nicholas had an update for him momentarily. “The van is registered to a cardboard box manufacturer in Torrance, California.”
“Throw it into the TIP program and see if it connects any dots.”
“Roger that.”
Harvath had moved to the still camera and was taking pictures of the van. It was hard to make out the driver from this angle. He appeared to be waiting for someone.
Two minutes later, the microphones picked up the sound of Sarhan’s door opening. Muted good-byes were exchanged in Arabic before two young Middle Eastern men appeared towing wheely bags.
Harvath snapped several wide shots and then got close-ups of their faces. “Let’s run these right away.”
“I’m already on it,” replied Nicholas.
They were dressed in casual business attire. It reminded him of the airport security footage of the 9/11 attacker Mohammed Atta. He suddenly had a very bad feeling about what he was seeing. “Where are you two girls going?”
The two men placed their heavy bags in the van’s cargo area and climbed inside. The driver then pulled away from the curb.
“Can you follow them in the traffic cam system?” asked Harvath.
“Yes.”
“You should ping the Old Man and let him know what’s going on.”
“Already did.”
“Good,” said Harvath as he watched the van disappear at the end of the street. What is going on inside that house? he wondered. Had they just wrapped up some sort of meeting and these two guys were heading home, or was something else going down?
Ten minutes later, the mystery deepened as two more men with luggage exited the house and climbed into a taxi that had just arrived.
Once again, Harvath snapped pictures, and everything was beamed back to Nicholas in Reston.
“We need to follow that taxicab as well. Make sure you get all the information about the cab company and the driver and put it all into
TIP.”
There was a delay in Nicholas’s response as he clicked away at his keyboard. Finally he said, “Scot, I can’t sweep data and follow two vehicles.”
“Get the Old Man to help you.”
“I already am,” said Carlton, who had joined Nicholas in the SCIF and had plugged into the call. “We’re going to have to open this up a bit.”
“No, we’ve got to keep it contained.”
“Scot, I’m making the call. Nicholas will remain in charge on this end, but I’m going to open this up to the personnel in the TOC. We need the manpower.”
Harvath knew better than to argue. “Just tell them these are people of interest. They don’t need the big picture.”
“Agreed,” replied the Old Man as he clicked off to activate the office’s Tactical Operations Center.
“So far,” said Nicholas, “the two vehicles appear to be headed in opposite directions. Maybe they’re going to different airports. Or maybe one pair is going to catch a plane and the other a train.”
“Or maybe they’re doing SDRs,” stated Harvath, referring to the surveillance detection routes one used in order to ascertain whether one was being followed. “Just stay on them. They look like they’re headed out of town. As soon as we know where, we need to have teams waiting to put them under surveillance.”
“The Old Man already has teams standing by.”
Harvath was about to say something, when another taxi pulled up and two more men exited the house.
“Are you getting all of this?” asked Harvath as he took still more photographs.
“Yes,” replied Nicholas.
The driver popped the trunk, the men placed their wheely bags inside, and after shutting the lid, slid into the backseat, and the vehicle pulled away.
“That makes three two-man teams in less than half an hour,” said Harvath, adding, “you still have nothing back on the photographs or the vehicles?”
“All of the vehicles check out. This cab, too.”
“Do we have any idea yet where the other two are headed?”
“No,” said Nicholas. “I’m starting to believe you may be right about the SDRs.”
“Whatever you do, don’t lose them,” replied Harvath.
Harvath glanced for the thousandth time at the dated picture of Tariq Sarhan he had been issued. All of the men who had left the house were too young to have been him. He still had to be inside, and at this point, there was no question that he was definitely up to something. Harvath decided he couldn’t wait any longer to find out what.
He grabbed several extra mags for his compact. 45 caliber H amp;K USP Tactical pistol along with its suppressor. He tucked the pistol into a holster at the small of his back and the rest of the gear into the pockets of his coat.
“I’m going to zero comms,” he stated. “I want a closer look at the target.”
“A closer look?” replied Nicholas, “or are you going over to take him?”
