foot.
Duka was a surveillance expert, having learned his trade while serving ten years in the Sigurimi, the communist Albanian secret police. Now he worked for the syndicate both as an instructor and an operative on the higher-priority tasks. He was in his fifties, smoked close to three packs of cigarettes a day and drank vodka heavily at night. But when it came to his job he was a devoted professional.
Duka’s techniques were old-school, using little in the way of sophisticated modern technology beyond high- powered optics and, occasionally, listening devices. His stocks-in-trade were patience and thoroughness and his speciality was tailing. He was famous for achieving by himself what others using entire teams could not. His motto was ‘Distance, distance, distance’ and he preached endlessly to his students that the further one could get from one’s target without losing contact the better. But the further back one kept the more easily one lost sight of one’s prey. That was where Duka’s particular genius lay: it was what separated him from others in his profession.
Duka had the uncanny ability to ‘feel’ where an out-of-sight target had gone, as well as the confidence and patience to persist even when it appeared to everyone else that he had made the wrong choice. His comrades back in the Sigurimi used to say that he could see through walls. When asked how he did it he said he could not explain, describing it as lucky, though in truth he did not know if that was so. It was an extra sense, like the sense of knowing when you are being watched.
The target this day had been easy enough though Duka could feel that the man had a kind of natural awareness that would not be obvious to an ordinary watcher. It served as a warning to Duka to be doubly cautious with him. But under these circumstances, even if the target had had no doubt that he was being followed Duka would have been very difficult to detect. The city was busy but not too busy, and American towns were the easiest of all to conduct surveillance in because nearly all of them were designed on the Roman grid system with all roads, or most at least, straight and heading north-south or east-west. This meant that the target did not need always to be followed directly and could be tailed along parallel routes. Two adults and two children together made it easier.
The move back from the park to the child-protection centre was even simpler since it quickly became obvious to Duka that the man and his companions were returning to the start location. He moved ahead of them along a parallel street and was already watching the centre from four blocks away before they arrived. After the man had left the woman and children where he had met them it was easy to keep him in sight while he walked down the street looking for a taxi. After that it was a straight run to the beach while keeping half a dozen vehicles between them. The final task was to house him and then watch the location for some time to establish it was indeed the target’s home.
Duka knew nothing about the man he was following nor did he care. His mission that day was to obtain an address for the target and nothing else. He watched his man enter the building and a few minutes later saw a figure on the fourth floor heading along a corridor. He did not need to identify the apartment number. That would have been an unwise move during the first tailing of a new target and besides, Duka knew how Cano operated. As long as he had the building pinpointed there were many ways of finding out what else he needed to know.
As the sun set beyond the ocean, Duka left his position leaning against the rails that lined the cliffs of the Santa Monica park opposite the pink towers. He walked to a small car park across the road where he had left his van. Once inside the vehicle he called Cano to give him the coded details of the day. Then he started the engine, pulled out into the traffic and headed for that first shot of fermented grain that would be waiting for him in his favourite watering hole downtown.
20
Hobart was sitting back in his office chair, having read the last of his emails for that day. He was thinking about the Leka-Ardian killings as he had done pretty much continuously since hearing Phil’s forensic revel ations.
The main problem that Hobart was having was his inability to decide where to begin searching for clues to the identity of those behind the murders. Phil had given him a list of probable users of the explosive material, with NSA organisations at the top – an enormous investigative task on its own. Then there were the CIA, the DIA, several other intel ligence groups that had anti-terrorist units, and half a dozen or so special forces groups that also used the stuff. Add to that the red tape he would have to wade through just to
And then, of course, whoever the guilty party was could hogtie any investigation with an arsenal of delaying devices, pleading national security and the like. Frankly, the odds against finding something and then being able to prove it were incalculable. What Hobart needed was a big fat clue to fall right out of the sky and land on his desk. Since he didn’t believe in miracles he was pretty stumped.
Hobart got to his feet and looked out over the city as the last light faded. He hated this time of day. As if the stress of the job wasn’t enough, he had to leave the office and join that mess of slow-moving traffic for at least an hour before he could pull out of it and into his quiet little backstreet in Van Nuys in the valley. If he was a drinking man he would wait out the worst of the traffic in one of the many bars up the street that would be filled with like- minded people at that time of day. But he wasn’t.
A buzzer sounded and a voice came over a small intercom beside Hobart’s computer monitor. ‘Sir?’ It was Hendrickson.
Hobart turned back to his desk and pushed a button on the intercom. ‘Yes.’
‘Do you have a minute to come look at something?’
‘What’s it about?’
‘What you asked me to do, sir. I found something that doesn’t fit.’
Hobart didn’t reply. He walked out of his office, down the corridor, and into the agent pool a couple of doors away.
‘What is it?’ Hobart said as he stopped beside Hendrickson’s desk by the window. Hendrickson was staring at his computer monitor. He sat up straight and started tapping on the keyboard, bringing up several windows.
‘Well, sir. I’ve been going over Leka Bufi and Ardian Cano’s careers and, well, there’s really nothing—’
‘You know I hate long introductions, Hendrickson. You’re a talented researcher, which is why you work for me. But can you edit it a little.’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. The most recent incident that connects the two is the Sally Penton murder – which we believe was coincidence, a wrong-place-wrong-time scenario. But since we’re looking for the
Something stirred in Hobart and he leaned on the desk to look at Jack Penton’s photograph on the monitor. He had not briefed Hendrickson on Phil’s forensics report yet and so the mention of special forces had hooked him.
‘I thought I was onto something until I found out that he died on active service in Iraq nearly a month ago. I continued digging through his wife’s – widow’s – file and noticed that she made a phone call on her cellphone just before she died. It was to a UK cellphone in Austria – a man called John Stratton. I went back to my people in London and they just got back to me. All access to Stratton is denied. When they enquired further they were directed to the Brit Ministry of Defence where they ran into a wall. He’s SIS, sir. The British Secret Intelligence Service.’
Hobart pondered the information for a moment until he could mentally taste it. ‘Get London to push harder. At least find out where he is.’
‘He’s here, sir. Or at least he was. He arrived in town the day after Sally Penton was killed.’
Hobart stood up and exhaled softly. He knew better than to jump to conclusions but despite the rule of never pinning the crime on the first person whom the hat fits something deep inside him was shouting that this was his man. Hobart’s immediate feeling was relief that at least it wasn’t an American outfit behind the killings. Suddenly it didn’t seem like such a serious matter. It was bad in many ways – a Brit SIS operative carrying out a personal
