The doctor’s house was an American-style McMansion that would have looked right at home on Florida’s Gold Coast. In Chisinau it looked like something from outer space.
Three stories high, with lots of glass and stone, it lorded over the nearby houses, which would have looked large in any other context. Two parallel runs of spiked iron fencing surrounded the property. Eight feet high, the fence was a deterrent to trespassers, but not any more so than the dogs that roamed the interior. Unlike the one Nuri had encountered in Italy, these were rottweilers, and appeared to be trained guard dogs; they moved in twos with almost military discipline.
The dogs were more than enough to dissuade Nuri from sneaking in the way he had at Moreno’s, but in addition there were video cameras and infrared motion sensors all along the fence line. As Flash put it, the doctor did not want anyone making unannounced house calls.
So Nuri decided they would settle for NSA wiretaps, and in the meantime plant some video bugs in the neighbors’ yards in hopes of getting a picture.
Flash volunteered for the job. The game plan was straightforward: he’d rent a motorcycle, whiz up into the area, plant the bugs per Nuri’s directions, then head back to the hotel where they were staying. Danny would back him up in the rental car. Meanwhile, Nuri would access the accounts they had set up at the bank, giving MY-PID a route into the bank’s computers.
The first problem they encountered was with the motorcycle: they couldn’t find one to rent. Flash was ready to do the job on foot when he spotted an open bicycle shop on the way out of town. The owner wouldn’t rent anything, but was willing to part with an older ten-speed for fifty euros.
They put the bike in the trunk of a rented Dacia and drove out of the city toward the development just after dusk. The houses around the doctor’s were all relatively new, built within the last ten years. MY-PID’s scan of the property records listed several Russians with connections to Russian organized crime, but for the most part the homeowners were part of the small class of nouveau riche Moldovans who’d made money in various legitimate enterprises, the most popular of which was the pharmaceutical industry, which the Moldovan government had set out to encourage a number of years before.
Flash got out of the car about a half mile north of the doctor’s house. He took the bike they’d rented earlier from the trunk and began pedaling slowly through the neighborhood. Danny drove around until he found a spot where he could see most of the house with his night glasses.
“How’m I lookin’?” asked Flash.
“You’re good. Looks like there’s somebody in the second story of the house,” Danny told him. “Back room. Moving around.”
The glasses couldn’t see inside the building, but they were powerful enough to catch heat signatures close to the walls and windows. Danny scanned down the nearby streets. The only people outside were a block and a half away, working in a lit garden at the side of their yard.
“Car coming,” he said. “Mercedes up that street on your right.”
“OK.”
Flash slowed his pace as the car came to the intersection and turned past, then crossed the street and stopped near the fence of a yard diagonally across from the rear of the doctor’s house. Danny watched him take a video bug from his pocket and plant it on a slim tree that stood just outside the fence.
MY-PID sounded a tone over the radio system, telling them that the bug was working.
“Next,” said Flash, hopping back on his bike.
Danny drove down the block, circling around to lessen the odds of someone noticing him. Flash installed two more bugs and was halfway through the project when MY-PID announced that one of the garage doors in the doctor’s house was opening.
“You hear that?” Danny asked.
“Yeah. I’m just up the block.”
A Mercedes came out of the garage.
“Where do you think he’s going at this hour?” asked Flash.
“I’m going to find out,” Danny told him. “Can you finish that on your own?”
“Piece of cake.”
Danny doused his lights as he turned down the street parallel to the doctor’s house. The Mercedes appeared a few seconds later, driving down the hill in the direction of the city. Danny let him get a block ahead, then put his lights on and started to follow. Without a tracking device, he had to stay relatively close. It was Surveillance 101—a course he’d never taken. Once more he felt like a fish out of water, playing detective or spy when he’d been trained as a commando.
The Mercedes went six blocks on the main road, then turned in the direction of the city. But just as Danny started to accelerate, it veered off suddenly, taking a right on one of the side streets. Fearing that he’d been seen, he continued going straight, slowing down as much as he dared. He looked, but couldn’t see anything up the side street as he passed.
He went a block, then took a parallel street, hoping to circle back. The road ran for nearly a quarter mile before he found an intersection. He turned left when he reached the street the Mercedes had taken, calculating that the doctor had continued in that direction. But he ran into a dead end; he made a U-turn and headed back to the main road.
The Mercedes was nowhere to be found. Possibly it had pulled into one of the estates that flanked the road; Danny decided he’d take another look.
“Flash, how’s it going?” he asked.
“On the last one.”
“I lost him, but I want to run down some of these roads for a second and see if he turned in somewhere. I’ll meet you at that little gas station we passed on the way up.”
“Sounds good.”
Danny found a place to turn around. As he drove back down the road, he realized that two of the estates had guardhouses set back a bit from the road.
“MY-PID, identify property owners for the street I’m driving down,” he ordered.
The computer had already accessed and downloaded the city property records, and within moments was reading off a list of owners.
Danny stopped it when it got to the Russian government.
“Is that the ambassador’s residence?” he asked.
“Negative.”
“Who lives there?”
“Not listed. Correlating with other data… residence appears to be occupied by the assistant ambassador for business. Possible link to GRU.”
In other words — the spymaster for the Russian military lived there.
Or might.
Was that where the doctor had gone?
The house was undoubtedly under surveillance, and Danny didn’t want to risk drawing any more attention to himself than he already had. He went back out to the main street and noticed a fire hydrant near the curb directly across from the intersection. He pulled over, got one of the video bugs and set it under the hydrant’s plug. Back in the car, he made sure he had a view of the street, then went and picked up Flash.
By the time Danny and Flash returned to the hotel room, Nuri had pieced together more of the money trail, with the computer’s help. Breaking into the Russian bank records after accessing the system through the new account, MY-PID found that 200,000 euros had been wired from the Russian account into a Moldovan bank account just that morning. The money was withdrawn in the afternoon, apparently in cash.
He showed Danny the money trail on the screen of their secure laptop. MY-PID had an Excel-based account tool that not only gave account balances and transactions, but could compare transactions to others at the same bank in real time, looking for related moves in shadow accounts. The SEC would have killed for it.
“First thing in the morning,” said Nuri, “we get a look at their security cameras. We’ll review the video and find out who went in there.”
