“Very interesting.”
“Thank y—… How so?”
“What kind of response are you getting from the graybeards on the seventh floor?”
“Well,” she said, as she frantically searched for the right words. “Honestly, I’d have to say there has been some pushback.”
Mary Pat repeated the word slowly. “Pushback.”
“Yes, ma’am. I did expect some reticence on the part of—”
“Can I take that to mean that you are getting your ass kicked over there?”
Melanie Kraft’s mouth hung open for a moment. She finally closed it self-consciously, as if Mrs. Foley were sitting in her cube with her. Finally she stammered an answer. “I… I would say I have been taken to the woodshed over my work.”
There was a brief pause. “Wel Cpaue bl, Ms. Kraft, I think your initiative was brilliant.”
A return pause. Then, “Thank you.”
“I have a team going over your report, your conclusions, your citations, looking for information relevant to the work we do here. In fact, I’m planning on making it required reading among my staff. Beyond the Egypt angle, it shows how someone can hit a problem from a different slant to shed new light on it. I encourage that from my people over here, so any real-world examples I can find are very helpful to me.”
“I am very honored.”
“Phyllis Stark is lucky to have you working for her.”
“Thank you.” Melanie realized she was just saying “Thank you” over and over, but she was so focused on not saying anything she would regret, it was all that came out.
“If you ever are looking for a change of pace, just come and talk to me. We are always on the hunt for analysts who aren’t afraid to upset the apple cart by delivering the cold, hard truth.”
Suddenly Melanie Kraft came up with something to say. “Would you be available this week sometime?”
Mary Pat laughed. “Oh, God. Is it that bad over there?”
“It’s like I have leprosy, although I suppose if I had leprosy I’d at least receive get-well cards.”
“Damn. Kealty’s people over there are a disaster.”
Melanie Kraft did not respond. She could riff on Foley’s comment for an hour, but she held her tongue. That would not be professional, and she did actually consider herself to be apolitical.
Mary Pat said, “Okay. I’d love to meet you. You know where we are?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Call my secretary. I’m pretty tied up through the week, but come have lunch with me early next week.”
“Thank you,” she said again.
Melanie hung up the phone and, for the first time in a week, she wanted to neither cry nor smash her fist through a wall.
8
John Clark and Domingo Chavez sat in their Ford minivan and watched the apartment building through the rainy night. Both men held SIG Sauer handguns in their right hands, resting on their thighs. They kept the weapons low in the shadows but ready for quick use. In their left hands, Clark held thermal binoculars, Chavez a camera with a long-range lens. Crushed plastic coffee cups and gum wrappers filled a plastic bag on the floor below the passenger seat.
Though their weapons were drawn, they would do their best to avoid using them. Any shooting that might be necessary tonight would be defensive in nature, and the trouble wasn’t likely to come from the terrorist assassin and his pals up the street in their safe house, which, in actuality, was a fourth-floor walk-up tenement flat. No, the immediate threat was the neighborhood itself. For the fifth time in the past four hours, a dozen-strong crowd of steely-eyed young men passed on the sidewalk next to their vehicle.
Chavez took a break from staring through the telephoto lens of his Canon at the lighted entryway of the apartment to watch the men pass. Both he and Clark kept their eyes on the group in their rearview mirror until they disappeared in the rainy night. When they were gone, Ch Fnt to watcavez rubbed his eyes and glanced around at his surroundings. “This sure isn’t postcard Paris.”
Clark smiled, reholstering his pistol in the shoulder rig under his oiled canvas jacket. “We’re a long way from the Louvre.”
They were in the
There were housing projects all over Seine-Saint-Denis, but the two Americans had the misfortune tonight to find themselves on the outskirts of one of the roughest. Decrepit, graffiti-festooned concrete apartment buildings lined both sides of the street. Gangs of youth milled about the neighborhood. Cars blaring North African rap music drove by slowly, while rats scurried along the trash-strewn gutters next to the van and disappeared down the iron drains.
Earlier, during their afternoon and evening sitting in the minivan, the two Americans noticed that the neighborhood postman wore a helmet, lest items be thrown from the buildings onto his head just for kicks.
And they also noticed that they had not seen one police car in the neighborhood.
This part of town was too dangerous to patrol.
The Ford Galaxy Clark and Chavez sat in sported torn molding and a dented, rusted body, but its windows and windshield were intact and deeply tinted, all but obscuring the inside of the van. Most strangers in parked cars who sat for long on this street would have been harassed by the locals, but Clark had picked this vehicle out from a budget lot in Frankfurt because, he felt, it would give them the greatest chance for anonymity.
That said, it would take only one set of curious eyes to pick out this vehicle, to spend some time looking it up and down, and to realize that it was not from around here. Then the neighborhood heavies would surround it, smash the windows, and then loot and torch it. Chavez and Clark would race off before they let that happen, but they certainly did not want to give up their surveillance on the safe house two hundred meters up the street.
The Americans had positioned themselves on the avenue at the rear of the building, assuming that even with the bare minimum of tradecraft, the cell would, at least, know not to enter and exit the building on the other side, where there was a high-traffic boulevard and consequently many more eyes that could turn their way as they came and went.
Clark and Chavez knew that with one vehicle, there was no way to properly stake out their target location. Instead they decided they would just try to get pictures of whoever came and went, and to that end Chavez had a Canon EOS Mark II camera with a massive 600-millimeter super-telephoto lens that allowed him, with the attached monopod, to get incredibly detailed photographs of anyone who stepped into the lighted doorway at the back of the building in the distance.
Pictures would be helpful, but other than that, there was not much they could realistically accomplish here. A surveillance force of at least four vehicles and eight watchers would be needed to make any sort of respectable effort at covering all the access points of this target location, and a six-vehicle fleet, crewed with two men each, would be the bare-minimum protocol for mobile surveillance in an urban area like Paris when working with a target trained in countersurveillance, as Hosni I Ke, foheb Rokki certainly was.
Chavez and Clark had yet to see Hosni Rokki, but the odds looked good that he was, in fact, here. This was the address Ryan passed on from French internal security, and they had noticed a few young toughs milling around outside the apartment building like a security cordon, perhaps URC men but more likely a local gang hired by the target to act as a trip wire, should any police or other forces come snooping around.
And earlier in the evening, just after dark, Chavez had flipped his hoodie up over his short, dark hair, climbed
