This sort of thing, she thought, was more Charlie Dean's line of work. Charlie had been a sniper in the Marines and, according to his service jacket, a damned good one. But Charlie had been tapped for another mission, something in England, and Lia had already been in Turkey finishing up another mission. She had the requisite training, so when Stargazer had surfaced, she and Howard Taggart had been dispatched to Lebanon.
Normally, two people were deployed in a sniper team, a shooter and a spotter, and that had been the original plan. Debra Collins had recommended splitting Lia and Howard up, however, as two independent shooters in order to give better coverage of the street, one on each side. There hadn't been time to bring in more people.
With luck, they wouldn't need to shoot. If Suleiman had taken the electronic bait just now, Echo Whiskey was about to deliver to Sagittarius an envelope containing a bank note for 45 million Lebanese pounds — a bit under thirty thousand U. S. dollars.
Lia did not believe in luck. If Syrian intelligence suspected something was wrong, Echo Whiskey might have just been dispatched to eliminate Sagittarius. Hell, even if Suleiman had accepted the thumb drive's contents as genuine, the man was perfectly capable of eliminating Haddid simply to wrap up some untidy loose ends. The hope, of course, was that the IMJ would choose to keep Haddid alive and available as a regular source of intelligence inside the U. S. Embassy, but according to the jacket compiled by the CIA over the years, Colonel Suleiman was a paranoid and psychopathic thug. It was anybody's guess how the next few seconds were going to play out.
Which was why Lia and Taggart were there as over-watch. If Echo Whiskey produced a weapon from inside that overcoat, he was a dead man. If he produced an envelope, he would live. As simple as that.
She watched as he stopped next to Haddid's sidewalk table, exchanging words with the CIA man. Lia could hear words in Arabic but didn't understand them. A moment later, Echo Whiskey walked around to Haddid's right and took a seat, facing the street. One hand reached inside his coat, and Lia's finger tightened ever so slightly on the trigger.
'I've got the shot,' she said.
Echo Whiskey's hand emerged from the jacket, holding an envelope, which he casually placed on the table between the two men. They continued to speak for a few moments, and at one point Haddid picked up the envelope, looked inside, then slipped it inside his jacket.
'That's it,' Collins said. 'Payment received. The fish bit.'
'Aquarius, stay on Echo Whiskey,' Caravaggio warned. 'It's not over yet!'
But a few moments later, Echo Whiskey stood, exchanged a few more words with Haddid, then walked back up the street. Haddid visibly sagged in his seat, rubbed his jaw, then said, 'Mission complete. I'm coming in.'
Lia continued to cover the man, however, as he stood, paid for his drink, and left the cafe. Only when he was out of sight from her sniper's perch did she lean back from the wall and begin breaking her weapon down.
She worked swiftly and with no wasted motion. The Mk 11 had been designed to disassemble into a small package, and this special modification had several extra steps to make it smaller still. The barrel and sound suppressor unscrewed, then came apart into two pieces. Then the receiver assembly unsnapped from the stock, then clicked apart into two more pieces, until Lia had five parts, not counting the magazine, none more than twelve inches long. After she pulled a tightly bundled roll of cloth and a pair of sandals from her handbag, all of the parts went into the bag, which concealed them easily. Her shoes went into the bag as well, followed by the camera and tripod.
With a final look around to sanitize her rooftop observation post, she pulled on the sandals, then crossed the open roof to the small building sheltering the top of the service stairs. Once inside, with no possibility of being seen, she slung the bag over her neck by its long strap, so that it hung over her torso just below her breasts. Unrolling the dark cloth, she slipped it over her head and tugged it into place — a traditional Muslim woman's burka covering Lia from head to foot and effectively concealing the handbag.
Down the service stairs to the main level, where she stepped out into the building lobby. None of the people there — mostly men — gave her a second glance.
Lebanon was a remarkably progressive and Western nation within a sea of conservative Islam. Women could be seen on the streets in blue jeans, miniskirts, and other Western attire, and could grace the local beaches in almost nonexistent bikinis. There was even one beach a few blocks from here in downtown Beirut, restricted to women only, of course, where they could sunbathe topless.
At the same-time, most Muslim women still preferred more conservative dress, and you could see a range of fashion from colorful scarves over the head to full-length burkas like the one Lia was wearing now. Within Beirut, she was now effectively invisible.
Bowed slightly under the weight of camera and rifle, she made her way toward the safe house on Verdun Street, as planned. The eerie wail of a muezzin calling out the adhan sounded from the loudspeaker in a spire- topped minaret nearby, calling the faithful to prayer.
'Good job, Lia,' William Rubens' voice said in her ear. It startled her. She'd not realized he was in the Art Room, or that he was watching this op. At any given moment there might be as many as three separate missions being handled through the Art Room, and a Deputy Director of the NSA could not be expected to closely watch them all.
'Thank you, sir,' she murmured. 'It was routine and went down as planned… thank God.' Just another day at the office.
'When you get back to the safe house,' Rubens told her, 'call in. I need you to check something for me.'
'In Beirut?' she asked. She liked Lebanon, and had been wondering if she might be able to grab some time as a tourist while she was here.
To be sure, that sort of thing was not usually a good idea and Rubens would never have sanctioned it. Standard tradecraft required operators to be pulled out of a mission area as soon as the op was over, just in case there were unexpected repercussions. But this op had been a walk in the park with no hostile contact and no complications. There was almost zero chance that she'd been spotted, or that any of her covers had been blown. According to the op plan, she would be going home on a commercial flight sometime tomorrow. That would give her the evening free, at least. And if Rubens wanted her to stay on for a while…
'Negative,' Rubens told her. 'Ankara. There's a company jet waiting for you at Beirut International.'
So much, she thought, for a free evening in exotic Beirut.
'On my way,' she told him.
Sir Charles Mayhew was a vice president of Royal Sky Line, Ltd., chief operations officer, and member of the corporate board of directors. He was also the company board member nearest to hand when Thomas Mitchell and MI5 needed a high-ranking corporate officer to give him some answers.
They gathered in a small meeting room adjoining Sir Charles' office, which was located on the tenth floor of the ultra-modern green glass tower adjoining the Atlantis Queen's passenger terminal. The tower also housed a hotel and a ground-floor gallery of shops and travel agencies, but the penthouse had been reserved for Royal Sky bigwigs, most of whom weren't available at the moment.
Typical, Mitchell thought. But unimportant. Sir Charles would do just fine. Mayhew was an obese man, heavy-faced but with nervous, active eyes. He was scared, Mitchell thought, scared that his company was about to be dealt a financial body blow.
That fear could be useful.
Also present were the ship's captain, Phillips, his second in command, Staff Captain Vandergrift, a solicitor for Royal Sky Line named James Alcock, and David Llewellyn, the chief of security on board the Atlantis Queen.
'I take it,' Mitchell said, placing a photograph on the table before them, 'that none of you have ever seen this man before.' It was a color shot of Nayim Erbakan, an eight-by-ten blow-up of the wallet-sized photo found on Chester Darrow's body.
'Sure,' Llewellyn said, grinning. 'A little while ago, when they arrested him. Caught him with his pants down, as it were, in the backscatter scanner.'
'I know,' Mitchell said dryly. 'I was there, too, remember? But how about any of you? Captain?'
'Never seen him before,' Captain Phillips said. 'Should we have?'
'Not really… but you have to admit that there are some puzzling facts about this case.' Mitchell glanced at his notebook. 'A Turkish national, caught smuggling one half kilogram of cocaine onto a luxury cruise ship… bound from England to the eastern Mediterranean. That's not one of the usual smuggling routes, you' know. Erbakan has a
