Much could be said for his endurance in a nation where political control changed hands often and violently, and death by assassination was the fate of most competing warlords.
Nonetheless, it was only the convenient location of the top-end hotel and its exceptional services catering to diplomatic and business travelers from abroad that had curbed the visitor’s annoyance over the inexhaustible convolutions of the bargaining.
A man of rigorous discipline, he preferred sticking to a tight routine. Every morning since his arrival he had taken a swim in the indoor pool at six o’clock, a time when few others were outside their rooms and he stood the best chance of having it to himself. It was also the one time each day he felt at ease moving about without his personal guard, wanting an interval of solitude.
After taking the elevator up from his room to the twelfth-floor recreational area, he would put on his bathing trunks in the locker room between the gym and solarium, rinse off in the shower, then walk through the short connecting corridor to the glass-enclosed pool and do his laps for precisely an hour.
On the first day, a garrulous Dutch banker had intruded on his privacy and asked whether he cared to have breakfast in the hotel restaurant after finishing his “dip.” Shunning interaction with strangers, he had tersely declined and ignored the man until he’d backed off.
In the three days since, he had found the pool empty and gone about his laps without disturbance.
Then, today, he had reached the locker room and again encountered undesired company.
Habitually alert, he whisked his eyes over the men inside. Both were fit and in their midthirties. One had blond hair, the other brown. They were wearing workout clothes and speaking American English to each other with the easy familiarity of close friends or associates. The blond-haired man had a somewhat tousled appearance and a light growth of beard. He was neatly hanging his street apparel in a locker. His companion sat removing items from his gym bag. A folded towel and sports bottle were on the bench next to him.
Superficially, they seemed of a type. Professionals on an overseas junket. Of no particular interest to him besides being trespassers upon what he had come to regard as his proprietary domain.
But he trusted the unconscious perception of environmental cues we call instinct. And something in the air told him to be careful.
As he stood inside the entryway, the men gave him mannerly nods. He noted them without response and went to the nearest free locker to the door, an ear attuned to their conversation.
“The taxis around here, Jesus, that ride from the airport gave me bruises where I sit. Plus he must have just missed getting us crunched at least twice,” said the man with the twenty-four-hour stubble. He yawned. “Thought I’d never make it to the conference.”
The one on the bench looked amused. “You should’ve listened to my advice, taken a metered cab. Their drivers have to be licensed. And they carry identity cards.”
“Like that’s going to do you any good. Or you really think the insurance companies pay off around here? Assuming they have insurance companies.”
“Maybe not, but you’d know who to curse out for putting you in a body cast.”
The bristle-cheeked man grinned and reached inside the locker to adjust his trousers on the hook. The other’s hand was returning to his bag.
Without letting another instant pass, the morning swimmer abruptly abandoned his locker and strode back out the door.
The pair in the room exchanged glances.
His hand coming out of the gym bag with a.22 N.A.A. Black Widow, the man on the bench sprang to his feet and slipped the five-shot minirevolver into the belly band under his sweatshirt.
The stubbled man simultaneously turned from his open locker, leaving its door flung wide. From his trouser pocket he’d removed a holstered Beretta 950 BS semiautomatic, his own choice of a peekaboo gun. He stuffed the deep-concealment holster into the pocket of his loosely fitting workout pants.
Both trotted to the doorway, then slowed as they went into the hall and looked up and down its length.
Neither saw any sign of the swimmer.
They split off in opposite directions, each using restraint to keep from moving too quickly. If the swimmer had about-faced for a reason unconnected to their presence — as they hoped was the case — it would do no good to raise his suspicions now.
Reaching the bank of three elevators, the brown-haired man glanced at the floor indicators above their doors. The numbers over the first and last cars were dark. The second elevator in line was descending, the number eleven and Down arrow lit up. He pressed the call button to be certain that the stationary cars weren’t sitting on his floor, the swimmer perhaps having ducked inside to wait out his pursuers, trick them into thinking he’d taken the other car. Send them chasing it via the stairwell while he stayed put.
No such luck.
Both cars began to rise from the ground-floor entrance lobby, obviously unoccupied.
He returned his eyes to the indicator panel above the middle car.
The eight had flashed on.
Seven, six, five…
The elevator stopped at the fourth floor and its indicator light blinked off.
He frowned, looked down the hall at his partner, shook his head.
“Shit,” he muttered to himself.
The Wildcat had retreated to his den.
“I can’t figure where we slipped up,” the blond man was explaining over his handheld radio. “One minute he’s walking through the door, heading toward a locker, then he just takes off. In and out…”
“Never mind,” Tom Ricci said into his communications headset. He’d heard the locker room banter through installed surveillance mikes and thought the slipup was evident. You went incognito, you stuck with what you knew, kept your act simple. Instead, they’d gotten too clever for their own good.
There was an impermeable tunnel of silence over the radio. Then, “How do you want us to proceed?”
Ricci took a breath. Along with a couple of snoop techs named Gallagher and Thompson, he was across the street from the hotel, in an office hastily rented through a cutout and used as a spy post for the past several days.
“Stay at the hotel,” he said. “You’ll hear from me.”
More silence. The blond man at the other end of the trunked connection understood what Ricci’s order meant. He and his buddy were finished. Removed from the action, and soon to be cut loose from the fledgling RDT. Good night, take care, see you again sometime.
“Okay,” he said, his regret and disappointment evident despite the digital scrambling process that robbed so much tonality from the human voice.
Ricci aborted contact and passed Thompson’s headset back to him. He wasn’t unsympathetic to the snatch team but neither were their hurt feelings of paramount concern to him. The bungled opportunity at the hotel meant things were about to get a lot more difficult for him and the rest of his task force.
They had maintained a constant watch on Le Chaut Sauvage—the Wildcat — almost from the moment the terrorist arrived in the country, acting on reliable word from a plant among Antoine Obeng’s inner circle. In essence, their operational model was the Mossad’s abduction of Adolf Eichmann from his safe haven in Argentina a half century ago: success achieved through simplicity of planning and execution. A small team watches the target’s patterns of movement, subdues him when a clean opening is presented, rustles him out of the country.
No witnesses, no fuss, no muss.
There were, however, some major differences between the past and present scenarios. The Israeli agents had shadowed their target for months without interference from Argentinian officials, who had a decent political relationship with their government, were aware of their activities in the country, and had lent them a sort of passive endorsement. By contrast, Ricci’s team had no such temperate climate in which to carry out a mission that had necessarily been planned on short notice. They were undermanned and underresourced. They were in a nation that was on the shakiest diplomatic terms with America and just recently had been taken off the State Department’s list of designated terrorist sponsors. The capital’s top cop was a crooked, venal son of a bitch who exercised his power in shameless cahoots with bands of khat-chewing thieves and looters. And, most significantly, the Wildcat was in the city at his direct invitation, enjoying the protective graces of the police and criminal militias that Obeng commanded with equal impunity.