With that pleasant thought on his mind, Jack Ryan stepped off a curb, looking in all directions as he did so.
Suddenly his face morphed into a mask of terror.
A small blue Citroën ran a stop sign and barreled down on him as he walked in the middle of the street.
6
Jack launched forward in a broad jump, avoiding the front bumper of the speeding car by less than two feet. He spun around to look at the vehicle, which was now in the process of making a screeching left turn at the intersection.
The blue Citroën almost slammed into a middle-aged couple walking on the crosswalk on the other street. The woman gestured and screamed at the driver, a heavyset man in his fifties, who seemed oblivious to the fact that his bad driving had nearly caused a bloodbath.
If this had been anywhere else Jack would have thought someone had just tried to kill him, but this was Rome, the most dangerous city in Europe for pedestrians. This wasn’t an assassination attempt; it was just some asshole who didn’t know how to drive.
And this town was full of them.
“Son of a bitch,” Jack muttered under his breath, but he didn’t yell. OPSEC demanded he not reveal himself as American in the field unless it was necessary to do so.
He started walking again, and he thought about something he read when he was doing research for his work trip. A writer talking about the poor drivers in the Italian capital had remarked that Romans park their cars the way he would park his car if he had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on his lap.
Jack thought that line was as true as anything he’d ever read, and he wondered if Gerry would give him hazardous-duty pay for living here in central Rome for the month.
He smiled at his own joke — working for The Campus meant every day involved hazardous duty, and nobody got a bonus for danger.
He crossed over the Ponte Regina Margherita and ducked into a butcher shop he had noticed earlier in the week. He used his pidgin Italian to pick up a pair of fat rib eyes, cut to order by the owner himself. His mouth watered while the steaks were wrapped in paper, and after leaving the little shop he began to pick up the pace so he could hurry home, careful to keep a close eye on the motorists around him. It was nearly four p.m. and he imagined they wouldn’t eat for another three hours or so, but like all good things, he knew these steaks would be worth the wait.
Jack’s eyes roamed constantly while he thought. It was on probably the fiftieth such quick scan of the day, just before reaching the corner of Ferdinando di Savoia and Maria Adelaide, when he glanced at the reflection in a passing bus and noticed a man behind him in a leather jacket with his long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. The man wasn’t looking right at Jack, but something seemed familiar about him. Jack wasn’t certain he’d seen this person before — central Rome was full of men, many had long hair, and this guy didn’t look or act different from the norm — but something inside Jack triggered when he noticed the man.
Jack had long ago learned that the moment you think there is any chance whatsoever that someone might be following you, suddenly everyone looks suspicious. He had been living with this phenomenon for years, and over time he had trained himself to keep a cool head and a dispassionate, analytic eye scanning the world around him. He saw no one else in the area who piqued his senses, so he simply filed the man’s appearance in his mental database and kept walking.
But by the time he reached the large, open Piazza del Popolo, he was convinced something was wrong. He’d slowed down significantly a block before so he could window-shop. This wasn’t a countersurveillance ruse — a magnificent Breitling watch really did catch his eye in a shop window, and although he wouldn’t let himself go in and inquire as to the price, neither could he tear his eyes away from the big chronograph for nearly a minute.
When he made his way into the piazza a few moments later he glanced into the glass of another passing car and realized Mr. Ponytail was still behind him, at the exact same distance he was before.
Either this guy had managed to stumble across a distraction that lasted exactly as long as Jack had been looking at the watch, or else the man slowed down or stopped so that he did not overtake Ryan on the sidewalk.
Suddenly Jack knew he was being tailed. He had noticed during his last reflection check that the man had a small backpack over one shoulder, and he wondered what was inside.
Jack crossed the street and entered the piazza. A stage was being erected in the center — he assumed there would be some sort of open-air concert here this evening — but for now it was easy to walk across the cobblestones among the small crowd milling about.
Now everyone did look suspicious. A man sweeping the piazza, a young woman sitting on a scooter and talking on her cell phone, an ice cream vendor standing behind his cart and gazing Jack’s way.
Jack picked up the pace for a moment, then turned suddenly at another vendor’s cart and purchased a bottle of water. While he fished a few euro coins out of his pocket he glanced back to his left and saw Ponytail tying his shoe, his foot propped up on an iron bench.
Yep, he was most definitely a follower, and not much of one at that. It looked to Ryan as if this guy had trained in surveillance by watching shitty made-for-television movies.
Ryan thought if this guy was part of a crew, he was either the weakest link or else they would all be as obvious as he was. As he began to walk away from the vendor cart, sipping his bottled water, Jack scanned the crowd more intently, all the way south across the Piazza del Popolo.
It was a three-minute walk, his wrapped steaks in hand, and through it all Jack ID’d no one else who appeared to be interested in him.
He chanced a quick look behind him as he tossed the empty water bottle into the trash. Ponytail was still there, seventy-five feet or so back, and he looked away as Jack turned in his direction.
Jack’s body tensed, and his mind began working on the situation. He’d been compromised, and that was bad, but he was too in-the-moment to think of the ramifications this surveillance had on his operation at this point. Now it was just about slipping this character and getting back to the apartment.
He’d work out his next move after that.
It occurred to Jack that the best way to shake this incompetent flunky, if he was in fact alone, was to simply climb into a cab. Ponytail probably didn’t have wheels close by, he would have no way of knowing that Jack would be heading to the Popolo, so the likelihood that he’d staged a vehicle right here was next to none.
Ryan walked to the curb of the street ringing the piazza, watched the cavalcade of small Italian cars whip around, each driver seeming to have his own idea about both the speed limit and the location of the lane markers, and he picked out a taxi approaching in the closest lane. He waited until it was a reasonable distance away at the speed it was traveling, then he held out his hand.
The cab driver whipped his little Fiat over to the curb and came to a stop. Behind him scooters and cars slammed on their brakes.
Jack jumped into the back and the cab lurched forward again.
Chavez and Caruso had finished a meal of schnitzel, sauerkraut, and mashed potatoes, washing it all down with a couple of beers. There was no rule about drinking on the job at The Campus; the operatives were supposed to maintain their cover for status and cover for action at all times, and sometimes that meant downing a drink or two while working surveillance. It was part of adapting to the surroundings, and while the men knew better than to overindulge, they also knew better than to draw attention to themselves.