Jeff Parks knew this was his cue to fill Lee in on the status of the hunt.
“I’ve got our best hackers pulling feeds from every municipal and private security network in the area. The newest facial recog software is processing it all.”
“How wide a net?”
“All of the Baltic, of course. Part of Poland. We can pull in Germany and Ukraine if we need to, but the costs will skyrocket. Also, there is a daily ferry from Tallinn to Sweden that also stops in Norway, so I’ve added Oslo and Stockholm to the collection haul.”
“Can the software keep up with all that data?”
“It’s the best there is. Better than the newest stuff they are using at the Fort.” Babbitt knew “the Fort” was Fort Meade, home of the National Security Agency.
“Good. You have the personnel you need?”
“I have everyone working on it. It’s a matter of time before Gentry shows his face in front of a camera. When he does, we will be on him within a few hours.”
TWENTY-ONE
When they were still in the arrivals cab stand at Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport, the taxi driver asked his passenger if he was absolutely certain he had the correct address. The passenger was, after all, a Westerner, and the address he gave was, after all, in the Dahiyeh, the southern suburbs of Beirut. The Dahiyeh was the tough part of town, and the particular neighborhood that was the requested destination of the brown-haired man with the eyeglasses and the sport coat was populated predominately by poor Shias; crime was rampant there and kidnappings of Westerners was certainly not unheard of. The driver pictured this fare of his paying him and then stepping out of the taxi, only to be grabbed off the street, dragged to a basement, and chained to a radiator.
Hence the cabbie’s plea that the man double-check the proffered address.
But the foreigner’s Gulf Arabic was surprisingly fluid and his reply was confident; he explained with a comfortable smile that he had influential friends in the government here in the capital, as well as friends in that neighborhood in particular, and he was not concerned for his safety in the least.
The taxi driver took that to mean this stranger — this Westerner — was tight with Hezbollah, and if true, that should get him out of most dangerous situations in the streets around their destination.
After all, Hezbollah was the law around here.
Russell Whitlock had not told the truth to the taxi driver. He had no associates here in the government whatsoever. He had worked in the Middle East during a large portion of his career with the CIA, and he had been in and out of Beirut enough times as a NOC operative and a member of the National Clandestine Service’s Autonomous Asset Program, but he wasn’t exactly drinking tea and smoking a hookah with the town council on those trips. No, here in Beirut he’d assassinated a Syrian general and a Hezbollah politician and an al Qaeda banker, but those operations did not come with the free time or the backstories to allow him to cavort with the local intelligentsia or glitterati.
So he was going to have to bullshit his way through today.
As they drove south they passed bombed-out buildings from Lebanon’s most recent war with Israel, and they passed armed men in military uniforms driving motorcycles and standing on street corners eyeing every vehicle they passed. They drove by posters glorifying suicide bombers, men and, in many cases, women who had “martyred” themselves over the border in Israel. It seemed to Russ that on every block there was another picture of a bearded young man or a woman with her arms and head covered, always in front of a flag and always holding a Kalashnikov. All these young men and women were dead now, and Russ muttered “Good riddance” under his breath while he looked out the window, careful to keep his head low and his eyes unfixed on anything that looked like it might have been official military business, lest he cause his taxi to get pulled over and his papers to get scrutinized.
Finally the cab arrived at the address. Russ paid the driver and climbed out, taking his small leather tote bag with him. He stood in the street as the taxi drove off, then looked up at the building in front of him.
It was a mid-rise apartment building, maybe a dozen stories high, with antennae and satellite dishes bolted onto every horizontal or vertical surface. At street level, older boys and young men sat smoking and standing around in front of a souk that spilled out of an alley just up the sidewalk, and Russ had not even shaken his collar down and straightened out his slacks from the cab ride before a malevolent-looking group of young toughs began walking his way. He ignored them, acted oblivious to the danger, and strolled toward the sliding wire mesh gate in front of the building.
A security guard stood inside the locked gate, staring back blankly. Russ told him he had a meeting with two men inside. The guard asked which two guys he was talking about, and this was Russ Whitlock’s first indication that he would have to bypass whatever flunkies were here in order to speak to someone with actual authority.
A call was made from the guard to Russ’s hosts, and after a perfunctory search, he was let into the building.
A few minutes later Russ knocked on the door to an apartment on the fifth floor. Behind him stood two security men who had just searched him. They seemed competent enough with the frisk, although they let their guard down to do it. As one man stood behind him, patting down his arms, the American knew he could ram back an elbow into the guard’s throat, spin him around, and stomp on the inside of his leg to break it. Then he could draw the man’s pistol from his waistband as he fell and with it shoot his partner.
But none of this happened; Russ just war-gamed scenarios in his mind like this in order to stay prepared for days when such moves might be necessary.
The door opened, and Russ found himself in a room with two dark-skinned and clean-shaven men in shirtsleeves. The men shook his hand while eyeing him warily. One looked to be over fifty, and the other might have been thirty-five.
There was a poster of Ayatollah Khomeini on the wall; otherwise the apartment was all but barren. A teakettle whistled on the stove in the kitchen to Whitlock’s left, but the men ignored it. They asked to see Russ’s passport and his visa. He produced both from the inside breast pocket of his sport coat. His documentation was passed back and forth between the two men; it claimed his name was Michael Harkin and he was a Canadian citizen, an import/export consultant from Toronto.
They handed him back his documentation, and all three sat down on threadbare sofas. Russ smiled at them, and they smiled back, but their body language read uncertainty.
The men were with VEVAK — the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. They did not know who Russ was, really; they’d only been ordered to meet with the Westerner by bosses who themselves did not know Russ’s true identity.
Russ knew this meeting would have happened somewhere else if the men he was coming to meet had had even an inkling of what he was about to offer them. Instead, Russ had contacted a man he knew to be an Iranian intelligence officer in Iraq posing as, of all things, a travel agent. Russ gave the man the Michael Harkin backstory and told him he had information to offer Iran regarding Iranian dissidents in Montreal who were operating in a computer hacking club that had created problems for the Iranian government.
The computer hackers did exist; Russ had learned about them in an article on the Internet. When the VEVAK man in Iraq asked how this Canadian man knew his identity, Harkin demurred, said he would make everything clear in a face-to-face meeting. He offered to come to Iraq, but instead he was given a counterproposal.