“I don’t understand,” the woman said, and while speaking she glanced into the street, a casual gaze. She looked bored, but Hazelton knew she was simply keeping an eye out for surveillance.
Hazelton waved his arm in the air angrily. “To hell with this. I’m out.”
The woman, by contrast, displayed no emotion. “Out?”
“I’m not passing the documents on to you.”
She sighed a little now. “Is this about money? If so, you will need to talk to New York. I have no authorization to—”
“It’s not about money. It’s about good and evil. That’s completely lost on you, isn’t it?”
“My job has nothing to do with either.”
Hazelton looked at the woman with complete derision. His decision had been made. “Tell yourself that if you need to, but you’re not getting these docs.” He kicked the briefcase loud enough for her to hear it.
The woman nodded. A countenance of calm. Her detachment was odd to Hazelton. He’d expected screaming and yelling. She just said, “This will complicate things. New York will be angry.”
“Screw New York.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to join you in your moral crusade.”
“Doll, I don’t give a damn what you do.”
“Then you won’t give a damn when I walk out of here and make a phone call.”
Hazelton paused, the strain of his work and the travel evident on his face. “Call him.”
“He will send someone to take that case from you.”
Hazelton smiled now. “He might try. But like you said, I’m not exactly new at this. I have a few tricks up my sleeve.”
“For your sake, I hope you do.” The Frenchwoman stood and turned away, passing the smiling waiter approaching the table with the wine on a silver tray.
Jack Ryan, Jr., watched it all through his camera from the rooftop across the street. He couldn’t hear the conversation, of course, but he correctly identified the body language.
“If that was a blind date, I don’t think they hit it off.”
Ding and Sam chuckled, but everyone stayed on mission. They watched while the tall woman pulled a phone from her purse and spoke into it, then began walking north.
Driscoll depressed his PTT controller. “Clark? Are we staying with Hazelton or do you want someone on the woman?”
Clark replied quickly. “She was after whatever is in that briefcase, so that case is now part of our mission. Still… I want to know more about her. One of you go with the blonde. The others stay put, eyes on that case.”
Jack and Sam took their eyes out of their optics and looked to Chavez, between them on the roof. Chavez said, “I’ll stay. You guys fight over it.”
Now Jack glanced to Sam, who slowly put his eye back in his spotting scope to watch the subject. “Go.”
Jack gave a big smile; it was the brightest light on the rooftop. “I owe you one, Sam.”
He was up and moving toward the fire escape in seconds, putting his camera into his pack as he walked through the dark.
Sam and Ding watched while Colin Hazelton drained the last of his gin and tonic, then gestured for the waiter to bring him another.
“What’s he hanging around for? He’s got another shitty date?” Sam asked rhetorically. Downstairs Clark was thinking the same thing. His voice was gravel, all annoyance and frustration. “Looks like we’re stuck here for a fourth round of g and t’s.”
The drink came and Hazelton let the waiter put it on the table in front of him. He said something to the waiter; all three Americans watching across the street thought he was asking for the bathroom, because the waiter pointed toward the back of the establishment. Hazelton stood; he left his drink, his coat, and his briefcase; and he headed to the back.
It was quiet in all three headsets for a moment. Then Ding said, “John? That look right to you?”
Clark understood what his second-in-command meant, but instead of revealing what he was thinking, he put it as a challenge to Driscoll. “Sam? What do you see?”
Driscoll adjusted his eye in his scope, looking at the empty table, the coat over the back of Hazelton’s chair, the briefcase on the other chair. He looked at the other tables in the restaurant, the well-heeled clientele seated or milling about. After a moment his eyes went back to the briefcase. He said, “If something was so important in that case that he refused to pass it to his contact, why would he leave it unattended at the table while he goes to take a leak?”
Clark said, “He wouldn’t.”
“Then the case is a decoy.”
“That’s right.”
“Meaning…” Driscoll had it in another second. “Hazelton isn’t coming back. He suspects surveillance on the front so he’s slipping out a rear exit.”
Ding confirmed this with “The old dine-and-dash routine.”
Clark said, “Bingo. I’m going to head through the restaurant and come out the back. It’s a north-south alley, but his hotel is behind us. You two stay on overwatch and keep an eye on the intersections to the north and south. Unless he can teleport, we’ll pick him back up.”
In the tea shop Clark dropped a few wadded dong notes on the table, paying for a drink that made his stomach churn, then he grabbed his jacket and headed toward the Lion d’Or across the street.
He’d just stepped off the curb when he saw something that made him pull up short. He backed onto the sidewalk, then looked around in all directions.
Softly he spoke over the communications net. “Ryan. Hold position.”
Jack Ryan, Jr., had been moving up Dao Cam Moc, but on Clark’s order he stopped. “Holding,” he replied. He turned toward the alcove of a closed electronics retailer and pretended to window shop.
“What’s your location?” Clark asked.
Jack looked down to his phone to a map of the area. Tiny colored dots displayed the position of the four men on the team, or more precisely, the position of the GPS tracker each man wore under the belt loop in the small of his back. Clark’s green dot was two blocks to the southeast, still in the open-air tea shop.
Ryan said, “I’m two blocks northwest of your poz.”
Over the earbud Clark explained himself. “I’ve got eyes on four unknowns on motorcycles approaching from opposite ends of the street. They look like a team.”
A moment later Chavez, who was still on the roof with his camera, transmitted. “Black Ducatis?”
Clark said, “Roger that. They came from opposite directions and have different clothing, but it looks like they are riding identical bikes and wearing identical helmets. No coincidence.”
Ding picked all four bikes out of the traffic below. It took him several seconds, because they were spread out. “Good eye, John.”
“Not my first visit. I know when something doesn’t look right around here. Jack, I want you to continue north of your poz. If he takes that alley all the way through the district you can get ahead of him when he comes out on Pham The Hien, but only if you double-time it. Watch for these bikers, don’t let them catch you eyeing the subject.”
Ryan was still pretending to look over a shelf of high-end cameras in the shop window. He felt the blood pumping through his heart for the first time on this trip. His boring evening was suddenly building in intensity.
Jack took off in a jog. “On it. I’ll stay parallel to the bikers and get to the mouth of the alley before Hazelton exits.”