8
John Clark and Domingo Chavez sat in their Ford minivan and watched the apartment building through the rainy night. Both men held SIG Sauer handguns in their right hands, resting on their thighs. They kept the weapons low in the shadows but ready for quick use. In their left hands, Clark held thermal binoculars, Chavez a camera with a long-range lens. Crushed plastic coffee cups and gum wrappers filled a plastic bag on the floor below the passenger seat.
Though their weapons were drawn, they would do their best to avoid using them. Any shooting that might be necessary tonight would be defensive in nature, and the trouble wasn’t likely to come from the terrorist assassin and his pals up the street in their safe house, which, in actuality, was a fourth-floor walk-up tenement flat. No, the immediate threat was the neighborhood itself. For the fifth time in the past four hours, a dozen-strong crowd of steely-eyed young men passed on the sidewalk next to their vehicle.
Chavez took a break from staring through the telephoto lens of his Canon at the lighted entryway of the apartment to watch the men pass. Both he and Clark kept their eyes on the group in their rearview mirror until they disappeared in the rainy night. When they were gone, Chavez rubbed his eyes and glanced around at his surroundings. “This sure isn’t postcard Paris.”
Clark smiled, reholstering his pistol in the shoulder rig under his oiled canvas jacket. “We’re a long way from the Louvre.”
They were in the banlieues — the outer suburbs. The safe house was located in a housing project in the not inappropriately named Stains commune, in Seine-Saint-Denis, a ban-lieue of low-income residents, many of them poor immigrants from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, North African nations from which France had imported millions of workers in the twentieth century.
There were housing projects all over Seine-Saint-Denis, but the two Americans had the misfortune tonight to find themselves on the outskirts of one of the roughest. Decrepit, graffiti-festooned concrete apartment buildings lined both sides of the street. Gangs of youth milled about the neighborhood. Cars blaring North African rap music drove by slowly, while rats scurried along the trash-strewn gutters next to the van and disappeared down the iron drains.
Earlier, during their afternoon and evening sitting in the minivan, the two Americans noticed that the neighborhood postman wore a helmet, lest items be thrown from the buildings onto his head just for kicks.
And they also noticed that they had not seen one police car in the neighborhood.
This part of town was too dangerous to patrol.
The Ford Galaxy Clark and Chavez sat in sported torn molding and a dented, rusted body, but its windows and windshield were intact and deeply tinted, all but obscuring the inside of the van. Most strangers in parked cars who sat for long on this street would have been harassed by the locals, but Clark had picked this vehicle out from a budget lot in Frankfurt because, he felt, it would give them the greatest chance for anonymity.
That said, it would take only one set of curious eyes to pick out this vehicle, to spend some time looking it up and down, and to realize that it was not from around here. Then the neighborhood heavies would surround it, smash the windows, and then loot and torch it. Chavez and Clark would race off before they let that happen, but they certainly did not want to give up their surveillance on the safe house two hundred meters up the street.
The Americans had positioned themselves on the avenue at the rear of the building, assuming that even with the bare minimum of tradecraft, the cell would, at least, know not to enter and exit the building on the other side, where there was a high-traffic boulevard and consequently many more eyes that could turn their way as they came and went.
Clark and Chavez knew that with one vehicle, there was no way to properly stake out their target location. Instead they decided they would just try to get pictures of whoever came and went, and to that end Chavez had a Canon EOS Mark II camera with a massive 600-millimeter super-telephoto lens that allowed him, with the attached monopod, to get incredibly detailed photographs of anyone who stepped into the lighted doorway at the back of the building in the distance.
Pictures would be helpful, but other than that, there was not much they could realistically accomplish here. A surveillance force of at least four vehicles and eight watchers would be needed to make any sort of respectable effort at covering all the access points of this target location, and a six-vehicle fleet, crewed with two men each, would be the bare-minimum protocol for mobile surveillance in an urban area like Paris when working with a target trained in countersurveillance, as Hosni Iheb Rokki certainly was.
Chavez and Clark had yet to see Hosni Rokki, but the odds looked good that he was, in fact, here. This was the address Ryan passed on from French internal security, and they had noticed a few young toughs milling around outside the apartment building like a security cordon, perhaps URC men but more likely a local gang hired by the target to act as a trip wire, should any police or other forces come snooping around.
And earlier in the evening, just after dark, Chavez had flipped his hoodie up over his short, dark hair, climbed out of the minivan, and performed a half-hour of foot reconnaissance. He’d made a wide, arcing circle of the apartment building, and strolled through a few parking lots, a playground that looked like it was used these days primarily by glue-sniffers and heroin users, and through the ground level of a four-story parking garage. He then made his way back to the black Ford Galaxy.
Immediately after Chavez climbed in, Clark had asked, “What’s the word?”
“Same three or four guys downstairs at the back of the building. Four guys at the front entrance, too.”
“Anything else?”
“Yep. We aren’t the only ones interested in that apartment.”
“No?”
“Beige Citroën four-door. This side of the road, in the parking lot on the other side of that building there on the left. Male driver. Female passenger. Both black, in their thirties.”
“Surveillance,” Clark said. Chavez wouldn’t have mentioned them if they weren’t.
“Yeah. They were subtle enough, but they have line of sight on Rokki’s place, and we’ve got eyes on the entrance to that parking lot and didn’t see the car arrive, which means they’ve been there since before we got here. So, yeah, they are definitely watchers. Who do you think they are?”
“DCRI would be my first guess. If I’m right about that, then there will be more cars around here; they probably have a surveillance box set up, but I doubt we’re inside it. They are probably closer than we are because they won’t all need to have eyes on the target. They would just tuck into the parking lots and stay in comms with each other. I’m glad the French are watching these guys, but I sure as hell wish they had some stronger measures on their plate. It would be nice for them to pick Rokki up, give him a shake, and see what falls out.”
“Keep dreaming, John. Not the French. The CIA used to do a little of that, before Kealty put the kibosh on offending terrorists.”
“Heads up, Ding,” John said suddenly. A pair of young toughs walked by on the left from behind. Both men slowed and looked into the van. John and Ding were somewhat concealed behind the heavy tint, but they were by no means invisible. Clark stared back at the two young African immigrants for a long moment.
Then the men walked on.
Clark’s steely-eyed gaze had won the encounter, but they were prepared if they had to actually talk to the locals. The two American spies never worked any operation without a plausible cover for action, a reason to be in a location other than the actual motive. Both men had worked under so many covers over the years, oftentimes preparing themselves on the fly, that they possessed the abilities of well-trained actors.